Posts Tagged ‘mind’
Reasons
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little known
indistinguishable
reasons for feeling—
…subtle
like hammers
only soft ones
wield incidental influence
thorny
noticeable
lovely
annoying
vastly underrated
interminably hyperbolic
and endlessly hard
to ignore
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This Happens
In the morning, our wake up call comes from Delilah. She sleeps in a crate beneath the spiral stairs in the main room. During my work week, when I leave the house in the early morning darkness, she regularly ignores me and stays quiet until around 7 or 7:30, if Cyndie is lucky.
It’s not exactly uncommon for Delilah to start getting vocal more than an hour earlier than desired. When it is way too early, I discovered that if one of us moves to the couch behind her crate and lays down to sleep, she will usually go back to sleep, too.
This morning was one of the occasions where it wasn’t so extremely early that it was still dark outside, but it was earlier than either of us wanted to wake up, after having stayed up a bit late last night because it was, after all, a Saturday. Cyndie, being less inclined toward sleeping on the couch for the dog, got up and let Delilah out of her crate. Then Cyndie came back to bed, hoping to get a few more minutes of shuteye before getting up for real.
That practice is based on the willingness of Delilah to calm down again after having just stretched out in expectation of starting her day. She puts her feet on the bed to check on me, she paces a bit and pants loudly. If we are lucky, she recognizes the situation and walks in a tight circle about 6 times and lays down to give us a little added slumber.
Then this happens… I realize that I have to pee.
Go figure. I am desperately trying to stay in my sleep mode, and the dog has just indicated she is willing to gift us with precious added time. I don’t have to go to work, I can sleep as long as possible, but my bladder is asking for relief.
Since I am tired, it is possible to override the body signals long enough to regain unconsciousness. It could be blissful, except for one thing. The body has its own intelligence, and it doesn’t give up without additional effort.
You know the drill. I was dreaming that it was time to leave and people were waiting for me, but before I could leave with them, I needed to use the bathroom. Actually, I think there were several bathrooms involved in this morning’s dream. Of course, a toilet couldn’t be found in any of them.
I dreamed I was peeing into something where I had mistakenly placed a kitchen utensil I had just used. Then I was peeing into a tub that had been placed where a toilet was supposed to be, but it turned out to be filled with plastic building block toys. In that case, the door was not latched and my niece’s young son wandered in, with her right behind. Soon she was commenting on my choice of receptacle.
It’s like being stuck in a labyrinth that has no end.
After Delilah decided we had enough extra time, she woke us again, interrupting my troubled sleep and freeing me from my self-inflicted imaginary dramas.
That was a relief for my mind which then, finally, allowed relief for my body.
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Get Up
You get up and face another day. It looks just like most other days. To some, it may be a day of dramatic significance, but for the rest of the world, it is normal to the point of being unremarkable. It hardly matters that it is the 15th day of January today.
How did we get here, to the middle of the first month of 2016 already?
I deal with the date a lot at work. Often, it is days far into the future that I am committing to as goals. As a result, I find myself growing numb about what the actual day’s date really is.
If you had long ago set today’s date as important and pondered over it at length throughout the ensuing time, achieving this day would understandably hold particular worth.
I don’t know how to pull that off for every single day.
When I was home all day, every day, managing all the ranch chores, I tended to lose track of what day it was. Now that I am in the completely different situation of driving to work to spend the days dealing with future dates on the calendar, I find it funny that I still lose track of what day it is.
Throughout my life, I’ve not been very good about waking up everyday with a feeling of awe over the gift of the day. Maybe that leads to my tendency to feel shock over the times that I do pay attention to the date. I don’t know.
Lately, I have been enjoying periods of intense pleasure over an immediate moment. The color of the sky, just after sunset. The look in someone’s eye. The sigh of our resting dog.
It doesn’t matter what day it is, when a fleeting moment catches your attention and feeds your soul.
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Feeling Sick
It occurs to me on occasion that my sense of comfort with the prospect of my death may be a result of so many years of living with depression. It is not a topic that people are generally comfortable about allowing their focus.
Frankly, I long ago learned through treatment of my depression that allowing myself to fantasize my death was something I must control, essentially eliminating it from my mental processes. I am happy to report that I am able to do that successfully, with impressive results.
Nonetheless, I sense the possibility that my years of considering the concept of my death have left me with a residual peace over the prospect of my eventual demise. I will point out, however, that it holds a dramatically different frame of reference when viewed from a healthy mindset.
Yesterday, I left work a little early because the pesky cold that has been ever so slowly gaining a foothold in my poor innocent body was sapping my interest in functioning. Upon reaching the sanctity of home, I walked directly into our bedroom and curled up under the bedspread, seeking nothing except warmth, darkness, and quiet.
I noticed a passing feeling of contentedness with the idea of falling into a permanent sleep. It’s remarkable, really, to imagine such a mental reaction to the very familiar symptoms of a common cold, but in that moment of fatigue, part of me was ready to leave everything behind for good.
The mind and body are an amazing, integrated system. Part of me was stoically expending energy to maintain a normal work-week routine, defying the uninvited consequences of biological warfare being waged in my cells. After several days of slowly intensifying symptoms, my incredibly strong mental yearning for absolute rest contributed in overwhelming my resolve.
I shall spend this day at home, resting, to rebuild my energies. No doubt, doing so will reclaim the enthusiastic zest for living to which I have grown accustomed in the days since I embarked on my path toward improved mental health.
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Embracing Impermanence
I have been encountering a recurring theme of late that is causing me to ponder my desire for order in my daily routines. Also, for constancy in the products for which I grow fond. Most times, I don’t want ‘new and improved.’ I just want more of what I had the first time.
