THANKFUL FRIDAY

Team building

6 Likes, 0 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Team building"

I had to walk a tight rope this week. Not a figurative tight rope. An actual tight rope made of wire. It was two feet off the ground, but at this age, falling two feet could hurt. I didn’t do this completely unassisted. I had some support since it was a team building thing, but I will say that I did most of my tight rope walking with very minimal assistance. I really feel like if I had had some time on my own, just a few minutes really, I would have been dancing along that rope with zero assistance. It is quite possible that I could have a second career as a tight rope walker for a circus. I shouldn’t be surprised with this ability. I dominated the balance beam during my short gymnastics stint, but a wire is very different from a balance beam.

Wires move.

The wire vibrates and bounces with each step, even while attempting to stand still. The tension and strain from trying to hold yourself steady flows right down to the wire, which then begins to vibrate from side to side. You body turns rigid in effort to stop the wire from moving, but this causes the wire to move even more. At least, this was my experience. The harder I worked to get the wire to be still, the more the wire moved. The wire would only stop moving if I paused to take a moment to focus solely on my breath and release the tension from body. Balance is not rigid. It is fluid. You have to be able to sway and trust me when I tell you that this fluidity counter acts the movement of the wire. This doesn’t mean that muscles aren’t engaged and you are all loosey goosey. I could feel every single one of my core muscles tighten up to help me balance. I guess it’s more of dancer like movement and less of a hold it together by brut force kind of thing.

The physical act of wire walking is the most obvious metaphor for life.

It is so painstakingly obvious that I am kicking myself for all of the many many many times I tried to hold shit together by shear force. And I know this from my practice on my mat. I know that when I pause to focus on my breath, when I allow myself to sway and bend, everything that is supposed to fall into place, falls into place. That’s the key: Everything that is supposed to fall into place, falls into place. This means dropping any ideas of controlling everything to fall into place. Instead I need to focus on the things that I can control. Recently, I wrote up a list of reasons of why I am unhappy. It turned out to be a very short list. So I followed that list with a list of ways I could fix the unhappy list. What I realize about the things on the unhappy list is that they all consist of things that I can’t really control, like other people’s behavior. The solutions to those things are to control my reactions. Some of that means speaking up more and some of it means putting less effort into things. I have stopped trying so hard to make the wire stop vibrating.

This is what I’m thankful for today.

BIRD SEASON

Sunday morning looks different in the Spring

6 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Sunday morning looks different in the Spring"

I was up at 6:00 AM on Saturday morning. The sounds of a bird in distress makes a pretty good alarm clock. I don't know if it is a skill I should be proud of, but by now I can tell the difference between bird and rabbit distress calls. I don't know about squirrels. They never make it into the house alive. The rarely make it into the house with their heads still attached. On this particular morning, I opened my bedroom door and then followed the trail of feathers to the kitchen where the cat had the bird cornered between the back door and the refrigerator. I told the animals to scram, dropped a dishtowel onto the bird and then scooped him up. I carried him to the front yard and I could feel his wings trying to flap. I just relaxed my grip and he flew off and up into a tree branch in the neighbor's yard. Then immediately after he landed, another bird tackled him and they both fell to the ground. I have no idea what happened to him or if he was the same bird I "rescued" at 4:30 this morning. 

I'm sure the bird from this morning didn't make it.

Since I was up at six on Saturday, I went ahead and got showered and dressed. Then I cleaned the kitchen and scrubbed the stove because a bird had pooped on it. I gathered my grocery bags, the list, my journal, my purse and my glasses, locked the door and stepped out of the house. With out keys. I stood there for a few minutes, trying to decide what to do. I banged on the front door a few times knowing that there was no way Micheal was going to hear me from his cave in the basement. I stepped around to the Cabbage's window and started banging. She pulled the curtain back with squinted eyes and I asked to her to go open the front door. She had a moment of panic when she didn't think she could get the door open, but I talked her down and said that all she had to do was turn the lock. I opened the door and told her to go back to bed. Later on, Michael went into her room and she said "Why did you lock Cindy out of the house?!" He didn't know I'd locked myself out or what the Cabbage was talking about.

That's probably the first time I've ever locked myself out of that house.

The rest of the weekend went just fine and dandy. My massage therapist removed a giant knot from my right thigh. I pulled up old dead plants and planted new vibrant living plants. I made the kind of guacamole that you never want to stop eating because it's laced with crack (not really, but I make some delicious guacamole). I spent time reading while swaying gently in my hammock. It was real nice. Some time between Saturday and today, I dreamed that Albus dragged a goose into the house. The house was a wreck with goose poop and feathers. It was like we'd used our living room for rituals. After that dream, I really studied the dog door. Could Albus even fit a goose through that door? Maybe. Yet my thoughts keep drifting back to the Saturday morning bird. He was a living breathing metaphor. I saved that bird from the clutches of a gruesome death only to release him into a different kind of gruesome death. It's like all those videos people post of releasing the trapped mouse into a field and then watching as a hawk swoops down and carries it off for it's dinner. 

It's really true. There are some things that are just out of your control.