Without knowing why – 216/366

Who do I look up to?

Admiration by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1897

Everyone to some degree.

I have realized, in my impending (present?) dotage, that life is fucking hard and kudos to those of us that try.

As Eleanor says in the quote below, I think that those people who make me stop and admire them without a true cause are those that I probably admire most.  The lucky thing is that 99.9999% of the people I have met do that to me. They present their je’ ne se quoi to the world and I see it and I am struck.

 

“The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.”
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Finding my middle path – 215/366 (catch up)

What made me compromise?

I think that I compromised when I let people throw me under the bus. I think this let me be too easy for people, so I became that one who you can throw under a bus, a scapegoat.

No more.

“The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.”
~ Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ2ZrnsDAkQ

Mistress of Fortune – 214/366 (catch up)

What is the last risk I took?

 

I struggle with these questions that can be left open to a superficial or a deeper interpretation.  Life is a risk, every day brings things we are surprised by, if it doesn’t then you I would venture to guess that you are not doing it right.

I am a Pollyanna. Most people assume it means I don’t see bad and ugly.  I disagree, I think i see past the bad and ugly.  I have a friend that has given me the impression that I am not doing life right, that my quest for plain and simple and quiet is wrong, that my wish to behold the beauty is wrong… that I am a failure for failing to embrace the mean and cruel, the ugly.

The thing is, I think that I do that… but, I reject it.

I mean that after several years of trying things out my friends way, I was not any happier. I  was probably more miserable, felt less resilient.  Granted a cancer diagnosis in the midst of trying to embrace the fucked up side of life was not helpful… but then, was it a result of that?

So here I am, embracing gentle again. trying to forgive myself for letting myself fall. Working hard at not letting the negative invade.

I feel happier when I am this way.

 

“Fortune sides with him (sic) who dares.”  

~ Virgil

Artifice of the heart – 213/366 (catch up)

What memories came to mind today in the last 24 hours?

Quite a few things popped in to my mind;

• my son as a preemie in NICU
• when my son fell in a hole with live electrical wires and in spite of several kids that were playing with him who could have helped but didn’t, he ended up getting saved by a dog.  But I was the bad guy. #stillbitter #mommad
• That we got our dog one year ago today

 

“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
~ Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera