1. Truth: A walk is magic, medicine. If you can go longer and take a few dogs along, even better. It clears my head, gets me unstuck, lifts my mood, gets me moving, reminds me to breathe. It brings my mind back to my body, gets my feet on the ground, holds both my mind and body in the present moment, in the same place at the same time. A walk softens the hard edges, relaxes tension, releases strong emotions, dissolves discursive thoughts.
2. Truth: Surrender, letting go of control is really, really hard. This morning in my meditation, I set an intention to invite surrender and let go of control. It arose naturally, those two things, the choosing of them specifically felt genuine and right–for about three minutes. Then I thought to myself “what have I done?!” I felt myself wanting to struggle with surrender, to cling to my sense of control. And yet, I know this is the edge I need to lean into, move past. Courtney Carver just put up a new post on Be More With Less, Let the Monkey off the Chain, that is helpful. And from my Inner Pilot Light today came this:
You may feel like if you let go of the reins, all hell will break loose, you won’t get what you want, and everything will fall apart. But what you may not realize is that grabbing the reins and trying to exert control is actually sabotaging all the blessings the Universe is trying to bestow upon you. So darling, please, let go. Surrender. Trust.
I’m trying, kind and gentle reader, I really am.
3. Truth: I miss Obi. I was watching videos of him this weekend, and it made me so happy to see him again, but so sad too, the hard fact that he is gone, that while I’m alive I will never see him again. That grief only gets heavier knowing the same is coming with Dexter, that soon I will be missing them both.
When they are, I can watch videos like this one and remember when we were all here together. They had just gotten a bath, which always makes them go a little crazy. When they would play like this, we called it Dog Fu. It’s hard to believe that this was Obi three months into chemo (if you look close, you can see the bare spot on his leg where they shaved it to put the IV in), which clearly wasn’t slowing him down.
One Wish: That we find ease, that we find the courage to surrender and let go, that we are lucky enough to love deeply and be loved.
Sometimes we use food and our weight as a way to be left alone. Since many of us believe that, regardless of what we get paid to do, our real job is to on call for people who need us, we leave ourselves with a way to get what we need and want: food. But when you say yes when you mean no, you abandon yourself. And when you say no when you mean no, you signal to yourself that it is safe here, inside your body. Safe here, where you live and are and breathe. You don’t have to run away. You don’t have to lie.
Saying no is a way of being tender with yourself and honest with the people around you. And when you say no with your voice, you will no longer need to say it with your body weight. And when you say no to what you don’t want, you have space to say yes to what you do.
And this one:
Right now, in this very second, ask yourself if what you are doing, what you are thinking and how you are acting brings you closer to yourself or farther away. Does it open your heart or does it close your heart? You have a choice. Break the trance. Come back to kindness.
And this one too:
Sometimes happiness is as difficult to accept as sadness or loneliness. Sometimes, we eat because we don’t know what to do with happiness or joy. We think we’re not allowed. We think we will get “too big for our britches.” We become superstitious. If we talk about it, people won’t like it. If we tell someone, they might be threatened and go away. We hold onto our sadness because we think that that is what connects us with other people–that if we feel terrible about ourselves, we will get help, but if we feel as if we are occupying our own lives, if we feel powerful, we will lose. In this way, we keep ourselves psychologically small. We keep ourselves wounded and afraid of our own magnificence. But it’s when you are aware of, and own, the hugeness of your heart, your being, your love that you are most connected to other people–which then allows them to connect to their own power, their own love. It begins with you.
10. Ben’s Friday Dance Party. I love this guy. He makes me smile. But I also watch this video and wonder if you were around him all the time, would it get annoying? Or would your face and stomach hurt from smiling so much and laughing so hard?
16. Why We Write: Mary Karr on the Magnetism and Madness of the Written Word on Brain Pickings. Equally depressing, refreshingly honest, and oddly comforting is this, “I still don’t support myself as a writer. I support myself as a college professor. I couldn’t pay my mortgage on the revenue from my books. The myth is that you make a lot of money when you publish a book. Unless you write a blockbuster, that’s pretty much untrue. Starting when I was five, I always identified as a writer. It had nothing to do with income.” I wish it weren’t true, and yet if it is, wouldn’t it just be better to surrender?
22. Yo La Tengo – “I’ll Be Around” video, a simple but magically complex video.
23. Danny and Annie, a sweet, sad love story, with an ending like so many others.
24. 10 Things Parents Should Never, Ever Do on BlogHer. I’m never sure if these are funny to me because I don’t have kids, or if they’d be that much funnier if I did.
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 