Open

Loving my new routine: get kids off to school, walk with Kathleen and Flicka, come home, shower, then write for at 2 hours and/or 2,000 words. I will admit that today I wrote two sections that were brutal to write about, so I let myself be done after two hours even though I hadn't quite hit the 2,000 word mark. The good news is those sections are as done as they are going to be until the next draft, and each day I get closer to writing about the fun stuff: Rojo's spiritual brilliance. At the ages I'm writing about now (up to 18 months), he was just a pain-in-the-ass.

Then I try and tackle one long-put-off home project or another. I discovered something about myself these last couple weeks: I don't want to start something if I can't finish it, and of course I can't finish a book or clean a whole basement in one day, so instead of chipping away, I would just postpone the whole entire thing. Now, I'm slowly, slowly-ing several things at once, moving from one "icky" task to another, just to keep the momentum going.

Walked into the garage today and almost walked out, but instead took advantage of the warm, dry day to haul a bunch of stuff out of there that was clearly garbage and/or recycling. Filled my car with things to take to ARC and the recycling center, and then hopped in the car and did so. Check, check! Didn't finish the garage, not by a long shot, but it looks SO much better already, and that took barely any time/effort at all!

Then I went down to the basement and started hauling stuff into my partially-cleaned garage, ready for the next ARC run (tomorrow). Old duvet covers, lamps, a too-small dog crate for a dog we don't even have, art work I'm sick to death of.

What I noticed as I sweated and hauled, went up and down the stairs and started to feel the difference not just see it, was that almost everything I was giving away wasn't mine originally. No. I was hauling other people's old shit.

I tend to do that a lot - haul things around that weren't mine in the first place, but somehow became so.

Eckhart Tolle plays on the ancient boom box as I move through the house. He says we are not our thoughts. We are the awareness behind our thoughts, and just touching with gentle awareness what's going on with us, as in, "Oh, look! There I go again storing other people's physical and emotional junk!" is half the battle. He says it much more eloquently, but you get the idea.

Today I will gratefully accept half the battle.

And half the junk.

* Photo of Sanskrit for openness from www.liberationny.com/images/