Transcending the Roles of a Lifetime

Oh, technology, you have failed me! Last night I spent more than two hours pouring my heart and soul into perhaps the most raw, honest, meaningful, therapeutic blog post I have ever composed - complete with tears and deep revelations. I was totally in the flow. After I had finished writing and attempted to add some pictures, Blogger froze, and I lost everything. It was the stillborn blog post, and there was nothing I could do to bring it back. More tears followed, for I knew I could never rewrite that post; it was way too powerful. It was so powerful that - once the tears stopped flowing and I regained my composure - I felt tremendous healing had taken place during the two-plus hours during which I labored with it. Apparently it was only meant for me in its original form. Although I had lost the writing, I had gained the experience and wisdom. And then I set to work on rewriting it in its new form. I hope some of the original energy will be transmitted through these words.

Since my mother's diagnosis of advanced Stage IV pancreatic cancer about six weeks ago, I have been reflecting on the mother-daughter connection, which is one of the most complicated and conflicted of all human relationships. I have considered the pervasiveness of mother-blaming in our society and the effects it has on mothers and daughters. It seems mothers are expected to embody the impossible archetype of Mother and are not easily forgiven for being human and fallible. Mothers are blamed for making mistakes despite our best efforts and loving hearts. We are blamed for our children's troubles and unhappiness. Our words, glances, actions, and inaction can carry such weight and be easily misinterpreted and blown out of proportion, thus giving unintended messages a life of their own that leaves our children feeling fundamentally flawed.

But where there is pain, there is opportunity to heal, even if it takes decades.

My wedding day

Pancreatic cancer is a thief stealing my mother from me too soon. I feel very sad about the prospect of losing her, although when she is ready to let go, I will be a midwife for her and release her into the Light with my deepest blessing. Along with my husband, she is my best friend, the person I pick up the phone to call and share my news and feelings. But it wasn't always like that. Although I can only speak from my own experience, it seems daughters tend to develop by differentiating ourselves from our mothers - defining ourselves against, or apart from our magnified perception of our mother's shortcomings and flaws. In other words: "My mother is this; therefore I am not this." We exile all these unacceptable parts we associate with our mothers to what Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung called the shadow. They become baggage that we drag around perhaps for the bulk of a lifetime until (if we are fortunate) we awaken and reconcile the exiled parts, making room for them in our psyche and welcoming them with open arms, no longer threatened by or having an aversion to them.

The healing began for me when I became a mother and realized that theory and practice are two entirely different matters. Although theory can inform our practice, a little practice tends to upset a lot of theory and squelch feelings of superiority.

Four generations of eldest daughters

I have sat in therapists' offices with my own daughter and been the target of mother blaming. It was painful, surreal, and frustrating as hell. I left one therapist's office wounded to the core and sobbed the whole way home in response to the therapist's abrasive, misinformed treatment of me. I was coached to listen to my daughter's painful feelings and presumed to be the cause of them (or so it seemed). But it was a one-way street. And this is ultimately abusive to mothers and daughters alike, turning mothers into monsters (like the witches and evil stepmothers in fairy tales) and daughters into victims (damsels in distress waiting to be rescued). I believe in the importance of hearing and acknowledging children's feelings, and a listening presence characterized by deep empathy is as natural to me as breathing and has formed the foundation for my parenting and teaching. However, there is another piece that is equally important: A child needs to know that s/he is loved, despite any pain attributed to the mother's fallibility or resulting from the collision of the child's will with the mother's boundaries. The mother is human. She will not always please her children. She will make mistakes. She is not the fairy godmother with the magic wand who grants their every wish. Forgive her, for you will make mistakes, as well, when it is your turn to raise children. You will not always be your children's best friend and make them happy. Forgive her so you may forgive your future self and allow yourself to establish healthy limits with your children without feeling guilty for doing so. Above all, you are and always have been loved.

My mother as a child

I feel it is so important for children to know this. Your mother is human and doing the best she can. You are loved. As a teacher, I am constantly giving my students this message. When they complain about something their mother has done that has upset them, I listen to and reflect their feelings and then remind them that she did it because she loves them and is trying to keep them safe - which is almost always the case. I feel it is very important for children to hear this, especially if the father is unable to support, or actively sabotages, the integrity of the mother-child relationship for whatever reason.

