We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

This week's pet peeve is being replaced with Things That Have Made Me Sit Up and Take Notice.

The first thing was my Sunday Inner Me email from Bridget. Are you signed up? If you are, you'll remember this about not being lost:

"Sometimes life feels like you have to stay on top of everything, or you're going to be left behind. You'll be lost by the highway like one old shoe. Sometimes life feels like an epic all-or-nothing. I asked Inner Me about this feeling and she said this... Sometimes when you are overwhelmed by the complexity of your life, it's because All That Is is asking you to be more specific in what you want. You're not lost. You won't be left behind. Look around. What do you not want anymore? When she told me this, yesterday, I stopped my work and I cleaned out a closet. There's so much that I have that I don't want. I think you might be like me, maybe."

I saw myself in having so much I don't want and I started with my clothes, doing another comb-through and coming up with one big lawn bag of clothes and shoes which I immediately ran off to the recycling center.

So much of what is in there I recognize hesitating over during my last sort-through and it felt liberating to finally let go of them.

The next thing that has slapped me upside the head this week is Pixie's post called Doorways. I heard some bells ringing reading this, realizing I need to stop being hard on myself for falling back into old, unhealthy patterns and know that as I catch myself doing them, I really am a different person now than I was then and I have the tools to do something about changing them.

I then had strong waves of gratitude for this friend and this scarf I blogged about here because it has been a great source of comfort and warmth these last two weeks as winter refuses to acknowledge that it is almost spring. It held me last night as I made my way home late from work, waiting for a bus that never showed, mentally rehashing my day, trying to grasp how I could see the day full of accomplishments and abundance while another looked and saw "not enough". Which normally wouldn't bother me except the words were meant to be personal and until I could understand that they were spoken through fear, the words hurt.

I definitely sat up and listened as the news program spoke of how the bears woke up yesterday at our Ecomuseum. Since it opened in 1988 the bears have never been wrong about predicting spring. I can't say that about the groundhog or Environment Canada or the Farmer's Almanac.

And I am not tiring of see this friend up in the cedar tree.

We are seeing him so often that we are starting to call him "our owl" but the wonder is still there each time.

And I decided to stop being so stingy and start turning on the heat in the upstairs bathroom. The main heating vent is blocked, or broken and I neglect to turn on the space heater because I am, well, frugal. Last night as I ran my bath, I put the thermometer in the room and it read 63 F.

That's kind of chilly when you're standing around naked.

Has anything made you sit up and take notice this week?