pulling weeds and planting flowers

Few peo­ple have been able to fill the void late­ly. The ones who do sing to me the unashamed­ly erot­ic songs of John Dowland and help me test new decks.

Through it all, I’ve been try­ing to take five breaths every now and then, inhal­ing and exhal­ing a lit­tle more ful­ly than usu­al. Trying not to live like it’s a fri­day every day. Trying to fig­ure out if I should apol­o­gize for using your song to score the moments I shared with some­one else. Trying to rec­on­cile my old Taoist beliefs with my new Buddhist views. Trying to be hap­py with the per­son I am, instead of let­ting dis­con­tent dri­ve self-improve­ment.

house in the woods

 

Frigid win­ter days are teach­ing me patience and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. Some are eas­i­er than oth­ers. I’ve been work­ing with the fick­le swings instead of against them. Otherwise, it’s a con­stant strug­gle when try­ing to impose sta­t­ic order on inher­ent­ly unsta­ble process­es. The hard part is mak­ing plans when you don’t know how you’ll feel from one day to the next.

Jesse arranges

Back in the day when we were doing cov­ers of Frank Ocean songs. One of the most rec­og­niz­able things about Jesse’s room are instru­ments strewn about.

The great­est test of my progress so far will be an acoustic show Jesse asked me to play with him on Sunday. Anxiety has been get­ting the bet­ter of me late­ly, and the prospect of hav­ing only two nights of rehearsal does noth­ing to assuage this.

I’ve been keep­ing in mind that we were able to pull off a decent per­for­mance last time when I did­n’t know the show was going to hap­pen until a few hours pri­or; one of those exer­cis­es to fos­ter pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences and com­bat neg­a­tiv­i­ty bias. Fortunately, Jesse is a great front­man to be behind, cause he com­mands the atten­tion of any­one watch­ing, also tak­ing the atten­tion away from ner­vous fin­gers and live jit­ters.

cat and girl

 

The jour­ney of self-dis­cov­ery has been dif­fi­cult. When there’s a his­to­ry of trau­ma, it’s inevitable that an uncom­fort­able feel­ings get stirred up every now and then. I take care of myself by mak­ing sure I see the impor­tant peo­ple on a con­sis­tent basis and liv­ing in those moments. The lit­tle ways to heal are found in both the expe­ri­ences them­selves and the time one takes to inter­nal­ize those expe­ri­ences.

This is how I learn that self-com­pas­sion isn’t self-pity, and that most peo­ple bring less kind­ness to them­selves than to oth­ers. To get on my own side, I’ve been visu­al­iz­ing myself as a child, just as wor­thy of care as any oth­er. I would wish the best for that lit­tle per­son, and it helps me under­stand that I should wish the best for myself as well.

7 comments

  1. Aw dang, I did­n’t know Byron was being THAT cute behind my butt! The beau­ti­ful world through the rose-coloured glass­es.

    • Yeah, I love that pic­ture. It’s rare to catch him so com­plete­ly relaxed and vul­ner­a­ble, chin over leg.

      It also makes me a lit­tle jeal­ous, cause he does­n’t snug­gle up to me very often, and yet he’s like that with you EVERY TIME you’re here.

      • Byron’s a ladies man. You get more cud­dles in total, he’s just seiz­ing the day.

  2. What exact­ly do you mean by your for­mer Taoist beliefs vs your new Buddhist beliefs? I’m intrigued.

    • Excellent ques­tion.

      I’ve been read­ing a book about Buddhism that approach­es it through neu­ro­science instead of reli­gion. I’m find­ing a lot of the exer­cis­es and prac­tices to be very prac­ti­cal and rel­e­vant in deal­ing with the issues I’m hav­ing. Until I picked this book up, I had no idea how lit­tle I knew about Buddhism.

  3. I find Buddhism com­pli­cat­ed, and hard to under­stand. Maybe you can share with us some of your enlight­en­ments.

    • I find it quite abstract as well, and dif­fi­cult to under­stand cause I can’t relate it to any Western religions/philosophies. I’m start­ing to pick up bits and pieces though, and will like­ly be writ­ing about it at some point.

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