back in the saddle

Over the past month, sickness made its slow and steady way through each member of my family.  It narrowed my focus and shortened my to-do list as I canceled plans, kept the van in the garage and made rest my priority.  I spent my days making endless cups of tea, soothing feverish children, and mothering myself through a wicked bout of bronchitis. 

I am so grateful that my kids and I are all healthy and my head is clear enough to do some writing.  Today I am linking up with Holley Gerth, fearless leader of our God-Sized Dream Team, writing on the topic of what I am going to stop delaying and start doing in order to create space in my life for my dream of writing my story. 

The thing is, I feel like my dream of writing is a horse and this past month I fell clean off of it.  So as I sit here, this thought keeps running through my head, “What do you do when you fall off a horse?  You get right back on.”

I saw this in action one day at my daughter’s horseback riding lesson when I watched her fall off her pony.  Her physical self was fine, but emotionally she was pretty shaken up.  Her instructor let her come sit with me for a few minutes, and then came over and to ask her if she could come show one of the younger students how to canter on one of the ponies.  It happened to be her favorite pony, not the one she had been riding when she fell, and Clare readily agreed.  She walked back into the paddock and the next thing I knew, she was right back in the saddle.

Looking back over the past few weeks, I see so many dropped balls in terms of my writing.  I am have not finished journaling through Holley’s excellent ebook, I haven’t written more about adoption or taken time to research places to submit my writing.  There is a voice inside my head that says, “How are you ever going to achieve this dream if you let illness get you so off-track?”

But if I still myself and listen closely, there is another voice I can hear, although it is a bit quieter, and definitely more polite, and it says, “Yeah, you lost some days last month.  You dropped some balls.  That’s OK.  Just climb back on that horse and keep riding.”

So while there is not one thing I am going to stop delaying there is definitely one thing I am going to start doing again: writing everyday.