It was a lovefest evening. My eldest daughter arrived home last night for a weekend visit. We drove back from the airport, picked up her sister on our way home and then sat on the deck as the sky turned from peacock-blue to indigo. One by one stars peeked out from behind night’s blanket as we chatted and laughed and shared and caught up on the happenings in each other’s lives.

It was bliss.

This morning, I have an early meeting and a busy day ahead.

And then this evening, I get to do it all again with ‘my girls’ when C.C.’s daughter joins us for dinner at our favourite restaurant, a place where we have spent many an hour talking about everything from heart throbs and heartaches, leaping hurdles and tripping up, dreams and bad ideas and what will happen if…

The joke in our family has long been that if Alexis, my eldest daughter, and I sit in a restaurant together, she’ll inevitably start crying. It’s not that I say something to make her cry! It’s just that Alexis (as she demonstrates in her blog every day) is so in touch with her emotional self, so connected to her feelings, and so willing to be vulnerable and open about where she’s at and what’s really going on within her, our conversations quickly dive into the heart of our human connection. And the water-works follow.

I admire her capacity to express her true self. I admire her ability to be who she is, without trying to cover it up with a brave face, or false bravado.

I am not as open. A lifetime of trying to pretend everything’s A-ok, even when the sky is falling, holds me back. It’s not that I don’t want to be as vulnerable and open. It’s often just, I don’t actually know what I’m feeling. Having disguised my feelings behind my smile for so long, it takes me awhile sometimes to actually figure out — what am I feeling in this moment? Is it anger? Sadness? Am I ok with what just happened? What is it about what just happened that is distressing me? What do I do next?

I know I’m not alone. In a conversation the other day with a very dear friend who is highly evolved and emotionally aware, she shared  how it had taken her weeks to finally figure out that what was going on in a work situation was not okay.

I couldn’t figure out why I was feeling the way i was feeling, she shared. Especially because at first, I couldn’t name what it was I was feeling.

I understand.

In the heat of a situation, I often revert to my adapted learning that would have me stay silent in the face of fear, anger, sadness, embarrassment, confusion, shame and a host of other emotions that I am more apt to run away from than face.

In my silence, I tolerate the unacceptable. I minimize my feelings, my needs, my desire to be seen, heard and real. In my silence, I lose myself to my fears and forget to turn up authentically. I regress back to that place within me where I make other people’s bad behaviour ok, or, as happened recently, I let other people’s bad behaviour be my excuse for not turning up.

Silence is violence when it is not filled with Love.

And in my silent acquiescence of the unacceptable, I am committing a crime against myself. I am lessening my joy, minimize myself and dimming my light. In my silence I become my own abuser.

I am 100% accountable for everything I accept in my life. When I accept the intolerable as permissible, when I conspire against my own well-being, I am not treating myself the way I want to be treated.

We teach people how to treat us.

When I let my silence hold me back from being present, I am teaching myself it’s okay to be invisible, to be unseen, to be disrespected, abused… whatever it is that is happening around me, when I let the not ok be ok, I am telling myself, I don’t matter.

We all matter. And that includes our feelings.

There is no right or wrong to our feelings. They just are. And when we let our feelings flow free, they don’t pollute our well-being. They don’t dam up our expression of our gifts, talents, light. They don’t stop up our magnificence.

We are born to shine. Let’s do it!

I am supposed to be deep in my morning meditation when I realize… I am reconstructing yesterday’s interview on CBC and saying all the things I wanted to say and didn’t!

Breathe. Repeat my mantra. Begin again.

I continue only to find myself a few minutes later dreaming of squirrel retribution. The dastardly devils ate my daisies yesterday and dug up one of my potted plants, again. Immersed in pleasant thoughts of how I rid my life of their pesky presence, I forget about my meditation until I realize, once again, I’ve veered from my course.

Breathe. Repeat my mantra. Begin again.

Sigh. It is always this way when I return to my practice. My mind is easily swayed, easily pulled from silence into active engagement with my thinking.

And I… Breathe. Repeat my mantra. Begin again.

