Yup. I had one of those today. 🙂
photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell
A Perfect Moment
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Tag Archives: moment
Beauty
photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell
No Endings
Sitting here with the calico cat on my lap – watching her ears twitch, feeling the breath going in and out of her warm body. She is 16. I’ve had her since she was a four-week old feral kitty – hissing and scratching and scared. I’ve shared almost all her life with her – from the beginning to today. She trusts me now – trusts me enough to jump into my lap and curl up there, and let herself be petted.
Now that she’s older I sometimes find myself thinking about that moment when my calico cat will no longer be with me. I think about death.
This year a lot of people I’ve known and cared for have died. November was especially challenging – a former student, a man who became my friend after he and his wife read one of my books, and a friend of mine from my walks in Bellingham all passed on. Â Last week a dear woman in her 90’s with a kind heart, a stalwart faith, and a twinkle in her eyes – a woman who had been a member of our church most of her life – passed on. It’s all gotten me to thinking about the nature of death – what it is and what it isn’t.
The thought came to me the other day that death isn’t really an “event” – that there really aren’t any seams or borders or divisions separating one part of life from another – but that it’s forever flowing in an endless stream.  It’s true that I can’t see the friends that have passed on, but I can tell you there are times when I feel their love. Death can’t end the love we have for one another.
It probably seems weird to connect the insights I’ve had about death to the Superbowl – but that’s where my pointy little noggin went when I contemplated the end of the Seahawks season this morning. If only the game could have gone on a little longer, I thought, the Seahawks might still have been able to pull it off. “But it’s done. Over. Ended. It is what it is. And the magnificent catch by Kearse, the receptions by Matthews, the runs that Lynch made, the colossal efforts of Russell Wilson and his teammates – none of that matters now because they lost.”  Those were my initial thoughts. But when I stopped thinking about the Superbowl as an “Event” – when I started thinking of the game as just a step in an endless progression – a step towards progress – a character-builder – another life-lesson – my feeling about it changed.
I would like to think that all the lessons we’re learning here – the lessons about honesty, compassion, integrity, friendship, courage, perseverance, honor, selflessness, generosity, love – are lessons we can build on and carry with us as we ride the current down the stream. It doesn’t make sense to me that all of that learning can abruptly come to an end at the close of a Superbowl, or a life.
My calico cat is with me in this moment – alive and breathing – and this moment is forever.
Karen’s calico cat
The continual contemplation of existence as material and corporeal – as beginning and ending, and with birth, decay, and dissolution as its component  stages – hides the true and spiritual Life, and causes our standard to trail in the dust.
– Mary Baker Eddy
New You
New adventures await! 🙂
Peace…
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Note to Self…
Note to self: Don’t waste a single moment. Hurrying to get through this moment so you can get to the next one is not the way to live a life.  Make each moment count – learn something new in each moment, love more, see the beauty in now. Okay. Carry on then…
photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell
Accepting the Moment
Trying to change the moment into something more comfortable instead of just accepting it for what it is… is really a waste of energy, ain’t it? … Of course, if you’re sitting on a tack or something you might want to remove it, but still…
photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell
Trying to change the moment…
“Trying to change the moment into something more comfortable instead of just accepting it for what it is… is really a waste of energy, ain’t it?… Of course, if you’re sitting on a tack or something, you might want to remove it, but still…” – Karen Molenaar Terrell, Great 21st Century PhilosopherÂ
Beholding the infinite tasks of truth, we pause, – wait on God. Then we push onward, until boundless thought walks enraptured, and conception unconfined is winged to reach the divine glory. – Mary Baker Eddy
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I had one of those days today. I got out of work a little late, and as I was driving home I started thinking about all the stuff that I still had to do before I could finally lay me down to sleep – there were things to feed and walk and tend – and I was really not looking forward to any of it. Â In fact, the more I thought about what lay ahead, the more burdened and overwhelmed I felt by it all. Â It was cold. It was dark. I just wanted a hot bath and bed and a good book.
