The feeling that I get in my belly when I pull into my driveway is something a lot like love.  I get that tingle in my spine as I head down the lane in those seconds that I begin to see my silver roof, and a sensation that I can’t describe when I begin to see, peeking through the cedars, my green stained plywood siding, and almost every time I have the same thought, thinking about how heavy those 4×10 boards were to move, as I pre-stained EVERY SINGLE ONE of them, 84 to be precise, in February of 2009, just four months after I got my building permit.  The anger I felt the other day when I discovered that SOMEbody dropped SOMEthing on my floor in the kitchen and put a big ding and gouge in my walnut boards, which I installed myself,  2 1/4 inch piece by piece, literally choosing which length of walnut I wanted to go where, row by row by row, in the late summer of 2009 and the coat after coat after coat of tung oil I applied that September, was an anger that a person should not “normally” feel over a damaged walnut board…it was more like the anager one would feel if one was punched in the face, but I was so mad!!!  It is, after all, just a floor…

My love of these walls and the things contained in these walls is perhaps not normal, but it’s me.  Every time I walk upstairs and see my Eames chair in the loft, I laugh to myself, how I so dearly wanted it, and saved for years to buy it, and yet I hardly ever sit in it.  Every time I come into my office to write bills for customers or to write for my pleasure, I laugh at what a disaster and mess this office space is, which needs to be repainted and reorganized and purged and cleaned, yet I just don’t make the time, and chuckle at how messy my upstairs life is compared to my downstairs one!  It is just thoughts about my space and my place on this earth, but I feel so much love for this place, that to say I’ve become teary eyed daily over these last few weeks of storms is not an exaggeration.  Listening to so much suffering on NPR interviews, and seeing so much loss and devastation on the news and the weather channel on television, with people saying how they are so grateful to be alive, although they are sad they have lost everything, is making my heart break a little bit every day for these people after these back to back to back hurricanes…

The father of my grandchildren has much, most of his family, in Puerto Rico and those residents of that island, OUR island, are suffering terribly this very hour.  I  know and love a woman who moved here from Bay St Louis Mississippi after she lost her home,  and nearly every possession she had, during Katrina, and I know people who lost most of what they owned and had to rebuild their homes after Sandy, and my mother stayed on her island during 1962 and knew many who lost much, and her mother knew many who lost most in the 44 storm before that…we live where the views take your breath away, and we know that to be so close to the ocean and the bay comes with the risks of damage and loss from the ocean and the bay.  Knowing the risks does not diminish the sadness when it happens though…

Almost every morning, I marvel at the way the sun kisses the tippy top of the cedar trees, as I walk back up the driveway from the bus stop.  Almost every night I watch the evergreens that surround the field out my west windows go through a trippy rainbow of color as the sun sets behind them.  I am in love with the house and everything around it, and I can’t stop thinking about these people who now have no house, no trees…everything became nothing in 24 hours…I have been thinking about my love of my home and wondering if I would have the courage to be so bold and brave, to say those words, “oh I have lost everything I worked so hard for, but I have my life”  I mean, I literally heard those exact words on the news the other day from a woman in Puerto Rico, and I thought, Wow!  so brave…I think I would just want to curl up and die.

Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism all teach the importance and practice of detachment.  Asserting that if we are not attached to things or people or ways of being, we won’t suffer so in this life…that the clinging to the things, or clinging to the way we want things to be, is what causes suffering.  This got me thinking this week about how much I AM attached and to WHAT!!!  I look no further than 36 feet behind me, across the office to the stairs and across to the south side of the loft to that chair and see that my attachments are strong and too many!  My metal roof above my head!  My handmade wood ’tiles’ under my feet, that my dad cut into rectangles for me from each 4×8 sheet and I routered, EVERY SINGLE ONE, and then predrilled holes in a formation that I had drawn  with a Sharpie on a piece of paper, and then made a plastic template for, and then painted purple, and then screwed in stainless Star head screws!!!  Oh good grief!!!  Talk about attachments and clinging…

I am practically in tears thinking about how much happiness building this house brought me and how proud I was of all I did, “what on earth is wrong with you??!” you might think exasperatedly…I am clearly too attached to this house.   THEN I think about what and who is in this house, and then what and who is next door to this house…LOVE is all around me!  oh my…it is just this never-ending loop of love and attachment! AND so all these feelings of sadness for so many suffering right now, on this planet, through the strong force of mother nature, has my heart so heavy and my mind so scrambled…will life be easier for me as I grow older, to care less and less about ANY of this??  I don’t have an answer today to my question.  I just know that I feel so deeply for all these suffering people in a world that is so full of suffering every day anyway…