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100 coffee filters, 65 days

July 25, 2015 //
0

Life here at Number 27 is generally a very gentle experience. I can usually expect serenity and quiet on a Saturday morning. Not so this morning; there is construction very nearby, and my music is re-mixed with sounds of hammering, and the coarse humor of the workers, calling to each other from above and below, some on the roof, some on the ground. I hear a drill, or a power saw a moment later, more hammering. This is not a quiet morning. I turn Lil Jon up louder.

Home.

Home.

I woke much earlier than the work began, and I am happy enough that I wasn’t awakened by construction noise on a morning I was trying to sleep in. I remind myself that many people I interact with in the community today were likely not so fortunate, and neighbors may be irritable because of the noise. It’s tempting to be aggravated that my peaceful weekend is being disturbed by construction noise – I mean, seriously? It’s got to be more expensive to pay this crew to keep working through the weekend! As I feel the irritation develop, I take a breath and smile, and acknowledge that the needs of displaced families inconvenience by the exposed wall, the missing windows, the unfinished roof, are a great deal more important than the inconvenience of the noise for the rest of us.

A great coffee in the morning is a practice, a ritual, a measure of time, and a way to take care of me.

A great coffee in the morning is a practice, a ritual, a measure of time, and a way to take care of me.

As I made my coffee, I observed that I had used up my original purchase of 100 #1 unbleached coffee filters… already? How was it I thought that would last my first three months? That was unrealistic – even counting on me to drink just one cup of coffee a day that’s just bad math – and assumes I am an ungenerous hostess with visitors. lol I’m up to two cups of coffee in the mornings, myself, and sometimes three on weekend days, but drinking only 8-10 ounce cups using pour-over brewing, instead of 16 ounce mugs with 4 shots of espresso. I entertain friends more than I have in many years. The math is clear; 100 coffee filters does not last 90 days.

I’m just 65 days into living solo. I am still ‘getting to know me’, and figuring out ‘my way’ of doing things. I’ve learned quite a lot about this woman I have grown to be over the years. I find that there are quirks and habits I have that – regardless of peculiarity – I really favor, and find value in, and they are a part of who I am that I am eager to nurture and build on.

  • I take the trash out every night before I got to bed. It’s not about whether that’s necessary; I just prefer not to sleep near garbage, or have it lingering near my kitchen.
  • I vacuum most days by preference. I’d do it every day, but sometimes I just don’t. It’s not that I’m throwing sand in the house, or have animals living indoors, or a lot of mess – but I really really like the way clean carpet feels on bare feet. I walk on the rug every day – why would I not also vacuum every day?
  • When I load the dishwasher, I put the flatware in the basket ‘handles up’ – so that when I unload the dishwasher I’m not touching the end I’ll be putting in my mouth later – and I always wash my hands before I unload the dishwasher. It’s my way.
  • I make my bed every day – but I’m not about ‘hospital corners’ or bouncing quarters off the comforter – I just like it to look tidy. I change the linens regularly – never less than every week, sometimes 2-3 times a week, certainly any time I sweat up the sheets. I like the way clean sheets and blankets feel.
  • I manage my lighting to maintain the ambiance that feels best to me personally for the time of day…soft intimate lighting in the evening, bright artificial light when I am cleaning or working, and as much natural light as I can get, supplemented with artificial light, when I am painting… I enjoy light, and the way light can play on emotions and aesthetic.
  • I lock my front door, more out of habit than concern…I’m often sitting here writing with the patio door open, soft breezes coming in through the screen – locking the front door is not about security (I’m pretty sure the spiders do not care that the door is locked, and I worry about those getting in more than ‘intruders’).
  • I foster an emotional environment that is calm, welcoming, and drama free – and manage a great deal of success there, making this the most singularly easy-on-the-heart living arrangement I’ve ever had.
  • I am learning over time to treat myself well without much rigorous habitual behavior, and benefiting greatly from letting habits and routine support me – but not control me. This is a work in progress, but so far so good.

I have learned that the woman in the mirror invests heavily in how things feel – most of my choices are about building a beautiful life from the perspective of feeling at ease with myself and my environment long-term. I don’t care much how other people choose to do things, or whether I ‘measure up’ to some other standard. It’s nice to make so many small choices entirely on my own, and really find out what ‘my way’ actually is. I smile a quiet thank you at my traveling partner, enjoying his own Saturday morning on the other side of town; he recognized how badly I needed this, and how much the lack of individual development in this area of my life skills was hurting us, together.

