Over the past three months, I've had this unshakeable sense of abundance in my life.
Let me make a few things clear very quickly here. I am not going to discuss money in the same way that I have in the past. I am not going to tell you how to stretch a dollar or make a meal go further or how to cut back. I am not about to share a bevy of affirmations. Nor am I about to delve into vision boards and feng shui.
I'm talking about an internal shift.
Many years ago, I had a dear friend who changed her furniture around at least five times a year. She lived in a modest home and at some point, every room except the bathroom and her beauty shop were switched around routinely. Her living room was in every single room of the house. A hallway might become a dining room, a bedroom might become a living room, her living room might turn into a dining room. She might have an eat-in kitchen or a dining space on the back porch. Walls got painted whatever color struck her fancy and matched her furniture at the time. She lived in her house, and she lived well.
I've been using the phrase 'authentic' a lot lately, if not in the written words I put out, then in my own head, or in my journal pages. This morning, I went to look up authentic, because while I thought I knew what it meant, maybe I needed a refresher in how it's defined.
Authentic: not false or copied or an imitation; genuine; real. Worthy of acceptance. True to oneself.
That adds dimension to what I thought it meant...
I've been thinking a lot about 8-year-old me...Wondering why I'd been silent all these years towards her. It took some real deep digging to find out exactly what was going on between myself and her.
Years ago, in a similar season of excavation and discovery, I had a dream of an adult Terri rescuing a child who had been hidden away in a dark cupboard. I scolded the older girl child who was responsible for treating her so and told her she was never to treat the younger child in such a way again. I was quite angry and quite forceful in my language to the older girl. When I awoke from that dream, it didn't take a lot of psychoanalysis on my part to figure out that both the girls were a part of myself and that the older had behaved pretty badly towards the younger.
John and I laughingly share a fantasy of what our next move will look like.
We began this little fantasy when we moved into this house thirty years ago. We didn't have funds left to rent a truck and all the friends we had were suddenly perpetually busy when we were ready to move. So, we came up with a routine. Every night I'd load up my SUV as full as I could get it with boxes and things. Then I'd drive the 50 miles to work. When work was done, I'd drive the hour here and unload the boxes, drive the 30 miles home and after supper I'd load the SUV all over again, then pack more boxes. After three weeks we were down to all but the sofas and bookcases, washer and dryer. And I was DONE.
It was a long and tedious process, and I was exhausted by the end of it. That's when we started our fantasy about our next move.
"The past is worth only what it makes of us." ~ Danielle Steele in Zoya.
A couple of weeks ago, some of the weekly tasks we were meant to do in one of the studies I'm doing involved Time Jumps. One required me to write a letter from 80-year-old Terri to present day Terri. Not such a huge jump, just a matter of 14 years or so, which fact I found rather startling...I hadn't realized it was so near.
(I did think of the irony that likely most of the participants of this study are much younger than I am and had to imagine a massive time jump of 50 years or so... I've always been a late bloomer. I don't mind blooming late. All the best flowers in the garden bloom in the last month or so before frost and some are only more brilliant after that!)
I recently had a dream that I was standing on a platform above a crowd. As I descended the steps, it was as though the camera switched. I looked at myself from the perspective of the crowd of observers before me.
December is such a festive month, that it hardly seems as though one would need to plan to enjoy it. But it's because it is such a...
