Friday, July 16, 2010

Daily 5 - Day 336

Today's Daily 5:
  1. feeling prompted to text message a dear friend (who rarely carries her phone) on the chance she had it with her right now,  and hearing back from her hours later, thanking me, and telling me that I'd also been on her heart.
  2. a few honest conversations at the Stampede BBQ tonight.  not always a common occurrence when I'm at an event hosted by dad's church
  3. learning about the "special senses" today, and collecting some really useful and fascinating (to me anyway) information about taste, vision, hearing, smell, and equilibrium.
  4. crossing some things off my list that been weighing on my heart a bit this week.
  5. a long hot bath this afternoon, while reading a novel.

Random Today Thoughts

This has been the sort of day I generally like best.  Things go smoothly, and get accomplished, but there is rest and joy and peace and humor amongst those things.

I needed a today like this.  Yesterday was anything but.  Full of hard moments and tears.  Just one of those days where all of the things being juggled come crashing to the ground and you stand there amidst the scattered bits and pieces of life and wonder if this is really what the beginning of healing looks like?  This shattered, broken, scattered thing?

Today's anatomy chapter was about the "special senses".  Taste, vision, hearing, smell and equilibrium.  It was a long chapter.  Vision and hearing in particular, it turns out, are rather involved processes.  I learned (or in some cases was reminded of) some facts that fascinated me.  Things like the fact that though your nose is able to distinguish something like 10,000 unique smells, there are actually only 5 distinguishable tastes.  Practically, this means that when you have a cold and your food seems tasteless, it's actually because your nose is plugged and you can't smell, and doesn't have much at all to do with the physical process of taste.  By far my favorite fact of the day is the reason you get a runny nose when you cry.  (Hey, I spent a good portion of yesterday crying, I had a vested interest in this piece of information!)  It turns out that your tear ducts actually drain into your nose.  So, when you cry, and your tear ducts are producing tears like crazy, instead of just lubricating your eye, they spill over your eyelids (and down your cheeks) and the excess drains into your nose.  Thus, a runny nose when crying!

The anatomy chapter too probably four hours to wade through and make notes and define terms, but stats went quickly today, though I'll need to attack another assignment over the next few days, and that is bound to be time consuming.  Other than that, though, and some serious memorizing and review, I don't have anything on the schedule school wise, for the weekend.  And that is a relief in and of itself.

I also spent an hour or so resting this afternoon.  Laid out in a hot bath, reading a novel.  A most excellent way to reward oneself for a long morning of anatomy, and to ease the edges of yesterday's painful remnants.

An email to my former roommate, catching her up on life, and another to the man in charge of my RRSPs from my former company rounded out the day.  Call me crazy, but I'm looking at changing financial advisors.  I'm just not comfortable with the close ties my financial advisor has to my former employer.  Ties professionally, but more uncomfortably, personally.  Ties like being the ex-husband of the woman who was formally my boss.  Though I know there is a code of professional ethics that he'd be a fool to break, I'll feel better if someone who doesn't talk to her regularly because of shared children, is in charge of a large sum of my money!

And with that, I'm off... dad's church is having a Stampede BBQ tonight, and if there's free food, that's usually where I can be found these days!  Food, likely laughter, and family.  Doesn't sound like a bad way to spend an evening!

Celtic Prayers

When I was in Michigan, on the way home from Ontario, just after losing my job in May, we stopped at a fabulous discount Christian bookstore, and one of the gems that I picked up was a little book called, "Sounds of the Eternal: A Celtic Psalter".  This book has truly proven itself a gem.  It's structured with prayers and scriptures for each morning and evening of the week.

To be honest, I really haven't looked at or read the morning prayers, but for several weeks now I've been cycling my way through the evening prayers for each day just before I go to sleep at night.

I'm finding the depth of these prayers to be stunning.  These ancient prayers are giving words to the cries of my heart in this season, and I wanted to share a few particular favorites with you.

Like light dappling through the leaves of a tree
and wind stirring in its branches,
like birdsong sounding from the heights of an orchard
and the scent of blossom after rainfall,
so you dapple and sound in the human soul,
so you stir into motion all that lives.
Let your graces of healing flow this night,
for my soul is wounded
and there is brokenness in my life.
Let your graces of healing flow, dear God,
for those whom I love are in need this night
and there are agonies in the life of the world.
There are agonies in the life of the world, O my soul,
and those whom I love are in pain.

~~~

Bless my body and soul this night
that I may be renewed in the forgetfulness of sleep.
Visit me in my dreams
that I may remember my birth in you.
Protect me with your angels of brightness, O God,
that I may awake to the freshness of the morning,
that I may awake to You as the new day's freshness

~~~

Bless me this night, O God,
and those whom I know and love.
Bless me this night, O God,
and those with whom I am not at peace.
Bless me this night, O God,
and every human family.
Bless us with deep sleep.
Bless us with dreams that will heal our souls.
Bless us with the night's silent messages of eternity
that we may be set free by love.
Bless us in the night, O God,
that we may be set free to love.

~~~

In sleep may my body be rested.
In sleep may my soul be renewed.
In sleep may my dreams be carriers of truth
borne by the night's visiting angels.
In sleep may I know you in love, O God,
in sleep may I be known by you,
the Lover of every living soul this night,
the Lover of my ever living soul.