Human Being has put a poetic challenge on her site. I’m not sure I understand the rules, but here goes anyway.

Beneath a pile of rocks

lie blessings.

Listen.

The earth survives

grateful for another breath.

Listen.

Childlike, the rocks resonate understanding.

Earth and rocks

grateful tapestry

appreciating.

My self.

My breath.

Beneath a pile of rocks

lie blessings.

Listen.

The winter was so long. I gained weight. I slept a lot. I got stiff and out of shape, pasty white and lethargic.

Not unlike a grub dormant in the cold earth.

Today, though.

Today I am so glad I let Sylvain talk me into a day trip to Point Pelee. How could we not go? It’s peak migration and we live an hour away. We have an annual family pass to the park. Feeling despondent or not, I couldn’t say “nah.”

Do you know what a migrant trap is? If you look at migration routes for the Americas, you can see that a major flyway passes right over the Great Lakes. Many birds are hungry and tired when they spot the first bit of land jutting out into Lake Erie. And so they land, rest, and feed before continuing the journey to their breeding ground. Some stay and nest right there in the park.

When we arrived, Sylvain asked me which trail I wanted to do. “I don’t care,” I said. I lost my appetite for birding a few years ago when I no longer had a car and so couldn’t get out in the bush when I felt like it. My identification skills are rusty. As any perfectionist, even a recovering perfectionist, can attest…once you’re no longer at the top of your game, that game doesn’t seem as fun anymore. In fact, my once vast ornithological library has now been whittled and Freecycled down to one old field guide held together with duct tape.

I didn’t know Sylvain had said a little prayer. He so hoped something would happen to make it fun for me. We decided it was prudent to park near the visitor centre, as those prime parking spots would go fast.

“Do you want to take the tram to the point?” Sylvain asked me.

“Whatever you want,” I said. The trolley left in 20 minutes, so I meandered across the grass while Sylvain held our place in line.

When I looked back, an older gentleman sitting on a bench was talking to him. I wandered back and joined the conversation.

“You’ve just arrived?” he asked us. We confirmed this.

“I’ve been here for three days,” he said. “If you really want to see some stuff, go 10 minutes down the Woodland Trail. You’ll get Prothonotary, Black-throated Green, Blackburnian…”

“Let’s do THAT!” I said. Sylvain smiled.

“You’ll know you’re there when you see a knot of people all stopped on a bridge,” our angel added.

Here is our list of sightings for the half day we spent in the park:

Mourning Dove, Brown-headed Cowbird, two Rose-breasted Grosbeaks either mating or fighting and making the sneaker on the gym floor sound, Yellow Warbler, Common Grackle, White-throated Sparrow, White-crowned Sparrow, Chipping Sparrow, Northern Oriole, Orchard Oriole, Red-winged Blackbird, Pine Warbler (all by the visitor centre).

On the Woodland Trail we got: Northern Cardinal by ear, Grey Catbird by ear, Black-throated Green Warbler singing and posing for the camera, Black and White Warbler, Chestnut-sided Warbler, Blackburnian Warbler, Magnolia Warbler, Prothonotary Warbler, a female Cerulean Warbler (lifebird for me), Northern Waterthrush, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Wood Thrush by ear, Carolina Wren by ear, American Redstart, Red-breasted Nuthatch, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Veery, Turkey Vulture, Blue Jay, Downy Woodpecker, Red-Tailed Hawk, female Scarlet Tanager and an American Robin on her nest.

In the beach area across the road from the visitor centre, we got Eastern Kingbird.

From the parking lot having a tail-gate picnic, we saw four Sandhill Cranes flying in the distance.

After lunch we went to the point and had Blue-grey Gnatcatcher, Red-breasted Merganser, Common Tern, Ring-billed Gull, Double-crested Cormorant, Barn Swallow, Tree Swallow.

At the marsh boardwalk we saw a pair of Canada Geese with young and Common Yellowthroat all through the marsh.

Driving out of the park we saw a Killdeer in flight.

I am sunburned and I am alive. I’d forgotten how being out in wind and sun, communing with nature leaves no room in the head for rumination.

I’d forgotten how darned friendly and kind birders are. Everyone smiles and says hello or bonjour as we pass each other on the path. We tell each other where the good birds are.

For Sylvain’s photos of today’s outing, go here.

If I don’t say much here on the blog, it is only because I don’t feel there is much of anything right now worth saying.

I also notice that the mere act of forming thoughts and words triggers ego.  Sometimes I prefer to remain in the realm of the nameless.

Floating.

Being.

Trusting.

Had anyone told me a month ago I would have my head buried in a business management book, I’d have looked at him like he had three heads.  But I do.  I am reading Eli Goldratt’s The Goal and I am barely coming up for air…or to eat or sleep. I am just gobbling it up. I’ll have finished it by Sunday evening, at which point I’ll be hungry for his next book.

