Princess in the House in Everyday Ramblings

“To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart and to sing it to them when they have forgotten.”― Arne Garborg who was a Norwegian writer born in 1851.

Spring and the return of color is the song in my heart. It is still a long way off but there are signs everywhere starting to appear.

When I heard the above quote in a meditation talk on Sunday I immediately thought about Mr. Finch. He learned the song that was in my heart. And when I had a bad day or was sad or distracted or giving myself a hard time he would (in his own way) sing it to me. He would always ground me back to my true north.

I think this is the fundamental quality that made our life together so special and why I put up with so much difficulty. He supported me in being fully who I am.

My sister Kes is having her 70th birthday in a couple of weeks and that is what I would like to be able to do for her for her birthday in some small way. If we have a dry weekend day maybe I can go down and help her prep her garden for the year.

She says they have yellow crocus blooming where she is today but this is yesterday, our first snowdrops of the year, in a wild front yard a few blocks away. It is heavy overcast now but earlier we saw something that vaguely resembled blue sky for the first time in days. It was so good for the soul.

After teaching for four years I finally get it that if someone mentions something they would like to work on in class, or talks to me about a particular issue and I say that I will design a practice for or around it, 99.8% of the time if I do that (even if I don’t tell them) they do not come to that class. It is a thing.

I think it is something about folks not wanting the focus to be on them. Not that I ever do that but it is the perception that I might.

I spent days, three days, working up this material on hamstrings for all three of my classes this week, because, you know, we all have hamstrings and almost all of us think they are way too tight.

At the last minute yesterday the student who had mentioned them was unable to come and I felt this great rush of disappointment. Oh poor me, all that work, blah, blah, Princess in the House.

The thing is I learned all this cool stuff doing the work, stuff that helps me, and my back in my own journey so it wasn’t a waste whatsoever.

And I taught about half the material to the 8 intrepid souls that made it to my class in the sheeting pouring torrential rain last night.

Another one of my students unexpectedly had a profound insightful revelation about how her legs work right in the middle of said class. (She is a retired doctor I might add.) We talked a bit about it after too.

Now that made my heart sing.

But from now on I am not designing classes with a particular student in mind. This sense of disappointment is totally avoidable.

When we were walking on Saturday I told Mrs. Sherlock that the Department of Transportation had posted the encampments of folks living in tents that were making me the most uneasy. And I was musing about who was going to clean up the mess they left.

A little while later we walked by a Parks Department employee who was picking up some garbage near another “nest”. He told us they call them nests. Mrs. Sherlock who will talk to anyone about anything asked him about the folks living rough and how and who cleaned up after them.

He confirmed my supposition that the Department of Transportation often contracts out to jails and prisons to do the clean up. We had an upbeat chat with him but then we both thanked him for doing what he was doing and told him how much we appreciated it.

From the look on his face I think we made his day.

Last updated January 30, 2018