Every project requires tools, a plan, and verbs.

Every project requires tools, a plan, and verbs.

I find that I am also very human – and sometimes struggle to meet my own needs easily, or recognize them in a timely fashion – I learn as I go along. It’s enough to do my best, and to try again when I miss.

  • When I am feeling low, or terribly fatigued, or in a lot of pain, I struggle to find my ideal balance between letting stuff go, and investing in the effort to handle tasks I know I will be irked about if I don’t do them.
  • I still struggle to treat myself with the tender consideration I give others that I love, and I can be pretty hard on myself when I wake and notice that indeed I left that coffee cup in the sink over night, or get home from work to notice I forgot to make my bed when I left for work in haste after losing track of time watching a great Skrillex video.
  • Slowly loosening my grip on rigid habits intended to support good self-care and emotional self-sufficiency, to learn to take the very best care of myself, and build sustainable no-bullshit lasting emotional self-sufficiency is fucking scary as hell, and I sometimes struggle with the emotional outcome of ‘failing myself’ in small ways – instead of supporting myself compassionately, and trusting incremental change over time is the inevitable result of practicing good practices.

I smile, noticing that the ratio of ‘things I easily identify as being pleased with about the woman in the mirror’ to ‘things I struggle with rather a lot’ is very much in favor of things I am pleased with. That feels pretty amazing. Just noticing it seems like a very nice thing to do for myself this morning. I sip my coffee grinning without any self-consciousness, guilt, or discomfort.

Today is a good day to sit down with myself and appreciate my progress. 65 days living with the woman in the mirror – she’s a good sort, and not bad to live with. She does tend to be rather particular, but she loves me, and does her best to care for me with great kindness, consideration, respect, and tenderness. She’s learning.

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

Strong or Bitter?

July 22, 2015 //
0

My coffee this morning is, perhaps, a bit of both – strong, and bitter. I can’t actually be sure…I don’t taste ‘bitter’ with any particular acuity, myself.  My own vantage point is that the coffee ‘tastes different’ in some hard to place way. It could be that it is simply a stronger cup of coffee than usual…

Bitter is not one of the flavors of Love.

Bitter is not one of the flavors of Love.

Strong versus bitter is something to consider on another level, isn’t it? The old adage that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger says nothing about what may become of our welcoming innocence along the way. Isn’t ‘bitter’ one opposite of innocent? The difficulty is that bitterness doesn’t typically serve me well as an individual seeking growth and wellness – it gets in the way. It is by far preferable, I find, to allow experience to develop over time in a gentler way, with a kinder (to myself and the world) outcome: strength. I still have a lot to learn about what develops strength versus what fosters bitterness…even with making coffee. 🙂

I was once far more cynical than I am now. More damaged. More wounded. More bitter. Experience had beaten me down, and torn my heart and my spirit to shreds leaving an emotional wasteland behind, and lacking any greater understanding that the journey could take me another direction if I chose my steps with care, I sort of trudged along…consumed by bitterness, ancient pain, and rage. That was a really long time ago. The first handful of steps in a different direction took so very many years…and the last handful of years have seen me take so very many steps in a better direction. The bitterness – the small bits that linger – are often simply a reaction from the damaged past to some “See? This shit, again??” moment within, before my brain can catch up with my emotions and remind me how far I have come, and that we are each having our own experience.  As emotions go, bitterness is every bit as fabricated as the rest, and just as illusory. The hurts in life hurt – they do – but the bitterness? I can choose differently. I can choose to raise my voice, use my words, and love the woman in the mirror by showing her the same respect, consideration, compassion, and openness I would show anyone else – and the reciprocity I need? That comes from using my words – answering circumstances with gentle reason, with awareness, with observation and clarity, instead of reacting with bitterness. Words may not change the circumstances – but I will feel heard. It takes practice to speak with tenderness, and vulnerability, about the things that set off a feeling of bitterness. It takes more practice to do so without letting hurt and anger become louder than the words – very few people, however much they love someone, can really ‘hear through the anger’ – we hear the anger itself, and earnestly wanting to be heard, I find value in learning to take a softer approach.

