Bright Tuesday 2022

I managed to make chicken salad, egg salad sandwiches and beef roast slices with cheddar cheese mini buns. 

My friend Photini and I had a nice visit. 

Tomorrow other friends are visiting and we hope to visit other friends as well. 

May God so grant.🙏

Bright Monday 2022

Bright Monday.  I tried all 3 of my new Pascha teas.  I had my favourite soup. Take out.  I am feeling a bit rung out. Tomorrow I am making a simple tea for myself and my friend Photini.  

May God preserve us and save us.

Pascha 2022

Pascha was very good 💗💐🙏🕯☦ 💗 Two pictures of our evening Pascha table. 

3 hours of sleep necessitate a short post as I am going to sleep now!

Christ is Risen!

sleep that elusive sleep

Meanwhile Holy Week is so beautiful. Deeply immersive. A church friend said that he read that the grace within Holy week can sustain us for a year. It really is deeply special. 

Onward

Great Lent has ended... now for the bridge between Lent and Holy Week... I am glad... my heart has a lot of heaviness about some things in the world as it is now... how deeply we need Christ and the immersive Holy Week to reorient our lives! 

May God bless us and save us and have mercy on us! 

beginning to turn towards Pascha

I put careful small stitches in two sides of this rushnyk in the middle with some of the white folded carefully. So that it would fit on my table better. I stitched it loosely so I can easily undo it later if needed. 

It felt very poignant to put this one away. This was put out before the w-a-r began. 

I realized that I never put up my Lenten icons this year. The horror beginning February 24th really derailed me.  

I don't think any of us will realize how difficult it has been until later. 

We ordered our Pascha bread this year from a Monastery. It came today and is now in the freezer. 

We went to church tonight. A real blessing. 

Every day a little more progress. Soon I will put up more Pascha/Easter decorations. 

May the Lord have mercy on us. 

Once Again, I Can't Sleep...

 

I may have slept but if I did, I woke again. 

So.  Here I am. It's 12:30 AM EST here.  I am not overly worried about sleep right now because I know I still have a chance at it and overall have been sleeping better again. 

So yesterday (Tuesday) my Husband was back at work again (as in office, in NYC).  He goes in sometimes now, the virus situation here is stable at the moment.  And I do mean at the moment, I have no idea when and if it will surge again.  This is profoundly a time when all we can do is 'constantly pivot' as things are in a great deal of flux. 

I feel like I am learning to do that in life.  I feel in ways that I am growing up a lot.  I mean, I know I am an adult, I am 45 years old now.  But I have had to do a lot of growing, learning, as we all hope we are doing.  Some of the work in this way has taken me decades.  

Like I used to not know what to do with sadness. Or anxiety. And I will always struggle with both.  I am wired that way. 

BUT.  I am not as afraid of it.  And anxiety is harder for me to deal with than sadness.  Here's the thing:

Learning to deal with hard emotions is a lot of work. For me, I have realized some simple but deep truths:

*don't ignore or avoid the feeling of sadness or worry.  Instead FEEL it. Acknowlege it.  BUT. Don't Get Stuck In It.* 

So.  Yeah. My writing project helps me not get stuck.  I am reading, slowly, a book of short stories by Dorothy Sayers so I don't get stuck in it.  

Another way to say it is:

*Change the Channel.*

If I start shutting down because of huge anxiety then it's time to PIVOT. It's time to do something else.  Then the name of the game is DISTRACT myself about what I am worried about so that I don't get stuck there and instead can move on to something else and REBALANCE. 

It's not about denial of worry.  It's what I have learned to do WITH IT. 

And if I stuff it down and ignore it, and don't look at it at all, then I will merely have it blow up later (often the same day) and will be shut down by it.

Feel it. Acknowlege it. Don't Get Stuck In it.

I mean if I was Saintly I would just be so aware of God's presence and peace while living in my life with all it's disperate struggles.  Since I am not, the above is how I have learned to deal with it.

And yes, prayer should be part of it. But seriously if I am getting stuck I will do anything (that still is God honouring) to get past it.  Reading a little bit of Agatha Christie to do so is fully OK. 

Anxiety used to shut me out and shut me down.  

Learning to cope with one's own self is a huge process.  And I will be learning as long as I live as I know that, for instance, anxiety, is a huge struggle for me personally. 

Yesterday, which is kind of still ongoing since I am not sure if I fully slept yet, was a good day.  I had the house to myself (rare since the pandemic began).  I did some research for my writing project.  Ordered 2 books on it.  My mind continued to be amazed (mind blown) about what I am learning.  

