Last night, Paul and I had dinner at Peking Gourmet, our favorite Chinese restaurant. We love the food, the kind and cheerful owner, Kim, and our regular server, Judy. At the end of the meal, we always read our fortunes — and they usually offer the standard hopeful predictions about money, friendship, and travel. But last night, we both received apt philosophical fortunes. Mine was: “Clear your mental, emotional and psychic space and you’ll see.” Paul received: “To live your life in fear of losing it is to lose the point of life.”
The watercolor, above, was created by my mother for the book we created together with her mother, The View in Winter. This book, published in 1992 and still available in print, includes Grandmother’s poems written in her eighties and nineties, mother’s lovely black and white watercolors, and one poem I wrote in honor of my grandmother. It was a project I didn’t think I had time (or resources) to do — yet, once I read the poems, I dropped all else and have never regretted it, never.
I am clearing, as I wish to see the way I saw when I worked on that project with my mother and grandmother. I am ready to reconnect with that vision and certainty, that focus.