Forgetting and then trying to ease in

Post small-kids, post 40’s, pre-emergence

I wish to forget about the blog I thought I had submitted for last week’s entry. Dianne, why are you still talking about it? I lost it and had a bereavement that you can only have with things (because in the long run, how can we even slightly compare it with the bereavement of a person??). And certainly what is so important has shifting winds daily. Yet all of last week, it sat in the back recesses of my mind as a dull ache that I tried to quash or figure out like a rubic’s cube. A sentence or a thought shed light on it, ever so slightly, and then it faded. I wasn’t going to mention it as I plunge into my writing for this week, so let this beginning just serve as an obituary, constantly press “Save draft”. Leave it at that.

The sun is basking down on my back through my window as I write this. All our sky has wanted to do is rain and I have to remind myself that we’re in May. Sun is encouraging, hopeful, and brings something about in a human that not too many words can touch upon. Yet after what seems like a very long winter, we can actually say that we’re here. It is like the season of spring reinvents itself year after year. We are at the apex right now where layers of lush and poufy clouds of flowers huddle together in clusters, or on their own, sometimes with licks of dew on them. They’re silently screaming “I am here! Behold…I am here!” And we just have to be in silent contemplation of all that is, right along with them. Having them be the periphery to our lives, if just for the moment. Before this emergence, I think that our psyche goes into somewhat of a patient hibernation too. It seems as if winter is spent in long periods of waiting.

Waiting is what parents do too. Some of us wait ever so patiently with a transformed body and parts of another human moving alien-like inside of us or our other. We wait again for a breast to be drained, a tantrum to be over, a passing of our own rage, waiting for sleep to come so that we can squeeze in an hour for our self before we have to wake up and start it all over again. A starting of a toddler class turns to waiting for a sports practice to be over, a music lesson to be driven to. Eventually we are waiting for them to be separate from us so that they will learn the ways of the world away from us. And at first, I just ached to be that spider on the wall; to see how their sweet faces looked or comprehended as they reacted to this or that person or situation. Of course too, to protect and defend if any thing or person were to harm them. Yet as much as we love and cherish and sometimes radiate from the human that our children are becoming and blooming into, we wait to get our time back in order to go back to working on ourselves.

Remember what working on ourselves was? In my twenties and probably thirties, I didn’t even label it as such. You just go on with the order of things that must be taken care of and happily so because the order of things, the activity of life, is the groundwork for all other ideas to take shape and lift into flight. Yet becoming the person that we want to be is a daily job. If I thought of it like that, on a moment to moment basis, I’m sure I’d be in the psych ward. But the urgency of it is always calling. Doesn’t miss a day. Is always tapping me on the shoulder. Now I am waiting for the re-emergence of this self that I was building upon before I ventured down this parenting trail on the game board. I am starting to go with what ultimately feels good.

What has felt good for me has always been yoga. I have now been actively practicing yoga for twelve years and before children, I had been practicing for around ten. It is only until recently that I have tried to make the natural connection to meditation. Always deeming it too hard, I rarely tried to practice. Although I found out about “Mindfulness of breathing” in college and had a couple of instances where I can definitely say that my soul hovered above my body (crazy!). I practice in the morning and try to nip my brain in the bud before all of the thoughts come stomping their way through. Endless lists of what I need to do, what I could’ve said better to someone, something annoying like an impending, endless call to Apple Music usually show up first. Why is that? Why isn’t our brain wired to shoot out happy and life-affirming thoughts? Why must we gently guide our mind to go there instead of it going there on its own? Maybe if one is a yogi for years and years, this milestone can be reached? The morning is also a great time because the rest of the house doesn’t have a 52 year old woman’s brain that immediately wakes them up. I do. I like to sit up in bed after John has gone downstairs, prop my head to fit a well-alligned torso and I start to bat off the thoughts like moths to a campfire. Focusing on the breath, I count 1-nice inhale, nice exhale, 2 – nice inhale, nice exhale..until I reach 10 and start again. Sometimes I combine a mantra (originally from Hinduism and Buddhism meaning a sound repeated to aid concentration) before each count. The moths continue to fly this way and that, erratically at first and then the more I focus on the breath and maybe throw in a visual of a soothing color (I’m liking a muted purple or glowing orange these days) I slowly get to THAT place. It is usually taken from me relatively fast as I think of the day that’s to come, but it’s absolute bliss when I’m there and I definitely notice the affects for the entire day.

Just tonight I tried a more activated meditation with Kellie Walsh and The Divine Hive in Nyack. I hadn’t done a guided meditation since college and with the assistance of tibetan singing bowls and vivid suggestive imagery, I was eventually brought somewhere else; floating and lifted above the realm of my usual consciousness. I hope to be on this journey of emergence and to be sharing my tales along the way. I can’t always promise absolute fabulosity as I stumble and try things on for size, yet I just want to be sharing the trip as I glide along. Again, many, many thanks for reading this blog. Grateful again to be bouncing it off of you…………………..d