It’s rare to begin a day “on empty” without something else going on. I woke feeling a bit dizzy, and vaguely nauseous. I arrived at the trailhead before dawn, nonetheless, ready to walk… for most values of “ready”. There’s a work day ahead of me, and I face it with the strange sensation of not being certain how many days of work I have completed this week, nor am I certain how many remain, at least not initially. Eventually, out on the trail, I get my bearings. Now, having a clearer sense of what day it is, I proceed down the trail with more confidence.
… Am I just tired?…
Not “just” tired, I’m also in pain. As I walk, silently urging myself to continue down the trail, I begin to wonder if my fatigue and weirdness are all pain related…? Seems more and more likely as I walk. I sigh to myself. Pain is aggravating, and tends to shrink my world. I’m halfway down the trail and get to my resting point before continuing on, and I’ve no particular recollection of the walk so far. Rough. I sit down on the rock I find convenient for the purpose and look around me without much enthusiasm. It’s hard to focus my attention on other things, this morning. If it weren’t a work day, I’d just go back to bed.
Now, I’ve annoyed myself by emotionally giving in to pain. I frown for a moment, irked with myself for “making it so easy” for pain to get the upper hand this morning. I remind myself that it’s only a moment, and to avoid taking it personally. I’m still irritable over being in this much pain – and also for being so ridiculously sleepy. I catch myself being unusually unkind to myself over the pain I’m in, almost to the point of cruelty, and I work on letting that go. I’m already doing what I can to manage the pain I’m in, there’s no excuse to also be cruel. I’m human, with human injuries, human damage, and human limitations. I’ve also got extraordinary human will, better than average endurance, and I’ve learned to value and demonstrate compassion – surely I can trust myself to provide myself with care and consideration? Pain isn’t a joke. It isn’t something we seek out. Pain is not entertaining. This morning’s pain is way beyond “discomfort”, and taking care of myself is an important step to take. I sigh to myself again. More practice? Definitely.
My Traveling Partner pings me a greeting. He’s in pain this morning too. I’m grateful to be easily able to work from a different location. I’m having enough trouble managing my own pain. I’m pretty confident trying to work from home when we’re both hurting so much would be a poor choice. Still, I feel loved and I am grateful for his affection, and his good morning greeting. I hope we both find our way through the pain to the other side.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. There’s time for meditation before I finish my walk. There’s time to begin again.
Chilly Monday morning. There is a faint veil of autumn mist clinging to the trees along the riverbank, and above the meadow grass. The vineyard is still a dark smudge across my view, in the predawn gloom. Daybreak arrives quietly. Hard to believe it is a Monday.
I walked the trail on this chilly morning, hands jammed into my pockets for warmth, admitting to myself the whole way that I should have worn my fleece. I feel fall coming. The morning sky is gray and cloudy to the west. The eastern horizon shows off a bit of orange as the sun rises. I stop at my halfway point to enjoy the moment, and write a bit with cold fingers, grateful that I thought to jam a handful of tissues into my pocket as I left the house this morning; I’ve already used them up.
I watched this video over the weekend. Timely. I recommend it.
I sit thinking about some incredibly worthy ideas I have embraced over the past year or two (or three, or five, i don’t know, the time passes quickly). Amor Fati. Vita Contemplativa. Ichi-go Ichi-e. Along with accepting impermanence, and practicing non-attachment, these ideas (paths? practices?) have been useful perspective-changing and have served to deepen my engagement with, and presence in, my own experience every day.
… I make more time to read books and waste less time pointlessly scrolling.
… I make more room to listen to my own thoughts and be comfortably alone with myself.
… I make enjoying each moment a practice of its own, and allow myself to savor small joys such that they linger in my recollection.
… I make my lived experience my focus more of the time, present in the moment, and recognize how finite and precious this mortal lifetime is, without grieving its brevity.
… I face change more comfortably.
Seems worth it. That’s a lot of value out of a handful of ideas. There are verbs involved. Choices. Curiosity. Study. Each moment and each day, I choose the path I walk. You do too. What will your legacy be? What memories will you leave behind? Will you be considered fondly when you are remembered, or an unpleasant footnote in someone’s memory of old hurts? Choose. Then choose again. Every day, you have the power to choose to be the person you most want to be.
… Choose wisely…
…Who are you now? Are you your ideal of who you could be? Are you letting yourself down? What could you choose differently to become more that person you most want to be? I sit with the questions as dawn becomes day… And then I begin again.
Hate is contagious and corrosive. It can become lethal. Hate can influence the thinking of entire groups of people. Hate can make one individual do terrible things. Hate can drive people to murder.
… What does it mean when someone perceived as hateful, or who espouses hateful ideas, is themselves the victim of hate?…
I’m as human as anyone. There are ideas and people I find pretty horrible and hateful, myself. It’s most often not a personal sort of emotional experience, it’s more abstract than that. I’m not sure I’ve ever truly “hated” anyone in a direct and personal way. I have actively disliked people enough to avoid them. I have even loathed an individual to the point that I had nothing good to say about them, if asked. Hate, though? That seems a bigger deal, a deeper emotional investment that implies a commitment to infusing the awareness of the individual with persistent steady negative emotion – enough, perhaps, to be a weapon itself. I’d really have to care about someone, in some sense, in order to hate them, I think. What do I know, though? I avoid engaging in hate as an experience. There is reliably always too much I don’t know that could change my opinion.
