Harbor Pilots - When ordinary meets Extraordinary

And we are live Christmas Day 2025. Harbor pilots on deck hoist the mainsails. We are on open waters, navigating life as it happens. I love the liveness, the immediacy, the access to Cadre. And I'm humbled and blessed that I can be one of the contributors. Hi, Michelle. Welcome in. My name is Kathy the Cadre. I'm known as Speakwinder because I like to take words and bend and mold them into works of poetry. And I also love the template or the mode of Harbor Pilots when I talk about caregiving on Thursdays in the Kadrasphere.

I am a caregiver to my mom, who's 94 years of age and having her Christmas celebration today nearby. I'm on my way to her. Her name is June, and the staff at the Rouse call her juneiebug Rouse, meaning her nursing home. So I have kind of a little potpourri of things I want to talk about today. And I'm parked at a place that's closed, of course, because it's Christmas Day. It's a cute little restaurant, looks like a log cabin, and it's called Cabin in the Pines. And truly there are pine trees everywhere.

You might see the restaurant through the windshield of my car. Not terribly sure what all you're seeing here. I'm going to circle back slowly so as not to make you dizzy. Hi. Merry Christmas, Jules. Ah, Yeah. I missed JC's Live because I was driving. It takes me about an hour and a half to get to mom from my house in Erie, Pennsylvania, which is on the shore of Lake Erie. And so I have about seven or eight miles to go before I get to embrace my mom and have a festive meal with her. Spend Christmas Day together.

C. often will talk about. C. lippold is one of the founding members of the Cadre, and his lives are so creative. And he talks about the thin space. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the thin space. Probably zero time, because he explains it much better than I. Yeah, and also Ohio. So I go through parts of New York state just to get home to Erie, Pennsylvania. So I was in between cities in New York. I was in between Sherman and Chautauqua. And the name of the town I can't even think of right now.

And it probably is population about 5 or 6,000. No, no joke. So I. I knew I was getting extremely low on fuel and I didn't even want to pull over to consult the map or the gps. Thanks for being here, Jules. Thank you, everybody. In the interest to fuel economy, I kept driving while using the navigation and it said, I found. You know how she speaks to you, Siri? She says, I found one gas station seven miles from here. Would you like that one? And I said, yes, please. And it navigated me there. And that gas station was closed up tight.

Dark, nothing. So while I'm thinking, okay, what do I do next? I could literally feel the car under me starting to expire. Oh, thank the good Lord. I found a street light next to a business in this tiny little residential area and was able to pull under the street light. That was a blessing that I wasn't just in the. In the way dark in the hinterlands on a snowy evening in New York. No gas, not even a fume, nothing. I have aaa. I could have called them, but I called my son in law first who was also en route home from the party that we had just attended with his wife and kids.

I said, what are we going to do? I'm out of gas. Should I call aaa? I'm feeling very much alone and stranded, which I was maybe a little bit scared, but not, not particularly scared, just truly just frazzled and upset with myself that I'd push the limits on my new car for when it says empty, it's really empty. My mechanic has told me in the past that when your fuel is low, it's not good for the fuel pump. It's not good to ride on fumes. Don't do it, he says. And there I was, stuck and under a street light waiting for help.

Nick said, hang tight, we're also not far from that town. And his Google told him that there was a gas station open, a 247 gas station, and that he would stop and get some and come and rescue me. And that's what he did. That's what he and my daughter and the children did. They arrived in their minivan with their kids and dogs. We had all just been together celebrating and it took him about a half hour by the time he got to the gas station that was open 24 7, put some gas in a small can and pumped it into my car.

It took about a half hour. So I sat and talked with a friend on messenger during that time while I was waiting so that the time passes quickly. There's a little reading I'm gonna use actually I'll just do it now because it segues with me. Car out of gas. I'm gonna find it here, I want to read it to you and I'll tell you the rest of that. Saga because it didn't get a whole lot better for a minute or two. Here it is. Is that it? I'll get to the gas one because I have everything in order here on my clipboard.

This is what I got here. I have all my notes. Do you like my hat? Very festive. It says I have WI fi and I have four out of five bars for phones. So I think I'm broadcasting well. So I drove to a gas station, right? And it was closed up tight. Another one. Not the one that I located, but yet another one in another town. So here I am. Two gallons of gas doesn't carry you very far. It wasn't going to carry me home. I finally found a gas station. Blessings upon blessings, filled my tank, topped it up and got home safely.

