Heart Reading … Day 93

Glazing over

This bench has been glazed over — maybe a bit like the way my eyes glaze over when my heart is overloaded.

At first I was going to stain it the same color it was when I bought it at a tag sale a few years ago. It’s been weathered because I’ve left it outside a while. I started staining it with leftover stain and saw that the color was way off. All three of the stains I had were way off. And yet all three of them — red, black, and white — were exactly perfect over the original yellow color.

This bench is a statement and a reminder and a tribute and another step toward unpacking expectations, priorities, and order. Life is so full of disorder and there are so many attempts to cling to old stories about what matters — attempts that put priorities out of whack and create injuries with unrealistic expectations (like the nonverbal wrath of our collective impatience that service workers experience every day)— that the stain on this bench signifies for me the importance of sitting still … long enough to be in the real story of a moment.

Even as I espouse virtues like patience and balance I know deep down just how damn impatient I really am and just how fragile the balance — the tenuous order of my life and any of our lives — really is.

Little random things cause me to glaze over, like shampoo that costs $24 for 9 ounces (who buys this stuff?!), or medium sized things like the electric company charging me many hundreds of dollars for energy which makes me think of the solar energy I had installed by a now bankrupt company that did such a poor job that my roof now leaks, or big things like the vice grip-like hold that big businesses have on our lives and well being with consequences so far beyond chronic stories of what matters … tightly woven into the social order of the U S of A…

I’m thinking of the riddle I learned as a kid: what is black and white and red (read) all over? Answer: a newspaper.

I don’t have the patience or the desire to read a newspaper (as I could see myself doing on my newly stained bench). Tomorrow is Monday and I am reminding myself to remember not to watch or listen to the news. Monday’s lately are just too much for me to add the stress of news to the mix.

I want to apologize for this heart reading but the truth is that I have yet to do an official heart reading — I just started typing about a few things in the world that feel heavy on my heart and mind. As I tuned into my shallow breathing and my heart beat a small photo frame fell off the wall and tumbled down the stairs so my heart is now racing. Surprisingly it didn’t break!

Returning to my heart I feel lightness once again. I am on the couch with my dog Rosie and Luna is close by on a chair. My daughter is close by in her room. This is all that matters in this moment.