Saturday, March 18, 2006Building a lifeI live in a small house. My office is in my son's room (don't worry, I didn't claim a Home Office deduction this year, so I can go public about these things now.) Thanks to the miracles of WiFi, my office has actually expanded however... and most of my work over the past two years has been done from where I'm at now: propped up against pillows, barely conscious, with a laptop in front of me.I am very happy to be back here with a keyboard. But getting here has been arduous indeed. Putting things back together has been painstakingly slow. I feel like the last ten weeks have been nothing but a series of lists, growing instead of dwindling, hacking at the items that grow like kudzu overnight. The cost of this burglary to me -- in time, in hassle, in money -- cannot be believed. Like a car accident, one flash of an event has taken my life hostage for a prolonged and indefinite midnight of time. But gradually it's coming together. I sometimes think, usually while sitting in traffic, that my whole life's purpose has been to teach me patience. I didn't used to think of myself as patient, but apparently that is one of the universe's little projects with me. I get to wait until my late forties before I have a book with my name on it out in the world. I get to wait, well, for quite a bit longer apparently before I get another shot at a long-lasting, fulfilling relationship. I get to wait for lots of things... computers to load their pages, my dog to decide to go out the back door, my money issues to quit changing their mind about whether to believe in my metaphysics of abundance or not. And maybe this thing that I'm thinking is all about patience only proves the point that it's NOT about patience. Because if I were TRULY patient, I wouldn't be so conscious of how long everything is taking. I'm reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of NOW, and it's pretty good stuff. The more I try to be in the moment, the more I'm conscious of how difficult that is, but it's worth trying. So as I look back on ten weeks and calculate what it's taken to get back to writing in this nighttime solitude in my own room, what it's taken to be caught up with paying bills and filing insurance claims and police reports. When I think about that in terms of the power of Now, then I need to just jetison the whole notion. It's not about the distance from there to here, what I had then vs. what I have now and how difficult it was to get back to the my status quo on Jan 2. It's about what I have right now. It's about the warmth of the covers and the sound of the freeway ebbing and flowing outside my window. It's about the two boys settling down in the rooms around me. It's about the puppy being quiet and sleeping his puppy sleep. It's about this moment, and being present to the present. That's it. That's all there is. This, this moment, this keyboard, this frame of life. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:37 PM  
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