It’s not just in meditation that this happens. It appear in my life too. My thinking gets in the way of my being and becoming and living my truth. instead of eating right, my thinking says, “Oh go for it. One (fill in the blank with any calorie, sugar-infused, fat laden item of your choice) won’t hurt.”

I look at my running shoes sitting in the corner calling me to give them a workout and my thinking says, “You’re too tired. Start tomorrow.”

Avoidance strengthens fear. It also keeps me tied to the couch, surfing channels I don’t want to watch, eating bonbons i don’t need to consume and playing spider solitaire.

Breathe. Repeat my mantra. Begin again.

It is the way. To find myself out-of-the-way of where I am going, only to return again to the path.

Buddha said, The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.

it’s also not in my head. The way is in my heart.

I don’t have to look up, down, out or all around me, all I have to do to find myself, to see my light, to discern my path is to look within. And there it is. Always.

Alberta Einstein wrote, God always takes the simplest way.

And that’s the problem with my thinking. It is seldom satisfied with simple.

My thinking likes to complicate, second guess, undermine, minimize or over-inflate, and trip me up with its constant judgements and criticisms. My heart knows the way.

And the way is not through doubt and fear. The way is always through Love.

I lost myself in meditation this morning. In losing myself I found myself once again right back where I belong. I found myself again in that place where I know peace, joy, contentment and Love are always present. I found myself in my heart.

My new flower bed

It was an idyllic day. Sublimely so.

A decision to create a flower bed in the backyard. Hours of hard labour, a satisfying result and an afternoon to kick-back and relax under an umbrella, reading a spy novel, sipping lemonade, listening to bird-song and squirrel chatter.

Ellie the Wonder Pooch

I don’t often read novels. In fact, when I decided to sit back and R&R I pulled out one of my many ‘here’s how to change your life and mindset to get what you want in life’ kind of books and settled in on a comfy lawn chair to read. The heat, the words, the message blurred and I fell asleep in the shade of the lilac bush that sits at the edge of the deck. When I awoke, I looked at the list of other things I had to do, and decided, they weren’t getting done. I was going to indulge myself in sheer escapism literature and an afternoon of unscheduled time. Fortunately for me, C.C. loves spy novels and thrillers so there was an ample supply of them to choose from for my afternoon of indulgence.

Marley the Great Cat

yesterday, I chose to ‘do different’. I chose to not live to my schedule, to not fill my time with doing, doing, doing and simply let myself be.

At peace. At one. At ease with myself, my world and where I am in it.

Like the butterfly who spent countless minutes simply sipping at the nectar of a flower, I let myself sip gratefully at the unstructured time before me.

It was delicious! Delectable. Juicy.

Later, when a girlfriend came for dinner, we sat on the deck and laughed and shared and chatted about life. She is one of the most amazing people I know. Where once alcohol blurred her vision of who she was and what she deserved in life, Sobriety now graces her every action. She sees, hears, feels clearly what it means to be human.

I get so tired of people asking me, what am I going to do next,” she said as we cleared the dinner dishes and brought them inside from where we’d been eating on the deck. “I’ve decided. I’m not a human doing. I’m a human being.”

I spent a quiet afternoon being at peace with where I was at. Reading. Relaxing. Not really thinking about what needed to get done. Not thinking about what I was thinking about, and what I was going to do next or why or how I was going to get it all done. I simply sat back and didn’t think.

I dug into my human being and let myself be.

It was delicious.

Now, where did I put that list. It’s Monday. I’ve got a lot to do and not enough time to do it all in.

Ahhh. How quickly I forget.

I am a human being. Doing is optional. What I do is my choice. How I do it is who I am.

And sometimes, to do my best, I need to give myself a break. Kick back and savour each moment as it passes by simply watching the birds and bees and butterflies busily doing their thing!

My ego is a mirror of the world around me
My heart is the mirror of my soul.

Those words floated into the silence of my mind this morning as I meditated.

I have drifted from my practice of opening my day with meditation. Left my path of centering myself in oneness to keep me grounded throughout the day.

