Harvest

When I think of October and think orange, Halloween, fallen leaves, a chill in the air and yes, the harvest.

I think of black cats and witches, of trick or treating and laughter.

I want to give my kids those same warm (chilled?) feelings in the years to come as we build memories and create traditions. I want our house to have a candy dish full of candy corn as the center piece on the kitchen table and to remember smelling crispy leaves on the ground as they walk to the bus.

I want them to cherish memories of us carving pumpkins, the cold goo that's inside the pumpkins sliming their hands.

I want to harvest all these things and hold them close as we enter this coming month.

I want to throw away all the negativity that I sometimes let bog me down. I want to build my confidence using the last two months' work and continue building upon it in the coming months. I want to harvest all those good feelings I've created within myself and weed out the bad that I've been tending for so many years.

I want to stop being so hard on myself and reap the benefits of being good to myself.

I want to dress in orange and black the entire week before Halloween and roast pumpkin shaped marshmallows over a fire. I want to admire the carved out jack-o-lanterns each night before bed, glowing from within from the light of candles.

Today, we hung a bat from our tree and a ghostly ghoul from our porch. We strung a spider on the rail that leads up the front steps. We bought some mini pumpkins and put them around our rock garden and some glow in the dark skulls that are scattered around our tree stumps.

And I stopped myself from saying something negative to Tom, something that made me look and sound bad. Yes, I thought it, but I didn't say it out loud and that's a start.

It will take a good long time before the negatives thoughts go away completely. In fact, they may never go away completely but the more I push them away, the farther they'll go and even if they're always there, in the periphery, I can continue to ignore them, to not give them power.

I can continue to harvest the good. That's the important thing. That's what this October is going to be about for me. Reaping the rewards of the hard work I've put in during August and September.

I can be good to myself for another month. I can think about how great it feels to be 28 pounds down from where I started on August 1st without thinking about how awful it is that I let myself get to that starting point. The starting point isn't the important part, it's just the start. The important part is now, the journey from the start.

And I want to concenrate on that, the journey, rather than where I started. I'm not even thinking about the end point yet. No. This is going to take some time, for the physical changes as well as the emotional. But if I'm kind to myself even as I take one month at a time, I can make those changes.

Remember, I can do anything, absolutely anything, for a month.