It was a lovely summer that, as I mentioned in my last entry, turned out considerably different than I expected.  I have greatly enjoyed my time of being a hermit and the low stress, low variable life that it brings.  There are certainly still struggles and challenges, but it’s so much easier to cope with them when I’m not running in 50 different directions trying to get things done.  My focus has improved tremendously and I feel more like me than I have in ages.

Big changes have happened, some of which were addressed in that previous entry.  On August 14th, I started back to work full time, putting my counselor training to use professionally for the first time in a long time.  It has been great to get those rusty gears turning again and feel as though I am helping people out from the comfort of my little office corner.  I can set my own schedule and fees, so there is a great deal of flexibility involved.  I got my first paycheck on Wednesday and that was a fantastic feeling.  

It has been draining because when you spend the day and most of your night listening to the problems of other people, no matter how much you objectify the situation and shield yourself, you can’t help but invest energy into what you are doing.  There are some truly bereft people out there.  Seven days a week, I work until sometime between 11pm and midnight, depending on the call volume.  (What I do is like being a radio psychologist, but without the radio.  You help people work through problems and get a life plan in place, basically.)  During the week, I get up at 5:30am to get kids ready to hop onto the bus, nap for a few minutes at 7:30 when the last of them have been delivered unto the great orange caravan of education, then get back to work agian at 11am.  Since Eric has been unemployed for several months now with the exception of whatever gold he was able to pull out of the river, I need all the hours I can get and the pay is quite good.  It makes for a very long day and I am still trying to find my balance in the flow of change.

Eric is still figuring out what college classes he will take for the Winter semester.  His hope is to get into a particular pilot school that his GI Bill endorses.  That has always been his life’s dream and was the primary reason he was interested in the Highway Patrol.  We are both very grateful that he was able to quickly see the ways that particular course would have been a wrong move and abort to a new direction before he was in too deeply.  

The two of us spend a good bit of our time working on avenues to come up with money for basic survival and so far, we have managed for several months with things looking brighter every day.  So much of managing a time like this involves keeping your head on straight, not giving into fear and panic, not dismissing outright any opportunities that come your way before completing a full investigation and finally, making sure that you never tire of turning over every stone and shaking every bit of brush to find the opportunities that are there.

It has been so long since we had financial security and balance that I have forgotten what it was like to live that way.  Now, moment to moment and complete diligence and persistence is the norm.

Admittedly, that is a challenge for a Virgo like myself who enjoys predictability and thrives in routine and stability.  I still crave it, but it isn’t good for the spirit to constantly lust after something that just isn’t available at that time, so I tend to pack it away and not look at it much.

I do go out on a limb sometimes and take a good leap of faith.  A month or so ago, I began planning a trip back to Kentucky for myself.  I have not visited family in well over 6 years.  I keep waiting for enough money to manifest that I can fly all 5 of us out there for the trip (I hate traveling with kids, especially cross country) and it just keeps not happening.  Meanwhile, months turn into years and work toward turning into decades.  I decided I would at least make plans for myself to go out to visit so that I do not lose that historical connection.

As the plans began to take form, I mentioned to a couple of my friends from High School (God bless Facebook) that we should all drag some tables together and order pitchers instead of glasses at Pizza Hut.  They thought it was a great idea and when word began to spread like wildfire, within a few days, we had a full scale unofficial High School reunion underway.  Now, everyone we know is inviting everyone they know and we have booked the banquet room fo a nice Mexican restaurant on the river for the night.  No prep, no clean up, no catering… everyone just orders their own food and the managemenet is thrilled that we filled up the place.  We discovered that the fatal flaw with the traditional class reunion is that it presumes that you had no friends who were upper classmen or lower classmen or even graduated with their own class.  This way, everyone invites the people they want to see and has a built in “crew” with whom to visit for the night.  I’m forcing people to wear the awful little “Hello, My Name Is…” tags since a lot of us look different than before and when combined with fuzzy memories, would go unknown (sort of like we did in High School itself).  Of course, mine will say, “Hello, My Name Is… Inigo Montoya.  You Killed My Father.  Prepare to die.” … just because.

