Tag: Blessings

A letter to my dad…

Published on by janna2 Comments

 

Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

There are so many things you did that made you a great dad; here are some of them…

You were the one who said these kids are mine. When divorce had just begun to define a generation, when dads weren’t yet recognized as important as moms, you signed up to raise a one and four year old, something less than 1 percent could claim.

Giving Jeff and I an extended family to define who we were – we were a Bushaw. From spending time in Nana and Papa’s pool to Christmas at Aunt Debbie’s and birthdays, family weddings and every holiday in between, we went when maybe you would have preferred to be on your own sometimes. It made all the difference.

Camping with the Bushaws in Eastern Washington, Fawn Lake and the ocean. And sometimes getting to bring a friend along.

Helping me with my homework, especially geometry because you really are brilliant at math.

Playing in the snow and the go-kart were magical. You built a ramp, made sleds at work, and stayed out for hours having what seemed to us, as much fun as we were having. We had Kirby (as in Kirby the love bug), the go-cart you made and painted white with the number 1 in the circle. We were the envy of the neighborhood.

We always had a swing set and toys to play outside – and then making us go outside. We had bikes to ride with the neighbors, pumped up tires and a playing card clothes pinned to the spokes to sound like a motorcycle. Super cool.

We always had a home we were proud of, that was clean and organized with a nice yard, which gave us the consistency we needed. We could set our clocks by you, leaving at 7:30 am and returning at 4:30 pm – every single day. Grocery shopping on Sundays with dinners and lunches planned for the week and always a plan for a dinner, something I have a hard time with, including vegetables.

Watching Little House on the Prairie together showed us it’s okay to cry when you witness the circumstances of others.

Our family trip to Disneyland in the truck and camper, stopping along the way at KOA campgrounds, was magical. I remember swimming until my fingers were so waterlogged I wondered if they’d ever return to normal.

At Christmas you would get us everything on our lists – of course equaled out in number and cost – along with going out to get the tree and decorating together. We would peruse the Sears catalog writing down the item and dog-earing the pages. Never mind, we never saw these things before – we absolutely needed them now. You got them.

You never once disparaged our mom, even though there wasn’t any information out that said this was bad for the kids. Somehow you just knew this and kept your opinions to yourself.

Trick-or-treating on Halloween was super fun after getting our costumes put together with a pillowcase for the most candy and face paint, sometimes from ash in the fireplace. We got to keep and eat our candy, although I remember not eating much of it – probably due to the fact that I could if I wanted to.

You made me know for sure there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do with some hard work and determination.

You kissed us goodnight, every night. You made sure we brushed our teeth and had clean clothes to wear to school – folded and put away in the dresser. You were mom and dad.

Whenever you wanted a treat at the store, you always made sure that we got one too. Cadbury chocolate bars and Pepsi were your favorites, at least for awhile.

We went with you to your work on some Saturdays and got to work the machines to make some creation of our choice.

We went everywhere with you, fighting over who got to ride shotgun. Instead of seatbelts, your arm was there for safety purposes. I loved showing up with my dad. I remember my friends saying how good looking they thought you were – and you were.

Going out to dinner with you to Godfather’s Pizza, Skippers, McDonald’s or Taco Time. I remember forgetting my new purse with makeup in it and you taking me back to find it. I don’t know if it was this time or another (I forgot it often at the beginning) but it was gone at one point and off we went to the store to replace the necessary items.

You had strict rules and those rules became my inner compass on right and wrong even when I experimented with unmentionables. I may have changed some of them that didn’t work for me along the way but they held me to a path based on the values of being a good, kind and generous person.

You dropped me off and picked me up for whatever was happening including soccer and basketball, cheerleading, going to a friend’s house, the Seatac Mall, or a dance. Maybe it was your copper colored Ford pickup, the little yellow work truck or your tee top, silver Trans am, you showed up and I could count on that.

You stuck up for me in spite of the fact it may have cost you your marriage given the decade’s lack of understanding on how children fare in blended family situations. It wasn’t the Brady Bunch, that’s for sure!

When things got tough and you didn’t want to show favoritism, you snuck me $20 bills to pay for things I might need. The favoritism helped me know I had you on my side.

We went to drive-in and theater movies, monster truck shows, fishing on opening day, and sporting events along with countless family get-togethers.

