This latest surge of coronavirus in our country has brought back some gloom and doom into our everyday conversations. But we will make it through it. This too shall pass. The interesting thing is that when you reflect back on your worst days, you realize how greatly outnumbered the worst days are, by your good days (or at the very least, by your normal, average days).
If someone asked my kids, “What does your mother always tell you?”, I hope that “I love you,” would be the first thing to pop into their minds, to give as their answer. I tell my children that I love them, all of the time. I think that’s so important for them to hear regularly. “I love you.” I also believe that my kids would say, “My mother always tells us to ‘Finish Strong.’ ” When raising children there are so many beginnings and yet also, so many endings involved. At the end of any school year, at the end of any games or competitions which they were involved in, at the final days of their summer jobs, I would always repeat the mantra, “Finish Strong.”
Lately, I have been repeating, “Finish Strong” to myself, quite a lot. My youngest child just started her senior year in high school. This is my final year of full-time mothering, which has been my main task and duty, for the last 25 years of my life. There are going to be a lot of easy, fun, celebratory days, in this coming year, but there will also be some “worst days” sprinkled in. That’s just the way of life. And I believe that we will survive, and even thrive through all of it. I believe that everyone I know has the capacity to “Finish Strong.” And I must model my own words to my children, if these words are to have any meaning and wisdom and worth. “I love you. Finish Strong.” Say these words of confidence and conviction often, to your loved ones, and most importantly, to yourself.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Hi friends and readers! Welcome to the best day of the week! On Fridays, I keep it surfacey. I typically list three favorite books, products, websites, songs, etc. and I strongly encourage you to share your favorites in my Comments section. If you are curious about more favorites of mine, please look at my previous Friday posts. Without further ado, here are today’s favorites:
Safflower Seeds – If you are like me, and you really enjoy having all sorts of birds in your yard, but you could live without the squirrels visiting, (they torture my poor Collie, Josie), then fill your bird feeders with safflower seeds. According to the experts, birds loves these seeds, but squirrels can’t stand them. I have two “squirrel proof” feeders in my backyard, but that doesn’t stop the squirrels from doing all sorts of Olympics-level acrobatics on the feeders, trying to “break the code.” This really sets off Barky, I mean Josie. I am hoping that these safflower seeds will finally send the squirrels packing.
Adam on Twitter (@adamgreattweet) – This guy is a resident physician in Georgia, but he is also one of the best “curators” of funny on the internet. I love most of his own funny tweets, but he also has a knack for finding other really funny tweets from so many different sources. (I don’t know where he finds the time to practice medicine.) Warning some of the tweets are a tad raunchy, but many of them are just plain funny, especially the ones that comment on parenting. Here is a sampling from a few of his recent tweets/retweets:
do i struggle with gaining weight? no, i do that pretty easily thank you. (Dadman Walking)
Growing up in the 80’s made me believe I’d need to “stop drop and roll” a lot more (Midge)
And here’s one of Adam’s originals:
them: i’m tired
me: hi tired, i’m
them: of your jokes
me: oh
“Peace is a practice.” – I read this recently and it has become my new favorite mantra. A wise person once said to me that you don’t go into a gym, look at the really buff people and ask yourself, “Why are these really buff people here at the gym?” The buff people are at the gym because the gym is where they got buff, and the working out at the gym is how they maintain the buff. Our peaceful minds work the same way. You have to find the ways that help you to gain and to maintain your inner peace and clarity, and you have to implement these practices on a daily basis. Unfortunately, just like good bodily health is not a “one and done”, neither is good mental/emotional health. “Peace is a practice.“
Have a great weekend, my dear friends and readers!! See you tomorrow!
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
“When they say, “Be yourself,” which self do they mean? Certainly not the self that wants to win every game and use up every resource and think of nobody’s needs except your own.
