I finished all the reading for my next weekend of classes.
One weekend ahead of time.
I am absurdly pleased.
I just closed my Ethics and Family Law textbook and shelved it along with everything else that I read this weekend.
I do have a proposal that I did not get to, but whatever.
I have all week to do it and it’s a proposal, not a formal paper.
I have had some time to think about what I want to accomplish with it and I do believe I am going to do the meditative coloring.
I also thought about doing a guided meditation, I haven’t done a lot of sitting meditation, enough to know I can comfortably sit for fifteen minutes without bother.
I remember the first time I sat for three minutes.
I thought I was going to crawl out of my skin.
I thought I might leap out of my chair or rip my own hair out.
I was that uncomfortable sitting still in my body, in my own space, with my own thoughts to occupy me.
I thought my brain might actually eat me alive.
I have come a long way baby.
I can sit for up to an hour and have done so on a few occasions.
I have had years where I did a sitting meditation, in addition to my writing meditation, but I have to be upfront about that, it wasn’t more than a ten minute sit, often times just five minutes and I did it because the person I was working with insisted I do it as a requirement to work with her.
I wasn’t opposed.
I am not now.
But.
I think the coloring is a nice way to go about it.
I tried some last night to get the hang of it and it was nice.
I actually got some freedom from the rapidity of my brain and it was nice to get lost in between the lines and let go and play with color and just enjoy doing something that didn’t require me to think.
I plan on being up front with my professor and outlining what I currently do.
I thought, briefly about with holding some aspects of my spiritual practice so that I could “implement” it back in and go from there.
Some might call this efficient.
However, it felt a little like cheating for me and I couldn’t quite square the principle of honesty behind that action.
I prefer to be honest with my professor, to even go so far as to say that I have had resentments and needed to work them out, that, already, is spiritual progress for me.
I recognized that it was with myself that lay the problem, not with my professor, he’s not doing it wrong, he’s just not doing it the way I think, or better, thought, it should be done.
Anyway.
That’s all I have to do.
Write and send a one page proposal, outlining what I am going to do to deepen my spiritual practice.
Due by this Friday.
I’ll probably ruminate on it a little bit more then type something up before work tomorrow.
Just to have it out of the way.
I don’t have to start the actual practice of it until February 12th.
Which is also when my first paper is due.
I plan on working on that next weekend. I will probably review the readings for the class, it was dense, really dense and not well written. If the author used “implicit” one more time in a chapter to give gravitas to what he was writing I was going to look him up and suggest some creative writing workshops for him to expand his vocabulary.
It really is a pleasant feeling, though, to have all the reading done.
I also got to see my girl friend from my cohort.
She rode her bicycle out and I was grateful to get to show her my home space and we went for coffee and toast at Trouble Coffee and Coconut Club and then down for a walk on the beach.
It was deliriously windy out and the beach was fairly deserted.
It was like being sandblasted.
We did not stay long, but she got a taste of the glory of the beach and vowed to come back soon, although by a better bicycle route than the one Google Maps gave her.
Oof.
Any other city it probably makes sense, but in San Francisco, negotiating the hillier parts of the city, there really is a way to get from here to there and it does not involve riding the coastline.
When she told me her route I got sympathetic leg pain just thinking about it.
I have done some similar things when I was newly on my bicycle and found out the hard way how to navigate around the hillier districts.
The SFBC (San Francisco Bicycle Coalition) map is probably the best one to use for navigation, as it shows grades of streets on hills.
One block over can really make a huge difference.
Going up Polk to the Marina is a lot easier than going up Van Ness.
And probably much safer too.
I digress.
We had a great time.
No homework was really accomplished, although we did go over a couple of things on the syllabus for the next weekend and talked about the school, the program, and of course, our other classmates.
But mostly.
About ourselves.
It was sweet and I feel a strong connection and bond to her.
Partially because she really does see me and also sees me in a way, that although I don’t find flattering and sometimes I get upset with myself, I do have a vast amount of acceptance about, that being that I am in desperate need to control my environment.
“It’s a safety thing for you,” she said in her sweet, lilting, French accent, “I totally get it, and I see how often you do it, with everything in your environment.”
I have had lovers mess up the pillows on my bed to make me squirm or a friend purposely mess up a section of literature I have just set out on a table.
I have seen it, consciously, more and more as I accept myself more and more and learn, not always gracefully, to let go of the reigns and have new experiences.
I really do want them and I recognize, I must recognize, how brave I am.
I didn’t fold up, I didn’t collapse, I kept trying.
Sometimes doing things that I didn’t know better, stratagems that I learned growing up, self-defense mechanisms that worked really well at the time and then stopped, even though I continued to employ them.
I see things with a lot more clarity.
The writing daily has helped, the praying, the spiritual practices I employ.
My recovery.
Oh, all the wonderful things I get to do in the act of getting back to that place where I am allowed to be vulnerable, soft, sweet, and not in control.
Tender.
I opened the door.
I let in my friend.
I experienced intimacy.
And I got my reading done for school.
Winning.
Auntiebubba 