day nineteen: 27 days of grateful

Today I am grateful for this damn 27 day gratitude challenge or I'd be hard pressed to focus on my gratitude's in light of a great number of present "bummers". So here goes…I am grateful for:

Mile Hi Church and the community that I am very slowly getting to know after nine years of attending.
The incredible women I am blessed to work with who care deeply about the children, education and one another.
Netflix on demand, since we don't have cable and hardly ever watch movies, I am grateful for the ease of access when I need a break from my overly reflective brain…or just need to entertain Bodhi for half an hour so I can drink a cup of tea in silence.
Sprouts grocery store.
My gym and the ability to work out, however slowly, whenever I want.
Hot tea with almond milk
Almonds---I LOVE raw almonds. They are my personal version of the potato chip.
Cell phones, that allow me to stay in touch with my big boy while he is in Illinois.
Hope, that promises, against all reasoning and experience, that I will feel the gentle warmth of a loving life companion.
Baths…I don't often take them, but today I am going to wrap this post and climb into a nice hot bubbly tub.

Comments

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment. It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float. It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within. It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains. Eyes closed. Eyes opened. A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being. It takes courage.

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much. It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall. The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep. But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy. I am a woman who loves the spring. I nearly live for it. When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis. I gorge. This year has been hard. Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally. The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...

angelbirdflies

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