Happy New Year, everyone!  Here’s hoping this is your best one yet!

In true new-year fashion, I’m going to find some nature-y spot tomorrow to do some taking stock—to reflect and journal about who I am and who I want to be, what I’ve done and what I’d like to do (or do more of).  I realized as I walked this morning that in a number of ways I’ve been gearing up for this activity all week.

The enjoyable part of the gearing-up began when I cashed-in on a gift certificate my sister gave me for scrapbooking supplies.  I’ve never been much of a scrapbooker, but now that I have a baby, I have all kinds of pictures I want to be able to enjoy.  So I’ve begun a baby album, and must say I’m having a hoot!  I love the whole process of looking closely at chaos and trying to find order in it all.  In this case the chaos is a pile of pictures, but for the very same reason, I write.  When I’m done with an essay or a chapter or a page full of pictures, I feel giddy.  Giddy, and somehow very clean.

While working on the album, and everything else I’ve done each day, I’ve noticed my eyesight being worse than usual.  How does this happen?  The glasses I’ve only needed for distances are getting a lot more important for all the other lengths, too.  I realized on my walk this morning that all this blurriness makes me pay less attention to the world beyond myself.  I get lost in my thoughts.

So I’ll say how all of that is a gear-up for reflection after I explain the hugely un-fun part of the process.  Mites.  Yes, you heard me right.  Mites.  They have infested my apartment and have chosen me as their queen.  Or, dinner, I should say.  They don’t like the baby, and they don’t like N, and apparently, according to the dermatologist I finally saw this week, their normal fare of rats (!) has completely jumped ship.  The cheapest way to get rid of them, doc says, is to get some rats to come live in our crawl space again.  Any takers?

I have had an absolutely miserable week on this front, covered from head to toe in extremely itchy bites.  The perpetrators are so small I can’t see them to figure out where they’re coming from.  All I’ve been able to do is join N in doing tons of laundry in hot water, disinfecting all the window sills and floorboards, putting double-sided tape all around our bedposts (to keep them from crawling onto the bed), and vacuuming like there’s no tomorrow.  I would put a picture of any section of my skin on here to prove that it really has been that bad, but I don’t want to offend anyone.  At least not by that means.

So anyway.  Here I’ve been bodily experiencing the need for refocused sight, the zing of discovering and/or making order out of chaos, and the dramatic impulse to be rid not only of rats (…skeletons in the closet), but of the tenacious, voracious annoyances that feed on them—all of that while moving daily toward experiencing the same things in a mind and soul way when I do my session of reflection.  Talk about holistic new-year work!

2005 was an amazing year for me—I think my best ever, so far as doing things I love to do and living more comfortably in my skin—and I’m eager to continue its trajectory with a mindful sense of where I’ve been, where I am, and where I think I’d like to be.  I’m even considering a Mondo Beyondo list!  Yeehaw!!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Mindfulness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.