The Experiment: Day 305 ~ On Being Back In The Zone…

There are stacks of books in every direction on my work table here. Favorite old books, books that have inspired my teaching for decades, books that are worn soft from use, underlined, highlighted, with notes in the margins. Books within whose pages I have the sense of coming home. I am living in these books just now and will be for the foreseeable future.

Last night, tired from a lovely day out with my grandson, I wrote here that I was going to curl up with my pugs and binge watch a favorite show. What I did instead was curl up with them with a few books and my notebook, the one that I use to write out class material, and I became so engrossed in reading through books and writing out exercises for upcoming classes that all of a sudden it was 10:30 and I was too tired to do anything but turn out the light and go to sleep. This morning over coffee I was back at it. I am in the zone once more and it feels fabulous. This is my happy place.

And today was a therapy day. I went out to therapy, stopped at the store on the way home for a roast chicken and came home and shared bits with the puggeries. We took a rest together but my mind was still piecing together sets of exercises. In my classes we do sets of exercises that work together to open up and unravel mysteries we hold deep inside. Anything might take us there. I carefully craft the material to lead us into and through sometimes dark passages and come back out into the light. Coming back to these books makes me remember so many times I sat writing through the hours with amazing people willing to do this holy work. It is soul work. We go deep.

Last night I opened up one of my most beloved books. Pages drifted out. I had to glue it back together and put rubber bands around it while it dried. Other book’s pages are yellowed with age. Notes that I wrote years ago are still stuck in the pages. I am back in an instant to where I once was, when this was the work that I did and never imagined doing anything else. Life will take us away but we will be drawn back again to what we were meant to do, who we were meant to be. I am a teacher. This is what I do.

It is 8:30. I am tired. And I am feeling very quiet. It is hard to write here because I am somewhere else, remembering other times and places, people that I met in my classes that changed my life, people who became dear friends, people who have long since gone on to where their life took them even as my life took me to places I could never have imagined. This is what life does, it catches us up like a leaf in a stream, moving fast, over boulders, too fast for us to catch hold of anything to slow down the fast moving current, the passing of time, the years go sailing by, and then one day we find ourselves drifting more slowly and we come to rest on a bank in a whole new place. Whole new vistas open up before us. Life begins anew. New people show up, there is still, we discover, time to live and have new adventures. Life isn’t over as we feared it might be. We begin again. This is where I am now.

There is work to be done once more. There are new people, and even some old dear friends returned, the most precious gift of all. And life once more is filled with potent possibilities abundant. I sit in awe. And tonight I am thinking about all of this as I take the rubber bands off of my old dear book whose pages will hold a little while longer, and I read favorite passages and think about the work before me. I am filled with a quiet peace. I didn’t know I could ever get here again. 

The Experiment ~A 365 Day Search For Truth, Beauty &
Happiness: Day 1 ~ Introduction To The Project
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
Yoda

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