Where is beauty in my immediate surroundings, right now?

I lie in my bed. It’s nearly 11 a.m. and I’ve been awake mostly lying in bed since 8:00 a.m. except for preparing my cat’s medically needed meal. I’ve gotten into a daily rut for a long time of lying in bed sometimes til the afternoon, feeling so alone, isolated and fearful. Not from COVID, except to the extent its social/economic impact has so fundamentally altered everyone’s world. But just depression I’ve grappled with completely alone without any other people in my life and with an out of the blue recent diagnosis of an extremely rare and aggressive form of cancer for which I’ve had, as turns out, very successful surgery and feel comfortable with my long-considered decision not to, at 70 yrs of age and devoid of any human connections, have any chemo/radiation. Surgery and final path report went so well that my oncologist is actually ok with my choice.

I say all this as a prelude to answering this question bcuz it’s been very, very much like this for a very, very long time bcuz of intense and prolonged life-situation stressors which have zapped all desire to stay alive, participate in life and so each day I’d lie in bed for hours grappling with the internal anguis fear and self loathing for being like this. Having shame. Fighting fiercely against this insidious malaise and then ever so slowly learning from different meditation sources from this site that struggling to push it away only pulls me in further akin to what happens if one is in quicksand.

So slowly I’ve been learning to accept, embrace and be grateful for the wisdom of my amazing body and the healing message it has been trying to get thru to me by sending this depression, this forced time off to heal emotionally and energetically from years of living engulfed unknowingly in the place of fight flight freeze due to pro bono helping/protecting others thru private solo litigation practice.

In learning to accept my current state of depression and anxiety as an emergency healing response of my body and to stop seeing it as personal failure/shameful I’ve learned about gratitude for what Life brings us and to work *with* it to ultimately heal.

So today, I will again come here Gratefulness.org. I will open my fearful and armored heart just a little tiny bit more. I will accept what unbidden tears may come and not push them away as being weak or feeling sorry for my ‘worthless’ self; I will honor and embrace my Self’s need to feel grief knowing in that, in trusting my divinely-engineered body’s wisdom in what it needs to heal the life long, bone-deep traumas of constant, recurrent, life-threatening childhood neglect. And the blessing to have the time now to trust the Process and let it unfold and be gentle and loving towards myself instead of critical and emotionally bullying.
So, today, in my surroundings and my slowly emerging clearer perceptions I do not see the bright sunny blue sky with puffy white clouds of yesterday, I see cold, wet, blustery remnants of winter’s passing, grey-white skies and the naked trees pressed pressed against them AND I perceive the deep just different beauty of that. AND I see my closest, dearest, most innocent and devoted family members/BFFs cuddled against me in bed, my awesome, affectionate calico cat and my standard poodle

And this is the first morning in as long as I can recall since dealing with this emotional state that I have been to truly perceive the beauty that is constantly there no matter how it may be obscured or made intensely opaque by life circumstances, pain, dark clouds instead of sunshine and puffy-cloud laden blue skies. All is needed for wholeness and all is a gift just in different ways.