I crave comfort food.  I’m talking about the foods that bring up a warm remembering with every bite.  Foods that just feel like home.  I am writing this on Thanksgiving, which provides me with the greatest of all comfort foods—Turkey and dressing.  Include some cranberry sauce from a can and every part of me is giddy.

Comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. The Song of Solomon 2:5

I am grateful for wild flowers. Recently, while looking at pictures of myself as a small child, I was surprised by the number of photos of me with wild flowers in my hair. It seemed like such a natural, joyous thing to do.

How did I get away from doing small things that bring such joy?  Now my brain is wired for responsibility and obligation.  But picking  wild flowers certainly doesn’t fit into those categories.  I want to get back to that place where picking wild flowers is second nature, and I don’t have to justify a reason to do it.

Earth laughs in flowers.Ralph Waldo Emerson

Check out the Lady Bird Johnson Wildfower Center.

Aren’t mud pies so freeingly fun? I loved playing in the mud as a child, and making mud pies was a favorite past time.  In my five year old mind, it ranked right up there with tire swings and puppies.  I still remember the dirt’s earthy smell and grainy wet texture as it squished between my fingers and toes. I’d start my mud pies by taking the water hose and running it over a spot in the yard, usually taking out an ant mound here and there along the way. Then, I took a cake pan and piled mud into it. I derived such pleasure in smoothing the top layer of the mud so that it was even with the top of the pan. Then, after all that effort, I dumped out the pan and did it all over again.

As a child, I did things like this for the pure pleasure of them. Imagine if I had said to myself, “Well, no one can eat mud pies so I shouldn’t go about building them.” This sounds absurd to a child, but as an adult, I regularly deny myself enjoyable experiences because they are not considered productive or useful.

Mud pies remind me that joy and pleasure ARE useful, and anything we do that creates them is worthwhile.

I do it for the joy it brings, cause I’m a joyful girl. ‘Cause the world owes us nothing, we owe each other the world. Ani Difranco

Oh, yes, anger.  The emotion you’re not supposed to have.  Growing up I always felt it was wrong to get angry. That nice girls put on nice faces and use nice words. While I definitely think we should strive to be loving and grateful toward others, I also think anger has its place.

I have been learning more about the mindfulness approach to emotions, and it has been very helpful for me. Instead of judging an emotion like anger as bad and tying to shove it out of the way, I just acknowledge its presence and the reactions it is causing in me. I notice my breath becoming labored, and my pulse becoming faster. Here’s the important thing to mindfulness — don’t intellectualize the emotion, just feel it.

It is important to feel our feelings and not to push away an uncomfortable feeling when it arises. Honestly, the harder you push away an emotion, the deeper it becomes lodged inside you only to resurface later in your relationships or your health. There is so much talk about releasing our unwanted emotions, as if we could hit an eject button and they would fly away. I believe the way to release them is by moving through them. We release by feeling completely, with acceptance toward ourselves and all our varied emotions.

For more info on mindfulness: Mindfulness of Emotions by Insight Meditation Center

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
Adrienne Rich

I have learned to appreciate suffering. Every time I suffer I transform in ways unimaginable. Although my mind can’t wrap around suffering in a world with an all-loving, all-knowing God, I can’t deny the beautiful transformative nature of suffering.

“Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.” George Eliot