Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Word of the Week - 162

Painting by Ed Ruscha.
Word of the Week:  INTERIOR

My own exterior and the spaces I occupy are candidates for sprucing up.  Little by little I work toward a  mythical day of declaring all officially spruced.  The interior is a different business.  I don't imagine a day of completed interior tidying.  I declare myself a work in progress and leave it at that.

These thoughts were sparked by beginning, last Saturday, year two of a daily chair yoga practice.  That year one is now in the record books seems a miracle or something very much like one.  When we were told "one day at a time," in our best moments we hoped we could manage such seemingly small increments.  Continuity is created with baby steps.  That a year now passes so swiftly is a mixed blessing.  That time, as I experience it, simply evaporates, often without a trace, is disturbing.  Yet its quality of vanishing even as I observe it makes 365 days of committed practice more possible than I could have guessed.  Next is the addition of daily art, either as work or play.  There are goals and desires.   I see daily work as the only reliable road.

Another interior assignment is rumination or the clearing of unhelpful thoughts, replacing them with ways of seeing that lead me away from chaos.  We seem generally to have been stockpiling chaos and are now cursed with a surplus which threatens to engulf everything.  If ground coffee still came in cans, I could pour mine into the empty ones as I once did bacon grease.  If I still had a back yard I could bury them there.  Beneath the pine and the camellia bushes, the earth was shady and damp in all four seasons.  In the absence of coffee cans and a private, walled garden, I've sought other solutions.

I adhere to the belief that our capacity for change is infinite.  We do what we can, with what we have, from where we are.  I realize that in my younger life, and possibly still today, I have been stupid in a thousand different ways.  If I could go back, there is much I would do differently.  But we only know what we know when we know it, if at all.  I believe that simply being kind in any and all situations will never be a bad choice for me.  I know that, once spoken, harsh words cannot be unsaid.

This, this living, is all so temporary and fragile, so finite.  Everything we love is really just on loan and we are wise to treat everyone and everything that matters as sacred.  We befriend and, one hopes, become the better angels we seek.