I took this photograph this spring.  When the peonies are not blooming, I still want to see peonies.  So I have the images from this spring set to scroll as my screensaver.  This one caught my eye today.  I thought about unpeeling, about layers, about what it takes to get to the center of something.  My daughter is missing.  We are trying to find her.  Finding or even approaching requires the delicacy that it takes for this flower to open itself without disturbing the dew on each of its petals.

How to do that when I am not feeling gifted at that kind of grace and subtlety?  I want to come in like Ironman or Matt Damon’s character with the exoskeleton in Elysium.  Violent and merciless with good intentions.  I do not want to wait for the right moment, be politic or nice.

Waiting has never been my thing and this process is like sitting in an empty waiting room for months at a time.  Like standing in line when you know that they have already run out of whatever it is you are queued up for.  Like not being able to wake up from a horrible dream.

Back to the flower.  My mail from Abraham this morning had a clue:  Appreciation and self-love are the most important tools that you could ever nurture. Appreciation of others, and the appreciation of yourself is the closest vibrational match to your Source Energy of anything that we’ve ever witnessed anywhere in the Universe.

I can appreciate the picture of this flower and my memory of it and I can appreciate my cat Maggie pressing into me and my granddaughter’s exuberant smile and her mother’s/my daughter’s sweetness. I can appreciate my movement as I rehearsed today, and the feeling of my horse standing next to me, and my friend’s generosity and I can even appreciate my willingness to write more than I think maybe I should here.  And in all of those little appreciations, there is a little opening, a little softening, a little breath.