Working it out ...

I am not working today.  I am supposed to be semi-retired and I need today to care for myself.   I start the day with some huge heartache that has been crippling me in several ways for over a year now.  So I write a letter that I shall never send as that is one exercise that hopefully at the least will allow me to move on today to do some other things I need and even want to do for myself today.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

A silent letter that will never be sent but I needed to write for myself to solidify my purpose yet again ~
" to be a loving person within this journey of learning about love."

Dearest ~

I LOVE YOU no matter what.


I do not need you to validate my feelings.   I already acknowledge them, examine them and then let them go keeping the lessons that they might have shown me.  In fact it has been a very very long hard road riddled with many mistakes. Yes indeedy even poor choices that then left me having to learn from those poor choices, overcome and apply the lessons to the rest of my life while keeping my eye on my purpose in this life!    I do not expect anyone else to do the work for me ~ in fact I know they cannot and me blaming any other would only leave me unable to learn and grow and to remain stuck.  Heck I even know about remaining stuck for several years at a time becuz ya see ~ I too do not get it right every dang time.   I have oft caused my own suffering by poor choices or holding onto hurts like they were some kind of badge of honor.  In the end I alone had to work through each of those and learn and find my way on over to the other side to move on.

When I have apologized for something I have done I make that apology from my heart and wholeheartedly.  I mean it.   I try harder to correct my behavior and not repeat the same thing over and over.    IF you refuse to accept that apology that is your choice.  Rest assured I have the choice to NOT keep giving the apology for the exact same thing everytime you decided to change your mind and reject the original apology.  You claim to accept the apology then we supposedly move on until you do not get your way and then you choose to revisit the old sin and demand an apology all over again for that old sin ~ that is unfair and tells me you have some personal problems to overcome.  Knowing that I can continue to love you but I do not have to put myself in line to repeatedly and cyclically experience your repeated temper tantrums.
To continually bring up the past each time things are not going well for you and throw it right back in my face trying to drag me down into your own mired muck is simply not going to work anymore.   I am sad that you cannot overcome your own 'stuff' and grow and move on. I would have been happy to actually WORK WITH YOU had you wanted that.   You did not and have not.

  BUT I am not in charge of fixing you.   Your wanting to make me somehow responsible for your current moods, problems et al only makes it very certain that you will not resolve those current problems or will repeat them yet again on down the road.   We all have to unravel and overcome what our problems are/how they came about, take responsibility for ourselves and work harder at making our lives better in the moment via learning and changing ourselves.  It is a lot of work.     I know because I have been doing that for 60 years.

Does it hurt that when you have decided your problems are all my fault you reject me and refuse to connect with me and now affect others involvement with me as well?   Of course it does.   It is heart wrenching.  It is a sense of helplessness that no matter how I myself have changed and shown a consistency in my own personal growth and tried to work with you I am told that nothing I do is good enough by you.  You leave us no way to work together to work through our mutual difficulties.  You simply dismiss and cut me off and then two, three even 5 years after nothing from you you come back and expect me to fully embrace you as if you are entitled and with no apology from you.  Forgive ~ yup I do.   LOVE always.  BUT I shall not forget and leave myself in the path of destruction and triggers from you.

I do not need an apology from you  ~ but I also will not leave myself open to be repeatedly hurt in the same way again and again from you either.  I can forgive the hurt you have inflicted.  I do not feel the need to be vindictive and 'get back at you'.   I love you through everything and it is that LOVE that sustains through it all.   No matter what!  If I cling to anything it is LOVE itself!  LOVE that is universal and is within as much as without.

I do not even need you to love me.  I have love no matter what.   I give love no matter what.  I remain human meaning I am having a human experience just as you are .......... I am capable becuz of the compassion and empathy I have, to walk a mile in your shoes enough to recognize that you too are having a human experience and at times you are struggling with your very own problems just as I struggle with my very own problems.  I empathize becuz I can relate that it is not easy and in fact is the hardest thing we do as humans ~ TO FACE OURSELVES and LOVE OURSELVES even in our flaws.  I do not expect you to fix my problems and I can not fix your problems.   All I can do is love you no matter what and wait patiently in love.

