Thriving In the Heat

We are in the middle of the hottest part of the hot season. While I feel like I'm wilting and having a constant battle with grumpiness, some things seem to be thriving, especially certain flowering bushes and trees. How they do it, I don't know. I wish I could be more like them.

I feel like I'm in the middle of a swirling stream, where things are constantly changing and leaving, flowing on, yet here I stay. I'm about to say "good bye" to some good friends and I am very unhappy about that. I feel forgotten by so many old friends, like my past is just that, "the past". I'm constantly seeing a stream of new faces. Life changes so fast. I should be used to it by now, given the fact that I have lived all over and moved more times than I can easily remember. But I'm not. Change is still hard for me. And while I have felt a shift in my soul, a "settling in" you could say, I am sometimes struck by random longings - to look through the Sunday papers and clip coupons, to call up a friend and go out for coffee, to go out to the garden and dig around, to go put gas in the car and drive for hours down the highway, to pop a handful of fresh blueberries into my mouth... but here I am. Yet, "here" is a good place too and I remind myself that in every place I have been I have known both happiness and loneliness. The biggest issue is not where I am or who I'm with, It's who I am and Who my heart belongs to. If my soul is at rest, I can make it through this heat, through more changes. I may not have fresh blueberries but soon I will have fresh mangoes. I may not have coupons, but who needs them when you can bargain at the local markets. And while my heart aches and misses my old friends and family and that place of belonging, I know that there is no easy solution to that ache. But I have seen enough by now to know that aches are a part of life, no matter where I am. Am I repeating myself here? Sometimes talking to myself helps me feel better. Smile.

A song that Sara Groves sings is running through my head -

I've been painting pictures of Egypt, leaving out what it lacked, the future looks so hard and I want to go back, but the places that used to fit me, cannot hold the things I've learned. Those roads were closed off to me, while my back was turned...

So here I am. I have no idea what the future holds, how long we will be able to be here or what will happen after that... but I have no doubt that we are in the right place for now and I am counting my blessings. And right now 4 of them are sitting in the next room, working together on Lego and they will soon be hungry... so off I go.