Don’t shoot people because you’re angry. Don’t shoot people over ideology either. That kind of hateful shit is terrible for the perpetrator, in it’s own fashion, and it’s likely to have regrettable consequences. It’s terrible for the world. Violence is toxic and terrible and the “solutions” it provides aren’t the sort with real value. (Have you seen the images of Gaza and Ukraine since the most recent conflicts began in those places?) I don’t suppose, if you’re reading this blog, that you need that sort of cautionary reminder; you’re likely on a different path.
So… Charlie Kirk is dead, I hear. I can’t say his death moves me personally at all. He represented no good qualities or ideas to me. I did not know him personally, and was only aware of him in the most indirect way, as some favored conservative talking head notable enough to be mocked on South Park. (South Park is hilarious, and definitely knows how to tap the zeitgeist, and my opinion hasn’t changed.) I don’t have any personal feeling of loss over Charlie Kirk’s death. The hateful ideas of our conservative administration get people killed and wrecks lives every day…why would this one guy, famed for saying hateful things, getting shot be at all noteworthy?
I think killing people is wrong. It’s vile and wasteful and morally repugnant. Humanity could do better. That doesn’t change because someone I find unlikeable gets killed. It’s still wrong. I just don’t plan to spend more time thinking or talking about this particular death. Aren’t the innocent lives lost to school shootings, domestic violence, and police brutality more worthy of conversation? Isn’t genocide more important to address than the death of one voice espousing hate? And femicide? Infant mortality due to disease? I guess I’m just saying that this one particular shooting death carries no significance for me. It’s unfortunate people are still so primitive and barbaric that they seek to solve problems through violence. That’s the problem worth solving. We could definitely do better.
Don’t spread your hate around (or anyone else’s) – it’s not fucking jam.
I pull myself back to this gray moment, here, now.
I sigh to myself looking at the gray sky. Daybreak came on the trail and I am sitting with my thoughts before the work day begins. I’m tired and I slept badly. The alarm woke me, and I thought it was a mistake, at first. My eyes still feel gritty and dry. My head aches. I’m feeling cross with myself and with the world. I definitely need more rest than I got. I’m grateful the weekend is ahead and that the week has gone well… but… g’damn I’m just so fucking tired. I’ve got shit to do, and all I really want is to go back to sleep.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. I yawn and rub my eyes. I don’t feel groggy – that’s something good. Too much to do to have to deal with grogginess or brain fog, too, and I’m grateful. Slowly I pull my focus back to the things that matter most (to me, right now) and let the rest go. I’m grateful that I remember telling my beloved Traveling Partner I’d run to the store before work, and glance at the clock. Already time to begin again…
This morning is better. This morning is even “good” for all the values of “good” that come to mind in the moment. It’s nice. No anxiety. I woke with my silent alarm, as the lights began to come on, and my morning routine felt… routine. The traffic heading to the more distant co-work space was light, and I got there “right on time” – by which I mean when I expected to. I got to the office with enough time to share a few words with my Traveling Partner, and enough time to set up without rushing, and to prepare for an early meeting. It all feels so… ordinary.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. I take the few minutes for meditation in the morning that I usually do. The early morning call means my walk will come a little later, and that’s entirely fine. I feel steady, centered, and comfortable in my skin. I feel self-assured and confident that I am in the right place at the right time, doing things I am capable of doing well. It’s as if I were never anxious at all, which is a very nice feeling indeed.
I look over reminders for later. No stress there, either. This is a lovely start to an utterly ordinary work day.
I’m grateful to be without the anxiety that has been riding shotgun with my consciousness since I learned I’d be laid off from my previous job. Strange that quickly securing a new job wasn’t enough to beat back my anxiety…it was the more-than-satisfactory completion of a project that had been assigned to me when I started. I really needed that, I guess, to soothe the background hurt (purely emotional, and mostly fairly bullshit and unnecessary) that resulted from being laid off at all. Knowing those sorts of business decisions are “not personal”, and even being treated with great consideration by colleagues, doesn’t mean it hurts any less. I really enjoyed that job, and could have happily done that until I finally left the workforce. That’s not relevant to the reality of the situation – in a sense that role no longer exists at all. Even the company doesn’t actually exist anymore, as any sort of independent entity. This is certainly a circumstance in which practicing non-attachment is the healthy choice. I smile to myself, feeling reminded of how very human I am. I’m grateful things are turning out so well, and I sip my coffee and reflect on that.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. New day; new beginning. The (metaphorical) clock ticking in the background? It’s always ticking, whether I hear it or not. Paying too much attention to the sound of the clock becomes a distraction; there is much to be done in those finite minutes of each day, and many practices to practice on the way to becoming the woman I most want to be.
