my cat, the addict

I just picked up the cat from the guy who was watching him while I was away and he, the cat not the guy, reeks of pot.

I think my little guy has been corrupted, see for yourself:


BEFORE CAT SITTING




AFTER


If you have a lead on a good Narcotics Anonymous group for household pets let me know.

it's not you, it's me

Two years ago when myself, Mikko and a bunch of others went to Kovalam to practice yoga while the Mysore shala was closed we met a woman that I haven't seen since but who I've kept in touch with through the internet. We don't talk often but emailed back and forth quite a bit after Mikko and I broke up. I confided some of the gory breakup details and she made the proper sympathetic noises which I appreciated until I learned that, while she was sympathizing with me, she was making a play for Mikko at the same time. I didn't feel the same about her after that.

She's currently travelling in India and she uploaded a ton of pictures from Mysore a few days ago which I loved, it was wonderful to see pictures of familiar sights. As I was looking at the pictures I thought I saw a familiar face but figured I must be wrong until I saw another, and another, and another. It was Mikko. In Mysore. With her.

Devastating

Mysore is the city we met in, a place he always referred to as "our roots" and spoke of returning to together. The fact that he's there during the very month he'd convinced me to reconcile, that he's there at another woman's beckoning (someone I'd confided in in particular), that I found out through her pictures, and that he knew I'd find out that shitty way but clearly didn't care - oh so sucky. Sucky but it also screams 'asshole' and I cannot continue to feel sadness over an asshole so in many respects, this has been an epiphany.

It strikes me as cheap to return to 'our city' during the same month he'd asked to come to Toronto to reconcile. It strikes me as weak to run from one adoring woman to another without pausing in between to process what happened and face what comes up. And his behaviour these last few months strikes me as downright mean. None of these things are who I thought he was and it's become harder and harder to resist acknowledging that I was in love with his potential, not him.

I don't want to admit that in part because I thought he was just fantastic and I so don't want to know that he's not actually that person but also because then it's me. Then it means that I loved something that never was, that I deluded myself, that I've been creating misery over an attachment that I dreamed up. It means that all of my sadness, my depression, my anger, my sense of loss is completely unfounded and exists because I've chosen to make that my existence. Come on!! I SO don't want to admit that just as I so don't want to admit that I don't like or respect the person he's shown himself to be. But there it is. Even I can't keep fooling myself into thinking that I can love someone that I don't even like. It's time to let all of this drop.

Epiphany

My journals spanning the last two years have been full of confusion over what I’m supposed to be doing with my life and where I’m supposed to be doing it. I spent much of the last few years feeling lost - lost in purpose and lost to myself. Yesterday as the plane flew over the city I saw the CN Tower, followed Yonge Street up to North York, found the white bridge and used my finger to trace the Humber River along it’s winding path until I reached my house and I had a huge grin on my face the whole time.

I may not know where I belong but I’m not lost. I have no idea where I’m going to end up but I know that I’m here. Now that I’m thinking of myself again as opposed to a mythical ‘us’ I'm realizing how much energy I put into nurturing that relationship at the cost of nurturing myself. I see how desperately lost I got in it all and how afraid I was that I wasn't moving, learning, growing; that I was just stagnating in sadness. I wasn't. I was learning, I was growing, I was facing up to some of my demons, and I've emerged from it with a different understanding of what I can do with this life.

Finding out what someone is not has helped me remember what I am.

insomniac pictures

Maybe it's the crazy full moon eclipse or all the stuff floating around in my mind or the late night hot fudge ice cream sundae snack but I'm completely unable to sleep.

Playing with pictures from the beach today instead of sleeping. Here's a few....

leaving

Trading Canadian Geese + ice

for pelicans + sun

and snow + stockings

for sand + bare feet

Back next week...

where i work

The entry hall of one of the buildings on campus following yet another snowstorm. The campus was very quiet but the building feels empty at the best of times with its cavernous hallways. Next week I won't be there, I'm trading snow for sand and headed south for the week. Yay for me :)







 

SPC2 - blue

I've been wanting to participate in the self-portrait challenge for months. When I saw that the theme this month was 'blue' I figured that would be an easy challenge to begin with. I love blue, it's everywhere in my home, my car, my clothes, my work. I seek it out when I draw, when I write, in what I take pictures of, and in my dreams.

I was wrong, though, it hasn't been an easy challenge because blue is also a state of mind. While I haven't necessarily been feeling blue as of late, the memory of the fall when that's pretty much all I felt is close. Too close. There's a lot on my mind and I find myself walking gingerly through the minefields of memories, fears, and dreams to avoid stirring things up unnecessarily. It feels good to let things settle.

