Hello, friends and Happy New Year to you and yours!!!
I know several of you have reached out to ask where I’ve been because it’s been a bit sleepy on here the last few months and I wanted to come on to say thank you, first and foremost. I had a chance just now, once I returned to my little Gift of Moments world on here and some analytics automatically compiled indicated that in 2019, I had several thousand visitors to this little page coming from 57 different countries! I am blown away! That makes my heart so happy and I want you to know just how honored and touched I am that so many of you have taken time out of your busy lives to spend a few moments here on this page, reading my heart stirrings and hopefully taking some time for yourself, perhaps gaining a new perspective on things, and hopefully providing a minute for some deeper reflection in your own life.
I wanted to update you to invite you into a new and amazing online community, of which I am now a part. Back in the fall of 2019, a dear friend I ran track with in high school reached out to me. This has been one of those cosmic connections where the universe kept finding opportunities for the two of us to bump into one another long after we parted ways in high school. As a young adult, she started writing a blog (www.adoptingawayoflife.com) and I began to read her words. Years went by and I, too, began my own blog. Then in 2018, author and activist, Glennon Doyle, had come to PHL with her girl tribe to share an evening of heart-sharing and celebrating the power of women and female storytelling at an event called Together Live. Sure enough, we both were there on the same night and bumped into one another in the crowd. Then, I got sick. And major life soul-aches from my past came out in the process… courage to do so having been fueled by reading her own strong words as she shared her own same truth in the years prior. When time passed, after many month and moons in bed, I became strong enough to walk and I enlisted the help of a personal trainer to rebuild my body and awaken my muscles. Sure enough, she was a member at that same gym at the time and we bumped into one another in the locker room and all our shared troubles came spilling out and we heard and helped and talked about PTSD and meditation and our shared suffering, similar, but unique to our own selves. Again, time went on. She hosted an event dedicated to mindfulness, meditation and yoga. I was there and I was the first person she laid eyes on (I didn’t know it was her event, she didn’t know I was coming). And again, time went on. Then, my friend had an idea. What if we could have a shared space to talk about mindfulness…. for people in our pocket of the world, helping people to know where to go, what to do, how to do it, what can help, finding mindful minutes in the moments. She invited me to meet with her and asked me to be a weekly contributor. Naturally, I agreed. So since October 15, 2019, every Tuesday I have been sharing little snippets of my soul in a Facebook group called Mindful Mamas of New Jersey (https://www.facebook.com/mindfulmamasofnewjersey/). I invite you to come check it out! Even if you don’t live in New Jersey. Even if you’re not a mother. Even if you’re not a woman. There’s some great information there. Some beautiful stories. Some neat spaces in the state that offer some cool opportunities for stillness.
Below is my most recent contribution to give you a sense of some of the things you will find there. I will do my best, moving forward, to share them here as well, but it would be so fun to have you follow along (see link above)! And if your life has been blessed by adoption in some way, or if it is a future desire of yours, I invite you to check out my amazing friend Lauren’s blog (link also above).
Enjoy!
The final shine of 2019 has blazed on the horizon just before it sank as the sun does, over that most-faraway line we can see in the distance, before mellowing into oranges and fading to purples and midnight blues and finally to black. The end of another year, the end of a decade. Another ball drop. Another Auld Lange Syne sung. Another season passed. Another page turned to close out another chapter in the book of our life. Another year in our rear view.
The feeling that keeps bubbling up inside my heart is over and over again: how blessed we all are. No matter how much joy or pain or stress or celebration or relationship shift or new life or life loss we have experienced, how grateful we must all truly be that we are gifted with the being-alive experience of joy. Of grief. Of empathy. Of contagious elation. Of deep reflection. Regardless of the depth of the hard or the lightness of the easy, all of it is shaping us, much like water over time carves and exposes and shapes the rocky core of our own earth… our souls all like a mini Grand Canyon inside, cut and carved by the slow, persistent current of life… of time.
