Noticing

The sky this morning was incredible. There were wispy clouds running in streaks across it, the cloud forms themselves a light lavender against the blue/black of the sky, and then stars – bright, singular and clustered stars – so that the sky was streaked in the most lovely way. It was nothing garish, but very soft and delicate.

The clouds were more fragmented than wispy, lumpy streaks with gaps that seemed to say that the clouds, like the stars, would soon be gone from view.

I’ve been so tired again that I thought I’d best get back to qigong and did that before heading out with Sam for a walk. The stars were already less evident and at the same time the dark was deeper. It was 6:30 and yet the very first time I’ve ever been out when I lost Sam in the darkness. It was a dull darkness that made everything indistinct and made me question my eyes…a feeling that this is what it would be like to have your sight dim. The loss of distinction was eerie. It wasn’t frightening but it was foreign. I’ve walked much earlier and never lost the dog…and it happened twice.

She too seemed disoriented. It may have been partially the fault of my reserve. I hesitated in this new darkness to go into the deep paths that usually thrill me so. Even on my shortest walk I take to the path to at least, for a moment, reach a point where nothing man-made can be seen. I don’t have to go far to shed the street light glow or cease to see the tops of near houses.

But having stood motionless at the start of the path, contemplating the depth of the darkness, hesitating, I soon decided to take the paved path, and that was where I lost Sam for a second time. Turning around to not see her behind me, I called out to her. I didn’t want to break the silence with too loud a holler, and clapped my hands with just the barest of audible sound. Still no Sam. I walked back the way I came and finally saw her near the street, turning in circles in its muted light. I called again and she looked in all directions, clearly confused.

This was the strength of the dull darkness. I joined Sam again near the street and we headed home, past houses just waking up, their warm glow welcome.

Two hours later it is full day but the light is still on in the cabin window. The Sunday paper has been read in parts, I’ve made an apple panekoken that no one ate but me, and Donny is off to work.

We were disjointed in our coming and going and it left a pall over the wonder of the morning. Once he was gone – gone while I was in the basement futzing with the laundry – I wished I’d said something. Sometimes I feel like attention to the breakfast or attention to the laundry is attention to my husband. It was only after he was gone that I realized that it was not and wished I could have the hour back to do it differently. To notice, as I did the morning, my husband’s mood without thought of food or clean clothes or the shape of the day.

Dilemmas, moral and otherwise

It’s been a long time since I came to the computer desperate to write. I got so irritated a bit ago over a tire situation with my car – let’s just say it was my fourth trip – over a tire that wasn’t fixed properly in the first place…and that no matter how many times I bring it back, the place won’t admit to any wrong-doing but will only say they’ll take care of it for me for free, as if this is a big gift, when actually they’ve inconvenienced me over and over again.

Of course, this was exasperated by having to get rides. Today, I was awaiting my ride from a woman battling a near 3 years-old over potty training. You’d think the world came to an end because the child pooped her diaper one more time. By the time I got my ride, about an hour later than I’d expected to go, I was rattled by the hysteria and wanting to tell the mother to quit calling her daughter “naughty”…while outwardly remaining calm and serving tea.

So I get dropped off finally to get my key to get my car, which is Still missing the hubcap that they broke the first time I was in, and the guy in front of me is chatting up the service guy, who won’t even look at me. After about 10 minutes, I fish my spare key out of my purse and storm out of there as the guy is calling “Madam,” and when I get home call, half to apologize to him, who had nothing to do with anything, and half to justify my irritation, because I hadn’t yet said a word about their shoddy service, which all hinged on their dishonesty about having broken my hubcap and lug nuts in the first place. There was still no admission coming as I recounted my history with them and why I became so impatient, and it was this lack of admission that had me as riled as the inconvenience.

I’d just read two articles – one on forgiveness and one on young people and moral values. The one on forgiveness was about not holding the grievance – for your own sake – and said “the content” of the grievance didn’t matter. It could be years of a horrid relationship and deep hurts leveled by your mom or the guy who stole your parking space. Either way, the same action, it said, was required: Feel what you feel, then let it go and return to calm.

The writer of the article asked, “But what if it keeps happening?” and it wasn’t until she asked, “How do I take care of myself?” that she started to get anywhere.

In the case of me and the tire, the answer is Don’t go back there. Get the problem solved and never return. The source of the forgiveness article was a guy who’d written a book, and he said, “Life is not fair.”

Okay. Point taken.

The other article, an editorial by David Brooks, was about young people and their take on morals and moral thinking, and even though Brooks found them to be nonjudgmental: “I can’t say what right and wrong is for anyone else. I don’t know how they feel,” he called the results of the research “depressing.”

He said the young folks, when asked to express a moral dilemma, as often as not didn’t speak of things that actually were moral dilemmas.

He concludes saying, “In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.”

It was the kind of paragraph that in another context I would have celebrated.

It begs the question of whether or not our hearts, and our feelings, can be our moral compass if we haven’t been schooled or inherited examples of morality.

Can we then know what is wrong or right based on how we feel?

I would have felt so much better if I had said, “You know, forget about the ride. I’ll do it later,” and gotten away from the mother I could only imagine telling gently and privately, not to get hysterical. The tea probably wasn’t the worst thing I could have done, but the hour had become a strain.

