(First time bowler.)
Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.
~ Winston Churchill
Growth
(Afternoon sunlight hitting the wall.)
The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are the most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
~ Frederick Buechner
It is not by meticulous care in avoiding all contaminations that we can keep our [spiritual body] clean and give it grace, but by urging it to give vigorous expression to its inner life in the very midst of all the dust and heat and hurts.
~ Rabindranath Tagore
Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
~ Simone Weil
As we grow old … the beauty steals inward.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Sunshine on water.)
Most people can look back over the years and identify a time and place at which their lives changed significantly. Whether by accident or design, these are the moments when, because of readiness within us and collaboration with events occurring around us, we are forced to seriously reappraise ourselves and the conditions under which we live and to make certain choices that will affect the rest of our lives.
~ Frederick F. Flack
(Reflections on a Saturday evening in October.)
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do no know enough to be pessimistic.
~ Hazel Henderson
(Colorado harebell. Photo © 2009 by Robin)
What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.
~ Joseph Addison
I have trouble seeing or hearing the word “inconceivable” without thinking of The Princess Bride (montage found here).
(Photo © 2008, 2009, by Robin)
Whether you know it or not, one of the most important relationships in your life is with your Soul. Will you be kind and loving to your Soul, or will you be harsh and difficult? Many of us unknowingly damage our Souls with our negative attitudes and actions or by simple neglect. By making the relationship with your Soul an important part of your life, however, by honoring it in your daily routine, you give your life greater meaning and substance. Use your experiences — all of them — as opportunities to nourish your Soul.
~ Elisabeth Küebler-Ross
(The body of a tree. Photo by Robin. 2007)
Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places … I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.~ Saraha
As I slowly approach the age 0f 50 (the turn of the decade occurs in December 2008), I find myself finally (FINALLY!) beginning to feel comfortable in my body. But lately I’ve felt more than comfortable. I’m actually enjoying myself.
I thought, at first, this was a brand new feeling, one I’ve never had before. But then it occurred to me that I must have felt this way as a child. Happy, joyful, glad to be in my own skin.
I haven’t had plastic surgery. I haven’t lost a lot of the weight I need to shed. I still have the aches and pains that come with getting older, various parts beginning to feel a lifetime of usage. I still have to take care with my back injuries.
Perhaps that’s it. The back injuries. The call to action. The decision to honor and care for my body as I wish I had been doing all along.
It’s interesting how life set up this series of coincidences. There have been quieter wake-up calls that I’ve ignored over the past few years. Then I got hit hard with the back problems and being unable to walk. What’s interesting, and coincidental, is that if we’d stayed in the Bogs, hadn’t gone on a sabbatical adventure, I’m not sure I’d have pulled myself out of the dark pit of pain. Well, maybe. Eventually. But the move to a new town with new things to explore forced me to do something while I waited for our insurance to kick in.
My waiting wasn’t passive as it might have been at home. It was an active waiting. A waiting in which I went faithfully to the gym every morning, even when I couldn’t do more than hang on to the rails of the treadmill and shuffle along at 1 mph. Even when all I could do was sit on the bench of the weight machine and hang there, in a kind of sitting traction. Some days the better part of the workout was just getting to the gym. Walking down the hallways, riding down in the elevator, walking down more hallways, opening doors. Those simple acts, things we all take for granted, were often all that I could manage. Sometimes more than I thought I could manage, making me push myself beyond what I perceived to be my limits, limits enforced by pain or by my own thinking.
Then one day I was able to pull down the bar of the lat pulldown machine. I discovered that walking uphill was less painful than a level or downhill course.
I was moving. I was doing. I was being.
I’ve lost a few inches. Weight/strength training will do that to a body. I’ve also lost about 10 lbs. But it’s not the loss of weight or inches that has me enjoying the feel and look of my body.
The change occurred within my soul or spirit or mind or whatever you want to call it.
I sat with my pain, listening to it, encouraging it to tell me what I needed to do next. I learned from it.
And now, now I’m discovering the awesomeness of the human body. The way it can bounce back, if given even half a chance, some nurturing, and some love. The way it can somehow work around the injuries, heal around them in such a way that it’s possible to start feeling normal again.
Cool beans. 🙂
Bountiful Healing 