Lazy W Marie

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

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BE ULTRA podcast

Friends!

I recently had the most luscious opportunity to chat with my extraordinary friend Shanna, and our recorded conversation became an episode on her podcast, Be Ultra.

Shanna and I met by chance just a little over a year ago at the inaugural meeting for a new local running club, a club which, it bears mentioning, neither of us joined. But we have been running together, just us!

We enjoyed an instant connection. It has been one of those rare friendships where we only cross paths once in a blue moon, but when we do the time is well spent. We dive deep and fast, and (because we are running friends) the sweat is a great conductor of good vibes.

Something I love about Shanna is how genuinely interested she is in other people’s stories. It’s her vocation, sure, being a suicide prevention therapist, but clearly it is also her nature. And she shares as well as she listens, which is why I think you’ll love this podcast episode. It is less of a Q & A about me and much more an authentic exchange between two people just living life and grappling with the universal stuff.

I hope you’ll give it a listen, friends!

We talk about this farm and our evolving purpose here, a little bit of our history. We also cover family life and raising daughters, trauma, spiritual guidance and discerning God’s voice and finding peace day to day, running injuries, human resiliency, the Law of Attraction and Mitt Romney and contradicting energies, the healing power of nature, and more. Toward the end, we begin assembling a recommended reading list, but it’s incomplete. You can look for that to be shared here soon!

Shanna is so fun to just be near (at a safe distance this time, ha!), I wish you could feel her personal energy. Ok. If you listen let us know what you think. And we will talk again soon!

Shanna, I know we will run together again, eventually. And I really hope that once the covid-19 quarantine is winding down you will visit the farm for an especially long dinner and bonfire and many more hours of deep conversation. You and her husband and your kiddos will fit in here so perfectly!

UBUNTU:
I am because we are.
XOXOXOXO

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

the mitt romney-law of attraction-high fever-skeptical husband story

One day back in the winter of 1883, during a blizzard and on the verge of a cannibalistic tragedy, an over-stimulated and under-challenged middle aged woman started reading a slew of books that altered her perception of the universe. Her eyes were flung open to new, exciting possibilities and she thrust this shiny new pseudo-knowledge on everyone nearby, whether they liked it or not. While milking the goats, while gathering eggs, while traversing the snowy peaks and dodging hungry settlers, she preached the gospel of the Law of Attraction and started to manipulate her own reality. It was magical.

lights

Not really, it was only me, and it was actually quite pleasant weather during the late fall of 2012, and while fresh eggs were plentiful then, we were happily free of cannibals at the Lazy W. But that got you imagining a cold and bleak setting, right? And the driving force of a new line of thinking?

Okay.

It started innocently enough with a book , which led to voracious reading on the internet and a few other related titles about the Law of Attraction, about the power of imagination and how meditation can fuel your prayers. I scoffed a little, I learned a little, and I experimented. Tested the waters. Prayed about it, actually. I compared this new philosophical material to what I already knew and believed about the Bible (my personal foundation of faith) and I just kind of… thought about it for a long time. I searched my own memory to see if it could be true. Had my mind been manifesting things into my actual three-dimensional life? Is that completely wonky, or is it possible?

Do you remember that “aha Moment” video?

Okay.

Let’s just bookmark all of that. I pinky promise to get back to it eventually, with concrete, important information, all kinds of adult thinky stuff.

Today I want to tell you a story about me in a fevered stupor, the Law of Attraction, Mitt Romney (remember him?), and my sweet, skeptical, doting husband. Grab some cocoa with marshmallows and prepare to text BW if you have his number.

sadromney sticker

It was early December, almost exactly three years ago, in fact, as I write this. The presidential election was over and cooling. Romney was sad. I was laid up in bed for a few days with an increasingly difficult flu or something equally temporary but incurable. I remember our big, soft bed was oriented against the east wall of our bedroom, not the south wall where we have it now. It was a dark morning, pitch black, and my fever was raging. It was that awful sweaty-shaking kind of sick that makes me nauseous just remembering it. Handsome had been taking really good care of me; he is gentle and attentive and good at condescending to the bed ridden, so I had been pampered. But on this morning he absolutely had to leave me to drive to the city and do Commish things. He was dressed in suit pants and a button down shirt. He smelled shower fresh and was so good looking even in the dark, even with my fever-cooked eyeballs barely open to see him. All week we had been volleying back and forth my new found ideas about magnetic thought (we disagreed to say the least). That morning I had one last chance before he left for the office to convince him of the things floating around my scattered brain. I desperately wanted him on board with me:

“I mean it, Brand, I think this stuff is real. I think if you think about something enough it will happen. What do you think?” So much thinking.

