I realized looking at my muse, my blog this morning that on the first day of Spring, there are photos of snow and storms. So I found a photo of some of Florence Walrath’s blue glass collection – this was being auctioned off last year – and decided that was a better harbinger of Spring. It’s close, the animals have already forgotten about winter.
My friend Pam White sent me a meditation she wrote for me on a sketch pad, and it is a beautiful thing. It is called “I am enough,” and one of the lines that caught me read “I no longer feel the need for any effort to be noticed by the world. I am enough.” This spoke me and to where I am now. I have lived most of my life in panic, and it has nearly destroyed me. But in recent months, I am in a great transition from panic to being. I just am not feeling much panic anymore. It isn’t as if I don’t have any problems, or life will be perfect for me. But it is different. It is bewildering to have lived in panic for so long and to not feel it now, it shaped so many of my decisions. What comes next?,” I have asked Pam, and she has responded with her meditation.
I’m not yet sure how to live out of fear and panic – I have my moments, for sure, but I have changed, even more than I might have imagined, even after years of hard and difficult work. What does it mean to “be enough?”
I am enough. I do not need to panic and worry about life, or my decisions.
I do not need an army of enablers to help me live my life. I can live my life. I can take care of myself.
I do not need drama and crisis in my life so that people will feel sorry for me, reassure me, worry about me, rush to support the troubles I need to create.
I am enough. I do not need a circus around me any longer, helpless animals to put between me and the world. I can love the animals in my life in a healthy way.
I am enough. I take responsibility for myself, I know now what I can afford and what I cannot.
I am enough. Someone will love me for what I am, just as I am. Someone does.
I am enough. I do not need to argue my life, or to argue the lives of others.
I am enough. I am learning what health means for me, and I am making my own decisions about it.
I am enough. I do not need to manipulate people, or struggle to please them, or ask them what they mean.
I am enough. I say what I mean and I know what I feel.
Pam’s meditation includes this line for me: “As I open to the world, I see I belong. I cease the fight to belong.”
From panic to being. All I need to do is to be, that is my work now, the next chapter in the spiritual work.
I am enough, my meditation for the next few weeks.
