In a Funk

It seems to me a lot of people lately are in a place foreign to them.  It feels very familiar and they have been there before but it is foreign because it is not in alignment with their true nature, which is happiness.  Are you in a funk?  Or are the people around you?  Struggling... in all sorts of different ways.  Are you yourself struggling to reach out to your fairy godmother in hopes that a wave of her wand will cure all?    We wonder, how do we get back to our comfort zone?  We may not have been ecstatic there but we also were not in strife there.

"In a fairy tale, you often have to leave the place where you have grown comfortable and travel to a fearful place of pain, and search for what was stolen or confront the occupying villain...". Anne Lamott

What was stolen might be good health, it might be mindful calm, it might be...whatever!  But how do we get the villain within to move back out, to step aside allowing our light to shine again?

Strangely enough, with all the stories of aches and hardship and despair I am hearing (and I've been in what I call a "funk", too!), my yoga teacher, Sylvia just posted her own eulogy on facebook.  She wrote it herself with the hopes of what she would like others to say about her and then she went back to what she had written to see if they were true.  Maybe we do need to go backwards to go forwards again with a clear path.  Maybe we need to surround ourselves more closely with people who, cumulatively, can bring our energy back up. Maybe we need to be open to looking for a different answer.

"I remembered what happens in fairy tales; the helper always appears in a form that doesn't look very helpful..."

I flipped open the book Grace (Eventually) to the following poem:
St. Francis And The Sow - Poem by Galway Kinnell
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow."
 
 
What do you  need to hear today to lift your spirits?  Whose spirit can you lift?..."sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness".

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