Sebene Selassie is one of the lead teachers for Ten Percent Happier. I have probably meditated with her hundreds of times over the past few years. Her book, You Belong, is an exploration of finding connection in a world that often focuses on division. She introduced me to Audre Lorde.
I find her personal story compelling:
Growing up, I felt like a big weirdo. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and raised in white neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. I was a tomboy, immigrant, Black girl who loved Monty Python and UB40, explored Asian philosophy, and did not go to prom. I never believed I belonged. But I do. So do you.
In addition, she has suffered at least four rounds of cancer, including one in the past year and she speaks honestly about how those struggles impact her life and practice. I find her fun, refreshing and serious, all at the same time.
She writes two newsletters a month, on the new and full month. Here is her more recent one in which she muses on learning about astrology (something I am exploring as well), Octavia Butler, and coupling. Take some time to read it and follow her links as they give a better sense of her philosophical grounding.
The Lebanon Valley rail trail near Cornwall, Pennsylvania
Summer is on its way out with a few last hot, humid days. Metereological fall arrived September 1, and the Equinox is tomorrow. Autumn is my favorite season. I love watching as it slides into our lives every year, chilly mornings and foggy fields reminding us, as Robert Frost once did, that nothing gold can stay.
With summer gone, I find myself nesting, decluttering and organizing my studio, making lists of fall projects, and taking some time to explore bullet journaling and planners. It seems as though everyone has a planner to sell. As I explored the options, it occurred to me that I could just make my own planner/journal, the goal being to use it for both planning and reflection. I have always been intrigued by the Daily Examen, a spiritual practice based on Ignatius Loyola. Loyola’s practice was based in Christian imagery, of course, but I think it is possible to take it as a more general approach to ending the day with intention. Actually, my Apple watch even suggests a bit of mindfulness as a way to wind down at the end of the day so the practice has certainly entered the secular world.
Even as I work on my organizer, I continue to drift along a bit. There have been endings: my retirement, the loss of Spot, the last of the vegetables from the garden. And there is the usual beginning as I head into the fall semester. But, for now, while there are a few glimmers of new opportunities, there is no clearly marked path. Astrologer Chani Nicholas mentioned the concept of liminal space in past two weekly readings, and the concept resonates with my current state. As I understand them, liminal spaces, from the Latin limen or threshold, are the spaces in between the endings and beginnings of practices and lives, its roots in anthropology and rites of passage. It is considered an uncomfortable place, and there are days when I wonder if I am living it right.
Joseph Goldstein, in the Ten Percent Happier app’s Common Questions course, commenting on what might happen at the beginning of your practice, says with a chuckle, ” The beginning can be the first twenty years.” I have only been exploring my own new beginning for a couple months so maybe I don’t need to worry too much and just allow myself to experience liminality for a little while longer. I created the image at the beginning of the post, using my own photo of the Lebanon Valley Rail Trail.
With that initial busyness behind me, I am facing a fall with more free time than I have had for decades. Seriously, decades. And I want to make sure I am finding the balance of chilling out and stepping up. One thing I am doing is learning to relish my reading life again.
A Woman Reading, Camille Corot
A long time ago, before you were born*, when I was still single, and life was great (it’s a song reference..google it), I used to get up on Saturday mornings, pour fresh-brewed coffee into the thermal pot, add it to a tray with mug, cream and something sweet to eat, and retire to bed for the morning with a book and a cuppa. These were my hours to read and sip and rest after a long week of work before whatever chores and activities the weekend held. Depending on the book and the weekend, morning might stretch into afternoon, and I would find myself sprawled on the sofa at sunset, probably with a glass of wine, mourning the end of yet another book. I know I had responsibilities but somehow they had not come to weigh on me. The *shoulds* had yet to take control. (As in, you should do laundry. You should clean the bathroom. You should call my your mother.)
Somewhere along the line, I lost that reading mojo, as a friend of mine on LibraryThing calls it. That ability to just sink into words, to lose track of everything except the book, to be able to ignore the voices, including your own, that suggest you should be doing something more productive than “just reading.” Was it some combination of graduate school, tl;dr social media syndrome, and life in general that made it a challenge for me to do more than a chapter or two of even the best book?
If you look at my statistics for the years, numbers wise, I read and listened to a lot of books. But, distraction definitely kept me from sinking into a book the way I once could, and I read in bits and pieces except over the summer when I escaped to the pool and floated and read, no devices allowed.
Lately, I have found myself working at getting that focus back. For instance, I take only the book or device from which I am reading to the porch or bedroom recliner, two of my reading retreats when the pool is closed for the season. As for choice of device, I am inclined to take the old school Kindle with me as it offers little in the way of entertainment. It is solely an e-reader, and sometimes a single use device isn’t a bad thing.
I have also disrupted my morning routine, because I have found that early mornings are still a favorite time to brew a latte and slip back in bed with a book. I do love reading at night with just the book light for illumination but, sadly, one of the perils of getting old is falling asleep easily and I wake with the impression of book and light on my cheek. Enjoy those late night reading binges while you can, my younger friends. Now, it takes quite a book to keep me up.
*Seriously, I know how old some of you are, and it was before you were born.
Last week was bittersweet. Even as I traveled to Pennsylvania to celebrate my mother’s 87th birthday, our old dog Spot was leaving us. He went downhill so quickly, from doing fine to not eating in a matter of a few days. An X-ray showed a large mass between liver and spleen, and there really wasn’t much we could do. My poor husband was with the vet while I was on the phone as we said goodbye.
We were Spot’s third family. He lived next door to us in Williamsburg and would come over to the fence for a scratch and a chat. He chased my chickens when they hopped that fence. When it became clear his current family couldn’t handle him, we adopted him. We had just moved to the farm where he has lived with us for the past 12 years.
Spot was a dog’s dog who loved to find ways to sneak out of the house and run for the sheer joy of it. We clocked him with the truck at 25 miles per hour in his early years. We were his third family. While he would have been happy to be a single dog and spent most of his waking hours within three feet of us, he accepted Major the puppy and then, to my real shock, Circe the cat, who arrived in 2020 and insisted on moving into the house.
Enjoy some pictures of Spot and friends over the years
It was hard to come home to a house without Spot. He had his favorite spots to sprawl in each room, often forcing us to step over him as we moved around. I may be able to sleep through the next thunderstorm rather than having to crawl out of bed and comfort him.
Bob and I have said goodbye to a few pets over the years and it does not get easier. We are comforted that we gave Spot his best life and did not allow him to suffer at the end.
I am visiting one of my oldest friends for a few days. We taught high school English together in Pennsylvania nearly 40 years ago. We get together a couple times a year and have kept in touch over the years via the prevailing communications methods, starting with handwritten letters then moving on to email and text messaging. Now, we connect every day playing Words with Friends.
When we do get together in the same place, we pick up right where we left off: lingering over breakfast, meeting other friends for lunch, shopping at our favorite stores, watching old and new movies, chatting about our families, talking about our current reads and sometimes just sitting in silence, each with a book in our hands. It’s nice to have one person in my life who knows all about me and loves me anyway. Comfortable and comforting.
This is my first post-retirement trip, and I wanted to see if I could travel without a laptop without losing my writing momentum. I am typing this blog post on my iPad with an external keyboard. It is still a bit of hardware to tote but is lighter physically but also mentally. The laptop means work while the iPad is my ereader and entertainment device so turning it on has less pressure. The add-on keyboard just makes it easier for an old school typist to create text.
