Day 486.

Today's breakfast, set to the soundtrack of "The Love Below" by OutKast:

Iced coffee from Sweet Adeline with a splash of half and half and a splash of soy
A whole wheat tortilla with a couple slivers of organic monterey jack cheese melted onto it. A couple of mushrooms, a leaf of kale, some pinto beans, and part of a green onion stalk all sauteed together, and folded into the tortilla along with some fresh green onion, a dollop of organic whole milk yogurt, half of a small avocado, and some Valentina hot sauce.
A bowl of cherries. Please find above, the last of the breakfast dessert cherries.

I'm very privileged to be able to afford healthy food, consistently. I hope that the ways that it feeds me also influences and feeds the work I want to do in the world. I am lucky to have so much good input, whether it's food, or the humans I am around, or the ideas I am privileged to be able to read and hear, or the music & art I get to see. Noticing all of the input I am grateful for inspires me to be intentional about my output, to try to give back to the world at least as much good as I am lucky to receive.

Yesterday, I was looking forward. Forward, forward, forward. This is a tendency of mine, to try to move away from what is behind me, my past, and just keep moving ahead. This can be healthy in certain doses. But what it does sometimes is detach me from my past.

The other day, some words came out to describe my physical state, my sensations, & my emotions. I wasn't trying to be poetic, they were just the first words I spat out when I checked in with myself real deep to see how I was doing. "My wings are screaming," I said. My back was begging for attention. My past was begging for acknowledgment. My grandmother and my parents were there, sitting on my back, waiting for me to connect with them. My family history was digging away at my shoulder blades with its fingernails, wanting me to want to learn it, wanting me to want to write it down. And my wings were trying desperately to get out, so they could do all of the things that wings do: fly, protect, and, well, just be wings.

I read these paragraphs back and I imagine they must all seem very disconnected from one another to anyone who might be reading this who is not me. But to me, they are all very connected. I am learning what my work is. I am realizing that I am lucky enough to have enough of my needs met that I can focus on something beyond surviving, that I can focus on living. I am learning what I have done in the past to survive, and imagining what I can do and who I can be in the future to do more than just survive, to live my life and contribute who I am to the world. In this present body, I know my story needs to be told. Not just the story of my day-to-day revelations about this Self, but the stories of who I have been, where and who I come from, who I can be, looking ahead, how I am connected to the earth and the sky, and how I am connected to everything all around me.