Other than that and flinging a few yearbooks around onto tables, there is no real prep on the part of the organizers other than assembling a somewhat cohesive RSVP list.  It should be fun and I look forward to it immensely.

With my mom and dad and grandparents all dead, it will be interesting to see who I can rouse up in terms of family.  One of my brothers is driving in from Louisville to both attend the reunion and visit with me.  An aunt and uncle and a few cousins I will see if they are available.  I will reconnect with as many family ties as I can find in the few days I can be there.

The kids are doing great in school with Delena exciting moving into her senior year.  Nathan is extremely pleased with his very brave and unexpected decision to switch from Grizzly Pines to Pioneer school.  It seems to have fulfilled all of the things he wanted the transfer to do.  Dylan is excited to have teachers he knows and loves for 7th grade.  He decided after 2 years to drop band and was disappointed to find that Art class was full, but as tends to happen, something better popped up.  He’s now in Creative Writing with his best friend and happily getting involved with the journalism side of the class for the school newspaper.

I am thrilled to continue to see great progress with the weight loss efforts.  Things slowed down considerably over summer, but I have found that by dramatically dropping the calorie intake, the weight is just falling off again.  I never thought working with such a low calorie level would work since I have always been told it would put the body into starvation mode and possibly even create a weight gain.  Evidently, my metabolism is slow enough to handle it well and the recommended calorie intake for weight loss is just too high for me.  It’s so exciting to get happy news every time I step on the scale now.  At this rate, I should reach my goal in just a few months.  I will likely continue the lower calorie eating since I feel so much better when I do.  The MILA supplements are great for added vitamins and fiber and really help out tremendously.  I feel better than I have in ages.

Life is definitely looking up and more and more, I am finding that our perception is so affected by how we define ourselves in the world and the labels we choose to wear.  I have also learned how important it is to not allow people to tell us who or how we are , but to discover it for ourselves and embrace our own truths, away from the delusions and self-deceptions.  

I have continued my immersion into the 50-50 principle I defined in previous posts (including the last one) and that has changed my life incredibly.  Surrounding ourselves with people who love, appreciate and understand us is so much more worth a time investment than trying to convince the other 50% of our worth.  In a way, it’s like trying to teach a pig to sing:  it frustrates you and pisses off the pig.

Tomorrow is my 48th birthday and I can honestly say that I have never been happier to celebrate being alive.

A blessed holiday weekend to you all!

…the more they, well, change.  Life is surely different in my tiny part of the mountain than it has been for a long time.

For one thing, I found out that I don’t have glaucoma and I’m not going blind and there is no need to fear.  Turns out almost everyone over 40 gets bleary-eyed at night and can’t thread needles worth a damn or read tiny print and there is a whole industry of reading glasses set up for just my problem.  I was on a trip to L.A. with my precious friends and was about to cry because even in bright light, I could not read the phone number on the back of my credit card to call and check my balance.  My friend laughed and said, “You’re not going blind, you’re just old!”  Sure enough!  At our Wal*Mart here in Placerville, they have this whole section of reading glasses back by the pharmacy (even though they’re nice, don’t just settle for the Christie Brinkley line up at the front of the store by the Vision Center) and there’s a chart on there that tells you, based on your seriously advanced age of being over 40, what strength of reading glasses you ought to be wearing.  Santa Maria!  Jesus, Mary & Joseph!  I put on a pair and I could actually read quite clearly!  Turns out I rest at about a 1.50 instead of the 2.50 I’m supposed to need for my age, so I guess my eyes are better than they have any right to be when a month ago, I was all set to kick them to the curb for being defective.  It helps that reading glasses are so cheap they are damned near disposable.  It’s a whole new world now that I can actually SEE again and I was able to read a novel for the first time in a long time.