I have begun again.

Day 5 of the Meditation Challenge created by Oprah and Deepak Chopra.

I missed yesterday. Got up late. Rushed through writing my blog. Rushed into my day. Forgot all about beginning in silence and stillness.

I begin again today.

Such a simple concept, to begin again, yet, sometimes, it seems so far away, so distant, so difficult. My critter mind wants to make up reasons why I need to go back to the beginning and begin all over. It likes to recite the litany of why not’s. —  I don’t have time to do it all, and what’s the point of doing any of it if I can’t do it all? It’s too hard. Too easy. Too stupid. Too whatever.

There are a thousand reasons why my mind would like me to believe I can’t.

My heart knows none of them are true. All of them are excuses.

My heart is the mirror of my soul.

It speaks of what is at the pure essence of my being. Light. Love. Joy. Truth.

It hears what is essential in my being here, on this planet, in this moment, right now. Connection. Community. Contribution.

It knows what is important to creating a life of wonder and awe,   Integrity. Honesty. Authenticity.

It wants for me to be who I am even when my ego would have me believe I am not. Essential. Evolved. Emergent.

It knows all. Sees all. Is all that I am when I live from my soul’s calling me to be the divine expression of Love’s amazing grace.

It is always who I am — even in those moments when I step away from embracing the truth of who I am because, it never ceases to exist — I am a radiant woman. I am a miracle of life, of love, of beauty. I am, as this morning’s mantra invokes, “Om Bhavam Namah” — I am absolute existence. I am a field of all possibilities.

I love that thought. It calls to me on this rain-soaked Friday morning. I am a field of all possibilities.

Within me exists the field of all possibilities. To access the field, all I have to do is breathe deeply into my essential being, and let the truth shine.

It’s all each of us has to do. Breathe in and embrace the truth of who we are. Breathe in and let Love awaken us to the beauty and awe and wonder of our absolute existence. Our field of all possibilities.

My heart is at ease this morning. My heart feels full of grace.

And my soul is dancing.

It was challenging getting into my office yesterday. Yellow police taped sectioned off the side of the street leading to the doors of the building. A policeman stood guard. Legs spread wide, hands on his belt, his voice commanding as he turned away anyone who tried to duck beneath the tape to get to the doors.

A man had been stabbed one street over and made it as far as the door next to my office entrance before collapsing.

The police were busy investigating.

And here’s the thing. He was stabbed at 3am.

My critter is screaming, “Told you so! Told you so!”

My voice of reason is calm in reply. “They’re not related incidences. There’s no correlation from one to the other.”

The ‘other’ refers to my blog yesterday. About choosing to not walk around the block at 3am.

A does not equal B.  Just because the stabbing took place in the middle of the dark hours, does not mean walking around the block at 3am will result in my being assaulted.

But the critter mind doesn’t care about the logic. It wants to remind me of other despicable things that happened in the dark. It wants me to remember fear. Because in the critter’s world, fear equals safety. And its job is to keep me safe.

Problem is. Fear does not induce a state of feeling free. It only creates more of what is — fear.

I know this through experience. In fact, I can see the critter at work in making relationships between what happened in the past, to how I need to stay safe in today.

Remember the time, that man, the one who tried to kill you, the one who lied and manipulated and cheated and schemed, the one who almost cost you your life. Yeah. That one. Remember… he used the dark to scare you. All the time. He called in the dark of night to tell you about the evil men who were threatening to kidnap your daughters and drug them and put them in the sex trade. He called in the middle of the night to tell you about the bullets he’d received. One for you and each of the girls. Remember?

How could I forget. Well actually, I’d like to forget but the critter mind is good at its job. it likes it when I remember my fear.

And don’t forget about the time he jumped you in the dark. Remember? You were walking back to your girlfriend’s house after Alexis 18th birthday party. It was dark. You’d dropped the girls off at the bar where they were continuing the party and driven back to Nan’s where you were staying. Remember? You parked in the visitor lot on the other side of the townhome complex. Took that shortcut through the buildings. Left the path to cut across the grass between two units. It was dark. There were a stand of fir trees and bushes on your right. You saw a shadow move up from where it had been lying in wait on the ground. He was wearing a hoodie. Dark. He jumped up and called your name. You screamed and ran.

