This morning, I am especially grateful for the pellet stove and its happy little plink plink plink as the pellets drop into the basket to make heat, as well as the husband who cleaned it out, readying it for the day before leaving for work.

I am grateful for the progress on the house that was made this weekend. The question of the day was apropos for me as I find myself longing for the time when we will be moved and I will be able to get back to some things I love.

I am grateful that my pain levels were pretty decent over the weekend, and though they are feeling less stable this morning, I am grateful for the reminder that I can feel good in my body and the healing I have been doing to get here. I am grateful to have some new tools to help it move through and form a different relationship with it.

I am grateful for the information I am learning in the Happiness course. Such work was put into this! I love the idea of studying what goes into happiness and its effect on our lives.

And on a super cold morning like today (forecast high is 8F) I am grateful for indoor plumbing! I was just thinking this morning of the whistling wind through an outhouse slat and ferling very grateful indeed!

Well, longing certainly keeps me from getting complacent!

For me, there is a distinct difference between longing and wanting. The things I long for are not things, generally. I am rather out in the middle of the country without bus service, and my husband needs our vehicle. I could ask for rides from friends, but I see that only as an emergency measure. It is not a solution for what I need, really.

Thus, while I long for access to a vehicle, what I am really longing for is greater freedom of movement. Under that is the longing to take another big step forward in healing via the ability to engage with outside life more. And underneath that is a longing for forming more community. And under that, the longing for a more active and fulfilling life.

So the longing keeps me forging ahead, looking for what I can do in my situation, learning my lessons here, and both working towards and waiting for the doors to open.

I hope your massage is a real “tissue restorer” and that you will soon find relief from the pain. One day, I hope to go for massage myself — it sounds so helpful and appropriately self-caring.

For now, I have been doing some specifc meditations and hypnotherapy for the recalcitrant pain I have had trapped in my body, specifically to retrain the brain to stop expecting pain. I have had a real difficulty with that, where pain kept begetting more pain. It is helping, I think. I am not there yet, but I do see improvement.

It won’t be too long until you and your daughter will share a wonderful big city adventure, and we will celebrate with you. ????????

So glad you had such a wonderful time with your daughter! It is exciting to see young people embarking on their adventures. I just ran across a picture of friends with their firstborn when he was about four months old. Now he is a sophomore in high school. Where did the time go?

The return of the cold is challenging my hygge resolves, I admit. I am grateful not to have to go out in it, grateful that the reason my husband does is work he enjoys at a place that appreciates him, and grateful for the opportunities this presents.

Dear Diane, I will pray.

Allow me to say your love, and yes, even your anxiety, for your daughter are a blessing to me to see. For what is anxiety over the welfare of those we love? It is Love. If we did not love, we would not care, and life would be poorer indeed.

We are muddlesome creatures sometimes, when our fear or anxiety causes our love to be expressed through fretting, lack of sleep, and systems gone haywire, just when we wish to express it through some other more palatable (to us) way. But Love is expressed in many forms.

Perhaps you can treat the anxiety you feel with the compassion you would show a child who was hurting because someone she loved was going to be further from reach? How would you hold that child’s emotion? With tenderness, validation, compassion, and care. You would hug her, do things to cheer her up or distract her so the intensity of the emotion could have a chance to fade. Maybe you would rub her back, stroke her hair, or make her hot cocoa with extra marshmallows. You would work at figuring out what would help her feel better in the moment, knowing with the wisdom of adults that she will adjust and even thrive in time, despite how she hurts right now, that she just needs time to get there and a little TLC. Do the same for you, as best you can.

And if you do the cocoa, toss in an extra marshmallow from me and know I am praying for you. Hugs.

I wound up making a sort of onion sauce over rice as we need to go to the store, and meals are fast reaching the Creative stage. Lol

Thank you for asking. Dear Wilbur is recovering well, no ill effects of his dental adventure. He is down to about seven teeth, but I doubt it will let it stop him from enjoying his victuals. ???? He was most glad to be back in his proper spot in front of HIS pellet stove, even if his canine friends did insist on sniffing him and kissing his head. (Do you have any idea how much effort it takes to get dog schnoodle off one’s left ear?)

Palm, I have several friends as well as a cousin who either are on the spectrum or have children who are. I hope this is encouraging to you, but in my experience, I see autism as simply the brain being wired differently, not as a label. The autistic folks I know personally are extremely bright, high functioning, and creative. They have challenges, true, but the designation of “normal” is elusive and very subjective. Who decides that anyway? We are each created uniquely beautiful, precisely who we are needed to be for the time we are here. Perfect.

I have an ADD brain, which was always obvious as I look back on my life but which was not diagnosed until I was in my 40’s. Do you know what I was told the “proper” term for it is? “Neurologically Atypical.” This made me laugh a bit because I have rather been the poster child for atypical on several scores — just ask my teachers! ????

Natural Calm with Calcium is helpful in this regard. It is something to start slowly and work up as doing it too fast can cause looseness, but I was amazed at how it helped. Magnesium is one of the things that gets depleted with Lyme, as that and collagen seem to be the borellia’s favorite foods, so supplementing can help. My herbalist suggested it to me.

Ose, this sounds like a variation on things I have been learning as well! The Observer position helps us see the emotion more as a thing, which gives us the needed space to deal with them more effectively, even if they have accumulated for decades through repression and disassociation.

Have you read The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer? Or Letting Go by David Hawkins? Our book group did those. We are in the first one now. I admit I like his style better than Hawkins, though there was so,id help in both.

What you described above sounds much like what Singer describes as “letting your thorns come up” so they can pass through and out. It always looks easier in print than it feels in person!

Blessings to you on your healing journey. Thank you so much for sharing!

And I happen to love Zora Neale Hurston, too. I was struck by how her work returned the dignity of personhood to those living closer to the end of slavery and under Jim Crow by the simple act of gifting her characters with the power of Choice. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine you see some spectacularly bad choices as well as some good ones, the gamut. By choosing to make her characters so real, so human, she was returning to them precisely what the prevailing culture had tried so hard to strip from them but never truly succeeded — the inherent human power of Choice, for good or ill. ????