Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

recalling the powers of “what if” & a reminder to choose joy

Following several days of pure bliss, I succumbed on Sunday to a few hours of good ol’ fashioned What If Anxiety. I kept forgetting to breathe, as my husband calls it. It was a trifecta of external stimuli: a couple of failed side dishes I had cooked for beloved friends (minor in the scheme of things but disappointing); a rouge, really violent hailstorm that did some mean damage to my beloved vegetable and flower gardens; and (the biggest What If of them all) waiting on health news regarding one of our most beloved young people.

I definitely kept forgetting to breathe. My mind kept rolling over the worst case scenarios for each of these, projecting into the future all the most terrible extrapolated consequences: They’ll never come to the farm for dinner again and probably think I am a kitchen fraud. I might as well give up gardening. I am definitely a fraud. She has something very wrong with her health but won’t reach out for help. Then I’d furiously resist those negative thoughts and scold myself for the struggle, because I know better than that by now. And that resistance created more tension. So I ate a second helping of dessert and got mad at myself for that too because vacation is over ma’am and you are so weak and also not a very good runner. Healthy living fraud.

Wow. Only one of those external stressors really mattered to life; but worry has a way of sneaking in through tiny openings to crack open the door and let the big stuff in. Have you ever been in such a tailspin?

As Sunday evening drew to a close, the biggest What If was silenced, and we went to bed thankful and exhausted. We were happy to be home and safe and ready to approach the threshold between all those previous days of bliss and the fresh, brand new work week. I muscled my thoughts back into the light. And I finally remembered to breathe.

?

Monday morning after Handsome left for the Commish, I plunged into all kinds of chores around the house, allowing the physical activity and sweetness of domesticity to drum up more positive vibes. Eventually Klaus and I walked around the farm, just to survey the storm damage with calmer eyes. The weather that morning was much more like early October than June. Bright and crisp, soft breezes, mellow. I could barely relate all of that crystalline brilliance to Sunday’s low, black canopy, woolly humidity, and violent wind and hail. I noticed a clarity inside myself, too. The storm had passed and everything felt fresh and good again.

The facts followed suit. Once I had the fortitude to really examine my gardens, I found only minor damage. Some broken vines and torn leaves, sure, and a few marshy beds that were begging for a stretch of warm sunshine to dry out. But all of it was more of a shakeup than a tragedy. And I had to laugh at my Yesterday Self for being so devastated at nothing. I also had to stop and give lots and lots of thanks for all the good news we had received concerning the much more important worries in life.

So I walked around correcting small injuries to various plants and re-threading tomato vines, harvesting slashed-off zucchini blossoms and deciding that the fallen stone fruits (still unripe) would be great to crush and feed to the hens.

I recalled so many other times in life when my worries turned out to be far scarier than reality. Often the anxiety can be quieted with just some time, some breathing, and lots of deliberate trust. Things really do tend to work out. But resisting fear is different than choosing faith.

Choosing Joy.

How wonderful to remember all of this. The mental games of What If are powerful. It is up to each of us moment by moment to choose to put that power to good use. We can funnel our vast imaginations into fears and worries and extrapolate terrible future chains of events; or we can harness the same exact power inside ourselves and project incredible future outcomes.

We can visualize and aim for beauty, strength, success, progress, healing, connection, abundance, and miracles. We can see the damage and exaggerate it with our dim perspective; or we can see the damage and give thanks that so much can be recovered, that circumstances, just like the weather, can so suddenly turn around.

Choosing our thoughts matters, in case you need the reminder today like I could have used it on Sunday. Our thoughts can steer our feelings and our behavior. They can literally shape both our perspectives and our circumstances along the way.

Choose Joy. It won’t always come easily, but it is always available.

Choose Joy over and over again, no matter how things look and especially now matter how you feel, temporarily.

P.S. This blog post is dedicated to two of my best friends, who could not be more different from each other: Mickey, who had the presence of mind on Sunday to assure me that, in fact, some stress can strengthen plants and trees (so true). And Brittany, whose already gorgeous life is suddenly brimming with some mammoth What Ifs. I am down here in Oklahoma sending up magical possibilities and promises for you friend!

