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When 9/11 hit I was in Glastonbury, UK having been pulled to visit there on a spiritual quest.
Spirit had called me and I had answered. No, really. I had been called. I had found myself in the UK quite suddenly having said I was going out of the blue. The plan was barely out of my mouth when the money showed up by chance. So, for September 2001, I was backpacking, writing a novel and researching a spiritual documentary program for youth I was developing for Channel 5 in the UK, it was called "Spirit in My Suitcase." I’d traveled down to Cornwall only to be spiritually "told" in the middle of the night, get to Glastonbury on the 7am bus. When your only focus is connection and spiritually aware living... things like that happen. I’d gotten in the habit of listening to that calling. So onto the bus I jumped.
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 I was visiting Brene Brown's site today and I found this image that was available as a download for your desktop. I quickly downloaded it and personalized my home screen with it... and I had to share it with you as well.
Because this... this is a powerful statement. This weekend was the start of JULY! How did that happen? And while we here in Nova Scotia celebrated Canada Day, and all of my friends and neighbors in the states are looking forward to July 4th... the truth is we all know that summer has officially arrived. And with that, we start making plans for beach days, holidays, playdays, sunbathing days, parkdates, picnics... We get our long sheets of paper out and start with the lists... the agendas out to figure out how to fit it all in, around our businesses, our work and our children's routine so they have stability. We feel the summer start to slip away and it's not even begun. And that very feeling, is what I want to discuss with you today. I read the other day a very poignant post that someone had written. It said "We have approximately 18 summers to enjoy with our children. Make this one count." Ouch. But as my children grow older, I happen to know this hits too close to home. So, today my quest, my Summer mission, is to offer you some tools and opportunities that will help you drop the To-Do list, Stop in your tracks... Rest your mind, Nurture your Spirit and Play... with your children and your own inner self.  Winnie the Pooh, on a hunt for huffalumps and woozles, walks around in a tree following tracks in the snow. The prints keep multiplying as he walks around, unable to catch up with the creature.
They multiply again when Piglet joins him. Pooh and Piglet get quite worried when they start to see the large amount of tracks that must be made by “ferocious” animals chasing them. Until Christopher Robin sets the story straight. The tracks were made by Pooh and Piglet themselves. We can all be pursuing something that’s within us all along. And we can all be scared of What’s Out there, so forget to recognize it in the first place, In other words. In every step of the journey, you have arrived. I was raised with the idea of a ladder. That life was about learning how to “be good” and that we often failed. I can’t believe that a year ago my daughter Gia was still struggling with schoolwork.
Oh my goodness, what a tangled mess we used to live in. She hated standard curriculum, would zone out if I suggested movies or educational videos like those her sister was using. She was staggering, literally staggering, through a few programs we’d found and she would often make herself sick by giving herself pressure to do things that felt so un-natural to her. Often I would suggest unschooling to her, but this worked against her desire for structure, for routine. We know we both work well with routine and rebel against it at the same time. I relate so much to my girl. We look a lot alike, but more we learn alike. I was home-schooled off and on when I was growing up, and the concept of sitting and memorizing what people told me to, without any explanation why, without any dramatic build so I could feel it in my soul… it was like pulling teeth! But last year we started the grade 7 Oak Meadow curriculum with my girl, and it all changed. This week we finally put our tree up and it was so exciting to see how our three children really dove into it this year.
At the same time, I had to do a little bit of inner work to really release the outcome and allow it to flow. You see, I have this box of Christmas decorations which we’ve been lumbering around with us for the past 15 years. They’ve been carefully gathered and collected over our family’s childhood. Many of them were bought in the UK from when we lived over there when our girls were small. There are the few things that were gifted to us during a particularly broke time. There’s even a small angel decoration that I made for my husband’s and my first Christmas together. (We were “in-between” countries, not knowing where to settle so not really wanting to buy a lot of things. We had a small apartment and at the last moment I decided we needed to decorate for Christmas after all. The little angel’s face was done with embroidery thread and her body was ribbon found in the bottom of a sewing basket. Her head was literally the blower of a bubble bottle, covered in material. Every year I hang her on the tree with fondness.) Over the years our box of decorations has been bashed around as it traveled from place to place with us. Not only that, many a time I’ve stressed about its wellbeing, begging my husband to do check ins on its care. There was the couple of Christmases it had been left in storage and I would mourn the little angel or special trinkets that wouldn’t be on the tree that year. There’s even been late night panic attacks where I’ve planned fire escapes and wondered how to get that box of decorations out from wherever it was stored. At a certain point I’ve had to ask the magic question of “why?” Why? Why was a box of decorations so important? |
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