So when they say, “Be yourself,” which self are they referring to? Here’s what I think: It’s the self that says “Thank you!” to the wild irises and the windy rain and the people who grow your food. It’s the creator who’s working to make the whole universe your home and sanctuary. It’s the lover who longs to express your love of life everywhere you go.” – Rob Brezsny
I love that quote by Rob Brezsny. I guess that when we say “Be yourself”, to ourselves and to others, what we are really meaning is, “Be your Highest Self.” (and I am not referring to any substance use here 😉 ) When Rob talks about someone who “think(s) of nobody’s needs except your own,” it’s so easy to curl up our lips in disgust and think, “selfish, selfish, selfish”, because we are thinking about this in the context of sharing food, and resources, and medicine, and volunteer time, etc. But there are other tricky times when we think that we are being loving and altruistic, when really, what we are more focused on, is our own needs and comforts, and we put that heavy burden on to others. I am talking about emotional selfishness.
I think that most of us would say that our biggest treasures in life are our families and our friends. We can’t bear the idea of losing those whom we love. We want nothing more than their happiness and their peace of mind. Most of us, by middle age, have suffered losses of people whom we love dearly, and we become extremely fearful of having to go through that depressing, painful experience again. So sadly, sometimes we project those fears of loss on to the people whom we love the most, in the guise of needing them to be happy and content and healthy, all of the time, for our own comfort and relief and security. Now these people love us deeply, too, so they want us to be happy and comfortable and fearless, so they feel the need to protect us from our own fears. And so these people pretend that they are always happy and content and fearless, so that we won’t worry about them. You can see what a vicious, ugly cycle this becomes. And when we aren’t being real and authentic with each other, the relationship becomes distant and false. We become isolated from each other, in the very relationships that mean the most to us. In a sense, we lose the real relationship, even with people who are still alive and with us. Our fears become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Worry does not equal love. Putting on a false front does not equal intimacy. It’s okay, not to be okay, all of the time. Unconditional love recognizes that fact. Unconditional love can hold space for anything – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Do you think that our Creator worries about us? Do you think that our Creator needs any of us to be anything different than what we are, right in this moment? I don’t. I believe that we are loved by our Creator in whatever mood we are in. I believe that we are loved by our Creator no matter what we have done, how we have felt, and what we will do and feel, forevermore. Our Creator doesn’t worry about us. Our Creator doesn’t need us to be anything other that what we are right in this moment. Soak that in. Our Creator holds space for us, always. Our Creator is within us. Our Creator is our Highest Self. We have the capability within us, to hold space, and to unconditionally love ourselves and all others. And when we are in that state of pure and unconditional love, we are fearless. Love is fearless. We are loved. We are Love.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Today, I took our annual “first day of school” picture by the front door. We have been doing this for 20 years now (My eldest son, the eldest of four children, is 25). It is my daughter and our youngest child’s first day of her senior year of high school. This will be the last “first day of school” picture that I will ever take of our children. I’m feeling a little sniffly. I am trying not to sob. This is going to be an emotional year.
I’m the eldest “child” in my family. I was even the eldest grandchild on both sides, by five years. Frankly, I didn’t always love the pressure of the spotlight. I didn’t love always having to be the lead dog, and having to figure things out for myself (often the hard way). But, I did feel special and important and mature. I guess in some ways, I even felt a tad entitled. In my mind, for the burden of being the eldest, I “deserved” the biggest bedroom or to stay out later. I think that I always felt that I should have a “bigger say” in my little sister’s life, than she should have in mine. I now realize that’s silly. We deserve(d) equal respect.
I feel for my daughter. I am trying not to dump all of my emotional baggage into her backpack as she heads off to her last year of her childhood. She doesn’t need to be weighed down. I realize now that the youngest children in families, have to share all of their own milestones, with the entire family. The eldest children mark the beginning of it all, and the youngest children are the “official closing ceremony” of the raising of any particular family. That’s a heavy burden for the beloved babies of any family. Too much attention can be a big burden, especially when it is laden with emotion and melancholy and an endless reel of memories. This year, I’ll do my best to keep in my own lane, as I process this “ending/new beginning” stage of my own life, and this new stage of our family life. Hopefully, my baby will not notice (or at least pretend not to notice) when I hug her to me, harder than ever before.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Yesterday, I spent a little bit too much time ruminating in my fear and my worries and my disappointments. It didn’t help that I had woken up in the morning to a terrible dream in which I had been told by a doctor that I had throat cancer. I spazzed out on that one. Interestingly, about half of the hundreds of dream interpretation websites which I looked at, said that this was actually an excellent dream that foretold fortune and happiness and lovely surprises. Nice. Let me tell you, Dreams, “There are much kinder ways to tell me that good things lie ahead.”