It’s a lovely  morning. A gentle, quiet morning that begins with a strong coffee, and an appointment, and will end with – no kidding – a baseball game! How peculiar? How delightful! How very different from the ordinary routine of the busy work week? I have never been to a baseball game. 🙂

Dinner last night with my traveling partner was quite relaxed and wonderful. I dropped him off at his place, still smiling, and headed for home – by way of rush hour traffic. It’s no wonder we spend so little time together on workday evenings – the traffic is nasty, and it takes 40 minutes to get from his place to mine! (It’s only 11 miles… 40 minutes seems somewhat excessive.) I can’t comfortably invite him to dinner much of the time, knowing that;  just the thought of the traffic in the evenings robs the idea of any fun. Why would I put him through that on purpose? It doesn’t sound very loving. lol  By the time I got home I was feeling on the edge of tears, and a hint of bitterness was creeping in. Rather than allow that to progress further, I reached for my handy self-care toolkit.

  • I checked my calendar – yep, due for my HRT; bitterness and other emotions on the darker end of the spectrum are often associate with fluctuating hormones. I take my hormones. This detail is not a safe one to ‘miss’ on – the consequences for my emotional experience can be pretty ugly.
  • I acknowledged how much I really just miss my traveling partner; this is an emotion that coexists with my day-to-day joy and comfort with living alone. Recognizing I have these feelings, I invite him to do something together this weekend (which both comforts me and gives me something to look forward to).
  • I take a shower and wash off the stress of the commute home through traffic; I rarely drive in rush hour traffic [or at all], and the scent of stress clinging to me could potentially continue to affect my mood. Besides…a shower after a hot day just feels lovely. 🙂
  • I meditate. Honestly, it takes the edge off, for me, in almost any trying moment.
  • I address other stressors that are in the background; there is paperwork for the appointment in the morning, and I had not yet found all of it. Taking care of that did a lot to ease my general level of stress.
  • I reminded the woman in the mirror that it’s okay to miss my traveling partner – he misses me, too – there is a greater purpose in living alone right now, a worthy one, a needful opportunity to heal and to grow. Taking the time to recall that this is a choice I am making for me, for my own sanity and longer term health and wellness, does a lot to ease the developing sense of bitterness.

Seriously? The bitterness was an illusion brought on by a little stress, a lot of love, and a lack of physical contact – it can be a challenge struggling with my libido in solitude, honestly, and that has been a thing that has held me back from finding my way through the chaos and damage more than once. The most important thing lacking in a solitary life [for me] is touch. An intimate connection with a physical component. Sexual romantic love. Going without that is super difficult for me, some days. Recognizing the simple primate mammalian truth of it allows the bitterness to subside – it wasn’t ‘real’ in the first place – and I move on with an evening filled with loving recollection of the excellent dinner I shared with my traveling partner, while I got myself organized for my appointment.

There is a lot of strength to be had in taking the very best care of this fragile vessel – and the being residing within it. Strength is…well… strong. And sexy. And nurturing. Bitterness? It doesn’t have those qualities at all. Given a choice, I’ll choose strength. I’m okay with not being so easily able to taste bitter. 🙂

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Hormone Hell, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Summer, The Art of Being, The Big 5, women, Words

Bouncin’ Back

July 15, 2015 //
2

I woke with the alarm this morning, and for a few moments lay quite still, awake, getting my bearings on the day before attempting to rise. I don’t spend much time on ‘auto pilot’ these days, even first thing as I am waking. It seems a healthy change, but it is dependent on my own still-developing ability to stay on course using awareness, will and verbs. I am a beginner. A student. A project in progress. I suppose this is always true, for each of us, until we choose to cling to what we think we know, instead of allowing ourselves to learn and grow…

I am not yet reliably skilled at staying in the moment and making each choice anew without the ‘advantage’ of habit, reactions, programming, and a clear plan with many ‘plans B’ and alternate options for a variety of contingencies and unexpected effects of the free will of others. Still…it’s very pleasant to wake, linger a moment with myself, breathing, before rising rather than feeling my feet hit the floor as I turn off the alarm, and sort of lurching hurriedly through a firm very fixed routine. The occasional miss on taking medication, or wandering off having forgotten to start the dishwasher, seems like a small and reasonable trade-off to become more awake, aware, and alive; embracing an authentic experience of myself, and enjoying my life is very much worth the effort. (Yes, there are verbs involved.)

Enjoying morning.

Enjoying a moment.

