Letting Go

"The compassion we feel normally is biased and mixed with attachment. Genuine compassion flows towards all living beings, particularly your enemies. If I try to develop compassion towards my enemy, it may not benefit him directly, he may not even be aware of it. But it will immediately benefit me by calming my mind. On the other hand, if I dwell on how awful everything is, I immediately lose my peace of mind." - Dalai Lama

I've been very grateful the past few weeks for the wise words of our Dalai Lama.  Finding myself in the midst of some not so fun circumstances at work has caused me to really draw on his words for inspiration and to maintain the calmness I know I need to feel, but don't always achieve. 

The interesting thing is that I'm finding myself feeling 'guilty' for not feeling strong negative emotions.  This applies to my situation with Jake.  I've resigned myself to letting go of him.  I've reached a place where I think of him, often, I feel my love for him, but I've stopped feeling the pain of his rejection.  Instead, I have a sense of peace and positive anticipation for a time when our relationship will change for the better.  Every so often, when I really think about this sense of peace about my decision and I immediately feel guilty for feeling peaceful.  I think I need to work on that. 

I wonder if it's common for us (maybe women in particular?) to feel guilty for being happy.  I'd be curious to see if there's any information about that.  

Rainy Days and Mondays....

When both of those come together it's tough to lift the veil of doldrums and find the energy to get motivated! But, here I am. Motivating myself and it seems to be working.  Have a lot to accomplish today work-wise and actually have made a list to check-off of.  Woot!

Went for a walk this morning with Paul and Gabby. As I type her name, I realize that I haven't even mentioned her despite the fact that I posted a picture of her yesterday!  Gabby's our new 'child'.  She's a year old Aussi/Chessie mix who must be part mole because she's burrowed herself so deeply into our hearts over the past 4 months!  I'll make sure to write more about her later when I have more time.  For now though, here's another photograph for our goofy Big Brown Dog. (Please disregard the fact that this is a B&W photo of a Big Brown Dog). :)

Harvests

You know how you can get tossed into a rut and you don't realize you're in the rut, until you come out of it?

I climbed out of my rut this weekend.  Not sure why it happened now, but it did.  Maybe I was laying fallow and all the various things that have been occurring in the background of my life sprang, flowered and now are being harvested.

The desire to write, to share to explore my world and to document what goes on in it is strong again, and I'll once again make the effort to do this on a consistent basis and see where it takes me.  Not unlike the process of quitting smoking, the process of keeping on track with maintaining a record of life takes many tries.

Today, Paul and I went to the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore.  What a fantastic experience.  It was warm, and welcoming and the service was centered around the theme of "Harvest" (thus the title of today's post...and you thought I was just a creative genius without any help! Ha!).   Listening to the stories behind what 'harvest' means to different people was very moving, as so many of them closely defined what I've been feeling and what I think Paul has been feeling.

We've both been a bit 'anchorless' and sort of swimming around without any purpose or destination, and I think that we've both realized that we need to have some sort of direction in order to have forward movement.

Besides the step of going to church, we also actually went out with another couple on Saturday night for drinks.  We met them at the dog park, and our pups are good buddies, so we spent part of the day together at a beach dog park, and then invited them out for drinks.  Like real grown-ups.  What a concept.   Had a nice time, we survived, and we discovered that sharing time with others besides ourselves was a nice experience.