Also, yesterday morning, my son texted a picture from his first medical school class. It was occurring on Zoom, in his teensy little apartment bedroom, for eight hours straight. Sigh. Thanks again, Coronavirus. So awful to see you again!
The great mask debate is in full force (and obviously on national display) here again in Florida, and my daughter starts her senior year of high school tomorrow. The ugly vibes are swirling on the news, and in social media, and in the neighborhood and like everyone else, I am so, so, so tired of it all. I had tricked myself, earlier this summer, that with the vaccinations, Covid was practically a thing of the past, and instead it has come back with an ugly vengeance. Some of my closest friends, despite being vaccinated, are in quarantine, healing from Covid infections. Luckily they have seemingly mild cases, so far.
So those three paragraphs above, show you where my mindset (and heartsick) was yesterday, and even into last night, as I crawled into bed. I don’t like that mindset. I don’t like negativity. It doesn’t feel good. As I was waiting to go to sleep, and I was thinking that I really didn’t care to have anymore scary dreams, I went to my phone and I looked up “the most comforting, reassuring thought in the world.”
Over a decade ago, when my family and I were the poster kids for the Great Recession, and we were watching our savings go down the drain like rushing water, this Bible verse helped me to get through those tough times (Matthew 6: 28-30):
28 And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
This verse made a lot of sense to me and it became my daily mantra. And thankfully, we made it through the Great Recession just fine. Last night, though, I wanted a new, fresh mantra. My current worries and stresses are more about the health of my family, and of my friends, and of our world, and maybe even my own mental health. My worries are more about the overall health and well-being of everyone I love, including our Mother Earth. So, when I searched up “the most comforting, reassuring thought in the world” last night, the search wasn’t as satisfactory as I wanted it to be. It turns out that there are about 18 million comforting thoughts to pick from.
My love language is the written word. I love to read. I love to write. I love comforting thoughts. My search had me strumming through hundreds and hundreds of uplifting verses and quotes, many that I had already seen, and had already read before, many, many times. So many of these quotes talked about the fruitlessness of worrying. Duh. But that’s not particularly comforting when you are stuck in the worry cycle, which has taken up a life of its own, in your head. It’s hard to find the “off button” for the Worry Cycle, at that point. So reading about how taxing worrying and anxiety is, to your body and to your spirit, is honestly, at times, just more upsetting and worrying, than anything close to being reassuring and comforting.
I was frustrated that there was not one simple consensus as to what is the “the most comforting,reassuring thought in the world”. So, I figured that I might as well take a few screenshots of quotes that at least, resonated with me. This quote was very similar to my favorite Bible verse:
“Don’t try to force anything. Let life be a deep Let-Go. God opens millions of flowers every day without forcing their buds.” – Osho
This one has always made sense to me:
“You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.” – Pema Chodron
And as I was beating myself up angrily for being such a Wanda Worrier/Debbie Downer/Negative Nancy, this one really struck home:
“I just give myself permission to suck. I find this hugely liberating.” – John Green
But then, some kind of Divine Intervention happened. Without searching for it, I somehow ended up reading a scientific article that talked about comforting music. My guardian angel must have been saying to me, “Girl, you don’t need any more words. You need to get out of that silly little pissy-missy mind of yours, if you want to have a good night’s sleep, and a hope for a more positive tomorrow.” The article that I miraculously landed on, said that this ONE song, created by professional sound therapists, has proven to reduce anxiety by 65%, and shows a 35% reduction in any one person’s typical physiological resting rate. This song is wordless. I played the song as I was trying to fall asleep. And I slept so soundly. My husband didn’t know that we were both being “treated” by this song last night, because he was already asleep when I played it, but this morning, the first thing that he remarked to me was how well he had slept last night. The lesson I gleaned from this experience was that we shouldn’t get so stuck in trying to control the ways in which we are going to be comforted, or fixed, or reassured, or loved to sleep. When we do the “deep Let-Go”, the Universe gives us exactly what we need. I slept incredibly well last night. I don’t recall any negative dreams. I feel comforted. I feel reassured this morning. It turns out that last night, for me, Marconi Union’s “Weightless” was “the most comforting, reassuring thought in the world,” and it is not even a thought. It doesn’t even have words. Last night’s comfort came from pure sound. Be open to every amazing resource available to us, friends. Keep the faith. We are loved. We are protected. All is well.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Good morning, my dearest readers. I hope that this Sunday finds you well. I devote Sundays to poetry. I write a poem and I courageously put my poem out there into the ethersphere, for no other reason than I can. And so can you. The world never died from bad poetry, and many worlds have been inspired by good poetry. Poetry is a release for the writer, and a spark of thought for the reader. Be brave and bold. Write a poem today and put it out there for others to catch your spirit. Here is my poem for today:
August
I suppose that August was created in order to
Help me to empathize with my food.