Loving does not make me weak or a target for more deliberate emotional hurt and pain inflicted  from you or any other of my loved ones.  In fact the more I learn about Love the more I know that love alone makes me stronger and stronger and with and through love I can continue to live my life trying to do the best with what I have at any given time with an eye to improving when I experience setbacks or mistakes or flaws.   That is living life with LOVE!


I sit in the distance with a part of my heart so terribly broken that sometimes especially at night when it is quiet and my heart is weeping ~ my mind tries to get me to give up.   BUT for LOVE residing in my heart and remaining as my guide I would give in to that childish ego and give up.  I will not.   I cry til my pillow is soaked ~ then sleep ~ then get up with a chosen smile on my face and an attitude of gratitude that I can do the best in this new day as I connect with others and with life yet again.


I love you.  I always will and I love you no matter what.  LOVE is above everything and everyone.  It really is THAT BIG a DEAL!!  It really is the solution. The process to seeing and feeling and embracing LOVE is ours to work out and work through and live!  I am working my process the best I can as well as trying to have compassion and empathy for my self and ALL others including you.

ALL I can do is the best I can at any given time with what I have.

LOVE ALWAYS WINS.   AMEN.

Indeed ~
I LOVE YOU NO MATTER WHAT!

Introspection

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography. 

- Robert Penn Warren 

In between the obliteration of the day

and the mists of the dawn she finds herself quieted

enough to examine within for not only what went wrong

but what can be with reconnecting the heart to the mind outlier.

She wanders around the solitudinal walls until the whisper of the soul

grabs hold of her ego bending it to the humbleness of the greater energy of the heart.

Not so much where once she walked but more where now she sits 

then how to reach out with a renewed determination 

to be better at understanding first the meager flawed self 

embracing it regardless and encouraging it forward,

then kindness and a humble compassion for all others encountered

ready for more lessons to be learned in the connecting that does not end.

Detach from the main 

to become what can be gained

when love is the energy

that drives this heart home.  

She was always nothing

which could have been something

had she recognized the nothing

holding it in love.  

Something is only nothing when

nothing is refused its due.

Nothing becomes the smallest

humble something

when nothing is held in love.

~ flow ~

She wandered in

to then sit for an hour

took deep breathes

stood up

wandered out.  

She was only better upon realizing

that it was in others she could see herself.

~ gasp ~

2017

"I have to climb through and over many obstacles

for those breath taking moments

of flying above the clouds." ~ KateyB

In the beginning of a new year

I like what Steinbeck wrote back on January 1, 1941 (and it even seems more fitting after having visited the places he lived and still haunts):


"Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.

Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like." ~ Steinbeck




So I am left to make choices yet again as this new year begins just as every human must do.  I can choose to flavor my perspective with an attitude of gratitude. compassion and ultimately love yet I can also make choices within that framework to live as best I can with what I have in the midst of circumstances I really have no control over anyway.  The control is in my attitude and perspective and the choices I make in that framework.

I look around me and see much depressive anger and angst being expressed towards one another in an environment that currently is not encouraging building relationships via working things out but rather simply building walls around each lonely self.  If the outward environment were allowed to dictate my inner environment I would surely implode where many explode.   It is the nature of my process to implode rather than explode.

BUT long ago (now) ~ the years have passed so quickly I near missed how many are gone ~ I discovered and learned well that no set of circumstances and environments can touch my inner life where the core is love in spite of all the criticisms and hecklings and put downs thrown at that core by the environment including betrayers who wish not success but project the anger of their own mess.

I am not supposed to have gentle breezes to sail easily across the ocean of time.  I am supposed to hone my skills in navigating while maintaining the ship's heart.  Learn and apply and learn some more and while doing that do the best I can with what I have.  Overcome my shortcomings one by one and keep trying to care about others along the way as well.