I knew I would have felt infinitely better if the car place had just admitted that they could have solved the problem the first time … had they been honest. So honesty became my moral issue of the day.

Life is unfair. It’s ridiculous to get upset over a nail in your tire or with a toddler-in-training, but it happens. Still, I don’t think it’s quite so ridiculous to get upset by simple problems made insufferable…which both of these had become for me through repeated exposure.

But my greatest ire is caused by wanting to “teach” or “preach” or right wrongs. Is this in itself a moral dilemma? Or is the moral dilemma exposed in how I respond…or don’t respond?

It seems to me our hearts could do a fine job, if we listened and acted in accord with them. But dilemmas, moral or otherwise, are not easy, which is why they are called dilemmas.

St. Paul Pioneer Press, 9-15-2011. David Brooks writing for the New York Times: Morality ‘It’s personal.’ Really?

The Dog Knows

I’m in the cabin and need to go in to the bathroom. Sam does not raise her head from her paws or move out of the cabin doorway to let me by. I step past her and say needlessly. “Stay. I’ll be right back.”

I am back at my cabin perch, ready to come in for the day, or needing to close up and go get Henry in the afternoon. As soon as my feet move Sam is on her feet and out the door. She knows.

Habits are a peculiar thing. A routine based on timing is different. That kind of routine finds the cats fighting or worse, (throwing up) to get my attention if I sleep past my usual hour. That routine is Sam whining at the side of the bed. It’s our little parade to the door and welcoming them back in with the standard phrase for breakfast, “Here it is. Here it comes. Here you go.” But the sensing of what is next by mere movement, particularly ones that seem the same as another, is an amazing thing to me. Do I do something differently?

It couldn’t be picking up my coffee cup because I do that almost every time I go in. I’m not shutting down the computer with any particular noise (if I’m shutting it down at all). Do I sigh? Do I square my shoulders and plant my feet just so? Or does Sam know from the minute I begin to think, It’s time to go in?

It’s a mystery of connection, familiarity, something shared between us.

On the other hand, as we head back to the house, she is not so accommodating. This is particularly pronounced when I’m wanting to fly, having stayed too long and in need of leaving post haste to pick Henry up on time. Then she is most prone to dawdle; to stand, halfway between cabin and house, and look at me as I call her. Sam come. Sam!

When I remember this tendency, I run behind her, herding her toward the house, urging her on from behind. But I forget, and even when I don’t, I am often struck by the realization that Sam is getting old. Sam has her own rhythms.

We all have our own rhythms. This is what dogs know.

How far do you have to go?

It’s 5 a.m.

When I left the house for the cabin I kept the yard light on. It’s been so long since I walked out in the dark that I felt I needed it I guess. I tested first for stars but it’s cloudy. If I’d been able to see the stars I would have left the light off.

On the walk to the cabin I got a full 30 seconds of quiet – which seems like a miracle. I could actually hear the yard pond gurgling. I’m still getting six or seven seconds of quiet at a time with an early bird thrown in. And it’s cool. Blessedly cool. The air feels fresh after two weeks of humid heat, one day breaking a heat-index record. I’d walk out the door and my glasses would steam up.

I guess I’m just awash in the appreciation that comes from absence.

I’ve been going a little crazy with the noise of living by the freeway lately. It started with this one video I did when the cottonwood trees were shedding. The cotton was drifting into the yard so heavily that I went and got my camera. It was such a cool visual – drifty and dreamy. But when I played it back, the sound was so loud – just on an ordinary afternoon in the middle of the yard. I wasn’t even as near the freeway fence as I usually am. I became aware.

Then construction started on the bridge over the freeway that’s about a block away and adjoins the edge of the woods. Jack hammering for two weeks and a lane closed since as work continues up the line. The traffic slows and trucks shift.

The final “awareness” hit me when I looked at two of the videos I did last summer from my new computer. I realized that my old computer had such poor sound that the full extent of the noise of the freeway was hidden from me. Suddenly it blared – a background noise that took over.

I’ve started thinking about moving but I probably won’t. The market is bad and people can be real particular. Who’d want to buy a house with this kind of noise level?

Maybe I’m one of those people who need the extremes before appreciation sets in. I don’t know if I’d ever feel this elation over quiet if it wasn’t rare. I think I would…now…but I could have needed this onslought of noise before I’d feel it.

Appreciation is so sweet. I close my eyes and feel the breeze coming through the window and my whole body drinks it in.

It brings forward all those things hidden in plain view. Like thoughts, and how when you see them they become a background noise that blares. And how there can seem to be as little choice about them as there is about staying in a house next to the freeway.

Once thoughts of leaving the noise behind enter, you start to wonder how far away you’d have to go to escape.

On my walks, I realize how a block would make a difference. Can’t hardly hear the freeway most days when I’ve trecked off to the park – even before I get there it’s lessened. But in my mind, on the noisy days, I think I need a spot at least an hour outside of the city.

The need to go far, far away.

It’s 5:30 now, the time I usually get up, and the blessed dark is lifting. Only a half hour separates me from a spot of quiet in the dark.

Little weasel mind's subtle ways

The simple ecstasy of not counting time.

It was my first morning out in the cabin before sunrise in a while – and the first one of doing my whole morning routine from here, which I did thanks to the bigger rug finally getting washed. It’s been a wet and muddy early summer and I hadn’t wanted to exercise on the floor of the cabin with or without the rug.

