Tag: friends

Joy, Simplicity

What Tiggers do best

Tigger and Friends
Tigger and Friend

Tigger, from the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, is one of my heroes.  This is why.  He knows who he is and what he does best.

Tigger bounces.  Bouncing’s what tiggers do best.  Fun.  Play.  Creating happiness (and some chaos) with friends and family.  Life is to be enjoyed.  These are also what Tigger does best.

In one of the stories, Rabbit tries to unbounce Tigger.  Not a good idea.  When he stops bouncing, everyone else gets sad too.  Bouncy Tigger is a necessary part of the family in these stories.  He is the joy.

I want to be a tigger.  If I could be a character from A. A. Milne’s Pooh stories, I would be Tigger.  Not even a pause to think it over.

I want to be a joy tigger.  I want to light up the joy in myself and those around me.  When I am happiness and joy, I can hold in balance the life things that are not so easy.

A joy tigger.  Me.  I want to know who I am and what I do best.  And then do it the rest of my life.  I have a good start at it, here on this page and in this blog.

Continue reading “What Tiggers do best” →

Healing, Love

Sunshine

If I Could Bottle Love
If I Could Bottle Love

We’ve had a full week of sunny days, and counting. How delicious!

I am a sunshine girl.  Warmth and light. Green growing things reaching their way out of the ground.  Songbirds and crows and squirrels noising up the backyard.  Bees and hummingbirds burying themselves in the rosemary blooms.  My studio window open to catch the clatter and hum and sweet air.  I am made for this.  This is glory.  This is me.

I breathe deeper on sunny days.  My body relaxes, releases the armour it wore against the cold weather.

I am a sunshine girl, but how do I stay sunshine?  A big question for me because these last few weeks all kinds of things are crashing around me.  Not onto me, but onto people around me who I know and love and wish only the best for.  My heart wants to stay open and loving for them and me.  How do I do this when another’s pain and sorrow comes bumping against me? How do I stay sunshine?

A grandmother’s death.  A family member with a virulent cancer, another injured and struggling, another with an untreatable aneurysm, yet another with a tumor ‘mostly’ removed.  Two long-time friends with cancer.  And household disasters, a broken water pipe, a flash flood, and more.

Life is life.  I signed up for all of it.  I know I can and do create my life.  I know that love is always my answer.  Yet my heart’s instinct is to protect itself and close against the sorrow and pain now standing beside it.

A closed heart can’t love, can’t feel love, can’t share love, can’t be love.  Closing my heart is an old pattern and not the answer.  I know this, too.

I remember.

I remember holding my son when he cried.  I can feel his small warm body curled against me, my arms wrapped round him.  Rocking him, and rocking and rocking, slowly, gently.  Humming to both him and myself whatever song comes into my head.  Always it is a love song, and never the same one twice.  I feel his distress as though it is mine, and yet my heart remains open wide as the horizon.  My love holding his pain.

This is my answer.

Hold my family, my friends, and my life as though each is my beloved child.  Because they are.  My love for them is no different than my love for my son.  This love, my love, shines like the sun, warming all it touches, them and me.

Yes, I am a sunshine girl.