Redrawing the Comfort Zone

 I have always been one of those people who firmly believed that you shouldn't start decorating for Christmas before Thanksgiving. The two holidays needed to be separate. Finish celebrating one before starting on the next.  Part of that comes from when I was a kid. There was a store in downtown Omaha, where I grew up, that would cover the big windows that wrapped around the building in the middle of November. Then, on the day AFTER THANKSGIVING, there was a big reveal of the Christmas displays. It was a big deal. We would go down to the store to be there for the big unveiling. It was magical , and it meant that Christmas was well and truly underway. I loved it. And I think that the limited time of seeing the decorations and hearing the music made it all the more special. So that became the way that I did things.  But 2020 is different. Today is November 10th and I am putting up my tree. I am putting the colored lights on it and I am lighting it. I am not going to put the ...

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...