I started reading it on Amazon (first three or four pages you can read for free) and was hooked. How did I hear about it? That Big Dog who pulled me into a meeting a few weeks ago asked my new supervisor to read it. She asked me if I had ever read it or heard of the Theory of Constraints, which piqued my curiosity.

If I look back on some of the happiest periods of my life, what do I see?  I do remember stretches of time when I bounced out of bed in the morning eager to greet the day. Here are some of the things I found:

A sense of community -

This time last year I was participating in an online group working through FInding Water together.  I would ride my bike Uptown and sit in my favourite spot in the Princess Cafe, spread out my pen and notebook in the sunny window and order a tea from Marc. I would ask him, “is the new issue of your zine out yet?”

I was a member of Grand River Intentional Communities. There were dreams of creating a co-housing village similar to the one in Ithaca.

A feeling of being needed at work, a sense that my contribution is important -

Often when I was feeling a bit under the weather, I would go to work anyway because I was the sole person who could provide tech support for one of our applications used by about 25 companies across Canada.  If one of “my” clients needed to close off her monthly statement that day and called for help, nobody else would be able to help her.  The marketing people often called me in a panic when one of their brokers wanted a special job done.  They relied on me and I always came to the rescue. I enjoyed this very much.

Pets help me enjoy daily existence. I remember days when I didn’t want to get out of bed until I remembered my darling ratties would be wanting their breakfast soon.  I looked forward to sharing my oatmeal with the little clowns, seeing what silliness or cleverness they would come up with next.  Again, this is a sense of being needed but it’s not an overwhelming one. Feeding rats, playing with them and cleaning a cage or two once a week is just about as much family responsibility as I can handle. (Did I mention that I feel overwhelmed easily?)

Using my talents -

Last summer before I found work was the hardest time I can remember. Then came that plea from my friend in the Green Party of Arkansas to translate a stack of flyers to Spanish. Suddenly I was bouncing out of bed again. I was needed AND I had a tough project to which to apply my brain power.  Oh, I love brain challenges!

Taking care of myself -

Another happy period I can look back on is the time when I lived in a building with a heated pool. I started swimming a few times a week. I got toned and was suddenly able to run after the bus without getting so winded. I lost weight.  This was also the time when I found a sense of community with my Iranian neighbours. As soon as I signed up for Farsi classes, it was as if I had been adopted by the parents of all my small classmates and their friends and neighbours. I was invited to all the earth-based festivals at each equinox and solstice. I learned to prepare traditional Iranian dishes.

These are not “problems.” I am not writing this because I am asking for solutions. I am just reflecting … while trying to keep an open mind and open heart about the current transition.

I had another intriguing dream last night.  I dreamed I was walking around outside with my cat Prozac, who has been dead since 1999.  This fellow Bruce whom I used to date was stalking us and trying to shoot us. I was carrying her and trying to find a good hiding place, trying to keep ahead of him. He was using a scooter, though I don’t know why. It seemed normal in the dream.  I thought I really had outfoxed him when I ran a few extra blocks in one direction and hunkered down behind a low wall in some leaves near a big tree. I had Prozie with me and I thought we were safe.

But then Bruce, who was going up one street and down another, coming ever closer, entered the street where we were hiding. I knew it was just a matter of time before he shined a light our way and saw us there.

Suddenly clarity came down upon me like Grace and I realize what I had to do. I don’t have to cower there like a silly victim.  I pick up Prozac, stand straight up and I just start walking home. I don’t care if he sees us. I walk past him.  He tries to shoot us but misses and I make it back to our old house in Little Rock where I lived from age 8 to adult. Suddenly the person following us isn’t Bruce on the scooter but my brother Mike in his wheelchair.  I am angry with him for intimidating me and I grab him down below and stare into his eyes. Clenching my teeth, I say in a very low and menacing voice: Do not do that again.  Then, just to drive my point home, I grab the hair on his head in my fist near the scalp so it hurts. I just grip it like that for two seconds.

I then turn and walk away toward the house.

======

I’m starting to see a pattern in these new dreams.  In the beginning of each dream, there is something or someone menacing. That someone or something would wield power over me, take something from me or harm me or those I need to protect. In each dream there is a turning point when I realize I need not be a victim at all. I am only a victim if I let myself be.  If I choose, I can take the power back.  And I do.

I thought about this dream for quite a while after waking this morning.  I can very clearly see situations in my life right now where I allow myself to feel victimized. I frame things in such a way that I don’t see choices for myself. I see traps.

After this dream, I stopped to realize that the doors on the traps are standing wide open. I can walk out of them any time I please.

I know there are two ways I can leave what I have come to see as traps.  One: I can physically leave, as in when one quits a job.  Or two: I can initiate a shift inside myself so that where I am is where I choose to be.

Everything in my life right now seems to be neither here nor there. I have moved into a place called limbo. I don’t yet like it here but I’m not so sure it’s worse than where I was. Once an audience member approached Tolle after a talk and said, “I don’t know who I am anymore.” Eckhart replied, “congratulations.”

