Yum Food Dichotomies

I must be really dehydrated these days, because I'm craving liquids out the wazoo. So I'm looking at what cravings are at the forefront and found what I call, "Yum Foods that Make Me Hum":

Perrier lemon sparkling water

Yogi gojiberry green tea (with raw honey and lemon)

Imagine Natural Creations organic vegetable soups

Milton's all natural multigrain crackers (okay technically, they aren't liquid but they go really well with the soups)

Synergy organic raw kombucha -- gingerade (although they make a delightful variety to tempt all tastebuds, including divine grape, guava goddess, strawberry serenity...)

Starbucks green tea soy latte

Bolthouse Farms Green Goodness drink

Pea green, microgreen sprouts

Bigelow chamomile tea (with raw honey and lemon)

Dannon all natural plain yogurt with berries and a dash of cinnamon

Campbell's homestyle chicken noodle soup with cayenne pepper, onion powder, garlic powder and dill weed (yeah I know, soup in a can!)

Of course, I'm also into icy bottles of vanilla Coca Cola and raspberry Krispy Kreme donuts...I'm all about the paradoxes these days. And, apparently, the brand names.



Credit: Photo courtesy of Coca Cola Company

Green Tea Soy Latte Wisdom

Today we enjoyed cold, drizzly rain -- (hello spring, goodbye winter :0) -- so a stop at my favorite weekend comfort splurge, Starbucks, was on the menu.

Here's what the green tea soy latte had to say:

People need to see that, far from being an obstacle, the world's diversity of languages, religions and traditions is a great treasure. affording us precious opportunities to recognize ourselves in others. ~ Youssou N'Dour, Musician, The Way I See It #21.

Amen, dude! You are echoing something Adyashanti says in his book, The End of Your World;

The truest sign of an awakened heart is that it is an indiscriminate lover of what is. This means it loves everything, because it sees everything as itself. This is the birth of unconditional love.

...it loves everything and everybody.

...the awakened heart loves the world as it is, not just as it could be.

I mean, NOW I can shut up.



Credit: amazing photo courtesy of MARK'N'MARKUS'S flckr photostream

Shut Up

So, it's Friday (TGIF to high heaven, because it was the day from hell) and my co-worker told me to shut up during serve (we work as lunch ladies at our childrens' elementary school) because apparently I talked too much....

Excuse me? You want me to what? I mean, seriously, ask me something I CAN ACTUALLY DO for Pete's sake! "Talks too much" was the most common complaint, I mean, constructive criticism, on my grade school report cards.

So, back to my co-worker; I told her to bite me.

And then the kids showed up...

(This photo is the only one I have from my job -- pre-45 lb. gain from eating all that crappy, I mean, government mandated, school food -- so my co-worker is not in this actual photo, but still, you get the picture.)

The Gift of Life -- Love

Motherhood...

Birth mother.
Grandmother.
Adoptive mother.

Comes in many beautiful forms.

Life Blessings

This weekend my grandson is receiving his baby blessing with his adoptive family. Our household is brimming with barely contained excitement.

The event is divided into two days of celebration; a luncheon on Saturday where we party with everyone, and the ceremony on Sunday. Now, normally I am not into rituals and such, but this generates excitement because we get to see him. Which is a rare gift for me, one of his birth family's grandmothers.

It's all so surreal in a way, as I don't know how to "be" in this situation, i.e. what feelings to have. Joy for his sweet parents? Joy for the bundled of energy that he is? Joy for his dear birth parents? I mean, it is bittersweet for me, but there is so much room for gratitude here. I'm awed by the whole experience. It's so tempting to drop the 'bitter' and just revel in the sweet.

I'm happy he gets to experience life on this amazing planet. I'm happy his adoptive parents get to experience him, and I'm happy his birth parents get to experience what they have created together. I'm happy we get to experience all this in whatever way we can. It's quite beautiful when I focus on that. When I drop my concept of what grand-parenting 'should' look like, it doesn't hurt. And that alone is worth the experience.

All I know is there is a lot of love in this world, and this is just another way to feel it.

Feeling very blessed in this moment.

Fresh Air

One of the reasons I love going to and being in the mountains is fond childhood memories of treks in the wintry forest in Germany with my brother, dad, cousin and uncle.

I remember how peaceful the quiet felt, not a single bird whisper, how our footfalls were muted, muffled by the snow blanketing everything. Occasionally you could hear our boots crunching in the snow if it was hard, but mostly I remember just this quiet stillness.

The sky--usually blanketed by gray clouds that seemed close enough to touch--made me feel very protected there, surrounded by peacefulness. I don't remember feeling the cold either, because just being there felt so good.

Now, sitting in my van at the American Fork Canyon I feel the blinding sun warming my arms. In the all-encompassing absence of city noise, my skin is absolutely tingling. This tingling sensation is running through my body, which I don't notice in the noisy distraction of home, at work, or driving to and fro in my busy life, even though it is probably happening there too.

