Posts
The longer I sit the harder it is to get up. I know about the negative effects of TV, but I am not watching TV, I am simply sitting—now reading, now looking out the window, now doing a puzzle. The sun beats in through the south window and warms me in a way our new-but-nonetheless-ineffective furnace never can. My head and neck are hot from the sun and I twist and turn my shoulders to take advantage of the warmth, to let go of winter's tension.
I should move. I should get up, do something, stir my stumps, get a move on. Work awaits. While I sit I could be sorting through the box of file folders sitting in the upstairs hall—folders I transferred from the top left drawer of my two filing cabinets. Why are all four of those drawers full to bursting, when I practically never add anything to them? It's all old stuff, and the time has come to rid the house of all old stuff (excluding the two human inhabitants). We've reached the stage where the burning question is "Do we want the kids to have to go through all this?" That's the question, and there are days of lethargy when my answer is "Why not? Let them sort through it." But that is not the answer of a dutiful parent, a responsible adult, so I go at least so far as to move the folders from the drawer to a box. Some day I will watch some riveting old film with one eye and with the other eye and half my brain I will make decisions about old papers: Keep? Pitch? Keep? Pitch?
But right now I am sitting in the sun dreaming of spring—that two-day period when crocuses dare to bloom.
The other way to sit is more conscious, by definition, but I have trouble doing it in this room, in this chair. If I were to throw off my lethargy I could go to my little room, close the door, turn on Max-the-Space-Heater, and summon up guides and teachers. I could sit in awareness with my body, my self, the sounds I hear. I could smell the smoke of sweetgrass or white sage and be open to what might happen.
When I sit like that, periodically calling my mind to stop its puppy-like wanderings away from where I am and want to be, I feel I could sit there forever. This feeling is totally different from my lazy, sun-absorbing loll in the big chair at the south window. There's sitting and then there's sitting. And whichever one I am involved in, I want it to last forever, though for opposite reasons: the one entrapped by lethargy, the other enmeshed in mystery.
Food blog: http://fastandfearlesscooking.blogspot.ca
No comments:
Post a Comment