In Sickness and In Health (nothing to do with marriage)

What a week.  I've been sick.  Talking about one's illness is boring so I won't except to say it took me an entire week to come to my senses and do something about it.  And that something wasn't going to the doctor.

I come from a long line of Christian Scientists and although I don't consider myself a Christian and instinctively shy away from anything with Christian overtones (not because Christianity is inherently bad but because of the bad things done in its name), I do believe in the power of the mind, I do believe we are all spirit and that our spirit is essentially the same as the Great Spirit or Infinite Spirit or God from which everything has its being.  And if I am that than I am capable of healing myself.  So after a particularly excruciating morning in which I spent most of the time doubled over in pain I took myself off to bed.  And then to the couch as the house painters were painting outside the bedroom. 

I lay there and visualized the pain as a knot.  I thanked it for its presence (after all I have lost 2 kilos!) and for what it came to teach me but now it was time to let go its grip and relax. 

Cameron and his girls were coming.  I had to be up (and straight up, not bent over groaning) and about before they arrived.  And I was.  By the time they came the pain had gone.  I'm sore.  Whatever it was, in the space of a week, left a bruised feeling but that's nothing.  The cough is still here (an entirely separate affair?) but that too is nothing.  And I'm working on that.

I am rereading In Tune with the Infinite by Ralph Waldo Trine.  Finished it and started reading it again.  It is chock a block with underlined words and sentences that held special meaning for Mom.  In the back is written:  Beauty: Eternal Spirit Truth Infinite Life Love.  In fact, although the book doesn't especially emphasize beauty, Mom does. She reads the book with beauty in mind.  To her it seems important to find the beauty in everything.  She also wrote that sins were like mathematical mistakes made in ignorance.  Once one knew better than one didn't make that mistake again. 

Having done a little research (thank you Wikipedia - just did this years small donation) I have a bit better knowledge and appreciation of my roots through the maternal line.  Apparently many of New Thoughts movers and thinkers in its early years were women.  Grandma Hazel was a Christian Scientist and I believe Aunt Joanne was cured of a serious (incurable?) disease through Christian Science.  So the female emphasis continues.

Unity Magazine used to be a daily part of my teenage life.  I read it and liked it but wasn't really ready for it and even then I was put off by the Christian overtones.  Didn't know that Unity Church also has its roots in New Thought.  

I'm just grateful.  Mom's emphasis was on beauty.  Perhaps.  Her artistic nature, necessarily dampened down by the life she led, found some release in the beauty of the everyday?  I'm only guessing.  I don't know.  My daily emphasis seems to be in gratitude.  Just so damn grateful to be alive to see the beauty in the every day.  And to be pain free.