Five Minute Friday: Finish

There are a million different ways to use this word of finish. The idea of it being what protects and gives wood projects that extra bit of beauty. In recovery and healing we talk about how it's not about the destination, but the journey is what's important. There isn't a finish. That's freedom from perfectionism and discouraging all at the same time.

I could write about how you have to persevere through that last mile to get to the finish line, but the last time that I ran was in middle school where I usually finished dead last. There's not a lot there to talk about.

What if finish is something that needs a reframe in my life? It sounds final, probably because that's the way we use it. The last step in woodworking or handicrafts, the end of the race, the completion of a project. We finish with school, with degrees, with seasons in our lives. It so often is synonymous with endings.

Paul writes about finishing well. Which is important, but hello perfectionism and comparison. Most days it's all I can do to start. Because that's necessary, isn't it? In order to finish anything, we must first start. And after we finish, we must start again, somewhere, with something else.

When I allow finishing to become part of the pattern, the rhythm of the way it works, all of a sudden it no longer feels like an unattainable goal that I'm not sure I want to reach. Finish becomes a place of beginning again. That I know how to do.

Linking up with the community at Five Minute Friday. Come join us? 

Five Minute Friday: Bloom

Once more linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker for Five Minute Friday. The day each week that we allow our inner editors to be silent for just five minutes as we write and publish on the given prompt.

Come join us?


I find myself draw back into the lesson of nature all around me as I work through the impatience of this season. I want to see all my dreams and hopes come to pass now, thank you very much. Yet nature teaches me, time and again that there is a rhythm to life. A pacing and a tempo that is all her own and it will not be rushed. There is growth happening, even when it's below the soil. There is beauty even when the blossom is only a bud.

It's easy to look at someone's life that's in full bloom and forget the dedication, the choices, the patience, the nurture that went into all the phases that brought forth that blossom. Embrace this place, this stage of your blooming because it too is beautiful.

Bloom

Before the blooming there was blossoming, a coming into her own. 

Before the blossoming there was budding, hope for colour and beauty to come.

Before the budding there was leafing, nourishment for the growing life. 

Before the leafing, there was sprouting, tenacity breaking through.

Before the sprouting, there was rooting, choosing to stay in this place.

Before the rooting, there was dying, hard protection splitting apart and letting go.

Before the dying, there was a seed, potential and promise of a blooming. 

Five Minute Friday: Belong

I've fought my entire life to belong. To be a part of what was happening. To fit in.

Belonging has been the yearning of my heart from the first day of kindergarten. The day I discovered there was a much bigger world than my little apartment building. When I learned that other children played in ways that I didn't know or understand. The seed was planted that day.

Years of rejections, of awkwardness, of being "different" watered that seed as it grew into a tree. A tree that I would sit and read under, nestled in it's shade, finding my belonging there, in solitude. My heart was lonely, but at least it wasn't getting trampled. I'd make occasional trips out from under it, to see all the places that my heart wasn't welcomed, where I still didn't fit in. I'd return to my tree, to nurse those wounds.

But on one of those trips out, I stuck around long enough to be accepted. I found people who spoke my language, and when they didn't, they were willing to learn mine and teach me theirs. As I found a place to belong, it was easier to be away from my tree, to risk other places of belonging.

One day soon I will have built my strength to the place where I can cut down that tree that grew from that seed that was planted in my four year old heart.

Linking up with Five Minute Friday. 

Five Minute Friday: Lost

Linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker for Five Minute Friday. We take five minutes to write and share our raw, unfiltered words on the given prompt. Come join us. 

I have this association with lost - lost years, lost love, lost time, lost words. A negative litany dragging me into this downward spiral. There have been losses. Heart-shattering-change-my-life losses. But those aren't the losses I want to write about.

I want to write about the good losses. About losing the lies that have held me back from embracing my words. I am not who I used to be because I am shedding this identity that no longer fits me, an identity that was never meant to be mine in the first place. I'm losing mistrust, shame, guilt, loneliness. Things that held me down, held me back. There is beauty in these losses.

As I meander my way through this year of become I'm seeing the pattern woven amongst the things that call to my heart, the things that are coming alive - they are all things I once thought lost. Things I had given up as lost. They weren't lost, just waiting. Waiting for the stars to align so that I could embrace them and in doing so embrace myself.

Five Minute Friday: Release

Linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker for Five Minute Friday. A place where we come together and write for five minutes, blurting our unedited words and then linking up. 

Release

Deep red crescents score the palms of her hands

The panic she feels behind gritty too tired eyes mounting

There is too much and not enough

She feels too much and not enough

Her weakness is hanging out like an untucked shirt

Weary she drags herself into another day

The blinking cursor mocking her sluggish brain

One word, then another

Pulled from the depths of her soul

They begin to spill faster

Followed by tears slipping down her cheeks

This is her release

Where her heart breathes and freedom is born

Five Minute Friday: Nothing

Today I'm linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker's Five Minute Fridays. Join us? 

Nothing - well that's about what I feel like I've got today. I'm showing up with nothing. As a recovering co-dependent, there's freedom in that nothing. There is nothing that I have to do for someone else in order to ensure my emotional well being. There is nothing of yours that I have to pick up and carry.

It's still easy to find myself slipping backwards into those old habits and patterns. Reaching out to make sure that everyone else is happy, and ignoring my own needs in the process. Reaching out to care for my husband, to help him process through his feelings after yet another merry-go-round ride of blame, criticism and silence. I don't have to do that. I can walk away. I can do nothing. There's freedom there around this nothing word.

It's bigger than my husband. There isn't anything I have to do to make you like me, to make myself belong. I'm allowed to show up, with nothing but myself and that nothing + me, that's enough. I don't have to earn acceptance and belonging. It simply is - and there's nothing I can do about it.