Back to my mother's illness...

When people ask me how I'm handling my mom's illness, I often reply by wondering out loud why it took so long to awaken to her beauty. At times, I regret all the wasted years when I could have enjoyed and appreciated her and reciprocated her love so much more than I did. But time is ultimately irrelevant. Awakening is the only thing that matters. Whether we do it years, months, days, or moments before death separates us from our mother, in the end the only thing that matters is that we did awaken. To awaken while our mother is still physically present is such a blessing - although I believe it's never too late.

So when the tears come - usually late at night when everyone else is asleep - they are a mixture of sorrow on the physical level and spiritual joy, for I am so grateful to have awakened. Perhaps the lyrics to my mother's favorite hymn say it best:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

It feels as if I have transcended the roles that have circumscribed my relationship with my mother all these years and have stepped across the threshold and entered her world with new eyes, able to appreciate the scenery I find there. I truly enjoy her company and presence, watching her favorite television shows with her, getting to know her friends, talking openly about important matters, laughing, listening to her play guitar, and running errands for her.

Now that my blinders have been removed by her illness, I finally can see how amazing and beautiful my mom is. I am in awe of her and love her more each day. Her essence shines through so strongly, like a bright sun that makes the details that differentiate us seem so trivial, small, and faded. I wish I could keep her around for many years to come. But perhaps a brush with death and the realization of our mother's mortality is what needs to happen in order for us to awaken, heal, and love more fully. Perhaps it is an initiation that awakens us to the truth of who our mother is as a human and spiritual being beyond the limiting roles we take on during our lifetime together.

My mom and me

I don't know how much time my mother and I have left together, only that our time will come to an end, for death is inevitable for each of us. It is perched on my shoulder and reminds me that every moment is precious. This time is an incredible gift, despite all the pain, and I must take full advantage of it because I cannot get it back to do over. Something like this reorders one's priorities. The advice I get from others who have traveled this path (as each of us will in time) is to spend as much time as I can with my mom now and not let other stuff get in the way. Make the time, and take the time. Be prepared by having my day-to-day affairs in order as much as possible so I can drop everything and be with her when I need to. And also remember to take care of myself.

This post is quite different from what I wrote last night. I am not attempting to interpret or invent psychological theory but to communicate how I am reconciling my own experience with my mother's mortality in hopes that sharing may benefit others. I apologize for any overgeneralizations I might have made about the mother-daughter dynamic (as I'm sure there are other paths up this mountain) and also don't mean to exclude males.

Grief has opened the floodgates of my heart, tears and poetry flowing. In closing, I offer a spiritual poem that wrote itself through me one night (and which is the only way I can account for the word fealty, which I have never used in my life but insisted on being written and not edited out):

MOTHER

The god and goddess
Become mortal
Hearts of glass shattering
Spilling a lifetime's worth of tears.

When it comes to a close
We bow deeply
And thank one another
For playing these roles
With such fealty.

It happens to each in turn:
Girl becomes mother
Set up to be knocked down
No matter
Never meaning any harm
Nor deserving such blame.

She removes the mask,
Hands it down
And all is beauty and love.
Really, that is all there ever was
When you see through
The impossible mantle
Of Mother.

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 © Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material, including all text and photos, without express and written permission from this blog’s author/owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography (www.riverblissed.blogspot.com) with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Opportunities for Practice

This morning, my husband woke me with the following words: "I know you want to get some sleep, but you might want to look out the window. It's one of those mornings." And it certainly was. Within minutes, I was walking through a frosted world waiting for the sun to burst through the clouds and play with the ice crystals that formed from last night's fog.

It took an hour and a half before the rising sun intersected with a patch of blue sky, but I was determined to be there and ready when it happened. I had plenty of time to walk around and consider the scenery and angles I wanted to photograph.

It was a cold morning, and at times I wished the clouds would hurry up and move out of the way. But then I'd take a deep breath and remind myself that this is a perfect opportunity to practice. To meditate.

After decades of practicing on and off, I have come to understand meditation quite simply as the act of bringing awareness back from the thinking mind to the spaciousness of the present moment. You catch yourself again and again, bring your mind back, and work on strengthening that response so it becomes more instinctive and immediate. Meditative awareness offers freedom from the tyranny of thought.

