baby steps

Life is a continuous cycle of movement. A coming and going. Birth, death, re-birth in all forms of nature. Whether we see the process as positive or unpredictable is not the underlying pulse. Rather momentum is achieved if we allow ourselves to partake in the rhythms it offers us. To explore what perhaps we could have overlooked before if we had not been able to release ourselves into life’s flow.

I feel my mind being awakened, my pulse increases, my body feels invigorated and my view clears to see the small things along my path when I go along with life's cycles. Knowing I may get lost but I will never get stuck, is uplifting for I trust in everything unfolding at the right time and place for the space I am within. This pattern that evolves, as I awaken to my potential and the possibilities I have in my daily structure of living is not without hitches, blockages or barriers. Only racing along a single route is not necessarily enlightening.

We have all experienced a detour of our intended destination. Often we feel as if we are top of our life’s tasks, situations and events when something stumbles onto our way and we are bluffed. It is a bit as if you have packed your suitcase with the essentials - fresh underwear, a change of clothes for warm and chilly weather, sturdy shoes, sun cream, hat, glasses and maybe an outfit to wear for a dressier occasion. Then when you are on your way to the station, you find out you have missed the connecting train to get to the airport. While waiting for a new train to arrive, you read on your mobile the news a hurricane has hit the small island you where going to visit and no flights are flying there any more. So you had a plan. Then an unanticipated mishap stopped you and upon wanting to redirect, you view the real reason behind the delay. You have been spared a greater personal disaster. If only we could remember this when our life is for a split second derailed and we are blown off course by an unseen event, piece of news or personal experience.

There is so often a reason for one happening that is unseen until we have accepted its now there allowing the other purpose to then be revealed. At times it is perhaps a hard pill to swallow but fighting a situation takes more destructive energy into your body than clearing space for understanding what this could mean for you directly.  Once you have acknowledged taking action from this standpoint, you can use baby steps to then begin a personal healing or recreating your new stand from the ashes of the old.

“Baby steps” is my term for revaluation and location of where you are going with a tentative awareness. Finding out what the new way you should be walking is requires taking, baby steps. Slowly placing your self into the situation and feeling how it looks. Noticing how you view it. If you are open to seeing it as productive or have you ridge set ideas of how you’re to deal with it. Baby steps require that you trust you have the strength within, which now is being tested. Trust your intuition. Trust the process, life is offering you. Baby steps are a reminder the situation your experiencing might be frightening, unknown and have no clear outcome defined but you are making a start to finding out how to deal with it. Baby steps also shows you are trusting there is another presence that will catch you if you fall, if you bend at the weight or collapse from the pain. Your adult self will react if it sees you becoming off balance by "testing the waters" yet it too knows the innocence of a child can be the growth of a consciously aware adult.

I have experienced many situations and times when baby steps have been required and often I have gone forward refusing to use them. Instead I have demanded I wanted to continue to run or leap or dance. The results where not often pleasant to view or experience upon my own person. I think one of the hardest tests of how to place my baby steps has definitely been in my health situation(s). Sadly not an unknown story either for so many in what I am about to write. I spent so many years being pushed from one area to another in the medical world, one antibiotic or medical treatment, which when it did not bring the textbook results, was seen as my having not followed the instructions to the tee. Or I was not to be placed in that draw and another was opened to see if I fitted in there. It made me question my own sanity and stability being told my symptoms and experiences where fabricated perhaps! How could I possibly even want to get up in the morning I was once asked while another doctor could never understand running (in my terms it is slow pleasure jogging) could not be undertaken if my ligaments and joints ached so much. He never understood the need for movement, which gave me a natural painkiller and mental release. Do you ever see goats not climbing rocks due to arthritic pain? I was probed, prodded and offered all kinds of remedies (some I took but mostly I refused when I noted the side effects offered along with them) that very rarely took in listening to me and working with me.

