My Story

I couldn't be more ready for spring. After two massive snowstorms in one week, I am feeling totally over winter. And after losing two friends in the same week, I am really ready for some joy in my life.

I completely understand on an intellectual level that everything is a creation of my mind - my reality is rooted in my perception. And I also see how my life has become dark as I have experienced a long list of challenges. And I understand that the more I keep that list going, the longer it will grow. Here's how my mind works:

My life changed in October. My beloved kitty died. The heartache was unbearable, and I felt as if I, too, were dying. And when the fog lifted just a little bit, I totalled my car. My chest was injured, and is still causing me some discomfort. And with the need to act quickly to deal with insurance and replacing my car, and with finishing massage school, I didn't have time to deal with the emotional fallout of that accident. Until I finished massage school, that is. At that point, in December, I began to have intense anxiety and panic attacks, and my body went into a powerful, scary expression of that anxiety. In the midst of that, I went to Tennessee to visit my family for a week, and the anxiety split me wide open. I couldn't stop shaking, and felt pain and strange sensations in my whole body. I was terrified, and began 2010 in a process of trying to heal from that. I started having weekly acupuncture, cleaned up my diet quite a bit, and got myself into counseling. And then, Ed died. And then Kenny died. And in the process of all of that, my neighbor started talking about Iran and uranium and the potential for a major disaster involving bombings, and we were stuck in the apocalyptic snows, unable to get out, unable to do anything about any of it...

There is a story that has started in this. I feel myself pulled into it just writing about it here, and have felt pulled into it as I have shared it with people, too. And I see how my list of horrible things just grows the more I choose to keep that list. There is also some angry, aggressive sense of "poor me" and victimhood within it, and I hear it and know it. I am so glad to have cultivated my observer well enough to at least see how I'm caught up in this. But here, standing in the midst of being caught, I also don't see how to break free of it. My head is above water, but I don't know how to push myself out of the water completely...

The Heart of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving week is here. And I have so much to be grateful for in my life. I am going to enjoy spending time each day devoting my attention to all the blessings my life has generously given me. Most recently, I am grateful to be alive and well in this body that I call my home. After my accident, I am feeling a renewed sense of gratitude for my life. Especially since during the previous week I spent a lot of time saying "fuck it all" and "what is the point of this life anyway?" I wonder if I had given more energy to that kind of thinking whether my accident would have turned out any differently... What I do know is that life gives us all opportunities to check out or to decide to stay around. And I am feeling pretty clear right now that I am exactly where I need to be. This life has a lot more to offer me, and I have a lot more to offer it.

I have a bright red rental car right now, and was able to go to the body shop and empty my car of so much crap. I was told that they should have an opportunity to check out my car tomorrow and hopefully determine the cost of repairs, and whether or not my insurance company will pay for those repairs or total the car. Either way, it is pretty much empty now. I took away bag after bag of stuff: two large plastic garbage bags filled with glass and plastic recycling, a bag of clothes and shoes, another bag of papers and binders, and several more bags of random stuff. I even found an umbrella! I didn't know I even owned one...

I am also grateful that I could go grocery shopping tonight. I pulled out a cookbook from a Buddhist monastery, and found a couple of heavenly sounding recipes. One was for quinoa lentil mushroom loaf, and the other was for sweet potato burritos. Unfortunately, I ended up needing a lot of ingredients, and headed out to Trader Joe's and My Organic Market. By the time I got home, it was nearly 8pm, and my steam for cooking up a feast had withered. So, tomorrow night I will have good things to create, and that sounds wonderful!

One of the things that I get frustrated with this time of year, though, is the whole speedy convenience living of it all. Trader Joe's was filled with tables and shelves of ready-made foods that would be luxurious and tasty for the holiday. And there were tons of folks flocking around them, picking their treasures. It makes me sad, though, that people are no longer willing to devote some good time to preparing this feast of gratitude. It has become, largely, just one more obligatory holiday where so many people just go through the motions and create the feast without any connection to the meaning of it all. Now, sure, much of the meaning could be found within a bunch of white religious zealots who sailed their ships to the New World and began spreading plagues and dominating the intricate balance the indigenous people held within the natural world. But somewhere deeper, I find this holiday a time of celebrating the harvest, the bounty that Mother Earth has given us yet again. Celebrating the beauty of togetherness, and creating food in community. Of celebrating gratitude for all that we receive. And there is something that makes my skin crawl about the whole way people buy the ready-made pie without knowing who made it, and without knowing where it came from, and without caring a bit about those things. One more way that Americans want what they want, cheap and convenient and easy, without needing to contribute much of themselves to it, other than money. *shiver*

And with these things in mind, I am feeling super-inspired to cook. I am feeling grateful for having a lot of time this week. I am also feeling grateful for the slowness I have been inviting into my life since I began this blog, contemplating voluntary simplicity. To me, cooking a feast to share with my beloveds is the very essence of what makes life worth living. And *that* is something that I am grateful for this Thanksgiving.

Life as Art

I have missed writing more in the last two weeks than since I started writing, including yesterday, and just before I went to sleep last night, I thought about writing just to capture some words on the page. Then, I told myself not to do it. There's no point in writing a paragraph that says virtually nothing just out of obligation. But obligation aside, I have committed to writing this blog pretty much daily, and today I am renewing that committment.