I couldn't do anything to speed up the clouds, so I had some choices, as we all do:

• Give up and go home
• Be agitated and discontented with the present moment while waiting for it to change
• Embrace the moment, and love what's already here.

You can complain about life not meeting your expectations, about all the misery in the world, about the present moment not being as you want it to be. Or you can find something to love, here and now. You can have a peaceful, joyful heart despite it all.

I have had a lot of opportunity for practice lately. When the house is still at night or I'm alone without any distractions, my parents' suffering often arises in my mind. I think about how very unfair it is that such good, kind people can receive such cruel blows from life. Pancreatic cancer sucks. My mom is worn out and in pain much of the time. She hasn't been able to do the things she loves. I realize the importance of acknowledging, allowing, and releasing grief, and I know from experience that grief is hard, physical work.

But this will not stop me from searching for beauty. From spending more than two hours outdoors on a frosty morning waiting for the moment when the light finally shines through and transforms the world into a luminous wonderland. Kahlil Gibran's words from The Prophet resonate: "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." In fact, the sorrow only fuels my desire to find and share joy and beauty.

Grief is energy that feels like a wave crashing through me. But I'm realizing that grief is not the same thing as sorrow. Grief is physical. Tears flow. Like shells and stones that wash up as waves crash against the shore, grief often gives rise to sadness and sorrow - which can be perpetuated by the egoic, thinking mind. Once the wave of grief energy passes, I can choose whether to focus on thoughts of deprivation or gratitude. I can feel sadness for my mom's suffering and for everything her cancer is stealing from us. I can continue to think sad thoughts for as long as I want. But those thoughts will not change her situation. They will only keep me awake at night and leave me feeling tired the next day - and less present and able to do the things that will make a difference. So instead of feeding the sorrow, I've found that once the grief wave passes through, I can breathe into my heart center and transform grief into gratitude. Gratitude for having such loving parents who have helped me to become who I am today. Gratitude for having awakened to how amazing and beautiful my parents are while there is still time to repay their love and kindness and enjoy their company.

It's all the same: Impatience for the sun to shine, grieving my mother's illness, etc., etc., etc. It's all an opportunity to practice returning to the spaciousness of the present moment and discovering the gifts waiting to be noticed and received.

While waiting for the sun to shine this morning, I found so much beauty when I decided to take a look around and expand my awareness beyond waiting and focusing on what was missing from the moment. The same can also be done when a loved one has a serious illness. Every moment is an opportunity to live and love more fully. Every moment offers a gift.

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The photographs in this blog and in my Flickr photostream are available for purchase as prints or cards through my Etsy shop by selecting a "custom print" in whatever size you prefer and indicating either the name of the print or the blog post and order in which it appears. 

 © Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material, including all text and photos, without express and written permission from this blog’s author/owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography (www.riverblissed.blogspot.com) with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Cooking up Some Memories

I just got home from dropping my son off at play rehearsal and entered a house that smelled just like my grandmother's house did when we arrived for a visit and a fresh, welcoming pot of vegetarian goulash was warm on the stove.

What a happy, comforting feeling!

Today is my grandmother's birthday. She would have been 95, which makes it the fourth year that she has not been physically present for her birthday celebration. We sat around enjoying "Great Grandma's Goulash" and sharing memories of her. It looked just like her goulash and smelled just like it, too. I thought it tasted just like it, although my son insisted that - although it's really close - next time I must buy the brand of tomato soup that she used, to make it completely authentic...even though some of the ingredients in it make me shudder.

Isn't it incredible how powerful smells are in recreating an atmosphere that makes you swear your dearly beloved relative or friend just left the room for a moment and could walk back in any second? As much as we want to remember how someone looked or sounded, sometimes it's certain smells that bring them back to us most poignantly. The aroma of a familiar meal cooking can be one of the closest experiences to being in that person's actual physical presence.

For Christmas, my mother-in-law gave each of her children a beautiful, homemade recipe album that is a real work of heart.

The recipe album - which is perhaps best described as her culinary memoirs - includes not only the recipes themselves (handwritten on index cards) but also typed narratives, old photos, and notes that provide the context within which the meals were shared.

