good morning friends
it's 645am - just showered and dressed.
I go down to services at 715am.
I'm kind of dealing with my experience today
as 'half an experience'. It's hard for me
to always pay attention to the nuances of my day and life
and still move forward actively - I ultimately get to a point
while questioning so many things where I'll just freeze
and live in the peace of life. Or my place in that peace.
Giving myself a sense of me experiencing "half an experience" when alone
helps me objectify things and helps me let go. Like living in relationship
to others - we each offer half the experience..when we meet it's one!
Gosh this must sound
crazy - but what I do know is just last night and now this morning,
I am calm about moving forward. Everyone has to deal with 'dealing with
what to do with themselves when they're alone' - and when they have responsibilities too.
So living with the unnknown now, living with my half of it ,- is helping me still feel affirmed
and reassured like in the phantom of the unknown.
So, I am ready for chapel now, it's going to be a long service today but c'est la vie.
I don't know if I will enjoy it and yet I question this with the idea "but I am supposed to like it".
I guess some days I'll like it more than others.
I've got therapy later today. Thank goodness - but then she's in Aruba for a week, next week,
and there will be no contact. I'll be on here a lot!! heh.
Replies
in my strictly personal questioning, i wonder paying attention to the nuances of my day and life are the very stuff of the social anxiety which so often cripples me. do i really believe my puny, human brain can catch, much less understand all those nuances? i don't find much proof of that in my own life. my life goes smoother when i let go and let god lead the dance. god's nuance data banks are more comprehensive than mine.
ditto for the notion that i am only half living when i am alone. that is when i am most free to live out loud.
Thanks so much Arfie!! You are so great and appreciated!!
Journal notes:
While in service I was so weary about my incompetence to follow along and at the prospect of me ever being able to do it. Mental retard. Overwhelming.
Then I thought “you really got to take it one step at a time.” That gave me power. Then it seemed like the lady deacon who I am shadowing was being a bitch. But then I thought maybe she has issues and then I thought maybe she’s just having a bitchy morning or that’s really just her. Why should she be perfect for me?
So with that I relaxed and accepted and could live with the niceness from some and the bitchiness from others.
I am here at my desk in my cell. I've no worries but it feels as though I am starting to manufacture them.
The same thing happened in college. First semester was so incredibly easy that I started to brow beat myself
that it should be harder... that I wasn't 'doing right' and it was the first ignition of the illness that took over the direction of life.
That being said, I'm here at my desk, trying to piece together a plan for the day.
Things are good. I have been making a plan to go into Washington DC to go to the National Gallery of Art
as well as the Hirschorn Museum. I love that it's called a museum! Where are the MUSES meet! :)
So I am organizing my time and the small projects I have here for personal admin type stuff.
Writing it out is giving me a respite from my own internal echo chamber that tends to rev up
my mind. There is squirrelly nutty self perpetuating energy that I am trying to look past in order give myself some shape
to the day rather than succumb to it. This quality in the past has served to be a 'super focus' (my own term inspired by super nova and such etc) that just feeds on itself over and over...until I do something really stupid.
So, It's 1215p I go down to the meal prep at 330p - then I come back up to my room/cell at 430p for therapy.
I'm thinking about making money. Part of me wants to help start a cottage industry here for the nuns
to bring in extra revenue sources...but for the moment that's just plucking pie from the sky.
For my own purposes, I am very grateful for the job coming up on November 6.
I go into the shop again next Tuesday the 10th to meet my direct boss.
I might have a chance to go to Oklahoma to the all men's monastery. Just made an inquiry about that.
I believe they are grooming me for a position amongst the fathers and brothers here in the USA Eastern Orthodox
Church but again - with the approach of something as overwhelming as that, I am going to take it "one step
at a time."
Trying to take my organizing of the day 'one step at a time' as well. I will do the simple thing of tidying up
here. Keep on keeping on.
in my own recovery, that realization that i manufacture my own distress was the most important breakthrough of my recovery.. even in the parts over which i had no control -such as being sold into prostitution before i knew what profit was-- my distress was different from the distress manufactured by my 10 siblings. each and every case of distress is custom made.
decades later, the mechanics of how, when and where i am manufacturing distress remain as elusive as the precise measure of sunrise. is sunrise the first light? the creeping of an arc on the horizon? the moment when that celestial globe clears the horizon? the moment the morning haters first hit the snooze button on their alarm clocks? which yardstick shall i measure by? where's my zen for dummies book?
the important breakthrough for me is that it shifts the focus to my own distress manufacturing plants and lessens my quest to find --perhaps to be-- an oracle of all truth and righteousness.
for what it's worth
dunno much about the eastern orthodox, but the u.s. roman catholics are starving for candidates to fill the gender specific positions, priests in particular. it is not too often that we get to speak with clergy whom speak with an accent similar to ours. the drive to recruit priests from the u.s. populace is intense.
thanks arfie!! xx