Archives for posts with tag: loving

It’s Okay to Love

February 14, 2017 //
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It’s okay to love all year long. It’s okay to love with my whole heart. It’s okay to smile, even every day. It’s okay to be kind, any time at all.

Go ahead. Love.

Go ahead. Love.

Valentine’s Day is here. Love isn’t about that, although Valentine’s Day is about Love. No reason to love on an annual basis. I plan to love all year. There are verbs involved. Opportunities to choose. There are choices. Practices. Moments to reach across a divide with intent, and affection.

Each moment is another opportunity to love again.

Each moment is another opportunity to love again.

Rationing love hasn’t ever helped anyone love more deeply, or feel more loved.

Every day is another chance to walk a path paved with love.

Every day is another chance to walk a path paved with love.

Valentine’s Day or not… today is a good day to love. ❤

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Categories Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Loving

January 21, 2016 //
2

This morning I exist quietly. My traveling partner sleeps in the other room. I catch up with friends and the world – and magically, in this fantastic modern age, I am able to do so without even waking them; our digital exchanges do not happen in real-time.

I am enjoying love. The simplest things, mundane pleasures, and the warmth of existing side-by-side. I’m not sleeping as well as I might otherwise, but I so rarely sleep through the night with another person that this is not noteworthy. What is noteworthy is that my solitary life has resulted in sleeping through the night generally; I would benefit from being more of aware of it, and enjoying the experience. This morning I woke shortly after three. I lay quietly, content, for some further time before getting up some time before the alarm would go off. My shower didn’t wake my partner. Neither did making coffee. I smile at these simple joys; how delightful to take care of me without it being at the expense of my love’s rest?

I continue the morning quietly, a bit a time. Yoga. Meditation. Planning the move, which is now imminent. Coffee. Correspondence. In all regards but the profound quiet this is a morning entirely like any other morning of late… only… love. The love matters. Love doesn’t have to sleep in my bed, or in my home, or on my schedule. Love doesn’t require cohabitation. Love isn’t always sexy. The power of love to build my emotional reserves, to nurture what is best and strong within me, and to add a patina of joy to just every thing going in is indescribably pleasant. I make no demands of love; I have learned a thing or two about nurturing love. I enjoy the moment, and the experience. I pause to remind myself that love is reciprocal, aware, and tender, and ask myself “am I loving well in this moment?” Why wouldn’t I ask this of myself? Love is no imposition on my time or routine – more of a rest stop on a long journey, or a broad stretch of very nice pavement on a walk more commonly fraught with obstacles.

No doubt love will also offer challenges, but today this quiet morning is enough, and I am love. 🙂

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Waiting for Coffee

September 17, 2015 //
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I am awake. Showered. I’ve meditated. I’ve done some yoga. It is morning, and the start of a new day. I am waiting for coffee, listening to the ticks, pings, and pops of the electric burner heating the goose-neck kettle, and the water within. There is nothing much else going on in this moment right here. I hear a freight train, some distance away, and the woosh of traffic on the main road, nearer by, and the percussive chiming of raindrops on the chimney cover – sounds of morning. I am here, listening, and waiting for coffee.

Sometimes it's a metaphor - sometimes it is just a cup of coffee. :-)

Sometimes it’s a metaphor – sometimes it is just a cup of coffee. 🙂

My coffee this morning is hot, still to hot to drink. The cup warms my hands – I type a few words, stop and hold the cup awhile, and return to this page, fingers poised over the keyboard…still this feeling of waiting… I am also waiting to see my traveling partner, a thread of loving woven into the fabric of my experience, even when we are separated by distance and a head cold. I am also gently waiting for new ideas and changed thinking to settled into all the corners of my consciousness; the meditation, study, and reading over the weekend, and the conversation with my therapist yesterday, are now all mixed together. I know that waiting will end, in each one of these cases, with time – it is the only thing that ends waiting, besides choosing not to wait.

I am pleased that the rain has returned. I enjoy rain. My walk to work is temporarily detoured along the main thoroughfare while a bridge across the creek that runs through the park is replaced. It is no great inconvenience to make the change, but the result is a far less naturally lovely walk. The current commute takes me through a parking lot, then down a long length of sidewalk between commuter traffic, and signs of humankind’s careless (I am puzzled that people litter, honestly), then I turn back to the remainder of the usual walk through the business park, with landscaped beauty that changes with the seasons thanks to the labors of a vast crew of landscapers who rip out all the flowers in the flower beds 2 times a  year to replace them with other ones. It strikes me as both cruel and wasteful – but the flower beds are always lovely and well-kept. I’m sure there’s a metaphor there, among the flowers or the between the raindrops. I realize it would serve me well to get my raincoat out today, for the walk to work, and wonder if the traffic will be close enough to risk being splashed as I walk along.

