i am grateful for…
1) gratitude everywhere! its health benefits are in the times, a lot of my FB friends are listing things they’re grateful for daily this month. it’s NICE. the gratitude vibration is one of healing and positivity and saying yes to what is. i love it. you can feel how it softens hard edges, makes impossible things seems somehow doable.
2) a four-day work week.
3) november, which inevitably feels cozy. sweaters and blankets and soft places while frost gathers and wind whirls.
4) getting away to woodstock last weekend. i heart it there. even though it feels, well, impoverished during the cold, like there should be many more people supporting the businesses than there are, it also feels warm and lovely in the populated pockets. like the yoga class/sound healing i went to at woodstock yoga center with the folks from sage wellness. he played tuning forks and singing bowls; she guided us into restorative poses. and i actually, for a change STAYED in the poses, sans squirming, because of the bowls. the next day when i told this to our teacher lea, who is also an awesome craniosacral therapist, she said, “it’s the sound. it just completely silences the monkey mind.” it’s true. it’s not possible to really think when the bowls are all going at once, even, “i don’t like the music.” it just obliterates the chatty mind reflex. and as a result was profoundly relaxing. want more.
5) deep tub in my inn room. two long baths with lavender and vanity fair.
6) having a tub in our own apartment. YAY.
7) worrying about stuff, then tapping into my support system, which somehow redistributes the worry weight so it’s not such high pressure at any one point in my structure. so that it’s bearable. emotional engineering.
8) visiting e. at the children’s emergency area in the hospital. cribs with wheels that look like mini jails but are hospital beds. a little boy being wheeled around in a big toy car while his mom asks about my psychedelic pants. the couple holding a baby while their two-year-old is in one of those cribs. and valiant e. in her bed, in the midst of this. because when you’re 14 and have cancer, this is where they put you when sudden fever hits. and it sucks. and i want to convey to her somehow that i know this sucks, and from that knowing, that it will also be ok. i really know. which j. mentions to her. and that wave of recognition transitions between our eyes. but i wish i could say something wiser than, “some day you’re going to have a great story to tell.” but i can’t so i revert to my standby: i rub her feet. i want to find some way to make love known, well, to make love matter to someone with a tube in her arm who should be bouncing around a soccer field and doing homework and texting about who likes whom. and there’s so much to say that there’s nothing, really except trying to emit, “i am here,” which i am, but barely, because of course this place is home to parental nightmares. but it’s also, maybe, healing. and there are nurses with compassion that comes from some well 1000 feet deep, who are also tough enough to step right in there and encourage e. to drink her water, even if dinner sucks.
9) the show once upon a time. holy shiz, it’s great fun. not very far in, but love.
10) puzzles. like the cardboard kind. we have a new one and i’m excited to use it.
11) peace in the gaps.