We spent the week after Christmas driving through the northeast corridor of America’s New England, visiting family and friends in New York and Massachusetts and then making our way back to New Jersey. Everywhere we’d driven, I continued to notice and see again as if for the first time these beautiful old stone walls. Lichen covered, mossy round stones, stacked one atop another. Large stones and small, snuck in and around the others. I was fascinated by them and spent a moment in the passenger seat learning about how giant glaciers all came south, melting from the north, bringing with them this massive haul of rock, and with the great tumble of one on top of the other, some types of rock crumbled into bits and pieces and the granite, limestone, and gneiss, tough as can be, survived, remained large and became smooth and round in that mess of ice and stone. As time went on in the 1700s and 1800s, as land became property and farms began to be built, the earth needed to be rid of these rocky masses to enhance the ease of plowing, so people began plucking them from their plots and placing them at their property borders. They became clear boundary lines. Or animal pens. Or orchard separators.
And then time passed.
Driving past these walls today, some you see are set surrounding quaint, darling homes, clearly from times in the long past. Others are set beside what are now massive highways and are drawn like an artist’s brushstroke across the earth, surrounded on all sides by trees. A few were very short, perhaps made by less skilled tradesmen, it’s neighboring rocks having tumbled back again into the earth…or perhaps destroyed in a war or dispute of some sort. Others are long and tall and stalwart, surviving well the test of time. Some of these sort have remained so sturdy all these hundreds of years that even despite massive oaks and elms having fallen from storms or age and landing atop these stone walls, there they sit, utterly unperturbed by the weight on their backs. In 1914, Robert Frost meditated on these very stones in his work, Mending Wall. And now, over a hundred years later, I’m having my own little moment.
It seems to me that we may not be so dissimilar to these rocks. Thousands of years ago, they began their existence and were born of intense heat and pressure and stress at the earths core. When their story continued, they were part of a great mass of rock and were locked within and transported by ice. Time passed. Perhaps lacking direction or purpose, they went with the flow…of melting ice and changing temperatures and underwent great change. Time, always igniting a challenge in us to see who can last, who can find their beautifully ever-changing purpose, and who can inspire. Onward. Years. Survival. These rocks were buried deep in the earth and grass and trees and, after years of silence left untouched by Native Americans, British colonists and settlers made their mark on the ground. Years of farming and exposed soil and deforestation brought them all to the surface. “New England potatoes,” some say, new ones coming up each spring. Two-handers, as so they were called, got lifted and stacked, made into walls that at one time, to some person, meant some thing. Purpose. And now, in the hundreds of years that have followed, great poets and this random girl from New Jersey who was just passing through…were moved for a moment to dive into another space and time. Inspiration.
As this new year dawns, 2020, my wish for us all is to take a moment. To look with clarity on our own little life in our own little pocket of the world. Look at all that you have survived. Born of great fire and passion and pressure. The great losses. The big hurts. The awful aches. And, too, the unbridled merriment. The victories great and small. The falling-in-love swirls and swoons of youth. Each experience cutting you and building you and shaping you into a more distilled version of yourself, some parts patched together by nearby stone and heat, the weak spots evaporating into dust.
Strong though we all are, whether we recognize that grit or not, like these glacial rocks, at times in life, we may feel like we are bumbling along without a purpose… lost in a frozen sea of glacial ice. I believe, however, whatever your story, whether you feel you had a purpose and lost it or have yet to discover your reason for being…know that we are all a work in progress. If you haven’t taken a minute to think about your path and desires, perhaps now is a good time to do so. Seek out your purpose. Dive deep into who you are. Today. Knowing where you’ve been. And where you desire to go. But know, too, that sometimes your purpose, like for these rocks, may also find you…if you remain strong, and if in your mere existence you inspire…your purpose, too, will one day become evident.
Happy New Year, friends. ✨
Awesome post! Keep up the great work! 🙂
Thank you so very much! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that!