The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder is the new release from Rebecca Wells, who wrote the 3 books about the Ya Ya Sisterhood.   I loved the book, Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood.  Little Altars Everywhere is actually the first book in the series and honestly, there were parts of it I just really didn’t like at all. I read the books out of sequence, so I was already heavily invested in the characters and some of the ways they were portrayed in Little Altars as opposed to Ya Ya Sisterhood were fairly jarring.  The last book, Ya Yas in Bloom, was … OK.  It ended the story satisfactorily, but you could tell she was fairly bored with writing about these people.   With Crowning Glory, she latched onto a new character and really went for it in terms of getting you involved in this girl’s story, which stretches through the first part of her life until she’s in her 30’s.  It’s well written and a very nice read.

Eric was well involved in working his mining claims until Gov. Swartzenegger signed a bill into law that prohibits all gold dredging.  (?!)  Figures that the one time I voted for a Republican, it would came around and bite me in the ass.  Supposedly, it is for environmental impact, but both Washington and Oregon have done exhaustive studies on this issue and have found there to be no notable impact at all.  The worst part is that this is the middle of the dredging season (May 23rd – October 15th) and thousands of miners have paid money to the state for dredging permits for that entire season.  There are no provisions for refunding any of that money they paid, so it’s pretty  much that you can’t make a living and it’s effective immediately and we’re not giving you your money back and have a nice day!  

Not one to let grass grow under his feet, Husband Dearest is in the process of making arrangements to be a full time, professional student.  Between his G.I. Bill and programs available through the state for displaced employees, he should be able to set up a good re-training program, finish his degree and get into a better career field.  Supposedly, electric contractor (which is what Eric does) is one of the career fields that is most displaced right now because there is just so little new construction going on.

Meanwhile, I have a new job that is supposed to be starting any day now.  If it is as good as its press seems to indicate, I’ll be able to make up the difference in what he used to make versus what he’ll make as a student.  I was supposed to start Monday, but there were some administrative hold ups and as of today, I am still waiting for the green light.  I can work from home, which is the best part and I can use the skills I love and have had for a long time.  Just don’t call or come over between 9:00am – 3:00pm, OK?

The kids were so excited to start school this year.  We all had a good summer, but it was time for something different to happen.  Dylan is thrilled with his teachers and classes.  Nathan made the big switch from Grizzly Pines to Pioneer and he is extremely happy with his decision to do so.  He has already made several friends and likes his teacher very much.  Delena is in full on senior mode in high school and got all of the classes she wanted in the order she wanted them.  I thought I was going to start work the day they went back to school, so it has been nice to have some quiet time in the house.

Speaking of quiet time, I’ve had several people ask me what it’s like to not be doing anything for G FORCE for the time being and it is definitely different.  That and the new job are even more changes to process.  After talking about it a great deal, Eric and I agreed that Spirit was leading us out of community service for a while and just stepped back completely.  All of the signals where there and we don’t ignore prompting from the Universe when it comes.  G FORCE won’t likely have any events for the foreseeable future and we are no longer working Burger Nights, so it has been very different for, after more than 3 years of community service, to just let it all go.  I watched as all of the other founding members of G FORCE resigned over time as life and other circumstances pulled them away from it.  I was the sole survivor and it was a lot of hard work and sweat and tears and energy that I was leaving behind.  Still, I’m not one to stand around questioning things to death.  ”Analysis is paralysis” and all, so I just let go of everything, went in my house and shut the door.  It has been very relaxing and peaceful and I have enjoyed the break very much and intend to continue doing so.  I was born to be a recluse and I learned allllll I needed to know from the social experiment I engaged in over that time.  Will G FORCE come back again?  It all depends on whether or not grants are available at the same time interest is in session.  Right now, we plan to do whatever there is money to do and call it good.  What will be will be.

I’ve been further exploring that idea from a long while back about how 25% of the people you meet don’t like you and will never like you, 25% don’t like you but can be convinced to like you temporarily, 25% like you, but can be temporarily convinced not to like you and 25% love you and will do anything for you and will be totally loyal forever.  The theory is that we spend way too much time trying to win over the 50% who don’t really like you to the expense of the other 50% and mostly, the 25% who totally love you.  