For her last birthday, I gave my own daughter a large binder of favorite recipes that featured many she enjoyed as a child. It wasn't as artful or narrative as my mother-in-law's gift, but it was very important to me to pass the recipes along to Jasmine.

My mother-in-law and I both love to cook, and one thing we both know is that you can cook up someone's presence by making foods they used to either serve or request. I think that is why it was so important to both of us to pass down our most treasured recipes to the next generation. For example, I have always remembered my vegetable jambalaya recipe as the last meal my former father-in-law had a taste for before he died. Some part of him exists within that recipe simply because he loved it and requested it when nothing else appealed to him. It was a way in which I cared for and nourished him and is a vehicle of love.

My grandmother's presence is invoked magically by making her goulash and a couple other recipes I'm so glad I had the foresight to ask her for while she was still alive. She would keep the ingredients on hand, and if we called to say we were going to visit, she'd have a batch ready by the time we arrived. My mom's signature dish is her macaroni and cheese. My mother-in-law's might be her creamed onions. Mine is probably baked ziti with two sauces: red and white. But at another time, it might have been my mom's tuna noodle casserole or my Mexican pie or tofu pot pie - or perhaps the "love soup" I traditionally make when someone is sick or the Christmas Eve menu I make to accompany our favorite Christmas movies. When I think of foods from my childhood, Chocolate Crinkle cookies from the ubiquitous Betty Crocker's Cooky Book come to mind. Although I haven't made them in decades, I'm certain that mixing together the ingredients would bring me back to making the cookies with my mom in the kitchen of my childhood home. Our spirit - and memories of happy times together - live on in the recipes we leave behind. In the delicious fragrance of vanilla extract being measured into a teaspoon.

My refusal to buy the soup laden with high-fructose corn syrup that my grandmother used to make her signature goulash got me thinking about what gives these special foods their magic. Must they be recreated authentically? Can you substitute an ingredient and still make it "work," or is that cheating? My son admonished me for tweaking my grandmother's recipe to make it more healthful, explaining that it's only a once-a-year indulgence, so keep it real for Pete's sake! Cooking such special recipes conjures comforting memories. I am talking about comfort food in the fullest sense of the term - food that appealed to everyone's diverse tastes, brought us together, and made us feel content and happy. My baked ziti is not what I tend to make when I'm hungry or want something healthful to eat. It's the dish everyone requests for family get-togethers, and it nourishes in a different way. It makes you feel loved! Like my grandmother with her goulash, I make sure to have baked ziti ingredients on hand so I can make it on the spur of the moment if my daughter calls to say she's visiting. (And of course, she gets to take home the leftovers.)

Family recipes and the stories around them are an important, intimate thread of family history. Which ones will you share? Which recipes will you want to acquire from loved ones in order to conjure happy, comforting memories?

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 © Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material, including all text and photos, without express and written permission from this blog’s author/owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography (www.riverblissed.blogspot.com) with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

A Very Special Recording

I just came across the most awesome idea and simply must share!

Since learning of my mom's cancer diagnosis right before Christmas, I have been very busy with "mom" projects. One involved scanning lots of pictures from old photo albums, including one that belonged to my grandmother that contained lots of photos of my mom as a baby, a child, and a young woman prior to meeting my dad. Scanning proved to be a fairly time-consuming process, and I had a deadline I was trying to meet (the end of the holiday break), so I sped up the process by taking photographs of pictures, using a tripod. So far, I have digital images of nearly 200 old photos of my mom organized in an iPhoto album.

I was talking with a friend in the midst of scanning and photographing images, and he mentioned the idea of making a screen recording with my mom using QuickTime (a Mac application). A screen recording captures images that are shown on a computer screen while simultaneously recording live voices using the computer's internal microphone. The end product is a movie file containing both images and sound. It is very simple to do, and the possibilities are endless!

For example, my friend described to me how he and his parents explored significant places via the website, Instant Google Street View at http://www.instantstreetview.com/ and recorded the screen images along with their live conversation about those places. The website allows you to navigate and view certain locations as if you're taking a walk down the street. (My kindergarten students love to take a virtual walk around town on this website and see all the familiar places.) This technology makes it possible, for example, to record yourself exploring and talking about childhood neighborhoods, places you traveled to, etc. I love the idea.

