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Today I am in a profound state of gratitude.  I discuss my gratitude every Sunday, however, today I recognize with utmost faith and certainty that I am so blessed.  Perhaps it’s been the chaos of trying to buy and sell our home, maybe it’s a new appreciation of understanding what it means to go with the flow.  But today honestly feels like floating, perfectly enveloped in a state of contentment.  And I am content today—what I would consider at peace.

I am grateful for the beautiful connection I have with my son.  My husband went out last night so my son and I made popcorn and watched some shows on TV.  Then we read a book together and because he hadn’t napped during the day, he fell asleep so peacefully on his bed.  He woke up this morning in such a good mood and we got to shop, play, cook, and pick out arts and crafts together.  I will say it every time: these moments with my family are so incredibly important to me and I will never take them for granted.

I am grateful to witness the growth of my son.  He has become such a mature little boy and having conversations with him now blows me away every time.  His ability to express himself and share his views and opinions makes me so proud and I love seeing his development as he turns into a “big kid.”  There are days it’s a challenge because he has his own ideas, often contrary to my own plans, but it’s a gift because he is one of the most sensitive and expressive little boys and hearing him say things like, “Mommy, we always love each other” just melts my heart every time.

I am grateful for time to work on my projects.  I woke up really early today and was able to knock out a big chunk of work that was still fresh in my mind.  I try to get a little bit of work done every day and a lot of the time I feel like I’m pushing it, like it just isn’t the quality I want or what I’m really trying to say.  Today it was a short time, but it was valuable time and productive time.  It made all the difference.

I am grateful for the universe’s cosmic humor.  We’ve been fairly stagnant with selling the house so my husband and I were already talking about different options we had as far as moving forward.  As soon as we decided what our next steps were going to be (which were not what we originally had planned) we started getting inquiries on the house.  Maybe we had to demonstrate we truly were flexible in the outcome in order for there to be fresh movement.  So there you have it…just when you think it’s going one way, the universe responds entirely differently.

I am grateful to recognize my humanity.  I started reading a new book last night (more to come on that) and honestly within the first 34 pages it gave me an anxiety attack. But as I began to work through it, I realized what a gift this life is.  We all have profoundly different experiences but what underlies all of those experiences is that we ARE all human.  No one is perfect and one of my downfalls is that I so easily fall into perfectionism—so reading this book was a great reminder to calm down and go with the flow.  Accept where I am to get where I want to be.  Something I talk about a lot but clearly needed a reminder to practice.

I am grateful to embrace this moment, sharing this message.  I love this journey and I love the steps I am taking to fulfill my purpose.  I am grateful to be able to do that.  We all have reasons to remember to be grateful.  Take some time to relish in it.  You deserve it.

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Emotions are so misinterpreted.  Intentionally and repeatedly misinterpreted to manipulate people into believing that their feelings aren’t warranted or they are wrong.  Emotions are the tools we use to navigate a situation and they tell us what is happening.  They make us aware.  They teach.

I’ve often been perceived as angry.  I speak passionately, I speak loudly, I speak with determination.  For a long time I noticed that people would shut down when I spoke so I automatically assumed it was my pattern of communication.  So I tailored my approach.  I curbed my tone and I spoke with less vigor and venom and with more frilly words trying to make the message palatable. The same reaction often took place where people would shut down.  I could see their faces drop and their body language changed as they appeared defensive and the conversation no longer flowed.  So I assumed it was the message.  I struggled to find new ways to say what I wanted to say.  And the same pattern repeated.

I noticed that every time I got this reaction, it was me who tried to change.  It was me who did the work of making myself and what I had to say acceptable to others.  My communication skills deteriorated because I wasn’t using my voice or my authenticity or speaking my truth—I was still trying to speak the words that other people wanted to hear.

As I continued to choke on the words I was trying to say, I lost my message.  It wasn’t until very recently I understood what a privilege it is to use our voice no matter how it makes others feel.  We aren’t responsible for their feelings in the message we share—we are responsible for sharing what we have to say without filtering and watering down the point.  We can spend our lives losing ourselves in the words other people want us to say or we can lose the people determined to misunderstand us regardless of what we say.

In the timeliest of messages, I saw a quote today “Acknowledging and embracing my anger means that I’m engaged, I care and I’m committed to doing something productive with this powerful emotion,” Candace Howze.  Being concerned about the perception of being angry is completely unfounded.  If people want to misunderstand you because of how you feel about a topic, that is on them.  Keep talking until you find the right audience.

