Sometimes that’s the question for me.  Am I giving out of true heart, or do I have alternative motives beneath the surface: like looking good, or trying to get someone to fix themselves with my “generosity”.  It happens.  Sometimes without me knowing it.  “I just want to help,” is such a deceiving statement.

I’m trying to help because YOU SHOULD FIX YOURSELF!!  Or, I’m trying to help so I look like the rescuer that I am–saint that I am–codependent fixer and manipulator that I can be.

It’s hard to recognize motives when for generations maybe, they’ve been dressed up in the goody-two-shoes with frills and gloves and nodding cooing helpfulness.  “Detached loving” is a peculiar statement.  However, it’s a new theory of how to love.  Not unlike “tough love” in some ways.

How do I detach and love?  Ask questions: “Would you like a suggestion?”  “What are you looking for?”  “How do you see that happening?”  Perhaps is always better than: “What can I do to help?”  For me it is an open question that sets me up on the battlefield of fixer and victim, martyr and rescued.  Tit-for-tat just never seems to work but goes off in endless arguments of who did what for what reason and why it didn’t work and blame and shame.

Just don’t want to go there.

So today it is a breath-by-breath focus on compassionate listening.  Calm consideration.  Lots of time to meditate on ideas before choices are grabbed like the last cherry on the tree.  I allow the cherry to fall into my hands.  I allow the easy right next action to saunter up to me like my cat awaiting a rub at the ears.

I never need to ask the Divine for guidance if I am sitting in Her lap purring.

It’s sunny out today–maybe the only one for a bit, but I don’t really care.  I’ve got a sugar hangover and it is exactly like any other kind of hangover.  Down, depressed, headache, tummy unsettled, cranky, tired, and pissed off that I got myself in this stupid situation.

Craving sweets like wanting attention.  Giving myself a chocolate peanut cluster as a treat for being a good girl and attending a difficult boring family event.  And then it twists my body into a pretzel.

I breathe in the fragrance of my Dear Friend’s Presence.

My prayer for you is that you are filled with the soft pure peace and
harmony of compassion for yourself, no matter the storm around you.  The
centered calm within every cell of your body, all thoughts, all
feelings, all words and actions–that rooted strength of serenity–is
ever-present.  The Presence is a touchstone crystal within your heart
that shines light from the inside out.

And for me I claim that the Divine is all the family I need.  That I
see in everyone’s eyes the soul of goodness within each frantic human
wrap.  I am loved, lovable and loving at every movement and word.  I
carry in my heart a waterfall of goodness and ease everywhere I go.

Today is a precious gift and I can cherish each bundle of courageous earnest love around me.  I can flow with the rich river of giggling grace with delight.

I like rainy days.  Normal drizzle is the hallmark of the Pacific Northwest.  Why people move here and complain about no sun is hilarious.  Rain brings the green.  Rain also reassures me that I don’t have to be all bright and sunny and positive in a “let’s-go-to-a-big-fair-with-lots-of-people” mood.  I can allow my funky undescribably melancholy seep through and be nourished by the soft dripping wet.

Tears falling lately, in loving tribute to the family dynamic I never really had as a child–or had, but miss, or had and can’t go back.  In any case, it doesn’t exist like that any more and the little girl part of me rushes to see family and sits there watching frowns, or having a brother come in and go out of the room, feeling disconnected, like I dialed up the wrong “Leave it to Beaver” episode and we don’t ever get to the “happily ever after part”.

Gratitude will heal this, recognizing the little family I have, the chosen family of sisters and brothers that do act like they want to be with me.  I am surrounded by them.  And the trees, bushes, grass and bird chirping nagging me to be part of the Divine Family. 

But being a rainy day human, I request those signs of love from Her Majesty–signs of being in the cosmos of kisses, huge galaxy of hugs.  Show me today Lady that I am surrounded by your familial, familiar, family Love.

I am faced with the very human idea of giving someone support and telling them they made a mistake.  What is a mistake anyway–just a detour.  But if I am a gardener and I want only daisies in this bit of dirt, I plant daisies and pull out the weeds.  I’ll let the bright dandelions grow in another patch of the yard. 

Being charged with a task that takes a team, I am dependent upon others–just like life.  As a manager of a team, I am responsible for the project and need to guide, prune and weed this part of a tiny garden.  Somehow I say “thank you,” but this doesn’t work, and you can’t do it like this anymore.  How can I help you be successful.

Hilarious.  Watching water flow, there is little to control the puddles and flooding.  We are a tiny set of beings on a lovely blue-green planet with hysterical story-telling minds. I control nothing; I make up stories.

