During our recent vacation, our wonderful pet sitter/dog trainer was kind enough to send us pictures of our fabulous fur babies, while we were away. This is her picture of Josie, our collie:
This is the picture that she sent to us of Ralphie, our yellow Dudley Labrador:
And this is the picture that she texted to us, of Trip, our Boykin spaniel who doesn’t really care for anyone but us:
“Progress, not perfection.” This is our mantra, for the rest of our week, friends. Let’s make it a good one!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Welcome to the quietest, most introspective day on the blog. Welcome to our poetry workshop. What is the song of your soul? Write a poem. You’ll find out.
Yesterday, my husband and I were making newspaper bricks which he uses as firestarters for his very simple, old-school grill. My husband loves to read the WSJ in paper form, but I think that he has an Earth Mother guilt complex about this. (We had compost piles long before compost piles became a hipster status symbol.) Therefore, to alleviate his conscience, my husband bought this cool contraption on Amazon that condenses wet newspapers into paper bricks. Our back porch is a currently a brick drying platform, and our hands have a not so attractive grayish tinge to them. (And these are the things that make me love him, and “us”, like I do.) As we were placing the papers into the water bucket, my husband stopped what he was doing and handed a sheet of the newspaper to me. He and I both knew that it had to be one of Soul Sunday’s poems. This one is by the great writer, Walt Whitman:
I have a poem of my own to share today, too. Here it is:
Confession to My Children
My dearest children,
For years I have fervently prayed for your strength, and your health, and your safety, and your vitality, and your happiness, and your sense of purpose, and your creativity, and your faith, but I often left out one crucial element in my prayers.
I often forgot to pray for myself.
I often forgot to surrender.
I forgot to pray for guidance on how to help you with your strength, and your health, and your safety, and your vitality, and your happiness, and your sense of purpose, and your creativity and your faith.
I often forgot to ask God for my own strength, and health, and safety, and vitality and happiness, and sense of purpose, and creativity and faith, so that God could work through me, to best mother you. And to best be a model for you.
In my prayers, I often acted as if I had to make a choice. I always chose you, arrogantly forgetting that God has no hierarchies. Love is all.
By hinging all of my abundance on your abundance, I erased me. And I burdened you. And I disrespected God.
Luckily, God doesn’t wait for permission to work through our lives. God never leaves. God works quietly. My prayers are always for you, my deepest loves, but they are also for me, too. We are all God’s children. And now, I often just pray for my eyes to be opened to the all-encompassing Love which gently and evenly holds All of us, dear beyond measure.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Years ago, a friend of mine told me that the difference between functional families and dysfunctional families, is that functional families had mostly good times, with a few bad times sprinkled in, whereas dysfunctional families had mostly bad times with a few good times sprinkled in. I thought that was a reasonable definition.
I have thought about her definition many times throughout the years. (This is one of those times in life, where someone told me something that has stayed with me my entire life, and my friend probably doesn’t even remember saying it. Don’t you love the idea of how often you may have touched someone’s life, ever so casually yet profoundly, and never even realized that you did it? This is one my favorite ways in which the Universe works its magic.) I think that functional/dysfunctional definition can be expanded to so many situations in our own lives . . . jobs, health habits, friendships, romantic relationships, money habits, personal moods, etc. In general, this definition can be applied to your own personal life. Is your life mostly functional or is your life pretty dysfunctional? Nobody’s perfect, and nothing is ever “all good” or “all bad”, but a lot of times we cling to people, and situations, and habits in our lives, out of inertia or by forgetting that we have more power to change things for the good, than we think we do. Sometimes we stay stuck due to the hope that those few good times sprinkled in, will magically turn the whole circumstance around.
