Getting ready to leave tomorrow for the third Quest retreat of the year.  I’ve tidied the house but not really cleaned.  It could use a vacuuming but the week’s work has not given me time.  Good news is that I’ve finished the week’s work!

Revelation: A clean house is about control.  My house has benefited from three years without adequate control.

The moon is full tonight and visible as I type, through a living room window, high up in one of the small rectangles which has a name that I do not know and cannot find.  I am reminded that I have not seen a full moon in awhile -- not spending much time outside at night.  I don’t gaze at winter moons, just acknowledge them and get warm. It feels like warm is coming in. I am also reminded of the moon in Harold and the Purple Crayon.  It is by the moon with a window drawn around it that he finds his way home.  

I am beginning to understand non-striving -- what was talked about in my second MBSR class and also to get a emotional hold of beginners mind.  The later is connected right now with those first months after David’s death.  The raw, unthinkably new time when my soul was torn from all that was my world and my eyes did not know what to fall upon.  That was a sad definition of beginners mind and I think it was my first experience in years of it.  There is a happy definition as well although apart from seeing my children for the first time is not as immediate.  But what is seeping in is an understanding that is beyond the event and the emotions around the event.  I have understood this beginners mind because death pull me present and robbed me of all comfort.  I don’t relish the sadness but I do the understanding.  

And non-striving.  It is doing without judging.  Being without criticizing.  Shushing kindly the quiet voice of “should’s” and disappointments, as well as the whispers of victories.  I can bring little that is unique to my definition, but I understand the determination and will needed to begin over and over, not praising or condemning the act or the effort.

Beth is 60 today.  Beth is David’s sister.  She has never been very friendly to our family or to her father, to tell the truth.  I’ve never taken it personally -- David and Dad had far more reason to than I did.  But They would both call her on her birthday.  She fawned over us all when David and her father died -- trying to project an image that she had been a fixture in our constellation.  Then she abruptly faded.  Again.  Today, I resent her terribly.  I know it is very ungracious to imagine even if for a moment that David deserved to celebrate his 60th much more than she does.  He was much more respectful of his body.  He loved more, gave more and had more to live for, but really who am I to judge.  She is who she is; he lived as long as he had to live.  His life was not cut off.  It was merely finished.  Like Jenifer’s at 19, and all those people who die when they are 90 whose obituaries I scan similarly resentful and with similar bitterness, they lived as long as was necessary and appropriate for them.  I am not proud of the bitterness, but there it is.  Naked.

When I come back on Sunday, I will be able to look forward to gardening.  My daffodils are opening -- I will miss some but I am already busy in my head planning, making lists and persuading myself to set a sensible budget.  What a lovely way of not living in the present.

This is the last night of a four-day, pre-retreat fast.  I may describe it another time, but suffice it to say that this is the proper way for me to prepare for a retreat.

Traci, Snick, and Sharyn, thank you for commenting.  These days and for awhile, I've written without thought that I was being read.  Thanks for pulling my feet back to the ground.  And thanks for the love.