Contemplating Softness

Wednesday, February 28, 2018 No tags Permalink

It’s the hard things that break; soft things don’t break. You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break, but it’s the soft things that can’t break. The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces.

We want to be “strong” and “tough,” to be able to handle all of life’s trials and tribulations without cracking. When we are strong, we hunker down, grit our teeth, and bear it. When we are tough, we “power through” the bad times. The short-term result of this is often satisfying. The hard person bounces back quickly from a failed marriage or an illness or losing a job.However, the trouble is often found beneath the surface and in the long-term. What happens when someone spends a lifetime hunkering down and powering through. The tree that doesn’t bend, breaks. A hard tree can endure a lot, but when a strong wind blows, it cracks and falls over.

Brené Brown talks of armor. We put on armor to avoid the hurt. That used to be a way of life for me. I endured a lot of trauma as a young adult and one survival mechanism I developed through these experiences was to not go too deep with people and not open up. But what does it mean when you don’t let people in and open yourself up to them? You avoid the hurt, but you also miss the intimacy, the connection, and the depth of an open, honest relationship.As Brené explains, you can cut off feelings—the good and the bad—but you can’t isolate and block out specific types of feelings. In order to feel joy and intimacy, you need to allow yourself the vulnerability that will also inevitably lead at times to pain.

<The more you hurt, the more you fear. The more you fear, the thicker the armor you wear. The thicker your armor, the more it weighs you down. When my armor finally cracked and fell off, it led to a  breakdown. It was during the recovery from that breakdown that I learned what true strength was. When the pain became too much, I fell apart, and at that point, I had no choice but to go right. At that moment, all my hardness couldn’t see me through. And that’s what suffering is: it’s the great teacher that tells keeps telling you where to go, and the more you try to power through, the more painful and prolonged it will be. Then you soften up and go right, and everything changes.

Let hurt soften you; don’t let it harden you. Let that time someone hurt you open your heart up to compassion for all of those who are hurting. Let it be a reminder at the moment to be more forgiving.

When an experience is difficult, you can fight with it. But if you surrender to it, let down your walls, and be open to the experience, and you will grow from the pain. Give up the hard walls and soften yourself up to what comes your way.

When floating down the river of life, you’re totally right to swim in the direction you’d like to go. But paddle too hard against the current, and you’ll drown. Try going soft and floating, seeing where the river will take you—it’s not like you have that much of a choice anyway. 😉

Bravely learn to relax with life and see what happens, and you will make decisions with more wisdom and take actions with more power than if you were fighting.

As Pema Chödrön says, “stop protecting your soft spot…stop armoring your heart.” Likewise, “wretchedness humbles us and softens us…Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.”

Anticipation of Love {Poetry}

Tuesday, February 27, 2018 No tags Permalink

Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day,
nor the favor of your body, still mysterious, reserved, and childlike,
nor what comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence,
will be so mysterious a gift
as the sight of your sleep, enfolded
in the vigil of my arms.
Virgin again, miraculously, by the absolving power of sleep,
quiet and luminous like some happy thing recovered by memory,
you will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do now own.
Cast up into silence
I shall discern that ultimate beach of your being
and see you for the first time, perhaps,
as God must see you–
the fiction of Time destroyed,
free from love, from me.

-Jorge Luis Borges

Alchemy

Saturday, February 24, 2018 No tags Permalink

Note to self:

Beloved…

Cut yourself some slack today.

Whatever you didn’t get to today, extend yourself some grace. Give yourself some credit for just showing up.

That’s half of the battle and it’s admirable.

I see you and I celebrate that you showed up.

It’s a New Day.

Like most people, I am harder on myself than on anyone else.  I don’t cut myself much slack. I have high demands and push myself until I push myself too far.  That’s probably not the best idea.  But I am learning.  🙂 It’s a new day.

Become {Poetry}

Tuesday, February 20, 2018 No tags Permalink

Ten Guideposts to Wholehearted Living:

1.  Cultivating Authenticity: letting go of what people think
2. Cultivating Self-compassion: letting go of perfectionism
3.Cultivating A resilient spirit: letting go of numbing and powerlessness
4. Cultivating Gratitude and joy: letting go of scarcity and fear
5. Cultivating Intuition and trusting faith: letting go of the need for certainty
6. Cultivating Creativity: letting go of comparison
7. Cultivating Play and rest: letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth
8. Cultivating Calm and stillness: letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle
9 .Cultivating Meaningful work: letting go of self-doubt

10. Cultivating Laughter, song and dance: letting go of being cool and “always in control.”

Chances and Changes

Sunday, February 18, 2018 No tags Permalink

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” ~Maya Angelou

 

That is one of the hardest lessons for me to learn.  I have struggled with it for years. I have caused myself much needless suffering because I always wanted to give people a second chance, and a third, and a fourth. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I am the woman who sees the “potential” in someone. The person they “could” be, with a lot of love and nurturing, and if I just believed in them enough. I tend to give people a pass and to make excuses for their bad behavior. Behavior that doesn’t  add up to what I am told, behavior in past or present relationships that wasn’t filled with integrity. If someone lies to other people in their life, there’s a very high likelihood that they will lie to you as well. When choosing those who I allow into I my life, I need to ask if he/she is a person embodies the things that are important to me, or am I convincing myself that I can change them? You can never change someone. Only they can change themselves, and only when they’re good and ready to change.