Now Sam’s lying there, which probably means I won’t want my face in it tomorrow, but that’s okay. There’s four sides when it’s folded. I’ll turn it when Sam gets up and put it away until tomorrow. It has become, as of today, my meditation and yoga mat. I know this, but I’m somewhat bugged that I do. It’s hard to explain.

When I got up to go in the house, Sam and the cats were all lying near the door – peaceful – like they’d been enjoying it as much as me. They followed me into the house. I fed them, got some tea, and then – there it was. The clock.

Once I looked at the clock, I thought, ‘okay – that was about an hour start to finish.’ I kind of nodded to myself. ‘Good, this is good.’

A minute later it hit me that I’d noticed the time that way; that I had to congratulate myself, as if I’d made it through a grueling task or done something I ‘ought’ to do. I don’t know how to convey this, but I was noticing another track of my thoughts…a track that seemed like nothing. Simple. Harmless. Just a little fact to tuck away. “That took an hour.”

All I’d really done differently was move my morning stretching exercises and meditation out to the cabin instead of doing them in the house. I already had a pretty good idea of how much time I spent with my new practice of qigong. The ‘hour’ was simply noticing how much time passed when I put the two together.

But I felt that what the ‘thought’ did was try to convince me that it mattered in a way that it didn’t.

The thought was like something I’d think if I started out walking to fulfill doctor’s orders. ‘Okay. I got in my 5,000 steps, that took me a half hour. I can quit now.” I knew it wasn’t like that. But there was some little weasel voice in me that was treating it that way, reducing it, and that part was not me. That part was old, old, old. An old track from an old record. A remnant from another time.

The moving of the rug that allowed me to bring it all together, being there at the time of day I love best, the animals all acting peaceful (instead of clamoring at the door in the house to go out), it all just happened. I wasn’t thinking ‘I should do this’ or, as soon as I found myself held by it, that ‘I should have done this before,’ or ‘this is the way to do it.’ I knew I’d found my way without thinking it. I guess you could say I was fully in the experience … until I looked at the clock and little weasel mind came back.

I guess the weasel may always be there, but catching it – well, all I can say after the sublime experience of my morning was that it was one of the clearest “not me” thoughts I’ve ever had. Simple and subtle – none of that flagrant bashing myself with a brick that I sometimes do, and in it’s own way, more deadly for its subtlety. Let’s just suck all of the life out of a thing!

There are times we need to make big deals out of our insights or experience. I really believe that. There’s times you need to because you have to declare yourself, or times you need to galvanize your passion into a creative force through action, or that you need to make a big deal out of your experience because, if you don’t, if you don’t hold it to yourself and let yourself see that it was a “call” or a message or a way-showing moment, you’ll file it away like last year’s taxes and not let it affect you.

But there are also times you don’t even want to notice what you’re doing because as soon as you notice you’ve brought your awareness a step away from your experience.

When you are the experience, even for an hour, all the thinking about it stuff becomes clear. It doesn’t feel particularly valuable that you see it either, even when you see that you don’t want it, because you get the feeling that, having seen it might make it harder to be the experience again. Oh shit, tomorrow I’ll be trying to be the experience. Damn.

So…I’m going to let it go as best as I can now. I just thought I’d share the insight because hey, I hadn’t seen it before in quite this way, and maybe there’s another person out there with the same weasel mind who will begin to see the subtle along with the flagrant, and to let it go.


PS: I'm writing more frequently now at this address:
http://blog.acourseoflove.com

The grapevines are coming back!

I just had to tell you that my grapevines are beginning to crawl up the fence once again. If you don't know the story, Donny cut them down last year to get more light to his fruit trees. I wrote a post about it.

I've missed them more than I've wanted to say. They created a mystery about walking back to the cabin and shielded if from view of the house. I felt perfectly sequestered out in the woods when they created their wall between cabin and yard.

It was almost as if they went with the soul of place...or mine.

And now they're returning -- all on their own -- the dears. I've tied some string to help guide them back over the trellis. By the end of summer...who knows? There may well be a wall again.

I've been away from myself, and their return and my own, feel linked, like our twin souls.

Storms of change and choice

For the last three months I’ve had the kind of time I haven’t had in ages. Angie was looking for a job and able to be with Henry the majority of the time. She took him to school, picked him up, took care of meals, baths and bedtime. I was still present and around enough to get casual time with Henry and a few babysitting gigs gave us some one-on-one, but for the most part, I was free. I was getting used to it. I loved it. It allowed my solo trip to the North Shore, whole days spent on my video meditation, gave me the ability to pick up and go almost whenever I chose.

Angie started a new job today.

Tonight Angie came home too tired to explain her complicated schedule. Working in a salon, I imagine there’ll be many more days like today where, other than for her dropping Henry off at school, our roles are pretty much reversed.

It was a fine day. Henry is at his best one-on-one – or on his best behavior anyway. When there’s three of us (me, his mom and his grandpa) hovering around, he acts up more.

But I wasn’t sorry Angie was too tired to go over her schedule with me. It’s been storming all night – one of those on again, off again storms that make you think it’s letting up just before the thunder resounds again and the rain goes from a quiet pitter-patter to a chorus that rumbles.

