Month: October 2017

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This is it.

I am writing this as I spend a weekend at home recovering from being sick. George is happily playing soccer in the backyard with his buddy and Olivia has two friends over as well.

There is music thumping throughout the house and the living room is draped in white sheets. Candelabras and red and gold pillows accessorize this rather dramatic photo shoot set-up. When I asked the girls what their theme was, they replied amidst wild laughter, ‘Murder.’

 

I love these girls. They laugh a lot and they sing constantly, their voices harmonizing and their big energies filling up the house. I imagine them now posing and enacting theatrical scenarios, but I don’t go down and watch,

wanting them to feel free,      at least here.

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another photo shoot, several years back

 

Meanwhile, our 12 week-old new puppy Marty (yes, we got a puppy!) is sleeping in his bed near the back window, resting after the vigour of chasing the ball around the yard with the boys.

 

I had forgotten what it is to love a new puppy ~to be utterly mesmerized by his antics, to laugh at his awkward little body falling out of bed and stumbling around in a tired daze. I forgot what it was to hold a puppy’s sweet body close, to wake up early in the morning to wide-awake wanting-to-play puppy. I forgot what it was to watch a little being almost wiggle itself out of its body with joy when it sees you.

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Sweet Marty

The kitchen is covered with dishes, and there are leaves tracked all through the kitchen. Marty of course, is not perfectly house trained yet so our carpet is speckled with cleaning solution marking accidents.

 

Yet, as I stood there amidst the mess and the pounding music, I realized I felt completely happy even though I am still sick. I was out of sorts this week, feeling cranky and anxious, overwhelmed ~ but in that moment everything felt right.

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This is it….messy, beautiful, imperfectly perfect life. I know the day will come when I will look back on these days and know that this was all devastatingly lovely, all of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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starting over

I am the kind of person that loves setting goals, dreaming up plans and projects, getting excited about what’s next…

 

yet.

Lately I have also become quite enthralled by the ways the different windows in our house frame the trees, the sky. I look and look, up through the skylight while I soak in the tub or out my window if I lay down for a minute on a Friday afternoon, tired from the week.  Each view is different…

the dance of fall colours and light and weather. I am certainly not overlooking a dramatic vista, I am just in my house.

It’s good to plan and create and act, but it’s also lovely to just sit and look and be.

Sometimes in those moments I even think,

‘This is enough, just this.’

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Olivia said to me the other day, ‘What if I decide not to follow this dream that I have told everyone is my dream. Then what? ‘ And I said to her, ‘it doesn’t matter if you have told the whole world’.

Dreams are fluid and fun and are allowed to change as we grow.

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Also, the whole landscape of what we thought was real, and even what we thought would always be or what we always wanted,  can change in a heartbeat.

 

The Kenow fire raged its way through Waterton and burnt 70% of the forest. Waterton looks raw and vulnerable but at the same time she is now more powerfully spectacular than ever. She’s wise and has been through some intense stuff. A beautiful wise old crone of forests, giver of life.

 

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And I know with every fiber of my being that watching her rebirth herself will be pure magic.

 

Dreams can change. And everything that we knew to be true about ourselves, and about what we thought was real can fall away in an instant. I have felt this happen again and again in my own life,

and I see it happening all around me right now in every aspect of our world. Everything we know is being challenged, so then maybe what we thought we wanted, what we thought was important, is being challenged too.

 

This doesn’t mean that we stop coming up with new dreams, or revamping the old ones, or that we live in fear and feel ourselves victims of bigger and terrifying forces we cannot control –

 

but I have learned to surrender to the complex web of unfoldment that I could have never in a million years have orchestrated myself

and trust that even in what is painful and heartbreaking and even in that which feels like utter destruction and devastation,

there are often aspects serving us that we cannot begin to comprehend, even if it’s just a rallying of love.

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Next year the wildflowers in Waterton are going to be extraordinary.

We are stronger than we think.

 

Happy weekend of ‘Giving Thanks’ everyone. May you sit and bask in the simple beauty of what you already have and what you see out your windows.