Month: January 2016

A Wellness Exercise

Can you remember the last time you felt truly joyful and carefree? How old were you and what were you thinking or doing at the time? How difficult is it to recall that joy and how long can you hold your focus on the memory? Do you know that focusing on a joyful memory can release the same endorphins as though the event were happening right now? Restorative healing can happen when we let go of the woeful stories and embrace our blessings.

 

Original Art by Sara Blair McNally

The most profound loss of my life has been the loss of myself. Wanting desperately to feel loved and avoid rejection, I molded myself to please others. Indeed I became a shape shifter. If you were an owl I would be a field mouse, allowing you to devour me, solely to please you. In this way, I lost myself, one little field mouse at a time. The ghosts of all those mice haunted me until I began the inward journey to reclaim them. It was grueling to get all those owls to regurgitate those tiny bones and even harder to remember the particular characteristics that would flesh them out again. Still, I persevered. It became an expedition. Having gathered and fleshed out all those sacrificial mice, I was still bereft of identity; all those mice, but no life in them. Reclaiming wholeness while identifying parts seemed an impossible task. Then, I remembered one characteristic of the owl that helped: long-sighted vision. I had to step back and get a broader view. Following the guidance of my inner owl, one by one, I swallowed each mouse and once again they were alive and reanimated aspects of me long forgotten. Inside me now lives an owl and many mice.

© 2016 Bessie Adams Senette

Photo by David Senette: “Christmas Flowers”

Prodigy Envy

If everyone could know at a young age what they were destined to become, would it change all of our social systems? A child prodigy not only excels at a particular skill but is driven to perform that skill and never seems to tire of it. It is more than just being passionate about something. It is that they are created for it. It’s in their DNA.

Statistically, what is the number of people who have college degrees, even post-graduate degrees who are actually working in their field of study? How many people have worked years at a white color job, even excelled at it, only to discover that they really just wanted to be a farmer? I sometimes envy those who are certain of their identity. It seems to me that knowing what your purpose and value is to humanity sooner rather than later can be both rewarding and treacherous. It took me a long time to be comfortable in my own skin. I suspect I share that sentiment with many others.

I am What I am.

Does the seed wonder what it will become?

If it’s a daisy, does it want to be a bean instead?

When it becomes a beautiful flower,

Does it think that its roots are too short,

Or its petals are too far apart,

Or its color is a shade too flamboyant?

 

I watch a bird pecking at something

Perhaps a bug or a worm

In the cement birdbath that we grew tired of cleaning

Resorting to using it as a planter instead.

 

I wonder if this is the same bird that

Bathed in the sun-warmed water last summer.

It doesn’t seem to care that the water isn’t there.

Perhaps it’s a different bird or maybe it has

Already forgotten what used to be.

I can relate,

What I am now is far more interesting.

 

I look in the mirror and smile.

What an absurd creation I am,

As though source of creation

Thought it might be fun to use only spare parts from

Leonardo da Vinci’s atlas of anatomy.

I no longer care that my legs are short

And my wrinkles are deepening,

I still have a twinkle in my eye.

Like Popeye,

I am what I am.

 

© 2015 Bessie Adams Senette