With a little help from my friends...

Since I was a young girl, I've always had trouble asking for help. Trouble with homework? No, I'll handle it. Trying to move a chair? Nope, I can do it. To this day, I have trouble admitting when I need help.

It's so....revealing.

You see, I'm supposed to be an expert on everything. Have a question? I can find the answer. Need assistance finishing something? I can provide it or know who can. Have an obscure or trivial thought? I probably know it's origin!

My strength comes from independence and self-reliance - I CAN DO IT (she says as she rolls up her sleeves in a Rosy the Riveter pose). I not only don't need anybody to help me, dagnabbit, I can save their bacon too (even if it's only in Trivial Pursuit).

Go figure - I'm a know it all. Not.

This year has provided some of my biggest lessons. Being vulnerable. Asking for help. Squirming less and smiling more as I reach out my hand to take instead of give. Saying thank you. Submission.

Tomorrow I go in for surgery and will be vulnerable and needy for quite some time. Instead of feeling incomplete, missing vital parts of what makes me strong, I'll be strong in a different way - strong through submitting to the present - the here and now instead of the should be and has been. I'll gain strength by being in the moment, learning how to be interdependent instead of independent.

I'll be stepping out of this blog for a little while during my recovery. I've asked some good friends to fill in while I'm out and provide you their perspective on this journey we share together.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter and touch base with me while I recover. I'll be back in a few weeks.

Lord, thank you for my dear, sweet friends, rooting for my full recovery. Thank you for this beautiful web of interconnectedness in which we touch each other's souls. Over the next weeks, keep me cradled in your hands and blow your healing breath across my body and soul that I may heal in all ways. Thank you.

Majeeda Rosa

Lazy Days of Comfort

I love the unfolding of spring into summer. Sweet scented orange blossoms caressing the evening breeze and floating through the window. Lilac blossoms bursting out in a brief frenzy of perfume. The return of the butterflies. Sitting in the garden and feeling the warm sunlight kissing my skin. My lullaby into warm darkness: hearing the comforting drone of a lawnmower in the distance as the last vestiges of evening sunlight slant across the yard and porch.

These are golden moments when time stands still.

Tick Tock Tick Tock,
Jumping over the hands of the clock
Grabbing the moment and hanging on
Gently, gently…drawing an eon…
Out of the well of time.

Is time flying for anyone else? I’ll be taking an extended leave from work toward the end of the month to recover from surgery. I’ll be suspended from my usual pursuits – work, household chores, walking around the city, meeting friends. I’ll be in suspension while I heal, a cocoon of gestation as my body emerges from limitations and pain to…recovery and discovery.

I’ll have plenty of time to experience the abundant nature we have in our yard. We’re at the end of the suburbs, not quite rural, but with fields adjoining our property. Our neighbors include mother horses with their frisky colts, jack rabbits and pheasants, garden snakes, bees, mice, a scrub jay who returns every year to our yard, hummingbirds and woodpeckers and many more feathered friends. We enjoy vegetable gardens, citrus and nut trees, grapes and berries, and a beautiful new maple tree my husband planted last month that will explode in crimson color in October. Things are usually pretty busy around here. I try to stop and actually take in the abundance we have rather than flying by in passing with an afterthought of “I should spend more time with this.”

Life finds a way of giving me what I want, in this case time to enjoy what I have, even if the method is unexpected and long and painful in manifesting. Oh, if you could only hear the sigh of relief and acceptance for what is unfolding drowning out the natural anxiety that accompanies injury.

How will you enjoy your summer?  I hope you'll slow down, if only for a moment.  You can find an eternity in a moment.

Beloved One, you who made this beautiful abundant world for us to enjoy in all its sensuousness, I surrender to my body, this instrument of experience my spirit resides in while here on this earth.

Majeeda Rosa