January 13, 2009 @ 5:51am

I start this morning with the affirmation because my spirit is weighted with thoughts. In this moment, I allow myself to be open to Spirit and all the good in my life. I know that every situation offers me the opportunity to grow (www.scienceofmind.com).
Good Morning Life and happy Tuesday to me. What is it that I'm feeling? What were my expectations of this moment? And what can change in a matter of an instant? Who am I? Where is this going? When will the tides shift in my favor? And why me?
There is a saying, if I had known what I know now, I would have picked my own cotton, And for all these years the underlining meaning of the statement has eluded me. I have thought to myself a couple of different ways of translating it's metaphoric impact but nothing that really sank to the depths of my understanding but just at this moment when I typed those words, a sense of reality struck me, ushering in a meaning I had not considered. For years, I thought it meant that while one works for the 'man,' one may want to take a piece for themselves, not in a theft of substance kind of way but a taking of a skill, a process, a mannerism, a insight or things intangible as well as tangible items that are begifted in the midst of hard work, that one can take with them and use to better there own life. I made this translation or is it transliteration because of my mother. My mother picked cotton as a child, she told us vague stories from that time period but what she did stress was this importance for school. She bantered on and on about how we should appreciate going to school, as if school was some important place. All we knew is that for the most part, it was a mandatory activity and we did our best to draw good out of it but to have an appreciation for something that I had no choice about felt a bit sadistic.
The truth is my brother and I, well we hated that, what we affectionately referred to as Mama's 'cotton pickin' story. On and on she would go about school, getting up to go to school and the luxury we had in this simple fact. Yet, what struck out for me but not until later in life was the part of the tale where she talked about her inability to go to school every day. The confessional tone was endearing, she said s a child she had to help out around the house which I would later understand as this, my mother lived with her grandparents and they were sharecroppers. She said she wanted to learn to read and write and do arithmetic so bad, she would take the books home and ask the teacher for more work. And at night when she returned home after working all day in the cotton field, she would do her book work. Now this was pretty amazing considering that her grandparents didn't know how to read, so she had to learn many things on her own, she had to have the mindset to explore, experiment, develop and teach herself in the space of an evening matters such as reading, writing and arithmetic. I conjure in my mind this nostalgic notion of her laying on a pallette on the ground next to an oil burning lamp and while I think it's imaginatory it might be closer to the truth than fiction.
Let's be for real, I can't imagine working all day on a cotton field and then coming home at night to do school work. And just as I say that, I am reminded of the days when I worked a full-time job, went to school full-time and parented full-time and all of this was no picnic. I don't remember those days to well because I was like a machine just getting through each day and although I wasn't getting through each day very well, I felt it was minute compared to what my mother had gone through, so I allowed myself no room for complaining. The 'cotton pickin' story' sticks with me on many levels, it's awe inspiring and when I feel as if I completely disconnected to my mother, I go back to the story because somewhere in that story is a place for us, I am like her and she gives me that piece of her unconditionally. It's true that my mother literally picked cotton but as closer look at her story, I realized that she picked her own cotton as well. She took what little was left and gave to herself the gift of self-education, she understood that although she might be in the field day in and day out, that was not an indication of where her life was going but more importantly, she took her power and used in service of making her life much, much, much better.
Today what I've come to understand about picking one's own cotton from my mother, we can work and volunteer and give and give and give but at some point we have to give and work and volunteer for and to ourselves. For me work has defined who I was, I put so much of my identity into working and doing a good job, even at jobs that were dead-end from the moment I walked in the door. Giving of myself at a level that behooves most people, that has me in a position where any future employer can call any former employer and never hear not one single solitary negative thing about me and that's great, don't get me wrong and to some degree I picked my own cotton but I was consistent. What I realize now, because had I known what I know now, I would of picked my own cotton. What I would of done is figured out what I wanted in life, what I wanted to do, where was my cotton to pick so to speak. but what ended up happening was in those moments of shear disappointed I was drawn back to my personal desire, to my personal dreams and then I would start to make plans only to find myself in another dead-end job and although in theory they aren't dead end but they're dead end for me because whatever was beyond wasn't what I wanted to do, so in essence it was a dead end.
What I realize about this statement is that by clarifying what I want, who I want to be, where I want to go is the first step of pickin' my own cotton and every action that is in support of that is the way in which I pick my own cotton. So, today I choose to pick my own cotton because it's not too late, in fact I'm write on time (lol). Today I know what I know now and know enough to know that it's time to pick my own cotton. It's a profound and wonderous revelation, it's deeply unsettling because it zaps out all excuses, it opens up a door, the very door that I've been wanting to walk through all of my life and the door is unlocked but it was never locked anyways. It's the door where my dreams come true and the only thing holding me back is me. Today I walk through that door, like sky diving, I trust that God as my parachute, I will arrive safely to my destination. Well today is the day, today I choose to pick my own cotton and sprinkle some of it's goodness back on my mother who showed me the way.
I am perfect and I am whole and I am complete. I LOVE ME!!!