Loves Me Lightly

I’ve been very new age-y today. Last night I found a meditation site on the web with real audio. A ten minute guided meditation at your fingertips, replete with music and a visit to my authentic self. Very cool.

When I arrived home, Ed made an early dinner and I called to arrange for a massage. A woman named Tina, with rough hands, kneaded lavender scented oils into arms, fingers, stomach, thighs. She played Japanese music and kept telling me to breathe. My feet are tight, she wonders why the muscles in my feet are tight.

I took a shower and did a full body exfoliate with jasmine and rose oils. The lavender oils loosened everything and the shower smelled like a flower store. It was heavenly. It still is, really. The smell of everything lightly rising from my skin.

And exiting the shower Ed makes me hot tea with honey and sets it by my computer. He loves me lightly, offers up these little gifts and then disappears into the other room. Just when I need space he offers it up and asks for nothing in return. Here’s the tea, now you just do whatever you want, whatever you need. I’ll be in the other room.

Today was just a perfect day. Today this is just a perfect life.

I Need A New Joystick

I have opinions about everything – fairly strong ones. In my internal life the universe is dichotomous – there is right and wrong, good and evil, black and white. I’m the right, but interestingly not the good. There is an intense discordance in my inner life. I’m learning to be okay with it. Ed is learning to be okay with it as well – all at once being my beacon of strength and support and an emblem of all that is evil in the world. He wears these clothes well.

I had the most productive day yet. But I don’t want to measure the value of my life in yardsticks of productivity. So it was productive but not as joyful as it could or should have been. I do want to measure the value of my life in yardsticks of joy.

So what is joy? What is joy? How do I find this thing that eludes my disposition so these days? Of course I could go off in another direction in a spiraling tome, but does it get me any closer. I’m not sure of this.

I think some people on this planet are zealots for their way of being, doing and undoing. Like Nietzsche wrote, “Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.” I’m not so different. My path is my path. I’m not so different from anyone else in this regard. You know, this is my path so fuck off. But I’m also pretty keen on the goal and maybe to some degree that sets me apart – apart with a subset of humanity who are fairly married to both to process and the product.

So even I’m wondering where this is going - how this has to do with my joy. I might be wondering this for awhile. I need to be okay with this. Today is all that matters. I really, really need to see and feel my today with more clarity, love and integrity. It’s time to get a new battery for the meditation helmet and see if I can open my third eye a little wider.

Turning Corners

The mountain was beautiful today. Forget-Me-Nots and white wildflowers (I don’t know what they’re called) are popping out early. I see them and smile, like I’m opening a present that’s been waiting in a box since last spring. I took the short loop today, hoping that maybe I’d spy the first wild iris of the season. I didn’t. But I did see the purple ones. I don’t know what they’re called either. I’d seen a few fairly heavy with buds and thought that perhaps in a few days.. then I rounded the corner and there they were. Ms. Secret and I did a little spring dance right there on the hill. We climbed up off the trail. I spun in circles while she watched me then she started spinning about too – tucking her back end in and running about in that excited playful way dogs do.

These antics of mine used to frighten her. She’d look at me in a suspicious way and cow. Now as soon as I set foot off trail she seems to know that there’s something to celebrate. It truly is a wonderful life!

I still feel pretty toxic on the inside but at the same time I feel like I’m slowly turning a corner. Haroomf. Don’t we spend out entire God Damned lives turning corners? Just walk around it for crying out loud. Can we just get on with it already?

I was thinking, I was wondering… was I more intelligent when I smoked? Did I think more quickly, were the synapses firing just a bit more rat-a-tat-tat? Or was I more dull and did somehow the addiction and the drug lead me to believe I was more clever? Right now I find myself rather dull. With most other drugs, people just think that they’re more interesting but they’re not. So on some level I hope I just thought I was more interesting - and now if and when I have a thought that I find remotely compelling – well, maybe it will really be brilliant. Or something. I’m not sure.

You know.. one to lie and one to listen….

You Can Call Me Baby

About six weeks ago I stopped smoking. Life has revolved around this point – waking, dreaming, laughing, screaming. And suddenly I’m not the person I thought I was. Wait, I simply don’t know who I am. Oh, it’s not so bad. When you don’t know who you are you don’t’ bicker with yourself so much, there’s not all this old baggage to address. I’m all newborn, covered with blood. Ten fingers, ten toes and a big mess you can call baby.

I’m in a rather menacing way. It’s fascinating. Dark thoughts at every turn. I don’t like it. However much I’d ceased liking who I was in that relationship with the addiction – well, I don’t care much for this girl either. On the ferry en route to San Francisco the other day, I thought about some essay I’d read here or there on mediation and prayer. The author contends that whether or not we consider ourselves religious folk and whether or not we think we pray – that we do – we pray and meditate all the time. The author urged us to be mindful of what our prayer rests on. Some people spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about money, material things, what others think of them (or what other’s aren’t thinking of them), etc. etc. So these are the kinds of things that might occupy our thoughts – which are our meditations and prayers.

