Labor Day Monday

[This looked like a serious conversation...a melding of minds...] lol


The long weekend is over. Grandson back home and today in school. Sister and husband back on their way to Florida. Husband back to work. Me...breathing a sigh of relief at having my quiet home back. I have a few errands to run today and am thinking i should get them done this morning so I can sit back and enjoy the rest of the day. Patrick had 4 days off in a row....yikes. lol It was all good though.

I tried blogging here last night after I got home from the meeting, but the power went out and I lost the satellite signal. Never mind. I just turned it off and went to bed, where I proceeded to sleep soundly for about 7 and a half hours. And this morning I am refreshed and ready for a new day. I have juice to make and bread to bake, and a tiny bit of straightening to do around my house.

I feel so blessed these days. As my friend Mary said so succinctly, "Abundance is everywhere..." If I can shift my paradigms even the tiniest bit, I can find prosperity in everything I see. If I can move from the errant ideas that wealth is in bank accounts and new things and more, more, more. If I can open my heart to abundance instead of always looking thorough my eyes. When I can do this, I see a world full to the brim. The value of a simply lived life is astronomical for me. The lack of stress, the absence of constant competition, the loss of those feelings of never having enough. Because that's what they are--just feelings. Not facts. The facts are made plain by the removal of lots of extraneous clutter, whether it's in my life reality or in my mind. I am not hungry, like 2/3 of the world. I am not homeless, like so many are. I am not alone. I have an excess of clothing, baubles, books and pets. (lol) I may not have much deniros in the bank, but my needs are met. I have lived a lot of my life wallowing in excess...so I do know this terrain. I have also been blessed to have lived in some times of scarcity, so I know that terrain as well. Today I am somewhere in the middle. Poor by some standards, wealthy by others. Resting here, in the middle.

I am blessed to have been given the chance to live a sober life. Many never get this chance. Some days I wish I didn't get so much of the experience, but mostly I am blessed beyond measure. I witnessed a man about my age last night who got sober the same year as I did, but drank again after 7 years and has been coming in and out of sobriety ever since. Cannot find his way back to stay...just getting little snatches of peace every now and again, only to fall back off the path and be lost...again and again. It shook me. He looked so lost and so miserable. I remember being told in my early days that it wasn't rocket science...I just needed one thing. To want to be sober more than I wanted to be drunk. That it wasn't enough just try--I had to DO. It wasn't hard to stop, they told me--staying stopped was the tricky part. That I had to build a sober life that was better than anything I had ever known drunk. And I started out on that road of discovery, love and service back in the early 90's and haven't had to drink since. I feel relatively secure in sobriety today, even when I watch people with some time drink again. I'm not stupid about it though. I still do almost all the things they told me back then. And mostly, I NEVER forget what it used to be like, what happened and what it's like now. And I dig in, and I put my hand out one more time, no matter how tiresome it gets sometimes. And no matter how many times I watch them stumble back out there, I know that I stayed sober through it, and that's enough. I don't have to analyze, rationalize or justify my life today. I just have to live it. Fully.

For these things, I feel especially blessed.


Namaste.