I let gratitude fill my thoughts for a few more minutes. It’s a nice way to begin a day, reflecting on what is going well, what is working out, what I am fortunate to enjoy in this mortal life, and the people I am fortunate to know. Dwelling on the challenges seems only to fill my life with frustration and anxiety. Savoring the very best moments is very different. The small joys, the things that suprised me in some delightful way, the coincidences and happenstance moments of luck or of beauty – those things are worth “dwelling on”, however small, and they fill my life with joy long after the moments have passed. Gratitude has become a favorite practice – it feels really good, and lifts me up.
I woke up with a thing stuck in my head. Not an actual object physically lodged in my skull, just a thought lingering in the background as though it had been the topic of conversation, or the content of a dream I had. It happens to also be the wallpaper of my laptop, and a reminder that whether – and how – we use our words really matters. For human primates, spoken language is our primary form of direct communication. Written language follows pretty closely, I suppose, and language is a powerful tool that can bring us closer – or drive us apart. It can reveal profound truths, or build terrible lies. It can soothe hurts and cause real harm, too. The thing stuck in my head as I woke, though? It was this:
Borrowed from a post by Kyle Hill, a YouTube content creator.
Words matter. Meaning matters. Using words to directly communicate our experience or needs to each other matters. It’s definitely more efficient (and generally more clear) than less direct forms of communication, when used skillfully, with a bit of care. Of course, like any sort of “magic”, it can be turned to evil purposes, and be used for gaslighting, manipulation, deceit, misdirection, or to directly do injury (or persuade others to do injuries to one another).
I drove up the highway still thinking about words, language, and communication, and how difficult something that seems so simple at first glance can really be. We live in challenging times, and communication is both the cause of some of our difficulties as a species (and society), and also the solution. Weird, right? Hell, we can’t even be certain of sharing the same “dictionary”, as individuals; the nuances in how we each understand a particular word can vary our understanding so much as to be not at all related, undermining our ability to understand each other, and even limiting our ability to recognize that we have not understood.
Here’s an example. When you use a word like “liberal” or “conservative” what do you actually mean by that? Is it straightforward? Is it is a common and broadly shared definition of the term? (What makes you so sure of that?) When you use it, are you actually clearly communicating an idea – or is it “coded language” carrying more (or other) meaning than the definition that will be found in a published dictionary? Could you be more clear? Are you being less clear by intention? Is it actually “your word” expressing your own thoughts, or are you repeating someone else’s talking point, parroting a phrase or slogan, conveying a message that is not truly your own?
…Do you even know what you’re really talking about?…
It’s hard to go wrong with good basics…
My thoughts bring me back to The Four Agreements. Not my first walk down that path, either. This peculiar little volume has some powerful ideas in it. These ideas are framed in a spiritual sort of context that isn’t a good fit for everyone’s thinking (including mine), but the basic messages being communicated are profound, and worthy of consideration. One of these “agreements” is the recommendation to “be impeccable” with our words. The book makes it clear that what is meant is to be clear, accurate, truthful, and also kind, compassionate, considerate, gentle, and aware of the potential for lasting consequences when we speak to each other. Communicating well takes practice, and maybe a lot of that, quite probably “forever”. Totally worth it, though. Skillful communication is a healing thing that brings people together, when used to connect and share and build.
Why am I even on about this, this morning? No idea. I woke up with a meme in my head. lol I woke up to some sort of interrupted internal discussion of the power of words and how we use them. I drove to the more distant co-work space I sometimes work from, still thinking about words, language, and communication (and my own commonplace difficulties with good communication). I hadn’t yet exchanged words with another human being at all. I’m thinking about it even now.
My Traveling Partner pings me a greeting in the form of a cute “sticker”, and shares some words about a quality of life improvement project he’s working on – improvements to our media library, and how it is organized – and I reply. Successful communication. How do I define that success? We understand each other, and feel loved. Win. I glance down at the wee tray my Traveling Partner made to hold my “regular” glasses when I have my computer glasses on, and feel wrapped in love. Another form of communication, not in words, but in actions. Those matter, too.
What love looks like – sometimes.
I smile to myself, and sit with my thoughts in the quiet of the office. I’m grateful for the solitude, the quiet morning, my Traveling Partner’s love, a job that pays the bills (or will, once the paychecks start coming), a pleasant little home, and the ability to use words and language. Powerful stuff. I think about all the books I have yet to read, and the poetry I have yet to write. I think about delightful compliments I have been offered, and useful feedback I’ve been given that I have used to grow and become more the woman I most want to be. I contemplate the dark power of sarcasm, insults, and angry words, and the lasting damage these can do. I think about promises given, promises broken, and how much it matters to keep our word. I think about the way unexpected kind words can lift us up from difficult moments. I think about how sharing our experiences with each other through story telling and anecdotes can teach, entertain, or bring us together. Words are powerful indeed.
I sip my coffee and for a moment, I deeply miss my Dear Friend, with whom I might have shared these thoughts, and further discussion. Words connected us over great distances and many years.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. I begin the day with words, and I’ll likely end it with words, too. I take a few minutes to meditate, letting the words fall away for a time, just being, and breathing. Now, it’s time to begin again. I glance at the clock, and prepare for the work day ahead. I remind myself to choose my words with care – because words matter.
Evening Light 