It’s been dark since 6:00 and I was in the throws of tricking Henry into an early bedtime when Angie got home, ready for bed herself, and I ran out here to the cabin.

I’ve realized that for years I’ve “run” for my time. A three month reprieve in which I got used to not doing that ought to mean something now, and I have hopes of not getting myself frantic again. That doesn’t mean I won’t come to the cabin, or even run when a busy day is through, but I’m willing to give enjoying where I am and what I’m doing a try. Then it’s a different kind of running.

It's still a little like the storm though. I might not have thought of it if the weather hadn't provided the impetus. It just seems to be the way life is. Right when you think things are letting up on you, the winds of change come around again.

This time, I’m telling myself I have a choice. If the childcare gets to be too much for me, I’ll let it be known. It’s really hard to love a child this much and still not want to be as tied to him as a parent.

I’ve gotten my first taste of grandparenting, I guess…and maybe the first taste of self-care I’ve had in a while. It’s been delicious.

Readiness and The Embrace

I’m looking out at the green that’s near to full with this morning’s rain. True to form in Minnesota, it follows a week where the weather has been (as they say) “variable.” On Monday the temperature was on the rise and reached the nineties. On Tuesday Minneapolis was one degree shy of the record of 104 degrees. On Wednesday morning the temperature had dropped 40 degrees. This morning I’m back in my hoodie.

Change, change, change. It feels like the only constant in the physical world.

I’m feeling sentimental about this blog this morning and about all the changes that it’s seen me through. Henry was barely speaking when I started it and now he’s expressing his emotions. After being thwarted in his desire to go swimming the other day, he told his mother that she was breaking his heart. Where did he learn that expression?

In recent months, he’s been saying “I’m tired,” every time he gets upset. I’ve been encouraging him to express his emotions and to find the appropriate words, but I swear, I never suggested that his heart could break. I hope that not getting to go swimming was a gentle first heartbreak.

It awes me to see how quickly he’s grown and to begin to see exchanges between him and his friends that could almost break my heart…that knowing that he’s going to find that not all people are kind…and that he’s going to have to learn to take care of himself in whatever age group he enters.

I’ve been pondering “care of the heart” a lot lately and seeing that with all of my experiences, guidance, learning, receptivity, and many years with A Course of Love, I am only now beginning to care for my heart – to become gentler with myself and to let my experience and guidance begin to show me the way.

Even while I say this though, I want to convey my great respect for all the cycles of life we go through.

I’ve become intrigued by the notion of “readiness.” How no one can tell you, no guidance can change you, no experience can irrevocably prepare you for all of the vicissitudes of life or make you ready for a new way until you’re…ready.

I’m ready now. Why wasn’t I before? I’d love to find the answer to that question, and yet, my respect for each time of life (and life change)prevents me from expecting a pat answer, or even one that might specifically address my own long period of unreadiness.

I’ll hesitantly say I’ve been “willing” all along without being “ready.” I’d describe readiness as a specific kind of willingness…something along the line of putting willingness together with action, or maybe practice, or maybe care of the heart.

All of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done have begun as an inner need that I must meet and then the realization that if I have such a need, others may have it too. I needed to create a meditation video for myself, to care for myself, to find a way to be with the words of A Course of Love each day as I begin this new practice of remembering to love myself and care for my heart.

One of my recent actions has been to start a new blog site to go along with this new practice. I posted the meditation on The Embrace from A Course of Love there. I’d like to share it with you and invite you to see it here: http://blog.acourseoflove.com

From broken to blossoming

Yesterday, it didn’t rain all day (unusual), but the air felt wet, it really did. I’d be walking out to the cabin and get the feeling that I was getting sprinkled on, and yet not have any evidence. Coming out this morning, it’s clear the rain finally came in the night. The day is gloomy and morning slow to come. It’s cool, delicious, somber, joyful.

I feel as if I’ve come out of my cave. I’ve been in that cave, hunkered down, feeling under siege. It’s not quite been the cave of solitude but something else altogether. I was beginning to get the picture at Easter and then went to the North Shore a couple of weeks ago. All those waves pounding on the rocks matched the kind of cave experience I’d been dealing with, but began to lift it too.

I don’t know why we have to go through those under siege times that break us open, but I’ve found there’s doorways in them and that coming out feels really good. Here’s a quote and a link to an interview with Elizabeth Lesser who wrote on this in her book Broken Open.

"The phrase "broken" is a good one to start from. When the stresses of life build up to a certain point, whether it's the loss of someone you love or the loss of a job or a divorce, we all would understand when you say, "That really broke me down," meaning it was a change that ended in making us a little more cynical or scared or unable to cope. But there is this other possibility that after the breaking, we can open up more into who are supposed to be, in the way that a flower breaks out of the confines of a bud into its full blossoming."

I made a pretty simple decision while us “up north”…to quit focusing on other people and start living my life. Just do that. Just follow my own nose and see where it would take me. No decisions. No plans. Just following that inner pull. My energy has increased daily since then and I’ve been doing a little creating. One creation is of a new blog.
On it you can find a video of my trip, or you can watch it here

Spring opener

Written Sunday:

The spring opening of the cabin is like no other time, no other day, no other year. Just like the shadows are never the same, or unfuckupable man, who is, today, eating snow. I’ve got to get that on my way back in.

