Plucking the Best from the Mess

It is morning and I am not due anywhere until three today which means 1:30 pm in travel time. Lately, my world has ramped up with increased work hours as an ESL teacher for a great organization and a tutor at a local college. I am finding this rapid pace laced with pockets of time is calling for me to pull together and be vigilant with all my acquired sense of a spiritual center if I am to get through and still remain balanced, positive, hearty, and in harmony.

There was a time I would have run so fast from such a challenge all while telling you the reasons why this just never could work, but my running days are over.

Being a military brat (love that term, as close a group with roots as I get), I learned to pick up and go and to release any ties with whatever or whoeverI had grown attached to in the current land where we lived. My father's Air Force career took us to delicious rural areas and two solid recognizable cities. And when we or later after my father retired, and I left, I mourned these surroundings whether they were the forests and fields of Alaska, the skies and deserts of Texas, the long sandy, wet shores of Lake Huron, or even the pungent midwestern cattle smells of Omaha.

I didn't grow attached to the folks around me, though, or else I learned as a child that you just had to let go. So now that I am a nearly 15-year resident of New York City and before that a member of El Paso for almost 30 years with a two year stopover in Dallas, I am understanding I have lived longer in two cities than I ever did as a kid with a dad in the military. So why am I still so shy at forming and keeping deep grown friendships with my community?

And now I see that it is because I am the one I've run the farthest from and until I sit down and make friends, heal, and hold Sheela, the other half of the delicious pie of life in having close and strong friends outside work and beyond is not going to be tasted by me. I am grateful for the friends I have made in my professional life. I am healthier because of them. And I want more of this wellness. I want more.

So I am going to stay with my outrageous, but doable schedule and work through my fears of attaching and enhancing my life with relationships. And I won't become self effacing or riddled with low self esteem. I will find real and effective solutions and I will heal. , I will work and manage my time, and write and pursue my goals. I will not run thinking if I can get away from the madness, I can do what I need to do. Because this logic - for me - means not finishing what is in front of me, not gathering the lessons from it, and not receiving the benefits that come with sitting with the uncomfortable and finding the truth and release from it.

Flying and being free, I see now, is sitting on a train, and being thankful. And not letting the notebook I'm holding as I close my eyes while doing a quick meditation, fall from my hands. It is staying put, fighting the good fight within and fortifying it. It is being grateful and appreciative of what I can gather from my situation just as I used to pick the best blackberries from the bushes in Michigan, placing them in my basket, daydreaming, and in nirvana, not worrying or wondering what tomorrow would have for me.

I am eating what I have sown.