Today I am grateful for witnessing healing.  Last night we went to my in-laws to celebrate Christmas and for the first time in a long time there was absolutely 0 BS from anyone.  There was no awkwardness or trepidation.  There is always room for change, healing, and communication.  It also showed me that we need to make a much more concentrated effort on how we spend our time.  I can’t keep piling more and more work on in the hopes that something will take off—I need to focus on presences and working with those around me and making sure the relationships with those I love are solid.  Making sure that those I love KNOW I love them.  Seeing the rifts heal over time and how we can find ourselves back together is a magical thing and if we can do that in one context we can certainly do it anywhere.  We just need concentrated effort and time.  Healing doesn’t always look like we think it will.  Sometimes it’s a matter of just letting it all go and moving forward—enjoying what we have and not living in a state that doesn’t exist anymore.  Sometimes it’s seeing the love that still exists in spite of anything that has happened.  Sometimes we have to get beyond the anger we feel in order to heal what is really lying underneath.  It’s seeing the understanding we are all on the same page.   

Today I am grateful for witnessing and experiencing family joy from another side.  I feel like such a child in so many ways sometimes, still wanting my parents to fix things, still feeling like I need them to fix things.  It isn’t something I feel all the time but it comes up when I’m in their presence, like I’m not sure who I am or what I’m allowed to do.  I remember my parents seeming to know exactly who they are and what they wanted, the same for my friend’s parents.  Being the age they were back then now feels like a dream, a surreal paradox of altered reality.  When you get stuck in your head sometimes you think your way is the only way or the things you know are how everyone knows.  It’s nice to have a reminder and a means to get out of our own heads where we see that there are alternatives to how we live and that it’s ok to do things differently.  It’s also nice to see that no one has it all together so the belief that we always feel like children and have no idea what we’re doing seems to be pretty much universal. I don’t think there is ever a point where people truly feel like they have a hold on everything.  Some may be better than others but we seem to do a lot of questioning our reality—and it made me feel better because I felt less like I was floating in space on my own.  It’s a human experience.  

Today I am grateful for not having to say anything.  I’ve been having a minor crisis of faith lately for a lot of reasons.  Changes, the time of year, confusion about what’s next, the imbalance of energy and power, the rug kind of being pulled out from under me in a lot of ways, reminders of time and the things I have to do, feeling lost in general.  I’ve been fighting my faith and my fear and feeling a lot like I’m on my own, screaming in a crowded room and no one listens.  Perhaps that’s a bit martyr like or even a bit “poor-me” but I can’t think of a way to explain the general melancholy and sadness.  I haven’t felt supported or much connection to source and I’ve been SO angry.  So hurt that things have started to fall apart for what seems like no reason.  There are circumstances that have always bothered me but when I look at the logic of it, even if it still irks me, I understand it.  Lately there seems to be no rhyme or reason to anything.  In spite of all that, I can’t help but admit that I’ve still been asking for signs and help even if I’ve been so angry I’ve claimed hatred to source.  It seems that the request was heard on some level.  I thought I would have to have a very difficult conversation this morning and out of left field, the very thing I needed to discuss (and was terrified to do) was brought up and the conversation was beautiful.  I hate that we’ve gone through what we have to get to this point but I would be remiss to say that miracles still happen.  Even when we least expect them.

Today I am grateful for bottom. To be honest that’s not entirely true.  I hate the bottom.  I hate the fall to the bottom, the feeling of being so out of control that there’s nothing we could do to stop it.  I hate the struggle to the top only to have it all seem like nothing as we hit the ground.  But the thing about bottom is it gets pretty clear.  Sometimes the truth is painful—and perhaps it isn’t so much that the truth is painful, it’s the loss of everything we’ve created to avoid the truth that’s painful.  It’s the misalignment of what we thought and hoped, what we remembered held against a reality that doesn’t match.  The mind is amazing at creating these realities for us, these places we convince ourselves exist—and the truth is if we can see them and feel them in our minds, how do they NOT exist?  Can anyone say that they aren’t real?  Regardless, when we lose what we thought we saw, what we thought we knew, and what we certainly thought we felt, it can feel like getting slapped in the face.  When we live in reality, when we learn to accept what is, we can see what we need to change.  Sometimes it takes getting to the bottom of it to know who we are and to understand what we want.  It takes being at the bottom to see a new way to the top and to fully comprehend that different means and viewpoints open different doors, we see a different life, we have different problems/views/possibilities.  And it’s ALL possible depending on what we see.  So don’t be afraid of the bottom.  It just might be the very best place to start.     

Today I am grateful for reminders of perception.  A follow up to my point above is the idea that we create this idea of what we think things are.  We think we know what people thought and felt and what it seemed like based on the stories we’ve been told.  Like we hold up these mythical versions of people and thinking they behaved any differently than we do.  The fact that they were human and, in fact, quite like us seems to escape us.  They were all trying to survive in their own way as well.  Just because they spoke differently, they were all saying the same thing and trying to find themselves the same way we do.  It’s important to get to the reality of who and what we really are.  When we are honest with ourselves, we unlock an entirely new world. The world would be a wonderful place without hiding these pieces of who we are.  The more we normalize who we are and accepting all those facets of what we are without worrying about hiding in what other people tell us we need to do or who we need to be, we can recognize the similarities in all our humanity.  There is no reason to hold anyone up on a pedestal or defer our power to them.  We just need to tell a different story.  Be honest and let the path unfold before us.   

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.