I read that designers and inventors usually don’t try to reinvent and change the wheel. They just break the wheel down to its smallest parts, and work on how each of those parts could be better. In the end, after working on each of the individual parts, and then putting the wheel back together, you end up with a more functional, better designed wheel. Here’s a good example of an individual’s life wheel (credit: Maestro Performance):
If you consider each pie piece in this wheel, which of these is the most functional areas in your own life? Which pie piece could use some new energy and design? Which pie piece might be so dysfunctional that it is impinging on the overall health and well-being and operation of the entire wheel of your own life? Summer, with its typically slowed-down pace, is a wonderful time to sit in reflection of how well your wheel is turning in the directions that you want it to go. Usually, it’s only one or two pie pieces that could use a little work and focus, and once those pie piece are cleaned up, it is truly amazing how much better your whole life seems to flow.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Happy Friday!!! Happy Favorite Things Friday!! Today is the third year anniversary of me writing my Adulting – Second Half blog. I started this blog on a whim, on the day that we got back from dropping off my eldest son off at his first “adult” apartment. In a week, we’ll be dropping off my second son at his first “adult” apartment, in a city where he will be attending medical school. You have been with me throughout this strange, uncomfortable transition in my life, where I am having to pull myself back from everything that I poured myself into, for over twenty-five years. Your attention is an incredible gift to me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
But that’s enough seriousness for a Friday. On Fridays, my regular readers know that I list three favorite things, or TV shows, or books, or websites, etc. that make living life just a little more fun, or comfortable, or interesting. I like to list things that give life to life! Please add your favorites to my Comments section. Here are my favorites for today:
Gossby Personalized Mugs – These are the cutest mugs and they are so fun to create! I recently got one for me, and for my son’s girlfriend, for her birthday. They have so many themes (dogs, sisters, friends, etc) and they arrive pretty quickly after ordering them. If I would change one thing, I would have purchased a bigger mug. Otherwise, I LOVE it. Go to gossby.com and let your creative juices flow. Here is mine:
Rooted Earth Farm Lavender Lemongrass Perfume Oil – A theme of my life might be summed up this way: “You had me at, “Wow this smells sooooo good!” I walked into a shop the other day and I thought that I would die of proboscis bliss. I said to the keeper, “What smells so amazing in here?” It turned out to be lavender lemongrass soap which I purchased, and put under the seat of my car. But that wasn’t enough for me. I did any online search and I found this incredible concoction that I just swill under my nose, from time to time, to remind myself why smelling might be my favorite sense. So ambrosial!!!!!!!! (look it up, it’s a good word)
Burned – This is a Korean thriller movie. Fair warning, it’s a long, drawn out movie, but it is one of those movies that you keep thinking about, long after you have seen it. I think that is the mark of an excellent creative product, whether it be a movie or a book or a piece of art. If you can’t stop pondering it, it has moved something in you. I recommend watching this movie. I enjoy foreign films, much in the way that I enjoy visiting foreign lands. I like to experience how other people live in their ordinary lives, in ways that are different than what I am used to doing. I find this experience enthralling, even more so than seeing museums or landmarks.
Have a wonderful weekend, friends!!!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
What I am writing about today, has nothing to do with the above quote. I just really liked the quote because I adore books. This one tickled me, too:
But here’s what is really on my mind today:
“I could never handle that . . . . I could never go through that.”
Yes, you could because you don’t have a choice. You would handle it. You would go through it. You would do your best and you would survive and maybe even thrive.
I remember having a friend who had twins shortly after having her first child. She said that people always told her that they could never handle her situation and she would laugh and then she would always answer them the same way, “Yes, you could, because you must.”
We always think that we couldn’t handle other people’s problems and difficult situations, because we are attached to our own problems. There is a parable that talks about throwing everybody’s problems into one big pile, and then the Universe telling us to go back to the pile and pick the same number of difficulties to take back, to deal with in our daily lives. It is said that we would be amazed by how quickly we would all run towards the pile, and take our own problems back. We know and understand our own problems. We are intimate with our own troubles. Sometimes we are even attached to them.
Dealing with, and grappling with my son’s epilepsy is probably the most difficult thing which I have ever dealt with in my life. People tell me the, “I could never handle that . . . ” line, all of the time. I know that this is their kind way to try to show sympathy and support and to compliment me on my “strength”. But I always answer it the same way that my friend with twins does, “Yes, you could, because you don’t have any other choice. You would do your best.”
I would rather not have to prove my strength through my problems. Wouldn’t we all? But that’s just not life. I have never met an adult person who has never had any problems or worries. Still, the blessings that come from our complications, are the reminders to ourselves, that we do have it in us, to manage and to cope and to persevere and to often overcome and triumph over the hardships in our lives. We can reflect on the many times that we have muddled through the tough times in our lives and made it through to the other side, maybe not perfectly intact, and probably not exactly in the same form that we started out in, but maybe that was the purpose for the problem, in the first place? Growth is hard but necessary. Growth from our adversities usually brings us to a whole new level of understanding and faith and compassion and respect for the sheer awesomeness and yet fragility of our own living experience.