My once satisfying job is now riding through a period of chaos while new middle management tries to introduce structure and common sense. You may wonder how I could be so happy before. My outgoing supervisor was masking a lot of the problems. I was blissfully unaware of the shit that would hit the fan as soon as he was no longer there to sweep it under the carpet.

Some days I can still find enjoyment, some days are pure hell. The day I was supposed to sign for the condo lease (Sylvain blogged about that) was the most hellish day of all. I ended up locking myself in a bathroom stall to cry off the stress. I realized I didn’t want to commit to a 12-month lease that night. No, there is too great a psychological advantage to knowing that if the BS gets to be too much to bear, I can tell them what to do with their crazy work environment.

There is a glimmer of hope that my new supervisor, teamed with the process gurus in the parent company, can turn things around. I could end up very glad I didn’t jump ship. In fact, I have been known to find process re-engineering loads of fun. I am what is known as an early buy-in. Nevertheless, I am passively scanning the job ads.

It is yet another area of my life where I’m currently not happy but am not entirely invested in the idea of leaving. Yet.

Wait and see. Wait and see. Be here now, even though here doesn’t feel like anywhere.

I am no longer miserable trying to live in a house with four other humans, but I’m not exactly happy, either. With ego taming, the OCD calms down. Fantasies of my own place appointed with only the bare essentials in order to render an orderly, zen-like space less frequently kidnap my mind. I am still surrounded by other people’s clutter, but it has stopped making me quite so crazy.

Even this blog is an example. I no longer feel motivated to write or read a lot, but I don’t want to abandon it altogether, either.

Every morning I still awaken with a sense of dread. Why exactly am I here? What was the point of this again, can you remind me? I do my best to ease into the day being tender with myself. I take my Omega-3 fish oil caps. I put a drop of Clary Sage oil on my pulse points. I remind myself to breathe, to be and just to be. To show up, just show up. And to TRUST the wisdom of the Universe. By late afternoon I’m usually feeling okay and by evening I may even be smiling. Then it starts all over again the next morning.

Dyer’s book Manifest Your Destiny is helping me remember throughout the day that I am not, as ego would like me to believe, separate from my environment. I am the grass and the clouds. When I have a judging thought about a co-worker who strikes me as lazy, I remember we are one. We are humanity. In judging her, I am judging myself.

Dyer himself says that once you realize what comes from ego, you are faced with a quagmire of paradoxes. I can catch myself turning up my nose at something and say, “likes and dislikes are of the ego.” But even that labelling of something in myself as “of the ego” is also of the ego. More categorizing, more labelling, more judging.

Oddly enough, my dreams are good. I have a long, long history of nomad dreams in which I am travelling from place to place with nowhere to lay my head, no money in my pocket for a meal, no car. Buses keep passing by without stopping to pick me up.

A few nights ago I dreamed I inherited a huge, beautiful house. It was like a California house where 50-something ex hippies had once lived. The kitchen was half open air and lead up to a big, rain-bleached deck. The former owners had left behind a beautiful big driftwood and fiber arts sculpture that adorned the wall high over the kitchen/living room. They also had left an ancient plant whose vines extended for yards up near the skylights. I noticed it had not been watered for a while but was still alive. My heart swelled with joy when I realized this.

Two nights ago I dreamed I was living in a mansion and there were some classy looking criminals outside who I knew wanted to come in and steal something. One rang the bell. I pondered whether to open the door and become vulnerable to his pushing his way inside. I opted to take the risk and used the opportunity to say to him, “I know you plan to break in and I probably can’t stop you. Take whatever you’re after. Take the diamonds if you want them. I would appreciate it if you would not take the Djembe, though. It’s only worth $200. Leave me that.”

This is so odd for me to have a dream in which I am in control, so confident, calling the shots.

Again last night, a good dream. I am outside at a water park and children are everywhere. I notice an alligator loose in the place and so I get all the children to come over into another pool. The gator starts to crawl out of the enclosure where it is now alone and join the children on my side, but I fend it off with a lawn chair or something. Then a large, muscular male staff member comes and takes over the situation.

I ponder these good dreams. My subconscious is signalling to me that although my life may feel to me to be sad and without aim, things are actually headed in the right direction. My ego certainly can’t see it that way, as so many things dear to ego have been stripped away.

But there is something good coming of it. Dreams don’t lie.

I’m feeling a dire need for a break from blogging. I put in 58 hours at work last week, which is too much computer screen time.

When I get off work, I want to be outside now that it’s nice…washing the car ( I soap, Sylvain rinses ) or taking long walks down to the Marina. My life has gotten far too sedentary and indoor. It’s time to feel soil under my fingernails again, balmy air on my face, earth under my bare feet.

I want to read my two library books, a Wayne Dyer book and How Doctors Think. Maybe I’ll read while sitting on the deck or under a tree in the park.

