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  9 days on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  The Cosmic Motor

  Tao Te Ching - 1

  (translation by Stephen Mitchell)

  The tao that can be told
  is not the eternal Tao
  The name that can be named
  is not the eternal Name.
  
  The unnamable is the eternally real.
  Naming is the origin
  of all particular things.
  
  Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
  Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
  
  Yet mystery and manifestations
  arise from the same source.
  This source is called darkness.
  
  Darkness within darkness.
  The gateway to all understanding. 
  
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  
  
  My favorite part of this is the two lines "Free from desire, you realize the mystery. / Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations." I've read it translated many different ways, but it all seems to add up to the idea that detaching yourself from the material is the way to be spiritual, and attaching yourself to the material is the way to understand the world. While this sounds contradictory, it really doesn't seem that way to me. To me it speaks of 'all things in moderation'. Understand the material, care for your material possessions, respect the material possessions of others, but don't overdo on the material. Learn to see the spirit, learn to look inside and communicate with your inner spiritual being but don't spend every second of your life so bound up in the ethereal that you lose your footing on the Earth. You will gain spiritual knowledge if you aren't so attached to the material that you can't focus on the inner self when you need to, and you will be able to prosper in the world if you are sufficiently aware of what's going on around you to function in communion with the world as it is.

  

  11 days on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  The things you take for granted
  You don't realize how much you'll miss a bag of chips.
  
  I spent some time in my home town with my siblings, helping tend to my mother. This was written during the time I was visiting her.
  
  My mother had a heart attack in 2007 and her kids dropped everything and ran home to West Table to tend her and watch the house. I'm the youngest, and the only encumbered by a child - and three year olds are a ton of work. It's a vivid contrast to my siblings who have sons in their 20's, and a reminder of how free I was when they had young ones.
  
  My sister had been ill, and wasn't able to help care for him at all, my nephew was only here a few days, and my brother stayed at a motel. I had some babysitting help a couple nights from the kid down the road, and was able to put my son in a local preschool (it helps to have friends in high places) during the days, but a great deal of the time I was been on my own at my Mother's house, just the Bundle and me.
  
  After Mother's angiogram came back clean, and the pacemaker is pacing appropriately, some of the intensity was off. Not that I wasn't still busier than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but at least I didn't need to be at the hospital constantly, and was not in danger of the nursing staff calling me in to help calm her at 2:00 a.m. I was on the hook for a lot of things, though, that normally I'd be sharing with my beloved Co Worker.
  
  One of those things that I took for granted for many years is running out to a convenience store. Hey, it's five minutes, right? Jump in the car, drive a block or two, grab a candy bar or soda, a bag of chips or a bag of ice and hustle back home. Ah, not so when you are the sole caretaker of a Bundle. Say it's early in the evening and he's awake. Not a problem, right? Okay, he has to have shoes... they're never easy to find because he's carried them into his room and thrown them in the toybox. Shoes are on, great. Now you have to find your shoes, your purse, your wallet... keys... balance it all while you hold his hand or carry him as you walk out to the car. Get the doors open, get him up into his car seat, buckled in.
  
  Now you're on your way. Get to the store, get him unbuckled, out, into the store and ride herd on him while you pick up your stuff. Pry the 30 things he wants but can't have out of his hands, comfort his sobbing, then get stuff paid for and back out to the car. Get the doors open, stuff inside, a child buckled back into a car seat. Home, unbuckled, carried in and undressed again. Now, try this when he's asleep. If you're desperate enough for soda or chips then you'll wake him up and dress him and go through that whole routine, you'll have ten times as much work on your hands. Chances are, you aren't desperate enough for that.
  
  So there I sat, many of the nights I was there. Ten p.m., no milk, hungry and nothing exciting in the cabinets. Alone, no options for people to call to come over and help out. Don't get me wrong - having a Bundle is the best thing that's ever happened to me. I was never angry about it, or resentful - but those nights became some of the many crystal moments where I had to recognize my life had changed drastically.
  
  
  Originally posted at TIBU on 9/13/2007, presented here with edits and additions.
  

