Category Archives: gratitude

03.05.21
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Where I find myself this Friday afternoon

Or at least I think its Friday…quite frankly, I really have no idea what day it is anymore. COVID quarantine on the heels of retirement joined together with a personality that was always busy living my job and filling my day’s off with sanity recovery, chores and rules. One would think having no rules, no need for sanity and time on ones hands, one might do all of those things I complained I couldn’t get done while I was working. I frequently go to bed and have stress filled organizing dreams because I don’t really want to go to bed…I have things I want to do… I work harder in my dreams that I do during any other time of the day.

Some might say these unstructured days are good for the soul and I don’t argue that point. The difference is when I fail to do the things I want to do because I have an overactive mind and the glimpse of something shiny has me googling, shopping and looking for books to read on Amazon or scanning Twitter and Facebook, watching YouTube videos and in the blink of an eye clicking on my next second of unstructured entertainment.

Today while doing the recommended “homework-exercises” from my Heartmath.com class from Saturday mornings, I was able to go within using a technique “Heart Math Point 0”. Asking my heart “What clearing for a mental, emotional or physical healing would be fulfilling to invest my energy at this time”. Writing down my hearts intention became this blog post. I will endeavor to go within and listen to myself on a daily basis. Listen within to quiet the monkey mind and fill my day with intentional joy rather than being controlled by the next sparkling thing that passes before my eyes into my ego mind.

Namaste

02.06.21
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Not sure where this blog will go

Feel like I’m all over the place today. Started off with a Heart 2 Heart relationships class at 10. The instructor is a highly credentialed leader in the psychological as well as spirit driven genres. Seems as though the small group sessions will get us through the end of March working on our relationships…current, future and past. It occurred to me this morning that I may find some healthy, loving forgiveness and peace while releasing the difficult relationships in my life.

Very cold weather forecast for the area in the next few days. I wish someone would communicate this information with the geese. They didn’t leave the pond this year which I felt was an indicator that they knew it was going to be a warm winter here. The pond, which has not completely frozen over this year, was full of geese today…..FULL. The occasional dusting of snow doesn’t seem to bother them. Their gentleness gliding on the pond brings me so much peace!

Super Bowl tomorrow….just the two of us here which is probably healthier. It just doesn’t feel like I could possibly hold onto the kind and gentle image I like to maintain when I’m cursing and yelling. Nobody who really knows me had better be laughing at that!! Go Chiefs.

Namaste

02.05.21
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Pandemic make me lazy? Or did I just find contentment?

Doing my Morning Pages this morning…

What I scribbled out was “has the pandemic made me lazy or has it been a gift of contentment and getting to know who I am?” While I’ve had those days of total boredom … screaming in my head that I want to take a trip somewhere…Key West, Italy, Walmart… the gift I’ve received is being locked up in my house rather than my mind for nearly a year and having the opportunity to get to know what I want and what I think minus all of the key turns of the ignition of the car.

I near the anniversary of my retirement which is also the day He and I left work, loaded up 5 cats, 3 large dogs and our last bits of our life in Iowa, drove 4 hours to our new life in Missouri. The emotions were raw…the excitement, the fear, second guessing if we were doing the right thing, realizing its too late to turn back now, sister, we are doing this! I remember feeling such relief…anonymity awaits. I could wear sleep pants and forgo makeup to go shopping because I will not know anyone. No small talk will be required at the grocery store because I won’t know anyone.

So it would seem pandemic quarantining is exactly what I had been craving. I’ve had the opportunity to just be. To sit on the couch all afternoon and play Words with Friends, to read novels and self help books, to binge watch TV shows. I have groceries delivered, dishes may sit overnight in the sink, I may eat popcorn at 2 in the morning. Isn’t this what I craved since I became a responsible adult with a career!

Living in the moment….just being…

Namaste

01.18.21
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Code name: Pink Flamingo

In the back of my mind, I’ve always known that if I ever became first lady or CIA, my code name would be: Pink Flamingo!

