waving daintily
the object of Spring’s desire
on a sunny day
In response to The Daily Post prompt: object.
Growth
immersing myself in melancholy
(a pity party with whine and cheese)
life gives me a sudden chiropractic treatment of the mind
(an attitude adjustment)
pulling me out of the muck of my own making
opening me up to possibility
and joy
As I mentioned on my other blog yesterday, we are sailing into the January Doldrums, the passage to the February Funk. That’s winter.
Lately writing has felt like hitting a brick wall.
I sit at the table staring out at the darkness waiting for the pond to appear and listening to the rhythmic patter of the rain on the roof, avoiding today’s writing topic of “Shapes like stars,” and wondering how anyone can come up with such prompts. What does that mean? A car whizzes by and the house heat kicks on with the usual drone and hum, warm air swirls around my feet. I put the pen to paper, to the brick wall, seeing the worn rusty color of each brick, the mortar that holds them together, the nooks and crannies and dings. I think about the brick wall we built last summer. Mortar, made with cement. I write: “Marilyn Monroe was shaped like a star and has a star on a sidewalk to show for it.” The bricks begin to crumble and fade as I write about those posing as the shapes of stars, and somehow journey in writing towards the miniature suns that appear on the waves of the water on a sunny day, and find my words in the shapes of stars.
I’m occasionally using writing prompts from A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves. I think the one I used this morning (“shapes of stars”) is for the 10th of January or thereabouts. I haven’t been using it daily as there are mornings when I prefer to empty out with morning pages or I spend time working on my small stone for the day. I don’t want to skip any of the prompts so it is going to take me more than the usual year to work my way through the book and prompts. I’ve noticed that those I find challenging and/or like the least tend to be the prompts that make me dig deeper.
tadasana
feet planted solidly
reconnecting to earth
lengthening, strengthening
standing strong and firm and balanced
a stable, powerful foundation — Mountain Pose
From this morning’s yoga practice, a small stone for Day 5.
Autumn light
Yoga is a light, which once lit, will never dim. The better your practice, the brighter the flame.
B. K. S. Iyengar
Paint Mines Interpretive Park. Calhan, Colorado. August 2010.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.
~ T. S. Eliot
I’m not sure I have many followers here at Bountiful Healing anymore. I’ve let the blog stagnate, occasionally bringing back the posts I set to private when I thought I might be shutting this place down.
I have found, though, that this blog doesn’t want to be shut down. I’m drawn back to it from time to time. This is one of those times. Some of the plans and challenges I have coming up might require the morning attitude adjustment this blog brought to me. I might also find it a good place to play, just as I did in the past. It can’t be all seriousness all the time.
In keeping with fresh starts, I’ve redecorated a little. It was a strange thing, changing the theme. I’ve used that theme since the beginning of Bountiful Healing. It will be fun seeing what I can do with the new one, but I suspect I’ll miss the old one every now and then (especially during those times I’m not sure what I’m doing with the features on the new one). I will continue to bring back some of the old posts as well, little by little. I’ve resisted doing it all at once because I know it causes tons of emails to be released to those who have email subscriptions. Slow and steady ought to do it, for the blog as well as the plans and challenges I’ll be dealing with soon.
I look back with gladness to the day when I found the path to the land of heart’s desire, and thank Fate ceaselessly with a loud voice that she did not permit town to sap all the years away while the heart was turning to wind-voices and flower-faces and the hands of kindly earth.
~ Mrs. George Cran, The Garden of Ignorance, 1913
Be not the slave of your own past —
plunge into the sublime seas,
dive deep, and swim far,
so you shall come back
with self-respect,
with new power,
with an advanced experience,
that shall explain
and overlook
the old.~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.
~ Pema Chödrön
Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose them now would be to lose yourself.
~ John O’Donohue
Bountiful Healing 