a lazy writer’s repose

“If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.” – Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian)

Hello! Welcome!! WOW!! I have been wanting to write for I can’t even tell you how long and I just had this really functional way of putting that off, and it was that Ame de la Terre (my other blog and my treasured growing space) is evolving – not only with the season, but within me. I am not going to be growing on that piece of land this year – other than what is planting itself, according to my brother, which I am sure will be plenty! What with winter and starting massage therapy school and launching my health coaching business, well, it’s pretty easy to see why writing has been put on the back burner. Oh! And, I moved! I am living in Minnesota – trying to be in Albert Lea with Tom as much as I can, and additionally I live in Bloomington during the school week (which really means I live out of backpacks and totebags in my Subaru!). Tom and I now live in a fabulous coop…er, uh, oh, cottage, I mean. 🙂 It is on his family’s property and decades ago it was home to turkeys and chickens. It has been a rental for quite some time and a wonderful woman who was incredibly talented with a chainsaw lived here before us – she left for us a totem pole (really she left it for the neighbors, but they generously gifted it to us!) and a huge mushroom carved from an old stump. The yard is so awesome! We have two great swings hanging from a magical white pine, enough yard for a garden and are surrounded by trees with a prairie just beyond… and even better… we have a winery likely moving in across the street! Yes, indeed, it feels like the perfect place to be!

So, in gearing up to write this post the title just came to me… and in all honesty I couldn’t have pinpointed the definition to “repose” if forced into a corner and told I would be traded for the most delicious bar of dark chocolate ever if I could just answer this one question (and that would break my heart!)… I just felt inside that it worked. But, quickly the rational intellect part of my brain took over and I had to boogie over to trusty dicitonary.com and that’s where I learned why it works SO beautifully: “to put (confidence, trust, etc.) in a person or thing; to be peacefully calm and quiet: The sea reposed under the tropical sun.” First off, who doesn’t love the idea of calm waters and tropical sun? – especially after the winter we have had, and secondly, that’s what this is all about – taking time for peace and calm within to connect with myself and with all of you fine folks who are constantly cheering the writer in me on. And this is the activity I have been working most on in the past few months – connecting with me, which inherently is also about the connections with others in my life. My firmly held belief that gets stronger, brighter and more resounding every day is this: the reality you create in your external world is a mirror of what you hold inside, of what is within you – and that includes the light and the dark parts – and notice how I did not say good and bad – because without a doubt they are both equally important, both equally there to teach us of our amazing capacity and heart if we allow them to. In my mind they are more like harmony and melody – that separately they are parts and that together they are immeasurable in their grandiosity – that the vibration that stirs is not equal to one plus the other, but that one plus one reverberates and resonates beyond range, pitch and dimension. And so it is with the way we live our lives, the people we attract, the people we thrive with, the people whom we allow to lead us astray – all are messengers to tell us – this very thing that you are fascinated with or irritated by, this generosity, this gratitude, this enthusiasm, this voice, this guilt, this sadness, this sass, this brilliance – you are seeing it because IT IS ALREADY IN YOU! Is that not beautiful and extremely easy to read, yet extremely difficult to incorporate into our belief systems? Hell, yes it is!

But, the beauty of the experience really does lay in the challenges we face that allow us to recognize that we always have a choice. So, if we don’t like this belief system that we have bought into we can say to it, you know, I love you and I am grateful for the role you have played in my life, but I am ready to be done with you now. Be on your way. The exercise is that simple and profoundly, at least in my experience,  powerful. It gives us permission to live our own purpose, not someone else’s, and it gives someone else’s power back to them – here we have been unknowingly carrying this around thinking it was ours all the while, when rightfully we don’t have to burden ourselves with it. We can be so silly trying to be human, these spirits of ours! The gentle rhythm of it all is that we are connected beyond ways we can measure with instruments and statistics and it beats within each of us. And we are free and able to make the beating louder or quieter in our own selves and in each other.

We are all magnificent – you just have to put on your “I’m looking for magnificence” lenses and it will suddenly become so obvious you will be surprised it wasn’t just slapping you in the face.  We are also all fallible, and if you put on your “I want to judge others for their fallibility” lenses, well, I don’t have to tell you what you will find, you know it, we have all lived it. We are human. We do things that in retrospect we aren’t always proud of, but every inch of our journey has brought us to where we are today, and for that simple truth, that simple miracle, we can be glad. We have each other! Sure, there are plenty of folks out there looking to break each other down, but slowly and surely we build our forces of brilliance and sister- and brother-hood empowerment and our individual worlds start looking a whole lot more like we imagine they could – we start living in our light only found through embracing our dark. Or at least surviving it!! And in the light we see each other for what we truly are – ONE!

I can hardly even get the words out of my mouth, or maybe more like get my fingers to keep up with my brain about how EXCITED I am to be writing!! Lazy writer no more, so please take a moment to bookmark this page and subscribe to getting e-mail updates there at the right. If you have a link you want me to post, send me a comment letting me know and I would be happy to consider it. If you want me to muse on a topic, I’m open to that, too! Really, I just want to get my thoughts out there because otherwise they are way too energetic trapped in my head – this can get fairly chaotic, as you can imagine! 🙂 Oh, and a note on “lightning bugs and thunder” – two of my absolute favorite things about living in the fabulous Midwest (this is not to say that it is more fabulous than other places I have lived, each is special in its own way… my nod to diplomacy!), and I stole the line from a Greg Brown song because I think he is a rockin’ poet! More to come, my friends, more to come!

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
— Abraham Joshua Heschel

Category : Reflection
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