MY SMALL ADVENTURES

Sometimes, I find, one’s ideas of how something can and should be accomplished are not how said things are actually achieved. In the middle there, there is process. I used to be good at process, at figuring out the steps for how things are done. I did it for a living. On the one hand, she is now dismayed that she has so lost this skill. On the other hand, there is the possibility that skill can be remembered and re-applied to life.

Many years ago, when I started this blog, I had just done a great yoga retreat at the now defunct Lulu Bandha’s Crib in Ojai. I was so fired up about the process that I thought maybe I would use those principles and precepts to write. And, for a time, it worked. I did more writing than yoga, but I wanted to write.

Years have gone by and the writing has quite dwindled from nearly every day to very occasionally.  Part of the diminishment of writing has been the diminishment of my life, which I rather don’t have any more, having been relegated to indigence, poverty, terminal unemployment, and the vast kindness of strangers (well, really friends and family).

All I am really getting at here is that seeing my mother’s dexterity at 90, and feeling the pangs and stiffness of older age, I have decided to try yoga again. There’s a free class at the local senior center. It’s pretty darned easy to get go being only five minutes away.

And what I found, pretty rapidly, what challenge I came up against was that little old winedrinker, me. Oh hell. I am telling me that I am still here, doing the same non-productive, stuck-in-a-rut stuff? That would be a resounding yes.

Later that same awake cycle. (I did take a cat nap.)

I am so upset and dumbfounded by the Donald Dick administration that I am nearly at a loss for words. I can't make any sense of anything. I am so nervous and depressed that I am eating anything that isn't nailed down and it is only with great effort that I am curbing my red wine consumption. Even now, as I try to wind down to sleep, I am almost in tears of frustration, the likes of which I don't think I have felt since I was a three-year old banging my head against the floor. I am anxious and short-tempered. I do things in fits and starts. I just want to cry and melt into nothingness, like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Okay, but I am going to try again tomorrow. The rain, the welcomed rain, is supposed to stop. The temperature will be 72 degrees and I should be able to swim. I will continue to wade back into doing yoga. I raided Janet's yoga library for some inspiration.

The rain falls softly. Butterscotch is on the bed with me, coming down from a catnip high. Emmy has taken over my desk chair. It is quiet.

I THINK OVER AGAIN MY SMALL ADVENTURES

I think over again my small adventures,
My fears,
Those small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach;
And yet there is only one great thing,
The only thing,
To live to see the great day that dawns
And the light that fills the world.

— Anonymous 19th Century Native American, World Poetry, Washburn and Major, Editors