  

  4 months on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  Gratefulness Being grateful is healing. Noting what you are grateful for, being aware of the things and people in your life that provide you with physical and spiritual sustenance is a centering exercise and should be something we all try to do daily. I've been known to post random "gratefulnesses" as status updates in various social media, but I've decided to try to be much more faithful about it in this blog, because it seems like a good place for it. Expect some photos here, too, I want to share the visible as well as words.
  
  Today why don't you tell someone, journal, or post somewhere a few things that you are grateful for? Right now I"m grateful for antibiotics (we all have strep), for a husband who's getting takeout, for a little boy getting to go back to school tomorrow, and for my own spirit which will rise out of the sick eventually.
  
  Here's a photo I took earlier after I left the doctor. It made me smile, something that I am indeed grateful for this week!
  
  

  

  9 months on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  A Song of Ascents (a repost from a previous blog - 2006) Psalm 131 (NRSV)
  
  0: A Song of Ascents. Of David.
  1: O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
  2: But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a child quieted at its mother's breast; like a child that is quieted is my soul.
  3: O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and for evermore.
  
  This is what I need to learn - to calm and quiet my soul... that pesky, evil, dark little child that lives in my soul. How do you shut the child up? My own child I held and swung quietly from side to side until he calmed - it was easy and comfortable. There's no one to do that for me, I'm an adult, I can't ask anyone to hold me until I calm down, I can't ask anyone to fix what's wrong with me. I have to find it in myself, but where is it? Where is the strength to do it? What needs doing? How can I find what it is that will calm my soul in the storms that rage inside me?
  
  Too many questions, too few answers.
  
  
  
  This is the July 2006 calendar for the Episcopal Church’s lectionary. Each reference to the Scripture is direct linked to an online version of the NSRV, which is where I get my text.

  

  10 months on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  The Amish and forgiveness (a repost from a previous blog, 10/2006)
  
  Daniel just passed an article on to me, from the Chicago Tribune, by Clarence Page. It’s titled “The Amazing Virtue of Forgiveness” and is about the shootings in Nickel Mines. I’ll quote from it briefly:
  
  “On Oct. 2, a deranged gunman burst into a one-room schoolhouse in the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pa. He lined up 11 young girls and shot each of them, killing five, before taking his own life.
  
  Witnesses say the oldest girl, 13-year-old Marian Fisher, bravely said, ”Shoot me first“ in an attempt to buy time for the younger students.
  
  Then, her 11-year-old sister, Barbie, who would survive with wounds in her shoulder, hand and leg, said, ”Shoot me next.“
  
  The girls’ families and their Amish community responded to that breathtaking violence with acts that can only be called extraordinary, at least by those of us who are not Amish. As they grieved, the Amish mounted a horse-and-buggy caravan to visit the family of the shooter with offers of food and condolences. In their Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, all deaths are ”Gottes Wille,“ God’s will, the Amish said. The killer’s family members are victims too.”
  
  I just printed that out and wrote a note at the bottom for my son, when he’s a few years older. I’ll quote it here so I can remember it too.
  
  “Gabriel my love -
  
  When you are old enough I will give this to you to read, and hopefully heed. The Amish are great people, brave and noble. They do what they believe is God’s will, for for the good of all.
  
  Please hold Marian Fisher as an example in your life, and protect the small ones, the weak ones, the ones who don’t have a voice and who need us most.
  
  I love you beyond my ability to explain.
  
  Always,
  Your Mama”

  

  10 months on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  Breathing - the bane of my existence.

  No lie, breathing is the hardest thing I do. You can probably guess that breath is a huge part of my thought process, given how much I mention it in this blog (and in real life, if you know me)... that comes really from about 24 years of being asthmatic. Pull up your chairs and I'll tell you a little story about that.

  When I was 21 I went and did something that I had absolutely no business doing - I got married. I thought it was TWU WUV. No one else liked him, for good reason. He was way older than I was, overbearing, condescending, and convinced that he was smarter than anyone around him. He treated me like a child (and I acted like one, I take a lot of blame for that mess) and the marriage naturally imploded after five years. We went into counseling - I'll give him credit for that - although it killed his soul that the counselor suggested that I might not be to blame for every single thing. At one point he was ranting about something I didn't do, or couldn't do, and I remember he said "She should be able to do that! Everyone can do that! It's as natural as breathing!" At that point our counselor started to laugh. My ex was stunned. The counselor looked at him and said "Think about what you just said... as natural as breathing... she is asthmatic. Breathing is the -least- natural thing for her."