I swept out a week or two ago, dusted down the cobwebs a few days ago before my visitor from Maine came out, but today is the real opener. I’m here by myself and not to sweep or dust. I’m here with my laptop. The sun is shining and the slats of the chair are shadowing the seat, and I have my camera. Yes, this is it.

It’s toasty warm for the heater having been on since 12:30. Now she’s quietly resting on “auto”, the freeway noise is largely kept out by the closed windows, and the occasional tings that let me know the “auto” is working are just right – soft, like the ticking of a clock but with only one tick per minute. Time is different here.

Oh, all the reasons why we take ourselves away! They’re countless!

Spring!

Out the front window and there it is – a dark, rain slicked street glistening in the light of street lamps. Out the back door, a train whistle sounding through the morning. All the yard a glitter. Spring – on her day. Everywhere – spring!

read these leaves

Advice from Walt Whitman from the Preface to Leaves of Grass:

THIS IS WHAT YOU SHALL DO

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air of every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

I found this quote on the website of my friend, the brilliant astrologer Pat Kaluza.

An old board

I have home improvements going on. One thing keeps leading to another and another. You take everything down off your walls so that you can paint, and first you have to dust and wash. You take down the curtains and you have to wash the windows. Then you wash the curtains. Then you iron them.

It’s the ironing that I had to come write about. I started it yesterday and after about an hour, my arm was really getting sore, so I left it. Later in the day I was at the store and happened to spot ironing board covers.

My ironing board is about a hundred years old – seriously. It came from Donny’s grandma’s house. I’ve seen these wooden boards in antique shops. I love it…but.

All these years that we’ve had it, I’ve put up with this vinyl cover that is cracked and patched. One reason is I don’t do that much ironing. Half the time, if I’m just putting a crease in a pant leg, I throw a towel on the floor and iron there instead of going down in the basement and hauling out the old board.

Last time I ironed the curtains, I brought the board upstairs. This time, I swept the laundry room, moved a few things out of the way, and was doing my ironing there.

Because I was ironing sheers, and a lot of them, that cracked ironing board cover was really a pain in the neck, and so having spotted this austere item that’s not exactly front and center when you’re walking through Target, I bought it.

Today, I took off the vinyl cover. It was held together by ancient metal clips. I hated to throw it, and them, away.

Then I found a pad underneath. Maybe it’s not homemade, but it could have been, and whether it is or isn’t, it’s got these touches – this extra padding – as if Donny’s grandma was a diehard ironer and she had wanted it just so. It’s yellowed from all the ironing she did (okay...and from age). I started imagining all those white dress shirts being starched, and the tablecloths and napkins back before there was wash and wear.

I did manage to toss the vinyl, but for now I’ve kept that pad. I would have kept it on the board but the new pad wouldn’t fit around it.

The new pad is nice too. It made me want to really clean and organize my laundry room so that I can keep the ironing board set up with it’s jaunty blue cover.

It’s been amazing to me the way this thing has spiraled out of control. One minute you’re just ironing. The next you’re shopping, and the next you’re recovering, and the next you’re planning for a spic and span laundry room with neat places to put things. What’s next? Coordinated hampers?

This kind of behavior doesn’t fall into the category of being “like me.” I’m doing this spiffing up because I haven’t done it in fifteen years – and you know what happens when you let things go that long. But I’m enjoying the surprise of finding a side of myself that is happy doing it. It feels like a fresh start, and that always translates…or maybe, as they say “as within/so without,” it could even mean the new start has gotten going inside of me. There’s always much more going on than meets the eye.

Now…if only I knew what to do with that old pad!

Access, technology, and temptations

Daylight saving time has struck again, this time the spring forward part, and I feel happy with it. When I woke up it was dark. My cell phone immediately adjusted, although I didn’t know it would. When I got up at 6:00… it was 6:00… not 7:00 as I thought it would be. The computer adjusted too.

As I sit down in my sunroom for the start of this Sunday, it’s light and bright out my window, a little less dull in that wintery way of mornings full of moisture tending toward the look and feel of fog without the mist. And today, I’m still an ordinary, flawed human being, watching the world out my window as dozens of thoughts dart out in all directions – many of them of what I could write about today – like the earthquake/tsunami that hit Japan.

The images, shown over and over again on television, feel etched in those memory banks that stand behind our eyes like news reels. This force of nature happened on Friday and I watched all morning with my eldercare client, the scenes looking just like the disaster movies and making them feel like predictions of things to come. I wouldn’t have known it had happened if I hadn’t been on the computer early on Friday.

The internet is where most of us, I bet, got the news first. The news came too late for the morning paper. When I arrived at the home of my companion she didn’t know it had happened, nor did her daughter.

In that way it was reminiscent of 9/11, the first news coming after most people had gone to work, read their papers. That morning, nearly ten years ago, Mia called from the coffee shop saying, “Turn on the TV, something’s happened.” I doubt many people first heard of that from their computers. I know I didn’t have a Google page that fed me news as I logged on to get my emails.

In 2001, the cabin wasn’t built yet. When I first got it, I didn’t have access to email out there and once it came available, it changed things – like carrying a cell phone in your pocket does. All those reasons to stay instantly reachable. Available. Even when you don’t want to be.

The access is a temptation. You might miss some news. Or a call for help.