There is a measuring cup in the kitchen that I have started to use every day, now that I am measuring portions of many foods, especially the all-too-sweet cereals I passionately love. I open the middle drawer, and there it is —most of the time.
If Cyndie has been baking, it could require a search.
I tend to experience greater pleasure when my developed methods glide seamlessly along like a well-conducted orchestral piece. If it runs into turbulence, I might alter my tactics to improve the flow. Basically, I look to simplify effort, probably toward something that would align closely to a style that could justifiably be viewed as lazy.
This probably explains why I am not big on the tasks involved with meal preparation.
It is occurring to me that I will probably be better served to work on honing my skills of adaptation to the constant variations that are a reality of life, instead of always pining to have things be where I expect to find them, clean and in good working order.
Sometimes, you discover that the tire is flat. People call in sick for their shift at work. It rains when it was forecast to be sunny. The manufacturer has discontinued a favorite tool/appliance/car/shoe/food/article of clothing.
The climate is proving to be in much greater flux than most people wanted to believe. Plants and animals go extinct. Millions of people get forced to flee their homeland, becoming a sea of immigrants.
Seriously, when wasn’t change a constant, despite what our minds have a tendency to perceive?
Maybe I can find a way to nurture that feeling of pleasure I usually get from orderly routines, to also manifest in the face of unanticipated complications. They are vivid examples the universe is alive and breathing, and I still am, too. It’s a reality that I am coming to believe is not worth fighting against. Conversely, I think learning to celebrate the aberrations should offer nothing but greater peace of mind.
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Cultivating Authenticity
In the everyday reality of each passing moment, we are constantly choosing, consciously or otherwise, our personal energy, which we project outward to every living being in our vicinity. For decades of my life, my energy was unconsciously that of a depressed individual. Sometimes it was encased within a facade of “I’m okay,” but the supposed ‘okay’ me was not whole.
In the years since I began managing my depression, I have continually discovered new levels of awareness about my mind and body. In the very normal fluctuating rates of change and growth, there are periods that stand out. The recent days of preparation for the visit from our friends, the Morales family, and the splendid excitement of our time together again after they arrived, have generated a terrific boost of energy for Cyndie and me.
Granted, we are all a bit drained from lack of sleep, due to all the fun we have had, but that is a recoverable circumstance. We are feeling a significant surge of progress toward crafting the framework of how we might best express the essence of the growth and learning we want to make available at Wintervale Ranch. Dunia and Marco Morales have helped immensely with inspiring this surge.
In the wee hours yesterday morning, Marco and their sons began the long day of travel, flying back to their home in Guatemala. Dunia is spending another week here to work with Cyndie and our horses, and help lead some training sessions.
When I pulled up the driveway yesterday after work, I spotted Cyndie and Dunia in the arena space, along with our neighbor, Rachael Walker, who was providing her counsel and guidance in getting the horses ready for Cyndie to begin riding again. For the first time since the horses arrived here, and 10-months after a hip replacement, Cyndie was back in the saddle.
With our horses as guides, I am discovering new insights about cultivating authenticity.
These feel like noteworthy milestones for us on this journey of creating Wintervale Ranch to become the place we have imagined.
Having written that, it comes to mind that I have a sense from the horses that they have been patiently allowing us to take all the time we needed to reach these milestones, while they have been ready and available all the while.
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I’m Curious
If you read yesterday’s Words on Images post about the simple choice that we make every day, how do you interpret the suggestion about accepting the obvious as the only plausible explanation?
After I wrote those words, with one thought in my mind, I got the impression that it likely implied the opposite of what I was thinking. I considered changing it, but then decided to let it go out into the world, as is, for readers to take from it what they will. We each come to our individual conclusions from a place of preconceived notions and personal perspectives that color our perceptions.
I expect some will align with the version in my head, and some will perceive the opposite.
Let me just say that I believe that there are unknowable possibilities, likely beyond imagining, available as explanation for what we sense and experience in our world, which others choose to miss by constraining their options exclusively to the one they construe as obvious.
I may be wrong.
And that’s the key.
Imagine the possibilities of embracing uncertainty.
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Consciousness Streamed
Never mind that there is no reason not to keep on going despite the obvious restrictions and hesitations that never cease to exist in every manifestation of whatever reality this is at the moment that is surging past unless it’s not and instead is totally stationary and we are the ones doing the moving at such high rates of speed that it becomes difficult to discern what has already happened and what hasn’t actually happened yet in the way we currently perceive things that happen based on the senses that we have relied on to get us here thus far in our lives as measured against the backdrop of the climate as we knew it from the past fifty-some years which someday might be compared with the next fifty as a way of detecting the possibility of there being a difference as in change which would be undeniable one would hope at that point in the proceedings especially since this stream of basically unconscious rambling seems to appear about once every year maybe as a way to scour the surface of residual order in hopes of restoring some reset of rote writing routine repeated in a cycle of day after day wording that tries to make sense regardless the random missing word or unintelligible thought splayed out in broad daylight for all the world to see in the rare situation they just happen to do and willingly hang on till the end with some morsel of curiosity or macabre fascination that there will be some pot of gold at the end of this rainbow of brilliance that reaches in an arc across the screen from one point to another with shapes to decode the message therein however frightening and disturbing the exercise may be but unless some magic or miracle arrives all we’re left with is what we had on when we walked in here plus the thoughts that we carry inside of our heads that we believe must be precious because they haven’t been forgotten and lost for forever like the ones that are gone which we’ll never remember and we live with that fact because we’ve no other choice and speaking of choice that’s something we do have when it comes to this thing called love which when all else has failed is one thing that remains and in this stream unconscious where very little makes any sense love might be an answer worth considering to solve what it is that is bothering your distressed countenance.
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Relative Something 