...a white ceramic bowl with a cobalt blue stripe around the brim, something that I think is a piece of exercise equipment: a circle of black, flat metal with two cushioned parts opposite each other that are perhaps hand grips? Now that thing I could make art out of.
One of the themes I deeply appreciated in the workshop I attended last Saturday was the idea that we each live with a foot in daily life and a foot in the life of our deep self. That is, there are the things we need to attend to to move the life we've chosen along: getting the kids to school, paying the bills, getting the car serviced, what have you. Then there are the things that serve our deeper life, the parts of ourselves that we feel called to express, our abiding passions. If we accept that this is so, then we forever try to attend to both because both are happening all the time. Sometimes we achieve a sort of balance. More times, we favor one over the other given the demands of the moment.
This morning, I was rather cranky. I think it's how I feel when I am yanked out of the world of deep self (where I have been enjoying myself) and plunked firmly into mundane life. We at the Goulash (as we refer to ourselves) household are smack in the middle of one more bedroom switcheroo. As G---- put it, everyone moved one space counter-clockwise. There is something about moving that is so very basic. It involves lifting and putting down, sorting and packing, setting up and making right.
At this moment, I appreciate that my crankiness simply came from feeling the absence of the deep self in doing the basic work that was in front of me. But I think that's a mistake in my perception. When I talk about being plunked into the mundane, I was using the word with its negative connotation, using it in the sense of "ordinary" with ordinary not being especially attractive or vital. But mundane also means "of the earth," and I can't imagine a more soothing balm for my deep self (while it does the deeds of daily life) than things of the earth.
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