Access and availability/reaching out and connecting. It’s a conundrum these days.

Strangely enough, this very conundrum is the story behind the readings that start Lent. One is the Gospel that shares Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. The other is the creation story.

In the temptation story “the devil” (like our thoughts) tempts with the meeting of physical needs, sets the things of this world against of the things of God, and tempts us to put God to the test.

In the creation story, God saw all of creation on the first day and pronounced “It is all good.” Then on the second day, he said for the first time: “It is not good”… “It is not good for man to be alone.”

So it’s technology and access that strikes me this morning – technology, access, and the temptations of them. One idea they breed is that we can be prepared. We can have faith in preparedness, we can be tempted to have more faith in ourselves than in God – to put God to the test. Another is that if we can reach out and touch each other, see what’s going on, communicate, then we will come together and be okay.

Ultimately, the stories work well together. We use everything we know to take care of ourselves and each other, and we also surrender to God – sometimes because we have no choice – and sometimes as a choice.

Frozen Shoulder and "The Yank"

When you’ve got frozen shoulder you might, after a while, come to appreciate a few “new ways of doing things”. There’s a certain mindfulness that comes of pain. (If only it worked as quickly with thoughts!) Honestly, after mere months of finding that the simplest action – like ripping a paper towel off the rack – causes pain, you quit doing it. You don’t try to yank anything. You don’t attempt to rip the plastic off of a magazine that comes in the mail, yank a towel off the rack, yank the lid off of the Tupperware, yank a car door open – or, for that matter, to slam it shut.

I never thought of myself as a yanker until developing frozen shoulder. I’m a yanker no more.

But there are a couple of funner things that I want to share.

Having frozen shoulder gave me insight about my coffee pot – and maybe yours. For years I’ve kept a red and black checked drying towel sitting on top of the coffee pot so that I could wipe up the spills that come – simply from pouring coffee. I go to a friend’s house and she has the same problem. There seems no way, with a pot built for pouring, to pour without spilling.

Then I started pouring with my left hand.

I have discovered that coffee pots must be universally designed by the left-handed. Try pouring left-handed sometime. You’ll see what I mean.

Another thing I discovered was how to have the “messy hair look.” If you’re a woman, you know what I mean. If you’re a guy, you might need to know that this is the tousled look that appears casual and effortless but that is achieved either through a certain know-how or through total accident. It’s the ponytail that doesn’t look severe. It’s the “hair swept back” that doesn’t look plastered into place. It’s the endearing loose tendril. Some of us, not good with working with hair, are incapable of achieving this look.

Well, just try putting your hair in a clip or a ponytail when you’ve got frozen shoulder. Your arm doesn’t move in the right way for this small task. I like my hair to be off my face, so I continue to try, usually getting the ponytail or clip off to the side. Surprisingly, what I got was “the messy look.”

And, since I mentioned thinking, I will admit that this awareness of what causes pain actually has made me more aware of the thoughts that cause me pain. This is a great thing. But the thoughts haven’t disappeared in the same number of months. I don’t know that they ever disappear. The idea isn’t to get rid of them, but to notice, release, do it again. Anyway, I’ve found my thoughts a little easier to catch. I catch them before they do the yank; before they get a hold of me. A small few of them still seem necessary – as if – if I didn’t worry an issue to death, it would stay alive longer. But most of the thoughts that cause me distress, if not pain, are simply habitual thoughts – old ways of thinking that are clearly unnecessary.

Thoughts “do the yank.” They pull us out of feelings of ease and yank us into feelings of stress.

It occurs to me that awareness tends to come to us in roundabout ways, even when (maybe especially when) we’ve been working at it for a long time.

Across Boundaries

In David Brook’s editorial: “Culture matters. So do aspirations for dignity”, he talks about a book by Samuel Huntington called The Clash of Civilizations? It was written in the early 90’s and said that there was, basically, no hope of avoiding the clash of cultures with the Arab world because our aspirations were so different.

Brooks’ theme is that the quest for dignity is inherent in all human beings.

I always like it when I see the word “spiritual” in the context of an editorial and he uses it here. Brooks, after saying that Huntington argued that people in Arab lands didn’t hunger for pluralism and democracy, explained, “It now appears as though they were simply living in circumstances that did not allow those spiritual hungers to come to the surface.”

Liberty is a spiritual hunger.

Like many of us with the freedom to pursue spiritual qualities, I spend a great deal of time focused on liberating myself from the tyranny of my own thoughts. These thoughts, too, are at least partially dictated by culture. Our fears, frustrations, and expectations may be different across cultures but when we confront them face-to-face, or begin to see the glimmer of a chance for change, the inspiration and hopefulness is similar across boundaries.

Brooks speaks here as well, of having many authentic selves. “It now appears that people in these nations, like people in all nations, have multiple authentic selves. In some circumstances, one set of identities manifest itself, but when those circumstances change, other equally authentic identities and desires get activated.”

Brooks is so kind and nonjudgmental here. He’s not calling former ways of being false, only seeing that circumstances activate equally authentic identities and desires. It reminds me of the practices in A Course of Love that I’ve been writing about in my pubjournal blog. They’ve been reminding me of that. The first belief/practice is in accomplishment. One of the things it says, appropriate to this context, is that you weren’t “wrong” before. You were always accomplished. You’re accomplished right now – even as you struggle and as surely when you’re having new authentic identities and desires activated – and even when they begin with your thoughts.

