Warming Up to Life

Tomorrow... my goal is to spend as much time by myself as possible. I miss ME.

I teach a lesson in the morning and straight afterwards I've been requested to check upon a piano that my student's mom is considering to purchase... I am hoping to spend some time with Beethoven in the afternoon and work on the 3rd movement as well as polish "Big My Secret"...

I'm sitting in my habitual deep freeze mode. When I'm finally at a final stretch on meeting a goal, I find that I lose my wind. Having a coach to study my piano pieces with makes that habit really stand out to me. I have a witness that sees me do my funny thing as I work on de-programming my deep freeze program.

I've been given an opportunity to stake my claim in working my music and writing skills. I've chosen to take it on... I'd like to find different realms to deprogram myself within (getting control of those emotional babies called Fear and Insecurity).. having a supportive mentor to coach the possibilities within me is exciting... Already, I'm feeling the slowing effects of fear but I show up anyway. Making sense of the dynamics and learning the "new dances" within television and film will be an adventure.

I recently read that...

"The secret of life... is to fall seven times and get up eight times."

I'll be fine... I BOUNCE!

As I "warm up" to life by taking on more projects, taking care of life... I think I just may be ready to take on the world of relationships at a new level. I suffer from "deep freeze" through many aspects of my life and find myself between feeling frustrated and feeling apathetic.

And then I wake up from my "fall" and get up again to take on what I've set out to do...

It is unbelievably easy to check out of the game with excuses or justifiable reasons. I'm becoming more aware of myself and of those moments when I feel captured. Choosing to define the moment with MY CHOICE despite mysel makes for an interesting game of life.

I may be exploring A LOT about right now... it is not without surpassing fields of fear.

And so grows on JNETSWORLD.

JNET

WORD UP: The Darkside of Christmas

I enjoyed being with my family. I enjoyed spending time with friends. Despite all the holiday cheer, laughs, food, and decoration, I still experienced a keen poignancy of sadness.

K calls it my artiste malaise. It laps against the shore of my faith. It's a strange place from where I find emotion come from... call it my reality... a foreign thorn that finds me grieving a world that I witness from a little corner.

Christmastime happens to be one of those holidays that has me sitting in this corner. Perhaps one day I'll reconcile myself with it and the holidays will make better sense to me but until then.. I am working on it and the day when I'll know how to claim it for myself.

Isn't Jesus the reason for the season? Isn't the spirit of Christmas about celebrating the birth of a savior king?

Yes.. yes.. of course... of course...

There are those intelligent ones that will bring up that December 25h isn't the real birthday and that the Christians had superimposed themselves upon what was once a pagan holiday to celebrate the winter solstice. And though it is refreshing to meet up with a consciousness that is not being taken with the wave of the masses so readily... it is not a good thing to meet with the smirkness on a reality that bends people out of shape.... or delights.

The tradition of trees in the house came from an early worship of the evergreens during winter for they were thought to have magical powers able to thrive in the snow and harsh weather. The twelve days of Christmas are a play on the winter festivals where people used to celebrate and party hard to punctuate the terrible weather with over-the-top fun... Animals were sacrificed and feasted upon and it saved on feeding another animal through a scarce season... Yule logs burned and people celebrated at the fire with lots of drink... and what was brought to the fire wasn't always animal...

We eat gingerbread men cookies as a reminder of the good ole secular days. A study of the way secular society celebrated in days gone shows how witch burnings came about. Coliseums cheering with people enjoying lions as they fed on the early Christians...and people of Israel...

It was an interesting idea to take on the winter festivals and tame them. The early Christian settlers had tried to outlaw the festival in an attempt to separate study of faith from secularized Christianity... but that is a hard ball to stop rolling... hundreds of years of Roman civilized ingenuity and traditional entertainment... It is like ending the Superbowl... some things that unite people are too pervasive to end...

My how we have evolved?

Indulgence has always been the spirit of these ancient festivals and the innocent were slaughtered to feed fires... literally and proverbially.

Will secular society triumph in diluting the faith community? The machinery had been set ages ago... Will the modern religion of fashion and hipness overtake the spirit of celebrating the new life of a forgiven life leaving the residue of wantoness, loneliness and guilt? Will expectations overtake action in healing society and jade us all eventually?

The dark side of Christmas is really about the dark side of our humanity that troubles me...a blindness that we don't articulate enough to search for light ... to create light.

The reason for living is to celebrate the light of the world that has been brought to us... an eternal reason to adore life and choose life. And that reason extends beyond December 25th and the season...

A long time ago, someone thought that it would be a good idea to bring that light to a dark side of our humanity... it is still a competiting dynamic...

I'll choose life... I'll choose God. I'll choose hope, peace and love... I'll have my sad moments knowing that ignorance and hate finds space to delight... But I won't ever offer myself as a sacrifice upon their Yule log.

JNET

12.22.05

Leading the introspective life in restraint of emotional excess is not a life void of love or passion.

"Life is a comedy for those who think

and a tragedy for those who feel."

Horace Walpole

The topic at the dinner table last night was "leading with your heart" versus "leading with your head." What defines how you are doing what? Who is to say they are exclusively separate ways of coming to a decision? Seeing that emotions can be indulgent and demanding, how can one say that they are on the path of truth and free of ego?

I know a boy who is always in love with a new girl each week. I know a girl who falls in love every few months. They both get engaged in relationships that consume them and then fall out of love and are next considering a new adventure. I have a difficult time keeping up with their lastest crush.

I've only considered ONE relationship to pursue since I've graduated from high school. And that is the mathematician. I've only one crush since grade school... and that is the mathmatician.

I sometimes wish I could "fall in love" every few months and be excited about a new person but that has never been the case.... except for the mathematician. He has been the invisible current that has inspired a great deal from me... If I was a different sort of girl, maybe we would have followed one of many formats....dinners, movies, drinks... blah blah blah.

That would consume a lot of time.

I couldn't play my life that way only to start another repetition of intense dramas and then no enduring friendship to speak of afterwards. It is perhaps another style of living and it works for people who are more "feely feely," suited to a more tactile experience and in need of possession or in need to be possessed. I don't know. Most of my failed relationships of yesterday are my successful friendships that endure today.

What does falling in love every few months or weeks offer? I don't have the patience to give myself over to that and I don't think my mathematician has such impulses either...

I wouldn't have been able to dance, work on my writing or music, or been part of the things I am involved with today that is important to me right now. He wouldn't be involved with his work at school and the embassy. And he is up to more things than I.

We're up to experiencing life and growing up within our respective worlds...

To be compelled to follow the other format works for a lot of people but it doesn't work for my path. It may seem odd. We may seem cold. It is demanding in some respects and every bit as vulnerable as love should be, teaching lessons on patience, trust, kindness.

Love is more than just companionship, an excuse to explain a relationship pulse and a sure date.

It is not about "a relationship".... it is about a relationship to life and with life.

JNET

"How can there be any questioning of acquiring or possessing

when the one thing needful for a man is to become -

to be at last and to die in the fullness of his being."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery