ah ha!

i've been feeling sad for some time now. i've been searching all over ... attempting to fill a void that is as impossible to fill as a black hole. avoiding alone time. today i figured out what's wrong. i really miss my mom. it seems like she has been gone forever and just left yesterday. but she's been gone almost 15 years and sometimes i still need her. i talk to her in my head. sometimes if i'm alone i talk to her out loud. no, she doesn't answer me directly, but inevitably the answer comes forward through some other medium. coincidence you say? there is no coincidence.

one of my aunties sent me an email today about living with unconditional acceptance. that is what my mom gave me, that and unconditional love. it truly didn't matter what sort of half assed idiocy i had participated in, she just loved me. not the tidy surface plastic love that is expressed through hallmark greeting cards, but the messy painful jubilant angry when you make the same mistake twice, hopeful that there won't be a third time sort of love that is more rare than anything else you will ever experience. but you won't realize you've found it until you find it in yourself to love yourself that way first or until it is gone.

by my late twenties i was just beginning to get quick glimpses of that profound state of self acceptance. i never seemed to be able to manage to hang onto it for very long. i would get mired down in self pity and guilt for my own behaviours. or i would be trying to get lost, to escape reality for a while. for so many uncountable reasons i did not believe that i deserved that acceptance. what about all the nasty things i had done when i was younger? what about all those people i had hurt, in some cases with fore knowledge of the consequences of my actions? what about the mistakes i had made with my children? there always seemed to be some reason/rationalization/excuse for me not to just love me. i was wrong.

how about this: don't live in the past, learn from it. don't knowingly repeat mistakes, which assumes you will pay attention to what you are doing NOW. use those experiences to inform your future decisions. don't sit around and think about it, put it into action. cease with the deprecating remarks. accept a compliment gracefully. believe in yourself. set some reasonable goals and act on them. surely if you can be compassionate with others, you can spare a spot for yourself.

life is a gift. a gift is supposed to be a good thing. open it now.

ps ~ simple but hardly easy.