This morning, I am listening to favorite tracks and getting my day started in an upbeat energetic way. My coffee is ready – but I’d forgotten about that, until just now; I am dancing through chores and housekeeping. Coffee does sound good…

…Still hot, too. 🙂

Today starts well – most days do now. It’s a pleasant life, and I am eagerly looking ahead to making some of this more permanent in my experience by buying a little place of my own. It’s time I was able to call somewhere ‘home’ knowing that it is not a lease-dependent condition reliant upon the whim of some landlord. I have a much clearer idea of what I want out of a home of my own, and my wants and needs are not lavish, out of reach, or excessive. I have no need to impress someone else, or achieve any goal besides ‘home’ [easy enough, since ‘home’ is something we make with our hearts, our will, and our work – and not something that can be purchased, ever]. Hell, this wee apartment is ‘home’ to me on a level only one other dwelling has been; it’s about what I put into it, rather than plumbing fixtures, fancy doors, upgrading paint or flooring, or vast square footage used to indicate importance and stature. Buying a home will be much less costly than it would be if I were attempting to purchase the esteem of others at the same time. 🙂 Something for me will be quite enough.

Last night I enjoyed some quiet time and conversation with my traveling partner. Saying so does little to describe the profound delight I take in hanging out with this one particular human being, or to share how precious those moments together are. We enjoy each other. The stresses and challenges of living together in a stress-filled multi-adult shared household were incredibly unhealthy for the two of us as a partnership [and for me as an individual], and it pleases me to be once again able to wholly enjoy him – to enjoy each other together – on this profound connected level that we share so easily without the interference of others. I had worried, when I moved, that I had entirely lost my skill for ‘being there’ for him, over time, and that I was simply no longer able to be a gentle supportive presence, listening, loving, engaging, connecting… It was silly to worry myself so. The environment we were in simply didn’t support that, at all, and in that context our effort to enjoy each other with any ease was continuously undermined, often in a seemingly willful way. I understand the circumstances (and people) much more now, and the perspective offered by distance is very helpful. It has been easy to ‘let it go’; it does not directly affect my experience now, and is not worth taking personally (it was never ‘about me’).

I am smiling this morning. My traveling partner is comfortable turning to me when he needs support – that means so much to me, and now I recognize that being there for him in that way is a powerful positive value in our relationship for me – it is something I have to offer Love that is very much worth having. My Big 5 is powerful there: Respect, Consideration, Compassion, Reciprocity and Openness build a strong foundation for love. My attention to living beautifully, and study of The Art of Being, is useful, too; I have created a beautiful safe space here, for myself, that nurtures calm, contentment, and affection. OPD dissipates here, unable to find a solid platform from which to run the show. Seeing my distressed partner at the door resulted in a warm welcome, a loving embrace, and supportive chill time enjoyed together – no stress. Lovely.

Enough.

Enough.

This is my life. This is my home, and this is the way of my heart. This is enough. 🙂

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Summer, The Art of Being, The Big 5

It’s Not a Competition

July 11, 2015 //
3

I slept well last night. I slept in this morning. I woke sufficiently early to enjoy the dawn. The kitchen is filled with the aroma of freshly ground coffee. The overcast sky promises cooler weather. The cool soft morning air fills the apartment by way of the open patio door. The morning is quiet, even serene.

Cooler weather and lovely overcast skies often come at a cost for me, and this morning this is the case; my arthritis pain is significantly worse after many days of not bothering me much at all. I shrug it off – at some points quite literally for the relief that movement gives – and wait on the kettle to put coffee nearer to ‘now’.

I look around my home contentedly, and without dissatisfaction, although it is Saturday following a week interrupted with stress; there are chores to do this morning. There generally are on Saturday morning, and I don’t offer myself any criticism that one or two things I could have done Wednesday or Thursday wait for me today. Why would I? My home is lovely and well-kept, and in any case, the rules are my own, the standards are mine, and the outcome need please and satisfy only me. I am enjoying this moment.

You see, it’s not a competition – until or unless I choose to make it one, of course. I don’t. I dislike competition [in life] rather a lot. I enjoy ‘game-ification’, and I don’t mind working to measure up to the standard I have set for myself, but frankly – there is no one else I compete with for my success, my sense of self, or my enjoyment of my experience. You can’t have what is mine [me] – and I can’t have what is yours [you] – on a level beyond mercantile goods, destination vacations, just the right schools or just the right neighborhoods; we are each having our own experience, and all the purchasing power in the world can’t change who we are. Of course, you could choose differently. You could choose to focus on what someone else has, what they enjoy, what their life looks like from an outside perspective, and you could make all your effort focused on getting there, being that, and doing those things. Let me know how it turns out? I haven’t seen any remarkable success stories on that front, mostly tales of frustration, discontent, disconnection and woe, instead. I have found that when I strive to be something or someone I am not, the less easily able I am to enjoy who I actually am – and the less easily able I am to grow or change. I consider my choice to fully embrace authenticity quite fearlessly to have been one of the most profoundly positive things I have ever done for myself.