Considering this unremembered author’s contentions I tried to be mindful. The bay, how beautiful the water, the sun glinting on patterns of waves in such and such a way to look like diamonds sparkling on something dark and mysterious and deep. The color of the hills surrounding San Quentin prison – electric green from the winter rains. The smell of salt and sea. The woman who asks for change on the Embarcadero – she has a lovely smile. I give her ten dollars. It’s what I would have spent on cigarettes that day – do I think for a second she is less worthy than that?

It’s all a fancy way of saying, go to a happy place. So I went to my happy place. I don’t mind saying that I have a bit of disdain that it’s a contrived place – not a natural place my thoughts and heart lands – not like it used to be. Or did it?

I keep trying to remember the wisdom in that thing that Homer Simpson said… Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen. It only goes to follow that it also takes two to speak the truth. Some days I feel like I’d have a real edge up on things if I were schizophrenic.

Namaste

It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.

But yet I find I’m not afraid. Over the years I find myself accepting rather than mourning and seeking the life in things as opposed to the death in things. Death is the final chapter. It will come for all of us marking neither a success nor failure but merely an end to our stories. The questions we must ask ourselves – did we live well, did we die well and how do we define well?

Namaste is a Sanskrit word. I’ve heard it defined many ways. The one I like is, I bow to the divine within you. And I do. But I don’t. I don’t see or acknowledge the divine in everyone. Is this right, is this wrong?

I don’t like disappointment and I try to rebel against it rather than accept it. There was a great movie, The Third Man, written by Graham Greene. It’s a fabulous film, not only for its wonderful zither music but also for brilliant performances by Joseph Cotton and Orson Wells. Anyways, there is a character, Anna, who says, “just because you know more about someone, it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change how you feel about them.” But this isn’t and hasn’t been my experience. Knowing more does change things. Sometimes knowing more builds that wall that blocks my view to the divine.

And I embark upon the day in a quandary – where this brick has been placed in a wall to a nine year old child. I no longer see the child for the child, no longer see the divine within the child. What does it mean or say about me when I view the actions of a nine year old child morally reprehensible and unforgivable? How can a child be unforgivable?

The Harvest

I put things in order from A to Z, small to large, dust off the debris, rearrange, restack and organize – trying to impress some order on the chaos. When am I going to learn that trying to organize dust particles is futile? And here we are dust to dust. All it takes is a strong wind and we’re history.

I don’t have much time here. I don’t have much time to figure it all out. I call it eternity – but it’s not. It’s my forever, but it’s conscripted solely in my flesh. I’ve been granted this gift and I’ve abused it – or maybe I’ve just lived it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. If I’ve used it well, sometimes I think I should arrive at this moment with more, but I never really deliberate on what I mean by that. More what?

Come down here onto the earth and die by the weight of it. It’s so much more than sitting up there in the clouds pondering the heavens. There will be time for that later when we’re dead. We will come to know the spirit world soon enough, when our forms are better suited for that understanding. We weren’t given the gift of flesh in order to understand that world. We were sent here to understand this one rightly. Is speaks through each of us and this is what Is tells me.

Walk on the ground and carry the weight of creation rightly. The burden increases with every act, every deed, and when it comes to be too much we’re to do what Atlas does – to shrug. This is the burden of our harvest. This is the burden of the abundance of life. It’s called joy.

Every Violin

Isn’t every violin supposed to be yielding itself to my hearing?? Damn trees. Damn blades of grass. You mean they are not growing all around me with the recognition that I’m the gravitational center?? No, no, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be the center. I just want my corner, off to the side, out of the fray, outside the whirlwind chaos of everything.

I want time to slow down and I want crisp morning walks and a progression from one thing to the next that feels even vaguely like progress even if I don’t understand why, to what end, toward or away from what. I want my voice to be heard, my words appreciated. Yes, the problem is that I want a certain reverence that I neither want to work for or be terribly accountable to. That’s arrogant and unfulfilling all at once.

If I set wind to these words will it offer them the gravity to float away? My old therapist seemed to think so. There are too many words left undone, half spun, frayed and broken and the tapestry is unraveling as we sit here saying nothing.

I had a dream last night that I was a drummer. Yes. A drummer, of all things. New music, subtle and complicated rose and for the life of me I couldn’t feel the rhythm of it, could’t find the beat for the life of me. I felt embarrassed. I wasn’t who I thought I was. And in my waking I realize that I’m not.

Perhaps my anger is for what I’m not – not for what the rest of the world is or isn’t. And that sucks. And maybe all I’m trying to do now is deflect my disappointment in myself.

Do you think I’m having some kind of mid-life crisis? That’s a possibility, but it’s such a simple phrase that’s likely overused and abused. The term mid-life crisis feels like an excuse or a box to place angst in. Oh look, one more aspect of life to throw a few simple words on, since it’s just a phase somehow it’s not real life and it can be dismissed. I don’t think so. Not this time. That’s been part of the problem all along. Sometimes I feel like screaming at myself, “you’re entire life is not a phase to simply endure until you get to the other side of it.”

If I have a single obligation it’s to find, experience and express joy. That’s the goal of every single day and why do I have such a hard time accomplishing this mission? What’s the obstacle here even when there’s no apparent obstacles?? Why am I my own biggest road block to this?