A New Start To The Day

The news ain’t great these days.

Most mornings as I wait the recommended four minutes before I can press the coffee, I scan my email inbox. Along with the tantalizing smell of freshly ground coffee brewing, my senses are assaulted with the latest New York Times Breaking News Headlines. While there is the very occasional headline that to my heart constitutes good news—the swearing in of Judge Katanji Brown Jackson—most of the time what I read breaks my heart a little more—the past two weeks have almost put me under—and hope is hard to find.

It’s not a great way to start the day.

So, I changed it.

I unsubscribed to The NY Times newsletter.

I subscribed to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s A Hundred Falling Veils: there’s a poem in every day

This morning I was greeted with my first poem from Rosemerry, about, of all things, hope. (You can find her poem, Longing to Be Seen here)

How we start the day matters. Along with coffee and time with my husband and our dog as the sunlight first hits the meadow, I’m choosing to start my day with poetry, and a little hope.

Maybe you will too.

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(Now before you go jumping to any conclusions, it’s not that I don’t want to be informed about the goings on in the world. I am simply choosing not to start my day there. Being part of a well informed citizenry matters to me, and it should matter to you too. Our democracy depends on it. There are good sources of news, as in real information as opposed to opinion and rhetoric out there, and, spoiler alert, they are not found on social media.)

The Whispered Invitation

“Allow your intuition to guide you today

and trust that whatever is whispering in your heart

is the right decision.”

Keith Macpherson

This morning I was about to head out to the gym for a quick 30 minutes on the elliptical before getting ready to go into town.

And then I looked out our front window.

Stretching out into the distance was our field, covered in untouched snow, the first light of day spreading across the sky, and more snow quietly falling. The whispered invitation was clear…

Off came the gym shoes.

On went the snowshoes.

The gym will always be there.

The chance for the magic of a solo trek in the snow won’t.

The Joy Of Sadness

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

Psalm 30:5

Joy is not the absence of sorrow.

Sorrow, however can be a gateway to joy.

There are few of us who look forward to pain and loss, much less the deep, dark emotions that accompany us in our  grief. It can be tempting to try and shorten our times of sadness, to move through them as swiftly as we can, and even to attempt to escape them altogether through our coping mechanisms of choice. But sorrow has a purpose. It isn’t meant to break our hearts, but to break them wide open. As I wrote in BLUSH: Women & Wine, There is a cleansing that takes place when we grieve with our whole hearts. By moving through it , rather than hiding from it, we come out the other side made more whole through our willingness to be broken.

Take heart.

Be courageous.

Weeping may endure for a night.

But joy is to be found in the mourning.

In A Heartbeat

Joy resides in the heart.  

Today has me thinking a lot about hearts. A few months ago my husband discovered, kind of by a fluke, that his heart was beating too fast, and somewhat irregularly. Rather than getting its signal from the sinus node, which regulates the heartbeat, his ticker was responding to a different impulse. While not imminently dangerous, in the long term it would be good to take care of it.

Today, he did.

His doctor, a cardiac electrophysiologist, put a catheter up into his heart to locate and shut down the misfiring cells. He’s out of surgery, and we will head home tonight with his heart, once again, responding to the beat of the right drum.

I think joy in our hearts is a lot like that.

We are meant to experience joy deep within, and come wired with an internal signal to regulate the quiet, steady heartbeat of joy that can sustain us even in the midst of our most challenging days. But sometimes we let fear and anxiety, anger and resentment, guilt and shame run amok, and suddenly our hearts are out of whack too. In other words, we allow the wrong impulses to regulate the state of our hearts.

Time to locate and shut down the misfiring messages, and allow our hearts to do what they were designed to do.

Beat with the quiet, steady heartbeat of joy.