No one knows what makes the soul wake up so happy!
Maybe a dawn breeze has blown the veil from the face of God. ~Rumi
My sincere apologies for the confusion regarding the (alliterative alert!) previously published password-protected bogus blog post. It has now been deleted. It’s a long and cumbersome story, but it involved a new widget that promised to deliver an amazing slide show. It did not. Back to the drawing board on that particular plan.
So, let’s get back to our regular programming…which beggars the question… what is my regular programming?
I am not quite sure what that might look like. Actually, it suddenly occurs to me that I have no idea.
You might have noticed that my last few blog posts have been stuffed full of pep talks, sincere admonitions, and other random advice to get up and get at it. You might have guessed that those are letters to myself. You would have guessed correctly.
Sometimes, in fact quite often, they work. Some days, they don’t. Truth be told, there are often fairly long stretches where my best mantras, booster talks and gung-go gadgets still leave me as listless as an old dog on a hot road.
But I read somewhere that the first line of defense is to recognize these moments as simply part of your own reality. As in, this is about me and my lost-in-space emotional state. (No one is doing this to me. I can’t blame anyone or anything, although that is a such a tempting option!)
Alas. I am accountable and Queen of my own ship.
Yesterday afternoon, like the day previous, and, in spite of a fabulous morning ‘bath’ in the forest, my energy did an extreme ebbing like a Bay of Fundy tide. I knew there were gathering clouds on my personal horizon; thunderheads that soon revealed the fractal sunbursts of an aura migraine. It was actually a relief when the shine and starbursts hit. Suddenly I had an explanation for my plummeting internal barometric pressure and inertia.
But how silly is that? It’s like the childlike disappointment of telling someone you really hurt yourself but, without having the visible display of a bruise or wound to prove it, the pain described sounds false and inferior.
Not every low point has a visible source or a wound to lend it proof and validity. In fact, more often than not, there is nothing to point to at all. It is simply the invisible weather of our lives. The absurd facts are, that hours before (or hours later) I might feel the exact opposite in mood and energy. Anyone observing my life from the outside would say all the circumstances of my world were exactly the same as they were the day before and the day before that.
And yet, each moment I am experiencing my life in a completely different way.
I did what any good metaphorical sailor would do. I sat in my little sailboat called life and knew I was becalmed. In the doldrums. Dead in the water. I could only show up and do my best. I had to batten the hatches, tighten the lines, hold the rudder steady and hunker in.
So, I stretched. I walked. I meditated. I worked on some art. I made a good meal. I went to a candlelight evening yoga class. Mostly I repeated my mantra; this too shall pass.
Some days are clear sailing; energy is high, the sails snap and the stays glint in the sun.
Others, like the not-so-groovy widget mentioned at the beginning of this post, are most decidedly not.
Such is a life.
“Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible.” – Rumi
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Ahh… you have hit upon my meandering melancholy mood today. I have shown up and hunkered down and occasionally had a MINOR fit of pique (oh, they used to be majestic sturm-and-drang episodes in the days of hormonal youth) and here it is the end of a day and I have barely accomplished anything I set out to do today.
Sideswipes out of left field, emotional dissonance rolling through the house like a percussive wave, taking each living entity in its turn… it has been exhausting. And yet still doable somehow, as I learn how to manage that erratic & dramatic ego me-ness and take it out of the equation.
Still, I feel for the dogs, who don’t have any such high-falutin place of wisdom to retreat to in moments of severe stress – Diane quite forgot herself and put down the bowl with the dregs of tuna sandwich makings for the dogs to ‘share’ and predictably armageddon erupted upstairs… the yelling and yiping and clattering of bowl, followed by Pompidou’s stressed out involuntary old-dog poop into the middle of it all did absolutely nothing to calm my nerves or restore my sense of grace.
Tomorrow is another day. Today I look into the fog of the hours spent revamping a client letter to get it just right (not yours, dear heart), the endless interruptions of ‘accounting day’ and think, “Oh, look at that. Thunderclouds almost coming my way. How interesting.”
Tomorrow will likely be sunshine again, especially with you in it.
It’s a funny thing. Like you, I just kept doing what I had set out to do and somehow, in spite of myself, I got some stuff done. Cleaned the apartment, wiped some drawers and shelves and did the email and business-y stuff and though it felt like pushing mud uphill, today I woke up and felt like I’d done something after all.
And the art piece I worked on, that I swore was complete and utter shite, ended up looking not half-bad out of today’s eyeballs. What a crazy thing…this thing called perspective.
But the trick, as you say is to extricate the ego me-ness out of the equation and to observe. Just watch and let those damn clouds roll on through, do their big ol’ thundering and head-messing banging about, and then move on down the valley (insert a ripping harmonica blues riff here) where, I might add, I shall fear no evil. Ha!
And yes, friends bring the sunshine. Thanks Miss Laurie Sunbeam!