Tag: rest

Getting Quiet

My New Year’s resolution (yes, I dared to have one and no, it was not to be nicer to people-sorry, in-joke) is to be better at rest.  Getting a full amount of sleep.  Taking breaks from tasks to recover so that I can do more better in shorter times.  Ideally.

To set the backdrop, I don’t spend a lot of time on my balcony.  It’s nice.  i keep it decorated and decently clean.  But I’m rarely comfortable spending time out there.

Yesterday, I went to visit a friend.  She and her partner regularly go outside for a smoke, they sit in their backyard, look at the trees and relax.

Today I realized that I avoid the balcony because I am bothered by the idea of simply relaxing.  I should be DOING something, not just sitting on my ass.

Or so says the back part of my brain.

Tonight I went outside for my own nip of bud though more importantly to take a distinct break between tasks, between things I was working on.  It felt good at their place, surely I could do something similar in my own home?

And it worked.  Okay, yes, we have to ignore my twitchy, must move, must do something, must must must voice, but after that it was calm, it was peaceful, it allowed me to regroup, as it were, and settle comfortably back into myself.

I didn’t wait until I was too exhausted and then crash out from the exhaustion of pushing myself through the horror of doing what I “should” do.  Instead, when that feeling came on, I went outside, took a break, gave myself just 15 minutes of relaxing and contemplating and BEING.

Then came back in and it was round two of doing…wait, I could do whatever I wanted.  And I did do it.  I did the things on my list but because I wanted them done not so that I wouldn’t feel guilty.

Recognizing and using the power of breaks and rest is my New Year’s resolution.  Here’s planning towards it being a new habit and soon.

A night of fabulousness to all, and to all a fab night.

~Abysmal Witch

Stillness

As I sit here in the deep twilight, candlelight warming the walls of my home, I pause and wonder if I am satisfied enough to stop.  Stop cleaning, stop working, stop trying to make more of my day.  Stop.

I’m on vacation and using this time in the way I feel best for my spirit and soul.  Or attempting to do so.

By the first I mean that I am staying home, enjoying the world that I have built for myself, from the physical enjoyment of how I’ve decorated and arranged my rooms to the basic pleasures of living I consider most important:  stretching, ritual, writing.  I have gone to places made favourites in childhood that are still beautiful to me.  I have spent time with friends.  I have read.  I have eaten great food.  I have seen movies.  I have surfed the web and even watched a bit of tv.

By the second I mean that I have been distracted from my highest goals of my vacation.  My list of what is important to me is, it turns out, in order of importance.  And I have regrets that I spent less time in writing than I had planned and more time in the movies and the web.  I have even avoided writing with a judicious application of house-cleaning.

My house is better for it, but my story isn’t.

The story is a child of mine.  A child I am afraid to bring to term.  She still rests in my belly and will until the editing is done and the queries start flying in flocks out into the world.  The longest gestation in history.

The closer I get to her birth, the more afraid and reluctant I become.

And this week I am getting very, very close.

And so I procrastinate and avoid even though I have longed for and waited for this chance, to have the time sitting in my hands, no, freeing my hands to do what I love, without boundaries, without alarm clocks, without a list of ten other things that have to get done now too.

Even now I write this rather than edit my story.  But this I find congruent with my inner spirit.

Today has been an extravagence of avoidance.

Strangely, it was spent primarily cleaning my home.  I mean really cleaning.  Vacuuming under the couch, washing under the stove kind of really cleaning.  A little magical cleaning was thrown in to boot.

My home feels great.  So good that I feel very relaxed and have cheerfully lit candles in nearly every room (small tealights in proper receptacles because I’m crazy, not stupid).  This is the state of clean I always want my home to be in and so very rarely see.  It’s glorious and I am thrilled that it’s like this.

I am heartbroken that I did not work on my story.

And I am torn between appreciation and anger (at myself, of course, for choosing other than my supposed primary goal).

Ah, that is the heart of it, isn’t it?  That I had told myself that my primary goal was to finish this book.  And yet I stray from that goal.  It was and is one thing to stray from it when pursuing the other goals of my vacation, but it is something else entirely to cheat on my goal with some random movie or etsy surfing.

It’s not as if the finishing of it is a ‘fake’ goal, something I tell myself but in my heart don’t care about.  No, it’s very real and I enjoy working on it.  And so it is my fear holding me back.  Ah, the theme of my year.  Fear.

But in the end, that will be something to face tomorrow, to see if I can do what I currently plan for it.  Which, yes, does include some work on the story.

For now, I sit, watching a movie, typing in a blog, and enjoying the peace and clean charm of my home.

And realize that at the centre of me, past the pleasure, past the disappointment, there is stillness.  It is accepting.  It is peace.  It is neither of those things.

It is.

I have stopped.

It is good.

~the Abysmal Witch

Fire dozing

The end of a long day, the tension of too much history and too much pain and too many turns just wrong enough that the feeling is that of being lost in the woods even though the road is quite visible still through the trees.  All of it sitting in the belly, solid and weighty, very separate from the marvelous meal that rests in the official part of the stomach.

Distraction calls with its usual voice.  So long as we keep dancing with the flow of constant information, there will be no need to rest deep inside with the fear and the pain.

The fire is lit.

I start the music and by will and choice stretch myself out before it.  Warmth envelops me but I do not relax.  Or do I?  I drop the distractions and settle into my stillness.

The fire calls, pops and sings to me.  Not to get my attention, but purely to savour its own ravenous existence.  It will consume everything until it dies.

And it does not care.  It is enough that it will be for as long as the wood shall last for in that time it will be fully satisfied in its consumption.

Warmth reaches out to me just as I crave it to do.  But as of yet I would not beg for it.  Not yet, not quite.

And there I lie, basking in its warmth, looking into its depths, hearing it murmur to itself without any interest in my existence whatsoever.  And I glory in its indifference.  And I start to doze.  Lulled by its heat, by its fast progression of life, by its beauty, into a place of rest.

In the deep warmth of the fire, I shall rest.