You tried everyday to do the best you could. Over the years it gets harder to keep striving for the ideal when the trauma of everyday life gets in the way. We had some everyday trauma, the three of us, but we came out okay.

You did good. xxoo

Stop. Listen. Rest. Repeat.

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BW hammocks

Life is an ebb and flow…

When we forget and go full speed, with all of our energy, attention, and force without rest or compassion or grace for ourselves, we face what people call burnout. The flame is dulled, the fires of the heart numbed, and things start to go wrong… yet we keep g-o-i-n-g (why do we do that?). A weekend, a vacation, a kind-hearted friend, retail therapy, or even a run might provide balm temporarily but at some point deep rest will be required. We get a choice until it’s too late, until our body, mind, and spirit have spoken without answer for far too long and then the tsunami overtakes you without notice. It seems like everything that could go wrong does. Why does it all happen at once we say. Really we say. Why is it all happening to me we say. I can’t take anything more we say.

I prefer to do things the hard way. It’s just easier. When the tsunami hit I kept going despite body, mind, and spirit going under like a battered ship. This can’t be happening I said. I can fix it I said. Everything is going to be okay (meaning just like it was) if I just keep trying I said. It took almost 6 months before I let go; before I let the waves wash over me as I laid in the sand face down, barely breathing, choking on the lies, the unfelt cruelty, the waterlogged dreams I thought were my life.

And now I know how to listen to my voice and when I need deep rest. Now I know where to find stillness and how to float on the waves of my own spirit. Only now do I know how to give my whole self grace, stillness, love. It took more than a tsunami, hurricane and an earthquake to get me to let go — at least that’s what my astrology chart said for that year. If only I had known. 

Our lives are almost too much whether in celebration or grief, abundance or need, happiness or sadness, good fortune or bad. Listen to the sound of your own heartbeat. Listen closely and sufficiently. Allow for stillness often whether sitting in meditation, on a beach, in the mountains, by a river, a tree or in your bed.

And when it’s been awhile, an antidote to our abundant lives, that causes what they call burnout, is as follows:

“And the antidote to burnout is, symbolically, a return from adventures, from trials and tribulations, to the womb, to an inner sanctum where we can relax completely and finally, once again, experience vulnerable, wide-open love. Then and only then may a deeply feeling sigh of relief come, like rain on a parched field.” ~Waylon Lewis

Quotes of Gratitude

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Gratitude…

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” ~ Melody Beattie

“Gratitude and love are always multiplied when you give freely. It is an infinite source of contentment and prosperous energy.” ~ Jim Fargiano

“We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.” ~ Frederick Keonig

“Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.” –William Faulkner

“Gratitude is the memory of the heart.” ~ Massieu

“Gratitude is an art of painting an adversity into a lovely picture.” – Kak Sri

“Clearly, one of the major obstacles to our experience of gratitude is the habit we have of sleepwalking through life. The truth is that we are never lacking for blessings in our lives, but we are often lacking in awareness and recognition of them.” ~ Rev. Diane Berke, Ph.D

“In the moments we are awake to the wonder of simply being alive, gratitude flows, no matter our circumstances.” ~ M.J. Ryan

“Each day, each season, each cycle offers something of beauty. Let us notice and give thanks.” – Diane Mariechild

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
~ G.K. Chesterton

“Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don’t unravel.” ~ Author Unknown

“Get down on your knees and thank God you’re still on your feet.” ~ Unknown

“[The most fortunate are those who] have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.” – Abraham Maslow

An Irish Blessing:
“Count your blessings instead of your crosses;
Count your gains instead of your losses.
Count your joys instead of your woes;
Count your friends instead of your foes.
Count your smiles instead of your tears;
Count your courage instead of your fears.
Count your full years instead of your lean;
Count your kind deeds instead of your mean.
Count your health instead of your wealth;
Love your neighbor as much as yourself.”

