WHERE WHAT WHEN

Last week, I completely spaced on my chiropractor appointment. I got a text from the receptionist asking if I was running late and I was all “running late? for what?” Then I apologized for my crazy brain and rescheduled. I know exactly what happened. I got to work and started dealing with emails and scheduling of microscopes and drinking coffee. The last thing I was thinking about was the way my left shoulder is sitting lower than my right shoulder. I was thinking about scheduling, batch processing slides, and how I am totally unprepared for Camp Wildling that is now nine days away. I am drowning in a sea of slides and will be imaging right up until the very last minute. If I had access to internet at camp, I would probably be remoting in to batch process all the images from those slides.

I do not have access to decent internet at camp.

I also do not have my work email on my phone.

I am nine days away from truly being unreachable; at least by those who do not have my phone number. I am equal parts relieved and terrified by this. I’ve gotten myself used to taking care of things around here and being the one that many of our microscopy users seek out. I feel protective of my grad students and postdocs. I feel teritorial of at least three microscopes in out Core. I know their quirks and tricks and how to deal with them when they misbehave. I worry about what sort of tornado damage I’m going to come back to after being away. Lately at night, I’ve been dreaming of doing the kind of lab work that I haven’t done in ten years and imaging samples that don’t exist. I know what those dreams are saying to me. Those are warnings telling me to step back and take a break.

I don’t want to.

I want to.

I need to.

I’m going to.

In nine, or eight and half days now, I will step away from all of this. I may have all of the things with me that I need for camp and I might not. But I will leave behind the things that will serve me no purpose at camp. I promise, cross my heart. For right now though, I’m just going to stay on top of this slide sea that’s forming around me and continue dreaming about failed DNA preps.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Way back, in what feels like another life (it kind of was another life), I taught a lot of yoga. Teaching yoga made me feel joyful and confident. The day-to-day job and living conditions did not make me feel joyful or confident. So I piled on classes to offset. When we moved to Kansas City, I put a hold on teaching yoga to give myself time to settle into a new job and a new home. During this time of settling in, my personal yoga practice grew into something very strong and beautiful and it is this practice that has kept me from leaping off tall buildings.

I am now back to teaching two yoga classes a week. The new schedule started last week and yesterday was the first time in over two weeks where I rolled out my mat for my own practice and trying to remind myself that reason for this is not because of my new teaching schedule. Teaching yoga changes your personal practice. Your personal practice turns into poses to balance out your body from teaching and lots of savasana. In the before now times, I always struggled to find time in my day for my own practice. Between work and teaching gigs and the time spent getting from one place to another, I just didn’t have the time for myself. The boundary line between teaching yoga and having my own practice got blurry. I am injured and I’ve been taking my time getting back into things like walking and yoga, but I don’t want my classes and my injury to become my goto excuse for not getting on my mat. Yesterday’s practice was gentle and challenging and ended with a fifteen minute savasana. It was everything I needed and a reminder to maintain some boundaries. It is no surprise for any one of you to hear that I struggle with maintaining boundaries. Many of us find it difficult to maintain healthy boundaries. The boundaries I set for myself maintain a very important work/life balance, one that doesn’t take much for me to mess up.

This is the snowball time year. We are only three months away from a new year. This is the time of year when our boundaries keep us sane. My situation is no where close to what it was all those years ago. I’m happy with my job and content with my living space. There is no reason for that teaching yoga/doing yoga boundary to get blurry. I am grateful for my hiatus from teaching yoga. That time allowed me to deepen and establish a strong personal practice, but that time away also made me appreciate how much I enjoy the art of teaching. I am grateful for this balance of feeling really good about the classes I teach and really good about the alone time I spend on my mat.

And I feel really good about this current balancing act.

GRATITUDE

I did not forget to write a Thankful Friday post. I just ran out of time last week. Michael has returned to work and the Cabbage schedule is back to an every other weekend schedule. This also means that I am back to a weekly evening chore schedule and every evening last week, after dinner, I would do some sort of activity. One evening activity was bike riding to ice cream, but the other evenings were devoted to cleaning out the chicken coop or cleaning the bathroom. One chore an evening to keep me from spending all of Sunday doing all of the things.

