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Musings: Love–Our Wedding Anniversary

A few weeks ago Richard and I celebrated twenty eight years of marriage.  I began the day in my usual fashion, out on the lanai having my quiet time with God.  My husband was inside having his quiet time too, and through the open door I could feel the connection as we each experienced our own unique relationship with God.  As I read my various daily reflections, the meaning of that day slowly sank in. 

We had known each other for almost twenty nine years.  I met Richard towards the end of July 1983, and we married on 24 March 1984.  It was a bit of a scary time for me.  I had been married once before for almost ten very unhappy years and it had been ten years since I had separated and consequently divorced that man.  I had lived much of that previous marriage emotionally alone, and had become very independent and self-sufficient in the ensuing ten years.  Oh, and did I mention that Richard is almost twenty years my junior??

I thought back to that time after Richard asked me to marry him and remembered how much praying and self-questioning I went through.  I had also insisted that we speak with the priest and go through counseling, and then I went on a retreat to distance myself from the relationship for forty eight hours, just to have some clarity and see if I had any different thoughts and feelings about the situation.  After doing everything I thought I should do to be sure of how I felt, we went ahead and married.

I sat there on the twenty fourth of March this year with a very full heart as I traveled back in time, and the prevailing thought was “where had all those twenty eight years gone?”.  The words from a well-known Christian song came to mind: “in the blink of an eye”.  As I said goodbye to Richard that morning (he had a day-long class he had to attend), I remembered our first real kiss. It had me blushing for a moment because it was a very incredible and passionate kiss and I remember thinking that I could just have floated off in that kiss all those years ago.  But it was also a very tender kiss, and I think that’s what sold me on Richard from the very first – he was such a tender person.  Tender-hearted as a person as well as tender towards me, and others.

If I needed any other evidence of the years we have been together, we have a twenty seven-year old daughter, Melissa, who is proof-positive that all those “blink-of-an-eye” years really existed. I remember very well appearing in a play, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, when I was about six months pregnant with her, and my eldest son, Marco, from my first marriage, break dancing day in and day out during the pregnancy.  Melissa was born to the rhythm of break dance.

While Richard was in class, I got on with my day and couldn’t help but notice in great detail the contents of our home, which is something between an art gallery and a curio shop.  There are paintings and photos all over the walls.  The paintings come from many different places that either Richard has travelled to during his years in the Navy or that we both have travelled to together.  Then there are the statues and figurines that cover every shelf and available surface throughout the house.  Many people are quite taken aback when they visit our home for the first time because of all “the stuff”.  But everything is a joyful representation of the years that we have been together and the memories that we have created.

When Rich came home from class, we got ready to go out and celebrate our anniversary.  First we went to the El Apache restaurant to enjoy a delicious Mexican meal.  With tummies pleasantly full we then headed over to the Thrasher-Horne Center for Arts to see a show.  A few weeks earlier, at a silent auction fund-raiser at our church, we had won the bid on two tickets for The Peking Acrobats which were dated twenty four March.  I think the only reason we bid on them was because the date was the same as our anniversary.  The show was quite breathtaking and very exciting and it was a great way to celebrate the day.

However, we didn’t quite finish the celebrations at that point.  Instead of heading home, Richard pointed the car in the other direction.  You see, he has an absolute weakness for Shakes, a small drive up cubicle that sells shakes and sundaes made with frozen custard.   And so we completed our evening enjoying our favorites: for Rich this was a strawberry milkshake, extra thickSmile; for me it was a kiddy-cup with one small scoop of vanilla frozen custard topped with a healthy drizzle of caramel – yumSmile.  A perfect finish to a perfect evening, and here’s to number twenty nine!!

Musings: Further Along The Road

Once again I have been on a writing hiatus.  It has led me to realize that I am unable to multi-task on many levels.  I have always understood “multi-tasking” to mean the ability to do more than one specific task at a time.  I am sure I have already mentioned in previous postings that this is very difficult for me to do. My brain and my body just don’t function well in multi-tasking mode.

I am always so amazed when I walk by my husband when he is working at his computer. I really should say “computers” – plural, because, although he has one computer (on his main desk – I’ll explain in a minute!), he has two screens and sometimes he is multi-tasking between the two and sometimes he is also multi-tasking on each screen.  My brain just cannot hold that!  It’s way too mind-boggling for me.

Apart from his main desk, he also has a secondary desk which holds another computer and recording equipment which he uses to create his “podcasts”.  When he is all set up to record in that space, it looks rather like an old-fashioned radio show.  He wears headphones and has a microphone in front of him and I almost expect him to break out into acapella singing.  Since he has been indulging in this activity, which is all linked to his web page work, (www.windowsobserver.com), I sometimes think of the computer room/office as a recording studio too.

The lessons I have learned about myself in the last couple of months are myriad.  I have lost three friends in that time frame.  Two were “expected”.  Is death ever expected?  The two people, although unconnected in any other way, had actually been struggling with the same lung disease over several years.  The third friend’s death came out of left field and left me, and many other common friends as well as his wife, completely mind- and heart-slammed. The first friend, died on 26th October 2011, the second friend died about mid-November, and the third friend died 16 December.

In other words, just as I was absorbing the news of one death the second occurred, and so it was for the third.  In the meantime, as death was occurring, life was going on.  Normal everyday events, commitments, and activities continued on despite what was going on in heart and mind.  Meetings were attended, friends were attended to, school and its accompanying homework had to be dealt with, volunteer commitments were kept, I participated in a retreat, Thanksgiving came and went as did Christmas, and on and off, in the back of my mind, was the little nagging voice that said “I need to write”.

