Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings

Tuesday gratefuls: Ruth, who sees me. Joe coming in January. Shadow in her third week of boarding school. Going to public spaces. That old debble melancholy. Deep darkness, nurturing. Now more light, let the growing season show its first tiny shoots. The dance of light and dark. Shadows. Shadow Mountain.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Self

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Yirah.    Radical amazement, awe.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs.  Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  ― Howard Thurman

Becoming a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Can you feel the trembling heart of children, ones who await not gifts but special dispensations from the holy Santa Claus who once a year accomplishes the miraculous, Reindeer powered sleigh landing on rooftops, finding a way in even to non-chiminied homes, eating millions of cookies and drinking gallons of milk, knowing what each child’s heart needs, and bringing a present that speaks love and caring.

 

And so. I’ve mostly said it out loud. I can feel, often feel, boxed in by my choices, living a tentative life with medicine offering temporary balms, welcome, yet always with the awareness that this drug, that ablation, will fail.

Chips away at my sense of self, my fantasy of permanence. I feel myself too often sliding into no, I can’t, rather than my usual, from a life I remember well, I can. I can’t travel. I can’t take care of this dog. I can’t engage large tasks. I can’t stand long enough to cook. I can’t.

When I can’t takes over, the self does not lose agency, it relinquishes it. No wonder sadness follows. What a pitiful excuse for a human being. Who’s old enough to know better.

Ah, as Shakespeare wrote, there’s the rub. I do know better. But knowing is a weak cousin to action and an even more distant relative to healing a wounded heart. From this well, I look up and see others handling their lives, doing this and that, keeping their life going while I languish. The one who can’t.

I know. For sure and certain.  This view flows from a crippled heart. And yet, I can’t seem to find that Archimedean lever to move my inner world.

It’s not for lack of love. Not at all. Friends and family, yes. Who see me. Care for me. It’s not for lack of self knowledge gained the hard way over years of analysis and honest self-reflection.

Then, what is it? I think, sometimes, that I should sell the house, move into a condo or an apartment, or assisted living where the burdens I feel in this independent, introverted life I lead would fall away. Then I remember AA, wherever you go, there you are. No to geographic escape.

I need to figure this out living in this place I love, with the Dog and human family I love, with my friends, with my wild neighbors both of whom I love. With Mother Earth, from  came and to her I will return.