The back-to-school schedule also means a return to getting up early on Saturdays to do the grocery shopping. This part of the routine begins with a breakfast sandwich, coffee and some writing, while sitting in a quiet corner of one of my favorite bakeries. For the past two years or so, all of my Saturday morning writing has been done in my Fortune Cookie journal. I have to admit that I have not opened that journal in many months, but this was not the journal I took along with me on this particular Saturday morning. Instead, I took a journal that I started writing in during our last camping trip. I started a story there that I just keep adding bits to when ever I get a chance to sit down and write. I know this sounds antiquated. I am potentially writing something that could be a book and instead of sitting at my desk and typing it out, I’m writing it down with pen and ink and paper. There’s two reasons for writing a story this way: no distractions and no commitment. Paper journals do not have access to online distractions like Facebook or Google searches about Ben and J.Lo. It also means that I am under no obligation to do something with this writing. Maybe I’ll do something with it some day, but for now, it’s something just for me.

Today, I’m cooking a large pot of brothy beans. I’ll sauté some cabbage and Italian soysage to serve on top of the beans along with some good crusty bread. Our friend, Heather, is coming over for Sunday dinner and because I did most of my chores before Sunday, I can spend the day leisurely cooking beans and putting together a simple meal filled with heart. I might also spend some more time with my journal. I don’t know, but even though back-to-school scheduling tends to mean more work for me, I am grateful for a return to something a bit more structured. The structured part of my time keeps me anchored, which keeps me from spinning out during my unstructured time. The gratitude comes in finding a balance between structured and unstructured time.

So, my Thankful Friday post may be a little late. I just like to think that I needed to marinate a little bit longer on my thoughts of gratitude. That’s part of that unstructured time.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I fell flat on my butt this week. That’s not a metaphor. In an attempt to lighten my heart towards the falling snow, I stepped outside to take some pictures. I knelt down to take a picture of an ice covered tulip and when I stood up, I completely lost my balance. I stumbled back and then fell over, my left buttcheek hitting hard against the cold wet pavement of the circle drive. I fully embraced this fall and let myself roll all the way back so that I was lying flat on my back on the cold, wet drive. I laid there for a breath or two before thinking “I should get up before someone runs over me with their car.” and I peeled my body off the ground. I stood and assessed the damage. A rough spot on my left palm and a bruised left buttcheek. A wet coat. All in all, it was a pretty minimal list of damages.

I heard on the radio that Riders In The Sky will be playing at a local venue here sometime next month and I was instantly taken to that year I took Dad to see them in concert. Every detail of that evening swam around in my head. Dad had arrived at my house dressed in his best western wear. He had on his nicest bolo tie and his dress cowboy boots. Of course he had his white cowboy hat. I took him to Cattlemen’s Steak House, THE cowboy place to eat in Oklahoma. I bought him a steak and we split a dessert before heading over to The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum for the concert. Dad was so happy that he cried. Later on, I posted Happy Birthday wishes to a friend from high school that included wishes for cookies. She responded with how she would much rather have my Dad’s roasted peanuts. She had been in the habit of driving over to my parents’ home weekly for bags of roasted peanuts particularly during baseball season when she would be rooting for one of her children in a game. Her comment made me chuckle. After all this time, people still miss those peanuts and their visits with the Peanut Man.

This was the week for nudges from Dad. While I was driving home, the radio host mentioned his gratitude to all who had reached out to him during last week when his father had passed. He said that week was the hardest week he’d ever had. I felt myself falling backwards with his words and I embraced the fall. When I assessed the damages this time, I was surprised to find minimal damage. Dad’s passing wasn’t the worst week I had ever experienced. I had been prepared for it and had accepted it without any shock or disbelief. My memories of time spent with Dad do not fill me with bittersweetness the way other memories do.

My balance has been wonky, leftovers from my vaccination. I have been working in my daily yoga practice not just on balancing on one foot for an extended period of time, but on slow transitions between standing poses. Moving one foot back at sloth speed to come into warrior I. Taking my sweet time lifting up and transitioning into warrior II. That place in between, when you are moving from one thing to the next, that is where you build strength. The moments in between are where we find our balance. This is where we learn to embrace the fall as it happens and to assess the damages later. I have found that after committing to the fall and moving slowly into that fall that I find there is less damage.

For this week at least, I am left whole and filled with some good memories.