Understanding Abundance

I want to share with you a bit of my journey with essential oils. When I first bought my starter kit, it was mostly for extra support during sniffle season. My child catches the sniffles rather a lot—he inherited that from me—and I welcome all tools to help improve wintertime quality of life. It was an easy choice. If peppermint helped a little in those long and dark nights of hot showers, humidifiers, the nose frida and tears, it was money well spent. I considered everything else gravy. Three months later, I have noticed a change in myself and in my family. The physical changes are wonderful--I don't like to think about how anyone does without oils for support--but the primary change is in my heart life and that of my family. We are increasingly more prone to act toward each other from an internal place of abundance, rather than an assumption of scarcity. In the night, when my child is wet and cold and needs me, less and less often do I think “I don’t have enough sleep for this right now.” More often I respond with “Come, let me share with you from what I have.” The change is not in how much I have, but in my attitude. Because of the ways that essential oils have helped me, I really do have more to offer to my family, but it's not really about how much I have. After all, Scrooge had plenty, and he still lived with the assumption that he did not have enough to share. I may not have much right now. I am learning to live like I am enough and like I have enough. To buy oils, I have to look at my life and decide that I have enough. Oils are extravagant. Can I do without them? Yes. Do I want to? No. Oils in my life are blessing. They make my son happy. They soothe and bring joy to my husband. They drive my pregnant weepies away and lift my spirits. They are a tangible gift that I can give to anyone, and expect that they will also experience blessing. Blessing is why I keep doing oils: not because they help with the sniffles and relieve my occasional bloating. I like those benefits. I use and love oils because they encourage me to live from a place of blessing. As an unexpected gift, oils are helping me shift my focus from myself and what I may sometime lack to what I have now and can joyfully share with those around me. Oils are transforming my body, yes. More importantly, oils are drawing my heart to live in gratitude and to embrace an assumption of abundance.

peaceful parenting and oils

These days, when there's trouble with the kids, I'm learning to go straight to the diffuser. 

Citrus oils can't make anyone bounce out of bed and get dressed... but they can sure make it easier. 

Cedarwood can't make anyone treat their siblings with warmth and affection... but it can sure make it easier.

Lavender can't make anyone calm down at bedtime... or maybe it can? The point is, I can't control my kids behavior, but I can support them in doing well.

Nine times out of ten, that's enough.

Not always, mind you. Willful sin is a thing, after all. 

But it's not usually the main thing, and it's never the only thing.

Most of the time, my kids want to do well, and things turn around when I take small steps to make that easier for them. 

And on those rare occasions when it really does just boil down to plain old sin? Then we need all the help we can get. 

As the fragrant mist shifts our moods, I'm reminded to take account of our flesh. Doing well takes more than willpower: it requires humble, prayerful planning. 

speaking the light

This Thanksgiving, I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for plants. For all the bright green leaves that teach me to gather the light, and now the gold and red ones dancing to the ground, teaching me the ways of graceful surrender. I'm grateful for Young Living, and the opportunity to recieve nourishment from so many plants from all around the world. I'm grateful for this business, too, with its organic growth structure that invests us all in one another's success.

And I'm also grateful for the FDA regulations that govern the things I'm allowed to say about these products.

Which is surprising, since those regulations are the main reason I didn't start selling essential oils years ago. Using plants to take charge of my own health has drastically improved my life, and I wanted the freedom to tell my story with honesty and integrity.

But freedom of speech doesn't do much good if you never get around to writing out your story. So I decided to take the plunge, carve out a space to say the things that I can legally say, and let go of the rest. After all, I wasn't saying them anyway! Besides, if we had to play convoluted word games, as a poet I ought to welcome the challenge, right?

As it turns out, though, it's much more than just words. (Words always are, aren't they?)

The FDA guidelines are pushing me to think in terms of maintaining health rather than avoiding sickness. By keeping the focus on wellness and nutritional support rather than disease, I am learning to bless the light when I might otherwise be inclined to curse the darkness.

It's kinda sorta changing my life.

Sometimes sickness calls for drastic measures, and at those times, there is no substitute for a personal relationship with a qualified professional.

But just as self-care makes a poor substitute when professional medical care is needed, even the best medical care cannot replace intelligent self-care. All day, every day, we are taking things into our bodies: through our mouths, yes, but also through our lungs and our skin. Doctors can advise and prescribe, but they can't possibly take responsibility for managing all the things that we are constantly putting into our bodies. Nor do they want to. The better we do our job of self-care, the better they can do their job of specialized medical care.

Self-care isn't about fixing disease. It's about pursuing, supporting, and maintaining health. It isn't about fear, but about gratitude and nourishment.

