Genevieves Everyday Miracles: The Miracle of Hope
My heart was moved to write about hope this past week when I was faced over and over with the difficult circumstances of family and friends dealing with tough stuff.
My heart was moved to write about hope this past week when I was faced over and over with the difficult circumstances of family and friends dealing with tough stuff.
There are a few days out of every year that I always look forward to, and the Love Ride is one of them. For 31 years now Southern California’s premier one-day fundraising motorcycle ride has happened rain or shine. And for all of those years, organizers have raised thousands of dollars for a variety of great causes.
In order to grow emotionally and spiritually, it’s important to look back, as hard as it is, at behaviors, routines and cycles that have produced less than desirable outcomes in our lives. While we don’t want to dwell on the past, we do want to recognize patterns that are no longer working so we can start to form new fruit-bearing behaviors.
At some point in our lives—if we’re introspective enough, or if we desire change in our lives—we’ll take stock of our past and present so as to affect our future. I’ve been engaging in this exercise in small, manageable doses all my life, but never more than now, since hitting the milestone age of 50 in March.
Day two of my incredible adventure began with my fearless guides pulling up in Shaun’s 4×4 pick-up truck named “Sweaty Betty.” I was going to get a firsthand look at some of the sacred places on Arizona’s Navajo Indian Reservation.
When two full blooded Navajo men, William Yazzie and his son-in-law Shaun Martin, crashed Michael Lichter’s Art Show at the Buffalo Chip in Sturgis, South Dakota, last year and came over and introduced themselves to me, I immediately knew I was in the presence of kindred spirits. But I had no idea of the magnitude that the experience of meeting them was about to unfold.
No matter how long you’ve been riding a motorcycle, it’s likely that at one time or another you’ve found yourself riding with a very tight grip on the handlebars. Most times it’s when fear takes over or something triggers your anxiety level to go up.
It’s been almost a month since I wrote my last column; I had wanted to write this one sooner, but I kept getting distracted. Ahhh…distractions. The title of this column. It seems the time I devote to spiritual matters and the “care and tending of my soul” (I heard that once and loved it) is often low on the totem pole of my daily priorities.
I’m tired. Yes, tired in so many ways. Physically, my strong lithe body has been whipped as my hormones rebalance themselves to a new normal. But I’m tired mentally too. And I never thought I’d say any of this…
I turn 50 this year. It’s not that I dread the big 5-0, it’s just for the last two years leading up to this milestone age, I’ve been going through a spiritual transformation. In the old days, it was called a mid-life crisis.