We act like we need to control our emotions—which are really things we have no control over.  All we need is to control how we communicate about the emotion.  It’s fine to feel what we feel about a topic.  As Howze mentioned above it means I’m engaged and I care.  We should feel things about what we say.  But we are trained to give the emotion precedence over the subject as if our feelings warrant the attention, not the topic.  We need to do a better job of explaining emotions as a whole because, quite frankly, we need to see some life again and we need to stop dismissing what people say because we are scared of how they convey a message.

The truth is we are scared of how we feel about what they say.  We aren’t experienced with handling the emotions of others.  I’m not talking about carrying the weight of their emotions or feeling it for them but I am talking about receiving what they are saying and understanding why they feel the way they do.  Imagine the increase in empathy of we learned what an emotion truly is, how to express it, how to cope, and how to understand other people’s coping.

The world needs more life in it—real life, real people who give a damn, real people who show their emotions in an effort to get things done.  The world needs more engaged people to progress and move towards equality for all.  So feel what you feel without shame.  Don’t water yourself down for the sake of other people.  Feel it all and let the world know how you feel.  That is how we become the example of living in reality.

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We sat out with our neighbors this weekend and met some new neighborhood kids.  They didn’t hesitate to play with our boys and teach them some new tricks on their bicycle and to play some football with them.  I feel so privileged to witness the absolute openness of kids.  They never hesitate with new people and experiences.  They talk to each other and they always do rather than overthink a situation.  They don’t qualify who is worthy of engaging and associating with them—they just go for it.

The world is small as we also found out during this play date that these kids were coached by a friend of our neighbor.  Sometimes we are taken right where we need to be even if we can’t see it at the time.  There is something to be said for being open to experience.  Being able to witness this in children is amazing because it is an example to keep that quality alive in ourselves as well.  To keep practicing that acceptance as we go through life.

According to our current way of life, we are so conditioned to compete and qualify and struggle to do it all on our own.  Kids still know how to work together and how to help without expectation.  They know how to accept each other without expectation as well.  They never question whether or not they can do something and if they can’t, they just keep trying.  And they know how to encourage each other too.  Yes, they have frustration and yes they want to give up, but they are resilient—far more resilient than a lot of adults.

The lesson in this brief interaction is simply that we are always taken where we are meant to be.  So we can trust.  It’s our own perceptions and emotions that twist the story and skew our purpose.  We have to learn to take our own stories out of the equation and listen to the voice of intuition in spite of being told to ignore it.

I have always believed in synchronicity but, like all of us, I tend to forget it or I don’t notice it as often as I should.  When the blatant reminders of synchronicity occur, I am in awe each and every time—and I am grateful.  We have a purpose and things truly happen for a reason.  Knowing that and experiencing those reminders truly is a gift.  Remembering that childlike openness to the world, the feeling we all had before the need to control set it, is also a gift.  That feeling is never too far and we need to connect with that more often.  I am trying my best to remember this.  And I see it’s little steps every day to stay in touch with that part of ourselves and they are necessary.  Each step is a chance to find what we’ve known all along and to share it with the world–just like our children.

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I went to the bookstore on my lunch break today, really excited to find a particular book.  I arrived at the all-too-familiar location and saw the store was closed.  Like, empty store, sign taken down type of closed.  I wanted to cry because this is the second time I’ve gone to one of my favorite bookstores to find it inexplicably closed–tears were involved the first time but that’s a story for another day.  I gathered my composure and did a quick search to find that the store had been moved down the street.

I drove over to the new spot and found it was a totally new store.  The store was not just a new location, but an entirely new layout and design from any that I had been familiar with.  One of the employees let me know that this new style that the chain is looking to implement.

It got me thinking about how people bore so easily that we have to keep coming up with new ways to entice people.  We have to constantly keep things fresh by changing what we know—often as we are just getting accustomed to how things are.  We want sleek and sharp and new—and we want it instantly.  We move on as quickly as the idea passes into our mind, never happy with the way things are.  Life does warrant that we should evolve as needed but we tend to change things just for the sake of change, to be the newest, biggest, and boldest.  The most innovative, the most eye catching, the most sales.

We need to slow down and reprioritize.  New isn’t always better but old isn’t always defunct.  Adaptation is meant as a means of survival, not as a gimmick to get sales.  In short, it’s about purpose.  Understanding the point and the goal of what we want to accomplish.  I am all for recognizing the need to change but I also want to advocate for the intention behind it.  If your intention isn’t to serve the greater good or to bring yourself to your highest purpose, then what is the change for?  Power? Accolades? Or is it about finding your purpose and helping to move everyone collectively forward to their highest good?

