Today I am grateful for my family.  My oldest sister is in from NY and we’ve been able to really spend time together for the first time in a couple of years.  It feels different this time around.  Sure, I’m older, sure, I know the changes I’ve endured since turning 40, sure I’ve changed a lot of facets of my life.  But I’m confronting things I didn’t expect to (discussions on aging and death and the fear of losing my parents), making choices about where other people are in their lives and my role in it (my friends’ behavior, the gaslighting from it, habits at home), and lessons on control (I like to be in the driver’s seat, I want to fix things, I want everyone around me happy—and I want to be happy too).  These are all things we have very little control over and the best we can do is find ways to ground and connect.  To discharge the energy that holds us where we are like hostages, unable to make choices because we are in some unseen battle of the wills with what we think it should be and what is.  It takes practice and patience and belief that we are safe.  Family gives us that sense of security and we have to accept that sometimes the look of what family is changes.  Loss, grief, development, movement, evolving, are all part of life.  There is a time for all of it. 

Today I am grateful for new lessons in finding myself.  We took a trip to a temple not terribly far from where we live, something my sister had mentioned a long time ago and it attracted my attention then.  I was too afraid to go alone, too afraid to meet her there, too afraid to leave my home at certain times.  But yesterday, we went and it was a beautiful experience.  The warmth of the woman who opened her door, for letting us stay well past the 10 minutes she had left in the day, for the conversation we had with her that opened new doorways to my heart, for the gentle reminders of what I still carry and need to let go of, I am so incredibly grateful.  I may have found a way to stay on the path, the next step in what I need.  I feel like I’m constantly losing more and more pieces of myself and I’m not sure how I feel about it.  Perhaps a little sad at letting go, a little scared at how much I’m losing, a little disappointed at the realization that I still have so much work to do.  But I know all of that comes with reason—and I can at least appreciate that everything happens for a reason.  I didn’t approach this thinking I had all the answers and that once I found what I was looking for that I was done.  I also didn’t realize how much there really was to let go of.  So the work continues.

Today I am grateful for strength.  Right now I’m facing a lot of fear of being alone from several different arenas: the loss of friends, the loss of a relationship that I put above everything for too long, the pending loss of everything due to the natural course of life.  I needed ways to remember that I am strong and the universe is providing them.  I can’t say I’m terribly thrilled at the lessons, but I guess if we have to learn something, it isn’t necessarily up to us how that happens.  It’s up to us how we receive it.  There has been one lesson I’ve been avoiding for decades now and it rears its head again right now.  The only way out is through, right?  I’m tired of running, tired of waiting, tired of delaying what I need to know because I’m afraid of what it means in relation to my comfort and what I’ve built.  We can’t keep things the same if we want to change, no matter how attached we are to it.  We can’t carry it with us.  So I am grateful for learning how strong I am and what I can carry but I’m also grateful to learn to be strong enough to put certain things down.  We talk about strength like it only matters what we can carry and we so often ignore what it takes to leave things behind.  I am grateful to have the option to leave things where they lay, and as scared as I am that I may not find them again or find my way back to myself, I am grateful to work on accepting the lesson. 

Today I am grateful for understanding what belongs to me and what doesn’t.  I guess I needed reminders of what I needed to stay out of—and where I needed to step up.  It’s hard to make the distinction when we’re already facing overwhelm to a degree. The lines blur in many ways.  I can’t fix everything.  I can’t do the work, even for the people I love.  I didn’t think I was still living at surface level but I have been.  There were many moments of flow yesterday, my sisters called it a vortex—and I felt it.  From the conversation we had meeting a perfect stranger to seeing the grace that stranger had with welcoming us even at the end of the day, to finding books on the same topics we discussed with that woman, to finding artwork that represented us, to the million little moments that showed us we were related.  Topics we discussed on random things like fairies and gas and berries and particular authors showed up just as we talked about them.  I know what I have to face now.

Today I am grateful for giving.  I allowed myself to get really caught up in some heavy crap happening in my life right now so I am grateful for the reminder that we still have energy to give, that I have energy to give.  I’m grateful for the reminders to be where I am right now. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead