Acknowledgement

 

Dear Readers,

This is an acknowledgement of your successes both current and future.  I even have a smile for your past successes.

I want to see you succeed.

I hold space for your successes in my heart. 

I see your bright future full of happiness, success, and love.

I see you shining brightly, holding your torch up high, illuminating the hidden treasures that in the dark we all thought were traps.

I acknowledge each of you as you dove deep into yourselves when you thought you were in a bottomless pit and pulled your true love self into your own arms and hugged her.

I see how all of us have taken some of our fears and turned them into love. 

I see how we opened our eyes to our true hearts and began sweeping out the corners and removing the cobwebs of criticism, hate, manipulation, and discontent, that we had accumulated from outside sources.

As I face fear, I uncover truth.  I don’t always like that truth in the moment, but eventually I see “reason” and “sense”.   They both seem like the same word but they aren’t exactly.  It makes sense to have a trash can and it’s reasonable to empty it when it is full. 

An example of this in my life is reflected in mud.  I have quite a lot of mud when it rains, but it is especially awkward near the entrance to my back door.  I can talk “shit” about mud, saying how horrible it is, how it should have been taken care of long ago, how so and so was to blame, and how horrible my floors get because of dirt and mud.  I could go on and on about late husbands who did nothing to solve the mud problem.  I might even theorize that they didn’t care enough about me to examine solutions.  I even have zippers on my boots so I can get them off more quickly and still I don’t always take them off.  Instead, I fight a war on mud.  My attitude of battle creates more battle.  The fact is that when there is rain, there is going to be mud.  It is up to me to bridge the mud.

I have faced this same battle with politics, finances, gardens, clutter, and my firewood. 

The easiest battle to end was the political opinion front.  When I learned that people pass information without fact checking, I began to stop listening to those people.  When I learned that obstruction was the goal in many cases, I realized that actual conversation about politics is mostly a ruse to waste time and energy. I take that personally, because as my time has grown more valuable, I protect it more fiercely. Very few people have real knowledge of how our government works.  Most people who spout political rhetoric are being emotionally manipulated and they in turn try to do that to others.  Being bullied by somebody’s opinion is like eating spiders.  I have never been a person who believes that the end justifies the means, when this means hurting or brow beating another person.  Cheating, lying, contriving, ETC. is not beneficial to my health or happiness. It isn’t even interesting to talk about.   (Using my pickup to transport firewood across five acres is a wiser choice than using the wheelbarrow.  In that case the end justifies the means even though it costs some gas money to use the pickup.) It is awkward but not hard to dodge political conversation.  It is clear to me that my engagement in such conversations is what brings me more discomfort. 

With this understanding under my belt, how then do I stop the battles with the other things in my life? This makes me giggle because a conversation actually requires another human being so even though I can stop having certain conversations, I can’t simply stop getting firewood, walking through the mud, having gardens, give up all money, and have no clutter.  

So, the answer to that question lies in acknowledging success instead of fighting battles.  Being a soldier of or for anything is joining a battle. Fighting doesn’t win a war, it perpetuates war.  One has to simply stop fighting and start doing.   This understanding has helped me a lot but I had to apply it to my daily life, to my way of thinking, and to my habitual relationship dynamics.  My successes excite and motivate me.  Battling exhausts me.

I am frustrated if I try to lift a log with my tractor and I cannot.  If I keep trying the same thing over and over, I am in a battle.  If I push that log aside and choose the next log that I can pick up with my tractor, then I am closer to actually cutting lumber with my sawmill.  Instead of fighting the situation, I get a lot farther by examining my goals. 

If my garden becomes over grown and dehydrated because I am battling weeds and weather, I am going to see myself as having failed.  Reducing my expectation and my reach until I have a garden small enough and close enough to my house that it can be a success, ends the battle and begins the success.  This may seem like a simple solution but it was not to me, because “We” have never had a garden close to the house.  This change of my behavior required some personal questions and the answers were all rooted in past relationships.  My old relationship dynamics always left me in a role that supported the “bread winner” whether or not their opinions were valid or made more work for me.

Clutter will always exist, especially if we truly live our lives.  The clutter that gets horribly dusty is the clutter that needs to be addressed for the long-term.  Because I have an active life and have many interests, I am going to have clutter.   Does my clutter bring me joy?  Some of it does.  When the power goes out, I love to pull out the old Scrabble game and engage with whoever is with me.  That game doesn’t need to be on a shelf all year around.  It could be in a drawer with the emergency backup telephone, candles, and a flashlight. 

We are inundated with the opinion of those who want to sell us something, of those who want to be right, of those who have to be part of a crowd, by the opinions of the people who are full of fear, and of those who are judging us for numerous reasons but mostly because they would rather do that than do their inner work. We cannot stop them from putting their greed, their fear, or their manipulations out there for us to trip over, but we can be more responsible in what we share with others. We don’t have to traipse all of this into someone else’s life.

For my part in that, I would like to remind you that I celebrate your personal successes.  I know that you too, struggle with some form of discomfort.  I do not define you by your circumstances.  I see you as blossoming humans who are reaching toward their personal goals, achieving them, then reaching again.

I am not defined by my circumstances.

Sincerely, Carmen Davis