Making Mandalas

One summer, I think it was about 2004, I made mandalas.  I carried black paper, colored pencils, a sharpener and a compass in my bag and I made mandalas, sometimes several every day.  It was kind of a way to check in with myself, to recenter my focus.  Some of them were really tiny, only about two and a half inches in diameter, and some took up the extent of a piece of black artagain paper, about nine inches across.

Amazingly, doing this art actually did help me to recenter myself.  It was like art meditation.  In the past week or so some of the old mandalas have resurfaced, maybe a reminder that I need to get something going.  It is so easy to get mired in the decluttering that I fail to start smething new.  I just keep on clearing out the old stuff.  Learning from what I find?  Certainly, to some degree.  But it’s time to start some fresh activity as well.  So, yeah.  I’m going to do that.  Photos to follow!

Hot, hot, hot!! Fried egg on the sidewalk hot!

Well, you got it.  It is summer in Chico and in a big way.  104 degrees today, and not supposed to drop below 100 until Tuesday.  That means rocky sleep for me for a couple of nights!  When it gets hot I go to the movies.  YEAH!! Today I went to see “The Proposal,” Sandra Bullock’s latest comedy.

This movie made me laugh which counts for high points in my book!  I think her costar is  in a somewhat different age group from her, but it didn’t matter.  It was pretty believable.  The characters were developed well enough and the costars were great.  Betty White and Mary Steenbergen played the guy’s mom and grandma and were delightful.  The dad was that actor whose name I don’t remember who was in Officer and a Gentleman with Debra Winger about twenty years ago.  I’m missing the details, but you can go to a website for those.  Bottom line,  I loved it.  It was a perfect hot afternoon matinee movie.

I think I need a bigger air conditioner.  I say that every summer, and it is still true.  Every year I think I’ll sell my house and get one with AC and every year I don’t manage to do it in time so I spend another year here in the hot house.  Oh well.  I can always go to a matinee!  Enjoy your summer day.  Keep cool!

Recentering

I love how gloriously centered this gardenia is. Each petal pivots and swirls from the center to the outer edge, the whole thing nestled in those waxy leaves and exuding a fragrance like no other. A few years ago a nurseryman came and looked at my yard and told me to remove the gardenia, but I couldn’t bear to. And I’m glad I didn’t. Right now it is covered in huge blossoms like this one. Can you smell it?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately and I’ve realized that the essence of my current quest is a need to recenter myself. I’ve been kind of off-kilter about my job for some time now, and have done a lot of writing, thinking, talking and meditation about that. I’m at a resting place with regard to that, at least in this moment. However, it seems that I couldn’t quite let go of my imbalance.

About two weeks ago I decided to buy a house. A second house, for I already have one. This house was located close to my granddaughter’s house and I loved (still do) the idea of her being able to just drop in whenever she wants to, now that she is old enough to ride her bike a little ways on her own. It all seemed to be lined up really well, because my older daughter and her husband are looking for a place to live and wanted to rent my house. It was a match made in heaven. Or seemed to be, except that the seller never responded to my offer. After 10 days, and rumors of his irritation with my low price, never mind that he received another low offer while he was entertaining mine and rejected it, he never responded. No counter offer, no rejection, just talk. And it didn’t seem like anyone was pushing him to do so. Everyone just kind of waited around while he threw tantrums. Finally, when it looked like just agreeing on a price could take months, if it ever happened, I rescinded the offer.

While it felt like I was taking care of myself in doing that, and I really did think it over before I did, being on the other side of it has left me feeling off kilter. Mourning a little bit the loss of the dream I had woven in those ten days. Not quite understanding why it didn’t work. What I missed in weaving that tapestry. Once again I feel imbalanced.

Now it’s Sunday night, and I’m looking at another week with time to do whatever I want to do. I think that I will spend this time releasing some stuck places. Getting rid of some stuff and re-finding something else that isn’t about places or stuff. Something that involves a little finer focus, some centering and relocating myself within my space, on all levels.

How about you?  What do you do to release yourself from the bindings, be they physical, mental, emotional or spiritual or some combination of them all (and really, when we’re stuck it is always on more than one simple level!)?  I’d love to hear what you do when you notice you need to shake things up and clear out the stuck spots.

BSLE Day 18: Focusing on the Experiment

Today I went to school and kind of cleaned up my classroom so I don’t have to go there again for a while.  For the past couple of days, since I typed up my list of to- and not-to-dos, I’ve been focusing more on this experiment.  It gets to be evening and I go, “Oh, just go take a walk.  Then you can check that off.” or “Finish drinking your bottle of water.  You know you need to.”