Choose Joy.
Magic is Real.
The Gardens will be Fine.
So Will She.
XOXOXO

more new than ever before

I find myself wondering whether this springtime is among the most luscious of all my life or my eyes and heart are simply more open than ever before. Everything feels new, but more than new; everything has a wet, trembling quality, and it feels like more than just the abundance of rainfall.

When seeds germinate and break through the topsoil lately, they seem to do so with music playing. When the chicks run across their flight pen, they return the other direction a full size bigger. And have you heard the news that one of our young hens has learned to quack, no doubt by living with two ducks? The skies are probably the same colors as before, but more crystalline, more kinetic. The pine trees are growing arms and fingers and reaching for brand new ideas, learning new languages I think. Walking around the farm, you can smell fresh energy like it’s incense or very good cookies and bread baking.

Old thought patterns are falling apart like charred wood, burned (I believe) by truth. And I can leave them where they fall or sweep them up and replace them with better thoughts, stronger ones, more loving ones, more exciting ideas about life and God and all of our complex human relationships. Fear is almost fully edged out now, and the Worry Door has not cracked open in so long.

A new friend recently loaned me her treasured paperback copy of Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. Somehow this author had been completely foreign to me, and now I want time to stop so I can gobble up all of his work, because his term “Christian spirituality” is right on target for my life. Here are a couple of passages that have struck me beautifully this past week:

I believe the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather to have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man’s mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God.”

I love that. And it speaks straight to me, because I am such a creature of habit. I thrive on not only physical daily routines but also meditative practices, which certainly have value. But when little interruptions ruffle my feathers or when I am so cemented in habits that I am wasting time, it all has a kind of soundproofing effect between God and me. Don’t get me started on excessive volunteering or millions of obligatory social connections.

Okay, and then this:

Passion is tricky, though. because it can point to nothing as easily as it points to something.

Somewhere around that sentence in the book, Miller describes his thought process around what he would die for and what he is living for. It’s all kind of the front burner for me now. The moments when we might be asked to die for someone or something may come rarely, if ever, but every hour of every day we are actively or passively exchanging both our time and our life force, our God given human energy for something else. We give ourselves away in pieces, big and small, over and over again, and I wonder how many of those transactions are beneath us, how much of it is waste. A lot, you know? Maybe unintentionally? But so very much is exchanged for good, too, for strong, solid, worthwhile purposes. We trade our time and energy and human life force for love of family and friends, for personal passions that are linked directly to some aspect of our creation that leads us right back to God. How thrilling to see that our intrinsic passions can be connections to God and thereby pipelines for more abundant life. I love that we are all created in such unique ways and that He can draw us near and put us to work based on our passions. I want to find more ways to facilitate exactly that.

So. The farm. All of these nine acres are pure joy to me. The creatures who live here, even when they frustrate me, the plants, the wildness, the work and creativity, our romance and our human fabric, all of it. It has become my home and sanctuary, classroom and temple. And for all of the physical, sensory pleasures here, I know in my bones that the real magic is unseen. The real magic and power and drama can easily be extracted and reinvested elsewhere, should that time ever come. This is just the stage.

This is how I know the shimmer and pulse of our current season is owed to more than the mild Oklahoma springtime; God is doing something here with us that brings it all into focus for me. The old fears and worries are burned up and crumbling; worldly distractions are falling back and losing their noisy power in favor of birdsong in the morning and frog symphonies at night. More beauty than I have ever seen is front and center, both for the physical senses and for that part of me that can’t find the words. Hope, joy, belief in the power of Love, compassion for the weird things we all need and chase, patience, silliness, healing. Lots of healing. So much more.

I’ll take the flowers and the vegetables and even the snakes. I’ll take the skies changing and the air tasting like candy, as temporary as it all is. They are outward proof of an unseen Power. For me, this is something worth living for, day after day. Our lives are filled with more goodness than we can manage, despite our efforts to soak it in. And the shifting details just press me to live attentively, to find balance in movement too. It’s all constantly changing and never-ending. Such magic!

Thank you for introducing me to Donald Miller, Stefanie. My mind is churning from it all. Happy weekend, friends. I wish you magic and Love and clear vision.

“You have found the life underneath your life situation.”
~Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
XOXOXOXO