Eventful and emotional day yesterday. I will admit I am reeling a bit still, anxiety has come to call again, and I feel unequal to the tasks before me. I feel like someone has wound all my strings far too tightly, and that is increasing my pain levels.

In truth, I think the dust probably needs to settle from yesterday in order for me to settle, too.

The day started with sadness due to us thinking one of our roosters, the injured Harpo, had been killed overnight. My husband had looked and looked for him in the dark and cold the previous night, without luck. I had heard a squawk at 2am and then he looked again. Nothing. We figured an owl or raccoon had gotten him. Somehow, he had missed seeing Harpo in the coop and found him there the next day!

Midday I got a call from the loan officer re our financing options for moving. I had asked him if there was any possible way for us to move and sell afterwards since I am not physically or emotionally up to the strain of keeping a house Show Ready. I also have no vehicle to get the animals into and leave so people could view. Rather big obstacles!

The answer came back as a Yes, which caused me to dissolve into a puddle of mixed up goo — relief, fear, and reality hit all at once, I think. Good timing for today’s Quote of the Day!

It would mean very tight finances and a gamble on selling time needed, but it might actually be less stress than the alternative of selling with us in it. They do say a staged house sells faster than one with people still in evidence in it — especially three dogs, a cat, and a flock of chickens in the yard!

So now we have decisions to make, and it is getting real, very real.

I am grateful for all the learning I have been doing on having more self-compassion as it helped me come to a decision this morning that will give more grace to my husband and myself. Instead of setting up a situation where our old dynamic could play out as usual, I realized the potential and chose a new path! Whoo-hoo!

This is huge! It is a decision that, whatever else happens, greatly lessens the possibility of us going into default mode at each other while under stress. It plans ahead, takes our limitations into account, and shows me where we need to seek outside assistance.

Thus, while I am still feeling a bit snarled up and overwhelmed, that gives me a glimmer of hope that we can move through this learning experience with more grace and less unnecessary drama than before — oh, I do hope so!!

We also got more confirmation that moving is the right decision:

1) I found out that our house payment is up for readjustment in August, which will mean a higher amount to pay. ????

AND…2) We now have the dubious distinction of being the people paying THE highest amount of house insurance that the loan officer has ever seen. He said our payment is $3300 MORE per year than the top of the range he has seen in twenty years in business. Ouch.

I am staggered by this, especially as the amount extra we paid out over the course of our time here was about a year’s take home salary! Considering how much we struggled to make that amount while underemployed for nine years, it is hard to swallow.

There is, however, nothing to be done but learn and move on in a better way — good timing for today’s question of the day!

I am struggling, too, with the loss of this place that was our dream for so long, especially as no new place that feels like it could home has appeared. Please pray/hope/well wish with me that the perfect place will open up before us as this next stage unfolds — and that my knees stop knocking so I can hear myself think!

Apologies for length!

Regrets are a kind of reverse road map.

When I look back with wiser eyes, I can see the potholes, bogs, and cesspools I walked into in the past. I can see the danger signs around those features on my map, and take more care to heed them and avoid the stuff that got me stuck earlier in my journey.

I won’t be perfect and avoid all I might have because I am not yet who I am becoming, but, with practice, I will miss more and fall less.

As Maya Angelou said, “When we know better, we do better.”

Today, I am grateful for a nice chat with a friend of mine who just went through breast cancer surgery last Wednesday. Her reports are good so far, and she said she is in much less pain than she had expected. So far, it sounds like no chemo will be needed, which is a huge blessing.

I am grateful to see the sun again, shining brightly over the snowy fields and melting the ice formations on the east door. Yesterday, a small flock of Canada Geese visited our pond, so beautiful against the powdered sugar landscape.

I am absurdly grateful for the six or seven seedlings of lonicera fragrantissima that made it from the batch I started last summer in anticipation of our move. It is not a showy shrub but a tough one and one of the first things to bloom and smell sweetly in spring. It is in the honeysuckle family. We brought them inside when the weather got into the single and negative digits, and they bloomed for me in my dining room, an early breath of spring.

I am grateful for the returning light, and that the halfway point of winter is only a few days away on Friday February 2! Happy Candlemas or Happy Groundhog Day, depending on where you are and what you celebrate.

Many blessings to you all!

Thank you, grateful. I think it will. I trust it will. It is simply scarier to move forward when you don’t see where you are going! To be able to put oneself in context in the new place helps, and I don’t have that yet.

No, the news on Harpo was good — he was found in the coop ALIVE not dead. My wording might have been wonky in my fluttery state. ???? He is still favoring the leg but using it more, according to my husband. He and his brother, Groucho, got into a scuffle the other day, unusual for them, and Harpo lost.

We have a remarkably quiet flock given that we have so many roosters. (Surprise hatches!) So long as they are docile and behave, they can stay. ????

Thank you, dear Pilgrim. I know you did this process yourself not long ago!