I’m coming around, I think.  There remain a few things that I haven’t gotten started yet, but I have faith that I will.  Next on my list is the Shiva Nata practice.  I think I’ll get that going tonight.  Check.

BSLE Day 16: In which I think things over

Here it is.  The past and the present.  I used to work at this school.  On that water tank is painted the name of the much loved principal who died one morning on his way to work.  I filled in as Assistant Principal here for a few months after he passed, juggling my grief with a lot of standardized tests and naughty students who needed discipline.  I thought I’d be an administrator after that.  All signs pointed that way.  I went to school and took all the right classes, got the credential and did as I was asked by those in positions of superiority.   I was good at that sort of job, and I liked it because I always had a lot to do.  It felt good to organize my lists and then check things off of them.  It was still messy, but not like being in the classroom.  No grades to do, no lessons to plan.  I was in awe of how hard teachers work to make less money than I was making.

After a couple of years working in “that” sort of job, I noticed that every time I owned my passion the person to whom I reported made sure to put me back in the box for which I was approved.  Passion, creativity, new ways of looking at a problem were not acceptable for a person in my position.  Eventually the job went away and I wondered what I’d done wrong.  Had I actually done something wrong?  I always had good reviews – they said I was a team player, always went beyond what I was asked to do. Things like that.  But in my reviews no mention was ever made of the times I was swept back into compliance.  Those aberrations of my behavior were kindly ignored on my reviews.  Until it came to revisiting staff assignments and suddenly it seemed that my position was expendable.  And it was, it truly was.  I had been reduced to doing work that a good administrative assistant could do.  My degrees and experience were not needed at all for the work I was doing.  But who was I to complain?  I was making more money than I had in the classroom and I was on the track to… where?  I never really thought about that. I had kind of lost my way, I realize.

In retrospect, I remember the day I was packing up my classroom, and a dear friend and colleague came in to say how much she’d miss me.  I looked at her, and with tears clogging my throat, said, “I don’t know why I’m doing this.  All I ever wanted was to be a good teacher.”  But I continued packing and left that school.

For the past year I’ve been back in the classroom, only this time it was a seventh grade one.  I wound up there because again I listened to the people who suggested it was stepping along the path I  had chosen and once again I complied.  It was the hardest year of my teaching life.  Like starting over again.  Taking care of myself was not part of the picture.  And why should it be?  I wasn’t even listening to my heart where work was concerned.  How could I even get close to the real heart of my life?

Now I have a little time off.  And I’m really thinking things over.  Really, what am I supposed to do next?  Where is my heart, my passion?  I can’t even feature why I am writing about it in such a public place, but as I recall, this is why I started this blog.  Accountablility to myself and to others.  There is no easy answer to spout out.  No big AHA!  Not yet at least.  I guess I will just keep walking and drinking that water.  I’ll look at my checklist (which I finally typed up last night!!)each morning and do a couple of things on it every day, until I finally reach a day in which I do it all.  And then I’ll see what’s up.

BSLE Day 12: Am I still here?

Well, yesterday’s events led me directly to the chocolates I’d purchased for the summer school teacher meeting I had set up.  Quite a few of them, actually.  Enough that I woke up with a vicious sugar headache this morning.  It’s gone now, and new developments today have the chocolates screaming at me again.  I wonder how I learned to eat about things that disagree with me.  Come to think of it, I do one of three things: eat sugar, preferably chocolate, play mahjong solitaire on the computer or read a novel.

Never am I gifted with the urge to lift weights or run or garden or work on my own novel. Nor do I erupt.  Ever.  I’m just attracted to the mind numbing stuff.  Hm.  How long have I known this?  Apparently not very long.  Actually, I have known this for a while, but I take myself to such a numbness that I forget to change anything about my behavior.

I’m going to make that changes chart tonight.  I swear.  Right after I go to the library and see what’s new.

Beginning of Summer Lifesaving Experiment Day 11?

Well, how many days into this am I?  It’s amazing how easily life’s variances can throw me off course.  Today a chunk of summer employment that I was counting on was cancelled.  It threw me for a couple of hours,even though really it is not a huge deal.  I still have a job and I will figure out how to get by without that piece of money.  Actually, there are a couple of work-related things that are messing with my mind lately, and in dealing with those things, I seem to forget about all the other things I mean to do.  My intentions waver and plummet, it seems.  I just completely forget myself.  I don’t even remember to drink water.  Hello? How hard is drinking some water every day?  But I forget about it.  I swear I’m making a little checklist tomorrow.  If I remember.

So, yeah.  Life throws us surprises but usually there is a gift in there somewhere.  If we can just open our eyes to see it.  So now my BSLE will last longer and receive a more consistent focus.  And that will be good.