...and Three Steps Back

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

Live in your hands
and your mind will learn
to bow like a root.

To always analyse and problem solve and observe and critiize what we encounter turns our brains into heavy calluses.

It does exactly the same if not worse to our emotions too.

I woke up this morning (Monday) feeling the desire to do not to think or to live in a headspace, but I wanted to just do stuff. I did. I had a blitz... I tidied, I laundered, I cleaned, I shopped (yes, I loved that this time, because I was shopping not just for groceries, but for cookies... yes it took longer than the hour I had allowed myself but in the end that didn't matter), and I also cooked. I made cookies. As well as all that, on the way out to the car I saw a ciccada on its back on the table outside, and adjusted my path to turn it right side up. I felt very alive.

It was wonderful connecting with myself that way. Not thinking about things, just doing them - living in what I was doing.

Did I have a means to an end, yes, probably so but is there anything wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with wanting to spoil the woman you love? I don't think so, not at all. To me that made the wanting of doing this all the more special.

Eventually we got home, had a lovely dinner (well okay it was nothing special, but I enjoyed it anyway), and ate some of the cookies I'd made for dessert - smores no-bake cookies. Very sticky, but very good.

Then settled down to watch some comedy central until it was time for Sanctuary. I love listening to the new comics too, all very funny, but I really must start remembering everyone's names.

I knew Mir was tired, what with her hip and all, so didn't worry too much when she fell asleep, it was enough to be there if she needed anything, and didn't worry her too much when she fell back to sleep after waking up to find out there was no Druit in the sanctuary episode - when the hell are they going to bring him back? - I just did, allowed things to happen as they needed... (and yay me... this was a step forward).

Until I didn't...

And that's when, without ever intenting do, I ruined the day... definitely for myself, and I'm sure for Mir too. I let my head start thinking, started getting frustrated when I couldn't wake her up at bed time. She was comfortable, and sleeping, I should have left her to sleep. And through overthinking and second guessing myself, I just ended up getting myself all worked up and upset.

I'm sure if I hadn't upset myself in thinking how bad it was to just 'abandon' her and go to bed without her (this is how my stupid head was thinking about it, not at all the reality of what was going on), then I would have been able to doze off and she would have woken me up when she did come to bed eventually by snuggling up to me or some such.

Instead I overthough, and second guessed, and ending up feeling bad for not being there with her, (and thinking it was maybe a romantic gesture to get up and go and join her), I grabbed my pillow and went to nestle down beside her there in the living room. But by this time as I said I'd upset myself unnecessarily, as I've said before, and ending up in tears woke her up... and what I'd tried to do in a romantic gesture, ended up being anything but, and we both went to bed in a less than romantic frame of mind.

I try to hard, when I 'think' when I try to 'problem solve.' I'm far happier (and I think others around me are too), when I just do. When I'm being who I am.

So after a wonderful start to being more myself again at Bealtainne, I feel rather like I've taken a whole bunch of steps backward in this one thing. I'm not very happy with myself about it right now.

Mother or Father Bear

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

As it does no good to harvest if we can't eat
it does not good to act if we can't feel

We need both male and female energies to drink fully of life.

You see all these stupid things like, who's the best driver, male or female, or who's the messiest guys or girls...? You know the kind of things I'm talking about, I'm sure.

Who's the most protective, men or women, and what does that mean exactly? Am I wondering purely about the physical or am I including the spiritual and emotional in all of that as well? And how exactly does a person protect another? Does it mean beating up on someone else that is threatening whomever or whatever you are protecting, or does it mean steering the protectee out of harms way?

I don't have answers to these questions, they're just things that I'm wondering right now, things that are on my mind.

Another bunch of things I have on my mind right now, specifically and painfully pointed right now, the distinction between Justice and vengeance. Between humanity and inhumanity and what it means - overall - to be the bigger man and rise above other wrongdoers... where is the difference between doing what is necessary and crossing a line. Just what is the nature of Evil (and yes, it's capitalised for a reason), and what happens to us if we allow it to touch us, worse, to move us.

At the moment I'm having a good deal or trouble finding a sense of empathy for the human race, or which I'm a part. Man's 'inhumanity to man' is getting me down, and I mean that on a large as well as a small scale). The best I can say right now is that I pity us... which isn't really very good at all.

I could say that these feelings come from Universal Mother and Father figures, looking on their children and despairing the point to which they've come - except that these feelings are coming from inside of me.

Dance in the streets all you wish, brothers and sister, but - as Teyla so succinctly put it in the episode of Stargate: Atlantis that I hate so much:

Unfortunately there will be somebody else to take his place. Of this I am certain.