Continue Reading…

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

Friday, February 16, 2018 No tags Permalink

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.
— Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

I plan on becoming a crazy book lady when I am old.  Instead of being surrounded by cats, like a crazy cat lady, I’ll have my books.  With books you are never lonely and you can be transported to anywhere in the world.  As Jorge Luis Borges says, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

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Logophile

Monday, February 12, 2018 No tags Permalink

Definition of logophile

a lover of words

I love words, and I just learned a new one. Do you ever get that shiver of pleasure that runs spontaneously down your spine?  Definitely one of the best sensations.

Monday, January 22, 2018 No tags Permalink

I’v been hearing about how so many of us are  feeling lethargic, unmotivated, or worn out. I realized we are not really made to rocket straight through winter, ablaze with energy. Look at nature– the ground, plants and animals are deep at rest. That is the natural way of things. We need to spend some time with the long nights, the moon, solitude, the bare earth, stillness. Be easier on yourself.

We tend to forget that we are still a part of nature and our biological clock isn’t set to perform 4 seasons at rocket speed…we need to listen to the body and nature more.

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Happiness and Purpose

Saturday, January 20, 2018 No tags Permalink

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depend upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily.”

~ Plato

Christopher Reeve was born into a wealthy family in New York. Reeve split his young adult life between Ivy League schools in the United States and sipping wine and riding horses around Europe. In 1978, Reeve hit his big break and scored the role of Superman in a big-budget Hollywood movie. He earned millions and became one of the most recognizable celebrities in the world.

Reeve made a fortune. He spent that fortune on nice houses, nice cars, luxurious parties and his passion for riding horses.Then in 1995, Reeve fell off a horse and cracked two vertebrae in his spine. He would never walk or breathe on his own again.

He became an advocate for the disabled and spent the rest of his life fundraising for spinal cord research. He was the first celebrity supporter of stem cell research. Reeve later claimed that his accident helped him “appreciate life more.” It wasn’t a joke. He noted that there were “able-bodied people more paralyzed than I am,” and once remarked, “I can laugh. I can love. I am a very lucky guy.”

Happiness, like every other emotion, isn’t something you obtain, but rather something you inhabit. When you’re really angry, you are not self-conscious about your state of anger. You are not thinking to yourself, “Am I finally angry? Am I doing this right?” No, you’re just angry. You inhabit and live the anger. You are the anger. And then it’s gone.

Just as a confident man doesn’t wonder if he’s confident, a happy man does not wonder if he’s happy. He simply is.

What this implies is that happiness is not achieved, but rather it is the side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences. So often we get this wrong, especially since happiness is marketed as a goal in and of itself. Buy X and be happy. Learn Y and be happy. But you can’t buy happiness and you can’t achieve happiness. It just is. And it is once you get other parts of your life in order.

Research shows that people who focus their energy on materialistic and superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, less healthy, and less happy in the long run. 

One vital aspect of attaining a measure of happiness is to have a sense of a purpose in life.  For most of us, it is something that is constantly evolving as we move through life. This is my latest iteration:

To live mindfully and passionately in the present moment, to discover my surroundings, discover myself, to follow my heart and to love freely, to become the greatest version of myself, to be a lifelong learner, to seek adventure and growth, and to spread kindness and peace along the way.

I ask myself these questions to discover my purpose: What do you love? What are you good at? What are your greatest passions? What makes you truly feel alive? Make certain to follow your heart (do all those things that make you feel happy, that lift your spirits, that give you butterflies, that make you feel light) and evolve spiritually — become more enlightened.

Densely {Poetry}

Tuesday, January 16, 2018 No tags Permalink

“I want to live so densely,
lush and slow in the next few years
that a year becomes ten years,
and the past becomes only a page
in the book of my life.”

-nayyirah waheed

 

Continue Reading…

What’s in Your Cup?

Wednesday, January 10, 2018 No tags Permalink

You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and bumps into you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere.

Why did you spill the coffee?

“Well because someone bumped into me, of course!”

Wrong answer.

You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup.

Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea.

*Whatever is inside the cup, is what will spill out.*

Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which WILL happen), whatever is inside you will come out. It’s easy to fake it, until you get rattled.

So we have to ask ourselves… “what’s in my cup?”

When life gets tough, what spills over?

Joy, gratefulness, peace and humility?

Or anger, bitterness, harsh words and reactions?

You choose!

Today let’s work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy, words of affirmation; and kindness, gentleness and love for others.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

Tuesday, January 9, 2018 No tags Permalink

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

            – e e cummings

 


When I hide away
from the world,
I take you with me.

i am running into a new year {Poetry}

Tuesday, January 2, 2018 No tags Permalink

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even forty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

—Lucille Clifton

published in Good Woman: Poems and A Memoir 1969-1980

«—»

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives… not looking for flaws, but for potential. When you start to feel like things should have been better this past year, remember the mountains and valleys that got you here. They are not accidents and those same moments weren’t in vain. You are not the same. You have grown and you are growing. You are breathing. You are living. You are wrapped in endless, boundless, grace. And things WILL get better. There is more to you than yesterday.

One thing I love to do every year is Apartment Therapy’s January  Cure. The Cure is a month worth of assignments, a giant kickstart to the new year in which you do something good for your home, every day.  You get a small task every day, and by the end of the month, your home is a better place to live.  I love it!  You can sign up to get a daily reminder here.

How He Touches Me {Poetry}

Tuesday, December 12, 2017 No tags Permalink

“He placed his hands
on my mind
before reaching
for my waist
my hips
or my lips
he didn’t call me
beautiful first
he called me
exquisite.”

-Rupi Kaur

Hideaway

Sunday, December 10, 2017 No tags Permalink

I’d like to hide away for about a week in a place like this.  Lots of books, pots of hot tea, hours spent soaking in the tub, a cozy bed, a blazing fire, good company, and wine!