misplaced mama

What blessings my 32nd spin around the sun brought me!

I am grateful for this past phase of darkening skies. I like nothing more than dark cozy nights and gray chilly mornings.

I am grateful that the sky will become brighter as each days passes. I like nothing more than waking up to the warm sun and late nights lit by a solar glow.

I am so for thankful health and the health of my family. I can run and sing and dance and dream with my kids. We were able to pretty much avoid medical offices, doctors visits (except out friendly visits to our N.D.) and medicine all year. I am so grateful for a year of rosy cheeks, energy, strong bodies, healthy immune systems and drum-n-base hearts beating rhythms of love and magnificence.

I am thankful for breastmilk.

My Love, my husband, partner, muse, confidant, and my best friend forever more. I give thanks for him like a believer at the altar. It seems unreal that we are approaching our tenth year together. It must be good because it seems like a blink of an eye. I become more and more drawn to him as each year passes; his mysterious ways, shifting and soft eyes, his hands, so strong and that of a worker, a sweater, a pectoral muscle builder (yum). He nurtures me, calms me, excites me, motivates me and most of all, just moves me to be a better me. I remember calling my sister just after meeting B and telling her, ‘This is it. This is the one. No question in my mind.” He has never stopped working or having fun in the name of our love. I am so grateful. One of the things I am thankful for every morning and every night is how when we met our life‘s visions were so similar and compatible, and now they have been and are becoming our reality. It is heart-warming to know I have this partner in life creations. I am also really psyched he is not a work-a-holic, sounds odd, but he blows off making money to be with us all the time. And that I appreciate more than words can say. I am thankful he owns his own business and can make those kind of time decisions.

My children are the greatest teachers and lovers and gentle guides for me. Thanks and thanks and more thanks for that. What generous gifts to be given; teachers that love me as much as I love and worship them. And each lesson they teach me, whether it’s in simple everyday patience, or big ones like to love the most when you feel the least able to love, is not only a gift to me, it’s a gift to them. In return I get to practice my new knowledge, teaching them right back. A perfect circle. I never knew I could feel this way about other people. It’s almost frightening, in that really big roller-coaster way, to love this hard. It’s so bold and beautiful and mountain-massive that it’s practically fragile.

I am thankful for Mia’s outrageous smile and powerful stance on her ground. I am thankful for her strength and perseverance and how she honors her role as a leader. I am thankful for the way she learns things, jumping on any challenge. I am thankful for her happiness, simplicity; she is such a loving and friendly little girl who finds an inner-desire to greet and introduce herself to most people she walks by on the street. And she really wants to meet them. I am so glad she has such intense interest in life.

I am thankful for Sula’s piecing eyes, so big and round, a dark Universe of thoughts and emptiness all in the same, scattered with pools of light. Her eyes ask so many questions yet also seem to know the answers to them all. I am thankful of her natural gift to communicate, verbally and intuitively. She is making our close-knit parenting all the easier. I am also thankful she likes to go to bed by 8pm and passionately eats whatever is placed in front of her.

This year I have formed such innocent and passionate friendships with new souls. In these friendships I have found only respect, trust, honesty, love and plain old silly fun. To bond and mold and grow with others helps me in celebrating this human-hood. When I touch, support, need and connect outside myself, I only get to know myself better. These friendships are so new and fresh yet old and ancient, and let me become more and more conscious of who I really am, which in turn unfolds in the vastness of space and perhaps becomes contagious. I am so grateful for friends who desire to know me better and who allow me into their lives in profound and personal ways. I am so thankful for what shiny new and sparkly gifts of friendship I found as an adult.

I am thankful I never feel lonely.

I am so thankful for keeping the links to the communities of people who have been walking this life path for many, many steps with me. This year, I continued to grew closer with a friend I wrote notes to daily in school at age 11, taught to use a tampon at age 13, funneled Jim Beam with her at age 17, helped push her VW bus across the interstate 17 in the middle of blizzard at age 19, lived it up Hollywood style at age 24, and watched and loved her while giving a powerful birth to new life at age 28. I have reconnected with a friend I traveled across the Western states with when I was barely a women and when we landed on new ground she taught me, through example, to let go of fear and be the artist I always knew I was. I am finding new meaning with friends who are now going through pregnancy and childbirth for the first time. I am so grateful to bond over birth and the love of babies.

I am grateful for vegan restaurants. This past year an all vegan restaurant opened a few miles from my house. I am so thankful for the genius behind it. I so needed a place to dine out that fulfilled my belly with things like Faux Chicken Po-Boys and warmed me with spicy peanut noodle bowls. There seem to be such few quality and affordable spots to take kids that offer animal-free foods. I am so thankful that more and more people want to eat more consciously!

I am grateful for material energy, things that have flowed into my life and given me the ability to create and invest in my divine purposes as well pay the bills each month. Money has come easily and continuously and for that I am ever grateful.