Having said that I don’t find life to be a competition, myself, I admit that this is based on the choices I make, and what I enjoy in life personally. Perhaps you enjoy competition? I won’t [can’t] take that from you – but I won’t be keeping score with you, or making any effort to participate or ‘keep up’. I don’t invest in relationships in which it becomes clear the other person is ‘competing with me’, generally. I dislike it when people undermine someone else’s experience in order to get ahead, themselves, and don’t favor those sorts of people for relationships, either. It comes up a lot out in the world. Is your house bigger? (Probably – this place is small. And enough for me.) Do you make more money? (A lot of people do, it’s really not the focus of my goal-setting or effort, nor do I measure my own success in dollars.) Are you leaner, stronger, fitter, or more muscular? (I bet you’ve worked hard to get there! I’ve worked hard to get where I am, too. There are verbs involved, regardless of the goal.) Are you famous, expert, or highly sought for your opinion, or your charm? (Is that filling when  you are hungry? Does it secure better sleep for you at night? Are you well-loved and secure in the companionship of those you love?) I guess my point is that there is always someone with more, someone with less, and those quantities are not truly relevant to living well and being a skilled and loving human being.

Have I drifted off topic? I was thinking about housework on a Saturday morning. Ah! I was thinking about my Granny being, perhaps, appalled that there is hair in my hair brush, or that my bed is not yet made. I am thinking about my first husband as I notice that vacuuming is a thing, and that today is a good day to do some. I glance at the kitchen and recall other kitchens, in other conditions. For a moment, my thoughts turn to laundry. My wee home is quite tidy, but so small that any disarray whatever is very obvious – and I’m okay with a bit of disarray before dawn on a Saturday morning as I sip my coffee; there is no rush, and this is not a competition. There is literally, quite definitely, no competition at all – this is my home, these are my rules, this is my way. After coffee, chores – it’s a lovely Saturday morning and that’s enough.

I grin at myself thinking back to other circumstances, and being annoyed at getting sucked into the ‘housework rodeo’ because someone would be coming over; it is the antithesis of ‘being myself’ to radically change my environment to impress someone, or to measure up to my assumptions about their expectations. I can’t imagine any of my friends would be so rude as to come over to visit and criticize my housekeeping – it’d be the last time they were invited in and given a chance to do so. I feel pretty much the same about family – and every bit as willing to be very frank and to say out loud “how dare you be so rude and ungracious – get out.” lol Even my late grandmother’s spotless home filled with antiques from all around the globe lingering in my memory does not fill me with the drive needed to compete with her by cleaning my home to meet her expectations – and…um…why would anyone else’s expectations of my home be relevant to my own experience at all? Just saying.

More than the housework, the stacks of paintings not yet hung, and not yet stored, cause me some concern; I hesitate to paint because they are so very much at risk of damage stacked here and there, out in the open. If I lose myself in a creative moment, I could so easily find, later, that I have damaged existing work that I greatly love. My traveling partner is eager for me to get a loveseat, so we can cuddle and watch movies or talk. I’d like that, too. My own needs in the moment have more to do with finishing getting moved in…which means doing something about the stacks of paintings. One of the cabinets I generally use for that purpose is currently filled with my valued porcelain; I have no curio to display them in, yet, and the sideboard I lovingly hauled all over the world for 25 years is gone now. So…what is the most practical next step? What best meets my needs over time? That’s a tough one. I do enjoy cuddling my traveling partner… I also enjoy painting, and seeing my home in a very ordered state. (Stacks of paintings here and there do not seem especially ordered, to me. lol)

Enough.

Enough.

Needs of self. Needs of others. Needs of Love. Expectations. Unanswered questions. Well…it’s a good thing enjoying a pleasant Saturday does not require that all of life’s questions have answers. Today is a good day to be, unanswered questions and all. It’s not a competition, and this, right here, is enough.

