offer accepted!

Holy cow! I guess I'm a real grown up, now! As long as there are no secrets we don't know about, we move to a *fabulous* place in a month!!! A month!

breathe

Riley at the top of the stairs. This is one of this guerilla warfare moves against Sam; the other day, finally fell through after several close calls in which B and I looked up to see him hanging.

Ayruveda update: I'm doing...okay. Meditating more, although serious drop off with this whole house thing. Oh, and since the house hunt, I haven't exercised a lick, and have been eating crap only. Purely crap, and not just regular crap but emotionally eaten crap. So we are talking about ice cream, salt and vinegar chips, an occassional pizza...Slipped into major unconsciousness with my eating choices. Not pretty, people.

So, today I'm resetting my "agni." (digestive fire) I'm doing a liquids fast, which is good for the soul because you get to see all the a-hole thoughts you have when you don't get to soothe them by feeding your face...and they do come, but then they go, and I have a feeling is is more cleansing mentally than being less aware that those thoughts are in the back of your mind. So far, I'm doing well and am still amicable, but 4 o'clock-ish is my usual struggle time for this. I wouldn't call. :)

I'm embarassed to tell ayurveda doc that I've barely been doing the very basic things he suggested. I mean, I've made efforts, but, well... You know. On the positive side, OVERALL since I've seen him: I'm eating food that is more fresh (more prana, or life force), more balanced meals overall, been taking triphala (the India wonder-tonic), and have thought about exercise more (hmm?). Oooh, I know. I started a gratitude journal; that's huge.

House update: Put in the offer. Hopefully, when we talk to our realtor in an hour or so, we'll at least have some little tiny bit of information. I'm a little concerned, because I know someone else was interested, and our realtor said she'd give the seller's realtor a heads-up there was a full-price offer coming. I hope she was able to reach him. You never know. I keep saying, follow your bliss, then hold on as your faith in that ideal is challenged...the point isn't instant gratification, it's in the holding on.

Miriam update: Yes, I still want it! Me! Pick me! Actually, I responded to your comment (you know how they come to you in email), and I kind of thought it might not actually work (and now we know), but I got destracted and never checked. Sorry.

ohhhhhhhhmyyyyyyygaaaaahhhhd

Word is, someone else wants the house. (Which my dad is convinced is fancy real-estate industry trickery.) But anyways, we are leaving in 15 minutes to put in our offer. It may already be too late, if the others beat us to it. We just have to remember that when we follow our bliss, life might test our faith...just keep following, roll with it, let go of the outcome....

breathe.

really, breathe!

check you later.

big & little decisions

Big decision: Tonight, we are putting in (hoping to put in. Waiting for all paper work to come through.) an offer on a house we fell in love with. It's perfect for us. When Joseph Campbell said, "follow your bliss," he was talking about us living in this house. Here is a view from the back yard. Holy crap, I know. Idyllic.
And another. It's a creek lot, just covered in trees. The creek is down an almost mini-ravine (don't worry, there's a fence! Preston and Sam won't be forging any rivers). It's great now, but makes you think of so many great possibilities in the future, too, like carving out a stone pathway from the house, down to the creek...a big deck that juts out over the creek (you know, the kind with the giant stilts and maybe even a hot tub??). Seriously, if we get this house, we'll freak. And hopefully we will get it, because we're planning to put in a full price offer, or close to it. It's just a few miles from downtown, a few miles from work, 1 mile to an arts district. 1 mile to the train, 1 mile to the zoo!! Fun!
If we get to move into nature house, I'm sure I'll have more of an opportunity to use my new (relatively) birding book! Not just some birds, people. ALL birds. I'm getting increasingly nerdy as the years go on. Small decision: pink.

