So, here's the thing...

My beagle has been a woman's best friend. Her name is Bayley and I've had her since she was seven weeks old. I was seven months pregnant with my little girl when I saw her in the pet store window in Lubbock, Texas on my birthday in July of '03. It was love at first sight, especially when I saw a little boy squeezing her and starting to give her a shake. I rushed in all belly and hormones and as politely as I could muster (it was also a hundred and five degrees outside and I wasn't thrilled when I woke up that morning) I said I was buying her. Three hundred and fifty dollars went on the credit card without blinking twice, and I walked out cuddling the most adorable snub-nosed baby beagle I had ever seen or held in my life. She was mine. Immediately the nay-sayers in life said I was crazy to take on a puppy when I was pregnant and about to give birth to a baby that would take over my life. Yeah maybe, but that's how I've always rolled, simply acting on a ...

They've got to be here for a reason. All the difficult, exasperating people that show up in life. At least that's how I choose to think about it. Nothing like a lovely day that's sailing along smoothly, even joyously, and then, pow, someone turns on you. So, if we are capable of drawing to ourselves certain events, emotions, life experiences, then we are capable of bringing to the forefront the ones that we need to help us get to that next level. For fear of sounding too deep, let me just say, I think when we are ready to learn how to cease being jerked around by other people's problems, is exactly when those same people enter the picture. Vividly. If I'm clear that I've done nothing to instigate a verbal assault, then I have to believe this person in front of me, trying my patience, is here to teach me something. "When the student is ready, the Teacher will appear".....and it's not going to be some kindly, sage old soul.....it's going t...

....angels attend us. I need to believe there is a Divine love that supports grief. Tears are the outward depth of our love, our anguish, our humanness. I know I could never get through this life without the knowledge that I'm being upheld by a source and power greater then myself. In my greatest pain I have felt the unseen. When I fight the flow of life, everything goes wrong. When I go with it, it leads me to greater things, opportunities, people, events.....completely unimaginable good comes into my existence. In the meantime, in the wee hours of the morning, in my silence and aloneness and doubt, I sometimes cry. Trusting a source to carry us through does not come without doubt. Trusting that life knows how to take care of us better then we do does not come without tears. Feel the fear (pain, sadness, anger), and do it anyway, and after you have cried all the sacred tears you have within you, you will have allowed a space to open up where you can now be on the receivi...

Lay your burdens down on the alter of your personal faith, whatever that may be. Just lay them down, gently. They were never yours to begin with, so offer them the space to go back where they came from. This life is full of burden, no one needs to drive that home with any of us. The burden other people try to inflict on us will try the hardiest soul. Then there's the burden of too much . Too much sorrow. Too much stress. Too much mental unrest. Too much stuff . It's all too much. I know.... My life gets to be too much at times. Too much juggling and balancing and rushing about to get it all done. In the last two days I have felt within my body the urgent need to lay down the burden of this life, if only for a little while, and if I decide to pick it up again I know it will have lessened in it's demand. When it's all too much, just lay it down. Da Vinci said when you are stuck, when you have lost your inspiration, your will...walk away. Leave it for thre...