Remember?

Yeah.

Good. ‘Cause that’s why you don’t want to walk around the block in the dark. He could still be out there.

Dang. That’s when it hit me.

Walking in the dark isn’t about overcoming my fear of the dark. It’s all about challenging my fear of his being out there. Somewhere. It’s all about keeping my guard up.

Problem with keeping my guard up forever is, I get really, really tired. Weary. Bone weary.

It has been ten years since his arrest. Ten years.

In that time I have not intentionally seen or spoken to him. Not even once.

And still, he stalks my memory. he stirs up the muddy waters of the past, keeping me from knowing true peace.

That’s way too much power to give away. Way too much mindspace to hand over.

It’s time.

Time to stake my claim on the past, present and future. It’s time to not give into my critter’s need to find safety in fear. It’s time to give into my soul’s calling me to be free. To be released from fear.

Yesterday, a man was stabbed at 3am. He survived.

In his survival I am given the gift of remembering to look beyond the obvious. To see into and through the evidence to the root of what was really going on. In the case of the man who was stabbed, the evidence is pretty over-whelming that his assault was related to what he was doing on the street at 3am and while the circumstances of what he was doing may have led to his being stabbed, there is no excuse for violence. No one deserves to be assaulted at any time of the day or night.

I have a fear of walking around the block at 3am. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as I am conscious of the underlying current of my fear. As long as I acknowledge that my fear isn’t about what’s on the street. It’s all about who my mind is telling me ‘might be’ on the street.

It isn’t my fear of walking around the block at 3am that is causing my angst. it isn’t even the remembering of those dark days and nights of that relationship that almost killed me that is stirring up my unease. What’s really the problem is my fear of ‘what might be’ masquerading as my fear of the dark.

There’s no proof he is anywhere even close to where I am. No proof at all. And still my critter’s mind would have me play safe, just in case.

No sense wasting a great life on what might be. there’s no place for playing small in the light, nor the dark.

It’s time to let go of my fear of who might be out there, and face myself in the mirror of my soul and acknowledge, “I am here!”

Whoever might be out there isn’t my problem. I am my problem, my challenge, my gift. It’s up to me to step beyond my fear of what, or who, might be out there.

Hey world!  I’m free!  Watch me shine.

2 am and I can’t get back to sleep.  I’ve moved from the bedroom to the den. Slowly sipped a cup of hot milk with honey. Repeated the Serenity Prayer a hundred times. Tried meditating and mindfulness. And still, I’m awake.

So, here I sit. Writing it out in the hopes it will leave me ready and able to fall back to sleep.

Challenge is, I don’t even feel tired. I just feel normal. Like it’s 7 am and I am getting ready to go to work. Except, it’s pitch black outside and Marley is sleeping on the bed with C.C. while snores emanate from Ellie where she sleeps on her rug at the foot of the bed. The house is quiet as is the street outside my window.

The quiet of mid-night. The inky blackness of the dead of night.

Some time ago I gave myself the challenge of letting go of my fear of the dark. The book I was reading recommended taking walks in the dead of night were a good way to reclaim my feminine power. Begin with a walk around your backyard the author suggested. And so, for a week, every night sometime after midnight, I would get up and go outside and stand in the back yard.

From the backyard, the author recommended walking down the street. Around the block.

Her premise:  there’s not really anything to fear out there. It’s just media, society, our imaginations that have created this fear of the dark. Women needed to overcome their fear of the dark by taking back the night. Only then would we be truly free to live within our own power.

I tried. I really did. I’d stand in the backyard at night, under the apple tree that spread its branches like a giant canopy protecting me from the dark. I’d stand there without any lights on in the house and look up through the leaves at the sky far above. I’d listen to the night sounds. The leaves rustling. The whisper of a mouse crossing the lawn. In the distance the sound of a car driving along the road. I even imagined I heard an owl hooting.

