Just read something horrendous in a piece entitled 13 Things You Must Give Up to Live the Life You Want by Zdravko Cvijetic on Uplift (http://upliftconnect.com):

On your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become. — Anonymous

If that doesn't light a fire under my backside....

Have been at odds with myself for a while.  The quote above plus a post from a friend (thanks KS) have inspired  me to write here.  I've been silent too long.

Partly because of not wanting to dwell and therefore make more important the negative things that I live with (and to not inflict those things on others) but also just not making the TIME to write. 

I make busy.  I make work.  And there's always work; cooking, cleaning, washing, blah blah blah.  So I can feel good about myself by keeping up the appearance of usefulness, of keeping up my end of things, of earning my right to be here.  Yet, by ignoring the things which make me ME, the things which I and I alone can create, I nullify the gift of my life.  I become just one of the herd; without individuality, without joy, without spark. 

And now, more than ever, I need the gifts I was born with because other aspects of my life which are out of my control, assume and consume more time and energy than before.  To keep sane, I HAVE to cherish and use the truest part of me. 

And there's another bit, a harder bit, the bit about being honest.  Other people seem to have their act together.  I feel like I'm fraying at the seams and that my 'act' is held together by force of will alone.  Heard a phrase from a song by Pink (and I don't follow modern music so have no idea what the name of the song was) where she said I don't want to control, I want to let go.

Well, yeah.

Is that the secret?  To let go so that I sink into the person I might become rather than spinning my wheels maintaining the illusion of this person I suppose myself to be?  It's hard work, dishonesty.  Oh, but the courage required to let go....

A Yoga Side Effect

There is an unlooked for side effect of doing yoga. It is an awareness of my thoughts, often not very nice or healthy thoughts. Thoughts that shame or depress me. Thoughts which lead to actions that were better left unacted upon. It isn't that before yoga I was blissfully unaware of my less than shiny thoughts, I was but it was easier to let them slip under the radar unexamined. Now the general tone of my thinking is cause of concern. (Two blue faced honeyeaters have just enjoyed an intimate moment in the poinciana tree just outside the window). Isn't there a quote about the unexamined life not being worthwhile or something like that? Thinking, always thinking, is really living life with my eyes closed. One of the eight limbs of the Yoga Sutra is pratyahara or turning the attention inwards. I don't think that means thinking. When I wake up in the morning I now notice, where I didn't before, how I immediately vacate myself from being by turning my attention to the surface of the thinking bubble. I must do this and this and this and what about that and so forth. It's as though I've put myself in a rocket and shot through to another galaxy far far away. Now I am starting to catch this runaway rocket and turn it around. Whoa! Stop, be and breathe. Yes, there's the bird song, there's the pressure of my body on the bed, there's my breath and oh, surprise, there *I* am.

That's a start but soon of course I'm away, behaving and thinking from habit and therefore thinking, saying or behaving in a way that is not in a sense, true. It's a daunting task to learn mindfulness and in my weak moments, I don't believe I am up to the task. Not only in my weak moments but most moments of the day when I am not mindful and therefore unaware. Despite the seemingly insurmountable mountain before me I suspect that the way to peace and serenity lies in that mindfulness, of living life examined breath to breath.

Then there's the act of measuring. With our literal logical minds we are always weighing up, comparing, labelling, dissecting and defining. Somehow in all this the essence of the thing is lost as is the person doing the measuring. I went to an art date a week or so ago. Enjoyed the day but in reflecting upon it later I noticed how much I compared things, not only the art work but the people, the environs. What good does this do? Of course the measuring is all in relation to me and the idea of what is good that I have formed (based on what shaky foundation - there's a dissertation in that!). In some things the ideal is exceeded, in others it is not met. I suppose it's another way of asking what is truth. It's all in the perception and what's true for Richard, with his colour blindness in blues and greens for instance, is not true for me. If reality is just different vibrations of packets of energy than the truth is fluid and only fixed when it is observed and compared to the past experiences of the perceiver. So a truth that is only fixed by observation and defining is no truth at all Is that part of the reason why we should "Judge not, that ye be not judged"?