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Categories art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Summer, The Art of Being, The Big 5, women, Words

A Day of Rest

June 21, 2015 //
0

Rest is important for growth, for healing, and for quality of life. You can look it up if you need to verify it, there’s science on the topic. Yesterday was an excellent Saturday, but ‘restful’ would not accurately describe the day’s fun. Today there is nothing on my calendar, aside the daily sorts of chores that  maintain order: dishes, changing the linens, vacuuming. I have not yet made any decisions about what to do with the minutes and hours ahead of me, today. Today will be good practices and taking it easy. The overcast morning was explanation enough for the backache I woke with, although I admit with a smile that yesterday’s fun could also have some part to play in today’s backache. A rest day is clearly in order.

flower

Some other day, some other flower.

It took time to become comfortable with setting clear boundaries with regard to taking care of me. (Your results may vary.) It wasn’t that people dear to me didn’t want me to do the things required to live well, comfortably, and feel good day-to-day, and I don’t find it healthy for me to make that kind of negative assumption about someone else’s thinking. (My traveling partner supports good self-care on a level that shows he understands how important it is, and did so long before I understood, myself, why I needed to practice some of the practices I now do, for example, but if I am trapped in a very dark mood I may lose perspective; I continue to find The Four Agreements a helpful read there, when my perspective on others is bleak.). Sometimes I have the greatest challenge setting the boundaries I need because I am, myself, prone to stomping all over my boundaries in a most inconsiderate and surprisingly callous fashion. There’s definitely a learning curve – and I’m on the slow end. I have improved, however, and I am eager to enjoy a relaxed day of rest, meditation, catching up on correspondence, yoga, reading – or whatever it is the day brings my way that is nurturing, and likely to ‘recharge my batteries’ for the week to come.

flower

We bloom where we thrive.

Generally, any apparent boundary stomping disregard or discourtesy I am likely to experience day-to-day is at the hands of someone with their attention focused so fixedly on their own agenda that others aren’t fully considered, or at all, and occasionally by those that just haven’t reached that point in life where they understand the value of self-care in their own experience, and are thus poorly equipped to respect the needs of others. They need my compassion more than my ire, and I only need to be mindfully aware that my choices matter, and continue to take care of me, communicating explicitly and gently where my boundaries and limits are. Sometimes, far more rarely, people are exploitative abusive dicks who don’t care. My best practice in that situation is to double-check that I am taking care of me, and walk on, cutting my losses without further investment. There have been moments when I have treated someone poorly, myself, or crossed a boundary inconsiderately. I’m not bragging, obviously – I’m just saying; it’s a very human experience. Being the best woman I can be – being the best of the woman I am, and that I aspire to be, means I choose differently with awareness in every moment I can maintain the awareness I need to do so. Practice matters a great deal; it doesn’t make perfect, but it does build incremental change over time. 🙂

flower

Unique and individual as flowers in a garden, each having our own experience, none of us so very different from the others, except for perspective, and all sorts of details. 🙂

Today I don’t fight the world for the rest I need; I fight myself, and the tendency to fill a day with things to do, rather than indulge in rest that stillness has to offer. The reluctance to slow things down and gently enjoy the day seeps in from all corners; I live in what tends to be a very activity-prone culture that places high value on productive output, and scoffs at treating oneself with humane regard for this fragile vessel in which we pass our time in mortal experience. I may go for a walk today. I may do some gardening. What I most certainly will do, though, is take care of me. 🙂

flower

Taking care of the garden of my heart matters, too.

Yesterday was quite lovely, and my smile still lingers. It has the feeling of a tumbler clicking into place on a very fancy lock, or as if a difficult to place puzzle piece happens to fit quite nicely with unexpected ease. Yesterday took me most definitely further in the direction of being more myself, and quite comfortably and contentedly so. My relationships with those dear to me feel comfortable, and meaningful. My relationship to myself is not undermined by my relationships with others. I feel at home in my apartment, and in my skin. This feels good – and balanced. Whether I see my traveling partner or the wanderer today will not change this very nice experience I am building with me – and this is a journey I have been wanting to take, needing to take, for a very long time.

flower

Love matters most – the love I give myself is not excluded.

Today is a good day to be free of baggage – I’ll just set that all right over here. Today is a good day for smiles that linger, and a good cup of coffee. Today is a good day for morning breezes, and birdsong. Today is a good day to enjoy the world as I create it. 🙂

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