On Healers and Healing

I haven't written a post in a good long while; I guess sometimes, life just takes over and our best intentions get lost. But I have a voice. And I don't want that voice to be lost in the shuffle of life anymore!  So here goes:

This morning I woke up thinking about healers. Some of the healers in our world are those out there on the front lines - our Doctors, Nurses,  Therapists, Firefighters, etc. I highly respect them and wish blessings upon them for without these public helpers/healers, our world would be a dismal place indeed.

But there's other kinds of healers out there as well, and probably more in number; healers that go about their 'practice' quietly, behind the scenes.  You know who I mean. The  woman who tirelessly rescues stray animals, brings them into her home and lovingly makes them part of her family. The man who, when he goes for his daily walk around his neighborhood, brings a bag and picks up any little piece of trash he sees. Countless men, women and children everywhere who, when they see an ambulance racing to assist someone in need, send up a silent prayer for angels to come and minister to those hurt. Others who, when finding a spider or other such creature inside their house instead of ending the innocent little life, trap it in a cup and take it outside where it can continue to live and thrive.

There's other kinds of behind the scenes healers too. Grocery shoppers who bring their own cloth  bags to do their own little part to keep plastic bags out of our oceans.  Your friend at work who is so in tune to things you have shared with her that one day, she gives you a safety pin (you know who you are!) and it brings tears of joy to your eyes because it's so beautifully symbolic. Such a seemingly tiny act, done years ago now, yet still huge in my heart of hearts. (And I still have that little safety pin today!)  The teacher who, at the end of a long day, wants nothing more than to go home but stays behind to talk with a shy student who needs encouragement. (And you know who you are too! I have never forgotten.)

We all know helpers like these. Take a moment today, right now, to silently give thanks in your heart for the ones you have encountered, because I know you have.  And I'm pretty sure that everyone who reads this has, at one time or another, been this kind of healer to a friend, family member, stranger, an animal or insect.... even to our entire world as a whole every time you choose the path of love over hate.

Heal on.

On Synchronicity

So driving home from work today, I was thinking (I do some of my best thinking behind the wheel!) about synchronicity, and I decided to try and describe how it feels to experience synchronicity. To start with, a definition of the concept (thanks to Bing):

synchronicity

[ ˌsiNGkrəˈnisitē ]

NOUN

1. the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection:  "such synchronicity is quite staggering"

Anyone who knows me at all, knows that I'm big on Feelings with a capital F, though, so of course I feel (ha, see what I did there?) driven to describe how it feels to experience a synchronicity, beginning with an example from my own life.

Not long ago, I had a dream where Snake figured prominently. I do a lot of dream work so had spent some time working with Snake in the days following the dream.. Shortly after that, the organizer of the drumming group I frequent posted an event with Snake energy as the main theme, so of course I signed up immediately and it was a tremendously meaningful session for me. AND, driving home from said event, I looked over to the side of the road at one point and saw a SNAKE slithering into the bushes!  Aha. Synchronicity.  Now to attempt to describe what it feels like.... it's like for that briefest moment, seconds even, something numinous is ALMOST within your grasp; like you can almost touch it if you could just reach through....something. It's like, a split-second but profound connection with the Divine.

How'd I do, ya'all? Comments welcome.

Recovery

So this morning I woke up feeling called to talk a little more about my struggle with, and subsequent recovery from, clinical depression. Depression is a terrible, insidious thing; we all know that. It robs a person of so much. For me, antidepressants were a big part of my recovery, but not all. It was a combination of meds and talk therapy (Jungian depth therapy here) that brought about my recovery. I've been off the meds for going on 2 years now, but continue with the talk therapy, because I believe there is always room for self-growth, no matter who you are. I value this work so much, and it is a challenging, most rewarding process getting to know myself so deeply. And it doesn't stop there. By improving myself and my relationship with me, I'm finding that all of my other relationships have gotten better, have gotten stronger. And for the first time in my life, I can actually see that I am indeed valued by many.  Which in turn allows me to value others more. Ah, circles... so much of life I find is circular... "The Circle of Life" isn't just a song, it's a fact, my friends!!  We are all one. Everything comes back around...

...like this post, even. What I was thinking this morning that called me to write, was about the things that depression robs us of. One thing in particular, it robs us of our passion for life. That's one of the things that meds couldn't give back to me; I found it back gradually through, you got it, talking with my therapist. I've been posting a lot on facebook lately about getting back into Girl Scouting - I'm so excited about that - that's but one of my passions that depression stole from me, and that I have re-discovered. There are quite a few others, but those are for another post.

I hope everyone has a blessed day!

NaNoWriMo!

