I consider myself contemplative–one who thrives on time to ponder.  Multitasking isn’t so much my thing.  For this reason (and surely a hundred more), having a child and pursuing a beyond-home career are stretching me.  At the end of most days I feel it, that combination of exhaustion and reved-upness, where my mind is still trying to puzzle together the things I wanted to do today but will need to do tomorrow (or the next day) instead, while my body is saying ENOUGH.  EAT.  SLEEP.

In an attempt to get a handle on when to do what, and when to tell my mind enough already on trying to figure it out, compulsively, I have officially turned into the guy from About a Boy who has his days divided into units.  His life is way too empty, so our motivations are different, but you should see the weekly schedule I’ve created for myself.  All the non-childcare moments are divided into blocks.  I’m super excited about three projects, simultaneously, that all require huge amounts of time, so here’s me and my gangbusters looking way more like the drip, drip, drip (i.e. an hour during this naptime, two before bed) that look like nothing, but slowly, tenaciously, get canyons made.

This all is to say that for a few weeks, I’m closing up shop.  Here.  Not for good, but until I can get some marked headway made on these projects (and thus have units to spare).  One of them is a new blog, so if all goes well, you will hear much, much more of me after the break.  In a different venue, but one I think (hope) you’ll like.  I can’t wait.

So stay tuned, and take care of yourselves, and much, much love to all of you.

I’m sick this weekend, tired and congested and wanting to curl up in bed.  N and I are swapping childcare duties, though, taking our turns at work-beyond-home, so here I am with a very sweet boy at my feet.  No sleeping right now for me.

I’ve been listening to Jewel all afternoon, feeding and changing and lounging with E in between, and am inspired again by her spirit.  I particularly love Life Uncommon.

Lend your voices only to sounds of freedom
No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from
Fill your lives with love and bravery
And you shall lead a life uncommon

It’s a rally to set down the chains that keep you living small.  The bravery piece is an acknowledgement that living fully, in the best sense of that word, will not be without opposition.  And my thought is opposition comes from inside of us just as much as from the outside.

Come on you unbelievers, move out of the way
There is a new army coming and we are armed with faith

If each of us is made of different voices, different people at our inner table, her "move aside" could be spoken to the voices inside of us that would thwart a robust life.  Isn’t that a great phrase?  I want to live robustly!  I want to use my words to bring life.  I want to stand at my own life’s threshold like a superhero, muscles flexed, fist held up and out above my head.  Haha!!!  Take that, nihilism!  Watch me live!!!

It’s moments like these, when my heart swells to bursting, that become my buoys in life’s day-to-dayness.  The trail markers that keep me going where I want to go, even as my feet are killing me and I’m sick of the food I brought and…I’m wiping poopy bottoms in between blowing my own nose.

Life is real.  Even the uncommon kind.  For some reason that’s okay with me right now.  For me right now, right this second, love and bravery have to be about the quality I bring to loving E.  Beyond that, we’ll just see. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go blow my nose.

Friday it was bright in the morning after a long stretch of rain.  I went walking for the first time in months (foot problems crippled me that long), cleaned house, washed clothes.  Elijah was in a great mood and endorphins from my walk were doing wonders for my own.

But then it got windy outside.  Dark clouds moved in.  I was tired from my work, but was hoping to get some errands run before realizing Elijah was tired too, and probably couldn’t keep it together in public like I was hoping I could do.  So I tried putting him down, and he wailed, and I tried rocking him, and he wailed, and I tried letting him wail for a bit, and he wailed.  I finally got him up, feeling tired enough myself for it to be two in the morning, wondering where in the world our day’s joy had gone.  The house felt bad, dark in ways beyond the sheets of rain outside.  I never know how much that kind of darkness is inside of me, and how much is something beyond myself.

So I put Elijah on his changing table and started making up a song about light and love, and how both could fill the whole place up as far as I was concerned, until E was changed and loaded up to pick up N, who wasn’t keen on riding his bike in a downpour.

We got there early. I parked in front of a meadow where weeds and trees had grown into a sea of green.  Elijah’s mood had turned sweet, and we sat there together, him babbling in the back seat, while sun broke through.  That sea turned bright, and as rain kept falling, I thought I heard the sound of green things drinking.  I thought I heard guzzling, and knew, again, that even when there’s darkness, outside or in my soul, there are these: jeweled meadows drinking rain.  Gladness.  Growth. 

Death and life are happening, and maybe knowing that is what makes death more bearable.  Maybe watching for the life, and moving toward it, are all the vocation I could wish for.

I’m at the library, supposedly working on my book. My mind is scattered, though, spread wide across time and people and circumstance.

My uncle died this week. I’m traveling to the funeral Thursday. His family relationships were strained, so his funeral will be a ritual I can’t really imagine (though I’m glad for the chance to be present for). I feel nervous about it. I feel nervous, too, about being away from Elijah for more than a day.

There are other things, too, though—friends working through physical and relationship challenges of their own, a surrogate brother leaving the country indefinitely, a book I’m almost done writing, but that’s challenging me to soul-search, to admit my feelings of inadequacy around writing a climax I haven’t personally lived, and then go ahead and write it anyway.