Fibromyalgia and mercury poisoning from dicey fillings are two rather hard to diagnose health issues I will give you, when your practitioner searches after instead “normal” sicknesses. Then again you do not have signs of being depressive or having anxiety and you’re not “fitting the given mould”, which makes a neat stamp of “this is it” just not possible. So I began to stop wanting to find the reason for my health issues and saw them as trying to tell me something instead. I listened to the areas aching, swelling and blocking me from moving freely. I tried alternative methods of looking into my situation and found that Traditional Chinese Medicine was one element my body not only immediately embraced, it also “saw” in my eye diagnoses what was the root cause of my imbalances. Once I could state to a westernized doctor what I wished to be tested for and the results were off the charts, it was a relief to finally have it confirmed. Yet also it was the start of my baby steps to redirecting my own health – physically and mentally. My stability and sanity could be restored. I was not the “crazy kiwi woman with a strong will” (as one doctor referred to me) but rather the kiwi chick that knew when to go attentively along her way, the right way. Placing one foot before the other, checking the surface, taking time to feel the ground beneath her feet. Throwing away the old shoes and going barefoot for a change was pure pleasure. If I wanted to wear shoes again then I would get some new ones, for the new occasion.

My baby steps have now become a solid part of who I am and how I handle situations today. Life’s cycles still give me situations that rattle my bones or make my heart skip a wild beat. I can be thrown right out of my comfortable sofa chair with an unexpected piece of news. The only difference is I take it as the beginning of something new in the “death” of what has been known and the “birth” of what can be. It is a chance to redirect, perhaps to leave an idea or desire behind or just alone, for the time being.

What makes life valuable to you? Is it the amount of years you have lived or the intensity in which you have lived your given years so far? We often strive for being in our future free from work commitments, extra weight, family responsibilities or health issues so as to really live our true dreams. It is coupled with the belief that what we desire can only be obtained or experienced without this "attached baggage". Though this “attached baggage” is what is there to make us become fully aware of life’s momentums and if wisely packed and taken with us they will open up a whole new panorama of chances in life. It makes you count the way you are living your life within this present moment, as being all that counts. Baby steps make it worth walking my pathway to experiencing the leaping moments of when I can take a larger stride into living life –my way.

Your Koruswhispers

after the storm

It's after the thunder the curtain call falls.

Drawing us back, to reflecting

what was given to us, in the first act.

A gathering of contrasts

captured within the wind, rain and their volume.

Pelting down on the edges

of a parched landscape so thirsty;

in need of answers we do not

yet even process.

The script is read without power.

The lines are heard but no one grasps

Their meaning any more.

For we have become blind to the true tune of life

and the reason you and I

play out our parts.

Or is there still a tiny spark lying smothered

under the density of the clouds,

which when focused upon

throws the whole scene back

into a timeless classic fire ball

of power, passion and possibilities for all?

Your Koruswhispers 

term friendship please

Friendship, like ships on the ocean it can pass you totally by while your view is focused in another direction. Friendship can only call in at one port at a time where you are standing now for you to embrace. It can be a sinking relationship or a life saving one depending at which moment it approaches you.

Friendship is not earned with the payment of sweat, tears and fear. It is not brought with jewellery, clothes or houses. Trappings of money might provide you an arena in which to dance a friendship “pow wow”. Though it won’t give you the satisfaction of knowing you are really heard. You are noticed for just you. You are valued on simple but potent terms of integrity, trust, honesty and openness in a friendship. These are not lining the hipster shop shelves for purchase.

Friendship will cause you at times heartache, worry and frustration. It is not a commodity that has “best used before” stamped on the backside. Nor will you get a refund if you back a destructive friendship or one that inflicts damages on you and leaves you wondering why should you even bother to start all over again with another. Perhaps you need to ask yourself if even it is worth looking into this friendship thing in the first place?

Oh yes I had (previous stated time span here) these turmoil question/statements often swirling in my head. Usually when I extended my hand to one whom again and again fell for the wrong guy; got her/himself financially stuck and never seemed to get out of the rut. I listened. I gave them space. I gave them a safe place to be. I got from it what? Worn out; tiredness; actually nothing, just frustration at the feeling I was dancing always to the tune they wished to play and I at the end of the day was drained.

Oh yes I remember the suddenness of not hearing any more from a long time friend who had searched out my counsel and hence revealed the darkest side of themselves to me. To use my “talents” to bring their goal further, to bearing fruit. To take my contacts and to call them in the end their own and walk over an area I had inherited by birth, so they could touch upon what I had. To abuse my openness is one thing.  To allow them to use my power was my wrong decision.

