Among other things, I think I'm tired of feeling stressed about my aikido test. No one else seems particularly concerned about it, so I'm not going to be either. I'm a little fuzzy this week; a little twitchy, a little crabby. That's fine, overall.
Ah, America, the land of responsibility that wants someone else to take the blame. And, while I try to restrict my generalizations, there are a few that hold special places in my heart, like Texas/Florida/Kansas (festering breeding grounds of racism, homophobia, ignorance, wilful stupidity, and jackassed fundamentalism), and Africa (almost the entire continent is really, really fucked up). Lucky for me, my broad generalizations are regularly reinforced by the news, thus requiring me in conversation to clearly articulate my meaning, but not retract what I originally said.
Last
Night
God
Posted
On the tavern wall
A hard decree for all of love's inmates
Which read:
If your heart cannot find joyful work
The jaws of this world
Will probably
Grab hold of your
Sweet
Ass.
From the Sufi master Hafiz. (The "tavern" in Sufi imagery represents our plane of existence.)
Apparently this best-of-craigslist actually comes from my friends--there was some event I missed with some women (including my ex) wrestling in chocolate pudding.
Over the past couple of years my sense of spirituality has changed somehow. You might say I'm not looking up as much as I'm looking around. I'm a bit less free-floating and lot more engaged in the world around me. Like my aikido right now, in the end I don't think I can really judge it as good or bad; just that my heart isn't open right now, and that ripples out well beyond dating-type relationships, into aikido and my ability to be free-floating and adaptable (which means, among other things, not getting cranky when things aren't how I think I want them) in any realm. I'm not stuck the way I felt I was for most of last year, which is nice: a lot of focus and a change of job have provided constant movement. I still have the feeling that a bunch of cosmic threads are slowly drawing together into some kind of giant resonant chord, and maybe that's real and maybe I'm imagining it; fortunately I can ignore that feeling most of the time and think about now instead of later. But, you know. Here I am. This heaven I'm standing on is quite a place. Chop wood, carry water, eat rice.