Say something, I’m giving up on you..

Today dawned sunny and warm and even in my earnest state laziness of late I could not deny that an outdoor run had to happen.
As Ella and I finally exited the house (1/2 an hour late for preschool simply because I didn’t feel like getting out of bed in time to take her. What is that? Earnest laziness is what it is), I noticed that the daffodils were juuuuust starting to bloom and I was all, “well HELLO Spring, so nice of you to finally show up”. 
   
But then I felt a bit hypocritical about chastising Spring for her tardiness given the fact that I was leaving the house 1/2 an hour late for preschool just ‘cos. But that sense of irony soon left me as I shuffled around the woods and I started getting a little bit irritated again because THIS is not a springy sight you know?

Come on now, we’re in mid-April. It’s been almost six freakin’ months without leaves on trees. Where are the leaves? The buds? The blossoms?!  I AM TIRED OF STARK BRANCHES and I have only been back for a couple of weeks. Imagine if I’d been here this whole time. What am I going to do next year when I am? OMG cue panic attack…
Wait where was I? Anyway, I was shuffling around the woods looking at all the bare trees and the large number of dead fallen tree limbs and yay verily, entirely dead trees littering the place and I was thinking,  “apart from making me fear that I am going to be the victim of falling tree head trauma, this place is not exactly inspiring me today. In fact it’s just downright unattractive, bordering on depressing and not to be rude woods, but seriously, DO SOMETHING.”
(And that’s what the title of this post is all about because as I was listening to my music and in the absence of an unrequited love, I decided to dedicate the song Say Something, to the bare, bare, leafless trees and to Spring in Ohio in general..).
Anyway, I lumbered on (that’s actually the perfect pun right there, sorry to point it out and ruin it but it is,) and finally I reached the end of my course. I moved into a clearing to do some yoga to stretch out my pudgy little limbs, and cued up some Motab for the event (that’s Mormon Tabernacle Choir for those not well versed in Mormonese.)  So there I was Sun Salutationing…Sun Saluting? to All Creatures of Our God and King, and as I moved into downward dog and looked at my hands pressing into the bare soil, I noticed that there were all sorts of things going on there, little blades of grass pressing through, twigs, tiny insects, my hands themselves which when you think about it are incredible marvels of nature.  I straightened up into tree pose just as Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring started playing and at that very moment I saw it. Tiny green leaves and a tree with unmistakable buds. Not beautiful yet (or in focus for that matter), but hopeful all the same…

It was a poetic moment.  It was. And I’m not sure where I was going with all of this but hang on it will come to me.
Oh yes ok, so I guess what I’m increasingly realising about life is that you do tend to see what you are looking for, and if you want to be inspired you have to put yourself into inspiring situations and settings.   Even though the woods weren’t particularly picturesque today, if I hadn’t gone out there today and done the little things I did, I would have missed a moment where I felt seen and acknowledged by God and the Universe.  It may seem like a very trivial silly moment and perhaps it was to anyone else, but it was somewhat sublime and certainly sustaining to me.
Speaking of inspiration, thank you so much to the many good souls who have reached out to me with ideas for service.  I love and admire you all so much for your interest in helping me to find a worthy cause to throw myself into! Thank you thank you! I am actively looking into several of them and will update you in a blog coming soon.  If you still want to submit an idea, the  deadline for consideration and award giving is April 15th! That’s Wednesday!
One more weird thing that I wanted to make mention of. Last night when I went to bed I asked God to make me a little more understanding, to help me to see things from the point of view of others, to have an increased awareness of how rarely things are actually about me and are in fact about a myriad of other factors going on in the complicated, difficult lives of others. Basically to help me grow up.  I have come to recognize how very driven I am by the need for genuine connection and intimacy with others, but that it often brings with it some unrealistic and unreasonable expectations from my relationships.
After this prayer,  I fell asleep and I had a very vivid dream about a relationship I have.  In this relationships I have often felt insecure and unsatisfied leading to feelings of inadequacy and anger. In my dream there was a scenario with this individual wherein I  felt truly hurt and misunderstood. I felt like I had been unkindly dealt with, I felt ganged up on, impotent, frustrated and embarrassed.
Instead of flying into a rage as I have in the past, I cheerfully said that I needed to go home and take a nap. In my dream I went home and cried. Then I went back to the individual and I said, “I owe you an apology.” I was shown all the ways in which I had misunderstood that person, how I had made them feel ganged up on and hurt.  As I talked to the person I poured out my sincere regret for having treated them with so little of the understanding I craved, I cried as I apologized for the insensitive things I had said and done when it was all about me and my feelings, I asked for forgiveness rather than for understanding.  Instead of hostility, I felt genuine tenderness. My impression of how it all ended up was unresolved. The relationship was not repaired to what it once was, there was still an element of sadness about the whole thing, but the change in my perspective was pretty powerful.  Enough so, that when I was woken up at an unholy hour by my son’s alarm blaring away and I had to get up and track it down in his disaster of a room and turn it off and then go downstairs to track him down to turn it off properly before it started blaring again, I did not have my automatic “woken too soon due to some idiot’s idiocy” rage-on.  I thought, “I wonder why he got up before his alarm, he must have a lot to do and be really stressed poor kid.” I was vividly reminded of the many times that I had left my alarm to go off once for an entire weekend in my locked room when I went home from boarding school!  It was somewhat of a miraculous shift in perspective.
I’m not optimistic enough to think that this new glimmer of enlightenment will be a permanent state of understanding and patience, but I am hoping that the little glimpse into the other side will stay with me and that maybe it will go a little way toward the ever elusive “growing up” process.  Gah, that process is harder than I thought it would be!  Didn’t you think that when you were pushing 40 you’d be a wonderful, evolved human being? Me too.  I’m really glad that even though I am often so willfully immature and so actively self destructive that God and the universe never gives up on me.
And grace shall lead you home.

Here’s some more inspiration I’ve come across this week. Thanks to my dear friend Deborah for these gems:
The Moral Bucket List
20 Things to Start Doing in Your Relationships
and to my personal spokeswoman Glennon Doyle of Momastery who has been commissioned to speak all the emotions and thoughts in my muddled head with so much more eloquence and compassion than I ever could:
Why the World needs the Mentally Different

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