Living up to a name.....

I had an epiphany yesterday, that I need to: a) blog on a regular basis, I really miss writing, and b) I need to take my blog and steer my writing of it towards fitting it to the name I have given it...An Enchanted Life.

All blogs are personal, however it can become easy to use a blog for a self induced pity party, that was not my intent when I started this blog. Life does have it's ups and downs and it can be cathartic to write about them, but I think it would be more cathartic to concentrate on lesson's learned from those dark times and the new light that is revealed.....So now that I've ridden the waves of the some of the roughest times of my life, I've decided that it is time to celebrate about how Enchanting life can be!

Enchante!

Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again.....

I LOVE this picture, every time I look at it I just go "ahhhhhhh" and I can feel myself wanting to lay down in my yard and let myself sink into my Mother's bosom...and right now, in the dead of a Cleveland Winter (if you live here you know it demands a capital "W")...I really could use a good Earthly Momma's Hug.

I haven't posted since my surgery in August and back then I had mentioned the roller coaster ride of Life I had been on, in fact just about everyone I know had a wild-ass ride in 2009. I've been itching to start posting again but couldn't seem to find my starter thread, then this morning I came across a comment posted way back in July by April and I was so deeply touched. Thank you April, for your comment, you have no idea how much it meant to me. You are the first stranger to post a comment and I was blown away by what you had to say. My family and friends have posted comments before and I'm touched by what they have to say, but they are my family and friends so their opinion of my postings are a tad biased, but to hear how my writing has touched a complete stranger, well, it lit a fire in my heart and I am honored to have such an effect on a person whom I have never met.

April commented on my "Like an onion" posting and wondered how things were going for me since then and it's the perfect thread and one I was trying to pull at all along to get this blog started up again.....but first, a tiny side trip....in that blog I talked about cutting my hair and letting it go gray and April wanted to know if I would post "before and after" pictures.....so here they are, along with an update on the "peeling" process.......

Me, before the "peeling" began, Fall 2008.....(sorry, couldn't find a larger pic)...

Me, last spring, after all the color and curls were cut off.....

I was so proud of myself when I cut all the color off, as you can tell by my saucy little pose above, but as time went by I realized how washed out the gray made me look, so I opted on the side of vanity and had it colored for my wedding

....(I don't regret my vain moment, love how my pictures turned out...but now we're back to the health debate, especially now in my life, over whether I should keep coloring or not.....I'm leaning, again, towards being the brave, sassy silver haired wench....)

Yes, the Wedding finally happened!...Jeff and I both laugh now as we look back and agree that it seemed to take SO long to get here and now it's been 3 months already and it seems like yesterday.......the wedding was BEAUTIFUL, the day was gorgeous, it had rained ALL week and was supposed to rain that day, but the Goddess loves me, so She provided a beautiful, cool fall day for us...

We have survived this past year and all it's dramas and have come out closer and happier and more in Love with each other BECAUSE of it......

As the New Year begins I have been aching to pick up where I left off last spring with the Peeling Process...despite all the drama and detours in the last year, the Goddess is quite determined to keep me pointed in this direction and I am more than happy to follow Her lead...

In the middle of the graduation and all three weddings I became very ill, found out I had a malignant tumor in my bladder (explains three years worth of constant UTI's and lower back pain). I had it removed in August (my last post) and have come through beautifully. Because of the tumor and the subsequent post op infections I took my diet changes even further and became a Vegan...(very interesting, creative challenge in a house full of "meatatarians" who all make faces at my food...but they are being extremely supportive of my decision for ME...as long as I don't make any of them eat "that stuff"...lol)

I was DONE being sick!!!!

I am determined to purge my body of whatever junk I can, so I can know that I did MY part to cleanse my body from the inside, at least.

There are always things that happen that are beyond our control, but I am a firm believer in doing all you can on your own behalf to make things better...whether it be your health, your job, your finances, your life.....YOU are responsible for your own happiness and well being, NOBODY and NOTHING else can make you happier or healthier, if you don't start with yourself first!

For the New Year my whole being has gravitated towards the word "Simple".....I am exhausted from the past year and want to slow down my life, considerably and that is my goal for this year, my "word" for the year...I want simplify my life, less drama, less stress, less STUFF...I'm going to spend the next year simplifying, purging, cleansing, clearing, opening, renewing, re breathing, restarting the peeling process...

Last spring I invoked Oya, the Goddess of Storms....She blows Chaos into your life so that it may blow away the crap and expose the hidden garden lying underneath the dead weight in your life......and boy did she give it to me.......yep, She is a Powerful Bitch Goddess and I love her.....I am not sorry, at all, that I asked Her to work in my life....it's been quite a "storm" this past year, but now that particular "storm" is over and the sky is clearing, I'm going to go out into my Life and see what new growth has been brought into my life...Oya brought to my attention a whole lot of "dead weight" that was cluttering, choking my life and I am working at clearing away all that dead weight so that the new growth, the new things, new people, new mindsets, new opportunities will have a place to grow and flourish in my life.......