All of it’s swirling around inside, mirroring the wind and rain that have howled outside all week. I care so much about the people involved in each of these swirls. I care so much I want to howl, too. If I had a magic wand, I’d make everyone’s hearts hurt a lot less.

This week I’m getting a crash course in “dealing with it”. There’s nothing like health problems and neverending bug bites to really unveil the depth and breadth, or in my case thinness and narrowness, of one’s character. I am just now trying to crawl out of the mire of feeling sorry for myself and actually realize the sun is still shining, and there still remains a wealth of things for which gratitude is most called. There still remain outcrops, for example, where mites do not live. I don’t know where they are, and if I did, I would be there, but just knowing they exist brings a small kind of ecstacy.

I need to vent. The mites are back AGAIN. Do you know what I spent a good part of today doing? Caulking floorboards and window sills. I don’t know what else to do. Exterminators have fogged the attic with borric acid. Rat traps don’t catch anything. Vacuuming twice and thrice a week doesn’t help. They come in waves, and, very much like the ocean, one never knows how big or small the next swell will be. This wave is nearly as big as the first. Bites everywhere. Elijah is now getting them too.

Can I just tell you what a BUMMER this whole thing is? It’s getting me depressed. There is nothing so unnerving as feeling things crawling on you, biting you, but not being able to see them, and having no idea where they’re coming from or what to do to make them go away. Crazy-making, I tell you. I’m all for loving all creatures, for seeing each as important in the grand web of the universe, but I have to admit there’s not a whole lot of love in me for this particular crew.

Back to scratching…

Today is my birthday!  I’m 30!  :)

Last week I wrote about a meditation I’ve been doing lately. This week I discovered a much shorter version that’s become possible now that the images from the first one are in my muscle memory (soul memory? psyche memory?). It’s just a deep breath. As I breathe in, my breath itself is what I visualize collecting all those parts of me that get spread so far away. As I breathe out, I visualize my breath creating an invisible skin that keeps me all here, all present in this moment.

As I write this, and even as I physically do the meditation, I’m aware that this kind of centering isn’t original to me at all. I’m aware that people of many religions and/or lacks thereof do these sorts of things, and that there are books written and lectures given and CDs recorded and workshops offered and meditation centers founded all around them. They aren’t new.

Somewhere along the way, though, I became tired of trying to find God and find peace and find community and ways of waking all the parts of me up by studying what everyone else does toward such ends. My studies became a way of saying to myself over and over again, you’re not enough, you can’t begin until you have some coherent thing figured out from all the pieces, you need something more. Something someone else has. I’m all for apprenticeship, and think there’s Life to be found in many forms of imitation, but at this point I need a healthy dose of trying things out “on my own.” I put that in quotes because what I really mean is playing with what’s already gone into me (and I’ve poured in quite a lot) and coming up with practices that feel honest, and make some sort of sense to me, even if only to my gut. Things that say to me and whoever else is listening: this is who I am, and these are things that make me feel thankful or peaceful or connected to something bigger. And all of it’s enough.

The day that I get certain voices out of my head, voices of people I love, but who have strong opinions about what the “right” way to be spiritual is, the right way to do religion, is the day I will rise up from this earth of nettles and legs made lame from thick constraints and feel my wings go soaring. Feel wind beneath them, and like Spirit is the one blowing it, and hear her singing while she blows, “Fly, dear soul! Become the woman you were meant to be!”

Sometimes, and maybe mainly when I’m very tired, and haven’t exercised enough, and usually late in the evening when I don’t really feel like reading and journaling feels like work, I feel an aching sort of emptiness, and a question starts to form inside:  Is this all there is?  It’s a mist that hints at form and substance, but, like mists do, wafts away when I try and look at it too closely.  Or maybe it’s more of a dark and unyielding chasm, and all I can bear is getting close enough to know it’s there.

Life is achingly beautiful, but for me, part of the deal is this ache for something I can’t yet name.

One of the things I’ve been doing in the last couple weeks—since that conversation I told you about—is a kind of meditation.  I do it when I feel my peace getting wobbly.

The whole thing came about because of an image I got in my head.  It was an image of me being spread out over too much space.  Like the parts of me worrying about things in the past and the parts of me thinking or scheming about my future and the parts of me trying to keep track of laundry or groceries, say, or whether or not Elijah will stay asleep long enough for me to finish a task—in other words, the present stuff, too—all those parts of me are spread around.  That’s a truckload of space!  I picture taking up a broom and going around collecting all of it.  I picture sweeping it all into here, right now, into this very skin I’m wanting to inhabit.

Once I’ve done that, then I try to be more mindful of what it feels like to be in this moment, with all of myself here.  I start to listen; what are the sounds in the space around me?  Even a quiet room has some.  I try to feel what the chair or ground or bed feels like beneath me, what the air feels like on my face.  I even take note of my itches (have I told you the mites are back???).  The great thing is I can do all of this anywhere—even walking down the street.

Something is so peace-inducing about this process for me.  I imagine it’s like a parent feels when the teenager out doing who knows what is finally back in the house, safe in their room.  The parts of my psyche given to worrying about past or present or future get to relax, knowing that all of me is here right now; their work is unnecessary for the time being. 

It makes me feel calm, and, quite literally, collected.