Living Happiness

Hi, everyone, and happy Thursday to you. It is a beautiful day here in Crete: not a cloud in the sky, and the daisies and poppies blooming riotously everywhere you look. I’ve spent the morning by the sea, drinking a freddocino and thinking about you, myself, life and this blog.

We are in the middle of Easter Week now. Tonight is Holy Thursday, and everyone will go to the church to kiss the cross, and the eggs will be dyed a deep, dark red today to signify the blood of Christ. Tomorrow everyone will all descend on the butcher shop to pick up the Easter lamb for Sunday’s feast. We will be there, too, getting our little cut of meat to make a Cypriot lamb with dates. And I am going to try to make tsoureki (a Greek sweet bread made at Easter) for the first time. Since yeast and I don’t seem to get along, I am interested to see how it turns out.

G and I are excited today because we may have found our home for the next few years. It is a lovely place on a high, quiet slope outside of town with a view of Souda Bay and the mountains. There is a big garden and a lemon tree and fig trees and clementines. There’s even a fireplace. We are going back again this evening to discuss where we want the phone jack to be placed in the spare bedroom (which will be my office), and then (assuming all goes well) we will be signing the papers tomorrow. We can’t believe it. And probably won’t believe it until we have contract in hand and deposit paid. It makes me smile.

Over the next few weeks, you may see a lot of changes to this blog as I take my cue from fellow blogger, Graceful Creative, to honor myself and create a blog space that is uniquely mine with its own unique purpose. Which is not to say that this current space isn’t also mine. But I do feel that perhaps I may have jumped the gun a bit and raced to load up my blog before I’d sifted through everything carefully and gotten a real sense of what I want it to be and where I want it to go. Thanks to Graceful Creative for the information she includes on her own website that has inspired me to follow her lead and do not the same thing but something in a kindred spirit.

Thank you to those of you who are stopping by regularly to read this and are offering me your words of encouragement (you can do this in the comments section, too!). I am confident you will enjoy the new reincarnation of this blog, too, as it occurs. So please … stay tuned. And bear with me.

I am also open to suggestions for the new blog space if you have any … ?

Peace to all of you today.

Good Easter Monday morning everyone. Today we will be talking about zombies. What? What’s that you say? Well … okay … maybe not so much zombies but I did get your attention, didn’t I?

It’s Easter Monday morning for everyone on the Catholic/Western calendar, which means for a lot of the people reading this blog = you. Many of you were probably out yesterday hiding Easter eggs that will never be found until they start rotting under a bush, traveling to Meemaw and Pop-pop’s house for ham and strawberry cake and any other food that can possibly be made with Jell-O, and probably going to church at some point with all the other people wearing dazed expressions and trying to remember all five million verses to “Up From the Grave He Arose.”

Yes, this past weekend was all about celebrating both resurrection and rebirth. The arrival of Spring. The hope in our hearts that just because things die, this doesn’t mean the end. YAY for this comfort! But, hey, wait a minute … what if some things really are just better off dead?

Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Easter. This is just the start of Holy Week here in Greece, and I am already gearing up to dye a ton of eggs a really dark red, make tsoureki, and go walk under Christ’s tomb on Friday night while Judas burns in a corner (more on that later … maybe). Yes, I truly love Easter. My heart swells all week long. I cry when Jesus dies. I mourn all day Saturday. And then when the Holy Light is passed around on Saturday evening and the church becomes filled with radiance and the midnight hour strikes and the bells begin pealing madly, my heart feels like it’s too big for my chest — it’s just going to pop out!

But, really, aren’t there just some things we don’t want to see resurrected? I can think of a few: leisure suits, calling men “Daddy-O,” parachute pants, spiral perms, Doc Martens and flannels, the Macarena. And there are some other things, too: bad jobs, bad relationships, our old selves (before therapy). Isn’t it better that at least some things be left alone? Maybe dead is the best state for them.

The reason I say this is because I’m remarkably good at letting things live on well past their sell-by date (yick) and at also trying to revive things that really just don’t need to be revived (and ending up with zombies. See? I told you there’d be zombies here). I’m the consummate optimist thinking, “Maybe things aren’t as bad as I thought they were/are?” Sometimes I am proved wrong, but there are more times that I am not.

Over the years I have had to learn when to let go of things, when to let things die. It is never easy for me. I want to believe that things will get better, heal, have miraculous recoveries, be resurrected and not stink when they rise from the tomb (I totally understand Mary & Martha’s concern on this one in the great Lazarus incident) but the truth is, this is not always the case. And I have learned to accept that this doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

The letting go is a bit hard. Losses of bad jobs and bad relationships, while almost always better for me in the long run, still leave me grieving. So I let myself have mini-funerals of the emotional nature. But then, after the grieving’s over, I move on.

What I then experience is not so much rebirth or resurrection as an opening out of my life. There’s now room in it for new things to come in. It’s a remarkable feeling when I realize this, and freeing, too. And I begin to anticipate what good thing will come in to take its place. Good things usually do … at least, if that’s what I’m expecting (see my notes on the Laws of Attraction).

So, on this Easter Weekend just passed, I thought less about resurrection and more about burial. It’s okay to let things end. And perhaps that idea doesn’t run as counter to Easter as one might be led to believe. Maybe, just maybe, when we allow these deaths (in all their finality) to happen in our lives, what we’re really allowing to be resurrected is ourselves. Maybe the more important rebirth is not of these things but of the hopes and dreams and desires that we let perish while weighted down with these other concerns. Maybe …

So, on this Easter Monday, may you be blessed enough to know when to let things go. There’s a time for everything. Even death.

Good week to all of you.