Short answer: See the world with fresh eyes.

Like many of you, we are going through a tough time. My father is struggling and fading at the age of 89, my mother is in a nursing home and will be for the rest of her life, my beloved dog just died, my other dog is older, has trouble breathing at times, is slowing down significantly and I worry about her, both Don and I freelance and work has been alarmingly slow if not non-existent, we are older and in a world that is youth-oriented, it’s not so easy to find another job, we struggle to get the money together for our ridiculously high mortgage payment every month and we seriously wonder if we’ll be able to stay here, I seem to worry about money constantly, Don has been ill (but is now getting better, thank goodness.)

There’s more, but enough of the list.

I’m not feeling sorry for myself. There are people everywhere who are battling even bigger things, whose list of woes would make mine look puny. I’ve heard from fellow bloggers about their own struggles and am keenly aware that everyone has a story or two or three about their level of stress and worry at this moment in time.

Life can be hard and unforgiving.

This act of writing a blog, of writing a virtual daily journal, has saved me more often than you could ever know.

I have to come up with something every day. I blog about my life. I’m not a niche blogger. I can’t take refuge in a post that shows pictures of things I found on other blogs or websites. I don’t work that way. So, as I would be in any case, I have to be honest. Sometimes that honesty results in a post in which I pour my heart out. Sometimes it allows me to be silly. Sometimes it results in a fresh look at the world around me. As I think about a post and walk around with my camera, I see the world with fresh eyes. I see the beauty in bare branches of a tree against a blue sky, in the fading of a flower, in the pattern of sunlight on my wooden floor, in the animals who share our land with us, in the beauty of a piece of pottery – oh, the list is endless.

Often, I start to write and the humor of a situation suddenly becomes apparent and I find myself smiling.

I see the beauty in the landscape around me and I find myself smiling.

I see the simple pleasures of my everyday life that have nothing to do with stress or worry or money, but have everything to do with thankfulness and gratitude.

I let go of fear. I let in love.

Blogging has given me that. Writing is cathartic. Healing. The camera lens offers me a look at my world that I never really experienced until I started this blog. This daily exercise of writing a blog has helped me work through so many problems, has helped me to see the joy of simple things, the funny side of something I might have considered negative without the aid of writing about it, the blessings that I do have.

The important thing

is to pull yourself up by your own hair,

to turn yourself inside out,

and see the whole world with fresh eyes.

Peter Weiss                                      

That’s what blogging has done for me.  That’s what it forces me to do. And I’m so grateful it does.

Happy Sunday.