Casting About

It’s easiest to find inspiration and gratitude in the morning. I find it easier to believe possibilities are boundless when the day is new.

I keep trying to give myself a practice–to meditate for just 4 minutes on what it is I want to create–and yet, somehow, the task evades me. Sitting comfortably on my patio, I listen to birds and squirrels and the sound of water flowing in the pond fountain just outside the door. I become distracted. At times, the beauty and abundance I’m surrounded by fade into the background while my thoughts paint pictures of other scenarios. I’ve spent so much of my life engaging fantasies–why do I find it so difficult to focus on one now for 4 short minutes — especially on ones I enjoy?!

Of course, information overload is the easy answer. If I step out here with no phone, computer or other electronic device, I feel I’m wasting time…can’t say why, really. Isn’t this time the most important of my day?

I created this blog to give myself a forum for displaying my creative projects…isn’t the internet a wonderful thing? I could conceivably publish ME every day! For a journalism student from the 80s, it’s a dream come true…but I haven’t afforded myself many opportunities to be read, heard, or otherwise noticed.

As far back as I can remember, I thought my writing would be the key to my fame and fortune. Well, the key is still gleaming new and barely used. Seems the only time I’m moved to record my thoughts is when I’m so miserable there is nothing else to do.

With Facebook and Twitter and email and TV, I send my energy out into the universe using others’ words, photos and thoughts. How silly, really.

Things have been alternately wonderful and terrible — and everywhere in between — since my last post so long ago. At home, I’m happy with my family and constant sadness and worry strains that picture with my parents’ failing health and strength. Brian helps to keep things light, but lightness is not always an answer to my problems. I worry out of habit.

Sometimes it’s about real things, like yesterday, when mom fell in her sleep and smacked her head, complete with blood, swelling, and broken spectacles followed by family discussion about ways to keep her on the bed when she sleeps. Dad looks awful in the face of it…his reality is very bleak, indeed. Stuck tending to the needs of the woman he promised to take care of forever, until death do they part, etc., his own life force is wearing thin. The atmosphere is quite energy-sucking. *sigh*

I imagine making a vow to Brian that I will never be her, never twist his reality in such a way, but I don’t speak the words.

Staying positive seems the only thing I can do differently than she. Seems disloyal to celebrate that one advantage, and also, staying positive in the midst of all this is quite the feat. In order to do so, I seem to need to create distance. Distance is the opponent of family support and togetherness. *sigh* again.

Time is getting away from me at a disconcerting pace. I’ll be 48 this year. I ache in physical and emotional ways I never imagined when I was younger. What could I tell my youthful self today that would have her life look different than the reality in which I find myself now? Study hard? Get that Masters? Take care of your body? I never really had a dream that I invested in enough to see it mirrored in my reality.

Is it ever too late to envision a dream? According to TUT, the answer is a hearty hell no, so pick the good thoughts…let them become the circumstances of my life. Maybe that’s the answer for today.

Ohhhkay…so forget the “cursed hows” just focus on the end result. Health, abundance, happiness, peace. In the form of my life, how would that look today?

I guess it has something to do with quieting the voice in my head that says lie down and turn on the TV. Use Sunday for renewal and don’t waste the day.

There are chores to do. I always feel better when they’re done, but it makes me feel tired to think of doing them. Oh, perhaps I’d better not focus on that feeling. Focus on the good thoughts: feeling cared for, well-tended, strong, joyful, peaceful…

Many questions come to mind: “shoulds” such as tending others. But in tending me, perhaps I tend them, too.

Okay, so I’ll start by visiting the old folks next door and then doing the stalls. See where else the day will take me…As I’m working alone, perhaps I’ll create a fantasy that fits the results I want.

Wish me luck…