  He completely discounted my asthma, repeatedly saying that it wasn't any big deal and refusing to believe my friends' who said that it was a dangerous condition and I could die from it. He taught me to discount it in a lot of ways, too, and I spent the next decade or so neglecting it, letting it rage out of control. Now that I finally have it under control, I spend a lot of time thinking about breath and breathing, its importance and signficance, as well as its connection to the rest of my life.

  I also notice the problems I have with breathing that have nothing directly to do with asthma... in particular the fact that I hold my breath for long periods of time. I'm not sure why I do it, I just know that it can be a very serious issue when doing bodywork. Breathing during exercise is vital, to keep the energy flowing. As it is I move, realize I need to breathe, breathe, start moving again - it's a herky jerky thing with no rhythm. I want to learn to breathe naturally, in and out, and let it be a part of my movement, not an extra component.

  So, when I tell people to breathe, I'm telling myself. I'm reminding -me- that I need to treat breath as what it is: the foundation of the body-mind. If you see me, ask me if I'm breathing. I'll probably thank you for reminding me.

  

  10 months on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  Body and Soul

  I recently started (again) the long uphill trek to lose weight and get in shape. I'll be blogging about the nuts and bolts of it in another blog, but here is where I will go into more detail about the emotional aspects of what I'm doing, and some of the deeper more soul-level reasons and possibilities behind why I am where I am today.

  Why am I fat? Wow. Lots of reasons. I think the most obvious ones are laziness (I got 'scared' of exercise due to some health problems), apathy, lack of motivation. I love food, I love the taste. I'm not really an emotional eater, but I eat because I want to - which is just about as bad, I think. Food is fuel, but that never got through to me. I think of food as pleasure and that's something I have to start to change.

  What are your pleasures in life? I take pleasure in almost everything so it's hard to narrow a list down. My family, my friends, art, food, music. Those last three change in order from time to time. ;-)

  Let's take today and think about what we find pleasure in that we should reassess, and possibly alter. Is there something that you take pleasure in that isn't so good for you? If so, why do you find it pleasurable? What needs is it meeting, and how could you meet those needs in a healthier way? Food for thought, so to speak.

   

   

  

  10 months on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  Body and Soul, Art and Heart 2011 is going to be a great year for me. My theme song is Whip It [Devo]. My goals involve getting my physical self into some semblance of shape (since 2010 was the year of getting my brain and emotions in gear), and trying to get on track with my business and art.
  
  It's a good thing I look at my yearly goals as a work in progress, because I think, upon reflection and a tearful phonecall with a close friend, that another goal for 2011 needs to involve dealing with my heart. I've been so battered and scarred by love in the past that I'm holding people away. I think I feel them pushing me away, I push back - or maybe it's the other way around. Either way I end up off to the side watching other people feel like I used to feel, free and comfortable with love and emotion. I'm not free and comfortable, I'm lonely and cold. I don't have close friends besides my husband and one other and that's incredibly foreign to me. Usually I'm the one that has an incredible reservoir of dear friends, and right now I don't. I have lots of friends but very few that are close. I miss that. 2011 is about me finding out why that's the case, and fixing it.

  

  11 months on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  The life of a gypsy (More or less)
  
  I realize in my adulthood that I was simultaneously raised to be a settled, controlled, scheduled person and a gypsy. I think the best way to describe what my mother passed on to me is the ability to bloom where I'm planted. I hadn't realized until lately that after I left home for college I'd been forced to become far more of an uncontrolled, unscheduled, uncentered person than I should have been. It wasn't until I found my true home that I could look back and take a deep breath and realize how profoundly unhappy I'd become at the constant move, move, reorder, rearrange, move, move, move my life has been in the past twenty years.
  
