fly above it

After a day of questioning my whole mothering approach with my 21 month old daughter, I realized at the wee hours of the night last night, that I completely missed the point.  Here I was so worried that I have a little girl who just won't eat (nursie, nursie, NURSIE!) and who seems to rule the roost.  She won't go to sleep.  She just wants to be latched on to me.  What have I done, I thought.  My happy little girl who seemed so easy and pleasant has turned fussy and bossy and difficult.  Yesterday, I found my way to my sit spot hoping to realize something...I heard the calls of the birds and thought: they are above all this worry about how well she eats and how demanding she is.  Deep breath. 

Alex woke up at midnight with a fever.  Ear infection's back.  How could I miss that?  Poor baby.  Man, I was so convinced that we were in a serious bad pattern.  The catastrophic nervous thinking that had me envisioning Alex as a teenager.  Deep Breath, good Lord, let it go.  As my mom would say: "let it fly on by."  To parent like a bird flying around, keeping watch from the bird's eye view, not tangled up in the weeds and thorny briars.

movement

I read recently that when you sit in your sit spot, you can tune in to something you never noticed before, and then, all or a sudden, it's on your radar and you begin to see it everywhere.  It was the movement of the trees.  My eyes looked up, up, up farther still.  And I realized that I'd always seen the trees as columns, tall and stately, beautiful but not really alive.  I feel like a caught a glimpse of "it"!

I'll try 3:40 in the afternoon

It's windy and cold, but I'm heading out to the sit spot.  Baby's asleep and not so little little guy is with Grammy.

learn to listen

So we've started going out into the backyard, looking for a place, each of us, that we will go to at different times of the day, and we will sit.  No cell phones or video games, no legos, no neigh neigh.  To be quiet is a rare thing because I'm pretty much a loud mouth and not at all a loner.  It's time to learn to really meditate.  To learn to quiet my voice.  What better way to learn than from my son, who is, and always was, truly connected to our backyard.  He can be out there in his own space just walking around, completely unaware of me. 

The first morning we went out to sit in our "sit spots," he asked me, why aren't you on the ground?  I was sitting on a log.  I said, because i don't want to get all dirty.  He laughed at me.

I have the feeling that my sit spot will quietly, unobtrusively change my life.