Hallo Lovelies,

It has been raining cats and dogs and mud for more than a week while the sun takes it annual winter break. Satine Bunny and I are toasty warm and inside. The rhythm of the rain is a quiet all its own and takes up the whole sky.  All this weather and a chest cold have made me even more aware of my senses. And made it all the more important to use their intelligence to guide me in making the most nourishing and healing choices as I go about allowing this cold to move through me.Because as the extraordinary, Jean Houston, teaches, our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to unlocking the meaning and the wellspring of creativity.

At times like these, I am intuitively drawn to soothing things that open my chest and heart and clear my nasal passages. Such as the steamy sweet smell of my hot honey orange and lime water. I have it in my favorite cup and cradle it between my breasts. Warming myself inside and out. Chasing away   the raw cold place in the middle of my chest and uplifting my senses.

And the ahhhh ooooh soo good feeling of letting the work of opening happen passively and naturally as I inhale deeply and to receive the life-giving essence of my breath move freely through my (once cold and crumpled) ribcage while resting on a yoga bolster my arms open like wings.

All around me people are complaining about the weather. Wishing winter wasn’t so damn cold. lol. I am definitely a summer baby. Much rather be too hot than too cold. Still I am also content to let winter be winter with all it’s chilly, bossy, bluster and adapt and respect accordingly.

It wasn’t always this way. In fact I am sure I have spent at least half my life wishing things were other than they actually are instead of meeting reality on its own terms.

If you are looking for a prescription for suffering look no farther. ” If you keep telling the same sad small story. You will keep living the same sad small life.” If you prefer to be happy try a little gratitude wrapped in tenderness or a little tenderness garnished with gratitude instead. Either way you slice it you come up whole.

So how grateful am I to be able to take time off from work and to have the time and money to spend on taking care of lit ol me. Molto molto, mui, tres!!!

This is a new thing. I  used to despair at needing to rest. Secretly I judged myself. Called myself names. Delicate, weak. Had genes to boot. My sensitive intelligent father was also branded with “delicate” constitution.

Biology is not destiny. Belief is. “Change the story and you change perception:change perception and you change the world.”

The old story: That I was not good enough and that I needed to prove my worthiness through doing. And while I did a lot, truth be told, not a lot of what I did truly needed to be done. And a lot of what I didn’t do really did need me to do it. At the time I wouldn’t have admitted that because I wasn’t in touch with my own needs or innate value. I now know that this belief did not help me get more done, faster, sooner or better. More the opposite. Like with a child or a horse. Eventually, the whipping stopped working the way I wanted it too and started to work against me. Somewhere along the way I had picked up false information and taken it as fact. So to that, I say

time to turn the page! We are not “encapsulated bags of skin dragging around a dreary little ego. We are an evolutionary wonder” The same air that moves the clouds and makes the rain and grows the flowers waters my imagination and feeds my dreams. I am whale song, and star-dust and palm frond. I am marrow becoming molecules of light, I am rainbow and mud becoming lotus flower and lichen, I am air flowing through rivers and through the silver gills of flat headed fishes, I am the song the whales sing, I am phosphorous and sand, hermit crab and shell, nautilus of possibility becoming possible. I am breath breathing myself into being, “a trillion cells singing together in a vast chorale, an organism-environment, a symbiosis of cell and soul.” A holy child of an Intelligent Universe and That Is more than Enough.

Beginning and end of story!!!