As I look back, I realize that I was actually multi-tasking in general across the board of all these events.  Just to be able to deal with everyday life as well as grieve, and support others who were grieving, was a huge multi-tasking effort of its own, and I am so grateful for my relationship with God and my strong support network of spiritual friends who help me to get through tough times such as these and still stay sane. 

But to hold all this together and allow the Muse of creativity to come forward is, for me, an impossible task.  I have to put great energy into honoring and dealing with difficult situations and emotions such as death and grief, and there is little energy left for anything else.  And I need to honor myself and where I’m at in all of that and allow the various processes to sweep through me.  It is all important to my personal and spiritual growth.

So now, as I sit here and look out my window (no working on the lanai today, we had a near-freeze last night!), I feel some of the tension surrounding these recent events slipping away.  Even though it is too cold to sit outside right now, the sun is shining brilliantly, the sky is that crisp, clean, light cerulean blue that only winter can bring forth, and I am breathing deeply and easily as I notice the hawks circling above the pine trees, the other birds swooping across and into the garden, and the squirrels frolicking on the backyard fence.  Muse is creeping slowly back into my heart, honoring and respecting where I have been and gently inviting my fingers to once again play across the keyboard and put the words on the screen.

Self Nurturing: Sedona Massage

I received my first massage many years ago.  I was living in the UK at the time.  I believe it was sometime in the sixties and I discovered a small massage and facial salon had opened above a shop near my parents home.  I very tentatively booked an appointment and remember how my heart sang and I knew that I was hooked from the very first touch.  There is nothing quite like a massage for relaxation, de-stressing, pleasure, and coming home to yourself.  Massage does for the body what a deep relationship with God does for the soul.

I probably received one or two more massages during the next few years because I really couldn’t afford more than that.  Then, about five years later, I moved to Sardinia, Italy with my first husband and our two boys.  In 1970, we helped to open a large holiday village called Forte Village in the southern part of the island not far from the capital, Cagliari. 

There were many holiday agency reps working in the village and the two girls from the Swedish company, Vingresor, were extremely grateful for the “extra mile” that I went in order to help smooth difficulties for their customers.  They came to me one day and said they would like to show their appreciation in some tangible way and asked me what I would most like.  I knew they had their own massage therapist on call in the village, so I requested a massage.  They were gracious enough to gift me with a series of four massages, and my love affair with receiving massage was rekindled. Since then I have received many massages and eventually, when I was fifty three years young, I trained to become a massage therapist myself.  I feel as much joy giving massage as I do in receiving them.

Fast forward to April 2011.  As I mentioned in my previous posting Traveling-  Las Vegas & Sedona Rich and I enjoyed a wonderful visit to Sedona, AZ.  I knew that I wanted to receive a massage in Sedona because it is a place of natural healing and there are many alternative therapy healers in the town.  As Rich and I were settling into our condo, he checked out a file of information about various activities and points of interest in the area, and called my attention to an advertisement. The wording in the ad from Sue really spoke to my heart and soul, and I knew that this was who I would book my massage with.

A few days later found me in Sue’s studio.  Little did I know that I was about to have a very significant and life-changing experience.  For the next two hours Sue worked intuitively with my body.  I have never received a massage quite like it.  She used many different modalities during the course of the massage and I knew that something very special was going on, especially when she started chanting as she worked my heart chakra.  I remember thinking, “I hope she is going to tell me what that was about”, as I felt a kind of a “whooshing out” feeling from my chest.  Then shortly afterwards, as Sue worked on my lower abdomen, I could feel “something” going on and a great deal of heat.

At the end of the massage, when Sue gave me some water to drink,  she asked me if I wanted to hear her perceptions.  My heart lifted and I said I wanted to hear everything.  She checked first of all if I believed in past lives and also asked me if I was familiar with any of the ancient civilizations such as the Mayans or the people of Atlantis.  When I assented, she shared that while she had been working on my heart chakra she was drawn into a vision where she saw me as a tall, regal person, dripping with golden jewelry, and knew that I was one of the ancient wise ones.  She felt that I was royalty of some sort and told me that whenever I walked into a room people were enveloped in a sense of tranquility and felt healed.  I told her that many people told me this today also. 

She then went on to tell me that it was no longer enough to just “walk into the room”, that I was “being called to more”.  She said that I needed to be ready for more work and not to be afraid.  I remembered Kevin’s words just a few weeks earlier at the Lenten Healing Mission.  Sue then explained that while she had worked on my lower abdomen she had felt “something birthing”, and she encouraged me to be ready, to prepare myself for some new work that I was going to be called to undertake.

As I left Sue’s studio, I felt very blessed.  I was filled with a sense of peace and yet was also aware of a very heightened sense of energy.  I felt like I could have run for ten miles.  I was very grateful for this because later that afternoon Rich and I went to experience the energy vortex at Bell Rock and I was able to climb about three quarters of the way up the rock formation without feeling tired. 

I will always remember my massage experience with Sue with much gratitude.  My main personal work since that time has been to quietly prepare myself for whatever work Spirit wants me to do.  Just two weeks after this experience, I attended a Qigong event in Orlando and a complete stranger there repeated the message: “Margo, you are being called to more.  Do not hold back.”  I will share more about this experience in another posting.   

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