A psalm of lethargy and resistance

 I resist, O Lord, the tasks before me.

The creative tasks demand too much risk. I may fail and today I cannot BEAR failure.

Do not ask me why.

Is my life so burdened that one more failure will kill me? Hardly. And still I prefer to steer clear of failure, so the creative tasks are out of the question.

The tedious tasks are too boring. O Lord, I die of boredom! If I take up the boring tasks I will hate them and my life will be filled with resentment and I will die!

Is this really true? It is not and yet, I prefer not to put it to the test.

The tasks of service to others are too demeaning. If I do as I am told one more time I will die of shame and embarrassment! I am too old to follow other people’s agendas, wishes, and instructions!

Do I have an agenda of my own that is so important that I cannot accede to the requests of others? I do not, not today, but following other people’s instructions would only remind me of that shameful fact.

There remains for me nothing left to do but to pray for deliverance from the rock of my resistance, O Rock of redeeming love.

Redeem my paltry tokens of resistance for the pure treasure of energy.

Do not make me do it myself!

Well, perhaps I will make the first move.

There. I have written this bad psalm and sing it with all my heart!

Or at least half of my heart.

How to make a meal out of nothing

1.     Open the refrigerator and examine the contents. Confirm that there is really nothing there. No leftovers from last night, no fresh veggies, no eggs, no meat.

2.     Open the pantry and examine the contents. Cereal doesn’t count. Pasta, yes. Rice. Cans of stuff? Tomatoes help. No tomatoes? Canned soup even though you hate it? No? Not even canned mushroom soup? Bouillon cubes. Vinegar and oil aplenty, even blueberry açai vinegar. Onions. Garlic, lots of that. And a whole bottle of 49-Pound Rooster merlot to go with whatever is going to spring forth from your fertile imagination.

3.     Reopen the fridge and reconsider the definition of “nothing.” Is that half a bunch of limp celery in the vegetable drawer? One carrot. Some cheddar you could salvage if you sliced away the mold.

4.     Check the freezer. Half a bag of peas. The last of the sweet cherries you picked last summer.

5.     Go back to the pantry. There’s got to be something else there. Look. You will find it, the magic ingredient that will make these scrawny loaves and fishes multiply into a feast. No? Wait. What is that hiding behind the oatmeal—cornmeal! Cornmeal=polenta. Okay. We’re cooking now.

6.     Make the polenta with bouillon so it tastes meaty. Add a little olive oil and all the old cheese at the end. Sauté the carrot, celery and peas with lots of onions and garlic and olive oil. Add a dash of the blueberry açai vinegar and some cayenne to make your mouth happy. Heap the veggies on the creamy-cheesy polenta. Drink all the wine with your sweetie. Munch on half-frozen sweet cherries for dessert.

7.     Contemplate:

a.     There is such a thing as a free lunch.

b.     There is no such thing as nothing. Even the Creator used ingredients: chaos, clay.

Spring cleaning the psyche

In the winter I work in a rocking chair in the living room by the woodstove. In the winter my real office becomes a dumping place for unmade decisions. Today I moved back to my desk and it was a mess. I was feeling lazy and at loose ends, unable to start or finish anything.  With great reluctance, I began decluttering my office.

I not only dusted around the decisions but I made them, which mostly consisted of throwing papers into the recycle. Scribbled telephone notes; notes from long-ago meetings (was that just last October we were talking about that?); file folders full of information on topics that I might be interested in but am not, after all; thank-you notes and Christmas cards; all the do-this, do-that detritus of things that I have done or will never do. Time, as usual, had made a lot of decisions for me.

Hello Spring

Hello, Spring! You come today in fog. I light the fire in the woodstove in your honor. It may be the last fire, not because we trust you to warm us up but because we are running out of wood.

The ground aches for you. The Earth is tired of its brown dress. 

The Africans in church yesterday were excited because you are coming. It is not just warmth they long for; it is color. You have no idea, Spring, what kind of color they would really like to see because you do not visit Africa. It would blow your mind, Spring, those vibrant oranges and purples and golds. I would like to take you on a walk through an African market and show you what is possible. They do not make up the colors in their cloth, they pull them right off the flowers and the birds and the rich, green forests.

Fukushima forever

Since I wrote last things have only gotten worse but not dramatically so. There may never be a big boom to grab our attention and horror. Fukushima will just linger, a chronic illness. We will learn to live with it. 

