Living For The Love
Life is moving at lightening speed, with work event hosting and planning, trying to get as much work done as possible in the few business days before the Christmas vacation.And yet, days goes slowly. My energy is low again, the darker evenings bring on a sleepiness I can't battle, and I feel like tucking in - to needlepoint, to books, to hockey on TV, to bed with flannel sheets and night walks with the dog.This morning, I read Yes by Jillian at The Noisy Plume:
...life is short. It becomes more and more apparent to me as I watch my grandparents in the twilight of their wonderful lives, as I watch my parents age, as I see our siblings and friends having babies and growing the next generation, as I see the lines of a life well lived begin to pepper my face. I’m not going to live forever. Neither are you. I am concerned that when I lay in the quiet of a failing heartbeat on my deathbed that I will regret how much time I spent worrying, how much time I spent on my computer hitting a “like” button, how many days I sacrificed making memories with the people I love on the land I adore for a small job I didn’t pour my heart and soul into. When I realized all of this, I decided to say yes as often as possible to the people closest to me, even if there were 100 unanswered and festering emails in my inbox, even if I was straddling a deadline in the studio, even if I was running late on photo submissions for freelance work — I started setting those things aside and doing a better job of living for love, living for the love of life, living for the love of experiences.
Her words wrap around the feelings I have about the panic that sets in about events, unanswered emails, the general piles of stuff that spring up around the house and the to-do lists. In the end, it doesn't matter. What matters is the time I've spent with people "living for the love of experiences".---------Rest keeps coming up for me too, from tweets, to blog posts, to friend's emails. Like, OK Universe, I hear you.November saw me travel to Boston, to Denver, to Joshua Tree. I haven't blogged about any of it yet, and I'm not sure why. I know there is some type of flow that happens between living / experiencing life the writing / reflecting I do... and I think I may need to do even more of that to really grasp what that flow is. To articulate it to you in words.It's so hard to revel in this season when everything seems to be so busy busy busy. I am taking time out each day to post a photo for December Reflections. I turn the Christmas lights on at night. I'm sipping a lot of hot chocolate and letting the holiday music blast through speakers while I work. The to-do list is focused, albeit shorter and shorter to cope with my lack of energy, but even in my weariness, things are getting done.And then this by David Whyte:
To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner bulls eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.
Again - to move from a place of outward productivity to a place of inward enjoyment. Reflection. A different type of giving and receiving. Especially being open to receiving.If that's what I focus on in the the next few weeks - receiving - I should be able to sing sink* right into the holiday spirit.*Originally I wrote sing which I thought was a wonderful slip as music seems to move me much more lately, and singing is an excellent way to move into the holiday spirit. xo