Category Archives: Musings

My “Duh!” Moment (32)

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Last week I had an aha moment. It dawned on me the challenges I’ve been having with my work are the universe’s way of helping me. So, my aha, my belated realization, was also a “Duh!” moment. I knew this, right? I’ve known this for years, haven’t I? I pray for help often, but I never ask for trials. I don’t say, “Please send me some really hard thing so I can learn and grow.” I ask for help—in healing, in changing—as though the powers that be might reach down, brush me with a stroke of feathers. Voilà. I am a new person. I forget I am required to do my share. I forget that healing, that changing, can be hard work. I’ve asked for help, for guidance in getting through a troubled time. And I never doubt I am receiving that help. But somehow I missed the whole part about how these challenges at work are the help. I forgot I asked for this. The trouble I am having is the answer to prayer. “Duh,” I say out loud. Sable’s ear twitches at the sound of my voice. His expression remains deadpan. And here I thought you were smarter than that, he thinks at me. “Duh,” I say again just for fun. But I am smiling now.

Let the Good Times Roll (31)

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This is quite a week we are in. I’d done my own marveling over it, staring at the wall calendar Auntie Gardi gave me for Christmas. Then one of my favorite astrologers pointed it out, too. Valentine’s Day, Margi Gras (Fat Tuesday), Ash Wednesday (the beginning of Lent), the Chinese New Year (The Year of the Goat) and the new moon, all within just six days. How can it be anything but auspicious to have all these happenings coinciding like this? It makes me glad I am almost through my crazy hectic stretch of work. I may be too tired to appreciate these alignments with the proper fervor, but I can feel the forward movement in them, the hope and the promise of them. Harbingers, I believe, of good things coming.

Fifteen Weeks (30)

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I know I don’t do well without taking days off, days where I don’t even turn on the computer. I have colleagues who think nothing of working seven days a week, who seem to do it by choice. But I have to walk away from it, shed the cords tying me to my students, to faculty, be apart from it all in order to stay sane, stay whole. Still, I am no stranger to long stretches without time off, and when I added the new piece of my job I agreed to working seven days through these three periods, about 15 or maybe 17 weeks all told per academic year. My mind always wants to do the math on that, as if to reassure myself several weeks remain untouched. (52 minus 15 = 37. Whew.) Right now, Day 44, this seventh week of no days off feels like it’s been a year already. My perspective is skewed, lost, and a bit of me, too, I am pretty sure. Still, I think I’ve navigated these weeks better than I’ve ever been able to before. The cats have only suffered a little loss of attention, I think, and I’ve been less patient with Mami. (Which is bad, of course, because I’m not very patient to begin with.) But I haven’t yelled at the cats for no reason. There has been no screaming into the phone. And I haven’t ended up in a puddle on the floor, hysterics my only way to release the mounting stress. So, I hold the thought of Friday in my heart, Day 49, my first day off after 48 days. I count myself lucky to have come so far unscathed. And that welling of gratitude seeps through my cracks and eases something inside me, and I know days 45 through 48 will be easier than I first imagined.

15.2.2015 or Not Quite Mine (29)

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Ah. I had no idea today was a magic number day until I wrote the date in my notebook: 15.2.2015. I still write the dates the way they’re written in Mexico (and most of the world, I’m guessing) with the day first and then the month. Maggie—a woman I met in Ajijic who split her time between Barbados and Canada but had come to Mexico for dental work—told me once my number based on my name is 15, so now I think of it as lucky. She had changed the spelling of her own name to get a better number. And she hated my beloved 29, based on my birthday. She thought it was a terrible number. I wonder if she would have changed her date of birth, too, if she could? My mind gets to wander while I write. It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve written in my notebook. My pen feels funny in my hand, my writing odd looking and out of practice. I am out of practice in all ways, it seems, knowing nothing but work these past six weeks. Work, and fitting in things between work, like sleeping and eating healthy meals. I’ve done my healing toning almost every day while I do my “morning chores,” but I’ve been doing them in the late afternoon or evening more often than not, having let work sweep me away for most of the day. I’ve begun to do my yoga again, though—a small set of sun salutes, mostly, hiding in the shade of the umbrella in the late mornings. And I’ve been swimming three times now. I’m especially pleased about these last two, about having found a way to reach the doing of them in the midst of this crazed stretch. But now, slowing down to write, I feel exhausted and numb, like my mind is not quite mine anymore.

