the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

I still have my Europe posts ready but have not been able to share my reflections since the last few months of grad school, which I saved a while ago. So here it is !:

Things I have been learning about Yahweh:

• Lately I have decided to be doing my morning quiet time again, although not always everyday with scripture. It is a practice I had become inconsistent in especially during my last busy year of grad school, but especially now as a I get antsy as there is only a little over 10 weeks left until graduation, among some other things I am dealing with, I really feel like I need something grounding, especially to start my day with.

Things I have been learning about others:

• I have been learning how the stages of change are so important not only professionally but also personally with regards to truly seeing people where they are. It is definitely something I have not been aware of throughout my friendships growing up, which I regret, but know how important it is to more genuinely relating to others going forward.
• I’m not really sure how to categorize this thought, but I saw this really beautiful food and travel show recently featuring different celebrities, one of them being Florence Pugh. She is stunning, but also, there is a part of her appearance that does not follow the traditional beauty standards of being skinny and wrinkle-free (at least at this time, and yes I know she is young but she still has lines). But despite all of that, she is still beautiful and so that basically was just making me feel better about myself too, as someone who isn’t super skinny and is also starting to form lines on my face.
• Also speaking of that food and travel show, it was called “No Taste Like Home” – and it is crazy how deep and personal things can get around food. It was a really beautiful show, and I hope to find more episodes of it.

Things I have been learning about the world:

• In one of my classes this semester, a professor was reminding us about turning in assignments on time. I agree with her statement, and if you commit yourself to something as serious as grad school, you should be turning things on time. But I didn’t really like the justification she used, that ‘life gets busy and we have responsibilities, and it’s just life’. Yes, it is life in the STATES, which as I go through the world continue to learn is highly dysfunctional on so many levels. I’m not saying that everyone needs to move away, but especially with things like cost of living especially here in the Bay Area, health care that is tied to work, and a dysfunctional way of internship practicums where students are overworked and underpaid, this isn’t just normal ‘life’. I suppose it may be ‘normal’ and ‘common’, but it doesn’t mean it’s healthy, and I also don’t think it’s something we should just ‘accept’. There are bigger systemic things at play. I also suppose however, that her using that statement is also just accepting the state of the times and place that we’re in, so in that sense, she is valid in saying this. But it is a justification that I have been thinking about a lot this week, and I wish this professor would have used a different justification as indeed there are other less debatable ones.
• I was humbly reminded that asparagus causes urine to smell

Things I have been learning about myself:

• So apparently, being in on antibiotic regimen can severely mess up the gut environment in your stomach ! I understood this at an intellectual level and mainly I was hoping that the effects of it wouuld only linger as long as I was on the antibiotics. But even after being a month off of them, I cannot even eat raw fruit for the time being without experience discomfort. Thankfully, I have read up that this is only temporary, and to help my gut heal faster (and basically re-introduce all the good bacteria again), I need to not keep trying to eat raw fruit (I may try to introduce one or two every few weeks to see how my stomach is doing), eat things I know are easier to digest, and really be intentional with eating prebiotics and postbiotics.

Thanks for reading !