Eclectic Waters

Archive for October, 2009

Breaking up sucks! But when breaking up, everyone should have a plan. This is mine.

1. Break up with your significant other or they break up with you (both can be equally traumatic)

2. Cry your eyes out on the way home and call all your best girl friends or text them.

3. Call your sisters because, well, let’s face it, they know you the best and you can sob into the phone or blow your nose on the phone and they don’t mind. My sisters and mum (but she was already sleeping on the east coast) see the rawest part of any loss I experience.

4. Make plans for the night after so your not stuck moping at home, eating junk food, pretending to watch movies when you really don’t give a #$@!%. My plans: going to the beach with Rach to smoke and ponder the meaning of life while watching God’s awesome beauty – it always reminds me there is a bigger being, meaning and plan outside of me – it makes me feel small and yet a part of something majestic all at once.

5. Saturday morning: run run run. Releasing endorphins through running helps gain perspective and to foster the feeling – i can kick ass and the pain of this moment will not destroy me.

6. Sunday morning: Going to an extended worship service with dear friends. Conversating with God – whether it be questions, tears or simply relaxing in His undying affection towards me – we’ll see where I’m at by Sunday morning.

Other than that – my recipe for overcoming grief (it moved me out of the depression after quitting teaching and through the questions and pain of my broken engagement to Charlie):

- keep moving in all areas of life

- cry whenever the desire/emotions overcome you to cry (get it ALL out). Crying is like barfing – you always feel better after

- run to release endorphins and to continue feeling like the sexy being you are

- do things that make you feel alive: SALSA DANCING – DANCING IN MY ROOM – WRITING – GOING TO THE BEACH

- press into God – talk to him about the frustration, anger, pain, hurt, fear… all that you are experiencing

- sit silently with God – listening to the sound of His love for you – resting in the embrace of His arms

When I feel weak or afraid, I imagine God’s hands inside my stomach, pressed against the inside of my back – holding me straight and together. He has hedged me in from before me and after me (and within me). He is the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our sorrow. He has a special place in His heart for the brokenhearted.

-spend time with friends – talking and doing fun things

Anyways, that’s the recipe I will be following for the next while.

I am also incredibly proud of myself for taking the risk of being vulnerable, sharing myself and my heart with another person, regardless of the outcome. I have done well. I am alive.

“Live your life while you have it. Life is a splended gift — there is nothing small about it.”

- Florence Nightingale

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Words.

They can inspire or discourage us.

“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.” – Proverbs 25:11

Florence’s words, staring back at me from my desk calendar, inspire me to live life large:

- to not be afraid

- to embrace opportunities

-to work hard

-to play harder

-to laugh as often as possible

-to cry freely

-to enjoy nature – even if it a simple sunset observed from the interior of my car as I drive somewhere

-to forgive when I’ve been hurt

-to know God

Lately the phrase has been circling my brain,

“Life with God is the best life possible.”

When things are going well, it’s easy to become complacent and begin to take things for granted. When I am faced with a loss or with pain, I feel the space around me tightening and I begin to have razorsharp focus.

This focus begins with questions, “What’s really important?”

and continues when I find myself surrendering my will and desires to God. Once again aware of my need for Him and becoming aware of the areas I have not entrusted to His hands.

Another set of words that give me courage are:

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in very foreign languages. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet

Sometimes discouragement lays just below the surface -

this last week I find myself vacillating between strength and weakness.

i stretch my fingers out and feel the frindge of life in the tension between joy and sadness

peace and chaos

at least i’m alive i whisper

as emotions flood over me again.

Knowing Grant will be leaving at the end of November

has awakened a range of emotions and thoughts in me.

It is taking more strength that I thought to stay afloat. I know I will, and I am reminded of what I read this morning,

This is just a moment; it will not last forever.

To love is to be content with the present moment, open to its meaning, entering into its mystery.

http://emiliewood.com/index.php?p=524

i resonated with her words – and her pictures are some of my favorite