August is like those last couple minutes of cooking
A friend of mine’s son just graduated from boot camp. In her pictures, my friend and her son look so full of relief. I think that relief is one of the most underrated emotions in the world. Relief feels almost as good as love and peace and happiness. Relief marks the end of suffering. Relief is when you finally get an answer to a question. Relief is finishing and crossing off all of the stuff that you have written on your to-do list. Relief is looking in the rear window of an event you had been anticipating and working towards for a long, long time, and then having completed it successfully. TUMS made “relief” their major selling point and marketing campaign. We love the feeling of relief.
In the beginning of the summer, I was feeling a lot of relief about the coronavirus. It seemed like it was really going to be behind us. All of my family and friends got vaccinated. We were even able to go on a nice family vacation, and out of the country, to boot. But now this damn Delta variant is ripping through my state. I personally know two vaccinated people who have tested positive for Covid. I believe that they are going to be okay, but it is so frustrating and disappointing and upsetting to be dealing with this virus, all over again, just when we were feeling so much relief.
I just read The Gift by Edith Eger, who survived the Auschwitz camp during the Holocaust. Edith said that a main reason why she survived the camp (she was found by the Allied troops, starving, on top of a pile of dead bodies) was that she was able to hold on to hope. She said that the definition of hope is knowing that suffering is temporary, and staying curious about what comes next. It is best to focus on how much relief we will feel when this coronavirus really dwindles down to not even being newsworthy. The hope and the anticipation of the wonderful feeling of relief (because all suffering is temporary) is what will sustain us through whatever else this pandemic brings our way.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Happy Friday!!! Happy weekend!!! My regular readers know how much I love Fridays. On Fridays, I take off my ruminating, philosophy pants and I put on my Friday Partypants. On Fridays, I typically list three favorite songs or products or websites, (basically anything that I really, really like) and I love it when you add your own favorites to my Comments section. I am always excited to have new things to try, or new movies to watch, or new books to read. Here are my favorites for today:
Uptime – This application for your phone is not cheap, (I think that it is about forty dollars a year) but for me, it is worth every cent. This app takes popular non-fiction books and documentaries and basically narrows them down to “the gist” of what you need to know about each source of information. I wish that I had time to read every book that I want to read, but that would take several lifetimes, and it would also create an extremely one-dimensional life for me. Uptime also works as a great tool to figure out what areas and books that I want to explore more about, and also figuring out areas, where settling for “the gist” is all that I need to do.
The Gift by Edith Eger – This book is outstanding. Written by an Auschwitz survivor who later became a successful psychologist (she got her doctorate in her fifties – it’s never too late!), The Gift is incredibly uplifting, inspiring and full of good sense. The theme of the book is to help people find freedom, which Edith Eger defines as “becoming who you truly are.” She says that freedom requires hope, knowing that all suffering is temporary, and staying curious about what comes next. You won’t regret the time you spend reading and soaking in this wonderful, empowering book.