With all that in my mind, I got busy investing in the people who I know are there for me and are invested in being friends and having fun and have let go of all the ones who aren’t.  Since being out of public service gets rid of the notion of having to pacify people and make nice with folks who I know don’t like me at all, it’s been a lot easier to surround myself with people who are loving and joyful and supportive.  It made me realize how much I’ve been pulling people along into friendship they really don’t want to be in in the first place, so it’s been good for all of us as nearly as I can tell.  In addition, I’ve been able to connect up with a ton of people from my past and those re-established relationships are absolutely lovely.

All in all, it is turning out to be a pretty doggoned good life.  (Fit for a Queen, even – smile).  I am one lucky girl.

Lord have mercy, it is just beautiful here.  The days, for that most part, are warm enough to enjoy Summer and warm your spirit, but not overwhelmingly hot.  Nights are cool with a nearly 40 degree temperature drop from the days and by the time midnight hits, covers are welcomed instead of kicked aside, even for a menopausal, hot-flashing female.

I love it and I am trying not to cringe thinking of the hot spell that will likely come.

This year has been so full of changes and revelations that it is sometimes hard to keep up.  The abrupt realization that G FORCE would not have enough funds to continue their year of events put a different spin on the summer as we put the organization into hiatus until grant funding can be obtained.  That will also likely impact the fall schedule of bingo and such.  Still, having months of time wide open for the first time in years is seductive.  That, among other things, caused us to rethink our Burger Night involvement, which freed up even more time.  

After a great deal of consideration – and after cutting his hair even – Eric came to the conclusion that the Highway Patrol was not for him this week.  He definitely went the distance and gave it his all just in case it was, but a few factors guided him away from it and into the rivers to mine.  One of the many things I adore about my husband is his fearless dedication to following the signs and indicators along life’s way and not let what society would think or do be the only deciding factor in his choices.  Sometimes, you just have to go with your guy and follow where life leads you instead of insisting on having your own way.  Since the decision was made this week, he hasn’t looked back.  He is likely one of the bravest men I know.  I see people all the time who are locked into jobs they hate, living lives they hate because the have a particular standard of  living they want to maintain or otherwise feel that they can’t take a chance to do more, have more or be more.  I’m so proud of him for taking the leap of faith and going with the possible rather than the known.

I am enjoying this time of solitude, even with the kids home from school.  Overall, my kids are very independent and impose very little upon my day.  If I ask them to do something, they do it.  They are creative about finding ways to spend their time.  They are loving and affectionate without being needy.  It has been a joy to have them home and I can’t believe August 10th is just around the corner with their Summer break halfway done.  Soon, I will be on my own again at 7:30 every week morning.

It feels great to have my time be my own again, although I will miss a lot of the things G FORCE did.  Like with children, I guess, G FORCE was my greatest pride, my greatest blessing and the biggest pain in my ass.  As most chronic volunteers can tell you, any time you try to do something nice, there are always a tiny cluster of people who gripe and complain and critique and gossip and work to make life miserable.  That got old pretty fast and stayed old the whole time. They were like Pez.  You get one handled and another one pops up to take its place.  It’s nice not to have to deal with that any more for the first time in years.  I will miss all of the smiling faces and kind hearts who enjoyed what we did and made it all worth it.  Spending a good bit of your life listening to people bitch and complain is no way to spend your life.

Neither is being gray, from what my pal, Carol, tells me.  I told her that I was having a debate with myself about whether or not to color my hair.  It’s kind of a pain to keep up with it and I was considering embracing my salt and pepper and just going with it.  She jumped like she’d been shot and told me I’d have my whole life to look old and while I can still do it without looking foolish, I should dye, dye, dye.  That sent me scurrying for the nearest Loreal box I could find and I have to agree that I do appreciate the results.  Thanks, Carol.