Oh yes, it is good to reflect back on the road I have traveled on so far in the last forty-nine years and the friendships I have made along the way. Simply for the reason that I know so much of it is in my past. I have left it behind. Been there and literally done that. I recently came upon two past friendships that ended on their part, abruptly at the time, which had me then wondering why. Both persons had showed their souls to me hence I then in their books knew too much. I saw the murky waters they swam in and understood the disillusion they were experiencing. I was a reminder of things they wanted to forget because no one else had ever been privy to them. That they had dared acknowledge the skeletons in their closets and trusted someone with them was at the time too much for them to acknowledge. Now they greeted me warmly but also with a sense of hesitancy, perhaps more apprehension. I understood why, they did not.

Many people fear the judgment others would hold over another when treated in the manner I was. I am not like that. Instead I see the soul behind the human window dressed mannequin. The image that they presented then and now has various other levels. I “see” them. I accept them. I hold no grudges. I feel just a trace of melancholic wistfulness for the fact that they still turn around the same roundabout to a old repetitive tune. Their footsteps continue to retrace the same worn out pattern on their pathway; in just another pair of threadbare shoes. But I do not ask to walk by their side and join in on the journey once again. That is not a part of my plan.

I have a friendship since several years that is for me a treasured pouch of stardust. We are the same age, same sex but we are of differing nationalities. Totally different upbringings as well but there are some similarities in our live situations, which mean we understand from where the other one is coming when explaining our view to a situation or reacting as we do. She is a person who also says her mind, stands by her opinion or undertakes something she believes in, because it is right for her and not because the world tells her too. And she does not either make an apologue for doing so. She gives no excuses for her action(s). Yet this is not what is so refreshing for me. It is that she does it with an openness and love for the whole situation around her. If you participate on her level, terrific. If not that’s fine too. One could term it “no strings attached” friendship but that would be put to lightly. For it is more that I have been extended the invitation to look at the world through her eyes and she wants just as much to join in seeing things as I do too. It is never about her or me. It is about our unity. It is with awareness that we are melding our pathways at times with another, while still retaining our own individuality. No matter how much we share there is never the need to withhold anything, for what we give of ourselves is a formation of change for all. It uplifts. It expands and takes a form of being part of the world we live in, not a segmented segregated section of it.

My friendships since meeting this dear soul had already began to take on another dimension. For I have chanced. I am not just skin and bones. I am not just a collection of stories from my past. I am not a formation of trades, tricks and notions learned. I am – what? Let me best explain it as the older Korus would to the smaller korus:

Older Korus: “It is so good to see you standing for a moment still dear one. Reflecting upon what you have seen and experienced today. Holding you could say an audience with yourself. Being present and knowing it requires not a stitch from you. You need not give or take. Not be seen or hidden. You’re just simply being who you are – you; unique.”

smaller korus: “You know what I was doing Korus?”

Older Korus: “What where you doing then bean sprout?”

smaller korus: “I was thinking. Stop what you are doing. Sit down. Be outwardly and inwardly quiet. Listen to the stillness. Then ask yourself --- what if I befriended this person or gave them my time here or left a space open in the day for meeting him or her would it make a difference to how I see the world? No need to think on them, which I used to do. Rather how can I be a beacon of light shedding a possibility to change and expand in an area that is dark, dismal and suffocating? Is it necessary to go that far? Then I asked myself what if I dared to ask if I should befriend this person instead?”

Older Korus: “ Oh bean sprout that is going deep. Perhaps more than others are prepared to go you know. Most jut want comfort even if it is destructive.”

smaller Korus: “I realize that but you know Korus, if attitudes are contagious then perhaps mine are worth catching. If I questioned first and reacted secondly I would definitely be practicing unconditional love to myself, towards you and all whom I come in contact with too. Into each nock and cranny it would flow. For when ones spiritual needs are meet by a balanced inner stand then does not happiness, light and love flow through you, to all, so as to benefit yourself and others?”

Older Korus: “ you have grasped the essence of friendship bean sprout. Extend it to others in the manner you offer it to yourself – in harmony with the balance of your own thoughts and deeds and then it is an inspired form of giving that breathes life into the heart and brings grace to the soul.”

smaller Korus: “… and often it all happens when we meet another kindred soul and least expect it. We befriend ourselves!”

Your Koruswhispers