Category: Healing

The Life I Want

~ Laura Lowder ~ 1 Comment

Years of being told who I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to settle for . . . none of it honest, none of it good, not knowing how to fight back to claim my own identity and to defy the people I love .. . They mean well, but they don’t know me, so they have no authority to dictate my life to me.  Still, from childhood I’d been taught I was supposed to yield to their judgments in all matters.

In the fall, I made the decision:  I would move.  I would cut the safety rope linking me to a life I mostly hated, but which was quite secure, and go in pursuit of something more. Once I reached this decision, I must say, I have not had a moment of fear or uncertainty. I have paused frequently to ask myself whether I really was willing to take this risk, and each time the answer was a joyful Yes!

The Hand of God in this has been unmistakable.  I am in awe of how He has guided my steps along the way, even feeling Him laughing at me and saying, “Sweetheart, what took you so long?”

I never had to place my property on the market. When I began doing my research, my neighbor offered to buy the place and offered me the high end of current market value for our area (I knew this because I’d already looked, before I talked with them of my intentions). We closed the sale on a Wednesday. That evening, I got in the car and headed to my chosen new locale for what I believed would be the first of several “recon” missions.

I arrived late Thursday evening.  Friday, I met with a dear Christian realtor I’d connected with online. She showed me one house. I fell in love with that house, beginning with the front porch. It abundantly met my needs and left me “room to grow” — physically and aesthetically,  The rental was well within my budget.  I filled out the application.

“Laura, you must contact the pastor over at such-and-such church. My good friend tells me they have just lost their organist of more than 50 years, and they need someone.” I thought, okay, maybe next week. . .   The pastor contacted me. On Monday I went and played for him and for the one Board member who was able to come over on very short notice.  I was provisionally offered the position, pending completion of a formal audition.

I cut my recon mission short, headed back to my home and began my move (I had a contractual provision to remain in my old home until the end of the school year). Friends offered to help — a massive savings over the professional movers I’d thought I’d have to hire.

There were decisions to make.  I felt that — not just because of spatial and economic moving considerations — I needed to take only those things I dearly love and actually need.  Only the items that would fit in the life I want. So far as furniture went, that meant my antique bed, two chairs, and my desk; everything else, I sold or donated to my church charity.  Of the smaller items, if it could not be immediately put to use to help me realize the life I want, it would not go.  A saddle I’d held on to for sentimental reasons, for more than 30 years (I have not had a horse since I was 18, nor ridden but a couple of times since I was 14) would not make the move with me. I gave away more than half my books in order to save on moving space. I gave an avid gardener friend all my yard tools.  The trailer itself — the neighbors did not want to deal with it — I was able to re-home with a couple who would move it and refurbish it for their own daughter, recently escaped from an abusive marriage.  They also helped me with the cleanup as I moved out.

Several friends came and helped me pack, easing the physical stress on my body.

In a scant 10 days, I was back on the road, this time to stay.

I admit I hurt some people with my decisions — not just to move, but more, to keep my own counsel regarding the move until the last possible moment.  I did this primarily to spare myself the stress of having to explain myself to the extended family.  And I feel justified in that decision, still, because they all have made major life decisions without reference to me, and I think informing would have been too much akin to permission-seeking.

I have moved in order to create for myself the life I want. It’s not about betraying my family (although I confess to a bit of the good ol’ British Workers’ Salute in the direction of a couple of people who had betrayed and abandoned me at a crucial hour.) There was no room for expansion, in my old home.  The area I lived in seemed to sap the joy and energy from me even as its sandy soil saps nutrients from the soil itself. A cousin had pointed out that everything is stunted in that region — even the deer are significantly smaller than just a county or so west, where the terrain takes on a different character.  I was stunted, I realized, and I want to grow.

 

Power Sheets: First Impressions

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

I promised to let you know what I think of Lara Casey’s Power Sheets. My box arrived yesterday, and my first impression is that it’s living up to all the hype and enthusiasm I’ve seen on YouTube.  I think I’m going to find this to be a most helpful tool in facing the New Year.

For one thing, the product itself is sturdy as well as beautiful. Heavy paper to write on — and she urges you to make a mess of it, not limit yourself to your best and most beautiful .  .   sturdy dividers. Lovely stickers — and I am not a sticker fan. (Confession: I’ve already used stickers. My favorite are the gold foil arrows that help draw attention to salient or memorable points in the explanatory/inspirational text leading into our personal reflections.)

