Saturday Morning, In Brief

There's an early Fall rain going on, just a pleasant shower -- but it makes my hackles rise as I contemplate the Rainy Season to come. It's time to move my pump into the laundry room so it's in place well before the threat of flooding.

I've started doing Morning Pages again -- three pages, longhand, before anything else in my day. It's been nice, and a much better way to start the day than immediately powering up the computer and doing email and LJ. I need to get in touch with myself first before I start ingesting the thoughts, feelings, and events of others.

My To-Do list for today consists primarily of getting no-longer-used things out of my house: old comics, back issues of magazines, my sister's antique chair. I'm also going to buy a new toilet, since mine was damaged a bit during the plumbing work. ( Details )

It occurred to me this morning that if I wait to get all the daily household tasks done before tackling the big, space-transforming chores, I'll never get ahead. But if I can get this clutter out, it will make it easier to maintain a baseline of neatness. Thus, the dishes are farther down the priority list than usual for a Saturday.

Spirituality and Plateaus

I have several major posts building up about various aspects of my spiritual life. The major themes are integration, transformation, and embodiment. It's all part of The Pentacles Gig: taking what's most important to me out of the abstract, the intellectual, and the interior, and manifesting it in the outer/material world.

I found myself using the phrase "spiritual plateau" in conversation with havah_prewett a few weeks ago, and the concept has been sticking with me. Not "plateau" as in an exalted vantage point, but in that long, flat space that seems to be void of progress.

We need the plateaus to adjust to and integrate all that we've achieved in getting there. They aren't the end of the journey, even though they may feel that way. And we have to do the work that goes with them, even if that "work" is rest. Or stillness. Or germination. All the silent, invisible, it-doesn't-look-or-feel-like-anything-is-happening stuff.

I've been trying to move forward, but I'm getting the sense that I haven't done enough integration to be ready yet. I've been trying to rush too quickly from one state of being to the next without having fully integrated what I've learned, without really getting to know who I've become. But during the past weeks, as I've been starting to do that work, I'm feeling the power slowly gathering, the momentum quietly building for another leap ahead.

But not yet.
Not quite yet.


“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Interests Collage Meme

It's kind of strange to look at a collage of my interests and not be able to recognize which interest each image refers to.

( My Interests Collage! )

Create your own! Originally Written By ga_woo, Hosted and ReWritten by darkman424

Family

My sister and her fiance were just at the house for her to pick up her antique chair (cross another item off my to-do list!).

He noticed -- how could he not? -- the holes that are still in my ceiling and walls from the plumbing project. He's volunteered to come back next weekend and tape and mud and patch the holes, if I provide the materials.

"That's what family is for," he said simply.

And yes, I have reason to believe he's better at this than the "upstairs family" associates who have been brought in. And if I'm wrong, I'll ask him to stop after the first patch.