“I could never, ever go through a world-wide pandemic and have to deal with all of the fears, and uncertainties, and grief, and ugliness, and pain, and difficult decision making that would come from that kind of a situation.”
“Yes, you could. You are in the middle of doing it. And you are doing great. And you have proved to yourself just how incredibly strong and vital and capable and resilient you really are, when it comes to having to go through really tough situations. And you will have this serene wisdom about yourself, to fall back on for the rest of your life. This wisdom will help to sustain you, during any calamity that comes your way. There is a hidden blessing in every curse.”
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Throwback Thursday (if you still feel like reading, these are links to previous, popular posts of mine). This particular post was actually published:
This is the fifth day since after my vacation, and my bounceback game is terrible. I could easily be an actress in a Zombie movie without even trying. If I had one complaint about getting older, it’s knowing that if I choose to do anything “extra”, the payback is going to be really, really, really hard and tough and miserable. Staying up extra late, having one extra drink, one extra candy bar on Halloween night, one extra mile of walking, one extra sit-up, one extra half inch on my high heels, pizza with extra cheese – girl, you’re gonna pay, extra, extra exponentially!
Last night, I decided to mix up my own concoction of “Bounceback Brew.” (Those who know me well, know my tendencies to become my own sort of “self-taught” intuitive chemist. I take about 8000 supplements a day. I mix up all of my face creams that I bought on impulse, to create, what is in my own mind, a SUPER fabulous, miraculous, all-inclusive, one-step anti-aging cure cream, until I break out in a strange and intensely itchy rash. I love to “layer” my perfumes and lipsticks, until no one can breathe around me, and my lips stick out an extra half-inch from my face. My dear friends and family, thank you for loving kooky little me, just as I am. It means the world.) Bounceback Brew consisted of taking my biggest mug (the one that says “Queen Bee”) and filling it with boiling water. I then took four different tea bags (two sleepy-times, one detox and one Honey Lavender Stress Relief, all made by different tea companies) and I allowed these bags to simmer in the Queen Bee Mug for a good 30 minutes. I then slurped Bounceback Brew down quickly and purposefully. Bounceback Brew did not make me tired. At all. Bounceback Brew did not even help me in the powder room department, but for some strange reason, Bounceback Brew gave me the giggles. (this is all OTC grocery store bought stuff, trust me on this) After imbibing in Bounceback Brew, I thought that the dumbest things were the most hysterical things I had ever seen or read or thought about. And then I got incredibly annoyed with my husband because he was seemingly confused, irritated, and he didn’t see the humor in any of it, at all. So, I was laughing playfully and yet, angrily scolding my husband, all at the same time. This lasted for a good half hour and then, poof, I was back to my current state of “post-vacation clawback to life.”
Try “Bounceback Brew” if you like. There were no nasty side-effects and they do say that laughter is the best medicine, for just about anything. In the meantime, if you have a better recipe for Bounceback Brew, please put it in my Comments section. I am always game to try something new, even if it takes me extra time to recoup from my mixology “gamble”.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
“The deeper you feel, the deeper you heal, and the more layers of your trauma you turn into wisdom.” – Inner Practitioner, Twitter
Don’t be afraid of your feelings. So many of us have been shamed for feeling deeply when we were children. Feelings rule so many of our actions in our lives. When we desire a particular thing, or a job, or a relationship, it is almost always because of the positive feelings that we believe that these things, or experiences, or people will bring to us. Feelings have a lot of power. Shouldn’t we become acutely aware of our feelings’ power over us, so that we can understand that power, and harness that power to lead us into positive directions?
Some people may scoff at this and say, well, I have total control of my feelings. Do you? Or do you suppress your feelings? Do you deny your feelings? Having complete control of your actions, which could be caused by your feelings, is a good thing. But, I assure you that you do not have total control of your feelings. Feelings are just a natural response to your thoughts, and to your perspectives of what is happening in your life. Your feelings are meant to be felt. To fully feel your feelings, is to get relief, and to get direction, and to live your life as fully and purely and intensely, as it was meant to be lived. To feel your feelings, means that you have completely soaked in, and wholly marinated in an experience, and that “staying in the moment” process allows your deep feelings to be alchemized into the highest levels of wisdom and compassion, as the Inner Practitioner so eloquently states, in the opening quote.
