Music helps me sink in and feel it all

One of my dearest loves introduced me to Bill Frisell about 7 years ago. I have been revisiting his music lately, and am always so deeply moved by the sounds, textures, nuances and tone he conjures. I have attached his version of one of my favorite old songs above (the photo that is there is one I took of sunset over Lake Michigan). I have been sitting in Durango, CO on a rainy morning with one of my dearest friends, reflecting on love, loss, learning, and growth.  Bill Frisell's honest and raw guitar stylings are helping me to sink into the depths of it all. What really strikes me as I as I reflect on today's deep conversations, is that I am so grateful for every twist and turn on my path, especially for the pain, because with every ounce of it, there has been an opening and a deepening of my own understanding of myself. Today I am celebrating the heartbreak, the hard lessons, the pain and the sadness......they have all shaped me and opened me so that I can love and feel even more deeply than before. I pray for the courage to always stand with my arms and heart open, ready to feel everything that comes my way! THAT is what being alive is all about for me!!

Here is powerful quote that takes this notion a few big steps farther, by one of my favorite authors, Alice Walker:

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
 

This is a very raw journal spread that was created in a moment where I was in so much pain all I could do was surrender and pray