Camellia

The world outside my front window is brown.  Brown grass.  Brown bare-branchy tree trunks.  Brown driveway.  A few stray brown leaves scurry with the wind across the ground.  Brown house across the street. 

The view into the small side yard seen from above my kitchen sink is quite a contrast.  A beautiful, unabashedly blooming camellia grows there.  Large green leaves and huge fuchsia flowers fill the frame of my window when I stare that way, which I often do.  I spend quite a bit of time in my kitchen, but this week has been even more filled with kitchen sink wash time.  Wash hands.  Wash dishes.  Wash fruit.  Wash vegetables.  Wash the good glasses.  Wash the fragile snowman cocoa mugs.  Wash more dishes.  Wash more hands.  I’ve been spending a lot of time letting that camellia sink into my eyes over the last few days. 

The Collins English Dictionary, 10^th online addition defines camellia as follows:  any ornamental shrub of the Asian genus Camellia, especially C. japonica, having glossy evergreen leaves and showy rose like flowers usually white, pink or red in color: family Theaceae  (also called: japonica) .

Apparently the camellia was named in 1753 from a Latinized form of G.J. Kamel (1661-1706).  He was a Moravian Jesuit missionary who introduced the plant to Europe.  I was surprised to find the camellia to be imported from Asia so long ago since it feels like such a part of traditional southern yards to me.  The flowery plant is abundant in South Carolina landscaping.  The family who owned my house for forty years before my family must have loved the showy rose like flowers because we have several camellia plants in our yard.  They always catch me off guard when they burst to bloom in December.    

                   Camellia

                    Camellia missed the memo of proper plant ways

                    required of attire during long nights and short days.

                    Southern lady immigrant from Asia’s distant shores

                    shows present bud to bloom in Carolina outdoors.

                    Seems not she to know her shiny abundance green

                    takes territory of lighted Christmas pines tall and lean.

                    Coquette puts on her finest flashy pink and red

                    despite other winter plants pretending to be dead.

Virus

Today I rose gratefully without fever.  I breathed the faint scent of mentholated ointment and pattered past a pile of wadded tissues on the floor.  Puffy-eyed and mouth breathing I sit pondering my recent surrender in a battle against an opponent both formidable and minuscule, a virus. 

Virus is defined at dictionary.com as follows.
1.  an ultramicroscopic (20 to 300nm in diameter), metabolically inert, infectious agent that replicates only within the cells of living hosts, mainly bacteria, plants and animals:  composed of an RNA or DNA core, a protein coat, and, in more complex types, a surrounding envelope.
2.  (informal) a viral disease.
3.  a corrupting influence on morals or the intellect; poison.
4.  a segment of self-replicating code planted illegally in a computer program, often to damage or shut down a system or network.

I am getting my butt kicked by what I suspect is the foe known in Latin as rhinitis acuta catarrhalis.  In contemporary American English my present enemy is called the common cold – a virus caused disease of the upper respiratory system.  According to perusal of Wikipedia, the common cold is the most frequent infectious disease in humans with the average adult contracting two to four colds a year and the average child between six and twelve.  Zoiks!  And I read there are over 200 serologically different virus types that cause colds!  What?  And, because of the many different types of viruses and their tendency for continuous mutation, it is impossible to gain complete immunity to the common cold.  Nasopharyngitis is raging!

How are we to defend ourselves from an ultramicroscopic infectious agent that sneaks its way through the air into the gelatinous haven of our nasal passages, the wide open watery entryway of our eyes, or the perpetually public port of our mouths?  Especially when low humidity, crowds and less than seven hours of sleep nightly are factors increasing chances of contracting the virus.  December is all about dry heat, throngs and late nights!

Thanks to Jennifer Ackerman who wrote in October 2010 “Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold” I learned people with stronger immune systems are more likely to develop symptomatic colds  because symptoms of a cold are directly due to the strong immune response to the virus.   Seriously?  My need to stay in bed for an entire day clinging dearly to tissues and religiously slurping Alka Seltzer Cold fizzy drinks may be my own body’s fault?  J.M. Gwaltney and F.G. Hayden offer hope in a 2006 article “Understanding Colds” stating that the common cold is self-limiting, and the host's immune system effectively deals with the infection.  In healthy, immunocompetent individuals, the common cold resolves in seven days on average. 

So, I have maybe three more days to go.  And I know I am not alone.  I see you out there sniffling along with me offering yourselves unwittingly as the living host to a metabolically inert infectious agent that cannot replicate without you.   