If you suppress your feelings, they will often become bottled up, like in a pressure cooker, and then out of nowhere, you will be screaming like a maniac at a driver who accidentally cut you off, or you will become robotic, and you will act curt and cruel and cold, sometimes to the people whom you love the most in your life. If you deny your feelings, they will grow and grow and grow, sometimes into major health problems and addictions, and often into unexplainable aches and pains.
Feelings are just feelings. They aren’t “good” or “bad.” Why are we so afraid of them? We won’t die from our feelings, if we are brave enough to face them head on. When we look at our feelings in a detached, aware state we can notice where they are in our bodies. Do you feel sadness in your throat? Do you feel anger in your chest? What is the physical sensation of feeling peaceful? Notice it. When we become intimate with our feelings, we are often surprised by just how quickly they pass into another state of being. Feelings are our friends. Feelings are a big, big part of being human. Why would we ever want to deny or to suppress one of the largest elements of our amazing living experience?
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
The older I get, the harder it is for me to bounce back from trips and vacations. I feel like I am walking around in a perpetual fog. I have spurts of getting things done, but then a lot of downtime of staring into space. It’s amazing how quickly you forget about the particulars of your daily routine, when you skip it for just a week.
I saw a quote from the American author of A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle that I really liked, so naturally I looked her up and I found quite a lot of quotes of hers which completely resonated with me. I think that you will like them, too:
“Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”
“We can’t take credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.”
“Just because we don’t understand, doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”
“The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all of the other ages you’ve been.”
“Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.”
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Good morning. I hope that you are in a peaceful, comfortable, allowing state of being right now. My friend recently reminded me of the popular quote by Dr. Seuss, as shown above. I repeated it a few times to my family, as we were in the airport, on our way home, from the wonderful, and highly anticipated summer family vacation that we had just experienced together. I thought to myself that the quote is also rather apropos for times that are awful in life, and then finally over, too. It would just be the quote in reverse, “Don’t cry because it happened. Smile because it is over.”
Anyway, back to business: Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. Poetry is the attempt to put emotion into words, like no other form of writing can. Write a poem today. Just start writing out your feelings, with no rhyme or reason (pun intended). You may surprise yourself by how beautiful and poignant your words that describe an element of your life’s experience can be. I consider Sundays to be an experimental poetry workshop for all of us. Here is my poem for today:
Hi friends! I’m back to my usual writing corner. Josie, our collie, is keeping a watchful eye on me, making sure that I am staying put, and not leaving any time soon for another adventure. She likes to herd every member of our family, right where she can keep a careful eye on all of us. Our trip was incredible, and thankfully, my youngest son, who is epileptic, remained seizure free for the duration of the trip, after suffering two major seizures, hours before our departure. Thank you for your love and prayers. I felt them and they sustained me. We are hoping and praying that this is just a matter of upping the dose of a new medication that my son has been trying since the beginning of the year. Time will tell.
I am in that digestion stage, which we all go through, after experiencing major incidents in our lives. I just experienced the trip of a lifetime, seeing things I have never seen in my lifetime, and may never see again. I also experienced a major disappointment, realizing that once again, my son’s epilepsy is determined to remain a terrorizing part of our lives. I have been through an onslaught of stimulation this past week. Now, I am just sitting with it all, trying to absorb what I want to keep, and also to find peace with what I cannot control. Mostly, I want to remain in that flow of love and faith, that allows me to move forward, to live my life in trust and in wonder, no matter what is happening to me, and around me.
Where we were traveling is an incredibly quiet place. It was probably the most quiet, peaceful place which I have ever experienced in my life. There are few roads, few cars, and even few animals, where we visited. One time my husband and I were hiking, and I asked him that we not speak for a while. I wanted to soak in the pure quiet of it all. It was intensely beautiful and healing to be able to be that quiet in myself.
I always try to make a trip, or a novel experience, a deliberate, new part of myself . What I took from this trip, was a reminder of how peaceful life can be, if we allow it. What I took from this trip, is how important it is, to find those quiet, still, peaceful moments and to sit with them and to soak them in. These still moments are the purest moments in our lives when we get to experience the most aware part of our being. These are the moments that we get reacquainted with our spirit within, and they are vital to our well-being.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