Today’s story is about being immersed in love, like the rain that drips for days.  The birds are brilliantly busy, singing praises to bugs and worms coming up for air.  All my words come from the sweet fragrance of the earth to nourish.  I speak my truth with compassion.  I clarify my boundaries and celebrate the bumping to find out new border markers.

The ancients believed that if you could trace a circle around a square, you are tracing the beginning of the universe.  The point is the essence of the big bang, the soul’s birth, that point where the Divine spoke the Word.  A line is that movement of being, where the Divine sees itself and speaks “I am that I am” and it reverberates back from the nothingness to exist.

The shape is then an enclosure of space, time, matter and poof!  There is the earth, a four-square base for a pyramid of dimensions. 

I was never good at geometry, and am fascinated by shapes.  But the world and life seems to be filled with anything and everything BUT clear shapes.  The line from my birth to here and now is so curved, so foggy and filled with dotted lines at best.  My heart is not a clear shape.  The loves I have and had do not follow any straight line.  The shapes I have enclosed are but stories.

But I am familiar with the starting point.  It is the center of all circles, the start of all squares, the tips of the stars.  It is that deep breath that pulls in love, sends out love, stands in love.  I claim today that I am IN LOVE.  In the stillness that I find between the hysterical noise of life, I embrace the grace of Her gaze and the truth of Her soft whisper in my ear tingling my neck.  I follow Her breath.

We should have parties just before death visits.  Celebrating lives, remembering stories, crystallizing what people have said and done.  But lots of times death comes too fast, in the night or on the highway.  Still we should have parties.

Humans still weep, though, at missing the presence of loved ones.  That’s just the way we are.

I am a bit numb today.  I have spent the weekend celebrating lives.  One to one, eyes deep into eyes, soul to soul speaking to aches and dreams and fears.  Stories of who they are right now.

I’ve been to many memorials this weekend of some I will never see again. I honor their mirroring eyes and compassionate laughter.

Thanks for the memories of me through you.

I call on the energy of steady rain to keep me constant in Your heart today.  Refresh and restore my soul as I drive by the soothing streams.  Allow me to side-step the valley of the shadow of bad dreams today and to allow the chariot of your love to fill me with ease, comfort and clarity.

I’ve been looking into your eyes, reading the cards for you.  Bright hopes, furrowed brows, darting eyes.  There is indeed only one of us.  In your eyes it is me I see.

Wishing hoping planning releasing and laughing.  We laugh a lot.  We recognize how much spirit plays inside of us with these fabulous dances.

I see you, I hear you, I bless me and we are both the blessed, the blessor and the blessing.

Mending socks means that sometimes you have to weave new material between the threads that have disappeared with harsh use.  Not many of us darn socks these days, but all of us may have experience with strained relationships and ripped families.

Sometimes you can fix them, sometimes you can’t.  Amends means to change a contract.  There are times when my changed behavior–for the better–means we just can’t have the same relationship we did in the past.  I can indulge in a fantasy about former partners supporting my change of heart, but I can’t change their heart–only mine.

I can always use a change of heart.  Today I want my heart to be a big wet nasty bullfrog making huge delicious burping deep calls to spring.  I want to quack loud and proud like a mom duck with nine tiny fur-balls of fast-trotting babies lined up behind me.  Let my heart today be that brilliant and beautiful red-winged blackbird watching me from atop his perch.  Let me celebrate my territory of here and now life and give out a body trembling trill to the universe.

I AM THAT I AM THAT I AM!

That’s what the essence of life is, all, nothing and then something completely different.  The Tao says, “She who knows does not talk.  She who talks does not know.”  Thus a dilemma of a know-it-all, HA! 

But overflowing is something different.  Rather than telling what I know (which, by the way, is useless for YOU), I’m given words that are to be sung.  The brilliance of our continuous connection AS the waves of the Divine Ocean is a melody that fills me up and begs to be shared.

This light-song comes from within and is teased out by nature.  But the view changes, just like the seasons.  One minute I see the seed, and with a flash turn of the head, there is a bloom.  A year or two later, there is a rigid bare branch, or a sidewalk, or nothing.  Stories and memory are part of my palette here, though, and I draw on them every second.

What is fun is that we are traveling along a changing landscape, each of us different yet the same.  So if I talk about an old friend, or death, or self-pity, or beauty, you have your memory/story that follows along–and makes it uniquely yours.

What a kaleidoscope this rainy morning is here.  I call upon my Play Mate, the giggling Gypsy Fairy Godmother.  Let us dance the universe into a day of color.