But the really important point is that these evaluation and planning prompts aren’t trite. They invite one to go deep, to think long and hard, and honestly, about a particular question.  I’ll be revisiting the pages over the next few days and trying to go more deeply and broadly into each one.

This is a workbook that invites deep reflection and conscious planning. And, I must say, realistic goal-setting.  I appreciate this more than I can say. Lara even has review and evaluation re-visits on a monthly and quarterly basis; this is not a one-off, trivial News Years Resolutions exercise.  She also has a video series that she emails to you when you order, that goes through the book in very manageable segments.

There are also YouTube videos in abundance that show you particulars of what the product looks like and what the prompts are. My favorites (so far) are Elyssa Nalani’s and Ashyln Writes.  You can do a basic search for PowerSheets in the YouTube search bar and come up with loads more. They’ll also have links galore in the info box.  I won’t add more here.

But, yes, I recommend this product. It’s pricey – I would never have bought it had I not been deadly serious about making some changes. But since I am that serious, I’d say the money is well spent.

On Love, Part Three

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

In my last post, I pointed out that loving turns a spotlight on us.

My marriage to TFP was a desert, emotionally. Sometimes I would try to contort myself into odd configurations to try to get his attention and make him take me seriously.  Sometimes I just fought him. All the things I was told a Christian marriage was supposed to be simply were not there for us, and I was resentful of his scorn and derision of those ideals, as well as of me.

When I was dating my second husband, a bad alcoholic and probably an undiagnosed bipolar, there were a lot of good things going on. What TFP had criticized and ridiculed about me, H2 found cheerful and welcoming and enjoyable.  When I cooked a meal, H2 appreciated it and told me so (and he ate with a hearty appetite).  When I re-arranged the furniture, he said it looked nice — not, “Why did you do that?”  There was a neglected, wounded domestic side to my nature, and H2 seemed to enjoy the fruits of my efforts in that direction, which flattered my feminine ego. The rest of my personality. . .  I was convinced (by TFP, in part) that my complexity was at least partially to blame for my inability to be happy; I was ready to narrow my life down, I thought, in order not to be alone.

But human nature won’t be narrowed down. H2 and I weren’t “equally yoked.”  H2 was straight, he thought I was bright and funny, he told me I was beautiful and he made me laugh and we had a lot of fun together — fishing, camping, and so on.  But I was better educated than he was, and after we were married, the flattery changed to complaining about the “junk” that marked some of the things I like best about myself:  my books, music, art.  He had bragged on how smart I was, before we were married, but afterward he found that threatening — he resented the clutter of my library and writing, in a temper would talk about backing a truck up to the back door and hauling off “all that junk.”  He decided he disliked my friends, even my blue-collar friends like himself, friends I’d had since high school; he only wanted to socialize with his family and friends. He was very demanding in that regard, and I lost touch with people whose company I had enjoyed, before. We had different religious and political values — again, revealed only after we were married.

So — you see, although I had a sort of love for H2, it wasn’t a mature or healthy sort of love for marriage. It was more along the lines of what C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, refers to as storge — an affection given to one’s family, or to a dependent or inferior.  It is, he said, the sort of affection a dog might have for the cat doing figure-8s around its legs, “although no self-respecting dog would ever confess to it.”  — or something along those lines; I don’t have the book in front of me.  It’s not at all the sort of respect-based love a woman ought to have for her husband.

Which brings me back to loving, and to what loving DF has taught me about the nature of love — and about myself. Love devoid of respect and esteem might do in some passing and mediocre, inessential relationships, but not in our most intimate, our deepest friendships. Let the romantic element of love be unrequited or unfelt in life’s various challenges; the respect and esteem can still stand strong and vigorous and healthy in the face of all things.

This is important. After the demoralizing experience of having been married to a man who couldn’t appreciate our femininity, who scorned us for being women — after trying to adapt to the impossible in hopes of becoming lovable in his sight — we need the experience of loving, and even more than of being loved, in order to be healed.  Loving wakes us up. It makes us whole. It reveals to us what is real and important about ourselves.  It shows us our dignity, our strength, our beauty, and our worth. It affirms our authenticity while leaving us free to discover just who we are.

After the destructiveness of past self-denial, loving gives us back to ourselves.

