Today's artwork and poem is about overthinking.
For myself (and most folks I know) uncertainty activates overthinking, and overthinking is how I try to control the turning wheel.
Sometimes that uncertainty is just a part of life.
Other times, it’s manufactured by my deeply ingrained self-doubt. I might know what I want, but a generalized lack of self-trust overrides any whisper of that knowing.
Either way, the result is the same: Hours / days / months of endless thought loops.
Either way, the path through is the same (courtesy of my therapist several years ago):
Thinking is not the solution, calming the body is.
The poem of the week is: “If I Can Follow My Heart”
Doubt grows like a thorn on this barely blossoming self-belief I’m poking & prodding under a microscope. Look - already wilting, already dying in the face of to-dos & never-haves I knew it wouldn't last, I knew it couldn’t stay against the graying guesswork, conjectures & projections of the past. It’s all too much. I’m finding this newness is too delicate for that. It needs to be cupped in the palms like water, gazed into softly and without demands , felt like a pulse, followed like a heartbeat… For if I can follow my heart it doesn’t matter if the path is wide or narrow, paved with gold or covered in mud if I can follow my heart, I will hear the birds sing the dawn into being its sun pulling me forward if I can follow my heart, fading blue ribbons & nutmeg pies fragrant in deep ditches won’t lull me back to sleep if I can follow my heart, a new way of being unfurls before me and my fear becomes a shadow behind me, growing ever smaller.