Music and clouds

...for awhile in my life I had to quit listening to music and looking at the sky.

Music made my heart feel like crying and the clouds brought back too many memories of painful times spent trying to look up and see the bright side.

That sounds crazy, doesn't it?

But things felt really black in my life and I couldn't seem to find a way out of it no matter how many Mary Engelbreit calendar pages I read. No matter how many sayings I told myself about rainbows and dancing in the rain. So I had to put the music away and I had to quit looking at the sky.

But time does seem to heal all wounds - or at least make them scab over enough that you can finally touch them and only wince a little bit when you do.

...and this morning as I was walking and listening to my i-pod and watching the gray and white popcorn clouds dance across the mornings apricot sky I realized how tough we all are.

Oh, we think we aren't and we think that cannot possibly survive another blow and that one more tiny pain filled straw will be the last one we can bear...

...but it isn't true.

We are all tougher then we think, I think.

And I don't believe we always have to be tough and put on a brave face and look on the bright side.

Sometimes it must be OK to cut ourselves some slack and allow ourselves time to just feel bad and sad and mad...and to not look at the bright side.

I know that happy is a pro-active choice but I also know that grief and sorrow is something that is OK to feel. We shouldn't beat ourselves up when we just can't spout platitudes with any self-honesty.

Maybe, just maybe, we should be as kind and as gentle to ourselves as we would be to a friend who is in a sad place in their lives. We nurture them. We are kind and gentle and loving and thoughtful to them.

No more then we should be to ourselves.

As we should.

Because we are also the people that deserve kind, gentle, loving and thoughtful.

And we also deserve to have beautiful morning clouds accompanied by rock'n roll on our i-pods!