 

On Love, Part Two

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

Life was so much easier, back in the day when the only thing that mattered about a boy was that he be cute and like horses!  But we are women, now, and love isn’t about an infatuation-attraction.

“Love is blind,” the old saying goes. Well, no, it’s not. Love turns a spotlight on the character of our Beloved. And on ourselves.

On the one hand, we have what Dr. Alice von Hildebrand called the “Tabor Vision,” seeing our Beloved in the divine light of who he was created to be at his best. This isn’t the sort of false vision that marks infatuation and emotional need; need tends to manufacture this idea of good and virtue, and, furthermore, build on it to create almost a character in a story we want to live out — something quite unrelated to reality.

But on the other hand, Love also shows us how our Beloved’s humanity plays itself out – in real time:  what his flaws and weaknesses are, his temptations, his Achilles’ heel. And love won’t let us hide from these failings, nor pretend they aren’t there.

Seeing a person as he really is, and not as we want him to be, takes time. DF and I have been friends for more than twelve years. Twelve years is brief in retrospect, but seems interminable in anticipation.  I had no hope, when we met, that we’d be friends now; I thought he was just one more person I was chatting with online who’d fade into the interweb echo chamber as we moved on from that web site and were occupied with the conversations of other people. As real life dominated.  I didn’t know he’d become part of the fabric of my real life. And, because I wasn’t “In-ter-est-ed” (in my best Bugs Bunny as Madge The Beautician voice while I bat my eyelashes) the friendship developed on its own timetable, in its own way, with its own integrity.

There’s a reason I speak of liking DF, of my respect, admiration, and esteem for him:  those were there first.

Love is a powerful force:  it is concerned with our investment in the good of the Beloved. Even our serving that good (not a popular concept in a world that insists we demand our own rights and deserts!) — which involves some varying degree of self-denial.

But it also, at the same time, builds us and strengthens us, so that if we must stand alone, walk in solitude, we can do it. Love of the Beloved teaches us our greater strength and worth.

 

On Love

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

I am almost afraid to write this one.  I’m afraid of overplaying my hand, of jinxing myself. Of looking stupid.  I also have a strong reticence about publicly discussing something very private and even more holy to me.

I did not expect this, not at this time of life, and not! with this man (DF).  My first reaction, when I realized, when the recognition burst upon me like the brilliant lights of an elaborate fireworks display — “No. Oh, no. No, no, no, NO WAY!” because he’s my friend, and that was the start and finish of it, and  because he is warm and comfortable and funny and so remarkably safe, and I don’t want that disrupted.

When I became friends with DF, it was with absolutely zero interest in love. This was important because, I now realize, I had been too quick, following my divorce from TFP (The Fairie Prince) to imagine virtue and character in a man before it was really demonstrated. I’d also been slow to admit grave defects of character of a couple of the men I’d dated.

I’d come into the acquaintance with  DF with a whole stack of chips on my shoulder, because of those other relationships, and because he is better educated than I, and because I was defensive about that, and about being (seen as) a subordinate, defiant against a presumed dependency  . . .  yes, an entire stack of chips! and those gradually, with his good humor and patience, gingerly laid down . . . It was years in coming;  I didn’t want any of it upset.  And it all seemed so impossible —

The experiences of an abusive marriage (and marriage to a gay man is abusive) make it difficult to trust.  It’s not just that it’s hard to trust someone not to be playing me false, pretending to be someone they’re not. A man will pretend to love us in order to use us for easy sex, for instance. That one is pretty easy to suss, actually.  Or maybe he’s a Peter Pan looking for a surrogate mother to take care of him while he’s an overgrown child — a bit harder to recognize when boyishness is so endearing and normal (to a point) at any age.

It’s hard to trust someone to be authentic with me. To be honest and consistent about who he is and what he’s willing to bring to a relationship. To be able and willing to stand toe to toe with me, as an equal. I’m an “alpha female;” few men can stand with me as my equal, much less my “lord and master.”

Nor am I willing to be treated as a remodeling project — for the life of our marriage, more than a decade, TFP persisted in telling me I’d be great if only I’d alter this or that (usually my domestic failings), which was never enough — Or found fault with and punished for trivial disputes or failings.  It takes a lot of proving to reach a trust that someone will be loyal and won’t abandon me, not even when I am not all sweetness and light. When self-doubt blankets me. When I’m not good enough. Even when one knows the criticisms and punishments are a deflection from the real issue, and the abandonment was the other’s great flaw, there’s the nagging worry:  what if he (TFP) was right? and there is all this stuff wrong with me? There is no peace in trying to contort oneself into being “good enough” to “earn” someone’s love. But one tries, none the less.