It's been a full week already. Yesterday Alan moved most of his stuff into the house, and today he finished. In preparation for the move, I also spent a lot of time cleaning the carpets, as well as going through all of my stuff. There is so much crap that I have accumulated in this house over these almost eight years! And it's so good to go through and downsize. Just today I freecycled a pair of hiking boots, as well as the frame to a futon that had been given to me. If I only can keep this stamina for a while, I can hopefully get rid of lots more crap that I don't need anymore.

As I type, Friday has crawled onto my left knee, and is happily purring away, licking my fingers and the back of my hand. What a beautiful kitty! Yesterday, as I steamed the carpets, I made sure he was far away from the noise. I let him out onto the porch, and he spent some time nestled under a table that is covered in a bright Bolivian tablecloth...under the table is a box filled with dry spearmint leaves. He love to crawl in there and munch on the minty leaves and just hang out. He spent a lot of time there yesterday, but when I went to go check on him and take a break, he wasn't there! To my surprise, he had snuggled up into one of the porch chairs, and was curled up on a cushion. He picked the chair with the most sunshine, and was super adorable. I got my camera and took probably forty photos - I particularly loved the angle of the bright sunlight as it defined his white little whiskers, and the texture of his fur. Too cute!!

Today, too, as I began to make more order from the mess that has been my home this last week, I thought about life as art. About how I choose to live in my space. Now this isn't the realm of deep philosophical or metaphysical stuff...that is the stuff of my inner life, for sure. But in my home, I choose to live artfully. Not fancy, not expensive, not terribly particularly. But in ways that express the color of my soul. I love this! I am not choosing to follow any fashion trend, nor any fancy, exclusive interior design style. I'm not going for any "look" or anything. But what I have managed to create in my space is some kind of bohemian whimsical art. The art of living, indeed. I love the thought that all arenas of my life can be expressed and experienced as the art of living. My spiritual life, my work life, my home life, my relationships. All are art! And I have had these wild and fun visions of painting murals on the doors of each room. Since I'm not a gifted or experienced painter of representational art, it's guaranteed to be somewhat childlike if it's not a mess. But I'm okay with that. I've already had a blast in my previous forays into painting the walls - from the wavy divisions between contrasting colors, to the sun on the wall of the living room (sadly covered by a bookshelf now), to the massive tree painted in the hallway. What's next, that's the question...

Moving On

Aaaahhh. The last night in my house as a single inhabitant. Tomorrow Alan moves in, and I begin the journey of living with a roommate. It seems like exactly what needs to be happening in my life right now.

Alan is an ideal roommate, I think. We know each other pretty well, but aren't best friends. Less likely to drive each other crazy, I think. Also, we have been communicating very well as this whole process has come about. I hope that will continue, so that we can both live happily in this small-ish space. Also, best of all, Alan loves Friday kitty like no other. Other than me, of course. Honestly, though, if I were to die, I would want Alan to take Friday - it is a perfect match. And having a scenario where Friday kitty gets even MORE love than he does now is really great!

The poor little guy is probably very confused right now. He spent the evening under my bed as I steam cleaned the carpets. The only thing worse than the noise of a vacuum cleaner is a steam cleaner! And Friday HATES the vacuum. I hate it that he has been hiding like that, but he's surely in the quietest, safest place for him while all that noise is going on. What will he do tomorrow when I steam the carpets in that room, I wonder? For now, he has come out of hiding, and is wandering around the house, rubbing his soft body against the endless stacks of stuff. How's that for making friends with chaos? Oh, my little Buddha cat, teaching me yet another piece of transcendental wisdom. =)

I'm told that tonight there will be a major meteor shower, and I wish I had the stamina to stay up and stare at the sky. But it's getting cold out, and I got up at 6am to go to DC by 9am, and then taught flute lessons, and then spent the whole evening cleaning my carpets. I'm pretty much beat about now. Maybe I will go crawl up on the roof for a little while and commune with the sky and some sacred tobacco.

It hit me tonight as I was sitting on the toilet that I am getting used to living without Familiar kitty in my life. And I spoke those words to him, as if he were with me. I kind of feel his presence there with me in the bathroom where he died sometimes, and it doesn't freak me out as much as it did a few weeks ago. I miss him still, and I feel like my life will never go back to the way it was before. But I am starting to feel that my life is going on in spite of the sorrow. And of course it does, of course it must. Sometimes I think that that is the hardest part...knowing that life does go on in spite of the pain and suffering of loss. It almost feels like it shouldn't - it's not fair to go on living without the ones I love! But I also can acknowledge that thinking like that just brings more suffering. All I can do is breathe into the pain and watch as my own life lives itself beyond that dark shadow that death has cast upon my heart.

Tribe

I'm too tired to write much tonight. But the blessing is that there is movement within me. It comes from a place of not knowing what will be, but of coming up for air after a long, long time in the water. I don't know what life is, what the point is, or what it's all about. I may never know. But for tonight, I am feeling a little more okay with that. Thank god for my tribe, and for coming together in full honesty and openness and authenticity. THIS makes life worth living.