And then, I moved to the back gate. Nope. Too scary to go down the lane. I moved to the side gate leading to the front yard. The rasp of the clasp was loud in the night. It felt like I was announcing my intention to walk the streets, alone, in the dark. It didn’t matter that the whole point of the exercise was to prove to myself there was no one and nothing to fear in the dark, I still thought someone was listening and would know I was out there, in the dark, on my own.

I moved away from the gate and back into the house. I went to the front door. Maybe I would feel better if  I just walked down the steps, along the sidewalk to the road. I got to the edge of the walkway, that space where it joined the main sidewalk and stopped.

What was I thinking?  3am is no time for a woman to be wandering the streets alone, even in suburbia.

I turned and walked (very quickly) back to the house. As I fumbled with the key I wondered what had possessed me to lock it in the first place. Nobody was around at 3am anyway to try the front door and break in. That thought sequence kind of made me laugh. If no one was around, what was I doing being afraid of walking the street at that hour of the night?

After trying to go out for a few nights I decided it wasn’t worth it. Some fears are good to live with. And fear of walking alone on the street at 3am is a healthy fear — it’s self-preservation.

And still, I wonder.

Is there really anything to fear out there in the dark or is it all in my head?

Gavin deBecker, in his fabulous book, The Gift of Fear, suggests that we know when to fear and when not to fear. We are intuitive beings, but he believes we have forgotten to listen to it, to hear it, to heed it. And it is in the not hearing it that our fear arises. It is in the not heeding it that danger stalks us.

Perhaps, walking in the dark is a good place to learn to hear my intuition, but I think I’ll heed my common sense that says, it’s not a good idea walk down my street alone at 3am.

Then again, if I was listening to common sense, I wouldn’t be typing my blog at 3am in the first place!

Night all! Going back to bed to dream of starlit nights where fear has no room to grow because even in the dark, the world is a wonder-lit landscape of blue skies and rainbows streaming across the sky. And in my dreams, I don’t fear walking down the street in the dark, because I can fly!

The forest or the trees

Satisfaction.

The word drifts into my mind as I drive home from the studio space where TZ and I have been spending several hours over the past few days immersed in the creative process.

Satisfaction. Satisfied. Suffice.

I am all of this and more.

I am at peace, my creative spirit dancing with joy and elation. I have been playing with texture, colour, tone. I have been slapping on paint, smearing, merging, layering. I have been having fun!

It has been awhile since I painted. In fact, since my art show in May I have not picked up a brush.

Work In Progress – not finished

I know. Scary.

And it is. Scary. To think that I have let go of doing something that brings me such joy, such peace, such satisfaction.

It happens. Life gets busy. Time and circumstances shift. My focus wanders and I forget about the things that bring me peace.

Like meditating in the morning.

I’ve been slacking off. Letting go of that which grounds me every morning. Using the excuse of ‘not enough time’ as a means to deny myself that which brings me strength, courage, joy.

What gives?

In the other light

Philosopher and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

And that’s the challenge. In my human experience I gave into my human nature’s call to check out. Avoid. Redirect. Detour and deke, dip and dive away from staying present. I got humanly lazy in my spiritual connections. I took a physical break from my psychic self.

Hello! I’m back. I’m here. I’m connected.

And I am reminded. When I lose the path, all it takes is to come back and begin again.

Emergent Women

Always begin again.

And in my beginning again I am not thrust to the back of the line. I am not in a queue or on the line waiting for a service rep to come on the line and answer my question. There is no voice exhorting me to ‘Stay on the Line. Your call will be answered in the order it is received.”

I am the giver and the receiver of my connection to the Universe. It’s not that the universe cares, or not, whether I turn up. I do. And when I take a break, beginning again where I’m at, is the only way to reclaim my balance, to restore my equilibrium.

I begin again.

I painted this weekend. I dripped and poured and splashed and daubed. I let colours run. I let my imagination flow free. And in the process, I found myself again, exactly where I am, in the place I’ve always been.

