Work In Progress

Last summer, I wrote about my small world. The world of pink and purple morning sky, hot coffee and birdsong on my back deck.  Flowing dresses, birdsong, warm breezes caressing my skin; I was trying to find peace in this small world as the big world over my fence zoomed by in cars and busses carrying people to work---the one place that had contributed so highly to my breakdown.  Since then, I have applied myself to finding tools and people to help me feel settled in my own skin. To sit and do nothing and fall back into old habits would have been infinitely easier than to do the work.  It is the work of the soul; to find your way back to the you that has always been there.  I found Brene Brown, Inner Mean Girl Reform School, Mood and Anxiety Group at the hospital, my therapist, the Sisters Social, meditation, Eat, Share, Love group, my Sista Perfectionista...and all of it helped me take myself apart and put it back to...

People say, (and by people I mean my therapists, my psychiatrist, my psychologist, my friends, my family......) that I should not care about what other people think. The way they say it, makes me feels like I am stupid; like it should be easy.  I have been off work for over a year and just recently, I am feeling like I am getting to know my true self, and I am incredibly vulnerable. I am raw and open when I do Reiki. Subtle voices, insidious in my ear, whisper quietly, "Who do you think you are doing Reiki?"  I am raw and open when I go to the women's group where we cook and eat and then do an hour meditation.   I reached out to them.  I needed to belong to something.  I needed people.  No, that is not right.  I needed sisterhood.  I used to pride myself on needing no one and wore it like a badge of honor.  Again the voices hiss, "Who do you think you are coming here? What mak...

I have quoted Star Wars before in some of my posts and I seem to be reaching back to one line that you hear a variation of in  each and every movie. "I've got a bad feeling about this." It's not so much the doom and gloom of the quote, (since every time someone says that, of course there is some imminent crisis to thwart),  but the intuitive nature of each of the characters that say it.  They know something is wrong---whether they have dropped into a trash compactor or are in the stomach of a space slug, each of them gets this "gut" feeling that something is not right. It's about intuition.   Faced with doubt about the likelihood of their undertaking, each character faces or braces for the bad feeling to turn into a bad thing. Nobody runs away. If you feel.....if you really deep down in your core...all internal voices saying, "THIS IS A BAD IDEA"....and we have the choice (ie to fly out of the slug's belly before ...

Star Wars Episode 4 -  A New Hope debuted in 1977.   I was ten.   I fell in love with it immediately.     It had a princess, handsome good guys, scary bad guys and AMAZING special effects that transported me (Ooo mixed reference as transporters are clearly associated with Star Trek---and Yes, I think you can love them both) from my seat in the theatre to the cockpit of Luke's X-Wing fighter as he bobbed and weaved on his trench run to deliver the fatal proton torpedo that destroyed the Death Star.     My sixty-something grandfather took me to see it, probably my third time, and his only comment on the movie was: "It was too loud".   Twenty years later, I got to share my love of Star Wars with my now, 18 year old.  He was four and we sat on the ground for three hours in line, in the rain, at our tiny town's ...