Archives for posts with tag: mindfulness matters
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Being

February 20, 2016 //
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I woke easily but wanting to sleep later. I lingered in bed for some time, but sleep wasn’t happening; the day had begun. I sat down with my coffee and opened my Facebook feed – generally a very positive place these days, because it actually does work to continue to refine my feed preferences over time. I block ‘news’ sites that aren’t legitimate news sites, choosing to refrain from injecting poison into my brain through my eye holes every day, if I can. I’ve even chosen to unfriend some long-time historical connections whose values, and means of expressing those, continued to cause me stress and rouse emotions like fear, panic, anxiety – hard to call them friends, if that is my reaction to their words, right?

The world is what it is, though, and incremental change over time on a global scale is crazy slow – because we don’t all share the same values, and frankly, it’s not even a given that we all make choices in favor of our own survival as a species. I mean… actually… it’s clear we don’t.

Isn't the beauty of a sunrise important, too?

Isn’t the beauty of a sunrise important, too?

Two articles got my attention in a fairly painful way this morning.  The first was an article about the artist Kesha losing a court case seeking to end her contractual relationship with a record company requiring her to continue to work alongside a producer who raped her. Wow. Seriously, Sony? Evil much? Is a record deal actually worth sacrificing a young woman’s mental and emotional health? My first thought is ‘how dare you?’, followed quickly by my own memories of attempting to report a sexual assault to my unit commander and being told I didn’t really want to ‘ruin that young man’s life that way’ and besides ‘it would be bad for unit cohesion’ and I should ‘grow a thicker skin – boys will be boys’. Yep. Apparently that’s still the world we live in. How about we fix that?

We could choose to change the path we're on.

We could choose to change the path we’re on.

The second article was entirely different, very peculiar, and tough to fit into my understanding of rational adult governance; the Southern Poverty Law Center produced their annual report of hate groups, and I guess I’m not really surprised, but… the Republican Party made the list this year. (Oh hey, guys – go you! It’s like an award for being… the worst people in the nation. WTF? Certainly validates my choice to register differently some years ago, just saying. Don’t hate.) Yeah. I actually don’t know what to say about it. I seriously doubt that my own Republican friends meet the definition of ‘a hate group’… then recall that I’ve unfriended a number of former associates, friends, and colleagues, for reasons very much relevant to the politics of hate: racism, sexism, xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, and political extremism of the sort that seeks to create a bigger and bigger divide between some arbitrary ‘us’ and some frightening ‘them’. So… huh. What now?

Taken in context, fully considering what you know of the world, yourself, are your individual choices building the world you want most to live in?

Taken in context, fully considering what you know of the world, yourself, are your individual choices building the world you want most to live in?

If Republicanism has indeed become a hate group… do we now see the wholesome, compassionate, educated, forward-thinking Republicans among us lead their party to a better way of viewing the world… or do they leave the Republican party? Those aren’t the only two options, of course. Another option is pissing and moaning about how misunderstood their hate is, and how they are only seeking to improve things for “everyone”, and perhaps something about how ‘that’s just a few extremists in the party’. Scary, though. If I were told, with supporting documentation and evidence, that ‘being an artist’ was a hate group… would I stop painting? Would I paint differently? Would living my own values require me to change my actions based on the new information – or would it require me to acknowledge the truth of it, and continue to live it?

What matters most? Taking care of me is not at the expense of others - it never had to be.

What matters most? Taking care of me is not at the expense of others – it never had to be.

When I realized I had gotten sucked into a very dark place quite early in the morning, even letting my coffee go cold, I set the world aside – it’ll still be here later – and take time for me. I calm myself with meditation, and take time to watch the morning unfold beyond the window. The sunrise was worth taking the time for it. A fresh cup of coffee is nice, too. I breathe, and let go of my own hurting resurrected by the unpleasant, uncomfortable, all-too-human hateful bullshit that snuck into my experience this morning. Hurts from the past don’t have to be indulged in the present; it’s something my traveling partner pointed out to me early in our relationship. Having the injury that I do, it’s often very difficult to ‘let things go’ once visceral real-time emotions are aroused, but it isn’t impossible. Verbs. Always with the verbs. 🙂

Be love.

Be love.

I don’t have to live within my emotional pain. It isn’t a requirement to hold onto the worst moments as though they define the present ones. They are now only memories, scars, and lingering impressions caught in my implicit memory. I allow ‘now’ to become prominent, again. I step more firmly into this moment. I hear the music in the background… it’s apropos and I smile, and relax.  I think of my friends, their wit, their wisdom – even the Republican ones. The world is damned scary filtered by fear and hate, isn’t it? That isn’t the world I actually live in, myself… You? Maybe it’s a matter of speaking up when we hear it around us, just simply saying ‘Dude, not okay!’, and reminding each other of Wheaton’s Law.  Maybe it’s bigger than that – maybe we’re not the most amazing primates, after all? Certainly we’ve got room to grow as beings. We live in the world we choose to build. Could we do better? Choose more wisely? Well… yeah. 🙂 Let’s do that!

