I'm watching the movie August Rush.  It's one of my all time favorites.  The music is beautiful.  Sometimes I hear music and it sounds nice.  And sometimes I FEEL music and I'm transported into another world.  And that other world is far away from finances, car problems, school work, addictions, laundry, grief, loss and pain.  In the movie, a boy is looking for his parents and his mom is looking for him and his dad is looking for his mom.  And they are brought together by the music they create.  Music is something so beyond anything I can explain or completely comprehend that hearing or even better, FEELING it gives me hope in God's greater plan for me.  It tells me there is something more than work and chocolate and dogs and coffee and Monday's and Friday's and summer and winter and worn-in jeans and high heal shoes.  There are some really great things in life and there are some really aweful things in life.  The hard part is going through the roller coaster of emotions along the way.  One of my best friends said she wished she "felt" things more like I do rather than being the level headed thinker I count on her to be.  Her words really stuck with me.  My life is such a series of chaotic escapades followed by attempts to clean up and balance my life that I didn't really think that it was a blessing to FEEL things so intensley. 

On the Myers-Briggs test in the THINKING vs FEELING area, I don't even have a touch of THINKING.  I'm all FEELING and for most of my life I have tried to control and squelch those feelings because a lot of them hurt too much.  Drinking alleviated the intesity of painful feelings, but they all came back in the morning, along with a hangover.  I've been hearing from my friends and therapist for the past few years that feeling my emotions again is a good thing and I have taken their word for it and I am better at it now than I have ever been, but I didn't think of it as a blessing.  For much of my life I have thought of it as a curse.  But as I'm moved by the depth of the brass and the strength of the strings and the steady, distant rythm of the tympany I can't deny the power of feeling music and passion and the smell of the ocean or the color of the fall leaves or the rush of water over my feet and hands in a stream, the wind blowing across my skin.  It's when I've shut down these feelings that the life seeped out of me and the depression pressed against me like a heavy blanket.

Maybe it's a good time to start embracing the gift God gave me to FEEL.  Not just the tough emotions I've been avoiding for years, but the inexpressibly deep and moving feelings I get when I hear the sound of something beautiful or see something brilliant or feel something warm and soft.  It gives new meaning to the advice my therapist gave me to stop trying to do things I wasn't made to do and start focusing on my gifts.  Sometimes it takes me awhile to get the message.  I'm going to go download some music onto my iTunes, climb into my warm blankets, smell my clean sheets and drift off to sleep thinking about the taste of my morning coffee.