Papaya for lunch

I'm chucking the current "ought to". I thought I ought to make an effort to make images I posted on this blog ones that I made. The black ink drawings that I'm making on this trip are fun to do, but they just don't convey the lusciousness and the color that is this experience. Thank goodness for cameras and modern technology, because there is but a moment between the decision and the sharing of these lovelies . . . Yes, I would eat papaya with lime for every meal. See those little lines of holes? Those are fork marks so that when you squeeze the lime over, it sinks into all the little holes. I remember my mother loving papaya when I was little and, having tried it, considered the possibility that she was crazy when there were such alternatives as tangerines and mangosteins. Now I get it. I get it, mom! Love it!

5 hours after rising and zipping straight to the beach we are back. Fresh food and a bit of shade. And a lettuce fan for her highness.

And here are my happy feet, slightly off balance in a one-armed downward dog while trying to take a picture with the other hand--you try it sometime!

One "ought to" down, how many more to go? Hard to say. My increasing sense is that often they are so internalized we don't have a smidge of an idea that we misguidedly live by them. Recently a friend told me that she had just discovered, in her forties and after struggling with pain and numbness in her fingers for years, that you shouldn't try to keep your shoulders way back. "I always thought that's the way you were supposed to stand!"

She's right--it's a natural mistake, and it seems a small thing, but look at the ripple effect. Forcing your shoulders back could be taken as a symbol of good posture, but not disconnected from the rest of you, right? Where is your weight carried over your feet? Where are your hips, your torso, and the gorgeous, essential, miraculous curve of your spine, not to mention all the muscles that hold your heavy head up . . . consider, and then it doesn't make sense to simply hold your shoulders back.

Everything's connected. So many things I do are "ought to's" I haven't seen clearly. Certainly there are oodles of duties that don't fall in this category, respnsibilities that must be attended to. It feels tremendously good, liberating, if that's not too obvious a word, to SEE them as choices, and then reevaluate. What a gift, hey? It's an overlooked category, this, small freedoms you can give yourself, occasional permission to do something other than you think you ought.