I am grateful for my sea blue organic bed sheets I got this year.

I am thankful for my home.

I am grateful for my daughter’s teacher. After being hesitant about the pre-school because of it’s roots in a Christian dogma, I got pleasantly surprised could have asked for nothing more. We have been blessed with a teacher who is a mama. More than anything she loves all 6 of those kids like they were her own. She allows them to explore and make mistakes and never, ever makes them feel small. She trusts them. She listens to them. She hugs them. She sees what each of them are interested in and makes such points to discuss and explore those topics. She let Mia teach the class about Black Sabbath when her heart was oh-so-black with love for Ozzy, (since then she has moved on to many things, but now it’s the soundtrack to Sound Of Music). She brings them lessons about nature and shares the eggs from her hens with them, teaching them how to bake pumpkin pie and gingerbread cookies . I can’t even imagine Mia hanging out with another adult 2x a week. After all that searching and debating and doubting, I ended up with such a warming situation. Dogma aside, love wins all debates.

I am grateful for sound, music and vibrations. I am so grateful that we are surrounded by music, that my children are constantly enriched by the listening to, singing to, dancing to, and learning the creation and technical production of music. I was lucky enough to be brought up with music and instruments and now I am so thankful that we have been blessed to give our children a life full of song. From reggae to rock n roll, from jazz to American Roots, from gospel to break-beat, my kids are learning it all.

I am grateful for my yoga practice, although being held together by an angel-hair, it is still lives and it is a gift to me. I am so thankful for my yoga teachers, Naader Shagagi, Mary Bruce, Darma Mitra, Vanda Scaravelli, Jeanine Parvati, Dave Oliver, Sharon Gannon and David Life and most of all for the first goddess who lifted, gently rotated, and lengthened my side-body in Triangle pose and opened me up for a long needed swallow of pure prana, Nanette Cresto. From her, I learned that I would teach.

I am grateful for the teachings of quantum mechanics/physics, Goddess/God./Universal Energy/Law of Attraction, whatever one wants to call the understanding of the mystical science of self. I grew up hearing that it’s “all in God’s hands” and “what will be will be”. And I am grateful I heard phrases like that because it did instill a sense of faith, in something greater. But that God was always presented to me in a form of a specific loving Father, who lived in a Heaven which was not Earth, somewhere in the sky, with a face and code of rules. Now I know that for me, God is only the boundless energy within and around me and that phrase “what will be will be” means I own the intentions to cultivate myself and my surroundings. For my experience these teachings have resonated with me perfectly and they are helping me in my everyday. I am grateful my evolutionary mind-set and spirit-filled body have found a path that allows the meshing of those both effortlessly.

I am ever so grateful for the lessons my parents have taught me and continue to teach me. Just this year alone I have learned so much from them about unconditional love and patience. I have learned from my dad it does pay off to be a dreamer, for we do get much of the reality we dream about daily. No man has ever taught me the sweet taste on the tongue that generosity and kindness leave. I have learned from my mama that no matter how big a kid is, they are never too big to pick up and rock and cuddle. I ma thankful for her respectfulness and support in my choice to birth at home. I am thankful she notices how I parent my kids and she expresses to me the good I am doing with it. She reminds me all the time that my 3 year old is only a 3 year sold and that someday they will be a 33 year old. 7 kids and 16 grandkids later and ages 76 and 77 years old, they both have impressed upon me that health and longevity are utter states of mind (my parents are living visions of beauty and youth).

I am so thankful for my blood brothers and sisters. Together we are a web of power, magic, strength and connection. I am from a tribe of people and we are committed to keeping our tribe together, and guiding our children to continue on this powerful circle of people.

I am thankful for the Sun and the Moon. And the twinkling stars.

I am unbelievably thankful for Joan Jett and Bjork, who just this morning got me up and dancing after a morning from hell.

I am thankful for this planet. This food. This air. This atmosphere. For these abundant plant and natural resources, I give tons of thanks. I am so grateful new voices and generations of Earth activists, guiding me and teaching me to a deeper understanding of how fragile and precious out home, this heavenly home, really is. I smile big when I see changes being made in green directions. I am thankful for earth advocacy.

I am thankful for the long hot showers I take where I can escape from reality for a few moments and let the water beat down on my backside until my skin prunes.

I am thankful for shea butter, cocoa butter and hemp oil which I have used plenty this very dry, dry year.

I am thankful for Highlands Teething Tablets. And when they don’t work I am thankful for whiskey.

I am thankful for my car, our double stroller and the invaluable Ergo baby carrier.

I am thankful for this electronic journey in writing.

I am thankful Benefit Skin Tint.

I am thankful for chocolate and for it allowing me to worship it numerous times a day.

I am thankful for this mellow, mellow mood.

I am thankful for this list, which helped to completely pull me out of birthday funk.

I am grateful for you.