I loved this by a new to me author who, in her case, wound up writing huge novels that had huge sucess 

I can tell you one thing.  My writing project, if God every allows it to be finished, is going to take me YEARS.  I am guessing 10 years.  Maybe more.  And that also is FULLY OK. 

And I can tell you something else. IT'S SO FUN. I am loving it so much.  

And without it, I feel like I would be on the floor depressed and unable to get up.

With it, conversely, I am able to better handle my life, better able to deal with sadness, even anxiety.  It's like so much better that I don't even care if, in the end, it's not published.

YES I want it to be.  But it's so much fun that I can just stay in today and not know it's future (or my own!). 

So basically it's an Act of God in my life holding me up.

I have some real griefs right now.  And yes, insomnia happens to me when I am in grief.  But I have a way through.

I can't tell you, again, how greatful I am for each of you and for those who comment, who pray, for email me when I tell you I am struggling.

I am sorry I can't always be here on my blog like I used to be.  It's just that life - and - my writing project - are quite time consuming. 

It's like I have an autodidact PhD and the 'dissertation' is what I ended up writing and the research is real (and so FUN) but thankfully there is no language learning requirement because then it may never get done LOL.

Well, it's nearly 1 AM.  I am going to try to go back to the magical place called 'a good night's sleep'.

God bless you all, each and every one. May the Lord save us, have mercy on us, comfort us, protect us and bring us through whatever huge struggle we are now in.  ❤

today and an unexpected gift

 

A friend and I just finally exchanged Christmas (!) gifts yesterday, Sunday.  We were busy so opened our gift today.  And inside was this beautiful rushnyk.  It's vintage, made in Lviv Ukriane when it was still part of the USSR (it had a tag, I translated it with google's help!). 

I already know that I will put it on my table where I have my writing table or my 'tea for two' table.  I will change it out soon for Pascha. 

You can imagine, realizing my friend found this for me months ago, had it for me in January (we kept missing each other) and now I am given it.  Well.  So many layers of meaning. 

Today was a pretty good day. This is a very busy week. I have something everyday till next Monday (thankfully tomorrow I can be home, it's online stuff). 

thank you again everyone who left a comment.  I really appreciate each and everyone. 

May God have mercy on us all.

I need to write this down

first thanks so much everyone who commented or emailed me about my last post.  I can't say anything more about it but thank you so very much. 

I want to share a story about the w-a-r and this is your 'trigger warning' because one thing I share is especially heartbreaking. 

Ok. So recently I was talking with one of my friends with Ukrianian connections.  I know lots of people that fit that catagory. 

It was heartwrenching. 

It was a story of a woman who had to grab her children, her sister's children and FLEE because of the w-a-r ... on her way to a safe place to go into Poland, she saw a two year old child (this is going to be hard to read FYI).  The child was sitting all alone on top of his recently killed mother.  My friend pronounced the word killed as 'kilt' which I looked up and Google told me this:

As verbs the difference between kill and kilt

is that kill is to put to death; to extinguish the life of while kilt is to gather up (skirts) around the body.

And that woman with her own children, her sister's children, saw this young child, two years old on top of it's dead mother, grabbed the orphaned baby and ran to the escape into Poland. 

She gathered up the child like the verb kilt. 

So I don't know about you, but I am crying just writing this so I remember and can tell you about it.

Thankfully she did not have problems at the boarder (no papers on the child to identify the child or mother) but this is w-a-r and she could not leave a child at 2 in the chaos with a mother who no longer is alive to care for the child.  

She is working on getting legal papers for the child now. 

The person narrating this to me told me that the first week of the w-a-r she could not sleep and does not even remember feeding her own children.  And this person is someone Stateside who has family overseas were the w-a-r is.  

Yeah.

So.

I cried about this recently again.  

This is why I can't read too much news.  I can't because I am not only a highly sensitive person; but because I can get news first hand from many who I know personally. 

Talk about getting a crash course on life and what it means to be a Christian. 

But these stories are so important.  And so, I am recording it here, to have a small marker as a tribute to the awful tragegy and pain of w-a-r. 

*******

Other than this, I am doing pretty well.  My writing project continues to hold me up and hold my interest.  I am in grief but also functioning.  I still laugh, wash the dishes, bake.  I get lost in thoughts about math.  Or I think about ideas and connections between them.  I got news of a couple's upcoming marriage and rejoiced.  

****

May God have mercy on us all.