Beyond Broken

Attachment

Redemption

Redemption

An act of redeeming or atoning for a fault or mistake and returning to a state of being redeemed.

Here is what happened for me. I married my husband when I was 26. I was a very young 26. I needed a mother and a father as much as I wanted a husband. He was going to make up for all my losses — a happy ending to a sad life.

It wasn’t so easy. He had two young boys in our care. They were 5 and 7 and had lots of NEEDS. I did not understand what it meant to be a wife, let alone a mother. I did my best at each of those tasks and I wasn’t very good at them. Most of the time I was resentful of everyone else’s needs and competed with them for my husbands attention. And I was so afraid to love. What if they did not love me back? I had no understanding of, or way to hold this negativity inside. The little boys were cute, creative and so smart. How could I feel so mean? I hated myself ­— guilt, fear and resentment forming a toxic mix….

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Beyond Dreaming

Beyond Dreaming

We all dream.  Our dreams take the form of fantasies, day dreams and dreams while we sleep.  Dreams have different purposes.  One purpose is to correct reality.  You fix what is broken or unredeemable in fantasy — your wish for real life played out in dreams.  You  seek revenge or pride where there was humiliation.   You win where you have lost.  You are powerful where you were powerless.  Our dreams can be very soothing.  And it is very powerful to observe them rather than get lost in them.
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Reflections From Nature

Last Saturday the Alt Right came to Charlottesville.  We witnessed them from our favorite breakfast spot.  They marched straight down Market Street in front of our window seat.  We witnessed one battalion after another dressed in different colors, representing differing ideologies with shields and clubs.  Some were outfitted with heavy combat gear including large guns and grenades.  We went out to the streets propelled to make real what felt so improbable.  Pepper spray and crowd agitation chased us away.  A state of emergency was declared 20 minutes later.  It was 11:00 am.  The Rally was not supposed to begin until noon.
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The Builders – What Are You Building?

This scene of our littlest grandchildren so earnestly at work moving sand this way and that and the Mary Oliver Poem, Song Of The Builders collided in my mind on an early morning,  just past sunrise, this week.

As Mary Oliver sat one morning to contemplate God she witnessed a grasshopper hard at work moving grains on a hillside.  She see’s both humility and great effort in the grasshopper’s task.
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Are you keeping ‘cool’ this summer or succumbing to the heat?

 

Are you keeping ‘cool’ this summer or succumbing to the heat?

Learn more about what happens in our brain during ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ moments and what huge differences it makes in our relationships.

We are only three weeks into the summer and already there has been a lot to learn.  Most of us continuously find ourselves judging others and making assumptions about other people’s behaviors. We do this continuously in a scanning function in our brain. These assumptions justify our defensive behaviors. Our untested ‘realities’ give rise to disconnection, wall building and subtle and not so subtle negativity in our relationships.
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