Monday, April 15, 2019

Today I Celebrate . . .

Ask not what your birthday can do for YOU, but what YOU can do for your birthday :)



It totally flips the script to think of your birthday not as a day for everyone to celebrate you, but a day for you to celebrate everything in your life.

Today, I celebrate my lungs. They keep up with me beautifully when I ask them to pace me through a strenuous dance.

Today, I celebrate my ears. They let music and white noise and thunder and Kris' goofy thinking sounds pour into my soul, enlivening every day.

Today, I celebrate my relationship with Kris. Man, my capacity to love deepens every day.

Today, I celebrate my capacity to love, built on a foundation of receiving love and care from so many over so many years, and empathy built (building) from being able to read about the lives of others.

I celebrate my ability to read. This is powerful and not to be taken lightly. I'm grateful for my access to literacy and the information it brings to my worldview.

Today, I celebrate my access to and support in dance training and career-building. I'm very fortunate for this to be my reality. I celebrate access to quality physical therapy. I celebrate the capacity of my body, and all the ways I am challenged trying to explore it.

I celebrate the gift of helping others explore this through teaching. When graduated college, I didn't foresee teaching becoming such a big part of my life, and I'm so grateful it is.

Today, I celebrate being able to learn from so many people, from friends to students to parents to partner and beyond. I'm really striving to always retain and explore a learning mindset - i.e. "What can I take away from this experience?"

I'm grateful for and celebrating being financially stable enough to make choices about the kind of work I wish to do and being able to consider the impact it can offer.

Today, I celebrate building conscientiousness around all aspects of how I walk through life. I used to think this idea mostly had to do with being honest. I'm thinking more and more that its scope is far beyond. Whatever you call it: mindfulness, simplicity, minimalism, consciousness . . . I haven't found a word I prefer yet . . . I just appreciate the human ability to train our own minds to process the way we wish them to. It's utterly fascinating to me that I can literally "rewire the synapses in my brain" or its pathways (not sure that's the scientific way to say it) to notice, calm, breath, appreciate, consider, rather than react immediately when there are other options.

Today, I celebrate viewing the idea of "a human" as something that presents beautiful shapes, sizes, backgrounds . . . I find so much beauty and lightness in seeing people this way. Beauty in the fact that each of us takes on our humanity in such unique ways.

Today, I celebrate my family and friends, who revel in my strangeness :)  They build me up on my journey, rolling with me as I wave around, figuring out how I wish to be. I'm also grateful for building toward the wisdom, as I grow, of understanding we're all doing that all the time. I believe, I choose to believe, that we're all doing the best we can. This is not an 'opt out' for always trying to 'be better,' but a gentleness with which to receive the impact of the everyday.

I'm celebrating the space to pursue my interest in the intersections of clothing, food and sustainability. I'm grateful I've been able to build life in a way that there's time, space and enough money for this.

Today, that's the short-list. There are so many more ideas wrapped within this, but that's the nature of the human beast.

Today, I celebrate my lungs.

1 comment:

Brian Wene said...

Remarkable post Erinn! It feels so darn good when appreciation comes to you. You are such a good person. Much love & happy MUCH belated birthday.😎
Cheers!
- Brian Wene