realignments
i awake today with the sun and am pleased by the miracle of sleeping the whole night through. my torment manifests in my jaw, yet somehow lets my mind rest as i rise feeling very well-rested, but with jaw clenched tight despite my best efforts to lay down at night with the intention of keeping those muscles loose and relaxed… i went to see amber yesterday, a very intuitive and amazing massage therapist and body worker who ended up spending the entire hour and more trying to release whatever i was holding. she told me i needed to stop judging myself. i sobbed and tried to let go. she pulled cords from my solar plexus and clapped away whatever was resisting flight. we giggled a little bit. it was really nice, but when it came time for me to flip over and get a massage, yeah, the massage part, i had to rush back to work and submit a large grant proposal that was sitting on my desktop waiting to be ‘released’. she did give me the number of raven, a spiritual healer and guide who i called immediately and will see today to help me realign. instead of pills or talk therapy, both of which i’ve explored extensively, i now just try to stay present and tapped in, but sometimes, when the rush gets to be too much and i am overwhelmed by things and ideas, i need to realign. i hold the weight of the world on my shoulders and despite my strength, some liken me to an ox, i cannot move it. the more i push against it, the more it appears as so much greater than it actually is. i forget to accept, i forget to be grateful, i forget to have compassion for ignorant systems and then i just feel muddy, like my channels are all filled up with smog. i did rush back to the office and got the C CHE proposal in under the wire. i hit submit with my beefy finger at 12:59 pm. it was due at 1. if awarded, this grant would allow us to design our own community-based research and policy project where the youth would design their own neighborhood health research instruments, implement them, collect and analyze data, evaluate their findings, and then finally use the data to take to those policy-makers and say, guess what? we’ve got some information for you. discrete information. how great would that be? the aggregate date the policy-makers recycle would then be obsolete as we see what the community actually thinks is important, expecially where city planning, regs, and language is concerned. every child needs a healthy space to move around in. and everyone should grow their food. the next step would be to design permanent healthy food systems in their neighborhoods, food justice, maybe.
sunday evening i returned from that wonderful, fulfilling and exhausting trip with 12 teenagers to the state capitol and my 9-year-old daughter had story-boarded her comic book. she dreamed the characters and laid them out along with the plot, though i don’t understand these things, i must admit. it’s called ‘graciela and saatan’ - yeah, you figure it out. i think saatan is a pet sidekick. one of the characters is based on me. she’s a kickboxer named ‘comet’ who is, and i quote, “tapped in to the universal library.” she said i can kick really high. my daughter thinks i’m a super hero. that’s pretty nice.
she’s been sleeping on the couch. i don’t really know why, as she has a nice bed and nice bedroom… she’s been using her bed as a giant table of sorts, laying things out and creating different combinations for different purposes. one day it was an ear piercing station and all of her bears sat upright with strips of cloth strategically draped around them and earrings. i asked her if she would ever return to her bed or if she planned on living in the living room. she wasn’t sure. it reminded me of the mitch hedberg skit where he says, ‘f u, real estate lady. shouldn’t I get to decide how many bedrooms there are in my house? hey, this bedroom has an oven it. this one has a bunch of people sitting around watching television. this one is over in THAT guys house.” if you don’t mind a little profanity, and possibly enjoy the tragedy of brilliant young people who die early from drugs because they just couldn’t handle the weight of the world, then you should check him out. another mitch hedberg quote “i had a stick of CareFree gum, but it didn’t work. I felt good while i was blowing a bubble, but as soon as it lost its flavor, i was back to pondering my mortality.” i shared a link to his non-sequitor one-liners. we miss you, mitch.
grace just awoke and informed me that she did not want to go to school today becase there is a sub and she knows she just has to sit still and write a whole bunch of stuff. oh, does she loathe and despise sitting still. so much so that it is giving her anxiety. this is always my dilemma. do i make her go to school, a place i don’t have much faith in other than a social incubator for good little citizens, or does she stay home and paint and write her comic book and read? shouldn’t really be a tough decision, but i don’t know how much school they are allowed to miss. i skip work all the time. just kidding, boss, if you ever read this.
