Rec Room

Sometimes you've got to use all your meditation principles

And that's not enough to stop you from being so incredibly pissed. Discriminate against me all you like, but leave my kid out in the cold and you've got to deal with me.

Yesterday's writing

Why did life need to be so much about winning? And why did winning need to mean stepping on the face of the people you supposedly loved the most?

“That’s great,” he said, smiling at me. “You should.”

I wanted to slap the grin off his face. Or maybe I just wanted to want that. I wanted to be angry with him. I wanted to take it out on him, all of it, even though I wasn’t even sure what it meant. I just knew that I felt like something was pressing hard against my chest, and that there was equal and opposite pressure coming from within. Between the two, I had no way of winning. 

Piedmont Avenue

Five steps to sustaining practice

Meditation practices are becoming more and more important to me. I'm putting them into practice even in my dreams. When I found out that a dog for whom I'd advocated was put to sleep, I felt it was necessary to revisit the five steps to sustaining practice, as outlined last night at Awakening Joy by Ange Stephens:

1) Intention: Set an intention daily to live your life as if it matters. This is neither a goal nor affirmation nor is it hope -- it's an expression of deepest longing. It's like having a rudder on a boat. It just orients you. It's a daily vow.

2) Attention: This is the key to the deeper self -- understanding and more presence in life. Feel into your heart and open to the feelings that are here.

3) Pause: Stop doing for a moment. Living a spiritually embedded life takes stopping to create a space where we can touch into our essential self. We need to relax into not doing. Pause briefly many times a day.

4) Live as if you're going to die: We open our hearts. Our priorities become clear. It's usually about love. How easily we forget this life is a gift. Life is fragile, always when we keep death close, we are not so petty. Everyone will die and we do not know when. This is the great work: to walk through life knowing everyone will die. You have this moment with them. We have no idea how long we have.

5) Gratitude: A good way to end and to begin. It's a great blessing to have been here these weeks, to receive these teachings. We belong to each other. Our lives are dependent on the lives around us.

"Clearing", Martha Postlewaite:

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

The unexpected

Here's the thing about terrorism: you can't predict it. That's the whole point. It's meant to invade the safe spaces, to rattle us, to scare the hell out of us and bring us to our knees in the places most familiar and happy.

What the hell were people doing last night? Having fun, dancing in a club, planning an after-hours rendezvous perhaps, to a bedroom or a diner. They didn't expect to die.

Does anyone?

Put this on Facebook just now

Super uncomfortable moment tonight that both triggered me and simply pissed me off.

Adam and I were at Bobby G's having a drink when a little girl around 8 or 9 came over to admire Baz. She didn't stop there. She basically manhandled and fawned over him, grabbing him over and over, until we asked that she return to her table, where her clued-out hippie mom didn't give a damn what was going on. She came back over and this time I physically removed her hands from his body. She sulked away and out the door, a caricature of a grown woman in all her sullen glory.

I'm second fiddle to my son. It happens in the world, and it happens here in the world of Facebook. I've said many times that I could post my intent to have a sex change tomorrow and people would be way more interested in Baz's next burp.

I was never, EVER the pretty girl, the one in demand. In fact, I have real issues with those girls, the ones who come over and grab. It's that possessiveness, that gimme. I want them to get away from him, but more than that, I want them to get away from me.