Sylvain and I have started to look for a place for me to live close by… a place with a pool, as I yearn to get in shape again.  This weekend we’ll take my bike down off the garage wall.

I apologize… I feel a pang of guilt already for not keeping up with all your blogs for the next while.  This just feels like something I need to do right now.

Love, K

Yes, I can be given to working a bit too much. I’ve just been assigned 600 cases (a normal case load is 150 to 250) and I am jazzed, knowing I can rise to the occasion. So the past couple of days I’ve been putting in overtime, working from home after supper doing “triage” as I call it on this huge backlog of cases.

I really enjoy this. I have to take a look into each case and see at what stage it is.

• If there is some follow up needed, like a call made or a letter written, or we’re just waiting on something already requested, I assign it to the Fast Track desk’s administrative assistant.
• If I see over $500 in bills already in or on their way, then I know this case doesn’t belong with the Fast Track desk. It got assigned there by mistake because the reserves were not updated as the costs ended up higher than originally expected. So I go in and update the reserves and push that case back into the Over $500 category.
• If the claim has been processed and we are just waiting for the cheque to be cut, I assign it to another category; it’s no longer in my pile.
• If the claim was paid a while back but the claims manager forgot to close it, I close it. Off my pile.
• Finally we are left with some that look ready to pay. I spend half to 2/3 of my day working on those and am able to assign a few to a new adjudicator who is going to help me plough through these Fast Track claims.

The whole process appeals very much to my OCD. I love cleaning things up, tying up loose ends, putting things in order. So where have I been instead of blogging? I’ve been working, working, working.

When I first started reviewing these cases, starting with the oldest first, I was appalled to see how one examiner in particular had let her caseload get out of control. She just isn’t a naturally organized person and had not developed any workaround to allow her to keep track of things. The result is that I’m running across case after case where we should have called back in January to ask if the client received the claim forms in the mail. But no call was made. Or bills came back in late February or early March and nothing has been touched yet. Shudder.

I have to admit, little ego voice woke right up and started doing its judging thing. Tut tut, shaking his head. Aarrgh, another one! I was starting to get ticked off at this adjudicator for the mess she’d let things get into at her desk.

But then I thought about the Course in Miracles lesson for today and realized how I was putting toxic thought energy into the universe and into me and into the MeUniverse with that ego crap.

No, I had to forgive her. So I prayed. God, I said, please show me how to forgive her for being unorganized. Please fill my heart with love and compassion and understanding instead of that judging voice.

I saw the chaos in her work style like the chaos of all of life…which really isn’t chaos at all, but beauty. There is order and there is meaning. There is a reason for all of it…for the backlog of follow-up going back to January, for the file folders helter skelter on her desk. It’s O K A Y.

I smiled. I breathed.

I’ve had some nice things happen in the last few days.

I had a woman call me who was searching for the company that sold her daughter her travel insurance and has a claim open for her. The daughter is still abroad and asked her mum to handle the claim for her, as it’s hard to make the long-distance calls from where she is. I tried finding her in our system but name, date of birth, case number and policy number searches came up blank. I told her I was sorry, we weren’t the company that had her daughter’s claim. She sounded so desperate and so tired of calling around; she hesitated rather than hanging up. “Tell you what,” I said. “Let me do an internet search for you.” I came up with a plan name and a Toronto phone number. She said she would try it and hung up. About 15 minutes later, she called me back just to thank me for finding the right people who had her daughter’s claim. “Some people are just so helpful! I just had to call you back and thank you.”

For a few days I thought one of my coworkers really hated me. See, she is a very bubbly person whose constant joking made it hard for me to concentrate on my work. AND she was about to be moved to a desk right by me. So I emailed the woman who is standing in as our manager for now and warned her that if she put Jolly Woman next to me, my productivity would go down by about 30%. I never dreamed I should have to add “treat this email as confidential.” Next team meeting? Loud surrogate manager warns Jolly Woman that if she drives me crazy, I have her permission to tell her to shut up. Yeah. That led to a few days of scowling and no joking and not looking me in the eye. Note to self: do not tell Loud Surrogate Manager anything you don’t want everyone to know.

I wanted Jolly to know I didn’t dislike her, I just need people to keep it down. So I kept smiling at her every time we passed by one another coming and going to the filing cabinet. Finally today she started consulting me on things…bonding stuff, you know. Whew.

Another coworker had her nose out of joint because it hurt her feelings when I was whisked off to that meeting with Big Dog and she wasn’t. So I was very relieved when today she whispered to me that there was something she had never figured out how to do and would I show her. So I showed her quietly without letting our supervisor see that I was teaching her how to do it. Another whew! I really did not want to lose her as a (budding) friend.

Neither Sylvain nor I feel quite energetic enough to venture out for Folk Music night tonight, so I think I’ll just sit here with my laptop and put in an hour or so of work.

