During the laundry and before work

Early this morning during the laundry and before work I sat down to meditate. I expected to devote some time to this but something happened almost immediately and so I cut it off right there.

What happened was a phrase: “The Practical Mystic: a blog.”

And so here we are.

Enough said about the nature and purpose of this blog, i.e. as little as possible because it's likely to unfold and shift. Let’s just start right in with a dream that set this all in motion.

A cool professional woman was looking over my shoulder, coaching me through a difficult task: I was preparing to talk on the phone with a publisher in French.  (Truly this is the most difficult task I can imagine. I am a little deaf, I hate talking on the phone, publishers intimidate me, and my French is extremely rusty.)  

My mentor had taken a sheet of brown paper with some numbers scrawled on it—a recycled, very used sheet of paper. On the paper she had me write numbers, alternately with her. I was to write 1, she would write 2, and so forth through 9, then we were to repeat the sequence at least once. I was to find spaces on the paper to write the numbers, fit them in somewhere, use some of the numbers already written if they were in the right sequence. Then I was to cut the numbers out. And as I was talking on the phone, we would pick up the numbers again alternately and again in sequence, as a symbol of each taking our turn to do what was required. The sense was that every time I did something difficult she would step in and do the next thing and we would get through the task this way.

I am hereby taking this dream mentor at her word, since she probably had something to do with the instruction to start a blog. I won't name the big difficult task, or the mentor, or say why the recycled paper stands for my previous writing but some of these details may unfold with the blog. And come to think of it the action didn't really start with the dream but with a Feldenkrais session the day before but more about that later, too.

What I will say is, Starting this blog is action #1 and now it’s your move, Madame.