My prayer is that we will be able to move before showing. I am not physically or emotionally feeling as if I am up to what it takes to keep a house Show Ready. My pain wound up increasing to such desperate levels the last two times someone came that I took days to recover.

One of the gifts in this is that I discovered that making this as easy on us as possible is key. I have never done that or seen things in that way before. I have always just tackled whatever was in front of me with no thought to what it might cost me — or my husband, either.

Self-compassion requires new choices in behavior. Hmmm.

Thank you for your prayers. I am sorting out what is current fear and what is old baggage. I suppose in the end, it is all a learning experience!

Thank you, Nancy! Her prognosis is very good, and her attitude is positive.

You must have some cat! Most would dislike even the smell of the leaves. Thankfully, geraniums can be cut waaaaay back and grow lush and full. I tried the method of storing them in a box in the basement over winter one year, then cutting back to green stem before replanting, and it actually worked!

Our cat prefers to nap rather than nibble on plants, though he did spend some time whacking my nun’s cap orchid leaves in a playful awake moment. ????????

What an added blessing that your healing helps your singing even more! It is so important to find what works for us as we are all so different!

Did you try acupuncture along with the drug for the hormonal issues? Hormonal problems were why I was sent to acupuncture by an obgyn doctor many years ago. Acupuncturists vary, too. I have had two acupuncturists who helped me enormously — and two who helped some but to a lesser degree. Like any profession, some are more adept and gifted than others.

My husband is also one who works through lunch. He is not very good at taking space for himself, though he is learning. He and I have always been better at pleasing others than pleasing ourselves.

Many blessings to you, and I hope you enjoyed your lunch!

Thank you, dear Palm, for your encouraging words: “Letting go also of the need to to try so hard for things to “work out”…if they don’t work, there will be another solution, no matter how hard we have worked to get to the present one.”

I really needed this reminder today. I have been wrestling with this issue, with my desire to “make everything work out.” As if it was my responsibility to run the universe or even our bit of it! I know this stems from a childhood and adult relationship with my parents where I was made responsible for their emotions and choices and has been a big challenge for me.

I have had to go through a time in my life where none of my solutions worked or were allowed to work, to be taken to a place where almost nothing has been within my control. It has been forcing me to see how little control I have over most everything.

Though this process produces anxiety, of course, on the other side of realizing our lack of control is more freedom than we have ever known. We’ve just got to get there! ????

So lovely to see you, Diane!

Isn’t it amazing how there is often such a wide gulf between how others see us and how we see ourselves? Sometimes, I will receive a compliment and my brain won’t even register it as belonging to me.

A friend of mine said a friend of hers told her that when she receives a compliment, she has learned to say thank you and then casually put her hand over her heart area and rub some gentle circles to “rub it in” and thus help her fully accept it.

My friend told me on the phone this after she had paid me a compliment, and I had said thank you a bit uncertainly, I guess. There was a pause, then she said, “Did that one sink in, or did it bounce off as usual?”

We laughed, but she is right. I have been coated in teflon regarding compliments! So now I try to remember in the moment and rub them in. ????

My anxiety has been high at times lately, too. I thought this time last year that if my husband could just find a job, I would be happy. Instead, it opened up new boxes of things to be healed.

Through this process, I have come to see that somewhere along the way I learned to expect loss even when there is no good reason to do so. Fear of loss, pain, of loneliness is a potent miasma that can obscure our vision.

My pastoral counselor challenged me to write on Attachments, and I found my thoughts going in two different directions on it. One emerged as a poem dealing more with standard issues of loss. The other has been more problematic and convoluted as it stems from the upside down dysfunction of my childhood.

The gift in this is that, although not pleasant, having this pop up now is in preparation for moving into this new chapter in my life freer and clearer than I have been.

I think, too, that it simply takes time to adjust and adapt. Having your daughter near was a blessing, and having her pursue her passion will be, too, in time.

I remind myself of this regularly — everything takes time.

Much love to you.

Founded on five element? How incredibly cool! That has been the most effective form for me, though I give due to other forms that have helped mixed in. Adept practitioners seem to incorporate many things then use what fits each person best. ???? There is a powerful wisdom within Five Element of nature and how things work together. It is fascinating.

There is a dog food company, Earthborn Holistic, that will plant a tree for every UPC you send in. We used there stuff for years but had to switch recently to see if that was the root of the itchies and ear infection for one of our dogs. I am hoping to be able to switch to a new formula with them as I also loved that they never had recalls.

Thank you for the link!

I understand that pain all too well, Cara Anna. I used to have very bad headaches for many years. Acupuncture was what diminished and then finally got rid of them for me. Oddly enough, it greatly diminished my PTSD nightmares at about the same time, so I got a double blessing on that!

I wish I could use astral projection to get some of my Nine Wonders cream to you! I created it for muscle and joint pain, but then I found it did great things for headaches. It has even been helping a couple friends with their migraines.

I know how frustrating they can be, especially when a particularly bad one sidelines you for a couple days. UGH!