On chilly mornings I see bumblebees sleeping among the flowers.

On chilly mornings I see bumblebees sleeping among the flowers.

This morning is a quiet pleasant morning. I am entirely okay with that; it is enough.

Today is a good day to enjoy each moment as is it is. Today is a good day to savor the beauty in the ordinary, and savor even those moments that seem wholly unremarkable. Today is a good day to share a smile and be uplifted by those simple things I love the most – even if only a good cup of coffee, on a rainy morning.

 

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, The Art of Being

It’s Not All Challenges, Issues, Baggage

March 11, 2014 //
1

It is a lovely morning. I woke groggy, and rolled out of bed sluggishly. The shower stung, too cold, I wasn’t awake when I hopped in carelessly forgetting to check the temperature. No matter. My coffee is… coffee. Not special this morning, not bad. Not great. Just…hot. I feel okay. I feel safe.

I feel a tad uninspired at the moment. I suspect Daylight Savings Time. lol. Well, not entirely, it’s just a slow morning. I do dislike Daylight Savings Time. I don’t understand the point of it, truly, and every year it messes with my sleep, my medication, my routine, for a few days or weeks until I’ve adjusted. I do find being dragged from sleep by the infernal beeping of my ancient plastic travel alarm preferable to laying awake through the night certain I will ‘miss the alarm’ due to Daylight Savings Times; other years, other experiences.

This morning I feel content, satisfied, and pleasantly relaxed, thinking over nice moments of the past several days. It is enough that I have them. More of them, more often, more intensely, more predictably… are demands or expectations that are all ‘extras’, not necessary to contentment and joy.

One sip of coffee at a time, I slowly wake. Some yoga. Meditation. Eventually moving on to catching up email, and now…here. Awake. Fingers poised over the keyboard I shopped so long for, and… yeah. Here I sit, still. Quietly contemplating recent contentment and contrasting it to more chronologically distant hurts without any goal beyond appreciation in the moment. As mornings go, not a bad start to the day. I suppose I could write more, comment further, provide details…but I suspect you have a moment or two of joy, yourself, suitable for appreciation, contentment, and quiet joy, and that connecting with that would be a more visceral experience for you. (Don’t let me keep you waiting! Coffee at the ready? And… appreciate! 🙂 )

It’s a good day for a moment of whimsy, and a good day to delight someone unexpectedly with a kind word, or an unexpected gesture of fondness and inclusion. It’s a good day to share. It’s a good day to ask ‘how are you doing?’ – and want a sincere answer. It’s a good day to be oh-so-human, vulnerable, and open. It’s a good day to expect less, and enjoy more…

…Don’t mind if I do. 🙂

A recent, unexpected, moment of whimsy...and...squirrel!

A recent, unexpected, moment of whimsy…and…squirrel!

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring

Just This Moment

November 7, 2013 //
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There’s only this moment, and I am quiet, still, and content. I’m listening to my heart resonate with someone else’s words this morning, words about love. ‘About’? Words that try to capture the nature and experience, the feel of love – are those ‘about’ love? What is love? There are hundreds, thousands, millions maybe, of love songs – do they describe love, document it, preserve it for others? It’s like sharing ‘spiritual growth’, or ‘happiness’, isn’t it? Always an attempt, rarely successful – or so it seems to me.

Since I was a ‘tween, I’ve longed to ‘be the woman men write love songs about’. Odd sort of thing to want, I guess. Wanting is part of my human experience, I suppose it as a obvious a thing to desire as any other. I didn’t know what I meant, until I realized that I have it. I realized it… yesterday? This morning? Sometime last week? It hasn’t been very long.  There was just this very still moment, connecting with a lover’s experience of me, when it hit me – I am loved. I am loved in that extraordinary and passionate way. Loved by poets, loved by artists, loved by craftspeople, artisans, engineers, soldiers, musicians, writers, philosophers… across the years I have been loved – and turned love away unrecognized because I did not love.

In this place in my life I know love. I love. I am loved in return. I am even in the embrace of one of those soul-shaking loves that leaves an impression, a glow, a look that lingers and that is visible to the world… which is a little odd and naked feeling sometimes. I’m not sure how I  missed it, and I smile for a moment thinking of other loves, other stories of romance, and the smile becomes a broad contented grin – all delight and no reservations.  Love is amazing stuff – and that this love does not write songs about it is no remark on the intensity of it.  It’s a good day to awaken to that awareness and hold love dear, in all its power.

Hormone Hell can be a dark corridor with a new nightmare or irritation behind every door, but it can also be a window into places in my heart that are usually far from view. This morning I know love. I am love.  How’s that for being ’emotional’? 😉

Thank you, Love. Thank you for walking with me, thank you for helping me change the world. 😀

Sometimes words aren't enough.

Sometimes words aren’t enough.

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Words