Brainstorm Overload

BRAINSTORM

Too many days of brainstorming on too many topics have left me in a fog.  

I’m exhausted.

My body aches.  

My body is in an inflammatory flare.  

My brain truly is in a fog.

Thursday, I saw one of my doctors, actually my doctor’s physician assistant, as a follow-up for health problems I don’t want to even think about, let alone discuss.  I showed her my latest blood work, and I still see her face as she stared at my inflammatory markers.  Yes, if she had been an emoticon, she’d have been the one with the great big eyes. Then, she composed herself and said, “We must get you into one of our rheumatologists.” “We need some more blood work.  We need another _______ study for _______.”  I walked out of her office with a fistful of papers for medical testing.  

I felt so grateful for her compassion and need to hear me and see me and for putting her best medical background to work to understand what is going on in my body.  There is much hope that comes from finding a new partner in brainstorming about what is going on in my body.  This body of mine that suffers from being attacked by autoimmune disease needs all the help it can get.  

Brainstorming is where I live most days.

I deal with a rare form of hair loss called Frontal Fribrosing Alopecia, so I am always brainstorming on ways to minimize, live with, afford the fixes for this devastating and disfiguring disease that has robbed me of my hair, my identity, my health.

One autoimmune disease leads to another.  It seems my body is out to acquire more than autoimmune diseases than it already has.

Brainstorming on ways to deal with health problems, healthier living, family problems, and life in general always seems to be going on around here. 

 Who has time or energy for brainstorming about writing?  

I brainstorm on ways to cope.  

I pray.

I read my Bible.  

I journal.

I write “to do” lists. 

I brainstorm until my brain says, 

No more storms in the brain.  Take a break.

Breaks are good.

The fog will lift.

The sun always comes through when one is in a storm, in a fog.

I will feel better.

I have to let the brainstorming go for a bit. 

My brain needs a rest, so does my body.  

Morning ~ A Reflection

Morning

 _{That song, an old hymn made popular in the 70’s, is running through my mind, “Morning is Breaking.”}  

_{We do not often think of the words morning and breaking together,  and yet the two do belong together.  The sun comes up at dawn to create a division, a split, between two very different parts of the twenty-four hours each of us are given. We go from darkness to light in dramatic fashion at daybreak.}

_{This break, the division between darkness and daylight, speaks of the hope, the promise, the freshness that is ours each new day.}

_{The painting that I have included in this post is called “Dancing with Dawn.”  I purchased this painting as a retirement gift to myself.  Looking forward to all the days where I hoped to sleep in, I jokingly said this would be the only depiction of dawn that I would see after I retired.}  

_{There were those mornings where I leisurely read my newspapers while I sipped my coffee, or I frittered away the morning by scrolling through Facebook, or Instagram, or I read blogs.  Then the morning would be gone, and I would feel as if the day were wasted.}  

_{Mornings are a gift not to be wasted.  I think of the artist that created this glorious rendition of daybreak.  He did not fritter away the morning.  He had to have gotten up very early to go to this spot, a spot I know well, to set up his easel in preparation for painting.  His time of creating a thing of beauty was best done in light of early morning.  The name of the painting denotes how he approached morning.  He said he was dancing with dawn.}  

_{The two artists I am thinking of today, the writer of the hymn “Morning is Breaking,” and the painter of my “Dancing with Dawn,” both saw morning as a time to be fully awake, a time not to be missed, a time to create.} 

 _{Each morning is a first.  It is a time of newness.  There is a break between the old things of yesterday, and newness of the day before us each morning.  Each morning brings us a reminder that God’s mercies are new every morning.}  

_{There a sense of the holiness of each new day when one arises early in the morning to see the day break.  As the song says, mornings are “God’s re-creation of the first day.”}