At home in my heart. At One with the One. At peace with it all.

I found myself in the embrace of the muse, my spirit running free, my soul stirring and jiving and dancing for joy. I found myself and begin again.

What a wonderful gift.

Sunday. A rainy day that didn’t happen, at least not until much later. A road that called us to explore and C.C. and I were off on an adventure.

We travelled south, the verdant hills rolling out on either side of the grey strip of tarmac we followed without thought for destination, other than to know we had to circle back towards home in time to make dinner at friends at 6:30.

Cityscape gave way to ranchlands. Concrete and wooden structures morphed into wooden barns and rambling ranchers.

Just past deWinton, we spied a sign to The Saskatoon Farm. “Have you ever been?” I asked C.C. and upon his negative response we turned left, off the highway, down a winding road, through the enormous cast-iron gates where two identical, larger than life, cast-iron sculptures of an Indian Brave riding his mighty horse stands watch on either side of the gateposts.

The place was busy. Families strolled back to their cars, their arms heavy with a sleeping child or white pails filled with ‘U-pick’ Saskatoon berries. A mother and her three young children pulled a metal wagon piled high with the last of the summer flowers being sold off at drastic discount. A group of women, their Indian sari shimmering in the light, giggled and took photos of each other against the backdrop of the rolling hills and the river valley below.

We parked in a field of golden grain ripening in the afternoon sun and walked up to the main compound of the Farm. Families, singles, couples, every nationality wandered through the greenhouses and displays, taking photos of each other sitting on the brightly covered Adirondack chairs and loungers. Grabbing a shot of the rooster. The enormous pot-bellied pig who slept in the sun, oblivious to the commotion around him.

We checked out the native grasses for sale, storing ideas on how to transform our front yard’s manicured lawn to prairie oasis. We laughed and chatted and stood at the edge of the ridge the sun warm against our skin. Below, the Sheep River lay at the valley bottom, a dark ribbon of water sparkling in the afternoon sun. It lazily wend its way through the hills, no sign of the anger and wrath that had swelled its banks and  caused such devastation to High River and other towns along its course just over a month ago.

A delicious saskatoon tart consumed, we drove southward. “Shall we stop by High River?” C.C. asked, and I declined. I didn’t want to feel like a voyeur, looking in on the town-people’s pain as they continue to measure the toll of the flood, clearing out treasured belongings, tearing down homes that sat for three weeks in the flood-waters that had consumed them and turned basements and first floor living spaces into uninhabitable bacteria and mold riddled swamps.

At Nanton, we pulled into the Air Force museum and wandered amidst the memorabilia and photographs and re-constructed Mosquitoes and Lancaster Bombers and other WW2 planes that gleamed beneath their new paint jobs and polished up propellers. I briefly watched a circa 1940 film on women in the war, but left when the announcer described their work as freeing the men to ‘go off and do the more important jobs.’

And I wondered, which is more important? To make the bombs or drop the bombs? And if either is so important, how do we ever make peace?

And Pete Seeger’s iconic, Where have all the flowers gone drifted through my mind. When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?

Peace cannot be made in the killing of another.

We drove on. This time westward, up and over the Porcupine Hills where rolling hillside gave way to the Foothills of the Rockies. Dark storm clouds gathered overhead, the sky turned from brilliant blue to threatening black.

And the skies opened up and the rain poured down, pelting the land.

We drove across the bridge between Turner Valley and Black Diamond. The bridge that just a few short weeks ago had stood like an island in a sea of rushing waters, the roadway washed away in the violence of the flood, has now been rebuilt. It once again serves its purpose of connecting townspeople and travellers.

A glance down-river was all it took to understand the enormity of the flood-damage. The shoreline that once gently rose up from the river bank is now starkly etched, a straight band of earth exposed to weather and time. Along its spine, giant tree trunks lay piled up in disarray, their roots festooned with the debris that surged into them in the passing of the raging waters.