The night before school resumed and my mom began chemo, I brought my laptop to my parents' house, and we sat around it and made a screen recording of the photos of my mom in my iPhoto album and our voices discussing each picture. It was wonderful. I learned so much about my mom's life and my parents' life together as we looked at the photos onscreen. Some incredible stories came out of this 50-minute conversation, and everything is captured in a video that can be copied for family members. I am so grateful to my friend, Sam, for giving me this idea. 

   
As I mentioned above, it is very easy to do this on a Mac. Here's how:

1. Open the QuickTime Player application.
2. Under the File menu, select "New Screen Recording."
3. Click on the down-pointed triangle to the right of the red dot, and select "Built-in Input: Internal Microphone.
4. Click on the triangle again, and select "Medium" Quality, which results in a good quality recording and a smaller (yet still very large) file size.
5. Click on the red dot to begin recording.
6. Create your recording by talking about what you're viewing on the screen. 
7. When you are finished, click on "Stop Recording" at the very top of the screen.

That's all there is to it. Movie files I create in this way are, by default, saved to my "Movies" folder.
To playback the movie, open the file, and click on the sideways triangle "play" icon.

As I mentioned above, the file size will be large. The 50-minute recording I made with my parents was 2.03 gigabytes. However, you can reduce the file size enormously by using the free app, "MPEG Streamclip" (Mac or Windows version) at http://www.squared5.com/ and following these instructions:

1. Open the app, and drag your movie file onto the workspace (five dots in a square icon). 
2. Under the File menu, select "Export to MPEG4." 
3. Set compression at H.264
4. Try 20% quality (which can be boosted if need be).
5. For Sound, select MPEG-4 AAC.
6. To the far right of Sound, select 128 kbps.
   
   
   

   

   
   

The above image shows the settings I used, and the resulting file was 140 MB. Then select "Make MP4."

If you'd like to make a DVD, you can drag the original (larger) movie file into an app such as iMovie (and then finish in iDVD).

I am so grateful for the technology that makes it possible to create keepsake recordings like this so easily. When I tried it with my parents, it was such a positive experience that I just wanted to tell everyone about it! It's something you can do by yourself, too, if the people around you aren't tech savvy and you'd like to make recordings about your own life.

Within the next couple weeks, I'd like to make the same kind of recordings with my dad, with photos from his life and of his ancestors, and maybe take a virtual tour of his hometown or even of the town in England where we visited relatives. He's always enjoyed taking us on car rides through his old stomping grounds, and this is a great way to have a more permanent record of the places, people, and stories that are woven together into the fabric of his life. I'd also like to make a screen recording of my parents' favorite places in Hawaii. I can't wait!

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The photographs in this blog and in my Flickr photostream are available for purchase as prints or cards through my Etsy shop by selecting a "custom print" in whatever size you prefer and indicating either the name of the print or the blog post and order in which it appears. 

 © Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material, including all text and photos, without express and written permission from this blog’s author/owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography (www.riverblissed.blogspot.com) with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

When Conditions Are Right

A few weeks ago, I saw something on my way to work that I have not been able to forget. It was an extraordinarily beautiful sunrise scene in which a huge amount of mist was rising off the river, and the surrounding, frost-covered trees were illuminated with mist-diffused sunlight. Every morning since then, I would wake up and wonder if this would be the day when all the conditions would come together at the right time and reproduce the effect I longed for. I even did a Google Images search for a photo that came closest to the image I held in my mind and looked at it frequently to remind myself that such astonishing beauty does, in fact, exist in this world.

A few mornings seemed promising. I'd defrost the car and head out to explore along the river. But each time there was an ingredient missing. Perhaps the weather needed to be a little colder or there was too much cloud cover.

But some days - and you never know when it will happen - everything comes together, and if you go out in search of your vision, you are quite likely to find it. You are at an advantage if you can read the signs and know when the elements and conditions are in the process of aligning.

This morning was one such morning. After a long string of overcast days that included two days of blizzard conditions, the sky was more or less clear when I woke up. I got up just in time to witness a colorful, early sunrise.

