Redrawing the Comfort Zone

I have a lamp in my living room. It is one of those lamps that were popular in the 70s, the ones that you turn on and off by touching the lamp itself. No switch, just tapping the metal surface of the lamp turns it on, changes the level of light, or turns it off. My mom bought it when she redid our living room when I was a kid, then it moved with my dad to Arkansas, Finally, it came to live at my house after I cleaned out his apartment last year. There is a lot of nostalgia in that lamp, and it was something that I was compelled to load in my car and bring back with me…after all, it has been in my life for almost 50 years. The thing is, I am convinced that my dad is using it to communicate with me from “the great beyond”. A bit of background on my dad: He was a caretaker. His main priority in life, the thing that fueled most everything that he did, was the support of those he loved. His father left his family (mom and 4 kids) when my dad was about 10. Being the eldest child, a lot of th...

Hello again. I know, I know, it has been a while. A little over 2 years to be exact. Amazing how time flies by. In the blink of an eye everything changes....and I have been blinking A LOT in the past few months, how about you? From one day to the next, heck from one moment to the next, you just never know what is going to happen. I have had a lot of thoughts running through my head and I wanted to find a way to share some of them. So I thought I would come back here and restart the blog. After all, many of us are in the process of redrawing our comfort zones practically every day right now, so why not? Here's to a little more comfort in the zone for the second half of 2020! Roots and Branches When I was in shiatsu school I had the privilege to study Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM. It opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about many things. The concept of yin and yang comes out of that tradition. They also talk about roots and branches when treating a condition of th...

You know the old caveat, "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it"? I have always known it to be true, but I would also add that wishes take many forms. It is not just what you think about when blowing out the candles on your birthday cake. It is not just the thoughts that you have when you wish on a falling star. It is not even just the things you picture when you are trying to imagine your ideal life. Those are some of the ways you wish, but you also wish with your words, every day, even when you don't realize that you are. Why do I bring this up?  Well, I have had this hammered home to me in the past month, in ways that I never could have anticipated...and I am still a little dazed. First of all, let me say, I have always been the sort of person who rarely makes big changes easily. There is usually a ton of bricks involved, and they are usually falling on my head. So that piece of the equation shouldn't have surprised me. But I think that the...

Okay, so I have given it some time. My experiences from the mountain are starting to feel more like a part of me, and less like something nebulous, floating around me like a cloud. Although, I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed that I didn't have the profound transformation that I was hoping for. Remember, a few posts ago, when I was talking about Moses going up the mountain and coming back down totally changed? Well, as crazy as that sounds, that was what I was expecting. I wanted to come back home and have it be more than obvious that I had done something incredible, and had been forever altered. I wanted to look at the world, my world, with totally new eyes, and see things differently. I wanted there to be a glow about me that made people wonder what it was that I had experienced. Instead, I came back and it almost felt like nothing had happened. Just that I had gone on a cool vacation, and was now back to resume where I had left off. I wasn't radi...

Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but mine was left in Tanzania. (Same number of syllables, so it fits nicely into the song)... I have been back from Africa for 4 days now, and I am having a problem being totally present in the Twin Cities. My body is here, but my mind and heart keep drifting back to my time on the mountain, in the towns, and on safari. The sights, the smells, the sounds (or total silence), envelope me whenever I close my eyes. I miss it so much already. See, I knew when I started this process, that the trip was going to change me. There was no way that it couldn't. I knew that my body would change, because of the training and the physical challenge of climbing that mountain. I knew that my brain would have to take on challenges that it never had, just to get me up to the summit and back down. I also knew that my heart would expand to take in all of the new things that I would experience. I just didn't realize how much it would alter m...

Okay, well, I guess this is really happening! I leave tomorrow for the first leg of my journey. I get to spend a day in New York, with dear friends, before heading off to Africa. WOW! It is always such a strange experience to have worked so hard for so long, in pursuit of a goal, and then to have it be right around the corner. On the one hand, it feels like it has been a very long time in coming, and I am so ready for my hard work to pay off. I am ready to stand on that summit and know that I earned every step of that journey. I am ready to celebrate the most challenging physical escapade that I have ever tackled. I am ready to experience a whole new country, its culture, and its beauty. But then there is the flip side of that. I have always found it so weird that I start to feel a little bit sad, like I will be losing something when I am no longer "in training" for a major event. The excitement of having it in the future, and seeing the interest on people's faces whe...