When Quakers call me and say eff this and eff that, I know shit is real. I know things are serious. Yesterday a Quaker called me and dropped F-bombs. I knew to pay attention. They weren’t directed at me, but at a situation, a political one.
Today we protested. I wanted to keep my sign short and direct yet all encompassing so Fight Fascism fit on my scrap of cardboard. Here is a great explanation of what is fascism.
My hands were cold so when I got back to work I had to hold them against the heater so I could touch people’s skin and do acupuncture.
I always thought I would have liked Ben Franklin, or at least joked around with him at parties. He went to coffeehouses before the revolution and I would have sat near him. I’d like to have known the Roosevelts, like Eleanor and Franklin, but also Teddy.
So I wonder why I didn’t live then and know them but I’ve noticed I can still meet people and get to know them and have lively interesting jovial intelligent conversations that lifts us both up, nearly instantly.
We had another coffeehouse. People want to know what’s happening and what they can do. A friend is going to clean the local democrat office kitchen. We all have something to offer. Some are overwhelmed with national email pelting so I say it’s fine to unsubscribe and plug-in locally.
To help calm me down during life in general, I’ve taken to doing 10-minute meditations to stop looking at news and scheming how to respond and the 10-minute break resets my nervous system and I feel back on track until I need to do it again.
I went to a meditation event in the nearby art museum and sat two feet from a buff earthenware storage jar from the Chinese Neolithic period, as in roughly 2300 BCE. Across the way was a Daoist Priest’s robe with tigers and dragons.
Lately for clarity, I’m just keeping animal beds fluffed by the stove and knocking snow off hummingbird feeders and refilling.
I had a dream I was in an opera. I didn’t know the songs and was just about to go on the stage with the lead soprano who was a much better singer than I am and a lot louder. I wondered why they gave me the part. I stalled a bit and went offstage where there was a field with a beat-up outhouse. This seemed odd for an opera house but it was totally real at the time.
Also I had no outfit. I needed a good clothing ensemble for this role.
This is how I feel sometimes when called to do something, but I’m figuring out ways to move forward. It’s a little like riding a carousel moving in a circle and up and down remembering to stay in my seat like a good hunter-jump rider sailing over jumps. I did that a few times a long time ago and I remember the sense of being in the air just above a large animal in the air.
I’m embracing being in an in-between place, a threshold. During meditation we were supposed to ask a question, though I had too many to ask so I just sat there. Eventually what I heard was “bless those places between my own interior thresholds, my own divisions, the spaces like now.”
“Keep bringing the sacred to the practical and the practical to the sacred.”
[Music: Feels Right, Biig Piig]
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