50th birthday week in California dancing, playing, exploring, thinking, relating, connecting, witnessing, creating.
Excellent example of why it is good to look and pause before taking action–such as picking a blossom.
A little after 5 this morning, the sound of the unexpected rain brought me out of my dream state. I was not ready to rise, so I realigned myself into a good savasana and just listened — following no other thoughts — until the morning musical awakening arrived at 6.
I could have thought of it in this language: the rain woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep, but I was still tired so I lay in bed until the alarm went off.
Hotels, I think, were on to something when they started offering “wake up calls,” though the sound of the phone ringing in the middle of an intense dream can be shocking. When did we start naming the sound we use to bring us from dreaming to waking “the alarm?” What perspective does it give to our day to think we need an alarm to start it? Why not at least “alert” or “signal” for the days when the only technology (think about that piece of it) was a jarring sound?
I have been thinking a lot about what wakes me up since Becky passed away. For 21 years, either Henrietta or Becky was lying on or next to me purring before any electronic signal could go off. They knew when it would go off and every morning sought a little petting (and then food) before they heard any signal to start the day. They incorporated it into their rhythm and created a good waking routine around my schedule.
Some of my waking with the cats instead of the electronic sounds must have been me ready to be shifted from sleeping to waking by the cats’ attention, because I am still waking 10-20 minutes before Bose technology utters an automatic sound (usually yoga chants) to make sure I get off to work. I also know from conscious attention to the effects on my sleep from when and what I eat and what I put into my day and until how late, that when I am keeping my eating, practicing, and sleeping schedule steady, I have no need to be called awake by something outside myself to start the day.
I have been walking past this sculpture regularly ever since I was a judicial clerk in 1987-1988. It is in the plaza between the Federal and DC court houses. It is dated in the subject matter. The partner-associate relationship has shifted over the years, both from the inclusion of women in the law place and the changing economics. The shift in economics to assume that most associates will not be partners because the firm simply does not have the space for more partners and because the associates feel freer to move around and for a whole host of other reasons, some more benign than others, has left new workers bereft of the support of a mentor. In the disruption of the continuity of the workplace, those who stay are less motivated to serve as mentors and lose the delight and strength that comes from the action of mentoring. Those who come into a workplace without a mentor never learn the way they could. Although some of the changes are good, the missing mentor is indeed a loss.
Though the sculpture reminds me of something lost, I love this sculpture, especially where it is set. It is absolutely suited to its location and was made with great skill and love.
Thanks to the farmers who come in to town, I know the people who gather the eggs and milk the goats to make cheese. Thanks to my friend Jess, who left a tub of sourdough starter on my porch Friday morning, and my inspiration to make dough to rise overnight between dinner with neighbors and going to bed, I have homemade sourdough bread. With such a fairly wet and very active chef, it was pretty successful to do a sort of hybrid of the New York Times’ no knead bread, which I kneaded, but not for 10-15 minutes, and Martha Rose Shulman’s no-yeast sourdough country bread (in Great Breads).
