TMS had a way of teasing out my problems. I had been blaming my daily naps on rheumatoid arthritis, but it turns out a lot of it was depression. I do still have to take naps several times a week, but it is no longer a daily obligation. I never would have guessed depression was playing such a significant role in my full body shutdowns, although looking back, it does make sense.
TMS took care of the depression. My goofiness is back. I had kind of forgotten about it? This Laura laughs and is weird and silly. (I told you I wasn’t afraid of her.) On the other hand, I’m feeling my feelings all the time now.
Something magical happened today. I slept in. When I got up, the Chaplain left with the five middle kids for the strawberry fields. Our oldest was already at school taking a test, and I was left with the baby.
The baby and I read a story over and over (Tickle, Tickle, by Helen Oxenbury), then he described the pictures to me. (He pointed to one baby’s butt and said the longest string of intelligible words I’ve ever heard from him: “Poop diaper yuck sorry.”) After storytime, he played happily by himself and stayed out of trouble so I could sew.
When the truck pulled in later in the morning and everyone poured out of it, arms full of clementine boxes brimming with strawberries, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to set aside my sewing to start jam.
It turns out I didn’t have to.
A friend from the retreat asked me if I’d been able to keep up my meditation practice while we were in Tobago.
The answer is yes, and no.
The first week, I read the fantastic Breathing Underwater. One of Rohr’s observations was that when you find positive practices for your life, you should find that you need less of them over time to get the benefit, not more.
For a while now, it had felt that the law of level of diminishing returns was starting to apply to my meditation, yet I was afraid to scale back and lose ground. In the weeks before our trip, I’d gone from an hour and a half to 2 hours a day down to about 1 – 1.5 hours. I’d been keeping up with an hour plus a day since we’d been on vacation, but was trying to figure out how Rohr’s idea applied to my practice.
800+
That is the number of photos I have that haven’t been edited from the period leading up to our vacation and the vacation itself.
3 miles.
That’s how far I walked yesterday evening on a snowy bike trail by the Mohawk River, listening to contemplative music and hoping for answers.
2 weeks.
That’s how long we were in Tobago, having a time that was truly transcendent.
1 simple command.
That’s what I heard from God yesterday. The words provided me with my intention for Lent.
Zero.
That’s the number of words I have ready to publish about our trip.
The trip feels like a fantastic dream. The longer I wait to document it, the more it fades from memory. I glance back at the magic, then turn forward to Lent, a period of repentance and waiting.
Life feels like the bare branches of the landscape, occasionally catching the sunlight in a way that shows the ugliness to be beautiful. Summer is a quiet, hopeful memory.
Here’s my Pandora playlist for Lent. My intention is to let women speak wisdom into my life during this wait for Easter. The above photo is one I took on my walk. And appropriately, I realized after I clicked publish that this “numbers edition” is the 200th post on the blog.
If you’ve been to enough Christian concerts and speaking events, this has probably happened to you: a room that is full of people, and full of the Holy Spirit.
If you aren’t a believer, that idea might make you feel uncomfortable, but stick with me. There’s a lot of things about the world that make all of us uncomfortable, and if we can’t let ourselves squirm a little while we try to put ourselves in one another’s shoes, then we should stop asking for acceptance from the people we are secretly (or not so secretly) judging. But that is another blog post altogether.
