day 29
Today’s a challenge.
On the mystical chart it’s Chesed of Hod.
Chesed means love or kindness. Hod is humility or Majesty. Depends who you ask. Either way we are starting week 5, further up the mountain, and with the climb higher comes the plunge lower, maybe deeper. But for now it just feels like lower, like the blues.
How do I shake it off? bad moods, like an upset stomach, linger till it’s over… but what helps snap out of it? how to hang on to happiness? or retrieve it from what is suddenly a tired blah, for no ‘real’ reason or some big change – just little things that add up?
I do my best. Get up and clean up – clothes, dishes, the emails most recently clamoring for attention.
I look for one thing I can do for someone else. Empty the change bowl on the shelf, take out all those dimes and nickels and pennies and hand em out.
And, which helps the most, turn to the words of elders and sages and fellow travelers who’ve had a hard day, to recall what this is called, and to hear that which needs to be heard, or read, and re-minded. As I read I think about some of the factors of my funk, and know that it has to do with the gap between instant gratification and patient yearning. I’ve been programed to get it NOW. the quick result, reply, rewards and there’s something within me, prompted by this 50 day count that is reminded to take it easy, slow down – marathon, not sprint, the slow pace of seeds into blossoms, the gradual glory of a sunset, a sunrise, the becoming of love. That’s where hope comes in. It doens’t negate the blah of the present moment, should that blah recur, as it would. But it does chart another possibility, of change, of better, or just different.
hope helps happiness rise.
I turn to Sam Keen’s book again. Since I picked it up at a Sonoma book shop during week 1 of this count I keep turning to it, slowly traveling with him, humbled by his wisdom, deeply touched. In the page I left at he writes about changes -about ‘quickening ’:
“it happens suddenly. deadness gives way to new life. depression lifts and the imagination begins to play in the fields of the Lord, to entertain novel possibilities. Unexpectedly, the chains fall away and we are surprised to find ourselves free to experience vivid life. Slowly, carefully as a surgeon gliding a laser scalpel, we peel away the layers of cultural myths, roles, and assigned identities that deaden our capacity to live and touch the quick – the core of our being.
Quicken – to make alive, to vivify, to revive or resuscitate, as from death or an inanimate state, hence, to excite, to stimulate, to impart additional energy. Quicken chiefly stresses the renewal of suspended life or growth or the arousing to full activity, usually suddenly.
Webster’s New International Dictionary
The quick is the holy ground, the place where we are most alive, where we touch the great mystery of our existence. ” (Sam Keen, In the Absence of God)
its easy to have a religious experience, it is more difficult to create religious life. THe quickening and the slow down dance to create commitment, conversation, change. So on this day, 29, sun is coming out here on West Broadway, and coldplay is on the speakers in this little cafe, and it’s holy ground and I’m still anxious but, better. one step at a time.
21 to go.
