How can I release this grip
This clinging on to everything good
As if my life depended on it
It feels so dangerous to release
All that I’m attempting to control
It is exhausting to hold on so tight
But it’s all I’ve ever known
Learned early to clutch and grasp
At what little good was parsed my way
If I loosen my fingers, if I let go my grip
Will I slide into the Void
Disappear into Nothingness
Or will I float into better climes
And find out what Life really feels like
I practice gratitude every day, so when Thanksgiving comes around, it is just like brushing my teeth to take time to acknowledge all in my life that I am appreciative of.
You see, I am a member of a tribe of gratitude list makers. I post what I am grateful for (and why) daily.
The “Grat List” that I am a part of was the brainchild of the wonderful fitness expert and life coach Erin Stutland. I joined it in 2011, when I regularly took a live Shrink Session class she was teaching at the time, and it has been a blessing ever since. (More about Erin’s class and how it changed my life here.)
The Grat List is a place to share gratitude, as often as you wish.
Some, like me, post pretty much daily.
Others pop in as they want or need to. “Need to grat!” “Feeling down…time to do a grat list!”
It is so much more than a space for expressing gratitude. There’s no one way to share, but somehow the format has evolved into writing a list of ten gratitudes, ten things to be excited about, and some brags thrown in for good measure.
What’s beautiful is how the list has become a virtual safe space, a place where we share wishes, heartbreak, fears, dreams, successes, prayers and, above all, love and support.
We ask “the list” for good thoughts or prayers, advice and help. We hold each other’s dreams and hold each other up.
I am ever grateful today, and every day, for the Grat List and its magic and power, and all of the souls- past, present and future – who make it the beautiful safe space it is. (Super extra gratitude for Erin, who is about to give birth to a real living child soon!”)
Here’s my list today:
I am so grateful:
To be alive, for my health, for my returning vibrance so that I may do the things that give me joy, for the wisdom of my body because she has healed so many times, for my huge heart because it keeps me loving this life, for my husband, who is so loving and wise, for Miracle, our cat, for her furry love and unconditional love, for the ever-flowing abundance within and without me, in every area of my life, for our warm, live-filled home, for fresh, healthy food and clean water, for the privilege of being able to do what I love for a living, for music, and how it connects me to my soul
I am excited:
To be flexible and of service today, to pick up the Irish family members at the airport, to see my sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews, to enjoy a beautiful home, to share a loving afternoon and evening of laughter, to get there and back safe and sound, to make cole slaw late tonight, for Julia and her exciting audition Monday, to help her prepare, to get off book for the web series shoot, to work on the audition sides with joy and ease, for JC going to Hawaii, for Shayna’s song to win the contest!!
I brag that:
I love Life and Life loves me
I am enough just as I am
I am connected through words and this blog to amazing people like you!
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
That black night
That night he came into her room
A part of her soul flew out the window
And left a hollow space inside her
A forever-empty place
A place as dark as the night
A hole that held shock and horror
In place of her innocent, free-flowing love
There can be no recompense
Nothing can ever make up for that loss
Even calling that piece back to her
Reuniting with her crucial center space
Cannot change the moments, the hours, the days, the years
Of being without her essential self
Yes, there is healing
Yes, there is repair
But the shape of the heart is forever changed
On a good day, she feels she is stronger for it all
On a bad, she wishes she’d gotten the chance to find out
Who she’d have become without his interference
That black night
And then came the day
I pulled the stuts out one by one
Pulled off the boards, and
The mighty fortress fell at last
Naked to the world, I stood still
Trembling in awe of my freedom
I kissed the ground goodbye
And greeted the sky hello
I carry my hurt as if it were an egg
‘Tis a delicately shelled precious part
In incubation, of me, but of its own, too
And if broken, my pain would spill
Thick yellow yolk to mix with clear
And what it could become would be lost forever
To the hardened mess of a premature birth
For as long as I recall, I’ve carried within me the following line:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
I can’t usually remember what poem it is from. I probably read it in high school English.
But it has stayed with me all of these years intact, the way wonderful writing can. It visits me at times, like an echoed wisdom from an ancestor since passed.
I think it stuck with me because even in high school, I sensed the existence of walls inside me.
I didn’t know it consciously. But often the Frost quote would float through my mind paraphrased as “There is something in me that doesn’t love a wall.”
Looking back, the Freudian slip was prophetic.
Those walls were walls that I’d built to protect me, but they’d also held me prisoner, because I did not know then that they were of my own making, and therefore my own to remove.
Years later, through much personal healing and growth, I’ve come to terms with my inner walls, and I find I am both of the people in Frost’s poem.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
Like the narrator, I, too, find that my walls want to come down.
Though I’ve come to accept them as a part of me to love and find compassion for, they also feel like something that wants to be dislodged, or that needs to disintegrate, feeling like foreign matter in the organic soul forest I inhabit within.
And like the neighbor, some ancient part of me feels them to be necessary. It’s as if there’s an ancestral heritage in place that pulls me to them, at odds with the part within that wants them down.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
I thank those parts within for their concern, and the peoples from which I came who needed walls to survive.
I thank them for their love and care.
I respectfully let them know that today, I choose a different way.
I feel their support at my back as I step out into the Great Adventure.
I lovingly dismantle each wall, and face the leafy, lush green of the world within and without, with my face towards the sun, unafraid of the shadows.
I wonder if Robert Frost was speaking of the walls within, too.
I like to think so. It makes me feel we are connected, like good neighbors can be.
Mending Wall
BY ROBERT FROST
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”
I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
I thought I was broken, thought I was missing
Thought parts of me had just died
Made friends with the holes that I thought you’d made
Made peace with what was left inside
Turns out I was wrong, nothing of me was gone
Certain parts just learned how to hide
I am whole, I am thriving, I am filled with myself
And that truth just cannot be denied
No longer have to trademark my grief
Don’t need the world to see where I was broke
I’ve given myself full attention and love
All I’d held dormant is now woke
I’ve befriended it all, found a place in my heart
For what used to have me in tatters
Don’t need you to see it to make it all real
It’s mine now, and that’s all that matters
“You’re not at all what I expected,” I said upon discovering my True Self.
“But I guess we’re stuck with each other now.”
A mist cloaked the green in a shroud of grey
I could no more discern the sky
No longer was I able to laugh or play
All my heart could do was contract, and cry
Then the mist lifted and my shrunk soul awoke
The whole of my heart took wing
I found myself in a new world, bespoke
Wholly alive, alight, at once I began to sing
Beyond the Skinny Branches 