Peep Show

Check out the peeps I made today (courtesy of Ma Schmidt and her yummy Easter basket shipment of goodies to the kids, from which I took the liberty of stealing a few peeps).

The Seattle Times features an annual Peeps contest. I so wish I had got on this earlier - (procrastination is a....ummm, I'll get back to you on that) ~ I woulda, coulda, shoulda entered the contest. If it weren't for my abysmal photography. If you want to see real photography, click here.

Rub a Dub Dub, Two Peeps in a Tub

Playpeep Bunnies

Peeptacular Bouquet

Peeping Tom

Heap of Peeps

Jeepers Peepers

Sissy Girl

OK, I am SO the demographic of this blog post, except that he directs his blog post at a mostly male audience.

Acually, I was about to qualify it further by noting that I am so the demographic except that I wasn't really embarrassed to be listening to these tunes back then ~ or even now. But that's not entirely true.

You see, back in the day, I actually did pretend to identify more acutely with the punkier, edgier, Iggyer punk rockers, or the headbangier, stonier Judas Priestlier metal rockers, rather than just admit reality: I was a Cindi wannabe and a Pet Shop girl in the making.

Not much has changed. Case in point, what tune, pray tell, have I been listening to on my car CD player?

Track 16 off the same "Vital collection of Canadian Music" disk, of 2-3 blog posts ago fame, which sports the Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft song. But that was like so yesterday, she says, smacking her bubble gum and blowing a big grape double-bubble.

This week I've been grooving to the Safety Dance by Men Without Hats. But I make sure my windows are rolled down and that no one knows this. It's embarrassing to be listening to such....well, sissy music.

But what can I say? I've even been secretly looking into buying tickets to the Duran Duran concert coming up in May. I wouldn't dream of admitting this to anyone I know in real life - Holy Hub included - he'd have a few choice words for such loserville lurking. I even went so far as to think, well maybe I could take Holy Son, but then I thought, what if someone he knew saw him at the concert - wouldn't that be embarrassing for him, too? Being seen in public at the Duran Duran concert, and with his mother to boot (or his mother the boot)? Or however that goes.

Oh well, I don't know much and I certainly haven't learned a heck of a lot since high school, I feel like I've ran so far away since then, but I do know that about the only sage and prophetic bit of gloppity-goo I gleaned from those years are words I imparted in my high school yearbook (thinking I was all being all thespian wise and wonderful): "this above all, to thine own self be True."

So there, I'll admit it. I'm an 80s sissy girl. Always was, always will be.

Save a prayer for me, won't you?

Luck of the Draw

I love this story.

Mostly because I adore both the randomness and synchronicity of prosperity and luck. Law of attraction proponents will have a field day with winning tales such as this. Life is a lottery that is your's for the winning.

I'm convinced, as of this weekend, that the trick to turning luck from random to fated is to be the ritual. Saturday night, I tried this curious thought on for size.

Since I had been attending a long day's journey into night retreat program all weekend, I arrived home late that night to find Chinese food leftovers and my very own fortune cookie as the remains of the day from Holy Hub and Holy Daughter's dinner out. Holy Son did not dine with them, as he had a different dinner date, but he immediately cautioned me, upon discovering that I was opening and reading my fortune cookie, that if I really wanted it to come true, I should eat the paper fortune.

This was a major paradigm shift in auspicious thinking and ritualizing for me. Eat the words.

It was diamond path brilliant in its "walk the talk" and "words have no inherent meaning" sensibility, and thus, made huge sense to me. Sense as in big-picture, embodied awareness and smells right sense.

So I impulsively did just that, while spurring Holy Daughter to do the same with hers. She was less than impressed with how chewy the paper was, and how it got stuck to her teeth and wedged between them so that her tongue had to dig into the grooves and fell groovy, forcing her to then toothpick flick the remnant bits to clear them, or she would keep obsessing over it. Fortune in mouth syndrome. I thought to myself, yeah, thoughts I allow to become things are much like that, too.

Now, I have to be honest. I have no idea if the words on our collective fortunes will come true ~ I don't much care. They were vague enough fortunes for each one of us (the usual health, wealth and harmonic suspects), ranging from ~

Holy Hub: Something unexpected will come in the mail.
Holy Son: Good heatlh will come to you for a long time.
Holy Daughter: You will enjoy peace and harmony in your home.
Holy: You may have to be patient, think, listen and heed signs.