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” ~ William Arthur Ward

“A basic law: the more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.” ~ Norman Vincent Peale

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
― Epicurus

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”
~ A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” ~Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.” ~ Meister Eckhart

“When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.”
― Maya Angelou

“Whatever you appreciate and give thanks for will increase in your life.”
~ Sanaya Roman

“What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.”
~Brené Brown

“The unthankful heart discovers no mercies; but the thankful heart will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings.” ~Henry Ward Beecher

“The poor man shuddered, overflowed with an angelic joy; he declared in his transport that this would last through life; he said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being.” ~ Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.” ~ Albert Schweitzer

“Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.” ~ Seneca

“Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty” ~Unknown

“Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.” ~Oprah Winfrey

“Stop thinking gratitude as a buy product of your circumstances and start thinking of it as a world view.” ~Bryan Robles

“Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.” ~W.T. Purkiser

“The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.” ~William James

“Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.” ~John Wooden

Positive to Positively Authentic

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As Americans we say things like, Be positive, Don’t complain, Pull yourself up from your bootstraps, Move on, Don’t let it bother you, Don’t worry, be happy, Count your blessings, not your problems; all of these, full of wisdom and the path to a happy life. At times in my life, I have been the poster child for “Everything is AWESOME!” I read Stephen Covey, Og Mandino, and Dale Carnegie, and listened to Zig Ziglar tapes (yes, I said tapes.) I was in sales and marketing, which put me squarely in the Positive Psychology camp or suffer by comparison. After all, You are what you think. With a smile, twinkly eye contact and a genuine interest in other people, a person could be very successful. Follow the 10 Easy Steps to a Happy Life; I’m sure I read it and wired it directly into my DNA.

This was in my early twenties and in my late twenties I realized, “Wait a minute, some things in life are just not okay, not happy and certainly not good.” Being positive all the time and denying reality started to seem a little foolish and might get a person taken for a ride. Cynicism seeped in. It’s so easy because there are many smart people who will jump on that wagon in a snap. It’s one of those deals where if everyone is cynical together,we feel pretty smart, in a class all our own (some would call this the Ego Mind.) “We see the REAL deal and no one is fooling us.” During this time I had a boss who was still in the Positive Stage and, wow, she was so annoying. She was repeating the earlier messages on a daily basis like I had never heard them before. Ugh!

At some point I moved on from the cheery-boss and just stopped caring. Positive. Negative. Whatever. I just let my thoughts roll. They generally liked to roll down hill. This is about the time Corporate America was revealing itself as a tad empty and also after September 11, 2001. Life needed to change and it certainly did with a move from New York back to Washington, no corporate job and a new (colicky) baby. Catapulted into suburbia, in a neighborhood of moms with babies in every home, life rocked into an easy balance between the good and, let’s just say, not so good. Moms bonded on the ‘challenges’ of said babies, but relished all the goodness these little people brought into our lives; no positive-negative decisions necessary.

Now in my forties with children/preteens, I have come full circle. I found that no one really cares if you are positive or negative, although people generally do not want to be around complainers. If you are one of those people, you may find yourself complaining to your dog or maybe on Facebook – and surely there will be those who sympathize for awhile, but gradually we learn people Like you better when you have something of value to say. Cynicism is everywhere. Cynicism is easy. Cynicism is worthless. What I have found is I am far happier when I dig in to find the beautiful, the kindness, the lessons and the love in life’s situations. Sometimes it’s really easy. I lived in the Rocky Mountains for a year where I hiked, skate skied, downhill skied, touched the river daily and was surrounded by people who did the same. Negativity? None whatsoever. It was easy to be grateful for literally everything in my life.

Then life took a hairpin turn catapulting me into the abyss. Suddenly finding the positive was no longer easy and the ugly followed me around like a Northwest cloud in November. Now what? I do know You are what you think, but this seemed insurmountable, like climbing Mt. Everest in a wind storm. Pretending Everything is AWESOME! was just plain ridiculous, yet I still have the DNA wiring that says to Look for the good, Pull myself up by my bootstraps, Move on, Forgive and forget is the only way to happiness, yada, yada, yada.

However, when faced with the absolute choice, balancing these two opposite views on life is the only answer and I call this Positive Authenticity; accepting and speaking your whole reality with deep recognition of our infinite blessings.

Positive Authenticity is understanding we all have both light and shadows within us. The balance of allowing others to know our challenges, humility, cracks in the armor, as well as communicating our resilience, courage, wisdom, and love of life. Mostly, it’s about knowing for sure we all have everything we need, we are whole and good and unique and the same. We are human.