So this friend, dear DF, has patiently earned my trust, and, what’s more, my respect and esteem . . . this man whom I admire so greatly, is far dearer to me than I ever expected him to be.

By not looking for, in fact by immediately and very decidedly ruling out, all the “interesting” stuff, I actually served myself well by allowing the friendship with DF — with the trust, respect, and esteem that give foundation to that friendship — to find its own level. To grow into its own time and sphere, without being forced or manufactured, or manipulated by wishful thinking. And I think that is important: we have to learn the patience and we have to find the peace with ourselves to allow every relationship to find its proper level in our lives.

There is no compensating for the losses of our youth, or the wounds that come from our failed marriages. Yet we are so often driven to try, come hell or high water. DF is not a replacement for TFP; he is his own man, with his own integrity; at the same time, because we do not exist in stasis, I am not the same woman I was in the early years of my friendship with DF, much less the early period after the divorce from TFP. Consequently, my esteem for DF and the friendship we share have an integrity and a dynamic – almost a life – of their own.

Again and again, I am left in awe after a conversation in which DF has made it very clear that he has no agenda to remodel me, that what he wants for me is that I be faithful to myself, that I live with integrity and strive to be my best in all that I do, in every sphere of my life. He makes me want to stand a bit taller, be stronger and better . . . but he leaves it to me to determine just what that means.

This is unexpected freedom.

 

How do we find ourselves again?

~ Laura Lowder

I can only tell you how it happened to me:
First, I was in college when DH and I separated and divorced. It was the first time I’d realized I am intelligent; it was my first major success.  He tried to sabotage it, but I knew that leaving school to follow him, when he announced his intention to leave, would have catastrophic effects on me. Deciding to stay where I was and to let him move out alone was one of the best decisions I ever made.  Brutally difficult (remember, I didn’t know at that point that he was gay), but worth it.

A few years later, during the course of my job, I came across a wonderful pamphlet, “Do You Love Me?” a reproduction of a talk by John Barger, founder of Sophia Institute Press. As Barger detailed the story of the death and rebirth of his own marriage, and the death of his much-loved wife, I found that the ideals I’d always held of marriage, of intimacy, were not, as DH had insisted, “unrealistic, naive, and irrational,” but were legitimate. And, in fact, were the teachings on the nature of marriage by the Catholic Church. This one event was huge.  It validated my deepest instincts and intuitive understanding, which DH had repeatedly ridiculed.

In the fall of 2005 I took the advice of some friends and auditioned for, and was accepted into, a large regional chorus. This activity placed me in the company of some very fine men and women, some of whom shared my ideals, values, and faith; all of whom were intelligent and accomplished people.  The camaraderie I experienced there gave me an increased sense of fitting in among good people, something I’d not pursued since I’d graduated from college, after the divorce.

A group of us would go out for a late supper after rehearsals, and the conversations around the restaurant table moved me to shake off the residue of the attitudes I’d put on in order to try to “get along” with a man who simply would not, could not, be gotten along with.  I found myself beginning to turn again to values and ideals I’d thought I’d “outgrown,” but in reality had only stepped away from in order to accommodate a difficult person and situation.  As I returned to them, I found more clearly who I am, in my own integrity.

I learned through reading, studying, and simply observing what matters to me, what I find strong and enduring, and what is fleeting, artificial, and unsubstantial. I jettisoned the latter bit by bit, and reinforced my understanding and love of the former.

One lovely thing that happened was not of my choosing, but the happy “accident” of biology, I think. One morning, in my late 40s, heading into menopause, I woke up one morning thinking, I have spent my entire life being told I have to be careful not to upset or worry or offend other people.  Well, it’s time for those other people to start worrying about not upsetting me!

I distanced myself from people who revealed that their acceptance of me was conditional upon my altering myself to satisfy them.  I’m not talking about holding a moral line — goodness knows, those are easy enough to cross. And too often, people who are critical of some things are astonishingly tolerant of immorality (so long as it doesn’t inconvenience them) — I mean, rather, that if I didn’t alter my personality, or my temperament, or my Faith, or my interests/tastes, etc. then those things were subject to criticism.  Sometimes we can’t physically distance ourselves — it’s a relief when we can – but we can mentally and emotionally draw some lines in the sand and withdraw from that point.  And we can do so with dignity, calm, and clarity.  It may take some practice, but it can be done.

