Drops of Inspira

 Friday night was not a good one. I spectacularly blew it. I had the biggest meltdown in the history of this month. In this year.  Now, the meltdown was stupid. I will admit that. The house was a wreck, but that doesn't justify a meltdown. During the meltdown, I reached out to a few friends via text and asked for prayer. Besides praying for me, one of them coached me through some breathing exercises and told me to step outside and just breathe. Everything within me wanted to say that it wouldn't work, but I grabbed a plate of food and marched myself outside and sat down at our picnic table and ate. Sometime during the stillness, I looked up and saw this moon. It was stunning. Wreathed in rainbows and clouds, it lit up the night sky. And as I gazed at the moon, everything else subsided and I was able to breathe. I could hear the rumbling of a few cars passing. Frogs began to sing somewhere in the forest and the neighbor's dog barked a few times. The stillness and the relativ...

 Hello! Thank you for joining me for another Monday! Today I'm discussing another area I feel woefully inadequate to write about: being thankful in every season.  When I was thinking about which aspect of thankfulness to write about this week, I really hoped to write about something a little more cliché. Something more happy. Something easier to write about. But as I thought more about it, the theme of being thankful in every season kept coming up. Songs about it kept playing on my Spotify. It came up in conversations with my friends. It came up in my prayer journal early, early this morning (like 2:30 early. Hello insomnia.). And it came up this morning. Being thankful is easier when the sun is out, the sky is blue and things are going our way. It's easier when there is plenty to eat and when our bank accounts aren't running on empty. It's a lot harder when we're sinking under depression, running from anxiety, sobbing in choking grief, our pantries are running empt...

 Hello! I know last week's post was a bit heavy, so this week, I wanted to tackle another angle of patience that is near and dear to my heart: Patience and How it Affects Mental Health. If you've followed my blog for awhile, you know that I struggle a lot with both anxiety and depression. As a kid, I never thought I would be dealing with either, but it happened.  Lately, I've been fascinated by just how much impatience takes a toll on the mind and body.  Did you know that impatience can raise your blood pressure, raise your cortisol levels and adrenaline? When these are raised, your body enters a fight or flight response and your stress levels raise. When your stress levels rise, your body is prone to physical illness as well as mental illness. Many illnesses start in the mind. It controls more than we realize. And no, I'm not saying it's all in your head. That saying is one that has been going around for far too long in my opinion. It basically means that the sick ...

  Hello! I've been thinking a lot about water.  Everything and everyone needs water. At least, you do if you are a living organism and not something like a computer.  Recently, I noticed how much I need a humidifier. Without it, the autumn/winter season is hazardous. I wake up continually thirsty, dried out and miserable. Sometimes my eyes rebel and I open them to what feels like glass shards in my eyes. It's extremely inconvenient and painful. A humidifier,  however, makes everything better. Thinking about water made me think: What are we doing to water our lives? And if we are watering our lives (which we are in some way or other.), what are we watering our lives with? Because that matters too. What we put into our lives affects the output. I grew up with parents who listened to the news a lot. I didn't pay too much mind as a kid. It was mostly on in the car and it put me to sleep. But as I got older, the droning of words made sense and the words worried me. More t...

  Hello! Today is usually the day when I show a bit of poetry that was inspired by a prompt, but I'm going to do things a little differently. A few weeks ago I posted my first poetry anthology on Wattpad.com. If you aren't familiar with Wattpad, it's a free site that allows you to read and comment on other peoples' books and to post your own for others to read.  I've been on Wattpad for years, but only as a reader. Lately, a friend posted her own poetry on the site and it inspired me to post my own. So here is the cover (link below): The Shadow Wars by Julia Garcia The Shadow Wars is a poetry anthology of darkness, hope and my struggles with mental health. Trigger Warning: Some of the poems may contain allusions to self-harm. I've written these poems over a period of five or more years. Some of them I've posted here on the blog, so for those of you who have been around for a while, they might be familiar.  In life, there is darkness, but there is always ligh...