(David Brooks’ column appeared in my Sunday St. Paul Pioneer Press (3-6-2011, 10B) courtesy of The New York Times.)

Me and My Analogies

A few days ago, my friend Bob and I were flipping analogies back and forth as we proofed A Course of Love for its transformation to the Kindle. It was sort of a Buddhist/Christian mishmash. He started it. I think the first analogy he proffered was of watercolor painting. Of clouds.

It was kind of fun, but also one of those things you do when you’re proofing. My own personal limit (or so I found) was eight chapters at a time. I’m not sure what Bob’s limit was, or Jeremy’s, another friend who offered a third pair of eyes.

I’ve also just received the proof of the Course books from Create Space, Amazon’s print-on-demand arm. They tell you to proof your new copy three times. Once for layout. Once for images. Once for typos. Since my files are the same ones as used previously, I’m not proofing for typos. This isn’t because the books are perfect, but because they’re in PDF form and to change the few small typos is not doable for me or cost-effective to have done by someone else. That’s the nice thing about the Kindle (at least when you have a little help from your friends). You can go forth with the idea that with three pairs of eyes, you’ll find everything. You’ll get perfection. You’ll use semi-colons when you need to. (I could definitely find an analogy there about going for perfection.)

But you get the idea from which I’m writing. I’m flipping pages. This is a labor of love but the desire to get up and, oh, I don’t know, clean the toilet or make dinner, is almost as strong as the analogy craze.

Since I’ve been so wrapped up in this stuff, my mind has gone kind of blank. I want to sit and just write something fun or creative, respond to the latest excellent editorial from David Brooks, anything that is off this track I’ve been on…just for the variety of it.

But something prevents me. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s fuzzy brain. I hope so. It feels almost like writer’s block, that dreaded malady about which you are told Write through it! I could make an analogy out of that too. I’m seeing a lot of analogies instead of friends. We’re getting buddy-buddy. Me and my analogies.

The writing one would look, (as everything else does) like a spiritual analogy. But I’m too fuzzy-brained to make it good, so I’ll share instead my vacuum cleaner analogy.

My son gave me, for my birthday, a robot that does my vacuuming. Great sin of useless luxury, but nice both for my arm and the fights Angie and I have had about it (since it's her chore...oh what useless falderal all that’s been). Anyway, you can’t set the darn thing down where all the cat hair is and have it get it up. No. It is programmed to “find the perimeter.” The theory goes that once it finds the four corners of the room, it will go back and get the middle. This actually works in a room like my bedroom that is virtually a square and has a door I can close. But in the living room/dining room area there is too much openness. I’ve tried blocking the open places but this is like doing all kinds of work to avoid work. (I could make an analogy out of that too.)

I'm not exactly sure I can spell out the robot analogy either, but here’s what I suggested to Bob (which means I’m borrowing from my own e-mail writing to write this blog! …under the theory of working my way through not having anything to write). Anyway, here it is.

This finding of the perimeter seems a bit like what we do in life. We head off to the four corners, defining our territory and thinking we’ll get back and clean up the center. But if we remain open, there’s so much ground to cover we might feel as if we never get back to the shit pile (oh, did I mean the cat hair pile?), and if we create barriers to openness or close the door, we get clean, but we’re closed off.

I’ve become content with letting the robot vacuum the rooms that sit at the outer reaches of the house (it’s a rambler): my sunroom office on one side, and my bedroom on the other. For the middle, the big sweeping “L” of the living and dining room, I do the work myself.

That's it. All I've got tonight!

Beauty inside and outside

I got out to the cabin for the first time in months on February 16. The whole week had been what some would call a tease. A hint of spring. A preview. I went out after a couple of near 50 degree days and bright sun, and I didn’t even have to turn on the heater. In just those few days, the cabin had lost her refrigerator chill. I don’t know what it is about that particular kind of chill. Maybe, even when you’ve never been in a morgue, it strikes you as a place not fit for the living – and I just don’t like it.

But I didn’t find it! The warmth was the biggest surprise. I was so grateful for it and to be there…in it.

But you know what I didn’t see until today? Until I captured the pictures I took that day? It was the dichotomy between the inside and the outside.

All I really did that day was sit a while, take some pictures, and sweep the cabin out. When I saw the picture of the broom, and the pictures of the snow, it just struck me. It was beautiful outside the cabin and beautiful inside – but the beauty was so different.

I thought – maybe we’re like that.

When things get shaken up

There's more new snow outside my window today, and like much of the rest of the country, we keep setting records for it. Henry described it this morning (he was home with a cold) as looking like tiny mirrors as he gazed out at all it buried.

Since last I wrote we've had countless inches of snow, two birthdays in the family (me and Henry) and Angie graduated from Aveda school one week and started a new job/training program with Juut Salon the next. In the midst of this her car died and mine, though in need of some major repairs (that I only just learned of when taking her in for an alignment), is momentarily her wheels. Small potatoes in the scheme of things, but it's made for an interesting few weeks.

To keep myself centered through those things, and for other reasons of need for comfort and insight when my quiet time has been less than usual, I found myself turning to the beliefs laid out in The Treatise on Unity and really digging into them as the practices they're stated to be.