Everything we encounter becomes an invitation to affirm our true nature:  we either bend with the prevailing wind at that moment in order to try to get along, or we stand in the growing certainty of what is right. This might be a subjective right — discovering one’s proper work, for instance; I have worked as a shipping clerk and as a secretary, responsible positions that my practical family and friends greatly approved of, and I did my work well enough, but I was very unhappy with the bad fit of what I was doing and the disuse of my real gifts and abilities.  Or it might be an objective moral right — the defense of marriage, of the vulnerable and defenseless among us, and so on.

There is great strength in solitude. A younger woman with children to care for might find this very difficult. A bit of quiet each day is barely enough to keep the inner batteries charged for facing the day’s challenges, much less to find solid grounding and healing. We use what we have and must trust God to provide the rest.  I didn’t have money for a vacation when DH and I divorced, nor for many years after. When it came, it was like the old-fashioned “rest cure.”

The trick, however, is to embrace the solitude and its temporary discomforts, and not to try to hide from it/them with noise and activity.

 

 

 

 

Time for ourselves

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

In my previous post, I talked about how relationships and sex can become a distraction and an anaesthetic against the pain of discovering our husbands are gay.  I want to pursue that train of thought a bit further, please.

We are created by God, we women, with a deep desire for someone to love, and to be loved. Frankly, I’m not sure that the need to have someone to love isn’t the greater of the two. So it’s very natural that we should not like to be alone, that we should want to immerse ourselves in loving someone as soon as we can, after our marriage ends.

We also have a distorted need, because of the twisted dynamic of being married to a man with same-sex attraction (and probably sex addictions involving pornography, now), to make up for the time we lost in our bad marriage, or the desire to compensate for that loss — maybe even the desire to erase the nightmare from our conscious minds.

But the same distortions that made our marriages so bad also shaped us — our efforts to accommodate our husband’s disordered inclinations have bent our expectations, our sense of ourselves, our reactions to conflict and challenges, etc. This is a hard reality:  we have been warped and bent and bruised and wounded by our husband’s homosexuality.  

We must take time to get well.

Rushing into a new relationship only compounds our wounds. We can mistake different for better. I’ve joked about my alcoholic Peter Pan second husband, “. . . but he was straight!” but that, too, was a bad marriage that ended in divorce and left me feeling used and dirty.

We need to give ourselves time, frightening as it is, as condemned to it as it might appear, to recover from the disordered, narcissistic expectations and pronouncements of our gay husbands. After twisting ourselves into emotional pretzels to try to accommodate a disorder we didn’t know we were living in, we need to learn how to untwist, to stand up straight. We have to know who we are, in our own integrity — what is important to us, what are our strengths and weaknesses, what motivates us (beyond panic and the desire to have someone to love and to be loved). . . .  Truly, discovering who we are, out of the toxic and manipulative environment of the mixed marriage, is an exciting adventure.

Don’t deprive yourself of this.

Straight up the middle

~ Laura Lowder ~ 1 Comment

The quarterback snaps the ball, and, darting first to the right then the left, suddenly puts his head down and goes straight up the middle of the field, plowing through the opposing team members like an icebreaker through Arctic waters.

It makes a good metaphor, you know? Life hands us the ball, a situation we didn’t know we were going to have to face. We can’t just stand there; life demands we move. And time moves us whether we wish it or not. We cannot throw that ball down, it will rebound into our hands. If we try to duck to right or left there are opposing forces waiting to trip us up and to lay us down to the ground, to pile on us in a mound. But those forces also loom at us from the road ahead as we can see it, and we don’t have any easy alternatives.

It’s a very human response, wanting to avoid pain and suffering.  However, there are those events we simply cannot avoid in any healthy way. YIELD! the crisis demands, and we must, or the hardship and suffering will follow us and haunt us and be dragged out far longer.