And so the last half of Summer ensues with all it holds in store ready to be explored and experienced.  I hope you are all having a wonderful time and soaking up the warmth.

I am just absolutely basking in this weather, neither trusting it to stay or expecting it to leave.  It’s going to be cooler this weekend, but there is also a nice chance of showers, so maybe our reservoir will get a bit more fortification.

Meanwhile, my doors are open and a lovely breeze that you just can’t duplicate synthetically is wafting through the house.  It’s so funny that in Grizzly Flats, you can go from 80 degree weather to snowfall in the course of a day.  It  just demonstrates that you can never take us for granted!  We’ll always surprise you!

There is so much absolute fun coming up in Grizzly Flats that I am just excited to get started.  It’s always so refreshing to come out of the quiet, reclusive introspection of Winter and into the light of late Spring, early Summer, seeing friends you haven’t seen in weeks or months, enjoying the warm weather and feeling alive again.  By Fall, I’m ready for the quiet descent into the dark of the year again.

Founder’s Day is really fleshing out nicely.  I hope all of you plan to attend this year (June 7th).  It is always such a joyful coming together of all different kinds of people and personality and ideas to make the event a success.  I really missed being able to have it last year and look forward to this year tremendously.  I hope all of our G FORCE friends (and new ones!) are going to be joining us in the process.

Burger Nights, of course, are always wonderful fun.  We look forward to them every year.  It’s so nice to have a night off from cooking.

Normally, I start to get antsy as the kids’ Summer break from school gets near.  I am very protective of my alone time and depend on it for my sanity.  Fortunately, my kids have gotten to be completely unobtrusive as they have gotten older and so for me, breaks from school now mean SLEEPING IN!  Delena has to get up at 5:45am to catch the bus at 6:30, so 5 days a week, I’m getting up before light has come to the sky.  Not so on nonschool days!  For me, getting up around 8:00 – 8:30am is perfect and going to sleep around 10:30 – 11pm.  Ahhhh. 

Life is definitely blessed!  Even with the economic stressors almost everyone is feeling right now, life is good.  We just have to decide what actually defines us and has power over our minutes and what doesn’t.

I’m just glad to live where I do with the people I’m with.  God bless all of you,

Katrina

Ahhh.  A brand new journal always feels like a new start, fresh and clean and untarnished, sort of like moving to a new state and having the opportunity to reinvent yourself.

That’s one of the toughest things about living long-term in a small community like Grizzly Flats, isn’t it?  We have relationships, good and challenging, and everyone knows everyone else’s business.  This means that you don’t really ever get a chance to re-invent yourself and there is always someone who knows where the bodies are buried and has seen you at your worst self.  God help you if you have a bad stretch of life where you are rarely at your best self and you showed that to a lot of people.

Don’t get me wrong.  I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else and I do love dearly so many people who live in our town.  I even dearly love people who don’t know or believe that I dearly love them.

It has been an intense year and coming out of it, I feel like a sword must feel when it is forged in fire.  I am stronger than I was.  I am brighter than I was and I am sharper than I was before the fire.  The other side is that wow, that fire was really, really hot.

A reconnect over a year ago with my first husband helped me to heal a lot of pain and feelings of betrayal that have colored how I engage the world.  He and I are a long way from drinking 40’s together on the corner on Saturday nights, but a lot of animosity over him abandoning his family has been healed and we are on a friendly basis.

The time I spent being married to him (almost 20 years) taught me a lot, but the time we spent communicating after our divorce and enforced 10 year estrangement, taught me much more.  Things like:

You don’t always know how much or even if you hurt someone deeply.

You don’t always know what the other person needs if they are not telling you directly what they need.

You don’t always know how dear you are to another person.

You don’t always know why a person does the things they do and sometimes, they don’t even know.

Sometimes, the answers you desperately need are just not available.

You can throw away a long history of happy times in one moment of bad judgment and hurtful reactions.