Whether we find ourselves searching for our familiar bookstore or we are searching for our highest good, there are times when change happens.  There are times when change is necessary.  Sometimes we can plan for it, sometimes it comes out of nowhere.  The point is that we do need a certain level of adaptability but we also need a certain level of reason behind the movement.  Activity without purpose is just busy work.  Purpose is what gives us direction and drive.  So take the changes as they come, look for the new location of the store, and do your best to go with it.

When taking the dog out this morning he almost stepped on a moth right outside our front door.  It was large and I could tell it was hurt immediately.  It looked like its wings had been ripped as the rusty red color was missing from a lot of it.  I picked it up and brought it inside to see what I could do for it.  I got a box, prepped some sugar water on a cotton ball and went back outside for some grass and twigs.  He rested in my son’s room away from the cats.

Whenever an animal literally lands in my life like that, I always take it as a sign.  I started looking up the spiritual meaning of moths and found a ton of different things.  Everything from blindly following our desires like a moth to flame to what we are hiding from ourselves.  But one interpretation that stuck out to me was that we must focus on the correct direction and that we must not allow others to transform us (auntyflo.com/superstition-dictionary/moth-symbolism). Life changes quickly and it is easy to be shaped by the will of the world rather than by our intuition.

Sometimes the application of the message isn’t immediately clear and I’m still trying to get some clarity on where exactly it fits for me.  I’ve been erratic lately, unclear, unable to focus so maybe this creature was more a symbol to bring attention to my flightiness, a message to pay attention to the direction I’m really going.  We found out today that we could possibly lose the house we’ve been working on getting since May so I have a lot of emotion around it.  Our current home has been in utter chaos for the last month as we are trying to move into the next phase and now it seems it may have been all for nothing.

This is the clearest example that our plans mean nothing.  We can do exactly what we are meant to and if the universe has a different plan in place, there is nothing that will stop it.  It’s also a clear lesson in non-attachment.  Getting attached to an outcome is what causes the pain.  It isn’t up to us to determine how things happen, it is only up to us to go with what is meant for us.

So, this synchronicity of finding this beautiful moth led me to see that there are some things I still need to work on as far as control.  The only thing I can control is myself.  There will always be unknowns and multiple variables in this world—we could never account for them all.  It is only our job to learn to go with it.  The only thing I can assume is that there is a greater reason for all of this confusion happening.  Perhaps something is wrong with this new house that we don’t know about.  It could be anything, but I can trust that when the time is right, we will get where we need to be.

I feel so grateful to have found this moth.  I honestly thought it was hours away from death and I only wanted to give it some comfort.  I kept checking on it and this beautiful, resilient little creature was still able to fly and to eat—so I released it.  Just as I am releasing any expectation about what is coming next in my life.  There may be unexpected detours and pain, but I can give myself the time to heal, just like I did for that moth, and learn to fly again.

Today I am grateful for release.  Or perhaps, acceptance is the word.  I have been holding so tight to the idea of the type of house I need and the things I want to build in my life that I didn’t take into account what I was building them for.  I was focused on the end result and not on the greater good in the circumstance.  Now I feel a sense of contentment in letting go of the attachment.  The pressure feels off.

Today I am grateful for some familiarity.  We haven’t gone out much in the last few months other than to grocery shop so today we took a little time to wander in a book store.  It felt so good to wander amongst the familiar friends of new titles in the aisles.  I picked up a few things to go on some new adventures at home.

Today I am grateful to take steps toward peace.  As a person with anxiety I tend to fall back into patterns really easily because it’s a form of comfort.  The repetition, the known makes me feel better.  Even though I was seeking comfort today and the known did make me feel better, I was looking for different elements, the next step to get me past my discomfort.  With all the personal chaos lately it would have been easy to repeat the patterns, but I made conscious choices to look for answers in new places.  Progress.

Today I am grateful to have some fun trying new things.  My son and I baked some cloud bread this morning.  So much fun!  His excitement was palpable in the anticipation he showed as he waited for the bread to bake.  We had it for breakfast as a fun family treat and it was so good.  See the picture above 😊

Today I am grateful for love.  My husband and I spent a lot of time talking today, discussing the future and what our options are with the house, our businesses, and our family.  We spoke with each other and took our time walking through all the details trying to figure out what we want to do.  It felt peaceful and genuinely caring to have that kind of talk.  While we didn’t arrive at all the answers, we settled ourselves by working together, and taking care of each other.