Trust the universe

I do feel sometimes that I am in the universe’s ashtray or forgotten drawer though. What is that I need to do now? Let go? I don’t know what to let go of, as I wrote here.

progress has definitely been made here. i truly trust that everything will work out in the end. but that’s sort of the next hurdle – “in the end” seems so far away and eschatological.

i want to be able to see everything working out right in front of me, rather than at some end-of-the-rainbow point of the future. although i can imagine myself successful and happy years from now, it’s still difficult for me to believe that good things can happen to me right now. perhaps part of me does not think that i deserve it yet. that needs to change.

i’m glad i’ve been keeping a gratitude journal. it helps me recognize that good things do happen and reminds me that i am capable of happiness, even now. practicing affirmations will be good also to help me realize and recognize my present capacity for happiness and success. i want to start doing those.

i think i need to make a vision board too.

i am feeling really good about this goal. even though there remains a lot of unsettling in my life, i feel less at sea than i did a year, even six months, ago.

i found this extremely inspiring: http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/may-it-please-the-court/

it’s a lovely, whimsical essay about law, justice ginsburg, and fierce women who end up being tremendous. how did they get so fierce and how did they become so tremendous? courage and self-confidence. that’s my take-away lesson of the last few weeks.

how does justice ginsburg feel about being the only woman on the supreme court? she says it’s lonely. i was talking to my best friend about this recently. we noticed that as we grow older, we learn more and more about ourselves and how unique we are from everyone else. often these things that make us so different are our great strengths and gifts to the world, but it can be difficult to allow ourselves this uniqueness and to shine and stand out among everyone else, like justice ginsburg pursuing law when so few women did or eleanore roosevelt with her “improbable” hat (from the essay). it takes a lot of courage to follow your heart when it makes you stand out, but that’s the path to beautiful magic and happiness. it’s an unfortunate shame that we fear criticism from others for daring to be different, for daring to be happy. but that’s how we can become tremendous. seems like most criticism of that sort comes from others’ fear of following their own happiness.

what a great essay maira kalman writes/draws.

there have been times in my life that i have managed to sustain self-confidence and those times are invariably my happiest. positive people were drawn to me like a magnet then, and i felt beautiful no matter what. when i slip away from that mentality, i am plagued by insecurity, and all that self-doubt seems to sabotage my life success. i want no more of that.

i’m so glad i decided recently that my spirit fruit was a grapefruit. they’re so delicious! but some people don’t like them. some people think they’re too tart and think it needs sugar added to it or something. but it’s that tarty, juicy, natural sweetness that many people love about grapefruits, myself included. keeping that in mind these days, i’m feeling extra ok with not appeasing everyone’s palate. i don’t need to placate to anyone but my own heart and i just need to be honest with myself and honest with the world. i think that’s how everything in my life will eventually start to fall into place.

trust and faith – in love and justice.

Some of the lessons are packaged so beautifully, but even the ones that aren’t are important lessons filled with beauty also and it’s important to be just as receptive and open to those lessons.

Trying to stop controlling. I have been hyper-planning, brooding, hyper-organizing, and trying to just control everything. I try to declare that I am now on empty, but I still persist in hanging on. I am trying now, really trying, even if only through made manifest outside of myself through this medium, that I am willing to accept a change of plans, a new direction, a different course than what I have attempted to build on through resistance of these things. I guess I just have to live every day without expecting that homing signal, living each day without knowing where I am going. It’s not freedom if you expect someone, even a greater force, to tell you the plan. But I am going to live my life on empty to see what shuffles up from all this.

FAITH

I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

—David Whyte

some weeks it’s easy to remember this…other times…”life” seems hard…

I will remember this!

I will smile & embrace each day, knowing that each moment is a growth opportunity…

I need to be patient with myself for the moments during which I forget that everything is gonna be ok…

that i am in the right place already and have things to do here and lessons to learn! Fine!