Home again home again jig-a-dee-jig. A quick nap. Pets fed and we were off to join friends for an evening of delightful conversation, a delicious meal and time spent exploring life and what it means to be human in the 21st Century.

There is a time and place for everything, and now is the time to find a new path. To discover new ways to be amongst one another without resorting to the loss of human life going off to do the important jobs of making war.

Now is the time to rebuild bridges, to reconnect human life to the wonder and awe of one another. To celebrate what makes us different, and to embrace what we share in being human.

Now is the time to make peace with our nature to destroy one another and claim our right to live in harmony with all humankind.

My daughter, Alexis, writes  on her blog today, about taking her first pregnancy test. Now, I must clarify, I am not a grandmother and have not been pestering my daughters about making me one. I leave that decision and the timing of it, or not, completely up to them. But, when I read the first line of her blog, my little mind quickly jumped to that place of “What! Really? Oh my! I’m going to be a….” Only to have whatever excitement, hope, anticipation that had arisen dashed when she said there was no second blue line.

And then, I read the last two paragraphs of her post.

What I do know is that if a second blue line had appeared, I would be doing everything in my power to nourish and protect the life inside me now. I would be eating clean and eating well. I’d be sleeping lots and fostering my happiness.

So maybe the lesson here (aside from the fact that I need to get my hypochondria checked out) is that the person I am giving birth to is myself. And if I’m going to come out healthy and happy and strong, it is time I began nourishing my body and feeding my soul.

I gave birth to this brilliance? I gave birth to this young woman who sees so deeply into our human angst, who is so fearless in her capacity to be vulnerable, open and real about not only her recovery from an eating disorder, but also her struggle to be vulnerable, open and real in life.

Wow!

Twenty-seven and twenty-five years ago when I gave birth to my two amazing daughters I had no idea that they would become my greatest teachers. I had no clue that to become a mother meant having to allow my children to teach me what it means to ‘trust in love’ and to be vulnerable, open and real.

Sure, in the haze of newborn love and the days of sleepless nights, it feels at first as if it’s about changing diapers, mid-night feedings and trying to scrape a few moments together to wash your face or even sneak a nap. And yes, there are the countless firsts to treasure. First smiles, steps, words, pictures drawn and stories told. There are the first days of school, sleep-overs, ears pierced and dating. There are the first times they drove, the first pair of high heels, stockings, first days of high school, first time their heart was broken, the first time they broke a heart and the first time they swore they’d never love again.

But more than all the firsts and all the sleepless nights spent worrying about where they are, or how they’re doing, or what will they do, or not do, there are the lessons learned. The teachings embraced. The moments that simply take my breath away because they are so amazing, incredible, wise and beautiful and absolutely right.

Last night, my youngest daughter and I had our weekly dinner together. We sat and chatted and laughed and shared stories and talked about life and love and being real. “Thank you for always leaping at the opportunity to have dinner together,” I told her.  And she smiled and replied, “I love our dinners together.”

And my heart melted and I was reminded, again, how blessed and precious each moment is that I can spend with these two young women who have taught me so much about loving, living and letting go.

My eldest daughter lives in Vancouver now. We don’t get as much time together and I miss just being able to go for coffee, or a walk, or sit over a leisurely meal to chat and share. My youngest daughter is planning a year abroad to take her Masters. Next fall, she’ll be gone, and who knows where she’ll end up. “I might meet a nice Scottish boy and never come back to Canada,” she jokingly told me last night. (She knows how to push my buttons that young one! 🙂 )

But again, I am reminded of one of the greatest lessons in Love my daughters have taught me. My job as their mother isn’t to hold them close, it’s to watch them and celebrate them and cheer them on as they fly free.

Love doesn’t need physical presence to grow. It already is. Everywhere. What I need to know its essence is an open heart. Love doesn’t need a new car, or pretty dress or sparkly jewellery, it simply requires space to grow wild and passionate. It needs space to expand into and around and under and over. And in my heart is all the space love needs to know that no matter where my daughters are in the world, they are always at home in my heart.

Now, about those grandchildren….  🙂