Since I've recently posted my alternate blog http://pubjournal.blogspot.com to my Amazon page, I decided to share some of what I'm finding there. So just in case you're looking for something too, I thought I'd mention it. I'm just getting started so there's not much to see, but my intention is to share what I'm finding over coming weeks.

Looking for something is such an odd thing. I don't often know what it is I'm looking for when I find myself vaguely entering search mode. Actually, some really cool things have been happening -- odd feelings of switches in direction, surreal moments of dreaminess, shifts in the flow. I don't know about you, but I kind of welcome the disconcerting. When I feel things starting to get shaken up I get excited. I enjoy the feeling of "What the heck is going on?...Now what's happening?"

I can't really trace why these feeling sent me to The Treatise on Unity and those practices, but as near as I can recall it was as if I suddenly remembered they were there!

Since I don't generally talk about my vocation with A Course of Love too specifically on the blogs, this is a new direction in itself. I'm curious about where it will go. And I like being curious too.

Hubris

I got a comment back on this quote from my last posting –

“Nothing happens by accident and the observation of this will help to put the responsibility of your life back into your hands, where it belongs. You are not helpless, nor are you at the whim of forces beyond your control. The only force beyond your control is your own mind.” (A Course of Love, 10.17)

What is meant by this – the mind is the only thing beyond our control? Who’s into control anyhow? I told the woman who wrote asking about it, “I liked the quote because that’s the way it feels so often…that the only thing I can’t control is my mind, even pardon the word “control.” I also said, “It’s a quote from early in A Course of Love. You wouldn’t find it in The Dialogues.”

That was this morning. As I’m writing this, here at the end of the day, I’m cracking up about my light treatment of that quote, and about how it whacked me on the side of the head a little while ago.

I was on-line half the day, which had me getting tight around my ears and in my gut and had my back acting up.

This all began because I convinced myself (and with good reason I might add) that it’s time to change a few things I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time. Okay? Are you with me…and that certain determination you can get?

Yesterday, I set up a new e-mail address so that I could change the one I’ve had forever (mari@thedialogues.com), the one that gets about a hundred spam messages a day. (The new e-mail is acourseoflove.center@gmail.com.)

Today I figured I had to let people know about the change and started manually writing down the email addresses from my Outlook account. I got to page five of that and I was so bored I could have cried, and pretty certain too that there was an easy way to do it that I didn’t know about.

So, I switched gears for a while to investigate whether to try to move my website (www.acourseoflove.com) somewhere where it would actually get updated, or let it go and build a new one where I can add updates myself.

By the end of the afternoon I was afloat in information.

Meanwhile, I’m aware that there’s a brouhaha of sorts over a 1994 video of Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric talking about the Internet, basically asking “What is it anyway?” In 1994! And now we have blogs, forums, on-line education, internet radio, iPods, apps, Wiis, RSS feeds, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wiki and more words I don’t understand than I can repeat.

Even when I get the information I’m looking for, I don’t know what to do with it, and so after a few hours, I save a page or two of my research to my Favorites and then go take all the photos and magnets and business cards and clipped cartoon frames off the fridge and spray it down with Windex in glad rejoicing. Here is something I can actually do. Here is an idea I can implement. I happily rearrange the photos and put up new ones I got with Christmas cards, and throw away some older ones, and the grocery list written a month ago. When done, I stand back and enjoy the order and symmetry of an idea hatched and carried out in an hour.

Then I go back to my computer.

I have, like most of us, all kinds of ideas. Developing the know-how to implement them is not fun.

I was reading about another media frenzy over the Tiger Mom book. It said that Asian Moms know that nothing is fun until you know how to do it. I immediately started thinking about Angie, just graduating from Aveda school, and how learning to cut, color, set, and otherwise handle hair was no jolly good time, but that she’ll hopefully soon have a job and a fun career.

Then I thought of how my son, now nearing 40 years old, told me recently that I should never have let him quit gymnastics. I still remember fighting to get him away from Saturday morning cartoons and how I finally put it to him one day: “If you’re going to fight me every week about going, I’m going to forget it.” He was probably all of four years old.

So I’m contemplating all this and getting more agitated by the minute.

Without a Tiger Mom breathing down my neck, I’d become my own Tiger Mom. I wasn't giving myself any choice.

But I need to have a choice in my sunroom on a Sunday afternoon -- a choice about how I spend my day. I need to remember that I do…have a choice. When I get myself worked into a frenzy of “have to,” I need to take a deep breath and slow down, even while I keep going. I have to remember, as my friend Mary told me the other day, “One step at a time.”

So I guess I’m just saying that there it is again – in a roundabout, insidious way – all that is beyond my control is my own mind. It’s was almost as if my hubris of the morning came back to bite me.

It’s not always that we’re thinking negative thoughts or that we’ve got chatter going on as we meditate, or that we’re creating scenes of gloom and doom in our future, or that we’re in fear instead of love. It’s far more often about the dumb stuff.

I knew what I was doing to myself, and still, for those hours, just kept right on doing it, as if I was addicted to a video game rather than needing to find that first step that I needed to find. I was not in control of my mind. I wasn’t even thinking.

There’s no real moral or anything like that to this story. Just an admission I guess, and with it, a little lightness has returned. And the computer is about to be shut off for the night.