Here and Now.

I sit breathing low and steady, noticing emotions that are jangling around in my throat area and solar plexus. This now-ness.

Activity today includes a long drive, laying out some plants and then continuing with this design. Maybe meeting a friend.

I’m laughing and thinking of a surgeon who is sitting at their kitchen table this morning right now and thinking ‘All I have to do today is save this person’s life.” Bit of perspective helps.

Well the good news of this next job going ahead has been replaced by discovering the technical complexity involved. It’s a pretty big difficult job. That will take us probably 4 or 5 months.

I stay with the jangly emotions. Anxieties pinching away, little contractions. “Hello there, I feel you and see you, you can be here, it’s just fine so let me extend a warm welcome”. Suffering like this hurts and it won’t harm me. Luxury suffering Tsoknyi Rinpoche calls it.

A tension builds with this sustained relative fearlessness. The mind knows the job is near completion, money is running out, the new plan not only needs designed and 3ds drawn up, client approval etc. so it’s wanting to launch into solution mode and actually wants me to worry about all that. It thinks worry will help keep danger away. Meantime I’m sitting here, solid and also fluid. I know where worry goes….so I sense it stalking me and stay present. No future disaster movies for this mind today thanks. I’m learning to be with pain, I don’t need to create more and more unnecessarily.

Yesterday was just marvellous. It started with an early intensive meeting with the builder who was super nice as well as very helpful and useful and the client who was delightful. We talked logistics of working on the same site, materials, possibilities.

Then to a nearby park from my childhood, along a little river, hugged an old oak tree, scrambled along a steep path through bluebells down a bank and sat staring at the water for a while. Dog happy. Me happy. Completely being myself all day long, spaciousness.

Then back here for intensive drawing, and that progressed well. Then out to the usual park to meet E at 2.30pm. Blazing sunshine. Small walk to river edge to let the dog have a dip then tea and ice cream. N’s wife M arrived after an hour and the three of us stayed till 5.30 just sitting in the sun and chatting. Back here, therapy client had postponed so did some more of this drawing. Great sleep. Wholesome life experiences.

Have concerns about a couple of people, my son and a friend both with addiction and other issues. No contact from son. That’s a first ever. He has a steady girlfriend now though so I assume that’s why. Chats it all out with her perhaps. My imagination has all sorts of horror scenarios for me if I go there. I don’t. I allow life to unfold in front of me.

Optimistically I ponder that it’s unlikely he will make the same level of mistakes I made at his stage of life. They do have to make their mistakes though. And live with the consequences. We do too. Being a mother is vulnerable that way. As a youth I always made sure most decisions were reversible, that I could change my mind. I was prone to reckless radical change making, and also to making big mistakes and getting it into bad situations. Also had goals not exactly tangible in earthly terms that came before everything else. Devotion to the truth whatever the price.

So no lifelong commitments, no tattoos, no drug addictions. Well one marriage actually, supposedly of convenience, though to a psychopathic narcissist. Oops. That had big consequences. Long gone history now though.

These kids are making irreversible decisions though. First the several tattoos. Then the prescribed mind fucking drugs. Things I’d never do, since I’m prone to reversals. Anyways…not my life to live. I don’t look up the weather there any more. Probably a healthy sign. Letting go.

The sun is coming out again this morning. I’m preparing myself for a drive. Charging the phone for a listen in the car to the ‘Why we Meditate’ audiobook by Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Daniel Goleman.