soul food

I'm enjoying equipping our play kitchen now that Anna's using it more. Today I found a little shelf for holding kitchen items. I'm not sure it will stay where it is, but she likes it doing its shelf thing there on top of the range.

Here's something else that's giving me pleasure: good and varied reading material in the co-sleeper. I don't hesitate to read withdrawn PEOPLE magazines from the library. But I might reconsider once Henry gets curious about my reading material. I think Adam Carolla's book In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks is pretty hilarious, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea. The Boston Review is engaging and fascinating. I don't identify with Nancy Hirschmann, but I sure do love Shannon Hayes' response. Superbaby? Well, I decided to just check it out and take a look. It's interesting. She has some helpful, reasonable things to say to me, a mother who leans heavily to the no-scheduling end of the spectrum, about the value of routine in daily life.
This quotation from Adam Carolla, though, really gets me laughing:

"Giving birth is tough, but let's not treat it like it's anything more than it is. I can't stand the mommy bloggers, the women who have kids and then decide to go online and write about the dos and don'ts. You know, hard-hitting topics like 'Sack Lunch. Friend or Foe?' It's all the same forty-year-old white chicks. ...[A]ll of a sudden after you have a kid you must write a children's book and a blog to explain to other people how to do it. You're telling us stuff we've all known for a billion years."

on the mantel

A certain Goldilocks-resembling almost-two-year-old has discovered a favorite hangout. Our mantel has held many things over the ten years we've been here, but she and Henry are my favorite decorations yet. Today she lay down on it like a bed.

Thankful Thursday

Inspired by Paige's Thankful Thursday practice, I'm posting these thoughts at the eleventh hour (well, 23rd) of Thursday. Today I am thankful for:

Delicious coffee, made by Joel every morning, presented with just the right amount of cream. Heck! Most of the time it's mostly decaf, but it's still delicious. And, when I get the real thing, it's really good.

The coffee maker himself

Koala bears: they're soooo cute. I remember that from my childhood, but I've fallen in love with them again since reading a new book on 100 animals (to Anna).

Marley and Me, the audio book. I haven't heard Henry laugh so loud in a while.

Heidi, a beautiful story that delights my senses and gets me thinking about the Swiss heritage we have going on here on both sides of the family.

My red clogs (and the sister who gave them to me!)

Snow

Full moonlight

Conditions that Maximize Healing

I find Spirituality and Health magazine to be chock full of good stuff, and I recommend it to everyone I think might be interested. Here's their website http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/spirit/.

Janene Heldman, MA, MFT has a great article on addiction and healing in the current issue. Here, she says that, to maximize our innate healing powers we must
1. Feel hopeful that healing is possible;
2. Believe that the power exists internally and externally to activate and promote healing, and that we can access this power;
3. Believe that we deserve to be healed;
4. Be receptive to and ask for treatment;
5. Be willing to let go of the illness or disorder;
6 Be willing to accept health and all of its known and unknown responsibilities.

This kind of thing really gets me thinking.

moving on

new energy for this blog

And now let me tell you something else. I am happy! Yes, I truly and surely am. I could say so many things about why, but what I wish to talk about in this one-more-post for the day is that I am finding energy to want to return to this blog--not that there is any mandate other than my own for doing so, but that it brings me joy to do so. I am ready to reconnect with the identity that began unfolding here a couple years ago and use the blog to reconnect with bloggers I enjoy knowing online.

My body, mind and soul can't afford to let this pastime fill too much of my life, but keeping my blog has been a life-giving outlet. Hooray for me!

To celebrate this inner shift, I bought myself tulips this evening. My favorite kind--red with yellow tinges. Our home is messy, and I have a deep longing to get it into a cleaner state by Candlemas/Imbolc. That said, I am enjoying a reconfiguration of some of its spaces. Here are two of them that I'm enjoying right now.

in memoriam

I used to be a chaplain. I am currently staying home full-time with our two children. It is good. It is what I have longed for. It is hard. It has taken me almost a whole year to really say good-bye to what was. The change was a welcome one. I could not figure out how to be in that position anymore. It was a lovely 9.5 years. A lovely place.

It was also becoming impossible for me to be myself there. I felt bitterness. I didn't feel enough creative energy to get along with people whom I didn't feel understood by. I need to process that here at Circle Squared, because I'm still hanging on. I still think about my former career when I awake and go to sleep. I think about what I want to say to my supervisor, who is not my supervisor anymore. I am having real difficulty letting go of that relationship. Or, rather, not the relationship itself, but what it symbolized for me.

In that relationship I felt deeply misunderstood. The person I had been at my workplace no longer fit in, because she evolved as I moved from full-time to part-time work, beginning in 2007. She was evolving before that. Don't we all?

My workplace changed, too. The culture changed in a way I can't put into words. I felt I had lost my voice.

That is okay. I speak on. I am okay. They're okay, too. And that's good to hear.

I was done a divine and human favor by being told "it's apply for full-time work here or leave."

I was let go. I chose to let go. The day I learned the change would be happening, this poem by Rilke came into my home email as part of the Gratefulness.org November 2009 newsletter. I owe that site a lot, because they've shaped me as a person over the last decade. Here is the poem.

Sonnets to Orpheus
Part Two, XII

Want change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything is alight as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body turning away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.


Rainer Maria Rilke

I don't think I quite dare to become the wind yet, but I am pouring myself out like a fountain, flowing into the knowledge that what I am seeking finishes at the start and begins at the ending.