~ that I'm guessing in the immediacy, inevitability and infinity of space/time boundaries, will be bound to come to fruition somehow, somewhere, sometime. For the lucky lotto winners above, that sometime was now.

As above, so below ~ for that sometime was also now for me. I'm beginning to slowly realize that someday fortunes and happily ever after hopes and dreams are lived in the moment, not the future. This has been a hard one for me to grasp. So, that night, I ate my fortune with my Kung Pao chicken and felt as though my belly and self were both very full and satisfied.

And when that full to the brim satisfaction dissipated, (as it invariably does in matters of Chinese food digestion), it was yet further reminder to me that I had digressed to the past - oh there I go again, why did I eat Chinese food instead of something heartier? I know better. Blah blah blah, monkey mind chatter. And to the future - I wonder if I should let this digest and then have a bedtime snack later? It gave me pause to remember that happiness and fullness come only from within, and these are moment-by-moment choices.

Luck comes in threes, as did fortune cookie messages for me this weekend. After putting the finished touches to the campaign poster above for oh Holy Son on Sunday night after my spiritual retreat had ended, I paused to reflect on my own grace and good fortune of having such a wise son and teacher, who instinctively knows what it means to walk one's talk, eat words and be humble. He can barely walk, chew gum and talk on his cell without tripping, but he can trip along on a higher spiritual plane - figure that one out. To this, I bow auspiciously.

Stay with me now, though as I Orient the face of luck from Asia and leap over to Ireland, in these, the penultimate days leading up to St. Patrick's Day.

Holy Daughter is fast and furiously preparing for her Irish dances that she will perform on-stage in downtown Seattle this Saturday. And I'm stoked because on my 32 squares list of lifelong dreams, I finally get to realize one of my biggest dreams alongside her, by strutting in the St. Patrick's Day parade. OK, so maybe my dream square only specified "be in a parade" but who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth? Or ass end, as it were, should I find myself behind any ponies or Irish rugby players.

So I'm very excited. I'm practicing and preparing my royal wave to the masses of adoring fans and lovers of all things Irish and OK, more than a few drunken partyers who will be literally littering the sidewalks that parallel our parade route. I myself am not Irish per se, although I come by it honestly from an environmental perspective. My maiden name is Quinn so I have a leg up on most, I guess. But as it relates to the parade, I have been given strict instructions by a friend to do at least one spontaneous act or gesture during the parade. Perhaps it will involve that same leg up - who knows. My intent is to see his sage advice and raise it a notch. We'll see where all that Irishnish leads.

Holy Hub sincerely hopes it leads us to the nearest pub. Truth be told, I think he's only doing this parade schtick in hopes of a pot of beer at the end of the parade rainbow. I hear him. And I sincerely applaud those lucky Irish who have life figured out and who lend themselves to the lore of their great nation. Sing bawdy ballads with a lilt and a wink, dance jigs with all of your closest neighbors, down pints til you burp, and zigzag home in the dark of the night. Life if probably not meant to be any more complicated than that.

So why oh why do I make it so?

I feel very much like a brewery these days actually. There is so much stuff fermenting and distilling and swirling inside me. Hops and yeast and barley and water don't even begin to cover it. My keg runneth over and is in need of a tap to keep it contained. And I know that if I drink too much from this primordial alcohol, I am bound to belch profusely and echo Ben Franklin's words about beer being proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

And there you go - I've worked my way back, albeit circuitously, to the notions of love and happiness. Altruisms worth raising the glass of life in toast to, to be sure.

That said, I will leave you on this note - the note of good fortune. Click here if you're feeling lucky. Click here if you're not. And finally, click here if you don't give a schmidt either way.

Irish you health, wealth and harmony. Cheers and bottoms up, blogland mateys.

Birds of a Feather

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

On Travel

I've been bitten in the butt by the travel bug again.

I can tell because I've been spending inordinate amounts of time on Mapquest, mapping out hypothetical and random roads trips between here and various theres in the Western US.

I love maps and road trips and yes, just plain travel.