“Babe, no. It’s not real. Mitt Romney wanted to be President real bad and it just didn’t work out for him.” My husband favors clear cut ideas over well executed adverbs.

Check mate? Not even close. But this gentle rebuttal almost made me cry. I remember sitting halfway up to literally grip my husband’s lapels and say earnestly, to his face, glassy eyes flung open now, “He just didn’t want it bad enough!” I’m sure my fever breath was super sexy.

My husband of (at that time) eleven years gently loosed my cold, sweaty fists from his lapels, checked for wrinkles, then tucked me back beneath our billowy comforter. He smoothed my hair and stage whispered, “None of this is real. Now just go to sleep.” Like he was comforting a child who had just woken up from a nightmare! As if!!

He went to work. I fell into a fitful, fevered sleep. He came home frOm work, and I mentioned neither Romney nor the Law of Attraction again that week. I did, however, with some measure of silent pride, make a mental note that I had been imagining in detail his homecoming that day. It happened exactly as I expected.

Bingo.

Okay, friends. Here is where your texting invitation comes in: Please let my sweet but too skeptical husband know whether you are in his camp or mine. Have you ever had an experience with manifesting your thoughts/prayers/hopes/worries into reality? Do you think Mitt Romney is to be blamed for losing that election? Spill your smart guts.

Thanks as always for checking in.

You guys are the best.

XOXOXOXO

 

 

 

tuesday catch up for motivation monday

Yesterday I was on the rusty, jagged edge of cranky and was rude to our microwave.

 

tweet 1 C

Thank you friends for your silly and encouraging notes on Facebook after this little outburst, haha! xo
Thank you friends for your silly and encouraging notes on Facebook after this little outburst, haha! xo

Today I feel light years better. I woke up early, fully rested, happy to see our Christmas lights twinkling on the shiny clean wood floor. In a couple of hours after finishing chores and running again (FINALLY) I expect to feel like myself again. Here is a super quick health/fitness update that I would have posted for Motivation Monday had I the motivation to do so, haha:

The first week of December was okay. Not spectacular, but not a disaster either. I only did a 30 Day Shred video once and ran 12 of the 30 miles I’d set as my goal, but really, what was I thinking for such a busy week? On the plus side I did eat mostly healthy food and learned or was reminded of a few important lessons:

  • When you eat to fuel your running you had better run, haha! Otherwise you feel fluffy and cranky. I can only speak for my own mind and body, but too many bowls of cereal/pasta without the attendant miles just makes for a weird chemistry. No bueno.
  • Vitamins are great but an iron supplement (for me! Check with your doctor!) is crucial. I cannot believe how flimsy I feel after a week without it. I came very close to fainting three times last week, which surely had something to do with not mustering the oomph to run or hang out with Jillian Michaels.
  • Choosing a focus sets our perspective. I have to remind myself of this a lot! It is so real. What we perceive we believe. Thoughts manifest themselves, etcetera. (Just don’t bother telling this to Mitt Romney.*)
  • Five days off feels like an eternity, especially when unplanned, but it is not quite the fitness Armageddon you think it is. Just shake it off and start again. Stop making such a big deal of it. (I honestly expected to have gained a thousand pounds, or at least four or five, over this super weird weekend, but I gained zero and actually feel pretty normal as I type this.) Remember that not exercising can let your appetite relax, too, so you know, relax.

Unrelated to this post but still cute: A few days ago I was brushing Chanta and Handsome snuck up and plopped Geoffrey the barn cat atop Chanta's ample back. The End. xoxo
Unrelated to this post but still cute: A few days ago I was brushing Chanta and Handsome snuck up and plopped Geoffrey the barn cat atop Chanta’s ample back. The End. xoxo

What do you have on tap for December wellness? I really would love to hear. Do you feel that paying attention to your body helps your mind, and also vice-versa? Do you notice that negative thoughts about yourself can trigger a dip in activity or a downward spiral in productivity at work?

I mentioned last Monday that Monica might be offering a December challenge, and she is! I am a week behind of course, but it’s simple and fun and totally worth diving in. Check it out here.

Happy Tuesday!

“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
~Benjamin Franklin
XOXOXOXO

* Oh hey! If you don’t get this Mott Romney reference, check in later this week for the story. Especially if you know Handsome in real life you will get a laugh.