No one should be judged by how they behaved during the worst times of their lives and you don’t always know when someone is having one of those times.

Nothing feels better than to be sincerely forgiven for actions you deeply regret.

All of this information was just a series of ideas until it finally gelled for me this winter.  One lesson that stands out strongly is that no one deserves to be judged on how they behaved during the worst experiences of their lives.  Few people are at their best when their world is falling apart.  In the best of circumstances, it’s easy to miss subtle clues or hurt someone and not even know it.  Sometimes, we say or do something so stupid that we just hope no one notices.  Often, they notice and just don’t say anything.  Everyone makes mistakes and there is no relief greater than to be forgiven for those mistakes.  When we are hurt or feel betrayed or are angry or even overly tired or hormonal, we are at an even greater risk of saying or doing something that is going to change a relationship forever, only to regret it deeply later and have no clue how to go about rebuilding that relationship or even any hope that it can happen.

We can be hurtful and not even realize it.  Last July, I found out that a friend of mine had been extremely angry with me since December and honestly, I didn’t even have a clue.  I thought everything was well and she was just busy.  We were never ones to have ongoing communication anyway and I had no idea that she was really, really upset with me over a slight that I did not even realize had happened.  

Next revelation:  I plopped onto the couch late at night a few months ago, not yet sleepy enough to go to bed even though it was late enough that I’d pay for it the next morning.  The first show I came to was a lecture by Christian minister and author, Joel Osteen.   The things he said would have had no less impact had he been sitting on my couch with me, holding my hand and looking directly into my eyes.  The message was for me and I knew it.  It was one of those sacred moments where the world stopped turning and The Universe held its breath until it was over.

He said that everyone you meet falls into one of four categories:  1/4 of the people you meet do not like you, have never liked you and have no hope of ever liking you.  Another 1/4 do not like you at all, but could be convinced to like you with a lot of hard work.  Their liking of you, however, once accomplished, is very fragile and fickle.  Another 1/4 of people like you, but could be convinced not to like you by circumstances, actions on the part of yourself or others or by a change in their perspective.  Their not liking of you, however, is also fragile and they can like you again easily without hardly even trying.  The final 1/4 of people love you completely, are there for you no matter what and celebrate who and what you are.  (I’ve often felt there should be another segment for the people who honestly don’t like you, but who feel really bad for not liking you and so they pretend that they do like you, creating unease and mixed signals for both of you.)

That completely blew my mind.  He went on to talk about the amount of time and energy most people put into the wrong half; that being the people who really don’t like them.  They work hard to garner their approval, do things for them, “court” them and spend hours wondering why, why, why they just don’t like them no matter what they do. Often, they invest so much time in trying to win over the 50% who don’t like them that they spend very little time and attention on the 50% who really do love them and want to be with them.  Even the time they do spend with the 50% who love them is littered with talk, plotting, planning and complaining about the 50% who don’t like them.

Although I am fairly certain that these 25% groups are not scientifically numbered, I do completely appreciate the premise behind what he’s saying and agree with it totally.  I see where this behavior has led me in my life and I am shamed by it.

All of this comes together on the edge of a brand new warm time of the year.  In Grizzly Flats, we all tend to hunker down for the winter and keep to ourselves and then after the snows, we come out of our winter burrows like little groundhogs, checking the weather and eventually crawling out into the sun for the social time of the year.  

With that time only a few weeks away, I am grateful for the self-awareness I have been given and the lessons I have learned.  I am going to do my best to remain seated in that knowledge, even when things get hairy, which they often tend to do.

Here are the insights I was given by the “time in the darkness:”

I have hurt people who I care about through my words and actions, unintentionally and intentionally.   Some of the hurts, I likely do not even know about.  (Such as the time when I went from December to July without knowing a friend was upset with me)  I know that I try not to read between the lines for fear I will misinterpret what someone is saying to me (or not saying to me).  I take what is said at face value and trust it.  Because of this, if a person is trying to get a message to me by leaving something unsaid and thinking I’ll pick up on it, it usually doesn’t sink in for me.  I know that one of the ways I have hurt people is by not picking up on things left unsaid.