Above everything else blue, for me, is water and I love water. Sitting by it, floating in it, canoeing/kayaking through it - nothing can beat the calming, cooling, meditative effect of being near a river, lake or ocean. This picture was taken in Florida in December. I've posted it before but I chose it to post again because it's a moment where my blue state of mind met the vast blue of the ocean and it was a turning point. This moment is where things changed and I started to leave the fall behind and look forward to the spring.

See more blue-ish pictures over at SPC

wah

It's when I write the least that I'm struggling the most. There's a growing reluctance to say anything as I'm keenly aware that I've been saying the same things for months. There's an even bigger frustration that I can't pull myself out of this tailspin.

I've written of feeling like the rug was pulled out from under me taking the lovely life I'd dreamed up with it but I've written less about the aftermath, about the bewilderment of fully being present in my life and finding it lacking. Without the distraction of a relationship and without the expectation that I'd be leaving to build a new life somewhere else, taking a long, hard look at the life I have has been a rude awakening. This is a really great life I've built but it isn't necessarily the right one for me. Kind of like I built the foundations but for the wrong house.

The funny thing is, it's exactly the life I thought I wanted and even that, that I'm quite literally living a life I thought I could only dream of, makes me so very lucky. It's just that now that I'm here I'm longing for a family I don't have, people who aren't here, cityscapes that are not my own, and a different way of earning a living. I'm wondering what I want to be when I grow up, what makes me happy, and dreaming of living somewhere else. I guess that, while I was working to build this life I dreamed up whatever number of years ago, the parameters of what I wanted changed but I was too busy to notice. Now I'm not. Now I'm noticing.

I've been sifting through the vision of the life I thought I was going have, the one I've been grieving, to pull out the pieces I can achieve on my own. There's a core certainty that I'll get there with the same focus and determination that let me create this life but I struggle to retain that certainty. I'm shadowed by an all-pervasive feeling of purposelessness where, the longer I feel caught under its thumb, the less faith I have that I'll ever get out. I go on dates that bore me and serve only as reminders of how hard it's going to be to find someone again and I look at joblistings for overseas jobs that are way beyond my language skills - it's overwhelming and I'm easily buried beneath feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and wishing. Wishing things were different, or easier, or clearer.

It's not lost on me that this isn't about a life, a job, a partner, it's about me. About wondering what my purpose is, the struggle to keep the faith that I'll ever know, and that the answer lies in surrendering to the reality that I'll never know and being happy where I am. I guess I just didn't think I'd be working through all of this at this age or that I'd feel so alone while I was doing it. Even more so, I never expected that I would find it so hard to keep the faith.

I wrote this post a few days ago but didn't publish it because I'm afraid to give the wrong impression. That I'm unhappy, that I'm depressed, that I'm whining. I am those things at times but they aren't me, they're not all I feel, they just seem to be the focus of what I write about because I'm so surprised to be here and I'm working so hard, perhaps too hard, to figure out where I'm going next.

I love that I dreamed a life bigger than I thought I could ever achieve and actually got it and I love that now that I'm here I'm not content to settle. I'm glad that I'm looking, evaluating, dreaming, and even despairing because it's that constant interplay between stretching and reaching that has led me to where I am today. Still, as much as I love that that is a part of who I am, I'm definately not enjoying it at the moment and I'm definitely having trouble keeping the faith which disappoints me to no end.

It's such a strange dichotomy because I know in my heart that I'll achieve whatever dreams I set out for myself, I've never NOT gotten what I wanted/needed, but my mind is so quick to lose the plot. I could spend an entire day laughing but all it takes is one bad moment and my mind runs around like chicken little screaming that the sky is falling in. I never, ever dreamed that it would be so hard to keep that screaming voice at bay and that being in the moment, seeing beauty, laughing would take such conscious, hard effort - I remember a time when it was effortless.

Underneath all of the chicken little screaming I DO know that this too shall pass, that the ebbs will give way to flows and I work to take refuge in the present moment where my fears aren't screaming and my dreams aren't tugging. Right now the present moment means the solace of my office, the sounds of my favourite CD, and a pink-frosted valentine's cupcake. The present moment is a very good place to be.

blue

May not have been the wisest choice for my living room walls...

a whole lotta white and a splash of colour

Lots



and lots



and lots



and lots of snow today.



So I bought some of these



and returned to my nest to spend a quiet afternoon



and an even quieter evening




Not pictured is a gorgeously slow yoga practice, the watching of a very silly girl movie, the eating of cups upon cups of bright red raspberries, and a whole lot of time spent lost in daydreams.

