Wishes for 2020

Wishes is probably not the right word to use however this is what this blog is about. First of all I wish you all a Happy New Year whatever and however you celebrate. A week ago, one of my friends asked us all to give her one word to describe what we wished for her during this coming year. This brought up lots of suggestions and I am taking some of these words to use in this blog. First of all I wish you all peace during the year. This is peace with yourself and peace with others as well as peace around you wherever you live.

I’d like to wish you love as well. Love for yourself and your family as well as for those around you. Love is a powerful vibration and can change lives. So what else do I wish for you? Gratitude; gratitude for what you have. I give gratitude each night for three things that are not the obvious ones like a roof over my head, food and clothes. There are many other things we can be grateful for. Caring and compassion for others is something else I wish for you. In our current world, compassion and caring are extremely important when there are so many who need help of some kind.

I wish good health for you and happiness. With good health comes another wish, sustainable eating and living. This is another very important thing in view of the changes in our climate, living sustainably, not wasting anything that can be used in some way and not buying what we don’t need. Repairing items that can be repaired is good as well. It is better than throwing them away.

I wish also that you gain a deeper connection with yourself, with others and with the natural world around us and also with the spiritual world. Take time to stand and stare, to contemplate and to reflect, to look at the bigger picture around the current circumstances, to forgive and to share. But above all I wish you happiness. Be happy with yourself and then you will be happy with others.

There is a website called http://www.actionforhappiness.org who produce a monthly happiness guide. I am using the one for this month as my photo today. Can you do the things it asks of you?

Doing too much

Last week I visited a friend staying for a few days. It was a busy but wonderful time. Other friends came to visit and we caught up with each others news as well as having deep discussions about everything spiritual and otherwise. London Midland rail staff were very helpful and I really appreciated this and told them so. The less said about East Midlands trains the better. I enjoyed visits to the local park where I was able to take some good photos, eat good meals and snacks in good cafes and the purchase of a lonely teddy bear in the charity shop who is now used for Reiki sessions.

I was rather tired when I returned home but happy and excited about plans I had made while away. My dark cold flat soon took the edge off the happiness and I found that the following day I was ill with vertigo. This often happens when I do too much. I keep going until my body makes sure I have to stop so stop I did. I am now recovering but not yet 100% but then again it is hard for me to ever be 100%. I do try to listen to my body and try to slow down when I feel the need to do so but sometimes it is much easier to keep going until I do have to stop. The excitement of writing new books for example keeps me going at a rapid rate until forced to stop. Looking back over the last three months I can see that the move to this flat was stressful, then the bathroom work was also stressful and travelling is stressful for me as well.

Maybe in the future I should learn to slow down a bit but I feel I still have so much to do, new books to write and Reiki to teach as well as other ongoing projects. Pacing myself should be easy enough but I do tend to go with the flow especially where words are concerned and writing. Do these kind of things happen to you? Does your body let you know when it is time to rest or take a break? Or is it just me?

A different heron photo from a different park taken while I was away. He was extremely well camouflaged in the willow tree but I waited patiently and did catch him when he put his head out!

Being happy

So often I hear words said about being happy. I hear people asking others what will make them happy. Will a new gadget make them happy, a new car perhaps or something else. I have also heard people say that they can’t be happy unless their partner is happy too. So what is happiness?

Happiness can be defined as contentedness, satisfaction, delight and joy or even just good spirits. For me there are deeper levels of happiness. You can have what I call the more superficial levels of happiness where you feel happy because of something you did or someone else did and you felt happy at that. Listening to music can make me feel happy too  But there is a deeper level of happiness that resides in me, somewhere deep down in my soul. It is about being contented with who I am and what I do. It is accepting who I truly am and allowing me to be that too. I am happy as I am, I do not want to have more material things as they do not make me happy and so on.

My happiness has a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. I know who I am and what I have to do to keep this level of happiness and I am not likely to let others get in my way or try to change me. Are you happy? What makes you feel happy? Bear in mind that happiness comes from within, no-one else can make you happy. How do you define happiness?

Sometimes tiny things can enhance that happiness like the bunch of flowers given to me the other day quite unexpectedly. But those kind of gifts are not necessary for my happiness. Of course we all have days when we might feel sad or other emotions but if we have that deep seated happiness it will still be there after those days and the bad days are less bad because of this if that makes sense.

The photo here today made me feel much joy inside me and enhanced my happiness.

Joy

So what does joy mean to you? For me it is a deep feeling of happiness and great pleasure. I have been having this feeling rather a lot since my move and it has to be something to do with my surroundings which are much different from where I lived before.

My surroundings are urban but there is so much green around too. One small thing which gives me joy is my walk down the hill to the retail park. I live in a street which has several other streets running parallel to it but with a street running across the top end joining them together apart from one street. This is linked by a path  across a small piece of land with trees and grass. There is a small group of trees, some currently full of blossom and daffodils, tulips  and now bluebells are opening up in the sunshine. I like to stop and admire this small plot of land every time I go that way. It brings me joy just to stand there and breathe in the scent of nature.

Following the path downhill I see willows and alder as well as other shrubs like brambles and a couple of small birches. At the bottom of the hill the retail park is edged with trees now all becoming green. They block out the traffic noise of the dual carriageway but they also give me joy as I have watched them start to awaken to the sunshine.

I suppose that I am a druid who is very much a part of nature. I love to just stand there and ‘be’,  listening, admiring and being at one with all that is around me. I don’t need to dress up to do this, I’d rather blend in with the land anyway so I really seem a part of it. My photo today is of the bluebells at the end of the street in that small plot of land.

So what brings you joy?