Today is a good day for sunshine, and for logging off Facebook. Today is a good day for being. Today is a good day to buy products from companies that don’t promote hate, or rape culture, or slavery, or exploitation, or… I didn’t say it was going to be easy. It’s going to take practice. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, Words

Savor the Juice

February 17, 2016 //
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Late last evening in a moment of pure delight I ate a tangerine. It sounds pretty simple. It even was a very simple thing. It was also… awesome.

What I actually wanted was a tall refreshing glass of orange juice, which I don’t generally keep in the house because it’s something I enjoy enough that it can easily override my limited impulse control and result in finding myself with an empty container of orange juice in my hand, and very high blood sugar – that ends up being a poor health choice. (Damn you, delicious OJ!!) Having no orange juice on hand, or any other fruit juice, and understanding that ‘a sugary beverage’ was not going to satisfy, when my eye landed on the fruit bowl and spotted the lone remaining tangerine – a medium-sized, thin-skinned, sweet seedless variety – I knew what to do about the juice craving; I would make that tangerine give up its sweet juice to me!

No juicer – not even one of the small citrus juicers so common in kitchen gadget drawers. I didn’t let lack of a ready-made tool stop me, why would it? I am a primate! Haven’t primates been eating fruits for… well, literally the entire time primates have existed? I sliced off a bit of the top with sharp knife and began gently squeezing the tangerine, pouring the juice into a glass as it ran from the fruit. I turned it in my hand to squeeze it uniformly, feeling the pulpy fruit within begin to break down from its sections. The sweet tangerine-y fragrance filled my senses and by that point I was most definitely eager to taste that sweet sweet juice. I looked at the glass, still holding the nearly flattened tangerine in my hand, which was a little sticky from contact with the fresh juice. The entire process resulted in a couple of tablespoons of tangerine juice – really fresh, actually entirely real juice. My eye traveled from the glass to my hand, and I unfolded my hand, revealing the split flattened tangerine, easily opened out to show the sectioned insides, burst, squashed, but… tangerine. Standing at the sink, without any reservations or hesitation at all, I tore into the tasty flesh, savoring the sweetness, the juiciness, the flavor of tangerine, consuming it all (except the skin) in just a minute or too of raw animal delight.

I stood there in the kitchen with a huge smile, feeling connected to my physical experience, and feeling open to how simple, meaningful, and delightful such a humble moment as eating a fruit can be… and how human. Damn that was tasty tangerine. I washed my hands, which were sticky, and wiped the sticky juice from my face (I hadn’t been especially dainty about eating that tangerine, frankly). I turned to leave the kitchen…and there on the counter that glass of juice sat waiting. Right! Juice! I felt a moment of additional delight and joy – there is still juice! I anticipated the flavor of it and it was my intention to savor it slowly… two swallows of tasty tangerine later, and it was done. It was a satisfying moment of pleasure, guiltless, childlike, animal, and without regret. I found it more pleasurable – and memorable – to take the time with it that I did, and to enjoy it fully without being distracted by any other experience.

It was just a tangerine. Just a shot of fresh fruit juice made with loving hands. It was also nourishment. It was the satisfaction of a desire. It was a sensuous pleasure. It was a moment of delight worth lingering over, and worth recalling.

We live in the world we choose to create. 🙂

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, The Art of Being, Words

Art, Music, Words

February 16, 2016 //
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This morning I am relaxed and alert after a good night’s sleep. I woke too early to a distant peculiar high-pitched whine; the train in the distance crawling slowly through the night, sometimes loud, sometimes noisy, doesn’t often wake me but in the wee hours this morning it did. It wasn’t relevant to the overall quality of my sleep, or this lovely quiet morning over coffee.

I enjoyed quite a nice weekend, and although I started it having to deal with my challenges it was skillfully done, generally, productive, emotionally nourishing, fun, relaxing, and fairly entertaining. I spent much of it at home in this beautiful space I am creating for myself, and a lot of it painting. I’ve been needing this so much – over the years of adult creative lifetime I have yearned for adequate space to paint. I’ve done some amazing work perched on the edge of couches, crouched on the floor in a corner, spread out across kitchen counters, dining tables, or on an easel of good quality and sturdiness wedged into a corner of one room or another, cautious about paint being flung thoughtlessly here or there… attentive to immediately clean up, every day, every time… I’ve gotten close to have real studio space once or twice, only to see it jerked out of reach at the last minute. I was well into my 40’s – almost 50 – when I understood how much I yearned for dedicated creative space to work. I put it aside as a fantasy. I put it aside as unreachable – so many times. (If this isn’t obvious; it was often my own choices that put fulfillment of this desire out of my reach.)

