Realness

Dancers' Workshop is on spring break and it has only been myself and my new co-worker Kim in the office. Everyone will slowly start to trickle in this week, including our new development director (who has replaced Robin), and the office will be abuzz again. The quiet is both welcome and also amazingly boring. I go through periods with this job when, in dramatic style, I feel like I am going to pass away from boredom. And then I get upset that I am spending my days, my time, feeling that way...I feel like the computer is sucking away my soul.

I have taken to reading to Olive in the morning. Along with singing my usual songs to her. I discovered Mark Nepo's book The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have. Oprah helped direct me to Nepo's book, one that gives a reading for each day of the year. I am finding the daily reads very inspirational and provoking, and I think that Olive is too.

From March 30, The Energy of Being Real

....He [Carl Jung] suggests that being who we are always releases an extraordinary power that, without intent or design, affects the people who come into contact with such realness. The beautiful and simple truth of this can be seen in looking at the sun. The sun, without intent or will or plan or sense of principle, just shines, thoroughly and constantly. By being itself, the sun warms with its light, never withholding or warming only certain things of the Earth. Rather, the sun emanates in all directions all of the time, and things grow. In the same way, when we are authentic, expressing our warmth and light in all directions we cause things around us to grow. When our souls like little suns express the light of who we are, we emanate what Jesus called love and what Buddha called compassion, and the roots of community lengthen....

Nepo is a poet as well as a writer, and has suffered two bouts with cancer, so he speaks from a well of deep feeling with poeticism.

It has been a weekend of being home with Jamie. The skiing is at its worse. We ventured up Snow King with our skis and skins, but watching others come down the icy, screeching slope only inspired us to climb half way. I picked my way down, Olive and Jamie racing ahead.

We are working on the upstairs of the house, and today, besides cleaning, has been my first real day up there lending a hand. Which makes me feel a little sheepish, but se la vie. Imagining what it is going to look like when it is done is exciting, and peeling back the layers of walls and floors bring small discoveries of the people who lived there in the past. Brown shag carpet, an old hair pin, ugly grey linoleum under the kitchen wood floor. I have been picking old carpet staples out of the floor, which sounds extremely exciting, but it has made me think about how no one will ever have to do this again in this house because there will be no more carpeting! My mind races ahead easily to the decorating part of the project, imagining colors and fixtures and rugs....

Time to return to the staples, although sitting here in front of our downstairs wood stove writing is really more delightful.