Welcome To the Cedar Grove

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

I'm late! I'm late. For a very important date!
No time to say hello! Good-bye!
I'm late! I'm late! I'm late!

--The Mad Hatter, from Alice In Wonderdland

Now I have to hurry along to make sure I can get everywhere on time... I laugh at myself. I can so easily become a slave to a schedule I create. Not one of these things is necessary...

I'm great at filling up a schedule, or to do list with countless tasks. I rarely get even half of them done, even when I'm rushing through task after task, which of course means I'm not getting any of them done properly. I either overestimate the amount of free time I have, or underestimate the amount of time it's going to take to do something. I always do it. It doesn't matter where I am, or what day of the week it is, without fail, I overplan... and I still try to get everything done.

Another thing - being a supply (substitute) teacher, I have a whole thing going where I say to myself "If they don't send me out to work today, I will do x, y and z..." and when no call comes by 7:30am I start to relax into the thought that I'm going to be following my own schedule - and it's actually quite a nice thought some days - only to get a call ten minutes later, meaning I really do have to rush to get to the school on time, (and without a car sometimes that is quite the challenge), and you know what?

Actually, I don't like rushing.

I don't mind workikng hard; I don't mind working continually - I quite enjoy the sense of achievement at the end of a busy day when I have managed to get a lot done, but... I don't like to rush.

The last few days have been quite an education in that kind of thing, and no more so than yesterday... a lesson in slowing down. To explain:

Every time I've come out of the house in the last few days there's been a sudden erruption of cicadas from the vicinity of the front porch. I don't know why, but they seem to enjoy using our porch to climb and hang on to hatch out of their skins before making the climb to the trees to start their life cycle all over again. It's quite something to see.

Then in the afternoon, Mir and I decided it was a nice evening and we'd like to read outside, so I took out a blanket and lay down on the ground with the book to ready, part way through reading, I turned my head and got scared half to death by two red eyes looking back at me. One of them had decided to climb up my arm, and was hanging on there just looking at me. I managed to coax him off back into the grass, but he just kept on crawling nearer. Then it was that Mir looked around and laughing said, "You have one on your back you know," and sure enough, there I was with a cicada settled on my back to get himself out of his shell. At this point I decided that I just had to remain still and allow him to do that.

We took video... which you can see here

Nothing like having a cicada emerging on your back to let you see that yes, you can slow down and appreciate the wonders of nature... of all life.