I have flamingo chimes thanks to my friend, Sue. I also have 3 metal pink flamingos in flower beds in the yard right now, as well as totes of the plastic ones which does include Christmas pink flamingos. My next door neighbor also likes them and has a little square in her side yard (my side) where her pink flamingos live along with pink flower pots. One Christmas she started decorating the yard with them and so I bought Christmas flamingos and set them up so they looked like they were headed to her yard. She and I may be the only two on the street who felt giddy about it.

Years ago my late night dispatch partner and I did crafts when 911 lulled. I taught her to crochet and she taught me to embroider. I have embroidered dish towels put away which will last many generations. I pulled out my embroidery hoops etc the other day and then sat with them because I had no idea what I would embroider or on what. I laughed thinking about his face if I started embroidering his underwear #notgoingtohappen But instead…I found this beginning/children’s punch embroidery kit during a late night excursion on Amazon. It came today.

…..and so it is!

01.01.21
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Get outta your head

I woke up this morning and before I realized that today was supposed to be different, I had the same “basic” thoughts I did in all the days before. There have been a few of my many, many mornings that I’ve jumped out of bed to music, doves and sunshine. But for the most part, I am grumpy….of course as life would have it, I married a man who wakes up throws the sheets aside and yells “it’s a new day, nothing has gone wrong yet”. A mild exaggeration there because remember, he wakes up next to me who is always on her first and last nerve.

Today is New Years Day….that day when everything begins anew. Today is the day that we are full of new hope for a new body, new health regime, new personality, new job, new relationships, new life. My question this morning is what happened overnight that makes us believe we have finally “fixed” the list of the things we do not like about our life….finally the miracle. For me, the list includes the very same things I have not liked about my life for the last 20, 30, 50 New Years mornings. The message is: We don’t have to make the seeming impossible changes in our life, we just have to change our thinking moment by moment. As a friend of mine reminded me recently…each new breath gives me the opportunity to change the way I think….the decisions I make….and the trajectory of my life.

Hindsight is 2020. I don’t have to make plans to change so that I’m magnificent with the perfect life and friends and body. I have that already. I just need to change the way I think….replacing displeasure and dislike with gratitude and love. The love for myself that I want to receive from everyone else. Nothing outside of myself really changes anything. What matters is how I think…right in this moment. Not with plans for the future or discomfort with the past. Stop right now and ask yourselves 5 things each do I hear, feel or see…this exercise brings us into the present moment….and then ask right here and right now is there anything wrong…right in this moment AM I OKAY!?

Happy New Year!

12.31.20
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Hindsight is best not remembered

Oh the naïveté of life. We make our plans, we think we just keep movin’ on from what we are doing today…this week…this month….we anticipate with gusto tomorrow, next month, next year and we expect them to be status quo. Here’s an excerpt from last years blog from the last day.

“What will happen is lots of life in 2020. Just the way twenty/twenty rolls off the lips fills me with hope and wonder. I won’t make silly resolutions other than I’ll try to spend more time in service to others, I will not focus on the negative but instead I will focus on loving myself and being kind.”

If I take one thing from my dreams for 2020, I did In fact spend more time in service to others. Obviously not face to face but in support. I admit that I TOTALLY went into corona fear and focused on the negative for a couple of months beginning after my birthday in March. To use a phrase I don’t think is too vulgar or overstated for 2020, “shit got real”. Then something happened to me.

I started taking to heart all of the teachings… from the lessons and new thought teachings of Unity Village Chapel and my training in my short time with the Silent Unity Prayer ministry…from Don Miguel Ruiz, Jr, Paul Selig, A Course in Miracles, and the list goes on. I chose to remove Twitter and the barrage of 24 hour news from my life realizing that they are absolutely not the predictors of our future. It all reverts back to money. We are paying with our hearts and souls and peace of mind for their job of delivering fear. Fear always manifests nothing but fear…it’s a circle…..A viscous circle!