We had been in the clutches of a brutal cold spell for a couple days, and overnight the temperature dropped to -25 degrees (F) with windchill. The tree branches were covered with ice crystals, and plenty of mist was rising from the river. I went outside and heated up the car so I could be where I needed to be when the sun came up, despite it being -10 degrees!

I took pictures at the place where I saw the awesome scene before, and sure enough, the sunlight playing with the mist rising from the dam was a sight to behold.

However, I felt that more awaited me elsewhere as the sun continued to rise. I felt drawn to a different location and got back in the car and drove down the road a bit. What I found there was astonishingly beautiful.

On my way home, though, I sensed it wasn't yet time to return home and allowed my intuition to guide me to the other side of the river. I didn't have a particular destination in mind but was curious what the view was like from the other side. Again, it was picturesque enough, and I pulled to the side of the road to snap a few photos. A few minutes later, I was about to turn around and head home once again, but something inside me insisted that I keep going. I let intuition be my guide and soon found myself facing a breathtaking scene very similar to the vision I had kept in my heart for weeks.

Some days everything just comes together like that. You have a clear vision of what you want, have done your best to prepare yourself, and go in search of it when you sense the conditions are right. Some days, a necessary element might be absent - until that one day when everything is in alignment, and you're there in the moment, aware and ready! You are in the right place at the right time...even after a string of overcast days that feel as if they will never end.

While waiting for the conditions to come together and manifest my vision, I connected with whatever beauty I could find in the existing conditions. I did this in order to strengthen the habit of connecting with goodness rather than allowing the gray skies of the here-and-now to dampen my spirit. This, I feel, is critical for any warrior of light. In addition, I read a book that helped me to use my camera more effectively. I put every bit of new advice into practice as I read along so that when the time was right, I hopefully would remember: 1) that various settings exist, and 2) how to access them in the moment.

When it was too cold or stormy to go outside, I turned my attention to frost paintings on the window.

(I see a phoenix flying through the sky in the frost picture above. It even has an eye, a beak, and textured feathers!)

Every morning, I was excited to see Mother Nature's window masterpieces. It gave me a reason to get up in the morning, even as I held onto a higher vision.

Frost painting of snow-covered trees during a nighttime blizzard - in my opinion

I believe that you must connect with something beautiful or meaningful even when the present atmosphere appears bleak. There is always something worthwhile you can attune to, and doing so strengthens the habit of noticing and cultivates awe. One day, noticing and intuition will direct you to where you need to be. Conditions are right, and you show up and manifest your vision.

Now there is another image I hold in my heart. It came to me in a dream: Ice-covered willow branches bathed in golden light from the setting sun. It was the most sublime sight I'd ever experienced.

The way I see it, there are at least two kinds of people. Free-spirited artists can hold a vision like that in their awareness, envision it clearly, and render it with paint, pencil, ink, or whatever their chosen medium may be. They can manifest their vision without waiting for external conditions to fall into place, for they experience themselves as co-creators with Life. They know when a vision has been fulfilled and a work of art is complete - and when inspiration comes, they begin a new piece with the same passion. True artists don't cling to past accomplishments. They keep moving along the path of their vision.

And then there are those who don't know how to manifest a vision artistically because they never learned how. Perhaps they were never interested in learning, didn't think they had enough talent, or simply couldn't make time in their busy life to develop certain skills and mindsets. These people are cautious planners who avoid taking unnecessary risks. They wait for the conditions to be right before setting out to manifest their vision.

I think both types of people can ultimately manifest what they hold most dear. But it involves paying attention and taking action at some point. You must do something different than what you have been doing all along and take a step out of your comfort zone (much like when I ventured outdoors on a frigid morning). The important thing is to hold on to that vision and let its energy fill you, guide you, and pull you through each day. Allow it to keep you engaged with life and to direct your course.

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The photographs in this blog and in my Flickr photostream are available for purchase as prints or cards through my Etsy shop by selecting a "custom print" in whatever size you prefer and indicating either the name of the print or the blog post and order in which it appears. 

 © Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography, 2012-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material, including all text and photos, without express and written permission from this blog’s author/owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Susan Meyer and River Bliss Photography (www.riverblissed.blogspot.com) with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.