"Feel the Love and Appreciation - it's there!"
Our youngest sister is incredibly thoughtful, warm, encouraging, and clever. Just when I was feeling the ol' childhood doggerel "Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I'll go eat worms," she surprised (amazed!) me with this package in the mail.
Some background: This sister has often said Lori should give me a box of Lifesavers candy every year at Christmas and show gratitude for every day, every year she got to live thanks to the good fortune of me being a bone marrow match for her 27 years ago. Without that transplant, she would have been dead by 1995.
I groused a lot in previous posts about not "feeling the love" and trying not to internalize some of the harsh words Lori was so good at delivering. I won't revisit any of that here.
One sister reached out this week, and it made all the difference.
A stone heart, red jasper, from Brazil.
A vintage (20 years old!) Lifesavers Barbie - who knew this doll even existed?
A card with photos and remembrances from childhood. Like this one:
I've never owned a copy of this one, and it was taken on my birthday!
"I hope it wasn't too much,"
she said over the phone when I thanked her for this.
As if!
Sometimes, no matter how much we tell ourselves it's ok, we won't dwell on the negative, we'll focus only on the good, we (I) just can't seem to get unstuck from the cycle of dark thoughts.
She broke the cycle for me with #PositiveAffirmations. For her to have found the vintage Barbie online was all the more fitting because she and I spent countless hours of our childhood together playing with dolls in the attic, which we annexed and converted into a doll town, with stores, houses, never a real Barbie (just dimestore knock-offs) and never an actual Barbie car (my dolls rode in a pink bleach bottle with two holes cut in for passengers, and yes, it rolled a lot, never a smooth ride for the dimestore dolls!). So, this doll evoked many years' worth of childhood memories.
The same day her "care package" arrived, I got a Halloween card from a fellow English major from many years ago.
Also on the same day, an email from a friend who seldom writes, but whose loyalty and thoughtfulness I "know" even if no words are ever exchanged.
As if to prove how many good things I forget, something sent me in search of old emails, and I came across one from five years ago from an author I particularly admire and love. How blessed I am, how very fortunate, to get emails from novelists like her, messages like this:
THE MAGIC OF MAKING A START
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)there is
one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills
countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one
definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would not
otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events
issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all
manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and
material assistance which no man would have dreamed
would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for
one of Goethe's couplets: "Whatever you can do, or
dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic,
and power in it. Begin it now."
-- W. H. Murray,
The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
Did you ever see Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders's film
about angels among us? {City of Angels with Meg Ryan and
Nicolas Cage was the American version.) I believe it. I
believe there are angels. They're here, but we can't see them.
Angels work for God. It's their job to help us. Wake us up.
Bump us along.
Angels are agents of evolution. The Kabbalah describes
angels as bundles of light, meaning intelligence, conscious-
ness. Kabbalists believe that above every blade of grass is an
angel crying "Grow! Grow!" I'll go further. I believe that
above the entire human race is one super-angel, crying
"Evolve! Evolve!"
Angels are like muses. They know stuff we don't. They want to help us. They're on the other side of a pane of glass, shouting to get our attention. But we can't hear them. We're
too distracted by our own nonsense.
Libby McGugan was born 1972 in Airdrie, a small town east of Glasgow in Scotland, to a Catholic mother and a Protestant-turned-atheist father, who loved science. She enjoyed a mixed diet of quantum physics, spiritual instinct, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Her ambition was to grow up and join the Rebel alliance in a Galaxy Far, Far away. Instead she went to Glasgow University and studied medicine. As an emergency physician, she has worked in Scotland, in Australia with the Flying Doctors service, and in a field hospital in the desert. She loves travelling and the diversity that is the way different people see the world, and has been trekking in the Himalaya of Bhutan, backpacking in Chile, USA and Borneo and diving in Cairns.
Read more about this extraordinary woman here: Libby McGugan Interview
by Paulfcockburn and watch her talk about the power of positive thinking in medicine here:
Thank you, friends,
Thank you, my little sis,
and may we all "feel the love" and know there is goodness all around us, no matter how many shadows the dark things might cast.
Funny how this image includes the "holistic healing" tag - on a vintage Barbie doll!
