Today is Writing Day. If I do the math I think I’ve got about 13 pages to write of script in order to catch up to where I’m supposed to be in order to avoid writing 83 pages in 2 days or so and still make it to the end of Script Frenzy with success.
I began a new yoga practice last night and I’m kind of excited about it, really. The work is essentially the same, but the movements make a certain degree more sense to me and feel gentler and more demanding. I do not see difficulty with this combination, as there is less strain put on my lower back in ways that cause it to hurt, but my leg muscles were shaking well before the end of practice. Shaking. It was a surprise. The focus required is not without difficulty and that seems right. The book belongs to the library and so will have to return to it, and I am hoping to gain enough knowledge and experience with the practice to be able to construct my own book of practices and to be able to remember what I’m doing when I do it. It is somewhat like knitting in the sense that the instructions are not going to make sense until you do them, whether you do them correctly or not – with exercise it is more important to move very slowly as mistakes are not generally as positive when it comes to manipulating your body as playing with yarn.
I do not remember dreams from last night. Boris woke me up at 4. He does this now. I am not entirely certain how to approach it. Do I scold him? (more) or do I appreciate that he’s my alarm clock and get up and begin my day? I’m beginning to suspect that the latter option is the one that will yield the more interesting results, especially as I already know what happens when I get tetchy with him and it is not really good. I find that I am more easily irritated lately, and while it will pass, there is still the question of how to control it and not to respond quite so strongly to events which would do better with a calm voice and love. There’s a practice for that. Woot.
Yesterday I listened to lectures on Anglo-Saxon history, specifically as a discussion of the fullness of the world of the Anglo-Saxons from the 500’s thru the 1000’s, so that’s 6th to 11th centuries. The lecturer is tremendous and emotionally involved and informed and willing to share and that is so much the reason that I enjoy these lectures – I do not have to compete with apathy in order to learn. It is such a barrier to engagement. The repetition of names like the Venerable Bede and Gregory the Great and Alfred the Great and the Cotton manuscripts – it is good to hear them again and again. It is good to learn of times and places in ways that add detail and more foundation to my understanding – (in the urban landscape of my thinking self, there are neighborhoods and bookstores and coffee shops and museums, but no libraries because it is the nature of my thinking self to be a library, willing to share and happy to organize and ready to throw a curse on anyone who mars or steals from the collection) there is no appropriate image that I know of (based on my own ignorance, not on its actual unavailability) to describe the dimensional world that holds detail and color and smell and someday will hold touch and taste as well, that moves through time in a way that is not linear and is not even specific to one person, but follows itself with ideas and words and spices and patterns of movements.
This small life that I am allowed to live is rich in heartbeats and creations and difficulties and community. Continued learning and passion for one subject after another brings it more and more life and responsibility.
Non-violence is a thing with which I struggle of late. To be perfectly honest (aside: how much do I love that a synonym for ‘honest’ is ‘frank’ like the firenj Crusaders who gave their nickname to the French), I have struggled with it for many years. It is very easy to see that violence destroys and begets itself and does not ever do anything but these things. It is not easy at all to behave non-violently. Even my language and jokes tend to be violent, emotionally, pridefully and physically at times. It is part of who I’ve become and that’s something that is more than a little bit challenging to overcome. Particularly as I have the desire, based on purely practical considerations, to learn all manner of self-defense as I will travel and I will live by myself and I’ve no need to ever again have to heal from not simply the act of violence but the horrible culpability that lingers believing that there must have been something that I could have done. There is no amount of gentleness too great in the approach to someone thus wounded.
And this concerns me, and very likely will concern me for the rest of my life. There are changes that I can make to my speaking and attitudes, and there are shifts in observation and in approaches to difficulties and challenges and obstacles and also demanding felines. He is curled up on the bed, watching me through sleepy eyes. His sister is in a window sill, watching the world with the sun on her fur, and now it is time for me to write about dreams and barbeques and other fragile thresholds of interaction…
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