"Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?"

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life -

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

--William Stafford

My husband calls me the "what-if kid." I tend to think of all the possibilities, many of them disastrous of course, before starting something. Talk about a recipe for stalling forward motion. I hope meditation will allow me to sort out those things I need to preview and perhaps avoid, and those with which I can confidently move ahead. Right now it still feels a lot like shooting in the dark, with maybe a pause for "oh, what if I had a bit of light, wouldn't that be nice, well, here I go." I wasn't this way as a child, so it is frustrating to be immobilized by it now. I need a bit of this poem's feeling, that feeling of when I turn around being the right time for what's in my heart.

A bit of success this morning. I got up for sitting meditation at 6 and didn't feel quite so out of breath. I think my body is a bit shocked by moving directly from being the apple butter in a sheepskin-and-down sandwich to propping myself upright on a bolster at that hour. I allowed the emphasis on good posture to slide a bit. We were told that posture gives instant feedback to the psyche, and feeling like I'm trying to breathe through a straw from underwater is my psyche crying for a bit of transition time to grow some gills. After setting up my blankets and candle I rested in child's pose a bit, then slowly raised up to somewhere between a crescent moon's curve and a melting ice cream cone. By the time the bells chimed at the end I was pretty much straight up, and breathing more easily. That said, I feel far less successful with a meditation using simply the breath rather than, say, the bodyscan. There is still quite a clamor going on in there without the presence of a constant guided visualization. The handout says consider your mind as an untrained puppy and that is right on. I am out sniffing, peeing, and chewing on everything in sight.

A bit of success with finding a quiet way to ask Theo to consider his first interaction with us in the morning as well. Nice to feel that a piece of parenting work is a way to converse and bond rather than a gauntlet to be fought over.

A few months ago I found a book which is fundamentally changing the way I look at myself and my challenges in the world. It is called The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World. I have had raging fantasies of this book taking the western world, or at the very least the U.S., by storm and everyone from President Obama to the supermarket cashier talking about how it has completely altered all their social interactions, and I have had small fantasies simply that everyone who knows me would read it and finally understand. Ah. So much for fantasies. I can share a bit, though, of what began a resonating glow in me.

"Introverts like depth and will limit their experiences but feel each of them deeply. Often, they have fewer friends but more intimacy. They like to delve deeply into topics and look for richness more than muchness. This is why it's necessary to limit their topics to one or two, or they can become overwhelmed. Their minds absorb information from the outside environment and then reflect on it and expand it. And long after they have taken in the information, they are still munching and crunching it--a little like cows chewing their cud."

Big clues, there, in relation to my feeling pressed for time to fully complete doing or processing something. There's more, too, about introverts using long-term memory and needing time for ideas and solutions to pop into their heads--we may take longer to remember something but we'll remember it for longer, apparently. "Introverts are in a constant distilling process that requires lots of "innergy." And pressurized situations simply make our minds shut down and go blank. Oh yes, I can relate to that. I know I have a lot of, um, thoughts in here somewhere…just a moment…oh, you're going, oh never mind. More on that later.