Tag Archives: Sam

Gratitude Friday

2 Replies

cityparksunrise031. The sky in Colorado. It does stuff like the above, all the time and for no special reason, sunrise and sunset and everything in between. This happened the other morning while we were walking Sam at City Park. Luckily Eric had his phone so we could get a picture of it. This is one of the reasons I get up early, leave for a walk while it’s still dark. This.

2. Red Table, my favorite cafe that was scheduled to close for good on December 22nd is not disappearing, just moving. Once a new lease is signed, they’ll announce where to, and there will be dancing in the streets, even if it’s just me, a flash mob of one.

redtableburrito3. Yoga Teacher Training at Om Ananda Yoga, (I’m official, all signed up and ready to go, we start in January) and a new yoga mat from Eric for my birthday. I am so excited to see how this is going to shift my practice, my relationship to my body, my life.

newyearseveyoga4. Birthday wishes. Lots of love there.

5. Guest post request from Rachel. She’s taking a blogging break, so “lined up a few great ‘substitute teachers’,” and asked me to be one of them. I am still working out what I’ll write about, but am so excited for the opportunity, so touched and grateful that she asked.

Bonus Joy: Sam. We have (mostly) decided that rather than get a new dog over Winter Break, we are waiting until Spring Break. *sigh* There are lots of really good reasons, but the most relevant is that Eric and I are still feeling the trauma of losing two dogs in a row to fatal cancers and need a bit more time to work with that before being responsible for another life, before inviting another beast in who will eventually break our hearts. The only issue I have with this decision is it isn’t necessarily the best one for Sam, because he needs another dog. He’s developing fears he never had before (the washing machine, which means the dryer too by default, the vegetable steamer, even the toaster because it sometimes sets off the smoke alarm) and will be much happier, calmer once he has another dude.

Mr. Sam, hiding in his bed because I was doing laundry

Mr. Sam, hiding in his bed because I was doing laundry

Day of Rest

6 Replies

This is one of those posts where I show up to write having no idea what I’m going to say. And yet, I can feel something there, see it like I would a shape in the fog, moving towards me but as yet unnameable.

Eric is walking Sam this morning, or rather running with him. It’s windy and cold, so Eric offered to take him, in part to be nice to me (Colorado wind is my least favorite weather, even worse than rain) but also because he knew if I went he’d have to walk and that would mean being cold. When they run, he doesn’t notice the weather so much — seems like a metaphor, doesn’t it?

The weather seems a perfect match to the card I pulled this morning, “a card of conflict” with the image of five scattered wands. The card warns that “Your energy moves outward in many directions, yet you are suffering inside.” I realized this morning that once again, I was trying to do too much. I was thinking specifically of all the things I’d signed up for leading up to the holidays, all good stuff, emails of wisdom and prompts for reflection and opportunities to connect, but maybe too much… okay, not maybe — too much.

fiveofwandsI am working on a paradigm shift, and that’s hard. I am attempting to move from thinking I can’t be trusted, that I’m not allowed to want what I want, have what I want, that I have to work to earn acceptance and love, looking outward to external cues and messages, trying to do what others want, make them happy so they will in turn love and care for me, thinking that wisdom resides “out there,” that if I’m not getting it right it’s because I’m either stupid or an asshole, measuring my worth by how successfully I pleased others, some of whom are almost impossible to please, and rebelling or collapsing, self-destructing when it gets to be too much.

I can’t do it anymore. It doesn’t work. It will never work. If it did, I would have figured it out by now, but it’s a broken system. I am officially giving up. I am learning how to trust myself, to be myself. I am allowing myself to want what I want, to have what I want. I am moving from focused on what I have to offer to how I want my life to feel, the experience I want to have, what I’m truly hungry for, and no one else can tell me what that looks like, what that should be. I am the expert, only I can know.

For starters, “pancakes make me want to dance,” and I won’t be apologizing for that anymore.