The Proverbial Bag of Cats in Everyday Ramblings

I have taken a picture of these trees in the park up the hill a block from me every year this time for at least four years and I think the one this year is my favorite because of the quality of the light.

Today is the first day that I will have taught a noon yoga class (if anyone shows up) and a private session five hours later. I am looking forward to both because I enjoy them so much but I am also a tad bit anxious. I want all the folks I work with to benefit in some small way for having done the work. A little more relaxed, a sense of ease or calm or accomplishment. But I have absolutely no control over any of it.

Kes had a 15% off coupon everything at LL Bean a few weeks ago so I ordered 4 things in size small. Eeek. They are all coming today. We had trouble ordering some of the colors I wanted. I wear a mostly non-obtrusive color palette. She says the dark red stitch work cardigan is very pretty. I originally ordered it in a heather green.

Still…I am excited. She picked up a couple of pairs of simple sweat pants with pockets in smalls before our trip to the beach for me and they fit perfectly. As Sammy will attest to as he has been sitting in my lap on them pretty much every day since I got back. It is nice to wear clothes that fit.

Yesterday after work I went to the gym for the first time in many weeks. This is the substitute gym, the one about a mile away down the hill. I got on the elliptical and wow you burn a lot less calories when you are a healthy weight. :) No rest for the virtuous.

I ended up coming home and going back out and walking on the track because I was just at the tail end of my audiobook and I wanted to finish it. I listened to about 15 hours of that book out there walking the track. It was nice because I walked casually and looked at the beautiful evening light and I almost burst into tears at the end.

Tana French, Broken Harbor. The 4th in her murder squad series. I liked the narrator the least of all of the books but the book is really well done and subtly and yet quite dramatically deals with the effects of the recession, this recent one, on folks and on mental health (particularly depression) in general on both individuals and society and (because it is Ireland) families.

I am also reading in little bits at night the book I bought months ago on “near death experiences” by Dr. Sam Parnia called Erasing Death, The Science that is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. He could have used a ghostwriter and the first part is a repetitive but quite stirring polemic about how we absolutely need standardized procedures for dealing with cardiac arrest.

I am totally sold on that. :)

But the books gets interesting if you hang in there talking about consciousness and the nature of reality. We don’t really know what makes experiences real. We know a lot about the brain now, what it is doing when we are having feelings or watching a video or day dreaming and technically we know pretty much what is happening but we don’t know how exactly folks are experiencing it.

I am glad he is asking the questions and doing some of the research.

When Sammy sits in my lap I am reading The Blessing by the poet Gregory Orr. It is a short memoir about what his life has been like after accidentally killing his younger brother in a shooting accident when Orr was 12. I had trouble actually reading about the accident. He gets through it blessedly early.

His mother came to his room where he was hiding and devastated a few hours afterwards and told him it was an accident and that his father had killed one of his friends in a similar accident when he was about the same age. Orr says that what he needed more than anything but couldn’t articulate was to be held there in that moment, to feel what physical comfort she could offer but she couldn’t in her pain and grief and guilt.

In the end of the mystery, one character ends up just holding his sister who is “as crazy as a bag of cats”. Just holding her.

We need that don’t we? Focused attention and a light touch. Even if we aren't crazy. What is crazy any way? We don't even know what is real.

I hope I can offer that to my students in an appropriate way.