Most of my partners and lovers have respected my artistic side, some of have truly loved my work; I feel certain that had it been commonly understood how badly I needed more room to work – understood by me, myself, too – I’d have been ‘here’ sooner. One of life’s many missed details – handled. I smile thinking about how many conversations with my traveling partner over the years have come back to making a viable solution to the need for room to paint become a reality for me – even our very first conversations as friends often wound around back to quality of life matters being needfully inclusive of this thing I did not have at that time; he recognized it as a ‘need’ when I still thought of it as a daydream without substance, forever out of reach. Over the course of our 5 years together, he has regularly pointed out potential solutions – and when it was clear that there was profound value for me (and us) in my living quite separately day-to-day, it was the artistic space that sold the idea first, healing was a bit of an afterthought (for me). I’ve been well-supported in this partnership – as an artist, as a woman, as a human being, and as a friend. How the hell do I say ‘thank you’ for all that?? Well… by painting, I guess, and making the choice to live alone have value beyond the separateness of it. 🙂

One of the faces of Love, and another way to take care of me.

One of the faces of love, and another way to take care of me.

I spent the weekend in my studio. I love the way that sounds. I spent it getting it set up, and using that time of making order out of chaos to ‘get my head right’ on Saturday morning (Friday afternoon and evening I wasn’t really good for much, dealing with a flare up of my PTSD and focused on very basic self-care). By midday Saturday I was painting. Sunday I was painting. Monday I was painting. Somewhere in the midst of all that, I found time to read, to eat, to shower, to love – the love matters most, perhaps, but without all that other stuff, who is here to be loved? I enjoyed the time I spent with my traveling partner Sunday – and there was no awkwardness in his departure. “What would you be doing if I left now?” he asked pleasantly after hanging out a while. I smiled and gave it some thought, the answer was an easy one, “I’d be in the studio, sitting with the new colors and the canvases I am working on, thinking about that”. He smiled back at me and observed that the timing seemed good. No stress, no emotional weirdness – an easy (for both of us) comfortable (for both of us) departure, freeing us (both) to move on with the day quite naturally. It was quite lovely, both the time together, and the time apart. What more could I ask of love?

There are now four canvases in various stages of completion in my studio, and they are not a frenzy of similarly themed work using a similar palette for economy. They are not being rushed through to avoid inconveniencing a household starting a new work week. Each is an entirely unique experience with color, texture, subject; I am able to slow my pace to a moment by moment approach that feels completely different – and worth exploring. Mindful painting? Is this a thing? The path veers in a new direction…

…I walk on, enjoying the view as I begin again. Today is a good day for art, for music, for words – a good day to feed my heart and my soul, not just this fragile vessel. 🙂

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Categories Art, art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5

Is It Really ‘Black or White’?

February 15, 2016 //
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I’m up earlier than I really need to be, and I have the day off. I’m okay with that; it’s simply more time in my day. My coffee is tasty, and the day begins gently.

This one is a short one this morning. I am thinking about reason, assumptions, and how we human primates build so much of our understanding of the world on incomplete or inaccurate narratives we make up in our own heads. It’s worth giving some thought to, I think.

This image is not a black and white shot.

This image is not a black and white shot.

Very few things in life are as simple as we make them. Very few things are ‘black and white’ – or more accurately ‘black or not black’, ‘white or not white’; the logical rules Aristotle left for us don’t account for the rich tapestry of ‘real life’, and humanity has long since moved on from the limitations of simple Newtonian physics, too. Just saying – allowing assumptions about things in life I don’t (or can’t) really know isn’t just a limitation, it colors my experience a great deal.

Today is a good day for not knowing, and for allowing reliance on certainty to fall by the wayside. Today is a good day to be unsure. Today is a good day to be open to more possibilities, and a broader perspective. Today is a good day to abandon assumptions, and let go of expectations. Today is a good day to be open; it’s a very different world that way.

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Categories Free Will, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, The Art of Being, Words

Every New Beginning

February 12, 2016 //
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I woke too early, but didn’t get up until 5 minutes before the alarm; I turned it off, grateful to avoid it. I have a headache, feels like one from being dehydrated and whatever else goes with crying. Easily resolved; I drink more water.

I woke with my consciousness free of emotional debris – that’s a nice change that occurred somewhen, over time. It’s a new day. I find myself glad it is just one work day away from a long weekend. I feel as if I need the rest, though I am doubtful resting will be my first choice; in spite of last night’s… difficulties, I feel inspired to paint. It’s an almost overwhelming feeling and I find it difficult to remain in this moment, in this time/place, so overcome am I with thoughts of what could be appearing on my canvas(es).

So…another day. I begin again. I don’t know where it will take me. I wish my traveling partner well with my whole heart, somewhat saddened that we’re unlikely to spend any part of Valentine’s Day together; we go days, sometimes weeks without seeing each other. We managed to get through last evening, unintentionally, without even embracing. How odd. Unsettling and unsatisfying occur as words in my thinking, too. It’s okay – move along, brain, nothing to see here. 🙂

The work day starts super early on Fridays – but this morning I didn’t forget that (which is probably why I woke at 2:30 am, and did not return to sleep; last week I forgot it was Friday when I woke on Friday morning, and was very nearly late, which I don’t handle well). Coffee soon…

Today is a very good day to begin again. I’ll start right here…

Be love.

Be love.

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Categories Anxiety, art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Art of Being, The Big 5, women, Words
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