Thought Cookie: Edition 17, Vol. 2
A Love Note + a Thoughtful Gift…
Dear One,
Thank you for taking a few minutes every time I create one of these Thought Cookies to sit with it.
If you skim through, thank you for that.
If you read it fully, thank you for that.
If you spend a moment with the images, thank you for that.
If you take in the poems, thank you for that.
I began this love note to help feed hungry souls with my own creative thoughts and art about a year ago. It has really been a year of growth for me and for the world. One year ago, we had no vaccines to argue about or to take. One year ago, we were coming to the end of a surprising and shocking year of quarantine. And since then, the world and our lives have continued to shift at a brisk pace.
As the calendar year comes to a close, and I continue to ease into a new year (beginning for me in September), I am considering what I need to heal from or learn from this past year.
Here are three deep, delicious questions designed to be a gift to your deeper you as you consider the last year. Jot these babies in your journal or on your heart or infuse them into your dreams to see what they might become when properly baked.
How will what I have learned this year inform my future?
What do I need to let go of from this year? What am I still holding tightly to from this year?
What one or two experiences from the last 12 months that stand out most profoundly? Why?
I love you,
Emily
622 Words of This and That
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to live in alignment. When I was younger I called this integrity. Integrity still applies, but to me …
Alignment is integrity (wholeness) in action.
I have come to believe living in alignment is the gateway to fulfillment and awareness in life.
Given the demands of modern life, we are constantly pulled to divide ourselves up.
We are encouraged to invent and share digital versions of ourselves.
We are told to create selves for our work, selves for our passions, selves for our various roles: mother, daughter, friend, professional.
The draw to divide ourselves into identities pounds upon us daily: we are encouraged to identify with political stances or parties, educational stances, religious affiliations.
Somehow we’ve even created factions based on medical choices.
The allure of these divisions is that all come with the ability to “other” other people, which is probably the most destructive human mindset in existence. Othering justifies the worst of human behavior: slavery, human trafficking, war, murder.
But everyday othering also creates less lethal but equally damaging common behavior: rudeness, dismissiveness, harshness, distancing and selfishness.
I fall prey to it all the time and hang my head when I realize once again I’ve adopted an identity in a moment that has allowed me to vilify another human being.
But that doesn’t mean my quest to live in alignment has failed.
To live in alignment does not mean following one straight line without wavering or failure. It does mean spiraling, circling as closely as we are able, to the leylines of our beliefs with mindful awareness.
Sometimes the spiral is tight and close, other times it makes wide, loose loops around the plumb line, pulling away, only to be drawn back in by awareness.
I’ve been through some big, grand spirals away from the heart of my beliefs. It can feel daring to pull away, to test the power of my beliefs. (I believe this is good work.)
But it always, always feels like coming home to turn the bend and make my way back to what I truly believe.
Part of my living in alignment has been ridding myself of the unnecessary. The belief this is rooted in is beauty and the honor of time as the most precious of resources. More stuff equals more time spent taking care of said stuff. And I want to shave that tending time away so I can use my time on what is most significant to me:
love
family/service
creativity
beauty
meaning.
Having done a few home improvement projects over the last year, I began letting go of more and more things. Kitchen gadgets, old tablecloths, the kids’ old toys, worn blankets, and years-old magazines. It has felt scary and cleansing, hopeful and frightening at times. And it comes with the balance of resisting the acquisition impulse and perpetuating the letting go of what piles up.
With the holiday season approaching, I find myself in conflict with the world’s heavyset push to obtain, to consume more, to own more. And it isn’t just physical things the world wants me to possess. It’s more busy-ness, more distraction, more doing.
I don’t want to add when I am focusing on removing. I don’t want to be distracted and busy when I work best in groundedness, stillness and calm.
And so I am wrestling with that loop.
I wrestle using meditation, prayer, creativity, movement and listening. I practice deep listening to others, to my guides and to the deeper me who is always there waiting for me to return.
Are you wrestling, too?
Do you fall into the busy-ness and muchness this time of year?
If you do, I see you, I feel you. I am you.
How do you stay true to the leylines of your beliefs in the worldly storms that come?