My Lenten Sacrifice er Opportunity!

   So. Do you do Lent?  Do you pick something to give up for a chunk of time in these last few days of winter? Although I was baptized into a faith that celebrates this season I was raised by skeptical parents who were highly offended by the midieval disciplinary methods used in the parochial school my sister attended and before I was old enough to have an opinion our family joined the ranks of the non-church going secular Americans of the post-war decades.

Mama was certainly a spiritual person - I am sure she was a closet Druid - but if you got too interested in the philosophy of being good - rather than the obedience to parents aspect - you were going to be teased by Daddy who invariably called you Sister Mary Margaret.

So my spirituality went deep inside and shivered in anxiety about dying "before I waked and my soul not getting taked" by the big guy upstairs. Lordy the nights I went to bed terrified I wasn't going to wake up and maybe there would be burning pits of hell licking at my feet.

Fortunately I became a naughty teenager and my dad had a heart attack and suddenly Church and God and Religion and Convent Schools didn't look so bad to him so off I was packed to what turned out to be a wonderful school with kind and liberal teachers who married late 60's philosophy to ancient church doctrines and presented it to this particular teenager in a way that met her spiritual needs. I'm not sure how many Other Girls are wracked with the oft blamed Catholic Guilt but I loved my experience at the convent and hold it close to me still - even if I do it all in my own way - heavily influenced by my Druid mama.

And one of the rituals I love from those long ago years of formal religion is the ritual of Lent. Totally untutored in the doctrine, I believe I understand the intent - which may once have been a primitive way of helping the unlettered get through those last few weeks of near famine that would have been a 12th century February - but certainly now is an opportunity - in this secular, high-tech, over fed, multi-tasking, frivolous era - an opportunity to stop what you are doing, consider the consequences of your actions, identify something that is unnecessary and let it leave your life - even if only for 40 days.

Usually I pick something of a gustatory nature. One year it was to give up Diet Pepsi - which I successfully did but in such a bad spirit, with so much grumbling, that I realized I had done more damage to my soul than anything. I tried that again the next year with a better spirit and came to understand how valuable taking the spirit of the Lenten sacrifice into your heart truly is. It's not a sacrifice - it's an opportunity!  Wow!

So this year I looked around at my life with an eye to the frivolous - the disrespectfully wasteful and identified my target - the iPad matching game apps that suck up minutes and even hours of my time - time that could be used for things that would make me Feel So Good. In my case it's prayer and meditation - two names for the same action of becoming quiet and going within to listen to The Voice. I call it God - and I am utterly convinced that He doesn't care what I call it. But it is easy to blast through life saying "yes yes. I hear you. be back in a sec. let me finish ________________"  and you can fill in the blank.  But at the end of my life I know He's going to say "Come here, sit down beside me and tell me about yourself. What did you do with the life I gave you?"

and  honestly - I don't want to tell Him I spent 10998723487120348045 minutes playing matching games on an iPad. I'd so much rather be able to say "oh - remember that great prayer/conversation we had in 2015? That made me feel so good and helped me do good.  Thanks!"

So the plan is to delete all the games on my iPad and every time I feel the urge to pick up that little plastic slate and tap away, I will instead stop and get quiet and go to my praying place - that spot deep inside me - and have a chat.

April's Pick of My 12 for 12

Okeydokey (Yeah I know. I'm quaint)

It's a new month and time to pick another good habit to add to my daily routine. In January I added food tracking, with the goal of looking like Helen Miren on my 60th birthday too - well - maybe not in the bikini. Don't really like bikinis. Nor do I hope for the dangle-less neck skin, since I can't afford the surgery I'd need to have that jawline. But you get the picture. I'm aiming at my version of hot at 60.

So far I've done pretty well - clawing my way down to within 10 lbs of my old Weight Watcher's triumphant goal. There have been some ups too, sadly but at least I knew what caused them and several times, knowing how much I've already eaten in a day has proved to be the stop sign I needed to keep me from crashing into excess. Also - with the exception of one week when family duty really kiboshed my efforts, I've tracked everything I've eaten for 3 months.

February I knew I needed something different. February was a fractious cranky month. In February I chose to add prayer to my daily routine. I have my own highly personal way of praying. Well. I suppose everyone does. Mine combines meditation and searching with being open enough to see the value of what I get in answer to those prayers. I love it and it has certainly helped me as I navigated a tough winter. Now and then it's skimmed me over rough ground very lightly. It has been harder for me to squeeze my own special TheQueen type prayer into my days than I'd have thought it would be - I have not been as consistent as I'd like to have been - but for sure I have taken the time for this quiet introspective conversation with the divine a lot more frequently than I would have had I not decided to make the effort. And ... these are things I want to add to my life forever, so I have the next couple of decades to get better at it.

