In my quest to find myself, one of the things I do from time to time is pick up Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and just read bits and pieces of it. I’m sure that’s not the way you’re “supposed” to read it, but it works for me and I usually get what I need from whatever page I flip it open to. Sometimes I get it right away and sometimes it takes awhile to sink in. And then there are the times when it really smacks me in the face when I’m doing something else. That’s what happened this morning.

It was reasonably sunny earlier this morning and so I decided that I would go out and take some pictures. It’s been dreary all week and I’ve been miserable trying to work all week in the dark. Needless to say, by the time I got ready and got outside it was starting to rain again but I decided I’d go wandering anyways.

This is where I ended up starting from:

It was nice enough in the park proper, but I really wanted to get closer to the water. So I hopped back in the car and drove around to the bottom of the hill. (Yes, I know I could’ve walked it, but I don’t do hills when I’m alone since at this moment in time I’m a fat lady with a heart condition. I might’ve got down the hill just fine but there’s no guarantee I would’ve got back up it without help.)

When I got down there I realized just how boring the paved path looked, and it still didn’t get me close enough to the river, which is where I really wanted to be. The cool thing is that there’s a dirt path that runs parallel to the paved one, and there’s a lovely little sloping path that takes you down to it.

And as I was wandering down the dirt path snapping photos, I thought about Tolle’s words and realized that what he had said was staring me right in the face:

“When we go into a forest that has not been interfered with by man, our thinking mind will see only disorder and chaos all around us. It won’t even be able to differentiate between life (good) and death (bad) anymore since everywhere new life grows out of rotting and decaying matter. …

“The mind is more comfortable in a landscaped park because it has been planned through thought; it has not grown organically. There is an order here that the mind can understand. In the forest, there is an incomprehensible order that to the mind looks like chaos. A New Earth, p. 194-195

And that’s what I noticed this morning … new life growing out of dead and dying plants. The green of a baby pine tree showing through the grey even on a cold November morning when nothing green should even be poking its head above ground.

Even though I wasn’t in a forest — in truth, I probably wasn’t more than 20 feet away from the paved path and could hear people jogging and walking their dogs above me — you could still feel the difference, the hidden harmony and sacredness of something that had been left untouched. For that moment I could actually forget that I was standing in the middle of a city.

I’m not even sure at this point if I’m doing more than rambling here. It just struck me at the moment when I came back up onto the paved path to head back to my car that it really was a perfect example of man-made order and natural, chaotic order side by side.

Thanks for reading!
Have a wonderful day :)

Thought for the day:
“Today I allow my spirit to play at the park. My body may be at work but my spirit is reaching for the trees as I swing higher and higher.”

I’m really excited today! My inner child is bursting at the seams to be allowed out to play. It’s like she knows that there’s something big coming and just can’t contain herself.

The adult me has known for awhile now that this would be a year of huge changes. I just never knew what, when, where, or how these changes would take place. I still don’t but that doesn’t mean that intuitive part of me isn’t ready for it all.

Today I’m caught up in a feeling that life is really great. I can’t shake it, and where before I would try and calm myself down and tell myself all sorts of negative crap to break the mood, today I have no desire to do that. Over the past few days there’s been a lot of stuff cross my path around the theme of letting your inner child out to play. Shileen Nixon wrote a great post about why as women of wonder, we need to make time for play dates in our lives. That’s kinda what started it off for me.

All I can think of is wanting to go to the park and play on the swings. I used to love that when I was little. We would go to the park and my dad would push me on the swings. I loved that feeling of freedom that comes from soaring through the air. (I’m sure the knowing he was there to catch me if I fell helped somewhat too, but that’s a story for another day.)

I think that as we get older we lose so much of our childlike sense of wonder, and that makes me sad. It’s so important to not let that go — to always know that the child who loves swings, sandcastles, and butterflies still lives inside us. And even when life is changing around us, and the to-do list is as long as your left arm and you’re wondering how it will all get done, our inner child is still there holding on for us, waiting for us to stop and play. All we have to do is close our eyes, take a deep breath, and remember the swings… and we can be right there with her, even if it’s only for a moment. :) Of course, if you can actually get outside to wander through a park or play on the swings, that’s even better!

No matter what, love your inner child. Take time to nurture her, and as always — be happy!

(Photo credit: sxc.hu)

I was musing the other day about my twitter bio and wondering if I should change it. I think it sums me up pretty well, but it doesn’t really give the clues that people seem to be expecting to find in a profile bio. But that’s not what I really want to talk about — it’s just where this particular train of thought got started. I can be a stubborn ol’ bat when I want, and that stubbornness kicks in a little more often than is probably good for me.

What I want to rant a bit about this morning is the working of my bio. Right now it reads “Still trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up.” It’s pretty much a given that I’ll never totally grow up, so theoretically I’ll never have to decide what I want to “be”. So it probably shouldn’t bother me that I’m expected to “be” anything.

But it does.

I question why I have to be anything other than what I am. I question why society feels this need to pigeonhole me into a category of its choosing, and why I should have to label myself only to make it easier for someone who has never met me to judge me based on that label. I’m a lot of things — mother, friend, counsellor, businesswoman, artist, musician, author, historian are the labels that come to mind right off the top of my head — but not one of those labels really describes me on its own. Each individual piece of me makes up the whole, and trying to deny one in favor of the others doesn’t work. Believe me on this — I’ve tried.

I’ve tried to shove parts of myself to the background, or even to deny them in some cases. All so I’d fit in.

I’ve tried to do what other people thought was best for me, and to follow paths that others laid out for me. The result? I lost my sense of self in an attempt to please others and ended up alienating them anyway when living in someone else’s plan became too much and I rebelled. The worst, though, was that in being so caught up in living up (or down) to other’s expectations, I allowed myself to be abused physically, mentally, and emotionally. And I stayed that way for years even after my abusers were no longer on the scene. In effect, by trying to “be” something I wasn’t, I became my own abuser.

Because of this, standing up for my funky little bio becomes an exercise in being myself. Refusing to pick one thing, or to even list my labels; to define myself as being anything other than myself is me allowing the real me to be seen. It’s also a lesson in loving myself enough to actually BE me. There are days when I’m not even sure who the real me is yet — I’m still peeling away the layers of everyone else’s junk I’ve worn for too long. I’m gettin’ there slowly. What I’m finding is that I’m okay just as I am … even if I haven’t grown up yet :)

Please weigh in with a comment below… how do you craft your profile bio? Personal, professional, or somewhere in between? Do you show people the real you?