I'm hearing birds, different kinds, high up in the trees making various bird calls. No singing like in late spring and summer. They just seem to be talking. And surrounding everything is this deep stillness, punctuated only by the intermittent bird chat. In the distance and up high, all around.

Occasionally a wind current sweeps the van but in here I feel sheltered.

When I look up at Mt. Timpanogos, ringed by clouds against a blue sky, I can see the climbing trees, which always remind me of the Lord-of-the-Rings questing Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn and the rest on their way to Mordor through the snowy mountains. And I'm noticing the sunlight beaming off the snow--glistening like eye-piercing diamonds and giving me a headache in the process (sigh).

So why I'm really up here, what I'm really doing, is continuing a passage I read earlier today, which excited me so much I had to come all the way up here to be immersed in perfect still awareness to absorb the words undisturbed.

This passage is from The End of Your World by Adyashanti, and I gotta tell you, his book ranks higher than my other favorites, including Wake Up Now by Stephen Bodian and Beyond Awakening by Jeff Foster. This book of Adya's, affects me as much as Eckhart's A New Earth. I'm continually blown away by what I'm reading.

Right now he talks about coming out of hiding;

...most people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest--not only with others, but with themselves as well. Of course, the core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were actually totally truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody.

Most people are protecting themselves. They are holding a lot of things in. They are not living honest, truthful, and sincere lives, because if they were to do so, they would have no control. Of course, they don't have control anyway, but they would have no illusion of control either.

...the place to start is with yourself--can you be totally sincere with yourself? Can you go to that place that is beyond blame, beyond judgment, beyond should and shouldn't? Can you go to that place that is so sincere you won't shy away from any part of yourself that is still in conflict; you won't use the perception of truth to hide from something that feels less than liberating?

...You feel your heart opening, your mind opening, you feel yourself opening on levels that you never dreamed possible. These levels are not just transcendent of humanness, but also right within your humanness, because there is no separation between your human being and your divine being.

I mean...!

His words just blow me away.

And that is how I ended up enjoying the mountains today.

Loving it. And you.

Forever Marriage

“Marriage should be forever, is that true?”

That's what I believed in my twenties and thirties and halfway through my forties. But then reality hit like a monsoon, washing away that belief in the awakening storm.
And I am left to wonder....

Throughout my life relationships flowed in and out like the ocean tide. Even family (I have relatives scattered across the globe; in Germany, Florida, Georgia and Utah). So what about marriage?

Relationships in general start out strong, the discovery-of-another-human an intriguing and intoxicating journey. Some people in our lives become constants, steadfastly with us like the North Star, while others move on like constellations (okay, I know it's really the earth that is moving) weaving in and out of our lives like the seasonally shifting night sky.

Sometimes they reappear, other times they just disappear. But often they just move on. Reasons vary; relocation, illness, divorce and death. Our family moved a lot growing up because Dad was in the military, but even when we stayed put friends drifted in and out as people developed new interests.

What this means for me is, I don't need to grieve so deeply over the losses. Which was a struggle for a very long time because when my 'forever marriage' transitioned to divorce, it seemed complicated because children were involved. And I held strong beliefs about keeping a ‘together team‘ of husband and wife raising the healthiest children possible.

As things changed I struggled with the dissolution of what we had created together. Would we tear the family we had created apart? How would we help them navigate the stormy seas of adolescence and young adulthood? How could we continue to parent while pursuing separate lives? If our children couldn't count on us to be their constants in this unpredictable world, who could they count on?

I used to believe God was the answer, but my experience was that he didn't protect you from 'bad things' happening either. So I'm thinking they need to learn to count on themselves to be able to handle whatever life brings them and trust that they are okay, because they are LOVED -- by us, by God and the world at large -- and therefore safe.

When I joined the LDS faith, I was ready to start a family. I wanted to raise healthy, happy children; spiritually, emotionally, and physically. For me that meant within a religious framework, a sort of protective life-support network.

And I loved the way it felt in the early years of the marriage; the security of our religious practices, the guidelines providing a sweet, safe arena to raise children. But as our relationship stumbled and I found myself living with an increasingly unhappy husband -- blaming me for his unhappiness -- eventually I began blaming myself until I was drowning in self-doubt.

For a long time I had leaned on my faith for strength, but eventually felt betrayed not only by my partner but by God when things got worse. And in the process, lost faith in myself.

So this is where I find myself today. Bobbing back to the surface of life’s currents, unwilling to waste any more precious energy looking for blame. Still navigating the seas of parenthood, I want to instill in our children a deep abiding faith in themselves, so that no matter what happens in this uncertain world, they will know that they are fine and loved and protected, just as they are, with nothing to change. Unless they want to.

So, is marriage forever? My answer is yes, if it works out that way. And no, if it works out that way. Reality sort of comes first, because as Byron Katie says, “When you argue with reality you lose, every time.”
And when I drop the arguing, I am free to take the best of what is left and move on.


Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net