March, knowing things were only going to get tougher, I decided to go easy on myself and add only the habit of drinking enough water every day. Like prayer - I have not been quite as perfect as I'd have liked to be - but there has been progress. The big deal is weekends ... I really can forget to drink water on the weekends. So now when I make coffee in the morning, I fill a big 20 oz glass with water and leave it out on the kitchen counter. Two of those downed get me close to the goal.

And now it is April and though all the astrologers promise me the second half of the month will be much more fun - I still have to slog through the first two weeks. I shan't go into detail about this. Just know that right now is an inordinately demanding time for me. I am far more prone to wake up dreading the day and there's nothing I can do but slog my way forward. There is another side and I will get there. But I'm not putting any unnecessary pressure on my psyche, my spirit or my brain. What I will do is choose to add to my life something I know will help me both now, during these hard days, and later, when things slide into easypeasy land. For April I choose #2 on my original list.

2. Wear a pedometer and get those 10K steps
10K steps, 4 activity points, whatever you want to call it - the goal is to build into my life more movement - I move - but not enough.

I actually love activity and fitness and only drift away from it because it's easy to drift away from anything. I've also been pretty good about getting in some exercise each week. I'm going to make this month the one I totally concentrate on strengthening TheQueen and to start off right, I've scheduled a session with the personal trainer at my gym. 3:30 today. Can't wait!

So. I leave you with my Virgo Horoscope from Rick Levine: 


You can feel the winds of change blowing through your life, but you're not able to catch the right breeze just yet. It's as if the wind tries to pull you off course instead of pushing you toward your desired destination. However, trying to resist can wear you down quickly. Don't try to fight against the prevailing currents. Follow them until they settle down and then you'll be able to correct your course more easily. 

Ta now - may the new moon come quickly.

12 in 12 March Update

I bet I am not the only one who is pondering the resolutions, thoughts, plans, hopes, ideas she had last January as she contemplated the richness that is a whole new year. Those of us who like NYRs don't tend to drift away from them till sometime in February or March. I know I can tell you everything that happened in just about every January of my life, since journaling and diary writing have long been a part of my January rush of Improvement. Mays and Junes are a lot foggier.

Last January, as I thought about the numerical significance of twenty twelve I decided to add 12 tiny (I hoped) habits to my daily routine - small additions that I might already be doing sporadically to which I would give special attention. Nothing monumental - not because TheQueen is already regal enough, but because I just wanted - and still want - to tweak the system a little. In January it was easy to stick to my resolution.  I wanted to journal my eating every day - and I did! In February, a month that was a little rocky, I added prayer to my daily routine and while I did not achieve a perfect score, I still made time to consciously pray more days than I forgot to.  I found that if I want to go into that quiet deep place, give thanks, accept love and ask for help every day, I really have to do it first thing in the morning. It's not that I can't carve out the time and quiet space to do that later in the day - I did. I do - and it's an amazingly productive thing to do on a workday afternoon ... to turn the lights off in my office, lower my chair and sit quietly for 5 or 10 minutes. But far too often I become totally distracted by all the rest of the world and forget - something else I did - and do.

Prayer is an important element in my sanity and my productivity. It's also something that I have done since I was fairly young. I had no formal religion till I was a teen and honestly, by that time I'd already created my own plan for spirituality. Happily, it folded into the formal Catholic Girls School practice neatly enough to go undetected. It's difficult for me to write about how important prayer is for me, not because I can't find the words, but because it touches something so very deep inside - and a public blog like this tends to have only so much information in it - and usually it's information about the physical side of life.

It's the very fact that prayer is so very important to me that I decided to give it more attention from now on. Of course I pray when I think I need to. I pray when I think I'm in trouble or when I need help. But that's just the point. It's all about I, I, I. It's all about my ego and its thoughts. It's about thinking and I know, absolutely, that thought is just part of the picture.  I need to honor prayer's rich and sterling qualities when I am not in trouble:  the giving thanks part of prayer; the joyful accepting of a love that is beyond the physical world, though still connected to it; the petitioning for help not just when I can't solve my problems, but asking for it just to live better, more connectedly, more kindly, wiser. It is a way of taking my ego out of things and uniting with something bigger than I am.

Well, what do you know. I did write about prayer - at least a little.

And now here it is March and this time I chose to add something a little more mundane to my daily routine. This month I am concentrating on drinking at least 6 glasses of water every day. It may sound like a silly habit to fold into one's life, but alas - drinking water is something I also forget to do. I like water. I have delicious tap water both at home and at work. I feel better when I drink water. I look better when I drink water. Alas, I also forget to drink water. A day will go by and I'll realize I haven't had any water all day. It's almost scary. But it's something that can be rectified by just scheduling "water breaks".

And now you know the status of my 12 in 12.