60 Seconds for Time Out Tuesday: Advice to Myself for 2025: A Factory Reset
- 60 Seconds for Time Out Tuesday: Advice to Myself for 2025: A Factory Reset 5:06
Hello to you listening in St. Paul, Minnesota!
Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories from Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds (and a bit more) for Time Out Tuesday and your host, Diane Wyzga.
While I don’t go for Begin Anew resolutions I’ve found that I can do pretty well with a factory reset. Those who have been following me for some years now have heard me seeking the genuine in life, women having a voice in the world, letting go of the unnecessary, and making room for what nourishes in these finite days of a human life.
What’s my factory re-set for 2025? Advice to Myself by Louise Erdrich whose writing and Wisdom I have coveted since reading Love Medicine in 1984. Perhaps her poem will reset something wild and unexpected in you.  Â
Advice to Myself
Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic—decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.”
“Advice to Myself” by Louise Erdrich from Original Fire. © Harper Collins Publishers, 2003. PDF in  Library of Congress
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Stories From Women Who Walk Production Team
Podcaster: Diane F Wyzga & Quarter Moon Story Arts
Music: Mer’s Waltz from Crossing the Waters by Steve Schuch & Night Heron Music
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