Let the Peeling Process begin....again......

Blessed Be.

Leap of Faith - Part Deux

The last entry I made in this blog was a long, long time ago. I spoke of all the changes that were happening in my life, the biggest, hardest change of all was the letting go of my relationship with my Honey. A very challenging time in my life.

Well as the old adage goes "If you love something set it free, if it returns it is yours, if does not then it never was yours to begin with...."

I set my Honey free, I also set myself free, freedom from agreeing to things that are not healthy for me and at that time things were not healthy for me. But time apart, time to re-evaluate, re-adjust brought my Honey back to me in MUCH healthier frame of mind, attitude towards the plans we had for our life together.....and my heart leaped at this and once again I took a Leap of Faith, back into his arms, sensing, knowing that a definite change had occured and finally, we were on the path that we had envisioned for our relationship and we are still going on that path, stronger than ever, more together than we have ever been.

I set him free and he came back to me and I came back to him and life is all the more beautiful because of it....I know with every ounce of my being that had I not taken this step and just let things stay the way they were we would not have survived and our relationship would have been irrevocably broken.

Since that moment Life has been very, very full for the both of us. My youngest graduated from high school, my oldest got married, my soon-to-be-bro-in-law got married, and my Honey and I are getting married, on Oct 3rd, 2009......between our time apart, then reuniting, the weddings in our families, we have really, really learned that what he and I have is extra extraordinary and we have both become manically committed to keeping what we have a cherishing the beauty of it....we've learned from our mistakes and are trying our best to take those lessons to heart and to keep moving forward. Love like ours does not come along every day and we've seen that up close and personal, too many people we know are either struggling or just "making do" and that is not for us.....we treasure every day together, every gift of ourselves to each other...

All of this was made even more valuable to us in the last two weeks as I discovered that I had a tumor in my bladder, which I had removed yesterday. Next Monday we will be meeting with the oncologist to see what the pathology report has to say about all of this.....there is nothing on earth like the word "cancer" to bring your life, your stresses, your worries, your petty greivances to blinding halt! Your entire life goes into a massive reprioritizing mode and some things become so much more valuable and other things lose their weight completely and utterly.

These are the times in your life where the chafe is blown away and the reality of your life, your loves, your goals comes into sharp focus.

I will laugh a lot more, I will play a lot more, I will love more deeply, I will treasure my family and friends and all the blessings and gifts that I have. I know this much as well, I will be getting rid of the negative things in my life that are sucking the happiness, the contentment from my days.

Life IS too short and some of these things are taking up too much of my precious time on Earth.

Leap of Faith

In my last post I spoke of the many changes, challenges that I foresaw in my future, changes that were absolutely necessary for my life to go in the direction it was fated to go. Besides cutting my hair, to embrace my approaching Cronehood, and cutting sugar and carbs from my diet, to help me live a long and healthy life, it seems that cutting My Honey from my life was part of it as well. I am no longer engaged to be married and he is no longer a part of my life. Part of embracing myself, my true nature, included being true enough to myself to realize, acknowledge and then finally have the courage to act on something that was not right for me. On most fronts life was fun, romantic and sweet, but underneath, in the shadows lay the truth, that all was not perfect, for me and what I needed in life, and it could not be ignored, covered or glossed over anymore. Asking him to leave, to accept that this wouldn't work, no matter how hard I tried, was the absolute hardest thing I ever had to do, this quote from one of my most treasured inspirations kept rolling through my mind:

"It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself.

If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy."

(from the Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer)

I had to betray another's trust to be faithful to my own soul and it was without a doubt the hardest thing I've ever had to do....

I trusted my soul, my instincts, I took a Leap of Faith and am already better for it.....here's to landing in the sweetness and satisfaction of staying true to myself and my soul.....

Namaste and Blessed Be.

On becoming an Onion.......

This is Bea who is 95yrs old!

(photograph courtesy of Rosanne Olsen from her book "This is Who I Am: Our Beauty, in all shapes and sizes.")

I was looking for photograph to epitomize what I have been going through, growing towards in the last few weeks and I came across an article of this beautiful book and this stunning photograph of this lovely woman. As soon as I saw her I knew it was the one, it says, perfectly, exactly where my new path is going....Aging Gracefully....and I could not have a more exquisite example of trying to explain where my new energy is headed towards. My intentions for this New Moon, for this new path, this new lifestyle is to capture and live, day to day, the same beauty, joy, inner peace, confident fierceness that Miss Bea has....see that look on her face, that bodacious pose, THAT'S how I'm going to live....today, tomorrow and every day until the day it's time for me to leave this body.....