So I'm grateful that these rules are teaching me to seek and speak the light.

In praise of pumpkin spice

'Tis the season for cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and cardamom. (Mmmm.... cardamom...)

With that first brisk autumn breeze, we begin to crave the warming spices that will support our bodies through the challenges of winter.

Our bodies pretty much know what they're doing.

The pleasures of taste and smell are true responses to real goodness. Cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom have long been used for immune support, and nutmeg is winter-wonderful for an entirely different set of reasons. The research is fairly sketchy (who on earth thinks half-drowning exhausted rats is a good way to study mental health??!!), but apparently I'm not the only one who finds nutmeg encouraging.

Science has yet to provide anything really definitive about these potential benefits, but the tantalizing bits of information that we do have are enough to make me take these cravings seriously.

I've been revisiting Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and once again, I'm astonished and delighted by the powerful clarity of his categories. This time around, though, I find myself vehemently disagreeing with much of what he puts into those brilliant categories.

For Aristotle, appetite is fundamentally irrational. In this view, the virtuous person is the one who has learned act according to reason rather than appetite.

There's a very large grain of truth this. Unchecked appetite leads to disaster, and reason can set us back on the correct course.

But it can go the other way, too. Sometimes we reason badly, and sometimes our bodies know things that our minds haven't figured out.

All of our senses are lovingly designed to respond to truth. And all of our senses are fallible. Each element of the soul is a necessary component of a finely-tuned system of checks and balances.

Thanks be to God, who gives us good gifts, and the capacity to delight in them!

your instagrammable life, and mine

I've been having SO MUCH FUN on instagram.

(You should follow me. I'll follow you back. It'll be great.)

Instagram is an amazing place, full of fascinating people doing remarkable things. It's a feast for the eyes, and it makes me glad to be human.

If you're not careful, though, it can also become a place of envy.

Getting behind the camera helps with this.

(Producing art helps with most things!)

Photography is the art of focus and framing. Always, always, there is something else you could have focused on. Usually, there's some kind of mess lurking just outside of the frame, as well as spectacular beauties that will have to wait for some other picture.

In this fallen world, we are surrounded by brokenness, ugliness, and pain. Pain is violent, forcing itself upon us, whether we are ready or not, and the more we flinch away from it, the more powerful it becomes.

Joy, on the other hand, is gentle. It will never force itself onto your consciousness. It simply waits, quietly hidden. Sometimes it is easy to find, and sometimes it takes quite a lot of searching. When you do find it, it offers up the strength to face pain with a full and open heart, and sometimes even to transform it.

The times when you have to look the hardest for joy are the times when you need it the most.

The flood of picture-perfect images on instagram is not evidence that everyone else has a better life than you. Rather, it is evidence that joy is worth finding and framing: in their life, in my life, and in yours.

natural law and wellness

"Oh."

He sounded mildly disappointed.

"'Natural wellness.' For a minute, I thought you said 'natural law,' and I was really excited."

And then it was MY turn to get excited.

Because even though 'natural law' and 'natural wellness' are very different buzz-phrases, the actual concepts are deeply interconnected.

Both are based on the premise that everything is designed for a particlar purpose, and flourishes best when filling that purpose.

I believe that people and plants were carefully, intentionally, and brilliantly made for one another.

Learning how to use plants well is helping me to experience God's love more deeply. It is also helping me to understand what it means to flourish as a human being.

We were made for this.

breathing together

When the scent of lavender fills the air, everyone seems calmer. Kinder. More peaceful.

On mornings when I put lemon in the diffuser, the kids have an easier time waking up. 

To be honest, it's a little bit scary.  

I'm not used to thinking about fragrance as something that powerful.

But of course it is powerful. How could it not be? When we percieve a smell, it is because it has become a part of us.

At least a dozen times a minute, we draw air into our bodies, take from it the things that we need, then send what we don't need back out into the space we share.

Breath is terrifyingly intimate.

We are inextricably connected to our environment, and to one another. We are so vulnerable.

Vulnerable... and yet resilient. Dust, pollen, smog, smoke, air frehsheners, mold spores, bacteria, viruses... we bring all sorts of things into our lungs, and most of the time we can handle it just fine. Not always, but most of the time. We are so amazing.

And the good smells... the rich woodsy, spicy and floral aromas that we crave... we want them for a reason. 

We can fool our noses, of course, just as we can trick our tastes with artificial flavors. But our bodies have more wisdom than we credit them. So long as they are honest smells, the good smells are usually the ones that support our incredible, resilient bodies.

And whatever there is in the air, we all breathe it together.