When I walked into the house I found I’d walked into a sort of mini-crisis. I realized, then, that I was going to need to go back out on the road, drive back into the town I’d just come from, spend a lot of money, and use up a couple more hours of my night before I’d ever see that hot bath or my bed.
And this is when I had an epiphany: I wasn’t going to be able to change the circumstances, but I could change my response to them. Instead of focusing my energies on trying to find comfort for myself, I could just accept what was – not make any judgment on the moment as good or bad – not wish it away or wish it was something different – Â and just live it.
Long ago I discovered that if I was biking or hiking or running uphill, and I was fighting the hill, it made it harder for me. But if I just let myself relax into it, everything came easier. Â So that’s what I did with this “mental uphill” tonight. Â I just sort of let myself lay back on the waters and let the currents take me where I needed to go.
I still needed to go back out on the road, still needed to drive into town, still needed to spend money – but I actually enjoyed myself, met some really helpful people, and even had the opportunity for some laughs I wouldn’t have had if I’d stayed home.
        One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity. – Mary Baker Eddy
Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts. – Mary Baker Eddy
Things I Learned from the Year of Insanity
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- butterly at Seattle Center
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- Seagulls in Bellingham, WA. (photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell)
(All photos [except the Big Hand Karen photo, by Scott Terrell], were taken by Karen Molenaar Terrell.)
The other afternoon my husband and I went out for dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant. For whatever reason, I was feeling cranky. Â Put upon. Impatient. Â And then I saw the leaves on the tree outside the window, and I remembered what those leaves had meant to me during the Year of Insanity. I remembered a time when I hadn’t had a choice in how I felt – when I couldn’t seem to “make” myself happy, and had no control over what was going on inside my head. And I remembered the pledge I’d made to myself at the end of that long, dark time when I had a choice again: So long as I had a choice, I would never, ever choose sadness over joy. And right that moment, I let go of the crankiness, and, watching the leaves flicker on that tree outside the window, chose to enjoy my time at the restaurant.
The Year of Insanity was a whopper for me. I’d never experienced anything like it before – and don’t see a need to ever experience anything like it again 🙂 – but, looking back, I am convinced that I needed to go through that time. I learned so much from it – one of the chief things being that even when I’m depressed, I can be happy – even when I’m sad, I can experience joy. Another important lesson was that the pain passes – always, always. It doesn’t last forever. I learned I was strong. I learned I could survive.
There were certain things during that year that seemed to bring me peace when i looked on them. I can’t tell you why my distressed thought was comforted by these things – why they were the objects that seemed to calm me during that time – but I can tell you what they were: The leaves on that particular tree outside the Italian restaurant; sailboats on the bay; my hands; butterflies and dragonflies; seagulls in flight; and big bright sunflowers.
One of the things that happened to me during that time – and that has stayed with me – is that I began to – I was forced to, really – tune in more intensely to the beauty around me – I began to notice things in my surroundings that I might have just walked by in the past: Little insects on flowers; all the varied colors in the sky and water; clouds – I’d never so appreciated clouds before this time! The insanity forced me to live moment-by-moment, taking each moment one at a time – being grateful to have survived that moment before moving on to the next one. I learned to stop the constant dialogue in my head by taking a deep breath and focusing on the gifts of that moment – the dragonfly over the water; the sailboat gliding by; the flickering leaves on the tree. “Thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you, God” became my mantra.Â
And one day I woke up and came back to myself. Â I remember walking down the ramp toward the boardwalk – the bay stretched out in front of me, and a ray of sunlight breaking through the clouds and sparkling on the water – and I was free.
 The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. – Robert Green Ingersoll
 Step by step will those who trust Him find that “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” – Mary Baker Eddy
(More about the Year of Insanity can be found in The Madcap Christian Scientist’s Middle Book.)
I remember once thinking that if I could just get through that obligation, and this appointment, and that scheduled meeting, I’d finally be able to get on with life. And it came to me, in a flash, that all of it – the obligations, appointments – and yes, the shopping, wrapping, baking, and cleaning – ARE life. I know. Duh, right? But it took me awhile to realize that I needed to be enjoying the messy stuff of life, too. Every single moment is precious…
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 