Anticipation

If you spend time with people in the under age ten set this month you may notice they are vibrating at an uber high frequency.  December excitement causes their bodies to bounce and their voices to get loud.  So much counting down exists with calendars and wreaths and candles and telling ancient stories and rehearsing songs or dances or plays.  There are sparkly cookies and handmade candy we can’t eat yet and bedecked boxes we aren’t supposed to shake or peek into.  Yet.  Parties are planned and people are coming.  In a few days.  All this preparation for celebration creates an electric atmosphere of anticipation. 

Dictionary.com offers these entries for the noun anticipation.
     1.  the act of anticipating or the state of being anticipated.
     2.  realization in advance; foretaste.
     3.  expectation or hope.
     4.  previous notion; slight previous impression.
     5.  intuition, foreknowledge, or prescience.

Much like extreme sports, December gets a place unto itself in terms of gift giving.   We hear reports of how consumer holiday spending may make or break retail profits for the year.  Every day news notes what percentage spending is up or down in the mayhem of money being dished out right now and if it will affect positively the economic slump.  I hear, “No pressure, folks, but get out there and spend, spend, spend.”

Immersed in the December time table and my role in bringing fruition out of anticipation, I’m working on a new perspective.  As in years past, I try to meditate on mysteries – darkness and light, birth and mission, simplicity and the sacred – while I make lists, decorate, run errands, buy and buy and buy.  I go back and forth, tugging both ends of the rope, over the intense gift giving this time of year and its place in my life.  I have tried a myriad of ways to make peace with it by valuing things we make ourselves and making lists of items other people might like instead of only what WE want for ourselves.  I also know that when my kids don’t express desires Santa can sometimes mess up so their wish list can be a blessing, too!

My emerging perspective is that maybe all this expectation and hope of buying and getting gifts can be a good way to capture the anticipation of light coming in darkness.  I am learning I can be more available to moments when I find a gift I think someone will love.  There is a foretaste of joy while I wait to give it to them, to see them receive it.  We can embrace the foreknowledge of gifts we may receive, too.  This is a good thing.  We can also accept mindfully ways to let ourselves off the hook of heedless buying. 

The trick for me is to both know miraculous things are in store and honor the miracle of our present selves by not becoming bludgeoned by the shopping.  In December we reside deep in festival anticipation of spiritual and material gifts coming.    

Change

A friend with wisdom and experience offered sage words upon the release of my book, Garden.    She said gently, “Sometimes when a first book launches writers expect everything to change.”  She was warning me that this can cause deflation because people somehow have an idea that, kinda like the glass slipper finally getting on the right foot, the achievement of a goal will whisk us into fantasy existence. 

The first entry for the noun change from dictionary.com is what I am thinking about. 
1. to make the form, nature, content, future course, etc. of (something) different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone.

My first book published December 1 (click book at right for details).  I’ve been editing it, talking about it, dreaming about it, fretting about it.  On a cold Thursday it happened:  my book became alive.  That morning I did something I had never done before, searched for my book at Amazon and giggled with glee when I found it.  I followed with the things I normally do:  made breakfast, packed lunches, took the kids to school, yoga, housework, a bit of writing.  I shared a fabulously fun afternoon book-launch lunch celebration with the greatest writing and creativity coach ever (www.CassiePremoSteele.com).  Later I looked up my book on Amazon again.  Same grin.  At bedtime I reflected that while I plan to schedule readings in the New Year, truth resides in the comment of my mentor, life showed not much change that day.

On the outside, that is.  The future course for me is different from what it would have been if left alone.  Something that was inside me is now out where other people can see it, read it, share it with me.  Garden has created change in my life because it gave me a place to see words I’ve had stewing around in my head arranged, bound and beautiful.  In Garden’s first pages I talk about how the book is a creation story, a journey.  I walked the path of those words either first hand or through others’ stories.   

Where we start is blessed, where we falter is holy, where we reclaim ourselves is tremendous.  I try to hold fast to that perspective because my friend is right to warn of the pitfalls of thinking we have “arrived” by achieving one dream.  Change is not about an endpoint nor does it have to be fantasy.  Change is often subtle in its transformation. 

                                Change

                                Paper into coins clinks away
                                round edges and raised images
                                chinks and jangles a pile of spent
                                nights and days offered as hour
                                by hour Kali reminds us, devour
                                each bite a tangy taste of what
                                at every moment is altered.

                                Shift is a gift only truly you
                                can offer yourself, a golden cup
                                sharp lipped, luminous reflected
                                held up with working, open hands
                                sipped beyond intoxicated, full
                                to the verge with that you are
                                not once (only then) but now.