Eep! It’s not a CRIME, you know…enjoying ones job.

There, Kat, I posted. Happy now? :)

What an interesting day.  We are trying something new where all the claims under $500 go to one examiner. I showed an interest in being that examiner, even though that means 74% of all claims will come to me. It also means I get a dedicated administrative assistant who helps me, only me, with calling and following up for missing items.  All denials will now go to the supervisor, so all I’m left with are the payable small claims that I can bang out one after the other.  I can’t tell you how relieved I am to be rid of the big complicated cases, as I don’t feel I was ever given enough training to deal with them comfortably.  Maybe one day, but not yet.

Yesterday the VP’s right hand man came to me for some help understanding our processes, which he is documenting with a cute Visio flowchart. As soon as he approached me, I felt a pang of awkwardness. See, I happen to know he’d already showed the flowchart to someone I’ll call Senior Examiner and she’d said it was okay.  When he said, “I’m just making the rounds, asking everyone for help with this,” I could hear it in his voice.  He didn’t trust the feedback he’d gotten from Senior. He was second guessing her…and within earshot of her, to boot.

As I was showing him some screens, he asked me, “how do you know when it’s time to do that?”   I admitted that I’ve been doing double data entry and keeping track of my 150-200 cases with an Excel spreadsheet. I have to do that because our system is still in development and lacks a proper screen where I can track the status of my cases, when it’s time to make a follow-up call, when it’s time to assess a claim because all the documents are in.  He asked if everyone uses a spreadsheet like that or just me.

“Just me,” I said.

He looked at my spreadsheet, asked me to explain my drop-down categories and so forth, then asked me to send it to him so he can see what fields I find necessary to have in this tracking tool.  It could serve as a prototype for the screen IT needs to build us.

“What do the people who aren’t as smart as you do?”  Wince. I know what he meant, but I hope none of my coworkers overheard it. Does he know how hard it is for someone like me to remain likable instead of resented? Didn’t YOU hate the teacher’s pet (unless you were the teacher’s pet)?

“I guess they go into each case to look at the last few notes, to jog their memories what needs to be done next. Or they wait until someone complains that something is late or was missed. I’m not sure exactly how they handle that.”

By the end of the day, one of the assistant VPs had come to my desk, whispered for me to come with her and then whisked me off to a meeting with a big dog. Big dog wanted to run a new process idea past me and see if I thought it would work.

Things are in transition.  My supervisor has accepted a job in the Middle East and flew there last week for some preliminary stuff. In his absence, all the #$%& hit the fan.  His boss found out all the ways he was mismanaging the department.  I’ve become so mellow of late, I really wasn’t letting any of it bother me.  I respected his medical judgement and he’s cute, what more did I want? I was just doing my best every day, letting the rest work itself out in time.

They are furiously trying to find someone to replace him ASAP, but in the meantime his boss is trying to be our manager. She is an ultra extroverted, loud person who LOVES the sound of her own voice (i.e. every meeting runs over by 45 minutes), asks for input then doesn’t let you finish a sentence, has a million new ideas a minute and gets us all working in five directions at once and then changes her mind about three of them before noon the next day.

Did I mention it’s getting interesting?

What would this all be like for me (once a highly stressed perfectionist who easily succumbed to ANXIETY when every ducky wasn’t in a row) if I weren’t on day 155 of a year of mindful breathing whenever I can remember to do so?

I’ve been tagged by Human Being and by Lynn to play this game and here are the rules.

1.) Write a six-word memoir, post it on your blog (add an illustration if you like).

2.)Link to the person that tagged you in your post.

3.)Tag five more blogs with links. (oops I am going to tag ten, like Forever Young).

4.) Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

Oh, dear. You know how bad I am with following rules on these games. How about if I just tag people HERE? I tag the bloggers who write: Dandelion Seeds, Abitibi South, Growing While Shrinking, Mandalas and More and Welcome to My Universe.

I can ask, Why did God create ego if ego is that which makes us feel separate from God and from one another?  Why was the fall from Grace allowed? You know, the whole fallen angel story? And the whole Garden of Eden fork in the road. Why?

Is it that we wanted the experience of what we are not so we could better relish the experience of what we are? Separation for the joy of reunion?

Ah, but the mere act of dividing things into ego and True Self, good and bad, enlightenment and unconsciousness is itself work of the ego. Judging, categorizing, labelling. As Rick and Human Being pointed out after the last post, the only answer to that weasily voice who tries to sell me those stories about how to be safe in what he sees to be as a terrifying universe is…to…well, LOVE him.

Without darkness, there can be no light. All things are part of a perfect whole.

No need to ramble on more about this, this thing not worth pondering. But I would like to share with you a beautiful passage from Breakfast at the Victory: the Mysticism of Ordinary Experience by James P. Carse.  This chapter describes a time when he had to go out to the foot of the hill behind the house to check the spring, as the water had turned foul. Some friends had come to help him dig layers of rotting birch leaves out, but he was the one best suited to climb down into the spring for a closer look.

