The thing is, your kids end up being like you, and also not like you.
What will keep your family together?
The culture and energy of each of our kid's families and lives will have distinctly different parts than ours. In time, what our family is could fade if we don't know what it is that we're all about, how we're all the same, what our values are.
What are our values? Who are we? What are the unique parts of our family?
Our country has almost no values that bind us. Freedom. That's it. Freedom for us, hopefully freedom for all. I guess that makes up for a lot of other values.
I bought a small book that is just that, what our family is about. You answer questions that have you fill in a blank. What do you enjoy doing most? Best memories. Best qualities. Maybe it'll spur us to decide what we're about. We know what we're about, but we've never said, "This is what we are."
*****
We worked really hard on the wedding. We spent hours planning and doing tasks over six months. We started almost immediately after the engagement in early December with researching and doing site visits with venues. It was almost nonstop for six months.
I haven't recovered from that all yet. The wedding itself proved to be a lifetime family event. It was worth all the work. However, that doesn't automatically change that I'm tired. Now, I'm just happy tired, with a tiny bit of grumpy tired as I want the cleanup to be done and onto other things.
I wish it wasn't so true that good things usually come from hard work. My garden and yard are growing because I've spent a lot of time on them. We were so blessed by the wedding in large part due to the many, many details we thought through and then executed on. It all took time and energy and then, oh, here's the word, you have the harvest.
Harvest, harvest, harvest. That word has been used in my life primarily in religious terms. If you witness to people about Jesus, you will have a harvest. Of what? I was never sure. I guess people that go to your church. Or heaven.
Pretty much all solid spiritual traditions and teachings, most wisdom teachings, refer to the need for hard work and then play, or hard work and then the reward. I guess reward is a more neutral term.
Farmers, now they understand harvest. They understand working hard for months and months for a week of work at the very end that brings it all in. Maybe since we don't listen to them much in our collective national voice, we're missing out on the wisdom of people who spend their entire working lives doing small chores each day that ultimately lead up to something substantial.
*****
What do I spend my time doing? Today I ate breakfast with Jay at our local deli/grocery store. I dropped off the dress I wore to the wedding for dry cleaning. I bought two sprinklers for the lawn. All this in the little circle of shops we frequent. Home to weed, plant the new cuke plant, get laundry going, folding clothes, doing some planning for the weekend, checking in at work.
Rob Bell made an offhand comment in one of his podcast episodes that much of life is comprised of this type of activity: errands, cleaning, cooking, picking up kids at school, repeat. I was thrilled to hear him drop that comment in the middle of whatever else he was saying. It made him quite human and also, he just dropped some real truth.
On the edges of personal growth and spirituality teachings haunts this culture of pursuing success.
This revolves quite a bit around maximizing every moment. That is definitely an underying tenet.
So what happens then when inevitably, you're bored? Or feeling down? Tired? Lonely? Just want to rest?
Inevitably, these emotions will be viewed with suspicion and hostility. Instead of welcoming them in, looking at them, trying to learn from them, accept them, their is a rush to not let them be there or be part of life at all.
*****
So, time to call it a night. I'm tired and kind of grumpy. I look around my house and life and see a lot of uncompleted projects. I am not even sure which way to go, when, how long, etc. I was hoping to do some planning this morning but ended up mainly just working.
I don't have anything to be grumpy about, and as I type that, I realize that is exactly something my mother would say. Wow, officially freaked out.
One thing I should touch on which I don't much is my health.
I am feeling amazingly healthy. I'm feeling like I have decent energy, energy enough to stay up late which I love because I think it's the only thing the women in my family had to assert their independence. (Tangent: I don't know why I like night so much. I like the aesthetic of night time, the quiet, the low darkness and sparking lights, the stars, planets and moon, the different sounds and smells only at night. I like the solitude, the possibilities to think, the settling down into a womb feeling. I like the sense that time has stopped. Yeah, I think that's part of it. It feels like I'm really alone, even in time, like, I'm tricking time by working at night, by thinking at night. I think it's easier on my HSP issues where I just get overstimulated by everything during the day even though I love hiking in the mountains more than just about anything which you really can't do at night and not get eaten by something. And yeah, I'm sure that's an official hiking fact so be sure to quote me and create some paranoia. End tangent... which this is a good one if we wandered out to the possibility of being eaten while hiking at night).
What I was starting to get at is my health, which is pretty amazing. I think of where I was pre- and post-accident and both were super shitty. I thought I had been seeing doctors to help with stuff but we took it up a notch or a hundred. I remember one week I think I had an appointment every day of the week with a provider of some kind.
All this AMIT muscle release stuff has changed my life. There is seriously cool stuff going on in the area that osteopaths live, chiropractors doing muscle release and pressure point work with muscle testing and muscle groups, body movement and sitting/standing stuff, the Foundation training. It's all changed my life.
I've just realized lately though that I'm kind of soul tired and not sure what I need to make that better. I know I'm tired of not loving my house, the colors and furniture. I'd like to have some direction with my career. I'd love to get all this clutter and craziness of our life landed so we're not so distracted by what we've been through and what's left.
I'd love to just feel settled into some things that are beautiful and life-giving and directed. Just that.
I continue to be deeply intrigued by Blue Zone stuff and went to a plant-based diet lecture tonight at the library. I'm learning a lot about food and myself and life. In that, I'm more committed than ever to staying connected to people, literally anyone. I am trying to talk to anyone I meet or see, ask questions, stay engaged. It feels like it's helping my soul come alive. We are losing that and I am trying to step it up instead of continuing to retreat.
So these are all good things. i need a good sleep and to keep moving forward with the changes toward beauty and purpose and helping others with whatever I learn that good.
I will say I wish I knew what were the things that pushed me over the edge into health. Was it truly the combination of it all, or one thing specifically? The biggie to me feel like the work w/ the chiropractor and DO, switching to more plant-based foods, switching to red wine on occasion and not much hard alcohol anymore, more exercise/movement, less anxiety... so much goodness as I type it all.