There are several ways we try to avoid our suffering:

Alcohol and drugs.  You may have seen the story from more than three years ago of the friend whose doctor placed her on an addictive sedative and left her on it for eight years. The addiction didn’t give her time for the pain to go away; it held that pain at the ready for a more sober occasion, it actually compounded that pain to her grief and adjustment. “Gina’s” story does not have a happy ending:  nearly three years after I wrote that post, she was found dead of alcohol poisoning by one of her children. Beautiful and stylish, funny, brilliant, enormously talented . .  but it wasn’t enough. She was absolutely certain she couldn’t cope with the situation she was living with. She tried so hard to avoid hurting, at all costs, but there was never a full payout to be free. And in the end, her avoidance method killed her and left her family coping with the collateral damage, in its wake.

Relationships and sex. We were lonely in our marriage, and the fear of unending loneliness is huge. We also have to recognize that the very disordered marriage to our SSA spouse left us feeling unattractive and disordered in terms of our own value. Consequently, when we start dating again, when other men pay attention to us and put the moves on us, it’s a heady experience. The energizing rush of a potential romance is a welcome relief after living in an emotional desert.  But the hormonal rush of sex masks a multitude of problems.  It covered them in our marriage for a while, and to a degree. Now it’s easy to use “romance” and sex to hide from our fear of being condemned to a loveless life.  But we need time to heal and to find our own integrity, and a hasty relationship can be as bad, in a different way, as our mixed marriage to a gay man.  I briefly remarried an alcoholic Peter Pan who was, in the end, as selfish and disinterested in me as DH had been.  I recently met a woman whose second husband was a serial womanizer.  This is something to protect ourselves against.

There are other forms of escape:  Work. Absorption in our children. Church. Injudicious and uncontrolled spending. Fantasy and daydreams. Anything that is good in our lives and a good in itself (imagination is a very good thing, for instance) can take on inordinate importance, and gives us a false sense of being protected from our reality or a respite from it. We have to be circumspect. Always.

Because some things in life — and grief and loss are among them – cannot be escaped. There are no shortcuts. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. One has to go straight up the middle of the field. The only way through it is straight through it.

 

 

Forgiveness Is the Key

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

We’ve heard clever explanations of hanging on to a grudge, such as letting someone live rent-free in your head. That’s okay, so far as it goes –

But let’s take it further:  do you spend a lot of time thinking and/or talking about the bad hand you’ve been dealt by the Fates? the wrongs you’ve suffered? how unappreciated you are?  how you suffer?

We all know people who do. I know several on social media who rarely post anything other than the attention-seeking whining and complaining.  It’s boring.  And you know, I just don’t see how they can be happy people.

You want to be happy?  You want to be at peace?
1.  Give your whole life to God, and walk with Him.  That’s worthy of a series of posts, right there, because it’s important to understand Who God Is and what He requires of us as we live for Him and reflect His Divine Nature to the rest of the world. But nothin’, and I mean NOTHIN’! is better than that!

2.  Forgive the people who have hurt you.  Yeah it’l come round to taunt you from time to time.  Some times it’s a torment and it might not even be easy to recognize what’s going on.  It took me weeks, this winter, to figure out I was still living under the shadow of my parents’ choices.  But keep trying!

Forgiveness isn’t forgetting the past or pretending it doesn’t matter (things that hurt you at the core of your being matter a lot).  I think of it as letting go of the very human desire to be avenged.  To get even. To persuade the person who hurt you to see the hurt and regret it and to make amends. Tha’s out of your hands and you’ll drive yourself batty, obsessing about it. God will rightly judge and hand out penalties in the Judgment (yes, I believe in Purgatory, and it’s a good, healthy place); our job is to release our need to be made right to and to go on living. Yes, 70×7 for the same offenses.

Learn, if you’re still stuck, to get out of being the victim or someone’s emotional punching bag. Or rescuer or one to hide behind. Forgiveness is NOT about letting other people willfully and viciously use and hurt us!  Become strong!  Learn to value yourself (get counselling if you find this difficult — not for the rest of your life, but for a few weeks/months while you find yourself)

3. Choose to be happy.  Count your blessings.  Can’t find any?  Start a notebook.  You got a roof over your head? Clothes on your back? Food in your belly? Start there.  Recognize daily beauty — the song of a mockingbird or the flash of blue of a bluebird, or the serene ambling across your yard of a doe and fawn — and make a note of it.  Note the brilliant colors you encounter in Nature.  Find beauty all around you.  Put a pot of flowers on the table (heading into spring, I splurged when I really couldn’t afford it on bunches of tulips from our local grocery store.  My spirit needed them more than my body needed the food, and I can’t begin to say how much they lifted my spirits, what pleasure they gave me for a week at a time).