The world is an extraordinary place. And when the unexpected hits the mundane, you have something that reminds you of the zest and the vastness and the unexpectedness of life. And this is a word for the day. I get these daily in my email and it says the world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries. There's your thin space. Yeah. You never know when you're going to cross a boundary line into an adventure. It could be a misadventure. And this one is about hope.

Hope is radical openness for surprise, for the unimaginable. If that is the attitude with which we look and listen and open all our senses, we enter into a meaningful relationship with whatever life offers us at the given moment. Just going to let that one sit. Hope is radical openness for surprise. And I love this one as well. The human soul doesn't want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed, to be seen, heard and companioned. Exactly as it is. That is Cadre. That is Cadre in a nutshell.

The human soul doesn't want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed, to be known, to be seen, heard and companioned. Exactly as it is. Exactly as it is. In whatever moment we happen to be in. Calm collides with chaos in any given instant. Our Cadre, computer computer contributor, Ms. Shannon Paul has comedy in the chaos. And we were together on. I was watching one of her lives and she asked me if I would be doing a December 25th live. And I typed in yes. And Ms. Shannon decided she would too.

She's coming up at 3 Eastern. This is the one I wanted. We don't call our cars broken when they're out of gas. They just need to be filled up. They're not broken. They just need to be filled up. We don't call our phones worthless when they're out of battery. They just need to be plugged in. The same goes for me and you. You are not broken. You are not worthless. You are worth healing. You are worth taking a rest. You're so hard on yourself. Yes, I'm of a certain age. You're so hard on yourself. Sit back, marvel at your life.

It's the grief that softened you. At the heartache that wisened you. It's the suffering that strengthened you. Despite everything, you still grow. Despite everything, you still grow. Be proud of this. I'm proud of you. Be proud where you are. People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner. No, no. I don't try to control the sunset. I watch with as it unfolds. I feel like I am handing you a box of rich chocolates.

And each one that we poke has something. Flavorful and rich and chewy inside because I'm giving you these little nuggets, these little caramels, if you will, of wisdom that people have dropped into the world. The one I just read about, sunsets is by Carl Rogers. I leave you with Mom's Christmas wish list. And this is something I wrote to my children because I told them I don't want material things. I do have a wish list and I started the list. I don't know if it's finished, but it goes like this.

All I want for Christmas, my precious family, Laughter, Sarcasm, memories, hugs, Phone calls, texts, coffee, Good hair days, mismatched socks, random unexpected visits, corny jokes, Dad jokes, beach, sunsets, tickles with littles, stolen fish sandwiches. And watching them grow and learn, I want to feel stored up. On sad days. I wish for more shared laughter with my mom, for many relationships that have come unraveled. Continued wonder, sustaining joy, small or big adventure just around the corner.

Hi, Mel Myers. Merry Christmas to you. That's my Christmas wish list. And this is my final statement is this picture. Jennifer Lawson is an extraordinary artist. She's a watercolor artist who I've come to admire. And this exists in my phone. When I need to send something that jiggles out laughter in someone. Or maybe gives an extra bit of random. Silliness, I send this picture. I think it's emu. Look at those eyes. Anne Lamott, one of my favorite authors, famously says that we are all together in this thing called life.

And when we have a moment of laughter, we join in with goofy, ravaged joy. The phrase goofy ravaged joy captures everything because joy is an odd mix, depending on what we've been through, what we've survived, How we've had to shift and adapt with the times, Our losses, our grief work, Our new journeys that we never anticipated. Joy is a mix of all of that. Joy is not pure and unfettered. It is a mix of life as it flows and the wisdom that comes in. I think it makes the laughter deeper. I think the sadness deepens the places where joy is going to abide so that it's even louder and more robust when it erupts.

Goofy, ravaged joy. I might post some of these pithy comments in the stream of conversation. In the meantime, I wish you a happy, Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year, a sense of anticipation and a feeling of community here in the Cadre. Our hope is that this is a neighborhood where you can just come in and as Mr. Rogers would say, you can take off your walking sweater and put on your red cardigan, take off your walking shoes and put on your tennis shoes. And I like you just the way you are. The sun is coming in the window of my car, which now has a full tank of gas.

I'm about to go see my mom, who's 94 and still remembers me. I'm not alone. I have my corgi companion riding shotgun. There's Gracie sporting her new Christmas sweater. And I'm not alone when I have you. Thank you for joining me. Whatever is on deck for your day, thank you for taking time to cut away so we could be together for a few precious moments, thinking about the ordinary colliding with the extraordinary. Keep being an amazing human. I'll see you next week on Harbor Pilots.