So I have challenged myself to complete a first draft of a short novel, the one I've been planning to write for more than a year now. I say "planning" because that's as far as I ever got, in a year... jotted ideas/notes, sketching out characters, putting to paper conversations that might take place between those characters, stuff like that. But I could never quite get myself to actually start the story-telling part. I'd heard of National Novel Writing Month, of course, but nothing lit the fire under me to actually DO it until now. Self-publishing my little book of poems was the spark that lit the proverbial fire, and I signed up last month. The basic premise is that you commit to yourself to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. That works out to something like 1,667 words per day. 

I'm trying to remind myself that it's about more than just the word count, though. Yeah, I know the commitment is 50,000 words and I am striving for that, of course. But I don't want to get so caught up in the word counts that I lose the magic of the story telling itself to me as I write it. So I'm not going to post daily word counts (when they're good) or beat myself up publicly (when they're not so good). Instead, I'll stick to posting those milestone word counts, like maybe every 5,000? I don't know yet. 

I have to admit something here. I'm feeling really good about this challenge, because I have finally started the get-down-to-business telling of this story that I have inside of me. I have learned many things about myself through psychotherapy, and one of those is that I tend to spend so much time thinking about doing things, that more often than not, I never get around to actually doing them. (Including therapy itself! I thought about it for a year before I finally made the call and started!) Well friends, 2014 has been a year of doing for me, and finally writing the novel I've been thinking about for more than a year is a fitting way to end that year. 

Don't you think?

Thoughts on inspiration and motivation

I'm thinking about inspiration this morning... that, and her sister motivation. Now I've gotten myself trained to write every day, whether or not I am feeling particularly inspired or even motivated to do so, as it's become a habit at this point. But I'm talking about something else... hmm, how do I say this, the chasing of that spark of inspiration, that feeling of "I have to write this NOW or it will be gone forever!" when I pull the car over to the side of the road, dig around the floorboards for a scrap of paper big enough to scribble a few notes on, which I then proceed to lose, and frantically search for after I get home.  Yeah, that.  And then when I finally find it again, I stare at it, completely unmotivated to do anything WITH it, the push of the moment of inspiration over, then copy it into my journal where it goes into hibernation until I'm motivated enough to work with it.

Wait, did I just say I chase that? I did, didn't I. And I guess I do. It's exciting to get that spark, after all! Alas, it isn't always that exciting.  Inspiration hides in all kinds of unlikely places... that's why it's so important to be Awake and not go through life like an automaton. I spent too many years of my life going through the motions as they say, eyes straight ahead going to work, doing my job, taking care of my family, you know the drill. Getting it all done, but effectively asleep. Waiting for "inspiration" to strike, and rarely putting pen to paper. It took a lot of work in therapy for me to be able to say that I am now living my life truly awake, and inspiration is just a turn of the head away.

Sometimes, of course, it just jumps right out and says HELLO!!

Poetry is when...

According to Robert Frost, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”  I really love this; of course, what don't I love from Mr. Frost? What a beautifully concise description of the process of creating poetry... especially the poems that, when completed, we read back to ourselves and wonder "where did that just come from?"  I don't feel like "I" have written those. It's like whatever the emotion was that stirred in my soul grabbed onto its thought, quite independent of any conscious doing on my part, and together they discovered their words... and I am responsible only for putting them to paper. It's beautiful when a poem is born that way! 

Perfect Imperfection

With the release of my first book of poems (you can purchase it here!) I'm also re-introducing my blog... and it's very much a work in progress, just like me. So, off we go!

Okay. So it's no big secret that I am a believer in talk therapy (a devotee, as my wonderful therapist recently anointed me). It has quite honestly been the best gift I could have ever given to myself; and I encourage anyone who has ever thought about embarking on the immensely rewarding adventure of self-knowledge to just go for it!

Now to the point of this post... after much stalling on my part (read: being a big chicken) I finally put together a selection of my most recent poems to self-publish, and submitted my little book to the independent publisher I had chosen to use. Submitted, reviewed, made changes; resubmitted, reviewed, made more changes; resubmitted, reviewed... well, you get the idea. After doing this numerous times I decided that if I continued to make changes until I thought it was perfect, I would likely never click on that scary "approve" button. I would remain stuck in the land of "big fat chicken" for the rest of my life. So, I took a deep breath and approved my book.

Yes folks, some of you have already guessed what comes next. The following morning, I looked at my proof again and discovered that I had submitted the wrong contents page. Eek!! So, it's out there now on Amazon, just as imperfect as I am....

Oh, I could probably jump through a few hoops with the publisher and try to do a last-minute correction. But if there's one thing I've learned in my therapy process, it's that I'm never going to be perfect - what I want to be, instead, is whole. Leaving my book out there "imperfect" is to me a testament to my acceptance of being imperfectly human; a promise to myself that I will never again let the fear of not being "perfect" keep me from realizing a dream.

I don't mean to advocate carelessness, or being lazy, or anything along those lines. That's not what this is about. This is about loving ourselves enough to accept that we will never be perfect and that it is "perfectly okay" to go out and make our dreams come true anyway!!

And, next time, just maybe get the contents page right....