MAY 2025

LIFE | LOVE | LOSS

“Just like May’s flowers, your progress starts beneath the surface.” 

– Msg Words.com

CREATE

“The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself.”

• Deepak Chopra

If you have been reading this newsletter for a while you already know about my great affinity for flowers, plants and all blooming things!  I think Mother Nature is amazing!! So, as you can imagine this time of year excites me.  Watching new growth and colors erupt from the earth is so magical.  I am in a new home so it’s a fun discovery to see what is growing in the yard.  There are gorgeous peonies about to burst their pods, irises budding, tulips have come and gone.  I love the creation and return of perennials. 

This month we get an extra chance to celebrate Mom’s.  Mother’s Day is coming early this year.  I love the gift of life that is given to women, the chance to create life.  Bringing breath to the unborn, then getting to love, nurture, teach, and help our babies grow and learn for a lifetime.  It too is a precious and magical thing.  Being a wife and mother are two of my favorite things to ‘be’.  They bring me great purpose and joy. 

I have so much appreciation for my children.  Who they are and  the gift they are to me. Taking care of my own mom in her later years, watching Dementia and Alzheimer’s steal her mind and faculties makes me more and more aware of the gift of lucid time, of how precious creating lasting memories are.  She knows who I am now and again.  Other times I think she just doesn’t as she looked me in the eye and asked me if I would call one of her kids to come give her a ride home.  Nothing quite prepares you for that moment of non-recognition.  I should have asked which kid then called one of my siblings!  I just said yes, I would call one of them to get her.  My funny husband often calls me while sitting two feet away when she wants to leave and says, “Your mom wants a ride!”

Each year for Mother’s Day when my pup Joey was alive, he and my husband would get me a new perennial to plant in the yard.  Then I would get to see it grow and bloom remembering them.  It hurts my heart that Joey isn’t here to see where we live.  That he can’t buy me something to put in the ground.  He has been gone seven and a half years and still sometimes it takes my breath away.  WHY IS HE GONE?  He should be here.  Mother’s Day like so many other things in life, love and loss have all the dichotomies of opposites.  I am SO grateful for my two living children.  So grateful I could be a mom at all.  I see and hear of so many women struggling with fertility. 

Creating life is a gift, one I cherish.  I also must be honest that celebrating Mother’s Day when you have a child who is gone HURTS.  I want him HERE.  I want to be able to hug him, know who he would be now.  Joey died a month before his 16^th birthday.  He was fifteen, just a boy.  Who would Joey the man be?  I never get to know.  That makes my heart ache, my throat tight and eyes sting with tears for what could have been.  I think he would have liked my daughter Carlie’s husband.  They have similar senses of humor.  I think he would have picked a great flowering bush for the new house.  In fact, we bought a lilac and planted it with some of his ashes.  So, he gets too ‘live’ in its blooms each year.  I look forward to watching it grow.

I invite you to find ways to create something in your life that adds meaning to this month.  What will bring you joy, peace, satisfaction?  Do that!

Mental Health Moment:

“Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.”

• David Richo

This month I invite you to sit with your face to the sun and bare feet in the ground. 

Create time to be outside even for a few minutes a day.  Draw the sunlight into your mind, body and heart.  Let it warm and relax you from the inside out.

Let the warmth spread through you.  Look up a short sun meditation while you do this, there are many great ones online! 

Let the light into your life.  Open your blinds, turn off the overhead lights, use natural light more!

Create more time in the light and see how it impacts your mind!

All my best, Genna