Sharing Knowing Looks – This might be one of my most favorite human experiences. The communication that we share with others, without talking, and yet being able to feel that complete connection and understanding between each other, by just one knowing look, is totally priceless. Yesterday, I was in the middle of getting a pedicure in a part of town that I don’t know all that well. I was getting a pedicure in a shop that I had never been to before. And I was trying to reach my daughter by text, and then by calling her frantically, and I still couldn’t reach her. Thus, (this is the negative side of today’s instant gratification, “reach everybody and everything in one second flat” technology) I flew into a mini-panic attack. I yelled to my nail technician that I had to leave the shop immediately to get to my daughter. I flew out of the shop, dragging along a towel, as my technician was desperately trying to help me to dry my feet, and to help me put on my shoes, as I ran to my car, breathing heavily. My daughter turned out to be fine. It was all a big, scary misunderstanding, but after the fiasco, I knew that I needed to return the towel to the shop. I was horrified and I was utterly embarrassed by my previous “making quite the scene,” but I decided that the best thing, and the right thing for me to do in this situation, was go back to the shop, return the towel, and get pedicures for both me and my daughter, and to leave them a nice tip. The shop was filled with female Vietnamese-American workers and it seemed that many of them did not speak English, but the look of relief and happiness and kindness and understanding on their faces, when they looked at me, almost brought me to tears. Mamas know other mamas’ hearts, without ever having to say a word. Love is the real communication and connection between all of us. And this deep and wise communication doesn’t even require any words. Love and kindness is able to be communicated in a single glance. Love is. Love.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
+ We saw a real “little horse” at a travel stop a couple of weeks ago. It really was really, really little. My Labrador retriever is bigger than the horse we saw at the truck stop. I once read that there was an emotional support horse on an airplane, and I thought to myself, at the time, that the story was total “horse pucky”, but when I was petting the horse at the travel stop, I thought, “Hmmm, that story about the horse on the airplane was probably actually true.”
+ Trip, our boisterous, one-year-old Boykin spaniel is due for his annual booster shots on Friday. Our vet is still doing the curbside service, due to Covid, where your animals go in for their health visits, without you. “Are you sure, Doctor, that I shouldn’t go in? You know Trip. He doesn’t really like anybody but us. And he does a lot of barking and snarling and posturing, to let you know it.”
My vet : “Honestly, he thinks that he needs to guard you. He thinks that this is his main job to do – to protect you. We see it with Dobermans and Rotties all of the time. He’ll do much, much better without you there.”
I thought a lot about this statement. I thought about my little 30-pound dog (with ears so big and long that he has been compared to “Dumbo”) thinking that he is a mighty ferocious guard dog. Trip, the spaniel, thinks that he is a Malinois. What good self esteem he has!! And honestly, I can see where he might not have a lot of faith in the protective powers of Ralphie (the retriever), who hides in my shower from storms, and likes to offer any Amazon delivery guy his chew toys, and Josie (the elegant collie), who barks a lot, but otherwise prefers not to get her paws dirty. Ever. (I envision me getting bludgeoned by a thief, and at the same time Ralphie offering up his best chew toy and Josie, side-stepping the blood in disgust. Thank heavens for Dumbo!) This also made me think about how many times over the years that I was told that my kids were better behaved when I wasn’t around. I suppose that it always comes back to the moms being the bad guys – even us “dog moms.” It’s always the mom’s fault. Sigh.
+We spoke to our middle son last night. Today is his first official day of medical school. He mentioned that he was feeling a little homesick. I immediately went into “the song and dance routine” that I did before any of my kids went to preschool, kindergarten, various camps, college or were subject to a babysitter . . . .
Me: “Mom and Dad are ALWAYS here for you. Day or night. We are just a phone call away. Mommy is always, always with you. And when she goes to the store, she always comes back. It’s going to be okay. . . . . . blah, blah, blah,” I blabbered on and on, without taking a breath.
Son: “Mom, mom, I do miss you guys, too. But I mostly was talking about my college town (where he has lived this past summer, and also for the last four years of his adult life) and M (his lovely girlfriend, who has been his girlfriend since he was a senior in high school, and who currently lives in their college town.)”
Me: “Hahahaha! Of course! I knew that! How are you doing with the separation?” (Sob.)
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
