Death Begins in the Colon

I am not a person who is unmoved.

Although I do pretend to be sometimes. Evidently pretty well since I’ve had people express amazement that I might be depressed sometimes, or say to me after they were talking to me that they had thought I was just stuck up before, or lots of other things like that. I took a psychological test one time and came out an extrovert which surprised me but the person administering/interpreting the test said, “CG, you aren’t really an extrovert, you’ve just learned how to act like one.”

But there is also “acting as if”, a useful technique. And sometimes it has worked and I have passed beyond and I have become independent of the good or bad opinions of others. In some areas. In others, I am not really unmoved.

Or unhurt. But what my friend Laura recently said to me about that rings so true: I am ready to be hurt even before I am hurt and in giving it so much energy I actually draw it to myself. So I have resolved not to be ready to be hurt.

And it is funny, my readiness to be hurt does not result in flinching, I just sort of stand there in front of the firing squad without a blindfold, knowing what is coming and what it feels like already. Sometimes I adopt some open-hearted yoga asana. And even when I didn’t know it was coming, I can always look at who inflicted it and think, I knew, I knew not to give myself to a person who (fill in the blank). And then the pose is of martial arts readiness. And when I do flinch, it is always because I really don’t expect that person to hurt me – that’s the only time I’m afraid of it, when it is a person I’ve convinced myself I could trust. I’m afraid only of being wrong.

And a thousand other things. And nothing at all. All at the same time.

I discovered this last night: everything I long for and dream about is right here in my life right now if I can only see it. A husband’s caress really is the loving kindness cherishment and not only an expression of something else being required of me.

I discovered this a thousand times: as much as nothing changes, everything changes. I always think, “This is how it is going to be forever,” even when I know it isn’t, it can’t be. But when it is bad, I’m always apprehensive that this is what I’ll always and forever have to live with and when it is good I always relax like laying in the sun.

And the cycle spirals. And I try to follow the mothership as it were, move toward who I really am, who in fact the universe really is. Which sometimes is summer and sometimes is winter. This week has been perfectly March. Saturday we actually had thunder and rain and hail and snow and wind blowing alternatively warm and cold and sun all in the same day. In like a lion.

Out like a lamb?