Dreams and the Not So True

From the window I see four horses exchanging gossip around the water trough. Two tails swish; perhaps they're not happy about the subject. "Is it a rumour that we'll have to stay in this over eaten paddock because She says we're too fat? Surely not. I can still see my knees."
Barely. Freya and Dakota both have crests of fat on their neck. My forefinger sinks into flab before I can find a rib on Drifter and Pagan has no waist. Only Balthazar, being the streamlined thoroughbred that he is, looks about right. They'll just have to tough it out. The only other alternative, and one which will have to be introduced later in the summer, is shutting them up in the yards for most of the day. Everyone, including me, hates that. But it's better than foundering.
On another subject altogether. I was thinking about the nature of truth today. Yeah, the big philosophical subject. Truth and how little of it I manage to write. Was it Hemingway that spoke about the difficulty in writing one true sentence. His writing is so spare yet powerful (must reread him one day). But I'm skirting around the subject. I don't write the truth in here. I haven't learned how. Sure, I write about this and that, the outward happenings but as soon as I start to zero in on what I'm really thinking or feeling, the censor raises it's mighty head and silences me with a 'what if'. What if someone read this. What if I'll be judged. What if I'm not really a nice girl with nice thoughts and nice intentions? I wouldn't know the truth if it reared up and bit me. Sometimes I think of something that I think I'll write about; something of importance (at least to me - because it's the Truth) and just as quickly I'll forget about what it was I was going to write about. I am concerned with vanity and other people's opinions (did I write about, truthfully write about my well-deserved humiliation and shame of a few weeks ago? No, it made me look bad. Because I was bad and it's important to myself that I lie enough to keep the illusion alive).
How difficult can it be? Bloody difficult. Nigh impossible. But I'll never write one good sentence unless I can rip the veneer away. It takes more bravery than I possess to be an honest human being - and I'm not talking about garden variety honesty. I've no difficulty with that kind of honesty. It's the honesty within myself that I don't access.
Woke from a nightmare last night. Driving along at night with the headlights illuminating a verge teeming with big red bears. Bears and wolves? Bears and wolves and moose? There were two other frightening critters on this one lane road but I don't remember what they were. Got to a house, my house although I didn't recognize it, and somehow made it inside. Went into my sister's room. White bedspread on a neatly made bed. Two scarves, one red, one dark hanging from one of the posts of the fourposter. Something, I don't know what, on the foot of the bed. But she wasn't there. Hadn't been there for quite a while. It felt empty and abandoned. Went to my room which had a bathroom/shower attached. Closed and locked the doors, drew the curtains but could hear the bears snuffling and crashing through the shrubbery outside. I was so frightened I woke up. Yet the bears, as I drove through them and while in the house, didn't try and attack. No broad bear paws swiping at the car. No yellow bear teeth tearing at the house. Just me and the dark and the sounds of bears being bears.
Now I think dreams that are powerful enough to wake me have a powerful message. Not that I know what that message is, I don't. Bears, bare? Nakedness. The nakedness of truth-telling? What about my sister and that spartan bed. I remember thinking at the time that it was like a blank sheet of paper, waiting to be written on. Yet it was abandoned. Who abandoned it? Me. I don't live up to my sisters expectations. I love her yet I feel distant from her too (now here's a bit of truth). We found during our last trip together, how we tiptoe around one another. Here I was thinking she was the one with the chip on her shoulder (and I was the good girl with the easy going temperament) and she thought the exact same thing of me. I don't get it. I really don't. Tiptoeing around my sister. Impossible. Unheard of! She's the only person who really knows me. But perhaps not so much any more. We have spent too much time apart, led lives that are vastly different so although our beginnings were shared (and no one understands the family home like a sibling), it is no longer the majority of our lives. And what about those scarves, although they were more like squares of cloth than scarves that were meant to be worn. What is the significance of them?
Many years ago I kept a dream diary. I dutifully wrote down every dream I remembered, and I remembered lots! Kept a notebook by the bed and wrote down key words and passages as soon as I awoke. Transcribed them into the journal and then attempted to interpret them. It was abysmal. I think I successfully interpreted one dream from the hundreds I recorded. How do I know? There was a Eureka feeling. Unmistakable. I just knew it was true. A warm wash of success and release. All I ever got from the other dreams was frustration.
But it made me think. Who dreams these dreams? Why are the dreams so inaccessible? Why is it important that they are impossible to interpret and understand? What danger is there in understanding dreams? What am I hiding from myself that is so dangerous? No suppressed memories here. I wasn't abused by either parent or any other person until I was 17 - and by then even though it knocked me for six for a few years, I eventually recovered. My life is happy and well rounded. I don't suffer from bouts of depression. I'm generally happy and content - so why the mystery?
There was another snippet too, of me thrusting my face into another face and saying, "Boy-yea, not Boy-er." My middle name is Boyer, like Charles Boyer, French not English. So, what was all that about?