I’ve lost track of how many days we are into Lent.  I haven’t read my daily messages from A Course in Miracles.  I feel I have lost so much time shifting through my nights at work.  I’m feeling as if I am in my own separate bubble, divorced from the whole wide world.  My cries echo silently in my tiny bubble.

All I feel is my physical discomfort – the thousand aches in my body, my breathlessness, the heaviness of my fatigue.  I would like to be inert forever, but that is also a discomfort unto its own.  So, with effort and the help of Sheba’s insistent barking, I rise out of bed in the morning.  We do the breakfast habit and somehow find ourselves at the park and on the trail between the trees.

Sheba runs this way and that way, happy to be free out in the world again.  I trudge along, my steps easing and lengthening as we went along.  I take a breath in and breathe out through the opening in my heart and felt my aches melting with each breath.  Oh, sweet relief!

Life is a struggle sometimes.  But where would we be without those struggles?  There would be no need to find solutions to problems, no experimenting, no puzzles to solve.   Through these days in Lent, I have abandoned my pursuit of happiness and perfection.  I think we have been sold a false set of goods by the media of what a good life is – the perfect house, the car, the money, the job, the stuff…..

Instead, through my time in the desert, I will learn to live, in this moment as I am.  I will be impeccable with my works.  I will not take anything personally.  I will make no assumptions.  I may fail and fall down, but I will get up and try again.  I will do my best. That is all that anyone can do, their best.