Sharing some things I value.

The advantage about the lifestyle I live is that I am able to have the flexibility to be where I feel I need to be in life when I need to be. I mostly work for myself and this has allowed me to be a stay at home mom while raising my three daughters and it has allowed me to take time to recover when I’ve had health setbacks and then return to whatever work I choose to do when I am healthy enough. I’m grateful for this but it has also meant that our finances have gone up and down over the years, and when my children were very young, we really had to make a lot of sacrifices while I spent most of my time tending to them while managing my chronic health condition.

I never felt that we were sacrificing that much because I felt we were always focusing on what was truly of value to us: our family, our passions, guidance from within and always seeking to expand that to a higher level of thinking and behaving, our health, and our community. We have had our ups and downs, I’ve come close to dying a couple of times because of my health; my heart stopped under anesthesia during surgery that I had to undergo a couple of years ago that ended up being more extensive than the surgeon originally thought would need to be - it was surgery to help me be able to walk.

I credit a lot of my ability to manage my health as well as I do because of the alternative methods of healing that I use. Doctor’s and other health practitioners tell me time and again that they view me as a walking miracle. I’m grateful I’m walking and alive whether by miracle or hard work and constant focus, either way, I’m grateful.

I do work at it. I come from a long line of hardy, determined, independent, and proud people. They have also been an ancestry of cold, bitter, distant people who have also struggled with being involved in victim consciousness; acting from both sides of the coin in being both victim and victimizer. There are extremes in my lineage; often the first step toward an issue turning into a problem is having it go to the extreme.

I seek to walk a balance and look for the qualities that can carry me through and discard those that have held my family back for generations. There is a deeply entrenched, unequal, and unfair patriarchy to my family’s imbalance among strong women who have often been left to pick up the pieces even though all they may have had left of themselves after the settled dust of abuse and abandonment were fragmented pieces. I have sought to reclaim the role of strong matriarch for my family moving forward and it begins with my three daughters.

I had daughters. I choose not to see this as an accident but as an extension of the will to do better; another chance to heal and to try to do it better moving forward. I also see it as no accident that so many in my family, siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, chose not to have children, even if they chose to marry, they made the decision very deliberately not to have children. The lineage is dying out and I have to say that in many ways I am grateful if no one was willing to take on the task of trying to do it better.

In my family the way paved was with little to no support, and very little understanding. There was little to no guidance because it was new unknown territory, so there was no guidance to be given. In my lineage one would be on their own in the wilderness, an ostracized member of a sick and dying tribe struggling to find the path to surviving much less the path to thriving.

I write as one of my coping mechanisms, I also expose myself to anything that will uplift and inspire because my life has been very challenging but I refuse to give up, though I will surrender. Surrender is a whole other thing - I actually find freedom and release in surrender. I surrender to the answer, which so far always comes as soon as I surrender. I choose to expose myself to that which inspires but that doesn’t mean I shy away from being exposed to something terrible or challenging, if I did I would have to be living in complete and utter denial. But when I come across something terrible or challenging, I try to seek out the inspiring. I search for the solution to a problem, or the way through the challenge; I look for the lotus in the mud.

I have always been a journal writer, I started when I was very young, and this blog is an extension of that exercise. I really use this blog as a reminder to myself to be inspired and to be inspiring. It is a part of what gets me through the day, and there are days where getting through the day means getting through the moments. I appreciate the exchange with my readers, and I am very grateful to those who are reading this and getting something out of it and comment this to be the case.

Thank you.