If the ideal day is like hand washing your delicates and hanging them on the line to dry in the sunshine, my day felt like whites and darks dumped together in a washing machine, then shoved in the dryer in lumpy tangles.
Life is not Pinterest Perfect.
And this is a problem for me because I loooooooove being in control.
Cue my Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. Here's the perfect picture I took for you a couple of weeks ago on Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. Delicious pureed pumpkin, steamed and mashed and mixed with spices.
Are you thinking I'm a domestic goddess? That my floors are clean? Well, here's the reality of my kitchen bench top:
These photos remind me of the suit of armour we all sling on every morning. How are you? and I'm fine can cloak a myriad of worries.
Meanwhile, time ticks on; small things go wrong or right.
Big things catch us by surprise.
I thought about surrender and control when I took Holly to the groomer this week. Shih Tzus don't shed, but their hair, like ours, just keeps growing. She's nervous in the car and trembled as I clipped her into her doggie seatbelt. Then I idled in the driveway for a while searching for a podcast, while she sat in the back shivering.
She had no idea where she was going (To the VET??? A haircut? What? WHAT?!?)
I glanced back.
'Yeah, babe,' I said, 'I can relate.'
Sometimes I feel exactly like a dog in the backseat of a car, with my little dog mind desperately whipping around in circles.
That's why I love this Julian of Norwich passage from a book she wrote in the 1300s. I guess it's kind of a prayer or a mantra. She was a mystic, and is believed to be the first English woman to write a book in the English language. Imagine it...she knew that only men write books.
And then she wrote one.
The image, if you look closely, is a bone ceiling.
It's a shot I took of Fiona Hall's sculpture 'Mrs. Macquarie's Folly' at The Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney. The ceiling represents animal bones. The spines represent Norfolk pines that colonists thought would make excellent timber masts for ships...but they were wrong. The knots in the wood caused natural structural weakness. The masts cracked.
So much of colonisation didn't go exactly to plan, but here we are, still standing.
To me, that bone ceiling is heartbreakingly beautiful.
And there's a message in it.
Carry on.