Where is Your Solid Ground?

Where is Your Solid Ground?

I was feeling so under-the-weather.  I am rarely sick but this flu I caught after Christmas really laid me low.  By day ten I was really discouraged.  All that ginger/cayenne/lemon tea I’d sipped, all the rest and all the “going with the flow” was beginning to feel pointless.  I felt worse on Day ten than on day nine!  I’m not a very good patient. I lack the integral ingredient: patience.

Still I was running about town, my husband chauffeuring me, doing my necessary Friday things; groceries, banking, post office, and stopped to meet a friend for coffee.  My husband and our friend were having a conversation that I was slowly zoning out of as I was sinking down in exhaustion into my booth.  It was then that my husband said something that pierced through my fog and caused me to take notice.

“You have to find that small piece of solid ground,” he said, “It’s there in all of us.”

The small piece of solid ground!  Where was mine?  I’ve been all over the place, trying to be all things to all people for so much of my life that I’d lost sight of it.  I needed to find it again.

I did because I wasn’t going to extinguish the light on that day until I had.  I found it in my heart, in living out the thing that gives me life; writing.

I realized that as much as I want my life to be other than what it is [ Read: not the life of a mother who lost her son and struggles with her grief ] that is the reality.  As a blogger friend astutely observed in an email recently “I can’t imagine a moment going by that you don’t think of Alex.”   He’s right.  I can’t pretend it isn’t so.  It is. I can write cheery posts to pretend I’m doing better than I am but I’m not fooling you and I’m not being true to myself when I do that.  I can’t host happy parties when “happy” is so far, yet, from where I am.

As much as I want LFI to be a happy place, if I’m here I’m bound to bring us down and that’s not what I want for this porch.  What do I do about that?

I gave it some hard thought and of course, ended up back at the beginning staring at my original goals.  I want LFI to be a place where we gather to wrangle with the issues of life and wrestle them to the ground.

Solid ground.  Ground we find together.

Where is your solid ground?

photo credit: Dan Zen

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About The Author


I have always loved writing and community building. I’ve written a book about healing and happiness, The Happy Place, as well as a Community Building book, Sounding the Drum: Community Building in the Digital Age,both available at any Amazon store. I’ve been through life changes that I thought were the end of my world, but I’m still here. You never know what will happen next. Isn’t that what makes life interesting?