When I’m gone I hope you play Bette Midler’s The Rose at my gathering…..
It’s always a new day one of some sort. Something to quit, to begin…..
All you gotta do is walk….. Griff
After three long years I was finally ready to give City of Girls the attention it deserves, the attention I deserve. I was not disappointed. How do you do it Liz and can I be like you when I grow up?!
When will that be…..
And all you gotta do is walk….. my song of 2022…
What Liz Gilbert manages to do with her writing is grant permission for you to be who you are, and have the issues that you do.
People are who they are and all of it is beautiful. Choice is beautiful. Stories of monsters and demons are for fairy tales and Netflix.
I used to ascribe to the idea I could bend anything to my will, until life bent me, and I finally got the lesson.
Surrender. A full surrender.
My little prince turned 21 yesterday. He’s all heart. He’s exactly as he should be and yet in all the wisdom I lacked, I showed him everything he isn’t, because of what I learned during my survival. How to push hard and harder.
I am unlearning THAT.
My son’s friends flew his rose out here to surprise him for his birthday and we all banded together to pull it off. He was happy on his birthday. Satisfied and knowing he is loved. There will be many other kinds of moments throughout his life, but these are ones we will always treasure.
He can receive in the moment. All really is NOT lost. Thank you Leslie Charles.
I see boats and sunrise and water. I smell water and salt and Sunday.
I will be gathering today with those who loved Karen Sahler in Greenwood Lake New York. So many memories. I always said I hated funerals, all those emotions in one place. All that discomfort congealed into a suffering pudding inside my sweaty flats.
Today I understand. I am looking forward to it. To being given the space to feel my feelings with others feeling theirs. To have and to hold. To remember.
Grace and Mercy.
Now I can understand the conflict inside of me worrying it means something about me that I won’t attend my own mother’s funeral. Thank you Liz. Thank you life and thank you death.
And most of all thank you love, which is the force that makes it all worth it in the end.
I’m not some cold dead thing inside who wouldn’t go. I found this love I didn’t know existed. It’s just there. You can’t make it or unmake it. Don’t misunderstand me, it does take work and discipline to maintain a self that is capable, especially when it wasn’t natural for me.
Could that finally be ok??! Could I finally stop analyzing myself for flaws?! I think it’s time.
I’m not angry with her like I used to be. She wasn’t made to be a mother and became one anyway. Liked the idea of the attention it provided her, but never got any further. And I don’t really know the ins and outs of what happened to her, or if it’s a wiring thing. And you know what? Somehow it matters so much less to know
Because it doesn’t mean anything about me. People could have said that a million times, but I had to live my lessons. Just like you.
And love exists in its purest form as so many things. Love is there in the person that smiles at me on my walk. Love is petting my dogs. Love is walking, running. In heat and cold.
And all the love I’ve ever shared is valuable and valued and has accumulated to make my steps in this world a little lighter.
Love is a friend who remembers a version of you, you forgot. Sometimes love is persistence and sometimes it’s letting go.
For me…. Now…. Love is no longer the confusing manipulative thing it began as. And I thank whomever for that. The windows and the walls and the ceilings and the floors.
And today on this beautiful Sunday love is a mother who has died too soon. A woman who made those around her feel her love. A woman who gave my kids and I family events that I never had before. The only mother who will have seen me in a wedding dress probably, lol.
The gift of love is that I still have all of these moments inside of me. I didn’t know. It’s natural for me to keep myself out in the cold when I don’t have to be.
I am still learning ….
And I am warm…..