Changes

CeeCee, Mom and Dad - and me(Feb '09)

A big, strong storm front is rolling in; the weather channel shows a huge swath of red coming across the state...between the oil spill, earthquakes, tornadoes etc...we do not escape our own severe weather- and hurricane season is not here until June.

After a weekend of scattered clouds and temps mild enough to make running comfortable, I focus on yoga this morning. This has become my routine. Take Monday to re-tune my body after hard workouts, to assess and stretch what needs work, where the tightness lingers. I follow a Rodney Yee core workout. It has the right degree of difficulty for me and focuses on all the important muscles which make running more efficient. I know where my neck and shoulders impede stretches, how my right hip/hamstring/IBS flare, the protest at the back of my knees, the sore shins. I am learning that a day or 2 off the roads is important and scheduling this week means I will not run again until Wednesday, giving me plenty of time to let my body recover.

Yoga day is an opportunity to center myself for the week ahead. In the changes that are developing, a leap into a busier life is upon me. Keeping up with work, training and Mom is more than a full schedule. When I saw her Saturday she was up to her old tricks; not talking much, making faces at Maude, and sinking into her own skin. My mother looks fragile, disconnected. Her smile is not her old smile. Her body is holding her head in a posture of closing in on herself. My mother is a flower that is entering a long winter, losing its color, form and function as it pulls itself back to the earth.

I was glad to see HBO's film on Dr. Kevorkian, and thought about how Mom has tried to instigate her own death. I wondered what a world would look like in which ethical medicine and healing is practiced allowing someone like her to make her own mind up about her quality of life. I am not enough for her to look forward to, neither is Bob's calls, or the sporadic letters of the rest of the family. Her daily interaction with Maude calls up all her old racist demons...and despite the love and devotion she gets, she seems unable to accept it fully.

We want the dying to be positive about death, and I watched Dr. K make decisions about who he could and would assist...denying a "depressed" burn victim, a Parkinson's patient...accepting other terminal folks. Wanting to die is not enough. The vortex of forces, both spiritual and material that coalesce to help someone make this passage is still a mysterious mix. I only hope when I am this old, we have figured out something better than all this mess.

Meanwhile, changes of all types will pound the resistance from us, and folks, we better be ready! Despite all attempts to orient ourselves from the outside in, to secure our jobs, our houses, our level of consumption, it must be an inside job. The only change we can really secure is the attention to the molecular, crystalline energy of our connection to Self. And I'm finding that the more I carve even a minimal time on this, the greater my sense of stability.

Running is still the place where I practice. Take inventory of my body. Listen to the music and mantras that help tune my brain, focus on connecting and envisioning not just the greater part of me, but the whole picture. My talent lies in the ability to perceive these atmospheric patterns; the 'gestalt' of the world's Superconsciousness, talking to us, imploring us, rattling and raging at times to get our attention, but otherwise, singing to us in a music we are learning to recognize as the Power of Change.