I look at the tragedy’s of 2020 and send love and peace and the light of the universe… I will not start 2021 holding onto the fear but I will remember the tragedy’s and the pain and Illness with the deserved reverence. We must move on. Not focusing on what has happened but what is happening right this moment…for each moment in our day, month, year and life. We must love ourselves, love each other and be kind.

Namaste

12.27.20
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Authenticity

Being vulnerable is not a sign of weakness or the enduring fear that there is something wrong with me. Allowing authenticity and vulnerability to surface is actually an indication of knowing who I am and making no apologies for who I am. In fact, by being authentic, I save myself that inner discomfort that someone outside of me can define me!

By working through some (childhood into adulthood) triggers in my life, I know I have often hidden who I am with defensive behavior by going on the attack before I am attacked. We live our life assuming that everyone but me has it all together. We see the weakness in someone else which feeds our ego and that sense of being superior bolsters our self esteem by searching and/or finding vulnerability in others…. manifesting unkind words/actions or irrational anger.

By healing the victim mentality within ourselves and by understanding that nothing outside of ourselves has anything to do with our divine nature allows us to be genuine and authentic in our relationships. One moment, one interaction at a time!

The bottom line for me is the quote from the pen of the Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better”

Namaste

12.25.20
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When the kids leave home

When my youngest daughter left for college, I was so excited for her adventure and her success. The next day I wondered what I was going to do with myself for the next 40 years. Most little girls born in the 50’s or 60’s usually know what they are to do. Get married, have kids and then the narrative ends. No one prepares us for the kids leaving home. I started collecting cats…..

Often girls also receive no instruction about the important things to expect after marriage…..like how do you merge the holidays. The options seem to be to give up on your family traditions and find peace with the husbands mother’s traditions, keep your family traditions and force the husband to disappoint his mother or wait until kids arrive and stand firm that you are making your own traditions and let the chips fall where they may.

Then your kids grow up, get married have children and there could be more grandparents than there are dining room chairs. NOW what. It’s possible to buy a day planner and schedule Christmas…everyone is kind of in the mood from Thanksgiving to New Years. That can work, I’ve heard.

But what I have found is you must release attachments about how Christmas is supposed to be. Learning to set aside “but they”…. I’ve always believed there was something special in the air about Christmas but I’ve learned that “we” have made Christmas what it is to us.

…….and I didn’t even want to touch on the religion aspect. Believe it or not, not everyone celebrates the same story about Baby Jesus.

Happy Holidays….

12.17.20
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A day in the life of 2020

I’ve joined a zoom Strength Builders class that meets on Monday and Thursday mornings. For the last two weeks, I’ve been walking with a slight bend at the waste. I believe this 1) is not natural for most women my age; and 2) this evidence that I accepted the invitation in the nick of time!

After class I opened the door and

He’s getting his exercise too and actually has also been walking with a slight bend. He’s been putting a ceiling in our downstairs family room.

It’s nearly completed….just a few pieces left on my end of the basement then he can begin the reorganization of his art studio. He thinks he can make it cat free….He’s such a dreamer!

While everyone else will be in their warm cars tonight driving through the many Christmas light venues around us, we are meeting the Missouri family at Powell Gardens and losing ourselves in the beauty and mystery of the decorated Christmas wonderland!

It’s really hard to believe the 2020 version of Christmas is a week away.

Sadly I think the geese are getting ready to leave the pond. They’ve all been sitting around on a thin layer of ice today…..I’ve been sending them messages to stay awhile longer…the rest of the week will be warmer

This reads more like a Dear Diary entry but that is where I am in my head…holding myself close, appreciating the friendships and the love and the beauty all around me.

namaste

11.29.20
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Fear burning like a flame in the cellar

My friend, Terri, posted this on Facebook this morning

The author understood what so many of us are learning….

I look back at my life and realize how exhausted I have been fighting for everything! I really thought that was how to be successful. Never satisfied, I always felt I needed to do better, to be better. Now I know it was fear. Fear that I would never be good enough instead of understanding that I just need to BE everything I AM.

Namaste