The physicist Michio Kaku recommends entombing the Fukushima reactors like Chernobyl was entombed: dumping sand, boron, concrete from above. That is about as much of a solution as burying our heads in the sand. It will tamp down the radiation, perhaps limit it to a forever-contaminated radius of a few miles. It will help temporarily. But they are already planning to build a new, bigger, more expensive, hopefully more durable sarcophagus around Chernobyl.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima

I am in grief over Japan. My personal feelings don’t matter but there is a pool of universal grief that disasters open up and we all find ourselves tapping into it, in one way or another. Port-au-Prince, Christchurch, Sendai. The Gulf of Mexico. The dying baby dolphins. And now, with Fukushima Daiichi (it means "Fukushima Number One" but it has 6 reactors), the grief ripples further back to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Nagasaki, Hiroshima.

Grief has never seemed like a useful emotion—it just is. It is not a motivating force. It stops me rather than moves me. Anger seems more helpful, especially when disasters are human made. Anger focuses us on what is wrong and what needs to change.  Anger moves us to action. Anger says never again.

But grief lasts longer.

Dusting and blessing

I don't like to dust. Sometimes I am in the mood to clean but I never like the dusting part.

Dusting reminds me of how much stuff I have, always too much.  Dusting reminds me of repetitive childhood duties. I  had to dust the furniture every Saturday morning and I can remember every despised rung of every chair. Dusting reminds me of entropy; there is always more dust even an hour later. And unlike bigger cleaning jobs like floors and kitchens, the results of dusting don't really show unless you've put it off way too long.

This morning I applied my personal remedy for impatience with necessary tasks like dusting: take it slow. I think of it as moving through the house or task at my mother's pace. She was slow and methodical, a one-thing-at-a-time person, not a multitasker. So I started dusting slowly and as I did this a practice came to mind.

Identity check

I just googled “practical mystic” to see whether this little blog would show up to any googling seekers. It does. On page 2.
   There are lots of practical mystics out there, including a woman in the UK who has made a profession of it, a number of books about practical mystics (among them, Abe Lincoln) and many how-to’s about being a mystic, bringing your mysticism to daily life, achieving Nirvana in 10 easy steps, and on and on.
   I wasn’t making any claims to originality with the term—though of course I had to secure my own unique Uniform Resource Locator (that’s what URL stands for).  While nobody else uses thepracticalmystic.blogspot.com, I am located, apparently, with a lot of other resources who are wearing the practical mystic uniform.

Followers

I see I have 9 followers, whatever that means. I interpret it as a vote of interest in what I have to say, at least now and then. (This blogspot system doesn’t give many privileges to followers, like getting the posts by email. If anybody would prefer to get them that way, let me know.)

Blogspot aside, the word “follower” is not one I like. It has a fawning quality to it. I am not after followers and I am not inclined to be one. Adoring or being adored triggers ego stuff for me. I am more comfortable with equality—equal adoration all around.

When I say it triggers ego stuff I am cluing you in to the fact that I know the problem is not with followers or leaders but with me. I do not bow easily to people who are clearly superior to me in one way or another.

Love you without the I (a belated valentine)

A young couple at the Y, going their separate ways into the locker rooms. He disappears into the men’s, says, “Love you.” She, bent over the water fountain, murmurs, “Um-um.”

Rings on their fingers. Newlyweds. “Love you” tacks the fabric of their love in place during this forced 15-minute separation.

“Love you” is not the real thing, not a surge of emotion and desire. It’s not the same as “I love you.” It’s a salute to the real thing, a hope, maybe even a superstition that if you stop saying it, the real thing will disappear. If you stop saying it, something will change.

A low-sadness diet

I often see this middle-aged woman at the Y, jogging at a good clip around the track. Her face is red, she is sweating, and she does not look happy. She wears tight, stylish running gear that shows every bulge and fold, so I can’t help noticing her muffin top. In fact, I’ve observed it over months, even years, expecting it to shrink with all that regular, strenuous effort, but it never does.

I haven’t been on the track for months because a plantar fasciitis is dogging my right heel. I stay downstairs for the elliptical trainer or the yoga class. But yesterday I went up to walk a few laps and there she was, red-faced, sweating, determined. And noticeably fatter.

American Idol and slow cookin'

I just frittered away a half hour or so worshiping a story I wrote yesterday evening in the 45 minutes between watching Jon Stewart’s opening segment and the start of American Idol. Well, I did run over a bit because I perfected the story then posted it for the online class I’m taking called “Feral Writing,” and so I missed the first two Idol performers but the really good ones came later anyhow. I don’t vote but if I did I’d have to vote for Jacob, with James and Casey close behind.

The story surprised me. It was a revelation, that I can imagine whole stories like I make meals: look in the fridge, see what looks good or needs to be eaten, and take it from there. It unfolds naturally, one thing leads to another and ties itself up neatly at the end. I’ve been discovering this ability in the last  two weeks in Maya's exercises. Where does it come from?