Study other people.  Who do you admire and respect? Why? Reach for those qualities in yourself.
Who makes you feel happier for being around them? Why? Emulate them!

Do you have friends? Be grateful for them. Look for ways to be a blessing to them.

Is there someone you know who needs help? Help her. Take the neighbor to the doctor and the grocery store when she’s not able to drive.  Pick up an extra bunch of tulips to cheer her up, too — or, this time of year, it’s little pots of miniature roses that are so beautiful.

Cultivate the habit of smiling at people.

Discipline yourself to stop bellyaching over every little thing. Everyone knows your sufferings by now; no need to belabor the point.  Now let them see your more cheerful and good-natured side.

Find one thing nice to say to everyone.

Get out of yourself.  Yes, take some time to rest and to be quiet and alone. But — bit by bit — “This week I will do this one thing” — get out of the rut.  It really won’t take long before you really have found some unexpected peace and joy and have become, very truly, your better self.

More to Life

~ Laura Lowder ~ Leave a comment

 

The arrival of spring invites us to reflect on how wonderful the seasonal changes are. My Gratitude Journal has been filled primarily with a record of the horticultural indicators that winter really is ended and spring is at hand — important when our temps are still a bit below average, right now.

The natural year and its seasons finds their match in our interior lives as well. The winter of our souls comes to an end, for a time, at least, as well, as the lengthening and warming days revives our energy levels.  And we discover that winter, with its cold, dark, starkly bleak days, is a time of hidden growth, a preparation for the fruitfulness of the coming summer. Winter isn’t only about rest from heavy productivity, it’s also a time of living off of resources, processing what we harvested before, of being still and quiet in preparation for an outburst of glory, with the lengthening of days and the warming of our lives.  Winter is when soil rebuilds itself. Winter is the season that makes us wise. Winter is the time when we go deep.

But at last it’s spring. Days are much longer, and for the most part a bit warmer, too. A lot of the trees and flowers have been blooming for the past month or so, and after this week my area is forecast to be out of the freezing temps for our nighttime low, even though our daytime temps are still running a bit below average. My energetic neighbors have long since planted their early gardens: potatoes, onions, sweet peas, cabbages, etc. Now that Easter is at hand, they’re looking at getting the warm-weather vegetables in the ground, too.

This is also a season when my neighbors are burning brush pruned earlier in the year, or “prescribed burning” the undergrowth or wood or yard debris of prior years. It’s a time to clean up – not just to make things tidy and manageable in appearance; it removes the fuel for out-of-control wildfires, such as the ones that swept through this region and destroyed so many homes a little more than fifty years ago.

A new season of productivity is at hand, in our minds and hearts as well as in the natural world. I’m spring cleaning. I have joint issues, so it’s going embarrassingly slowly; what might take a friend or family member an hour to accomplish, in a whirlwind of activity, I took a four-day weekend to do, this week, one step at a time. But the results are satisfying. “Brick by brick,” that’s how Rome was built, and it’s how my life is being rebuilt, too.

Like my neighbor burning brush cuttings last week, I’ve been trying to purge household debris that makes it harder for me to navigate the life and work God has given me. I’ve been living out of plastic bins for too many years; this weekend those bins and a metal cabinet went to the trash bin and a lovely wooden cabinet replaced them. Those bins were cheap and they were adequate, but the new cupboard, an old wardrobe fitted out with shelves, not only holds more, it’s also beautiful. We need beauty.

I got other things done as well, that aren’t so immediately visible, but also are satisfying. Writing work, administrative work for an organization I volunteer with. Music prep for Eastertide.

It’s a time to re-evaluate all sorts of activity. I told a friend Sunday evening that I really need to cut back on my social media time; it isn’t just a time suck, it has also left me habituated to the quick sound bite and short bursts of “conversation” that become a habit, a habit that makes it harder to focus for these longer (!) efforts like a blog post — much more so, an article or book.

Cutting back — reducing or ejecting — the clutter and debris. Cultivating the things we decide matter most — the relationships we value, or the skills that God has given us to use in His service —

Cultivating our own character: resolving to purge weaknesses, faults, defects and to cultivate virtue.

This is a season for renewal.