One small step to the good

When I go to bed at night, I’m very good at being able to empty my mind of the woebegone happenings of the day.

A long time ago I learned how, at shut-eye time, to pack a mental suitcase with any worries, frettings, and negative thoughts I might have and give them up to my higher power for safe-keeping until the next day.

I’m a firm believer that on any given night, we all deserve a restful sleep free of the dark, regurgitated materials that might have crossed our daily path.

As I’ve said before, I love to get up really early in the morning, especially during the summer months when by 5:00 a.m. I can catch a glimpse of the sunrise not yet written upon by the events of the coming day.

These night and day rituals renew my take on positive thinking, which aside from my appreciation for small wonders, is the currency of my endurance and my existence.

My beef continues to smolder with the media powers-that-be—who for reasons beyond my comprehension—believe that bad news is the way to jump-start the coming day.

In my view, it’s a sucker punch and something’s gotta change when it comes to the morning news.

Though I am smart enough to know at least some of the harsh realities of the world we live in, audio bytes about murder and hate crimes are not the first conscious thoughts I want planted in my soul at the start of a new day.

In my opinion, it’s all about the art of sensationalism, what sells, and the public’s thirst for the negative.

And while I’ll admit I’ve still a lot to learn in this Earth school and that I may be a small fleck of influence in the argument for the positive, I’m not alone. Even on a rainy day the birds of the pre-dawn morning sing good news songs—or at least they do in my neck of the woods.

The poet Pindar wrote, “Unsung, the noblest deed will die.”

Fill yourself up with good news once in a while. Go out and find it. Google it if you have to. Spread it around. Stand out from the crowd of naysayers. Fill up on positive thoughts and pay them forward.

It’s what my old wicker couch is for on the banks of Frog Creek. It is as Wendell Berry penned, in “The Peace of Wild Things”

"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. 

I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. 

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

The evolution of my given word

It has been seven weeks since I last emptied my words here. Wow.

However, contrary to past excuses for not writing, my latest sabbatical from this column had nothing to do with being unhappy. I am, in fact, in a most content and joyful life space, and more so in an honest and truthful vein, than I have been in for some years. That’s what happens when I listen to my intuition.

On most mornings I still make time for me. I pour a cup of coffee, sit in my favorite chair, write in my diary, and read a daily reflection from “The Book of Awakening” by Mark Nepo, and from the books of my go-to “Melody” on how to let go. 

I’ve also fallen with gratitude upon two more wise works – “Becoming Wise,” by Krista Tippett and the masterpiece, “Embers,” by Richard Wagamese, the extraordinary and gifted Ojibwe writer whose life and works I discovered on March 10^th, 2017—the day he died.

To quote Mr. Wagamese, and I do concur, “Mornings have become my table.”

I always have been in love with the sunrise. To see it, to involve myself in its renewable and unconditional resource each morning is the epitome of “sucking the marrow” out of my life and I only have so many days afforded to me to do so. By late June I will be able to see the sunrise at 4:30 a.m.

In mid-2012 I admittedly wrote that I lived a very safe existence—“one that’s calculated and organized so that I turn as many of the knobs on the horizontal and vertical as possible.”

It was the control freak in me. I’m much better now than I was five years ago at stepping outside the box, but at times I’m still a subtle commander, a recovering control junkie.

But man, when I can let go, I feel like Dorothy in the “Land of Oz,” and I feel the real “Wow” of life out there, and I hear the mockingbird sing.

I know how words work. I know how to put them together to get my point across in this space but they fail me now as I scrape my brain dictionary for the right “write” ones that will paint a picture of how my life has opened up to reveal the silver linings born of playbooks I didn’t choose, fought against, fell into, lived through, learned and have grown from.

Mark Nepo writes, “Perhaps the secret to growing from our wounds is to live close to the earth, to live without our hearts and minds and bellies always in touch—both inside and out—with that which is larger than we are.

Perhaps, when cut in two, it is a life of humility, of risking to be at one with the soil of our experience, that allows us to heal into something entirely new.”

The morning I left for Wales in May 2012, I wrote in my diary, “I want more than what I can get by wishing. I have so much life to live, so many opportunities ahead of me to experience.

I don’t think I could have written myself a better gift of intention than I did that day. This I know for sure.