Back to the beginning of the year with Melody Beattie's "The Language of Letting Go," after two years of pretty much keeping up with her weird daily things. Many of them, I find supremely helpful, in spite of also catching my skeptical or cynical hooks on some of what feels like toxic positivity. I also get blindsided by some of the heavy-handed God stuff. It doesn't bother me, usually, I just read right on by. Take what you need and leave the rest yeah? January 3rd's entry includes a quotation from her own excellent book, Beyond Codependency: "There isn't a guidebook for setting boundaries. Each of us has our own guide inside ourselves. If we continue to work at recovery, our boundaries will develop. They will get healthy and sensitive. Our selves will tell us what we need to know, and we'll love ourselves enough to listen." She continues: "What do we need to do to take care of ourselves? Listen to that voice inside. What makes you angry? What have you had enough of? What don't you trust? What doesn't feel right? What can't you stand? What makes you uncomfortable? What do you want? Need? What don't you want and need? What do you like? What would feel good?" This moves me in a lot of ways. It is partly, at least, a reminder of how far I have come in the past 10 years or so. I know with much more clarity now what makes me angry, I know when I have had enough. I know intuitively what I trust and what the feeling of not trusting feels like. I listen to my discomfort and take it seriously. I used to be completely silenced when someone would ask me: "what do you like?" Now I know a lot more strongly and clearly what I want, what I like, what I need. I can still catch myself faking it in order to be liked, or to please someone, or to seem open minded, when in fact I am not. But, much more than in my past, I am able to state what I do and don't want or need, and stand in it, while still being resilient, open minded, and willing to compromise when it will work to do so. Part of letting go into the adventure with M was that I knew intuitively that it would be powerful and I was resisting. Thinking it did not fit into my carefully constructed defense, or narrative. She quite quickly eroded that resistance. But that occurred only in person, and on the basis of a completely intuitive feeling of trust, one that deeply astonished me. It's important for me to remember and honor also that the opening to love and the presence of the beloved has cracked my stone heart into some other areas of sadness, grief, deeper letting go. A romantic like me finds a lot of truth in the experience, and it's not accessible from a defended, hermit, solitary position. I've been as full of sorrow as much as joy lately, for this reason. And one of the ways I know myself is that I no longer pretend to be all joy when there's a lot of other feelings moving. In addition to all of Beattie's excellent questions above, one of the top ones for me is: What am I feeling? I like to be open in answering that one. For many years, I had utterly no idea. Below, a pic I took last year near this date, a shy Great Blue Heron perched on a cardon, Baja California.