It was a good day.

work today

Or NOT work, as the case may be. The snowstorm (I know, ANOTHER snowstorm) kept the students away and thanks to all the other snowstorms we've had I'm already caught up on casenotes, workshop prep, and my email inbox is clear for the first time in, oh, ever. It's hard to counsel when there's no one to counsel so I not-worked today.

It was a pretty good day.

Outside it continues to snow every bit as heavily as it was when I woke up this morning, tomorrow is going to be beautiful.

yog-ahhh

So. Yoga. This morning I had to talk myself out of a temper tantrum during practice; a full on hand slapping, feet kicking, huffily exhaling tantrum. Instead, I took deep, non-huffy inhale and checked in with myself. It reminded me of the calm, rational way a parent checks in with a tantruming child: hands on hips looking down and asking in that overly-calm, soothing tone "Ok. Just what is it that you want?". Turns out, my self wanted to chill the heck out. To suck at poses I can normally do and for that to be ok. So, ok, today my asana practice sucked.

I've been moving into the intermediate (second) series these last few months which involves a lot of backbends. Instead of my chest opening, as I'd assumed would be the case, making some of the primary poses easier the opposite has happened. My back has stiffened up and I quite literally can't get into (bind) some of the twisting poses in the first series. Which causes me NO END of frustration.

I get it. I get that my body is changing. The new poses are developing underused muscles and revealing weak areas that I just worked around before, the result is that I'm stiff and am forced to develop those ignored areas before entering deeply into the poses again. Kind of like my body is using the information gained from the intermediate series to self correct. It reminded me of something someone said after I adjusted them in a class this weekend, they looked up and said that practicing is like giving the body a chance to remember where it wants to be. So true, and this is a good thing, just frustrating. Soooo frustrating.

It kills me to be incompetent at anything but to work for months to learn something only to lose it again - argh. As I moved on from my narrowly averted temper tantrum I thought about what the practice reveals in the body and, beyond that, in life. Today I got something very cool. I got that not binding in my twists doesn't mean I've become incompetent period, it just means that after such a big growth spurt my body needed to pull back and integrate what it's learned before continuing to move forward. And, yes, I got that it's very much the same in life - I got it in many, many different ways loud and clear.

This, my friends, is but one of the many reasons that yoga rocks my world.

"The power needed in yoga is the power to go through effort, difficulty or trouble without getting fatigued, depressed, discouraged or impatient and without breaking off the effort or giving up on one's aim or resolution. A quiet vigilant but undistressed persistence is the best way to get the sadhana (yogaic practice) alone" Sri Aurobindo

instead

I thought today would be different.

Instead of thinking about how I thought I'd be spending the last day of January cleaning in preparation for the boy's arrival, I led my friend through two hours of yoga, pranayama and meditation which was amazing. Amazing for him and amazing for me. It reminded me of how much I wish to do that for my living - very much a new beginning in itself.

That evening, instead of thinking about how I thought I'd spend the last night of January in delicious anticipation of his arrival the next day, I spent the night snowshoeing through unplowed streets to S's house where I sat in the company of 7 others howling in laughter. It was purifying, that laughter, better than any therapy. As if the cobwebs of the last few months had been cleared to welcome a fresh start.

Instead of spending the first day of February thinking about how I thought it would begin with a trip to the airport arrivals, I spent it in a red snowsuit hiking through the forest while the snow continued to fall. Instead of thinking about how I thought the day would include the sound of our stupid, made up language I spent an hour sitting by the river listening to the sound of the water made heavy and slow by the cold. I held out hands filled with birdseed and, as the chickadees landed on my outstretched fingers to feed, I didn't once think of how I thought my hands would be holding the hand of someone else instead of birds and birdseed. Nope. Not once.

And today, instead of thinking about how I thought this would be our first full day together again, our fresh start, I woke up early to make breakfast for everyone, drew a picture that didn't suck with my new ink pens, and hiked through the still-unplowed snow to P's house to lead a group in yoga. I didn't once think of how I thought I'd be teaching yoga somewhere else, with someone else. Uh uh. Not even a little bit.

The tail end of January and the beginning of February have been packed with good things: whispered inspirations, opportunities, a knowing of where I should be, and fresh starts. Instead of spending the weekend thinking about what might have been, I spent it consciously acknowledging the new beginnings that have come my way and I didn't once think about how different these new beginnings are from the new beginning I was expecting just a few weeks ago. Definitely not. No way. Not even the tiniest little bit.

Uh. Uh.




Sigh.