What I’ve been doing instead of blogging….

Well, life is nearly as full as it ever was. I have been working to try to not fill it up quite as much as it had been before my diagnosis. One of my methods for achieving this is to put appointments in my calendar for things like meditation, cooking, blogging, and ceramics. So my calendar looks very full, but it’s full of a lot of things that are really quite flexible as to when (and whether) I do them.

I’ve mostly been keeping my morning practice appointments with myself. These are appointments not only for meditation, but for a combination of physical therapy/Pilates, sitting meditation (including concentration practice, compassion practice, and the “5 remembrances,” which are about sickness, old age, death, impermanence, and karma), centering and jo practice with my “declarations” from somatics, and gratitude practice (the thank-you cards!). My practice accountability partner Liz asked me a few weeks ago, do you really have time to do all of that? And I said, no, not every morning. I decided I should pick which mornings I was going to do my “full practice,” and make myself appointments in my calendar for those days. And so far, I’ve been doing pretty well with it.

My cooking appointments I have “flexed” more often than not, but I have been cooking a lot more lately than I had for years. As you can see from the first picture, I re-stocked our long-depleted supply of dried beans, and have been making big pots of them for various dishes (Brazilian black bean soup, barbequed beans, gypsy soup), as well as corn muffins and other quickbreads, all with lowfat (& gluten free) versions of the recipes, some of which I’m finding online, some of which I’m making up. It feels a little like learning to cook all over again – albeit on a pretty solid foundation.

I have also made it down to the ceramics studio more frequently as a result of my appointments, though not necessarily exactly as scheduled. I’ve run my kiln twice in the past week, taking advantage of a couple of relatively warmer (40 deg. Fahrenheit) days when I can leave the garage door open to vent the fumes. I have also been writing a fair amount, and some of what I’ve been writing will probably eventually make it into my blog, but none of it has been exactly blogging.

One of my somatics coaches suggested I re-write my “emotional autobiography.” This is an exercise I did during my somatics training, around 10-12 pages of highlights of what’s shaped you, and she suggested this would be a good time to do it again. I decided I wanted to do the social justice somatics version of it, my “emotional/political autobiography,” which I haven’t done before. I’ve started working on this, though mostly so far I just have notes. I had a memory that I wanted to look up – and I thought I could find it in a diary I kept very intermittently as a child. That led me to a box in the basement, where I did find it (along with a bunch of other interesting stuff, but I’ve so far controlled myself and haven’t dug through it all).

I spent one potential “blogging” appointment with myself transcribing the entire diary! This wasn’t hard because I didn’t write that much in it. It’s a “5-year” diary with only about 2 or 3 square inches per day, begun Jan. 1, 1976 when I was almost 10, with the last entry in March of 1981 when I was almost 14. There are only about 40 entries all together, most of them not actually that interesting, but taken as a whole it kind of paints a picture (most colorfully in the entry pictured here, when I got some colored pens for Chanukah).

Many references are to my sister Rachel & brother Ari (including times when I felt they were not being nice to me ☺), and many are to my best friend Rachel (or RJB, or RB), or other friends Margie, Naomi (misspelled “Niomi”), and Jennifer. Trips to Buffalo (where my grandparents lived), camping trips, and my trip to Israel were mentioned. My interest in writing other things (poems, plays) gets a fair amount of play near the end.

I did mention a couple of deep things – the time our babysitter died (I remember being told at the time that this was because she’d been very sad for a long time--which years later I figured out meant she had committed suicide), and a time I was worried that we didn’t have enough money. I apparently imagined the entry I thought I was looking for – my memory was that I wrote that I’d decided that money was the source of a lot of the world’s problems, and that we should just get rid of it. I think I did write this somewhere, but obviously not in this diary!

The other thing I’ve been writing is an application for an upcoming somatics training on Transformational Fundraising. It includes questions like: “What social justice values, principles and analysis do you apply to your work, in particular to fundraising work?” and “Please describe your volunteer and paid work experience in social & environmental justice movements. Please share about your experiences connected with fundraising (ie. donor organizing, grant-writing, donating, grant distribution, grassroots fundraising, etc.) and how you see yourself in relation to donors and foundation leadership.” Since my volunteer and paid work experience in social & environmental justice movements arguably dates back to around the time my diary ends (I went door-to-door in my neighborhood when I was 14 campaigning for David (now Daithi) Wolf’s school board campaign, which he ran when he was only 18), this answer took some doing!!

I also have drafted something that might be a blog post or might be a CORE newsletter article or might have to await some other soapbox, about how Pilates is like social change…

I’ve been doing pretty well emotionally most of the time, feeling engaged and excited about exploring this next phase of life. I have decided to try a couple of new physical challenges and see whether I want to take one of them on longer term: Aikido and Trapeze. These are both things I’ve been interested in for years, but never thought I’d have the courage or strength to try. I’ve been to “Intro to Trapeze for Mature Women” twice, and apart from sore muscles and almost-blisters, I can report it was lovely. I’ve been to Aikido once and already got to practice falling backward safely! As you can see from the 3rd picture, my hair is back in force, though I’m keeping it shorter than before.

I have had a few moments of sadness and fear related to cancer lately, brought on by learning that my friend and mentor Laird Schaub has just been diagnosed with a pretty complicated case of multiple myeloma. Even though I’m practicing the 5 remembrances several times a week, and even though my friend Liz’ father has recently received the same diagnosis, there is nothing like having someone dear to me, who I’ve known for many years, and who has always been extremely full of vigor, facing this shocking and life-threatening circumstance, to bring it home again.