"It was either stay in bed or get up and meet the impassible barrier."

Well, I've been reading a lot the last few months. 

It began for some reason I can hardly remember to forget now, something about a lockdown and the same four walls and a little bit of imaginative relief instead of an airplane or an intimacy or another physical escapade. 

I missed it here. I missed collecting my thoughts and other people's words, others' ideas. 

So today, reading my second Rebecca Solnit of 2021, I thought I'd come back to see what seeing myself looks like again. 

To see if I feel safe here, to see if I can let go of the idea that it was ever unsafe, that I was ever unsafe. 

Or at least live with it. 

 [Of course I remember I started with Joan of Arc, but that's a different story to chase.]

*

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, she wrtites,

"Maybe if I really paid attention to my life, 

I'd notice that I don't know what's going to happen this afternoon. 

And I can't be fully confident that I'd be competent to deal with it. 

How do I engage this process so that I don't become 

too frightened by what it may unfold or too complacent by avoiding it?

This is the delicate work of awareness. 

 It all happens in half a second.

We see someone and make up a story about who they are. 

And so we get ourselves into a lot of trouble about the stories we make up as we weave our world.

And the practice of awareness doesn't say, don't weave your world 

-- that's what we're hard-wired to do.

The practice of awareness says, don't grasp it too tightly, don't be too convinced."

*

Here's to a life practice of not being too convinced & not being too convincing.