The Mari Celeste
Jun. 13th, 2011 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cedar_groveFrom The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.
We think we protect ourselves by taking inventory and moving on, but we only spin our web tighter.
I woke on Sunday to… silence. Way too quiet, eerily quiet, and began to imagine all kinds of things that could have happened. Had something happened to one of the dogs and mum and dad had to take them to the vet? Had something happened to Richard or Kim? To Mum or Dad themselves…? All manner of terrible things had happened – and all before I'd even had breakfast.
Of course eventually I realised that the only way to actually find out what had happened, was to get up and go downstairs and find out, because if they had gone anyway, they would surely have left a note.
When I actually got downstairs I discovered that actually yes, Mum had gone out. She'd gone to an APDT meeting and wouldn’t be back until the evening. It was so quiet because Dad was working on some paperwork to do with my late grandfather's estate, and he needed the quiet to understand the forms. There was no disaster – things just were as they were. Later, mum came home, had enjoyed a good day at her meeting, and we all had dinner together as usual, the three of us, and the two dogs.
I do this a lot, though not as badly as I used to. I think my brain has grown up and accepted that there are things outside of my own little world that are happening that might actually be the reasons for something that is happening, and not my terrible imaginings… but still, at times, when the happenings are out of the ordinary, or unexpected, I still fall back into the old pattern of letting my imagination run away with me, rather than taking out my abacus, and touching the beads of the moment with my hands, my heart and my mind.
We need to count by touching
not by adding and subtracting.
We think we protect ourselves by taking inventory and moving on, but we only spin our web tighter.
I woke on Sunday to… silence. Way too quiet, eerily quiet, and began to imagine all kinds of things that could have happened. Had something happened to one of the dogs and mum and dad had to take them to the vet? Had something happened to Richard or Kim? To Mum or Dad themselves…? All manner of terrible things had happened – and all before I'd even had breakfast.
Of course eventually I realised that the only way to actually find out what had happened, was to get up and go downstairs and find out, because if they had gone anyway, they would surely have left a note.
When I actually got downstairs I discovered that actually yes, Mum had gone out. She'd gone to an APDT meeting and wouldn’t be back until the evening. It was so quiet because Dad was working on some paperwork to do with my late grandfather's estate, and he needed the quiet to understand the forms. There was no disaster – things just were as they were. Later, mum came home, had enjoyed a good day at her meeting, and we all had dinner together as usual, the three of us, and the two dogs.
I do this a lot, though not as badly as I used to. I think my brain has grown up and accepted that there are things outside of my own little world that are happening that might actually be the reasons for something that is happening, and not my terrible imaginings… but still, at times, when the happenings are out of the ordinary, or unexpected, I still fall back into the old pattern of letting my imagination run away with me, rather than taking out my abacus, and touching the beads of the moment with my hands, my heart and my mind.
