So my new year has started off like constipation...

My only resolution for 2015 is to keep this blog more faithfully. Every writer should keep up a blog, yes? I planned on every Thursday and was very vague to myself about what the posts should contain. I try to be realistic with my resolutions. But already I am two weeks behind. Which means I have not kept my resolution at all until now. My substantial winter hiatus has included a great deal of curling into a ball under a blanket on my couch and fading in and out of sleep. It's not even a very comfortable couch. My spine is a mess. But I tell myself that it is better than crawling like Gollum into the frigid cave of my bedroom and essentially calling it a night in the middle of the day. I don't know if it's depression. I do take pills for that, so all should be well. And no I don't want to up the dose because that could result in my getting fat, which would cancel out a resolution I had at age 18 that I have never broken and don't plan to.

In these times, I would normally talk to my mom on the phone for a while, and she would fill me with encouragement and shower me aurally with love until I felt better. Mom was a doer. A master of mind over matter. She never stopped working/playing/working at playing. She achieved. She ran a home. She stayed in shape. She moved things, people, herself. She made things happen, even when she must have felt run down. She never got fat ever. She allowed herself a nap now and then, yes. But what I'm doing is more like wallowing than napping. Am I even tired? Or just afraid?
Mom is gone now, and the thought is a stab in the heart sometimes, and sometimes just a dull ache in my eyeballs. I don't dream of her every night exactly, but it's pretty close. I'm resigned to the fact that this never goes away - so I'm told by all my friends who've lost parents. But I can't help thinking this is like the cold that temporarily kills a car's battery. Which by the way has happened with my husband's car already.
Yes it is Wisco winter. The awful deep dark misery of it. The soul-crushing invasion that happens every year and lasts oh so long. It could be that because of Mom's passing I don't have the energy to fight this for six months or however damn long it's going to be this time.
At any rate, I'm open to nondoing, as Mom was when she started combating her own anxiety, perhaps a little too late. This is her, and this is her poem:

Nondoing- How to

How to sit nondoing

Watch a Kingfisher sit

                Dive and enjoy.

See a Heron graceful

                Slow and gently fly.

Know that beach and flowers say

Its ok to feel.

Dive and enjoy-slow and gently fly.

Judy Thorburn

August 13, 2013