The Compost Pile

It's occurred to me that, except for comments on other blogs and a few "just the facts" TTC posts here, I haven't been writing much lately.

The main reason is a family crisis. Someone dear to me has been in the hospital twice in this past month, and spending time with her almost every day has been my focus. It will be for a while to come.

Also, my life tends to be organized around cycles anyway: cycles of TTC, cycles of moving inward and then outward again. Right now seems to be a time of hibernating, percolating, and, I guess, conserving energy for what lies ahead.

In the weeks that I've been away, I've written the beginnings of many posts in my mind. Then the time comes to get them out, and nope. Ideas go into the compost pile, churn around ... then stay down there to churn around some more. They're not done yet. I'm not worried about it, since there's plenty of fodder there, and compost makes great fertilizer when the time is right.

I'm not worried about my thoughts needing more time to ripen. What I'm worried about are my emotions, which feel awfully stuck and flat lately.

You know that line in my profile about loss and acceptance? Here's the thing: I'm not really sure how to DO the "acceptance" part. This blog is meant to be part of the process, not the result. And lately it feels like the process has gotten stalled.

So this week I met privately with the teacher who leads a drop-in meditation class I've been attending for the last year and a half. I didn't want to go into any details with him, because words sometimes get in my way. I can use them to skip over the actual experience and jump right into "fixing" it, which seems to be counter-productive with grief. He agreed.

Instead, he basically led me through a Focusing session, which involves attention to sensations in the body (the "felt sense") that underlie emotions and thoughts. Staying with the felt sense can lead to unexpected insights (less mystical than I'm making it sound) or a sense of shifting or release. Which is exactly what I need.

Yes, I want to write more about Focusing. In coming weeks, I'll probably be writing less about my own analysis of things and more about whatever practices are helping me to feel less stuck ... after I, you know, actually DO them. Until then, lots of good but unfinished ideas will be getting thrown back into the compost pile.

From Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”