My new journey I have liken to the story of the Goddess Inanna, the Queen of Heaven. The Cliff Notes version is this: her beloved was taken to the Underworld and in order to save him she had to descend into the Underworld. She girded herself with all the trappings of her power and started her journey, however, at each gate (of which the were seven) she was required to give up one of her power objects, each time it was something more dear and when she reached the final gate she passed through completely naked and vulnerable, but it was that power, the power of her true self that helped her complete her quest. She discovered that the greatest power of all was loving yourself, that you have all you need is inside of you.....you don't need all the trappings of the world to get what you want, which is love, because the greatest love of all is being yourself, completely and in return being loved, unconditionally, for who you truly, deeply, nakedly are.....

and that's what this picture of Miss Bea makes me think of, she loves herself and her life and doesn't apologize to ANYONE for it....that's the new corner I am turning in my life now. I have had a certain lifestyle that I have been drawn to my whole life and have been pulled off that path for various reasons (mostly my own reluctance to "go against the flow") and now the pull back to that path is as inevitable, as destiny driven, as the salmon going upstream every year, I cannot NOT do it......

This new lifestyle, this new path entails me letting go of all the many objects of armor I have used throughout my life to shield myself, my trappings of power, as it were......the first to go will be my hair, as in I have made the conscious decision to no longer color my hair. Right now it is shoulder length dark brown mass of curls that needs the roots touched up every two to three weeks. As of today those roots are about 1/2 inch long with 40% sandy brown and 60% silver and as soon as those roots are about 4 inches long I'm going to get ALL my colored ends cut off and get a gorgeous pixie haircut and celebrate being free from societies choke hold that I keep trying to look younger than I am. I am going to wear my new look with the same fierceness and pride that Bea has! I am shedding my first shield, which has been my glorious curly mane for years, I may decided to grow it long again, but I am not going to keep dumping chemicals on my head in the name of public opinion.
I am fully aware that this new turn will be greeted with a lot of gasps and consternation, but the only person who's opinion I am worried about is My Honey's and he and I have talked and he is completely supportive of me doing this. He is completely supportive of the whole new corner I am turning and I am very pleased and grateful, not for his blessing or permission, I would do this anyway, but for the fact that many of these changes will affect him in some way or another and it is nice to know that he has my back and he will help me any way he can to keep me on this path to becoming more comfortable in my own skin....

The next shield to go is my eating lifestyle and my weight, my whole life I have used food as a emotional crutch and now am 140 pounds overweight, now I am not one to get stuck on numbers but I am well aware that I am very much over the weight I need to be healthy and most of it is due to the fact that I am an emotional eater as well as reactive hypoglycemic, (in a nutshell that means any sugar or carb that passes my lips converts straight to body fat, does not pass go, does not get processed as energy) and what do emotional eaters want when they are feeling blue, stressed, unhappy, happy, celebratory or any other excuse to eat!....CARBS & SUGAR......so after about 27 years of eating all the wrong foods and after 5 years of KNOWING it, it's time to grow up and do what's right and so now I am a quasi-Vegetarian/SouthBeach/Mediterranean lifestyle convert.......a HUGE change to my lifestyle, especially since my Honey and I are complete Foodies, however our obsession with great food usually ran towards pub grub, diner food, the perfect cheeseburger and fries or the who has the best doughnuts, so my decision needed to be discussed so that he would understand that my new choices with food would greatly impact how and where we go out to eat from now on and happily, he is fully supportive and that makes life and moving ahead so much easier.......

There are more layers that will be shed, like an onion, they will be exposed, examined and dealt with as they reveal themselves, for now the most important ones are the thick, top layers that must be removed so I can access the inner layers that lie within, shedding each unecessary one until I reach the rich, beautiful, true inner core that is ME......

So Mote it Be.....
Blessed Be.....

For Vanessa.......

My Darling Daughter, words will never be enough, hugs cannot be enough, our love and support won't feel enough or help enough, right now....but let this thought float around the back of your mind, for now.....that some day the sea will be calm again, the storm will pass and some day, some day the pain will go away and you will enjoy the little things again.
And some day, some sweet day that dream will really, truly come to fruition..........some day.

Happy Imbolc......

Imbolc, wiccan sabbat of fire, of light. First day of spring, if you look to the natural world. Winter seems to still have a cold, hard grasp on our world, but below, seeds are stirring, hibernating creatures sleep is lightening. Spring is a mere two months away, and the earth is making ready for the next cycle to begin, soon snow drops and crocuses will bravely poke through the snow. The earth is getting ready to shake off it's heavy mantle of snow, sleep, hibernation, getting ready to breathe, expand, blossom and bloom.

Imbolc is the season of promise, it is the inhale before the next exhale, it is the certainty that the sun will return in our lives, literally and figuratively. It is a time to reconsider, reconfigure, plot out and plan out goal, intentions and dreams. Time to get start cultivating, nurturing, coxing the seeds we planted at Samhain for the next year. What intentions we sent out into the Universe at that time needs now to be tended, weeded, coddle, encouraged to grow, thrive and bloom.

It's time to tend the Garden of our Life, time to focus the Light of Life towards those intentions so that they will blossom to fruition.

What seeds have you planted, what dreams would you like to see become a reality, what tools do you need to tend your Garden?

Spring is coming, what would do you want growing in your Garden of Life?