As I began cleaning slime off the walls with a broom, I noticed that the spring did not bubble up from the bottom as I had expected but oozed through the stones in a dozen or more places. All around me thin, vigorous rivulets of water were making clean streaks down the walls.

…I ran my fingers along the seams between the stones until I found the most vigorous flow of water. While its quantity was impressive, I was still a little disappointed. I think I wanted jets, hissing showers of stinging force, something showier than this. But I noticed when I jammed my finger into the outlet the flow immediately appeared somewhere else. This suggested a different kind of power. It was not a matter of pounds per square inch but of patient indifference to its path. Because it did not care where it went, it always had somewhere to go. We could have filled the well with earth and stone or capped it with concrete; we could have put an entire mountain on it and it would have continued to flow–somewhere. In fact, it had an entire mountain on it already.This is the deepest secret to its living water: it transforms every obstruction into a new expression of itself. It accepts as channel what is presented as barrier. The mountain does not stand in the way of the spring; it is the way of the spring.

Not in a long time have I heard it put so eloquently. It transforms every obstruction into a new expression of itself.

Every obstruction.

In Lesson 13 of the Course in Miracles Workbook, I recognized truth–at least for me–in the statement, “A meaningless world engenders fear because I think I am in competition with God.” Earlier lessons had been talking about the ego and its stories about my being separate from others, from the world around me and from God rather than one with all that is.

In my OCD, in my perfectionism and other manifestations of my ego’s attempt to quell my “free-floating anxiety,” as one therapist many years ago called it, I see a cartoon character standing off to the left of me. He is greasy-haired with a pencil-thin moustache and a trench coat.

He does indeed try to convince me that it’s me and him against the world…the terrifying world. He fills my head with thoughts of death, making that passing sound like the end of the world (as, of course, it would be the end of him). He makes mortality something to worry about and worry a lot about. He likes to point out to me what a scary place this life is, full of things like tsunamis and colon cancer.

“Pssst,” he whispers to me, like a con artist stepping out from behind park bushes to try and sell me a knock-off Rolex. He tells me in his weasily voice that he can help me with that anxiety problem. He has formulas, recipes.

Like maybe if I just got myself a loft apartment and painted the walls just like the ones in that movie, filled it with furniture from Sundance Catalog. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

“You mean tsunamis couldn’t touch me if I had the perfect apartment?” I ask him.

“Weeeeell,” he hedges…”maybe if you added a pair of red Naot Mary Janes.”

“Then no colon cancer?” I ask, hopeful.

“Well,” he hems and haws, “maybe if you also…”

Each day he comes up with different formulas to chase away the anxiety of living in a terrifying universe.

1. Alphabetize spices and take up yoga. Yeah, that should definitely pacify the earthquake gods. Let’s try that.

2. Drink green tea from lucky mug and don’t step on any cracks on way to work. That should be good for keeping auto-immune diseases at bay for at least a year.

You get the picture. We are obviously in competition with God, ego and I, when I align with his view of things.

Yesterday on Rick’s blog I watched this most fascinating TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist whose own left-hemisphere stroke gave her the rare opportunity to gain first-hand knowledge of the workings of the brain as half of hers shut down. This video could not have been more timely for me as I pondered the two worlds…the linear world of words and Mr. Ego versus the non-linear world of beauty, fractals, chaos and oneness with All That Is.

I wish to interrupt the previously scheduled third instalment of Chaos and Ego to say that I have just bought myself this fun prezzie, which will go great with THESE that were a gift to me from a dear friend years ago.  I made good use of them with my Birder’s Journal. I hope they enjoy learning anatomy!

I was around 25 or 30 years old when my friends Scott and Darrell first sat me down at their computer to see the fractal software they’d bought. I sat spellbound for almost an hour just watching the Mandelbrot set unfold over and over in an infinite variety of colours.

After that I read books on chaos theory and couldn’t stop thinking about it. I saw fractals and self-similar patterns in everything.

I’d be driving along a country road, but couldn’t stop thinking about the trunks, each with its branches…each branch with its limbs, each limb with its twigs, each twig with its leaves.

More iterations in the leaf itself! Each vein has ramifications of its own, which have smaller ones of their own and so on..down, down, down.

And what about our bodies? Lung tissue! Arteries, veins, capillaries.

Snow flakes (photo of actual snowflake courtesy of SnowCrystals.com)

Lightning.

Brocco-flower.

Frost on a window.

Zooming down into a Mandelbrot set to see the infinite symmetry is very much like what we find when we watch the famous Powers of Ten film created by the Eames’ in 1977. The universe is made up mostly of empty space.  So are we.

Here.

Back at the beginning of 2008 some bloggers were posting their new year’s resolutions, others were sticking to Mondo Beyondo lists and such things. Yet others settled on the idea of having a touchstone or a key word to remind them how they want to live this year.

