"What's doing nothing?"

At the end of a Winnie the Pooh movie Christopher Robin is going off to school, and he tells Pooh that he won’t be able to do nothing anymore.

“What’s doing nothing?” Pooh Bear asks.

“Well,” answers Christopher Robin, “It’s when grown-ups ask you want you are going to do, and you say, ‘Nothing,’ and then you go out and do it.”

Remember being a kid and lying on grass cool against your back and staring up at the sky and being entranced by the shapes of the clouds? I remember being in my crib--taking a nap supposedly—and calling out, “Momma, the sky’s moving.”

We watched the 1938 movie You Can’t Take It With You with Lionel Barrymore, Jimmy Stewart, and Jean Arthur, about a house full of eccentrics who are doing whatever they want. The Momma is writing a novel because a typewriter was delivered to the house 8 years ago, one daughter dances all the time, the little man Grandpa picked up from the accounting office, makes up things, a toy bunny that raises us out of a hat, masks, Three old guys in the basement are making fireworks. Thirty five years ago Grandpa, on the way to being a corporate giant, rode the elevator up to his office, decided he wasn’t having any fun there, and rode it back down, never to return. Now he collects stamps and appraises stamp collections and gets paid for it. Of course trouble comes, but Grandpa takes it all in stride— “Things turn out,” he says, “as they usually do.”

DD asks me how we can live that way?

Any suggestions?

Keep Believing

Early Head Start

I have driven myself cuckoo with trying to figure it out—life I mean, manifesting, the Secret, God, all those things, the Ask, Allow, Receive theory of the Universe.

I’m letting it sit. And letting Little Boy D, who on February 2 became a great big two-year-old, provide the answer, Life, Love, Laugh and be Happy.

This morning I am driving in my pickup truck—my office on wheels—to a place where I can read and write. It is 8 AM. I just pulled off the road to watch the deflating of a hot air balloon. I see 5 balloons, 2 aloft, 3 on the ground still inflated to their exquisite splendor, stripped, variegated, colorful, grand floating orbs.

I watch as a green and blue balloon the size of a garage swings above the heads of a ground crew.

A man on a horse rides up shadowed by a dog trotting at his heals. The horse stands within feet of the balloon, apparently non-pulsed by this gigantic bloating object that is being pulled vertical to the ground by a man tugging on a rope. The great balloon lies on the ground, like a steed subdued by reins, and I can see the balloon’s construction, a giant hole in the top, filled with a lid-like enclosure, a smaller balloon within the hole. I suspect that opening serves as a door or window--something that adjusts the air flow.

I think of Velvet and Sierra my horses, how they would have apoplexy at seeing this monster shrinking before their eyes.

The horse seems okay with it. The dog just circles, watching or going to a person to be petted.

It is sad to see the once majestic balloon lying limp on the ground, reduced to a simple pile of blue and green.

Soon this once majestic balloon is rolled into its own gondola and placed in the back of a pickup. I think of our lives—once over it would be like that balloon lying unenlivened, a simple lump. Yes, we can be that lump or we can be filled with air and rise majestic. Deflated one day, souring the next. Is that how life is? Life, death, rebirth?

Apparently content that the show is over, the man on the horse gallops, the dog beside it, across the expanse of green that was the balloon’s landing site and together they disappear into the citrus orchard beyond.

I feel nostalgic for the rise and fall of a running horse, but happy to see the morning life of a balloon.

P.S. Yes, I know I need a picture, but that would require taking the camera with me.