As 2016 ended with so much turmoil around the globe and huge turmoil within the country I live I observed increasing anger and fears that left so many at odds with one another in a time when what was needed most was a building of stronger and even more caring relationships.  BUT I too have not given up HOPE ~ for when hope is totally lost and gone so shall I be gone in this human form.  Interestingly enough hopelessness also dies with its death ~ and life in the universe goes on in many forms.  Cyclical indeed.

I firmly believe that each human being is personally responsible of peace and increased love and I can only make it start/continue with me and my attitude ~ I choose gratitude.


Someone wrote:  What will the theme of your life be in 2017?
I think that is a good question to ask and answer rather than what resolutions will I make.

My theme will be gratitude for all lessons and love to help continue to build relationships.  In my world anger and angst in the environment is simply begging for me to gain more compassion and learn more ways to love.  My heart is alive in Love.

If I should die before I wake ...

~ everything is exactly as it is supposed to be ~

The moment I realized that the entire process called life which was inextricably tied to death with birth not being a beginning but rather a marker of so little in the greatness of much greater was the next level of freedom my soul dreamed of on its way to unified unconditional love.    Now why be bothered by so much fragile snags that are washed down river or cast up onto disappearing banks never to be seen again other than in the dregs of egos clinging to disrespectful delusions erroneously called hope. 

Live out on the edge of the process while floating above the under current of frothy foam.  Yet live with childlike wonder expecting the unexpected brilliance of abundance of love.  

            I am grateful for it all.                  Breathe stars.    Exhale ancient cosmic dust.  Creation is but energy changing born in the gentle shelter of love's recessed pool.

                                      We start not all over again but rather after each rest moving not forward or back but upward to the next star.   Love like the love that loves without restraints, without comparisons, with only increased love.        

Gratitude unlocks the heart releasing more mysteries to the connection of the universe that is Universal Love.    

nde

for in that moment

as the body fell away

the spirit rose up

joining in the universal love

as like rain on a warm summer day

the rays of love fell down

upon heads, flowers, ground

washed anew to begin again

leaving behind the grime

of past times

rising into holy mists

the wonders of hearts

where universal love

always and forever exists

within you

within me

connected beyond 

mere breathing

of flesh bound thoughts

torn back like flimsy curtains

to reveal the love

that has always been there

no matter what

mists now burned away

the brilliance of this

Universal Love

It was and is and will be forever

here to stay

peekz

from Jeremiah Johnson

"The way that you wander is the way that you choose,

The day that you tarry is the day that you lose.

Sunshine or thunder, a man will always wonder.

Where the fair wind blows.

An Indian says you search in vain for what you cannot find.

He says you’ll find a thousand ways for runnin’ down your time.

An Indian didn’t scream it, he said it in a song,

And he’s never been known to be wrong.

He’s never been known to be wrong."

and then .....

~ what comes from listening to my soul ~ 

My path is not yours

Your path not mine

All that we can do

Is have compassion

 for me and you

where we come from

where we go to

our paths barely crossed

perhaps even a time times two

accept what cannot be changed

worry not what comes later

be concerned for now 

which is really all we have

in the grand infinite soup

where the highest vibration

is the drumming of that one drum

Universal Love

Living in the realm of an attitude of gratitude (I)

(I write for myself.)

One of the main obstacles to being able to express gratitude is having an overly high opinion of self.   People who are ungrateful generally have a sense of excessive self-importance.  There is arrogance, vanity and a high need for approval and admiration that is oft manipulated out of others.  There is at the far end a lack of empathy.

No gift will bring grateful joy to anyone who thinks they have a right to everything.

Everything is in essence a gift that we have an opportunity to be grateful for IF we can RECOGNIZE that we have NO CLAIM TO ANYTHING!!  This is one of the most important ways to be able to stay in the realm of an attitude of gratitude.

In that attitude of gratitude it even allows me to give with no expectations as much as to receive with deep gratitude.