Annoyed in My House on A Wednesday Afternoon
I’m already in it yall! This week Bogs (3.5) is already out of school while it’s Chop’s (7) last week. Btw, those are not my kids’ names, and we did not change their names. How amazing would that be if I actually named my kids Bogs and Chop?! Kinda bummed I didn’t. And/or if they wanted their names to be Bogs and Chop? That also would be amazing. They are nicknames, and for some inexplicable reason it feels too personal to share their actual names in my newsletter, yet less personal to share nicknames. I don’t know! It’s my way!
Yesterday I was exhausted because neither of my kids slept well the two nights before, which means I did not as well. In my blessed current older kid life, that doesn’t happen so often, which reminds me how cruel it can feel to not sleep. When I don’t sleep now I feel a sense of bewilderment at how many years I did that. Shout out to you who are still doing it! Talk about x-games dharma practice!
Anyway, I was annoyed at my family for no reason, or the reason of no sleep. I kept watching my mind catch, like how a hangnail catches on every material. I could see my mind snagging on everything, in resistance to almost every experience. The experiences were just everyone being in my house in the afternoon and evening, being themselves. I could feel my ego-everyday-mind obsessively looking for a problem. It will find them! It did! An example of a problem is: if I feel this exhausted and overwhelmed today, how will I function in summer in a month or two? I can’t do this! It hasn’t even really started yet!
Then I would notice that happening, and taking a breath. Oh! Look at my mind doing that! I can see that it’s an imaginary problem because all that is happening is I’m projecting my current state into the future, cultivating fear about the future. Right now, I’m standing in my kitchen, looking around. That is all that is happening right now. I don’t need to imagine my state at this moment will be my state in a month, or two.
(If I discover I need more help, I will find it! There are many layers of support available to me, and there are always more options than first appear. So I’m not saying I wouldn’t take a more concrete action if needed.)
In the evening, I got some magic moments of solo time in the shower, and grace arrived again, and I was flooded with remembering. Remembering that the annoyance itself is sacred. The “problems” that arise because my mind is filling space with them are sacred. Forgetting and remembering is sacred. I realize this might sound flat - it’s so hard to convey the shining aliveness of it. It’s this remembering that every single state, every single flavor of pain and discomfort, is also a gift of earth life, exclusively available in a human body (as far as I know now). I used to say these pains are a gift because they the other side of joy and happiness, they go together. But now I don’t even feel that. I feel that the pain and sorrow and other emotions that used to feel inherently difficult, don’t anymore. And I don’t need pain and sorrow to experience joy. Joy is what is present when my thoughts aren’t covering it over, and it’s present even when they are covering it over.
Maybe it’s like marveling at the entire process from caterpillar to butterfly. I wouldn’t change one part of it — as if I could! And therefore each part is the magic. Same with my life. But instead of that being a concept I’m efforting to believe, I am experiencing it fully in my body, in my whole experience. I keep writing about this because I keep trying to understand it, or figure out how to share it, because it’s the realest magic I’ve ever experienced. I watch this remembering happen, and it’s like the feeling goes away. But I’m not trying to have it go away. I remember: oh, the annoyance is sacred, the annoyance is another material of earth life, how sacred and beautiful! And then I can’t find the annoyance anymore. Like I am looking for it and it vanished, but I don’t know how it happened.
I wonder if and hope that sharing this is useful to you in some way.
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One of my goals for the summer: I want to find this awake place I’ve lived in for months now, in conditions where I’m immersed with my kids. Because I want to feel myself being inside it no matter what is happening in my life. I want to see where and how I will be inside it, what it will feel like, when I don’t have more alone time. And I am in this process of feeling that, right now!
I’m realizing that one of the reasons I want to do this is freedom - freedom to know and push / invite all of us (mostly me) in my family to be together through more states. To bolster resilience and tolerance for a bigger range of being together. Part of how I imagine that arising is my needs and desires not being taken care of when the kids are in care, and so I will be forced (in a chosen, loving way) to bring more of those needs and desires into the family picture. This feels appropriate as my kids get older, and a way I want to update with them. So I’m interested in this place where we get exhausted, or bored, or frustrated, and see what happens through that.
An art project called summer, being together. What is produced, and more importantly offered, from us and to us, by these constraints on how we organize our time for three months?
That’s what I’ve got this week. I’ve written this in between answering one million questions from my dr pondu (Bogs) wearing only socks and typing at her keyboard, so I can’t really revise it - honestly not sure it’s any different from school year writing, but let’s call it summer writing hahahaha. Thanks for being here with me.
What is happening for you this summer?