ghetto bohemian birds, flowers, child life

I've mentioned that we've been house hunting. We have driven ALL over, trying to be more open minded versions of our actual selves. Guess what: it worked in a big, bad ol' way! Our new favorite local is North Oak Cliff. My teaching partner (soon to be) is in the process of buying there, and she opened our eyes to one of the best areas in all of Dallas-Fort Worth. They do things differently in the Cliff, more funky-like. That's the way we like it. Way cooler than me, to be honest. As you can see, even the birds have a style of their own. Anyways, learning about North Oak Cliff is exciting, because I only learned about all of the most fabulous parts of it after I started reflecting on the fact that we make our happy whereever we are, bloom where planted, yada, yada. AND, as if I'm not already happy with my proximity to work (5 mi), I'll be even closer! Wanna be my new neighbor? Check it out: www.cliffdwellermagazine.com OR www.bishopartsdistrict.com
Hydrangeas. Next best choice after I found out lillies could kill my cat (sorry Riley, I didn't know). p.s. Riley didn't ever actually eat the lilliess, but he did play it fast and loose, batting them around on a few occassions.
I miss my kids. I wish I could show you pictures of them; they are so full of life and each wonderful! Either teaching is THE best profession for me, or I am seriously still honeymooning. I cannot wait to get a whole new batch in a month! I know. Annoyingly excited. Barf. In spite of my enthusiasm, *H*, if you are reading this, I have been really thinking about going into child life at some point (I know I have been telling this to you for about 6 years now, but it has always been true!). I'm thinking of doing an internship next summer and a little volunteering in the near future. If you don't know what child life is, go to: http://www.mdanderson.org/topics/kids/display.cfm?id=1ac80c36-5a75-4c9e-bf278a114fa26830&method=displayfull (Sorry for the necessary cut and paste. As fabulous as Mac's are, they are not so good with some blogger formatting things, so you'll have to do to your own link. It IS a good article. Go!)

if perception is reality, then what is reality?

I am lyrically stunted. I just don't perceive song lyrics the way you probably do. Exhibit A: I always thought Stevie Nicks was singing, "just like the one winged dove." My husband, pointing and laughing, explained to me that white winged dove makes more sense and that's probably what Stevie meant. At times like this, he turns my own evil teacher tricks against me and says things like, "Uh, let's use our context clues please?"

I guess I made that bed. Always a fan of the self-denegrating humor genre, I later riskily performed what I can only describe as an interpretive vignette of what a flying one-winged dove would indeed look like. At a work holiday party. At my principal's (i.e. boss, evaluator, bestower of financial future) table. Think circles, beer in one hand, free arm flapping most ungracefully.

There are some things I've been meaning to tell you. One is that I had the great pleasure of hearing Maya Angelou speak a few months ago. It was honestly too huge to write about at the time. I can only equate how I felt when I saw her to how I felt when I first saw a real-live sketch Van Gogh made in preparation for a painting that I received love, comfort and beauty from for years and years of my life. Instant overwhelming feeling of gratitude and love.
I first read Angelou's, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" when I was 14. It was a very dark time. Sharing someone else's darkness (as Angelou shares in her memoir), knowing they lived through it, gave me hope. It was precious to me, she was precious to me, like a friend that I really needed. This was right after I moved out of my mom's. To make a long story short, I was given the wrong test, and so medicine that I never should have taken. I have never felt darker in my life, and I believe I will always feel humbled to what those who suffer true deep depression like that are going through. It is senseless and naive to ever, EVER judge them, as we can never perceive the world as anyone else perceives it exactly; the chemicals in our brains, and sometimes the neural pathways from childhood can literally leave us absolutely wired for debilitating depression (thanks to brain plasticity, it is possible for brains to re-wire, by the way), slaves to the brain's circuitry. That's not to say we don't have some control, and I'm not talking about moral relativism. It is just incredibly humbling to consider the degree to which chemicals and neuropathways control our emotions, thoughts and perceptions.
Anways, increasingly, the ridiculous medicine drove me into this mega darkness. I remember being at school one day in 8th grade and actually having a reality break. I was seriously drugged, straight out of a "this is your brain on drugs," commercial. I would just refuse to pick up my head during classes, and I cared not a bit what anyone thought about that. I doubt that teachers in my rural German-mennonite school community were equipped to deal with this, so I spent a lot of time sleeping in the nurse's office. I would just lay there, hoping it was true what they said, that I would feel like living some day. On this particular day, the climax of the whole God-aweful experience, I stumbled from the little nurse's office cot only to observe the walls and furniture around me grow and twist like some Alice In Wonderland nightmare. It was total sensory cluster-youknowwhat. I would reach out for something, and it would be further than it should, bigger than it should, smaller than it should. As you can imagine, I freaked. School counselor (whose coffee, I regret to say, had previously been involved in an Ex-Lax scandal among myself and a group of friends) drove me to a community mental health center where it was FINALLY figured out that they had been wrong all along. Misdiagnosed. Wrong diagnostic test. Living with grandma turned out to be pretty good medicine in and of itself.