Good Candlemas (27)

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nasturtiums, bougainvillea

I light five candles for the pagan holiday today, pick flowers from our courtyard garden. They are still out on the patio table. I peeked at them a bit ago, watching them through the kitchen window, something reassuring and ancient about the look of those five flames lighting the dark. It’s been like early summer in the middle of our Palm Springs winter, that delicious evening air that feels like velvet against your skin. Or maybe you are the velvet—it is hard to know. It reminds me of one evening years ago sitting in the warm pool at Tassajara, the water and the air and my skin all one temperature so you couldn’t tell where one began or ended, the closest I have ever felt to being literally one with air and sky and water. The days have grown warmer than I’d choose, wanting as I am to push summer off as long as I can, but how can I complain about this evening air? It is like January in Ajijic, bare feet braced against the railing of my third floor roost, my northern Californian self almost gloating. I was barefoot in January. Now seven winters later I am spoiled in this. But still, I want to linger, wallow in the sweet, soft ease of it. Happy Candlemas, everyone.

five tealight candles, flowers, orange metal bird

Wild Things (24)

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My kitchen sink is angled in a corner, so when I stand before it to do my healing “toning” with the CD, the voices come to me from behind, engulf me, and my own meets them in the space between me and the corner, echoing, blending. Today I am toning my weakest note, the C, my birth note. I run the scrubbie inside a dirty glass and hit the note. “Jah,” I hold for eight counts, then “pah,” for eight counts more. I still run out of breath. My voice cracks and wavers, wobbly as I work to heal. But already I can feel the difference. Ideas for my blog flit through my head as I stand there, a series, maybe, about my health things, my German healers. The toning vibrates me. The dishes pile up clean and soapy in the left side of the sink. I think again about the power of belief, and just then the birds outside the window at my back bolt in a sudden racket of wings. I look over my shoulder, and the hawk swoops past and lands on the fence. I stand still, my fingers full of soapsuds, so I won’t startle him away. He moves to the other fence, and I turn around and bend my knees to see him through the window. When he flies off, I wish him well, send up a prayer. “May he have a full belly,” I whisper, “a little more often than he needs.” May he have a mate, offspring, a happy life. May he not go hungry. And then I cry, squatting on the kitchen floor, taken by that odd mix of gratitude and grief and love, aching for the small, beautiful, wild things of our world.

The Power of Plaque (23)

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I sweep under the kitchen table and wonder about the power of our beliefs. I remember my dental hygienist in Sebastopol telling me she had client who didn’t believe in plaque. (He didn’t have any.) Meri told me the other day on the phone that someone (was it Deepak Chopra?) claims there is no physiological reason why we need to age. I believe it may be true. But could I stretch my brain enough to let it be true? I can’t even get myself to not believe in plaque. I maneuver the broom between the legs of the kitchen chair. It’s weighted down with books rescued from the swamp cooler in August, so I don’t move it, but I sweep with care beneath it. I think about all the efforts I am making to heal. Most people don’t believe in them–I know. I hear it in the things they do not say. Something tries to stir in me, some habit of futility, and I shake my head as I swipe the broom across the floor. I believe in my choices. I believe I can heal, that my efforts already bear fruit. I remind myself I have shed that old, heavy cloak, dissolved that terrible message that said no matter what I do it will never be enough. I have gathered all the endless desert dirt and the feathers from the leaking down comforter and the teeny Palo Verde leaves we all bring inside with us into a neat pile near the kitchen sink. “I am already healing,” I say. My intentions, my actions, they both carry weight, have ooomph, make me well. I walk down the narrow hallway to get the dustpan. I am humming now, and I feel the vibration in my face, my throat. I am already healing.