  I was born in 1966. My parents lived in a house way out in the country in a place I'll call West Table. They moved in town to a house we stayed in until we moved to Oklahoma City when I was three. There we lived in two different houses, one for a year or so, and the rest of the time in another house near my grade school. We left OKC when I was just about to turn 10. I remember the first house only because apparently other kids had lived there before me and buried a plethora of small plastic cars in the dirt. I found tons of them, and greatly appreciated those little archaeological expeditions.
  
  That was 1976, and we moved home to the town of my birth, Good Old West Table. We moved into the best house I ever have or ever will live in, and the Mother lives there to this day. It is a gorgeous Victorian, built by some local Personage of Interest in the late 1800's. The house sits on an acre of ground that still is a showplace of a yard - small rock pool in the back has been home to generations of goldfish (sadly none of the original bloodlines remain), and now has a lovely rock fountain above it. Various nooks and crannies exist all over the yard, and it's shaded by trees and graced by flowers of so many varieties it would be hard to count. A huge fir tree shelters my bedroom window upstairs. There's very little that cannot be healed by a visit to my home. I lived there for 8 years until college, then technically through most of college. By the end of school I was married, but that's another residence on down the list. I've had to move back into the old house twice in adulthood, both for brief periods of time.
  
  In 1984 I headed to college (the same state I was born in, but about four hours north) I lived mostly in the dorms, but one summer I shared an apartment with a couple friends, then a house for one year of school with my best friend - that's my favorite address of all time: Falling Leaf Lane. After another brief stint in the dorms I married, and we moved into an apartment on the outskirts of town, in a tacky little subdivision named after famous golfers. We lived on Demaret Drive. I lived there for almost four years, then it was divorce and a move to Memphis. There I lived in three different apartments. The first two were studios in an old building in Midtown, and the third was a spacious and gorgeous 3rd story walkup in the building next door. Those three years were a funny time in my life, and one that's hard to even think about on some levels, much less write about.
  
  After having my fill of the south, we moved to New Jersey in 1996 for a few misguided and thoroughly odd months. After that it was back to my hometown and a few months of "living with Mom and Dad" before we found a house. The first house we found was perfect, and I regret moving from it. It sat on a fairly busy street in the center of my (admittedly rural) hometown, but was backed by a gigantic yard that went all the way back to a small runoff creek. Our yard sung with wildlife - I had a huge bowl of cat food left outside 24 hours a day, and it fed turtles, raccoons, fox (really), cats, possum and every other kind of wildlife you can imagine. Scary weird landlords forced us to move into another house down on the same street where we spent a year or so very happily... until the owners decided to sell after one died. We moved into the house on a street named after a tree, which promptly burned down a few months later. After that it was a very small house smack-dab in a neighborhood full of people who were fairly horrified by our odd hours and music. We went from there to the house out by the radio station, which was a joy since there were no neighbors... just wilderness, fields, deer and hawks. Big hawks. No bunnies or squirrels or mousies out there, you betcha.
  
  From there in 2002 I came here, to the only truly stable home I've known in adulthood. With luck I'll raise my child here, and be a much more settled person than I've been allowed to be for many years.
  
  If you were keeping score, that is 17 residences in 41 years. I didn't count the dorms, nor did I count the two times living with Mom and Dad - although I'd count them if I was counting actual physical moves from place to place. That, my friends, is too much moving for one woman. I hope I'm done - but if I'm not, by God next time I'm hiring movers!
  
  
  Original TIBU publication date: 11/02/2007

  

  ~1 year on
  The Cosmic Motor
• 

  Who am I? I have spent my entire adult life on the edge. On the edge of bad marriages, on the edge of health, on the edge of financial ruin, on the edge of homelessness. I was always so overwhelmed by the moment-to-moment needs of my life that I could never concentrate on myself in any substantive way. I put my surface emotions and needs ahead of my inner, spiritual needs, and the needs of others and financial stability ahead of everything else.
  
  Some years ago I stumbled blindly into safety, security and clarity. It took a while for that to sink in. For the first part I fought like I always had, unable to realize I was finally out of the swamp. As time has passed I've relaxed and realized what my situation really is, that I'm not a moment away from doom like I had been for so many years.
  
  Now I am faced with being able to work on me, to create for myself the things I've always wanted: stable mental health, stable physical health, a comfortable home. It's not too late to get started.

  

  ~1 year on
  The Cosmic Motor