Today I am grateful for music.  They’ve said that music is the language of the soul—I’ve heard many things described as the language of the soul—but music stands out.  One of my favorite teachers from high school said that the highest form of expression is song.  Music speaks in melody, harmony, tones, vibration, and poetry.  Poetry is it’s own type of song.  Music resonates with its sound, it reaches something inside of us in a way we can’t explain.  It triggers things—emotion, memory, and movement.  It draws people in.  Since ancient times music has been used as a way to commune with ancestors across time and space, a way to connect each other, a symbol of life events/milestones, as a way to connect with nature and spirit.  I feel gratitude for this today as it helps navigate and guide me through some complicated residual things in my life.  In a stage of clearing, we need to release and music helps us achieve catharsis in so many ways.  It stimulates joy and healing even if the trigger was sadness.  There is no higher expression than song because it speaks for our soul when words alone won’t do.       

Today I am grateful for words.  I can’t leave the words out of this—I thrive in my words.  The more I work with words the more I understand the complicated relationship we develop with expression as we get older.  As children we have such limited means of expressing what we need that determining how those needs is actually pretty easy—as infants we need basic needs met so that cry has to do with hunger or discomfort or pain, as toddlers we may have bumped our knee or we get frustrated if we can’t get what we want.  As young children (prior to entering school—and maybe those first few years of school) we still feel pretty confident about expressing what we want because we haven’t learned the masking skills of speaking in codes, hoping someone will figure out what we need—we are still able to state what we need.  The older we get the more we hide our needs and our true selves and I found that it became increasingly difficult to verbally express what I felt/wanted/needed.  But I could write about it.  Even if I couldn’t say it verbally, I could write it.  I love the artistry of words—the stringing them together, the way we can describe things—the way we can make something jump out at us visually using words-words sink directly into the mind and create a show entirely in our minds.  There is power in words—power over our minds, our souls, our emotions, power over others—words have meaning we assign socially, personally as well as what we feel viscerally with them.  That’s part of the magic of words—they mean as much as what we assign to them.  While their power lies in the meaning we give them, the way we feel with the tone/undertone etc. is all from vibration and energy in delivery.  People are cautious with yelling and aggression, they are empowered with speeches given with hope and love.  There are many things words stir in people.  Love or hate, they create connection, and I appreciate this expression.

Today I am grateful for non-verbal connection.  I’ve been missing my cat a lot this week.  Monday will be three weeks without him and I am still reeling from the course of events that took him from me.  I bring up the cat because I realize what I’ve been missing is the connection I had with him.  The way he simply understood me.  I still feel the weight of his absence, not just because of how recent it has been, but because of how he was everywhere for/with me.  Cats are fairly creatures of habit and we definitely had our routine—every day from the time we woke up to the time we went to bed.  He was always near me whether I was working, cooking, watching TV, reading, writing, sleeping, showering.  He knew how much I needed him—and I think he needed me too.  I understood his language and he understood mine and I miss that feeling of being understood that deeply.  I feel the change in our last cat as he is alone—he waits for me differently, he sits with me differently, he cries differently. We all feel the loss and we haven’t had to say a word about it.  From what I had to what I have, I am grateful for that level of love and understanding.  That connection is a gift, and even if it isn’t song, or words, it is an energy and a gift to be able to feel that.

Today I am grateful for emotion.  I struggle with emotional regulation with a variety of reasons and contributing factors.  But I’ve come to understand that emotion is an indicator of life, an indicator that we are alive.  We feel things to gauge where we are in the universe, what our standing is with other people, to tell us which way to go.  The gut-brain connection is incredibly powerful and as we learn to interpret what it tells us, we navigate the signs based on how we feel about things.  Emotion is a powerful tool designed to point us in the right direction.  Uncontrolled emotion makes it difficult to function and relate to others as much as overly controlled emotion.  But how we feel is a form of proprioception in the world and tells us what we need to do next.  Allow the connection to what we feel and learn to follow those emotions as guideposts.  Follow the triggers and learn what we can control and what we can’t.  Make sense of how we feel and what steps the emotions reveal to us.    

Today I am grateful for all of the things that make us understood.  As I was writing about the things above, I realize that they all come down to connection and being understood.  Understanding is one of the greatest quests of humanity—we seek answers to all of the mysteries of the world: what is in the greatest depths, the highest highs, what is beyond our planet, how does the body work, the function of everything in the universe from the microscopic to the macroscopic, why do we feel, how does the brain work, etc.  We seek to understand the world and we seek to be understood because it is when the mind is able to make sense of things that we feel we are able to work with it.  We feel we are able to master some facet of it.  Understanding is power, and when we grasp concepts both seen and unseen, we feel secure in ourselves.  Understanding also means survival.  There are infinite complexities in this universe and we seek to know all because we want to be known as much as we want to know.  When we understand, when the deepest parts of us are understood, we feel safe—and safety is a different level of power.  For all of the things we seek to control, big and small, we ensure our survival.       

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.