It only took a moment or two for my word to come to me.

LIGHTLY.

This has so many meanings. In 2008, I want to take things and myself less seriously. I want to remember to keep a sense of humour about things. I want to be lighter, to vibrate at a higher frequency. I want to tread lightly on the earth, leave smaller footprints. My personal energy bubble is these days less heavy. Lightly also reminds me not to hide my light under a basket. I am to let my light shine.

What is your touchstone for this year or this cycle of your life?

Serves 4 to 6

Slow cooker size: 3.5 to 6 quart

4 to 6 potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch (5 cm) chunks

3 large carrots, peeled and chopped

2 large parsnips, peeled and chopped

2 onions, quartered

1 cup vegetable or chicken stock (250 ml)

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar (50 ml)

2 Tbsp packed brown sugar (25 ml)

1/2 tsp salt (2 ml)

1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper (1 ml)

1. In slow cooker stoneware, combine potatoes, carrots, parsnips and onions.

2. In a bowl, combine stock, vinegar, brown sugar, salt and pepper; mix well. Pour over vegetables in slow cooker.

3. Cover and cook, stirring once every hour, on Low for 8 to 10 hours or on High for 4 to 6 hours, until vegetables are tender.

From the book 300 Slow Cooker Favorites by Donn-Marie Pye.

I’ll let you know how it turns out! I added two turnips and two sweet potatoes, too.

Language saved me. I almost let the teachers convince me I was hopeless, dull-witted, too spaced out and forgetful ever to be more than a C- student. Then came German class. Then Spanish. Berlitz Teach Yourself Portuguese records borrowed from the library. By the end of university, foreign language success had bolstered my confidence enough that I allowed myself to find my competence in other areas, such as physics and astronomy, trig. Had the money kept coming, I could have hidden in that safe world of academia forever, as some I know have managed to do by becoming profs after grad school.

So languages are my friend, old and dear friends. When I exhausted the day-time language curriculum at my alma mater, I took to joining the old folks in the continuing ed classes at night. That’s where I did Italian for business and travel, one term of Demotic Greek, Latin I and Latin II. Two decades later, I again turned to my old friend foreign language study to get me through the year of separation between marriage to and divorce from my second husband. Farsi came to my rescue.

My first real job after immigrating to Canada was at a smallish company that administers travel insurance claims for the large underwriters in town. It is a competitor of the company that employs me now. One thing that came immediately to my attention at that company was the fact that they were sending foreign bills off site for translation. Not only were they paying ridiculous fees for these simple translations, but they had to put a claim on hold for three to five business days waiting for the translation to come back.

“You know, I could translate that for you in a minute,” I said one day to one of the claims examiners. (I was not a claims examiner, but worked in Recovery, where we sent paid claims to the government health programs to recoup a portion of what we’d paid out.) The examiner took me up on it, so I grabbed a pencil and wrote lightly next to the terms on the bill: emergency visit, physician’s fee, supplies, medicine.

Soon I had brought my collection of dictionaries to work and lined them up on the shelf overhead: Langenscheidt’s German, University of Chicago Spanish, Collins Portuguese with its bright orange cover. Soon I was turning over the translations in under two minutes, as the terms were always the same and stayed in my memory. It was always cast, blood work, x-ray, date of admission, date of discharge, diagnosis. The same words over and over they had been paying to have translated again and again.

It was satisfying to be able to help, to see money saved, to speed up the claims, to watch the examiners who hovered over me or chatted with my team leader while I scribbled walk away happy with translated bill in hand. Being able to use my long-useless languages was fulfilling and made my job more enjoyable.

Then one day my team leader’s manager came to me and asked me to stop. It wasn’t in my job description and I was not authorized to do it.

That was one straw landing on the camel’s back. There were other straws at that place. I don’t need to relive any of that now.

At my new job, I let it be known from day one that I speak and can translate Spanish. Although we don’t pay much for translations where I work (we send them to a local non-profit that helps immigrants adapt to life in Windsor and find jobs), it can take weeks for the organization to find someone who speaks the language we need translated. We have no Plan B in place, no professional translation company to handle the ones that non-profit cannot do for us.

So it wasn’t long before I was being handed the Cuban and Mexican bills.

Then one day someone asked if I could by chance read French. Yes, I suppose I can.

Then one day someone asked if I could by chance read German. It’s rusty, I told H, but I suppose I can muddle my way through with a dictionary.

So I have easily become the gap-filler in that previously less than efficient system. From my three fellow examiners, I probably get an average of one translation per day. Some days none, some days two or three. Again my little collection of dictionaries are lined up on the shelf over my computer. Only THIS TIME if anyone dare try to take this away from me, I will growl like a dog with a bone. Getting a translation is the highlight of my day.

On Thursday the youngest member of my team came to my desk and handed me a client’s folder. “Sorry, another translation for you,” she said.

