Sometimes it feels like writing isn’t enough.
As if putting my thoughts and feelings into words could not possibly capture the sensation of any given experience.
I am sitting down to write and the evening light is shining in through the windows, illuminating the flower of life stickers creating rainbow upon rainbow that fill the room. The smell of my husband cooking chili, the sounds of the birds flapping their wings and the washer spinning the sheets. I pause from time to time to pet the sleeping pup on the sofa where she shouldn’t be and also exactly where I’d like her to be. I look around at my home and I see all of the ways in which this was the space designed for my growth.
Maybe words are enough, maybe they do have their special way of allowing us to assign them our own perceptions and emotions.
It becomes too funny that peace never really looks like what we thought it should or would be and yet, here it is, living within the chaos that is the every day life.
Each day I am reminded that peace is always present, we have to be willing to surrender to it especially when we feel like we have to be in control of everything. I feel like we get stuck when we believe peace or relaxation to mean that we aren’t actively doing enough to support the present situation and yet it is the opposite. When I allow peace into my present that is the only way in which I have everything I need available to me.
Our son being diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes last night flipped our world upside down, it has been a lesson I could not have anticipated with any amount of angel numbers, ringing ears or feathers. Even if I could have anticipated it, I cannot imagine that I would’ve made anything better because frankly, I did everything that was within my power when the situation PRESENTED itself.
I was enough then just as I am enough now.
That has been a big part of my lesson that I have been chewing on for the last week.
At first, I internally went through the rollercoaster of emotions that come with a life-changing diagnosis like diabetes. I wondered if I failed my son, if I should’ve been more crunchy and stricter with the sugar intake. I asked myself the hundreds of “what if” questions only to find myself in the middle of all of that doubt and see myself as having done enough.
As I begin to walk on this new journey, I see that I am not alone, God within me, my family beside me and my ancestors all around I see that this lesson has not only applied to my sons diagnosis but to my whole life.
My thirty-fifth birthday is fast approaching and while the number itself doesn’t phase me, it is the growth I cannot fathom being measured by a number as if 35 could possibly describe what has been experienced, lived and grieved in those years.
There is a growing sense of peace as I look back on the parts of my life in which I used to cringe and feel shame. Thinking of myself as so dumb for making the choices that I did, what good has being so critical of my past self ever brought to my lives?
It is now, as I approach and God willing get to celebrate this next chapter of life that I seek to transmute this critical energy. Wrapping all of my past selves in a golden light of warmth, gratitude and peace knowing full well that each part of me has been enough in getting me here.
Even when the waters are unknown, when its dark and I am not quite sure that I have what it takes to make it through, I find a way.
