I am awake ridiculously early, for no obvious reason other than I apparently got enough sleep to be awake now. I have no emotional position on the matter of being awake at 4 am on a Sunday morning. I woke thinking perhaps it was quite late on Monday night and that I’d slept through the work day. I’m glad it is Sunday morning. So… in spite of the early hour, the morning starts in a good place. 😀

I woke in pain. My lower back is still aching from an unfortunately very comfortably (in the moment) placed small pillow yesterday evening that resulted in very poor positioning of my spine (although I didn’t feel it until later). I’m still dealing with the pain of my careless mistake. Reality works like that; it literally does not care – or account for – our opinions about good, bad, comfortable, uncomfortable, win, lose, best, worst – any of it. Reality simply is.

Our value judgements are as made up as a lot of the rest of our experience, and align to reality by varying degrees depending on our level of awareness, and willingness to recognize reality’s hard surfaces, sharp edges, and unexpected corners, when we could choose the softness of our dreams, and the soothing poetry of our internal narrative.

Very few people seem to actually want to live their lives awake and aware, present and engaged in this moment, here, now. Some people talking about being awake, awakening, and other such assorted verbiage for being more “on” than “off”, more clued in than clueless, are talking about other dreams, rather than being simply mindfully with what is (as much as our senses allow us to be). Some people use statements of awareness as accusations that others are less so. I have even read articles suggesting some people use basic mindfulness practices to distract themselves from life’s practical realities needing their attention. It is perhaps useful to avoid those pitfalls. I have no particular constructive solutions or suggestions to offer. Awareness is a fairly personal state of being. We are easily misled, sometimes by our own thinking, and it is tempting to think that our notions are a matter of “being awake” solely because the thinking is new, ours, or because few others share it. What is “awake“, anyway?

This morning it is enough to distinguish sleeping from waking, and to consider this state of being literally awake sufficient to define the term. 🙂

It will be hours still before day break. I sip my coffee, relaxed, enjoying this moment without anxiety, stress, or weirdness. 4 am doesn’t have to be loaded with baggage, fear, stress, existential angst, or the residual emotional load from nightmares. It can be, and is, simply a moment. To be sure, it’s a moment I could be sleeping through, were circumstances different, but the circumstances are what they are – and I choose how I experience the moment. 🙂

Weekends seem short now, just two days, with firm borders of work days keeping them in place, like bookends. Making best use of the time seems to matter much more than it did only weeks ago. Today will be spent mostly on housekeeping, meditation, reading, playing my guitar… I can’t complain, that sounds like a great Sunday, to me. I’ll make a point of getting a good walk in sometime in the morning, after the sun is up; in only months this nearby trail won’t be so nearby – I may never walk it again once I move.

Oh good grief – not again?!

Moving is hard on me. Departures, leaving, breaking free, letting go, “never again”, endings generally just don’t feel as delightfully welcoming as beginnings. I had the thought last night that with regard to moving, if I were to look upon the process as a prolonged beginning, instead of a prolonged ending, perhaps it would feel different overall? Would I grieve less to view this move as a profound beginning, a delightful choice to be embraced, a unique adventure whose time has come? It seems a promising notion, and I decided to begin putting it to the test today, by beginning with a list of the small things that have been less than ideal, compromises of aesthetic, unsatisfying logistical necessities, things that haven’t worked well, or have continued to be problems yet to be solved. If nothing else, I expect it to reduce my level of attachment to this place, and these circumstances, and perhaps reduce the emotional baggage associated with moving. I guess I’ll find out once I do it. Practices, and practicing them, tend to work that way for me; they are an idea with intent before the verbs are put to work, and only in the practicing is the result evident. Sometimes it is necessary to practice regularly, continuously, frequently, and with some persistence (like meditation), others sort of “just happen” and continue on auto-pilot once I practice them a few times and find it a natural fit for who I am. My results definitely vary – they vary by practice, they vary by day, they vary by moment. I’m very human.

I get distracted by a favorite track on my playlist and lose my train of thought. Perhaps it is for the best? Some mornings I can continue to hit “enter” and start a new paragraph more or less indefinitely and find some hours later that I’ve got a few thousand words to cut down to size – and haven’t said much. Sometimes a distraction is helpful.

It is interesting to watch the sky through the open blinds of the studio window. When I sat down the sky seemed a milky shade of some sort of orange, pale and peculiar, and the pine just beyond the patio was silhouetted boldly. It was quite striking. I look up now, and more than hour later (less than two), all is darkness without feature or form, nothing to see of the sky, the pine, or the imminent dawn besides some distant streetlights shining through more distant trees, invisible on the horizon. It is strange that the sky seems darker now than when I woke, much earlier. Reality does not care what I think about it. Hasn’t ever cared. Isn’t likely to care in the future. Reality is. 🙂

Today is a good day to be here, now. Today is a good day to embrace change. Today is a good day to practice practices, to be, and to become. It’s time to face a blank page.