Our kids have inherited the road trip gene - they're positively Pavlovian when it comes to car excursions. They immediately begin packing, upon hearing of said impending trip - regardless of destination - and then a full hour prior to departure, they can invariably be found already ensconced in their seats in the vehicle amongst myriad pillows, snacks, electronic gear and stuffies. Repeat rituals on return journey. Suffice to say they are stellar travellers.

Speaking of stellar, our quick and dirty road trip this week took us to Vancouver, BC. In honour of this homecoming, I decided to crank Canadian tunes all the way, whilst deftly avoiding all the speed traps set up along the way. Listening to Klaatu was very retro - I was making wide-eyed nanu-nanu gestures at passing vehicles while singing 'calling occupants of interplanetary most extraordinary craft.' (The Klaatu thing throws people who assume this to be a Carpenters tune - wrong-o).

What can I say? I was on the stretch between Marysville and Bellingham, WA and I was bored.
But not only was I pretending to be a Heaven's Gate cult member on this drive, I was also channeling my inner cuckoo nester, when I switched to glide by grooving to The Kings. One of my favourite ways to frighten my children is to belt out lyrics at the upper limits of my vocal range to songs they don't know. This is a particularly gratifying activity when said lyrics necessarily entail yelling: 'lunatics anonymous, that's where I belong!'

Sigh. My thrills, they are cheap and infrequent, especially in the road trip department. Road trips are stupendous and wondrous, but they are sadly lacking in our life lately, given our collective if impossible schedule.

I recognize that these are the best of times and the worst of times for we are in both the best and worst kind of vagabondage right now; encumbered by our dharma and lot in life, which is that of householder (2nd of four Hindu stages of life). The operative words here being house and hold.

On that note, here are some excerpts from a piece by Pico Iyer that I love, entitled "Why We Travel: A Love Affair with the World."

"We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home.

We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity - and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and joy and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the "gentlemen in the parlor," and people cannot put a name or tag to us.

And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of unessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home). Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse, and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation."

Some final thoughts on travel:

"We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

George Santayana

"We carry within us the wonder we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us."

Sir Thomas Browne

Disappearance

Disappearance

The leaf tips bend
under the weight of dew.
Fruits are ripening
in Earth's early morning.
Daffodils light up in the sun.
The curtain of cloud at the gateway
of the garden path begins to shift:
have pity for childhood,
the way of illusion.

Late at night,
the candle gutters.
In some distant desert,
a flower opens.
And somewhere else,
a cold aster
that never knew a cassava patch
or gardens of areca palms,
never knew the joy of life,
at that instant disappears-
man's eternal yearning.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh ~

Happy Heart Day

Holy Daughter went to school this morning with a gigantic, bouncy spring in her step. She was so excited for Valentine's Day because she wanted to show off her special Valentine's box creation, which all the kids made as a container for their classmates to stuff their Valentine's cards and treats in.

We seldom do things in small measures in the Schmidt house. Her Valentine themed box was no exception.

Normally the cat itself, woulda coulda shoulda sufficed, but she was worried it wouldn't hold all the cards and candy. So what started off as a heart-shaped cat-shaped box, soon turned into the cat and a huge honking, diorama cat house, complete with bed, room decor, kitty litter and food. Check out the lightbulb she made at the top.

She had a ton of fun making it but I had to giggle because of course, the lion's share of kids showed up with wrapped shoe boxes with a slit cut in them.

Oh well, go big or stay home, I always say. Actually I never say that, but I began doing so today. This being the big splurge day and all. I can't believe the retail expenditure figures for Valentine's Day - $17 billion in the U.S.?

OK, that. is. insane. If ~ instead of buying flowers that die, and chocolates that make us fat, and cards that kill trees ~ we all redirected those funds towards providing much-needed vaccinations, food and safe housing infrastructure for the world's needy, think what a massive act of love that might be.

Anyways, tonight we're having a romantic Valentine's dinner at home, fam-damily style. If I'm not mistaken, it's the only free night on the calendar for the next month and a half. Holy Son will make homemade heart-shaped pizza for Holy Hub & I, Holy Daughter will mix up (perhaps literally) some raspberry mousse in chocolate cups, and we'll drink wine and eat salad by candlelight, while Holy Son makes his cello gently weep in the background, and while Holy Daughter cuddles the guinea pigs til they squeak. Sound romantic?

Welcome to my world.

"To hide the key to your heart is to risk forgetting where you placed it."

Timothy Childers