Soon after, I got my spunk back, and somehow they let me graduate 8th grade although I am almost positive I missed over 60 days of instruction and surely flunked almost everything. (I have no idea.) Although I never felt that way again, my brush with crazy gave me a strange sense of comeraderie with, well, crazies. I didn't know crazy was something you could catch, and it's still tempting to see a giant chaism that separaties the crazies from the non-crazies, but the humbling reality is that, in the words of Maya Angelou, "We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike."

stillness speaks

+you know that book, The Great Kapok Tree? + This is a kapok tree somewhere near Quepos, Costa Rica, which I clearly cannot get enough of + It is way huger than it looks here + I think I took this pix from a car, actually +

Stillness speaks, says Eckhart Tolle. Not that he's the first or last to say it. Really, when I think of sitting still through mental drama, I think of Pema Chodron and her fabulous words which have really become somewhat of a mantra to me, "This moment is the perfect teacher." In honor of day one of my new two-day (did you know some people do like 90 days?! Holy crap!) second juice fast, I've been reading Tolle's little book called Stillness Speaks. Before I actually read some of it this morning, I did sit for a long time (kind of). I was semi-grumpy for what my normal self would call a silly reason, and really didn't want to sit with it (because, like, it's uncomfortable!). I'm realizing more and more, that these are the times that I would often not even know what was annoying/grumpifying me, because I'd move right on to some kind of destraction. And every time...EVERY time, like frickin' magic, when I sit with it, look the discomfort in the eyes without even telling it go go way, away it goes. It goes away, even if it takes awhile. And I don't tell it to go away; I just accept the moment, I say to myself, "this is what is, the feeling that is, or the fear that is floating past my mind like a dark cloud." This too shall pass, dark clouds and giant fluffy clouds alike...Then, I picked up the book and read something I found fitting :


"When you are identified with mind, you get bored and restless very easily...When you feel bored, you can satisfy the mind's hunger by picking up a magazine, making a phone call, switching on the tv, surfing the web, going shopping, or- and this is not uncommon- transferring the mental sense of lack and its need for more to the body and satisfy it briefly by ingesting more food...
OR, you can STAY bored and restless and OBSERVE what it feels like to be bored and restless. As you bring AWARENESS to the feeling, there is suddenly some space and stillness around it, as it were. A little at first, but as the sense of inner space grows, the feeling of boredom will begin to diminish in intensity and significance. So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not..." -Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks


Uh, yeah! Put a check mark for me in all those boxes! That's what I want to do this for. I think I'd like to go the rest of the day without the internet, and then not at all tomorrow (except maybe to post). No movies. Just acceptance and awareness for whatever is in that moment. In this present moment.

And a little xanga wannabe update. I shall now attempt to define myself by my books and song:
+Been listening to: New Soul, by Yael Naim; The Heart of the Matter, by India.Aire; The Amelie Soundtrack (Le Fabuleaux Destin d'Amelie Poulain), by Yann Tierson
+Been reading: Stillness Speaks, by Eckhart Tolle; Goodnight Nobody, by Jennifer Weiner; The Laws of Money, by Suze Orman
+Been watching: Oprah's Soul Series, Season 8 of Friends...but I'm putting it away! I am!