This week I’m walking in tropical sunshine with my spouse, eating delicious food (cooked by someone else), jumping into the blue ocean wearing a cute polka-dot swimsuit, and exploring ruins much older than I am.
This week I’m walking in tropical sunshine with my spouse, eating delicious food (cooked by someone else), jumping into the blue ocean wearing a cute polka-dot swimsuit, and exploring ruins much older than I am.
My birthday is this month–the penultimate before my 70s. Hope I have another 30 good years ahead.
#bethechange
My younger brother and I often laugh at the fact that we were indeed raised in a barn. Or what used to be a chicken shed at the edge of an orange grove and next to the railroad tracks. No brag. Just fact.
You see, in the late 1940s, my grandparents purchased the remnants of the Valencia Dale Ranch on East North Street in Anaheim, California. The ranch included a few orange trees, a rundown farmhouse, and a large, albeit even more rundown chicken shed. My Irish grandmother always noted, even when viewing the most derelict and dilapidated of buildings, “Well, it’s got possibilities.” And she was stubborn enough to set about proving her point.
When I was born in 1950, my dad joined the Marine Corps Reserves for the little extra monthly income it provided. Little did he know that a few months later, war would break out in Korea. He was called up to serve for a year, until the regulars arrived. In preparation for that year of separation, my mom and I moved into a recently finished little room beside the barn, just across the driveway from my grandparents’ farmhouse.
A year later, when my dad came home, my grandparents offered my parents what they could–that barn. And over the next decade, that sad shed became a warm and cozy home for me and my little brother, born nine months after Daddy’s return.
Both my parents and grandparents exhibited resourcefulness and inventiveness, converting what they had into what they wanted.
So, no. I don’t consider being raised in a barn an insult.
Have you noticed that sometimes the Universe aligns to whisper in your ear or show you a path you hadn’t seen before? It probably happens more often than we know. Sometimes we’re just not listening.
Last week, my yoga teacher began our practice by reading this poem.
If you’d like to know more about the poet Rev. Safire Rose and read the entire poem, click here: She Let Go