Dancing Geek

I have a point to make, and I actually want to make it quickly so I can get back to getting ready for bed, but before I do I have to let you know about a comic called Monique Marvez.  Go check her out.  It’s totally hetero-centric but it’s still some of the funniest (and truest) stuff I’ve heard in a long time.  Totally made my night/morning.

The Epiphany

So, yeah, I’ve a point to make.  After trying my morning practice for a few days, and having a great success from it, I decided it might be cool to try it before going to bed as well.  This comes from knowing that meditation is recommended either first thing or last thing (or indeed both) in some places, and I suddenly thought: “I get so clear headed after this in the morning, and hence ready to get on with my day, that maybe I can use that at night to get to sleep better.”

Bam!

As I sit here, at what was 3am but now thanks to Monique is 3.50am, and asked myself the question “How do I feel right now?” there was a whole pile of yuck that just tumbled up.

Sploooge! Ick, ick, ick. (Do the sound effects help?  I’m not going to stop if they don’t, because I love them, but I’m just curious.)

Well, gosh darn it, no wonder I avoid going to bed if the moment I start thinking about it a whole kit and kaboodle of gunk goes squishing through my wetworks!  Who’dathunk that the act of going to bed could have so much baggage attached?

Well, ok, you probably have, given how much I’ve written about it (recurring theme, much?) but the whole point of an Epiphany is when you suddenly go ‘ding!’ and realise (that is, remember) what everyone else already knew.  As Joely calls them: ‘Oh Bugger, Really?’ moments.

Hurrah for live-blogging at 4am

So now I get to go back to my feeling practice as it closes on to 4am and my feet lose all sensation from sitting still in this chair for hours on end without any heating turned on because I thought I was going to go to bed soon (I mean, come on, do I never learn?!) and know that I told you all how I crazy I was.

Wait, no, that’s tired cranky talk.  I’m actually really grateful to have reached a point and found a practice that work together so well for me.  I’m off to enjoy freeing up my mind to go sleepy-bies and I’ll catch you all on the flip side.

P.S. Today/tomorrow (given time-zones the day technically starts in a few hours for her) the Urban Panther is re-opening her blog on WordPress complete with fancy widgets and the ability to subscribe to comments (FINALLY!).  So I expect you all to head over and shout up the wonderfulness.  I recommend starting with the story posts – brilliant characters and setup.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.  PATTERN ALERT!

I’m at it again

Ok, first of all I’m going to take a moment to appreciate the fact that I’m noticing the pattern. Then I’m going to have a moment where I get to sulk and pout about the fact that the pattern has come up again.  Then I’m going to tell you about it.

Shoulding all over myself in the garden

It’s March, spring is rushing towards us with lighter evenings and earlier sunshine, and I’m all for that, but I had a sudden panic about getting the garden ready to grow food.  Food is very important to me.

So I leap into action, I make a list of the food I want to grow, I research how it should be grown and at what times of year.  I do a little spreadsheet, I make a list of what I need to get in the ground this month, and what we need to prepare before we can do that.  I talk to Glyn.  He feels totally railroaded.

Gee. I wonder why.

Of course, I’m all, “I just want to make sure we get the most food” as well as a few slightly blame-y sounding things which I’m too ashamed to repeat on here.  Oh, yes, James.  Very rational.  King of Rationalisation, you are, aren’t you!

Ummm, yeah.  I am.

Well, quit it.

Ummm, sorry.

(Sometimes tough love is called for.)

Back to the plan

Well, rather than needing to plan out the next 24 months (oh yes, I was there already) I’m going with Glyn’s much saner version:

• build the second raised bed we want for the raspberries & blackberries (no blackberry fruit this year though – gardening is good practice for the impatient)
• start to plant up the veg patch at the end of the garden

End. That’s it. You could write it on a post-it. Maybe I should have that as a rule for all my plans.

Wait! That’s another plan!

Gah.  See how easily they slip in there?!

And now?

So, back to the moment.  Right now, what do I need?

Well, I know that I *want* to get a load of mental work done (reading, self-inquiry, meditation) but I also know that I’m tired already.

I’m going to try and practice being ok with not feeling like I got enough done today.  Embrace the panic, accept that the end of the day has come and just go to bed.  Do you reckon I can do it?

Planning

Apparently, I plan.  Now this may not be a big shock to anyone who’s actually read my blog but it is a surprise to me, the guy who wrote it.  Or rather, the fact that my planning is the busywork I’m doing to avoid the big scary thing.

The big scary

Sometimes you get a feeling of what your stuckness is as a physical object, e.g. a small hard ball, a sticky mess or a sharp box that might live in your chest say.  Mine is big.  Mine is so big that it isn’t in me, I’m in it.  Mine is the size of space.  And I’m floating around in it with nothing to aim at but a random sea of twinkling stars, massively far away and completely surrounding me.

I don’t know where to go next, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.

This one is the one that’s had me frantically doing (or rather frantically reading about doing) for so many months now.  I have learnt a lot about myself and the world in that time, met some great people and started to think about my journey for the first time, but I’m still left with the big black space all around me.

In fact, a lot of the busy work was building a nice safe space around me so that I didn’t feel like I was quite so lost at sea.  But the same urge that got me to break free of my job and start looking is causing me to break down the walls of this space as I build them.  I could keep going at that for a loooong time, but I know that it’s rather silly and so I’m putting down the trowel, leaving everything as it is, and sitting down for a bit.

What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

Do nothing.

Yeah, I know.  Durrrrrrr.  But the point about a realisation is that it takes something that you may understand intellectually and makes it visceral.  (Or maybe that’s just all the Dim Sum I ate this afternoon with Joely that I can feel).

As we talked last night, I described my space as having no air, I couldn’t breath.  But it turns out that I was just holding my breath.  In fact, if I let the weird sensation of no sense of scale pass (like when the TV suddenly seem really close or really far away after you’ve been starting at it for too long and lost all reference points) and relax then I realise that I can move around at will, turn all around (“rotations in multidimensional space”!) or just float there without any effort.  Suddenly it’s starting to feel more like a playground.

Reality

Enough analogies, as much as I like them they aren’t the real world (a bit like twitter, for the good stuff to happen you eventually have to do something in real life even if still at a distance).

So what does this mean IRL?  Well, as I said above: Do nothing.  Or more specifically, stop planning.

It’s tricky, because some stuff requires planning (like making sure I pay the right tax) but some stuff doesn’t and I’m determined to make the effort to remember which is which.  It’ll be hard and I’ll muck up, so I’m hoping that anyone reading my posts in the future will call me on it if they see it.

I have an idea around giving myself a structure for writing – but only as a reminder to stay open.  No theorising, no structures, no hypotheses, no patterns.

FYI it actually hurts to write that.

Questions

I like questions.  Questions are supremely better than answers.  So I’m coming up with some questions to ask myself each moment that I bring my awareness back to them, and then to listen for the answers with curiosity but not expectation.

I wonder what’s going to happen next?