I took the file from her, assuming it was Spanish again. When I opened it, I saw a page covered with squiggles. It was Greek.

“Sorry, N,” I said. “I can’t translate this. It’s Greek.”

She looked at me with the large brown eyes that probably have gotten her most of what she’s ever asked for in life.

Silence.

“I mean I took a night class in modern Greek years ago, but…”

She just kept staring with those big eyes–as if the truth were self-evident and I was simply refusing to acknowledge it: if you can turn any mysterious page of squiggles into English, then you can turn them all into English.

“And I have a Greek dictionary,” I conceded, glancing at the shelf over my desk. “But…”

Silence.

Big brown eyes and silence.

I took the file back from her with a sigh. “OKAY, I’ll give it a TRY,” I said.

She smiled and walked away.

Last night while Sylvain watched The Bourne Ultimatum with his dad, I bluffed my way through the Greek document. Never mind that I couldn’t look anything up in my dictionary until I remembered the order of letters in that alphabet. “alfa veeta yamma delta epsilon…” I started and stalled. “Zeeta eeta theeta…” ???

First I tried transcribing the bill into Word after downloading a Greek font so I could paste it into Babelfish. Ha. After an hour of transcribing, my paste job turned into “???? ?? ?????? ???? ????? ? ?? ????? ??? ?????” in the translation window. Sigh. It came down to looking up each word in the dictionary, a painful process which finally rendered something that–to my surprise–made sense.

Today’s theme seems to be language. This morning I was reading from The Four Agreements and reached the part that says that the first agreement to make with yourself is to be impeccable in your language. Your yes means yes and your no means no.  This is very Quakerly. It’s something I struggle with, the feeling that I sometimes do not have a right to my truth, do not have a right to cleanly and clearly express my truth without shame or apology.

I started reading blogs today and find I am not the only one facing this struggle.

Then I get to Human Being’s blog and she is also exploring this subject.

I have made a commitment to my partner and to myself to live here in this house with four others until at least late spring or early summer. I have let this period of time spent in an environment that is not the best soil for me be an experiment. I’m being a scientist of my own spiritual experience.  I am plumbing the depths of the idea that our happiness is not dependent on circumstances.  We can choose to find the sweetness and contentment in any situation.  Or, if the situation is truly unbearable, we can take steps to change it or leave it.

Having decided not to leave it yet, I have been using it–this less than ideal for me living arrangement–to learn about myself and to stretch more than I believe I’ve ever stretched before.  I am one of those instant gratification types.  I want what I want when I want it.  I’m like Liz Gilbert who could not make herself sit and meditate.

So it has been very interesting for me to test out the theories in the spiritual texts I’ve been reading. Does this stuff really work, I’ve been asking. Let us see. Let us apply these methods to a situation that could very easily drive me to the same pattern of actions I’ve taken over and over and over in my life.

It feels like there are two possible worlds around me at any given time. Most of the time, by habit and conditioning, I live in the world of the Judge and the Victim in my head, to use terms from the book I am reading.  But with a little mindful breathing, with a little faith and a little effort, I CAN effect a shift and find myself in the parallel universe to that one, the one where Judge does not reign but becomes a silly voice fading to background.  Then I am surrounded by magic, by beauty. Then I am omnipotent, omniscient. Then death cannot touch me.

There are no words to describe this other place. Not sure why I try. But I can tell you that effecting this shift is becoming easier and staying in the other world is becoming easier to maintain. My moods have become more level. Things that once drove me crazy just don’t bother me anymore. They BEGIN to bother me, but then I see it’s just another story being spun by ego and I stop listening.

I am almost never visited by anxiety anymore, which is a state I once could not attain without two glasses of wine or an anti-depressant.

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself? (from XV)

When I was younger, I read the Tao Te Ching and it resonated with me, but I only now see that I didn’t really get it. I got it on one level, but not like I get it today.

If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up. (from XXII)

When I was twenty, I read these words and thought that if I adopted the attitudes and values of those pages, I would find the Tao. Now I understand that when I relax into the Tao, those attitudes and values come on their own.

Still there is a part of me that is frightened. Still the Judge sometimes reigns and my Victim mentality sometimes emerges. Freedom is scary at first.

I dreamt last night that I was observing the traffic flowing up ahead of me on a street. It was like a street in Windsor, perhaps Riverside Drive. I saw a man on a three-wheeler who had his pug with him on the trike.  I thought how irresponsible he was being, risking his pet’s life. Did he really not realize that if he stopped or turned or accelerated suddenly, the dog would fall and be killed?  Sure enough, that is what happened. I could see the shock and grief on his face as I looked back at him. I was moving with the flow of the traffic, though I didn’t have a vehicle of my own. I was more a floating, observing presence.  Then I saw another motorist out with a pet unsecured; it was a large lizard.  I wondered if the lizard was headed for the same fate due to its human’s stupidity.