I have to understand that of the 50% of people who do not like me, many of those live in Grizzly Flats.  There is plenty about me not to like and I am the first one to admit that.  I recognize that my personality doesn’t click with everyone.  I am very grateful to those who do appreciate me and enjoy my company, but I completely understand when someone doesn’t and I will do my best to show respect for that when it’s the case.  I totally accept that a person can stand in their own truths and know that they just don’t like me and I’m peaceful with that.

I forgive everyone.  Yep, everyone.  A lot of things were done and said by others within the past couple of years that were really hurtful to me.  I took all of that very seriously and a lot of my reactions to others were based on those experiences.   This time of introspection has taught me that what I expect from others, I must be willing to give first.  As I have said, I have hurt people and not even realized it and I need to accept that some of the things that hurt me may not have been intentional on the part of the other person.  I know I have hurt others with my actions when I was not in a good place in my life.  I was raw and beaten up by life and not being my best self.  When you are already life beaten, even a friendly pat on the back can hurt – like a bad bruise or sunburn – and a person can overreact solely from that pain, even though the gesture was kind.  I need to accept that when others said and did things to hurt me that they might have also been in a terrible, Godforsaken place where all they could do was lash out and hurt others because they were hurt or frightened themselves.  Because I was hurt or frightened, I might have interpreted pain where none was intended.  Dear Lord, this gets complicated.  Whatever the reason may be, I completely forgive the people who have hurt me and I feel only a rushing return of love and appreciation for who they are in this world and for the good times we have had together.  

I am so sorry for the times when I was hurtful and I very much hope that fences can be mended.  There are several people in town who have drifted away (or run screaming) and I sincerely hope that this can be a year of reunion and forgiveness and dare I say it?  Fun?  I don’t need to walk back through the past and have a “he said, she said,” “who hurt whom the most” contest.  It is what it is.  We all have our own perspectives of what happened and why we made the choices we did.  I’m not proud of a lot of mine and I want to apologize to all of those who I’ve hurt as I went through my learning process of trying to be “out in the world” after decades of being a classic hermit.  For a lot of reasons, I had to hit the ground running  fast  when I did come out of isolation and I did not always do a good job at being a friend. I was definitely out of practice. I am absolutely committed to being a better friend to those who want to be my friend and being more sensitive to the needs of others around me.   I have no attachments to the hurts and misjudgments of the past.  I am committed to looking forward and offering sincere appreciation to the people I know and those who I meet for who they are and the best self that they bring forward.  I do not expect that everyone concerned will forgive me or be interested in reconnecting and I respect their feelings on that and honor and give thanks for whatever thought they give to the idea before rejecting it.

As for myself, I believe firmly now that we should all have the honor of being judged based on our best selves and highest potential.  In yoga, there is a greeting that is, “Namaste.”  (Nom-es-tay).  It loosely means (and has been translated and pronounced many ways), “The best part of me greets the best part of you.”

From now on, my intention when I encounter someone is to speak to the best part of them and love them and honor them for that part exclusively.  It’s idealistic, I know, but I am determined to live my life that way from now on.  Everyone deserves to be celebrated for who they are.  I want to be the person who does that.  I am so grateful for the messages that have come from Life, God, The Universe, Spirit or whatever you want to call the divine force that cares enough about us to insist that we learn and evolve.   I am grateful to have felt the hurt and anger and fears drop away like old skin and to step out anew and reborn.  I am thrilled to feel the love and appreciation for those around me again and to smile at the memories we share, whether there are more fun times to be had or not.  The good memories never go away even if new good memories don’t come to join them.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this long missive.  I felt I needed to put my heart out there to the world and to be open to whatever comes afterward, so this is just me following my gut instinct.  

I promise that future entries will not be as long or as maudlin.  God bless you, Grizzly Flats.

With Love,
Katrina