Don't Wallow In It

I can still hear my mother’s loving, yet stern caution to “just don’t wallow in it” tiptoeing through my mind’s ear as my heart deals with disappointments or misdeeds by others now and then. This caution from her didn’t come immediately in those days. She knew I was a little girl, an adolescent, a young adult, a striving career woman, or a young wife trying to filter my way through my own unfolding life. No, she would allow a time for a heartbreak to wreck its temporary havoc or a disappointment from a lost opportunity or poor result from a valiant attempt to run its course, but when she determined that any further nurturing of self-pity was entering into a totally unproductive zone she would gently draw me aside, take hold on one of my hands while I dried tears with the other, and, in her low, beautiful, reassuring melodic voice she would begin to tell me all the reasons life had taught her not to wallow.

Given to drama as I was sometimes back then, I didn’t necessarily want her to cut my pity-party short. I was enjoying the so-called ‘sweet sorrow’ or that ‘justified outrage’ I was feeling. Darn it, I’d earned the right to suffer for as long as I wanted to I’d find myself thinking, but try as I might I could not drown out her truths, her logic, her sharing, her tools that she was offering me to move to a higher place within.

Lately I find myself wishing my mother were here to talk to our nation, to take it by one of its hands and have it dry its tears with the other so that it too could hear the voice of reason she would impart with such tact and grace as to why we’d all wallowed long enough. I really wish she were here to do that because undeniably we all need a road map paved with love to take us to that higher place within.

  ©Peggy Eldridge-Love 2013

Toxic People: Emotional Food Poisoning

This is from another blog that I write entitled "The Rattle Within". Thought I'd also share it here.

Toxic People: Emotional Food Poisoning

I recently had a sudden encounter with food poisoning. I was awaken by violent cramps and a revolting feeling that lasted for about an hour, an hour in which my body was doing everything it could to eliminate and expel the violating intruders which had invaded my health.  Fortunately it was short lived and about a half-hour later I was thanking God for the return to physical calmness and  thought how I never wanted to feel what I’d felt during that episode again. The thought that rushed to mind immediately thereafter though caught me off guard, but I’m certain it came from that same source of healing as that which had relieved my physical suffering. I am sure it was a thought from God.

Rather than forget how you felt, my mind seemed to say, you want to remember this agonizing twisting and turning when you encounter people whom you know are invaders in your life bringing with them toxic dysfunction, deceit,  needless drama, anxiety, confusion, chaos, and hurtfulness. Just as your body fought with all its might, even though for a while it was painful and difficult to endure, to drive out whatever you had consumed that was poisonous, allow your wisdom and your truth to recognize and fight a sometimes equally as painful and difficult internal battle to loosen and expel that or those toxic poisonous people causing you anxiety from your system as well.

Not easily done in many instances. Especially not if we are dealing with friends, family, long held relationships, or perhaps those whom hold sway we believe over financial health or well-being. But recognizing the sound of this ‘rattle within’ is a great place of beginning, a great opportunity to begin the process of letting go.

©Peggy Eldridge-Love 2013 

Parched

Words fall,
raindrops on parched soul,
not enough though
to end
the lingering
drought.


©Peggy Eldridge-Love 2013 

Photo Source: 123rf
  

"CENTRIFUGAL FORCE" REVISITED

Every now and then I revisit this very early poem I wrote. Today is one of those times.

CENTRIFUGAL FORCE

I am a butterfly
who does not
yet understand
centrifugal force.
©Peggy Eldridge-Love-All Rights Reserved

 Photo Credit: Dimonspace

Hail to the Chief!

I revisited something I wrote in 2009 that now seems to me to have been somewhat prophetic, sadly. Here it is. I wonder, what's your take on where we stand in this regard today?

Hail to the Chief!

August 15, 2009 at 9:46am

Whatever your personal politics, however you voted in this or other elections, it is the attack upon the office of the President of the United States that ought to concern you most as you observe what is being fanned across this country today.

We ought to be ashamed of ourselves; those of us who say we hold this country dear. To look and listen, to hear and ignore what is taking place in an attempt, not to save us from some impending social monster that is encroaching upon our future well-being, but to paint a picture of fear, inferiority, and hatred, without calling it what it is and doing what we can personally to squash it. To ignore it is unforgivable.

I remember another time like this, a time when hatred and allegations flew, when they were falsely created and perpetrated across the airwaves by right-winged voices carefully designed and orchestrated to reach and trigger a certain element of the nation’s population into heinous action. I remember feeling as I do now, listening then as I am listening now, and seeing, sensing and, with deep trepidation fearing, what the outcome of such hate pandering would be. It was 1994 and 1995 and it cumulated with the domestic terror attack upon American citizens in the Oklahoma bombing.

The flagrant distortions of truth, the shameless manipulation of facts, and the recruitment of segments of the country known for their vulnerability to hate-baiting and racial prejudices in order to dumb-down the most revered office in our nation’s history and to suddenly lessen its worth because of its current occupant is an act of hubris that, were it once achieved, would be virtually irreversible on countless fronts. The world is watching us! They celebrated with us when the majority of the people elected the current president, and now they are shaking their heads in dismay and disgust as they see what is unfolding.

These efforts to “cheapen” the office of the Presidency now “cheapen” and will minimize the office of the President of the United States from now on, regardless of who is seated there in the future. It is a slippery slope that we cannot afford.

©Peggy Eldridge-Love 2009

Until

Let's talk until the cows come home

If home is where they want to be

And perhaps by then we'll solve life

And all it's misery.

c Peggy Eldridge-Love