A young friend designed incredible cards featuring familiar local scenes from a totally different perspective. Completely different & utterly wonderful. And different. Did I mention different? Different can be experienced as disquieting, and not necessarily in a negative way. Or in a negative way that has a positive effect on our thinking & capacity to experience. It can scour out new channels in our mind & imagination, opening us to experience old things in new ways. My guess is that's how Lisa's artwork affected a lot of people at yesterday's craft sale. Including - maybe especially - the shoppers who couldn't resist their siren call of beauty & heart.
My lead in to this a.m.'s realization that what helped my mother deal so well with the rigors of older age was her ability, her enjoyment of seeking the different. She would have snapped up two of each of Lisa's cards - one to send to Mike & Kerry, to Bob & Linda, to Peter & Mim, to all her friends & family who loved our little hometown. And one to keep for herself.
No question which would be her favorite - the pair of cardinals with Glencairn in the background. Cardinals were a totem for Mom & Dad. She would have loved Lisa's remarkable design.
Mom was born in 1910, grew up in a generation of women who thought their highest calling was to help the men in their lives reach their highest calling & help their daughters embrace doing the same. This generational culture of coming second - if you ranked at all - was compounded beyond measure by having a surviving parent who drummed into her middle daughter the importance of supporting nurturing enabling the status quo, including/especially a status quo that brought her (Mom) no benefits, that downright did her harm. She learned to square her shoulders, accept the load (whatever it might be) & soldier on in a horrendous cause. Not a good lesson to learn from your mother.
Praise be, Mom - like Lisa - embraced the different. She certainly immediately recognized that Raymond Lewis Lockhart (universally known as Pete to all who knew him) was different from every other man she'd met. Dad had the same impact on Mom that John has on me - he helped her see her BEST self, not the self that was needed by others. And he loved her - truly deeply passionately. As long as Dad was there to mirror back the marvelous person he saw & loved, she had her bearings, but when he died in their early 60s, she reverted to the behaviors she'd learned under her mother, especially supporting the status quo, no matter how gosh awful it might be.
The fresh appreciation I felt this morning connects to how Mom changed after a 1997 road trip to DisneyWorld, almost 25 years after Dad's death. It was mighty courageous of an 87-year old, slightly frail woman to tackle 9-hour drives punctuated by sprints of sightseeing in Williamsburg, Charleston & Jacksonville. Mom was a woman of great spirit & a strong sense of adventure that never wavered. She thirsted for the new experience, the different.
Never appreciated that so much as I do this morning - Mom thirsted for the different. And that was her great salvation from getting old. Oh, she aged, but never got old.
Here comes the BUT - until November 1997, she observed the different, she appreciated the different, she even gloried in it. But she never once seemed to think of embodying different. Her job, especially after Dad died, was to preserve protect & defend the status quo, however horrendous it might be, however much it might work in every way shape & form against her own & everyone else's best interests.
Second BUT - her hankering for the healthy whole healing different proved stronger than her attachment to perpetuating an adverse status quo. Two moments from that drive down to DisneyWorld stand out forever in my mind & heart - Mom's reaction to hearing Stephen Covey explain that between what happens & our response is a moment where we can CHOOSE our response (for her, that was revolutionary) & Marianne Williamson's call to spiritual arms, that we are put here to blow apart the status quo. One moment, she'd never heard those insights & another moment she had - and her world had shifted, she breathed in & out in new ways.
My fresh appreciation of Mom - born from appreciating Lisa's wondrous cards that stirred in others new feelings about familiar objects & places - is that there was always & forever a seed within her awaiting the right trigger to grow & blossom into someone capable of recognizing & differentiating between a status quo that helps & one that hurts & responding to nurture the one & limit the other. And that changed everything.
Can see some further builds on my new-found AH HA! of Mom's longtime appreciation of the different. I see that same connection between an acceptance, a seeking of the different in the experience of so many older friends to aging. Have to stop writing - places to do, grannie clients to lead astray. But will come back to this. Soon
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