Gratitude

 I listened as a friend told me how she recently learned how to quell anxiety (and we all have it, the plague's not over, many are sick, new variants, wars, climate change - I'm so very sick of even trying to list).

So it goes like this: she has an old rosary beads of her granny's that she treasures. Hanging up somewhere as we do with things that are precious but have no use for.

She took down the rosary bead and off it went to bed with her. And she thought of her granny and fingered one bead in thanks and then she thought of other wonderful beings in her life and she assigned one bead to each of them and on it went. And she slept better than she had in years and woke refreshed with the beads still in her hands and resolved to do this every night when lying down.

I threw out all the old beads, sinful me, but I need to find me some and do much the same thing. I have so very much to be grateful for including those wonderful beings who have no idea they help me so much as I navigate each day and I daresay I might even run out of beads.

I met my new internist yesterday, very impressed, and and afterwards went up glorious Signal Hill here in St. John's and took a few shots as the gloaming of the day settled into my bones. I took a shot behind me and a shot in front of me - the ocean and the moon and the gorgeously lit harbour with all the boats and ships and peaceful waters.

Gratitude.

What are you grateful for?

Whatever happened to wearing the world like a loose garment anyway?

I can't seem to settle into my own skin.

It's been hectic since I got back, workers still crawling around the house, municipal matters piled up while I was gone now scream for attention and the plans for finishing off Book 3 and sending it around recede into the background. I don't think my brain could cope.

Yeah, I'm living in chaos.

On top of that my android phone appears to have been stolen while I was gone. The wee shelf where it lives and sucks power is bare. Daughter hunted high and low while she was staying here. As did I when I returned. That leaves me feeling queasy.

Dozers and other machinery tear up and down next door building monster summer homes for the sons of the local merchant.

Discombobulated is what I am. Restless and irritable. And anxious. About what I couldn't tell you. Pileup it feels like.

This could be seasonal, or it might be the noise and banging around me not to mention the crunch of scrapings, dust and debris underfoot. Summer people are now leaving for warmer climes and that makes me sad.

Oh yes, good news in that a play I submitted to a St. John's theatre is being "considered" for production.

And no news on the artist's grant I applied for.

I can really see now how elders/artists living alone make a monthly choice between food and heat.

Seriously.

Nudge: To the Universe - grant, please, now. I need this grant!

Then it will be loose garment time.

A New Pair of Glasses

Yeah, that's how I'm trying to see life lately.

I've carried this philosophy into my home too. I changed things around yesterday. Old formations of furniture, bits and pieces. I don't have much here, never did. I keep it simple. But sometimes it's not simple enough. So I make it even simpler again.

I've always suffered episodes of free floating anxiety, since I was very small, usually a precursor to depressions that in the old days would cripple me or drag me back to the bottle. And the battle. But I was reading something about different approaches to old themes that keep cropping up again and again in my life, the big one being abandonment. I'm tired of those old violins. I think these sickening old themes are dead and buried but they're not. The smelly corpses protrude up through the soil and give me a death grin. (Graphic. Sorry.)

But I make a gratitude list every single night and it sings those corpses back to sleep.

And sometimes I feel like I'm going mad all alone in an alternative universe. Until people who care about me remind me of who I am.

And I look at the gifts I've been given. And if I forget, or they get stolen, I am reminded.

To reclaim and polish them up.

And put on the new glasses. And keep them handy.