Day 22: Demeter (#30DaysofHarvest)

Our Women in the Wild inspired photo shoot last weekend thanks to Little Mother Photography felt like a nice response to today’s earth mother prompt.

I actually struggled to come up with a photo today for quite a while. I took a couple at my mom’s house as possibilities. One a palette of fall colors…

And one with my mom herself in it…

Part of the material in today’s prompt included this message:

Give no part of yourself to what does not sustain you.

Given that I’ve spent the last three days doing hard and largely unenjoyable work finishing up my current class, this gave me something to chew over. I start to feel very skewed and off-balance and tense during the end of the session. I start feeling like I’m doing things wrong, that my priorities aren’t in order, and that I don’t have “enough time” for all of my life, and that something needs to change. I get very irritable and strained. It is temporary and subsides when the job is done, but I don’t like experiencing it. This time, not only did I finish my work more quickly, I also became mindful of those old, familiar, unpleasant, exaggerated, feelings in the middle of the downward spiral and kind of laughed at myself about them. Grading papers does not feel like it sustains me. But, teaching does provide more than half of our household income and since grading papers is part of teaching, I guess in their way they do sustain me…