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A Tale of Two Mondays

Monday mornings are infamous in a culture conditioned to have fun on weekends and go back to the ‘grind’ of work/school/paying bills/paying dues. Off we trudge, lunch bags in hand, grieving the past days of sunshine and steeling ourselves for the days ahead, just like our ancestors did. No wonder I woke up feeling achy and sore like an aged labourer. I was repeating a pattern set long before I was born. However, I have something my ancestors did not: knowledge of myself as Signal in a body for the human experience, offering a new way to move through the world, and ownership of my choice to do it or not.

Sounds easy, yes? Know different, choose different. Part of the knowing different is listening to body cues – pressure, pain, or stiffness, for example – then breathing and relaxing into those sensations, inviting energy to move and information to present itself. Often this looks like prolonged periods of mindful breathing, relaxation, and quiet as the brain calms to let the body do its thing. However, silence is uncomfortable for most of us, particularly those of us with Signals pushing to be heard through the droning demands of the outside world. Writers are especially adept at filling the inner void with constant chatter of stories, often developing elaborate explanations for why this hurts or that annoys or this other thing just isn’t working.

So this particular Monday I awoke to a rainy day with head swimming, lower back aching, and the desire to do little except burrow under my quilt and wish the world away. My choices were many. I could claim that I had a virus, pop some Tylenol, go back to bed and wish for Tuesday to come as soon as possible. I could yawn and stretch and make breakfast, because of course everything can be fixed with a good meal. I could suck it up and push through, go to my desk and plunge into my do-list.

Instead, I chose ME. I did go back to bed but mindfully, stretched under the covers and breathed. I breathed into my lower back and relaxed. Breath gentle and steady, owning the wisdom of what my body was locking down and inviting it to move. And there it came, a memory in my awareness of frustration with another’s choice and actions spun into a story that kept a ball of righteous rage spinning deep in my lower back: fire energy that I could choose to use for creation, instead choosing to lock it away, keeping me achy and in place rather than energized and in flow.  So easy to stay stuck in the feeling, to keep the frustration going when it is about another person. Why don’t they know better? Why do they keep doing that to themselves?  Meanwhile, my energy stays diverted and my intellect insists I push on and not let it bother me. Sheer genius.

Genius that no longer serves if I choose to evolve and live fully in the life I am creating, moment by moment.

The thing is, once one story emerges, others will follow. More ownership of creation required … in this case my knowledge that I had started my Monday morning lockdown on Sunday, binge-watching Succession past when my body wanted to go to bed. A two-pronged genius approach here. Lack of sleep guaranteed I would wake up feeling like I was hit by a train. And hours immersed in a streaming service meant I was not present to my internal stream of consciousness, the flow of energy into words into my expressions to the world. Stay silent, stay safe. That may be true in some circumstances, for some people. It is not true for me. How to alert me to my misguided choices? The body never lies.

After I owned my binge-watching hangover as part of this intelligent yet misguided creation to keep my fire energy locked down, I could touch yet another story churning beneath. Write a blog today? No, don’t have time.

Hmmmm. I have an entire day spread ahead of me. As a contract worker I have more control than most over my external demands of time. No room to write my own blog? Of course I have room. Space is infinite.

And here I am. Back pain is gone. Head is still a little swimmy, but I’m only one coffee in. Body is relaxed as words flow, not squeezed under external pressure, invited to flow from within.

How many Monday morning agonies are tied to the stories found in workplaces and schedules, the lack of room for change or adaptation, the ‘we’ve always done it this way‘, or ‘too late or too old to change now‘ or the myriad of other ways we as humans convince ourselves that change is scary, habit is productive, routine is the grease to the human wheel of survival.  Well, habits can be reframed and reformed and patterns can be interrupted, and if we as a world want things to be different, we as individuals need to be honest with ourselves about where we choose habits and patterns of others, take ownership of all we create and choose mindfully for ourselves.

This blog is proof of what happens with ownership, choice and mindful breath. For you it might look like something else … a chapter outline, a pitch to a publisher, cleaning out the closet, whatever you hold as something you want to do yet to this point have avoided doing it. There is a reason why you haven’t done it. Honour that in the moment, and open to learn from it. Then the stigma of Monday morning may fade into the infinity that is a quantum existence, where, as the beloved Lady Violet from Downton Abbey, we ask, puzzled, “What is a weekend?”

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The Longest Day of the Year

I love lilacs. The scent, their simple elegance, their tenacity … every May and June, they brighten my world and remind me to stop, smell, and just BE.

The longest day of the year, the summer solstice … that’s a powerful invitation too and this year the lilacs were a bit late, leaving a few hardy blooms around in time for this special transition that only recently I am coming to fully appreciate.

It was on the longest day of the year that someone I care about became a widower, and it was on the longest day of the year five years later that I awoke with a story too vivid to ignore, a story so urgent in my body that I sat and wrote for a day until it was finished. It was a story of how they met, this man and his wife, the story of the longest day decades before. It was a tale of shy attractions and veiled hopes, of a watch that suddenly stopped telling time and a moonlight dash for forbidden lilacs from a cranky neighbour’s yard, shared with me in wisps and phrases. I wrote a story and created something new. At the time, it was something I couldn’t NOT do. After I worked up the courage to share it with him, it became a story we both were called to tell.

It was on that longest day that the Finding Maria series was born.  His story in four books. I knew not then the power of what I was writing, just that I could feel an expansion, a light, with every new chapter and I could see in him the courageous evolution he invited in sharing his story to process life choices and heal the grief. What has taken considerably longer is for me to sit with what writing the series did, and continues to do for me.

I offered him a powerful creation and wanted nothing in return. He stood firm and offered me an invitation – to step into the creator that I am, the writer that I am, the I AM that I am. And that is an invitation for which I have not always been grateful. After years of allowing my intellect to form my tiny controlled world, it became difficult to separate fact from fiction, the who I AM compared to the who I was trained to be.  After four books of another’s story, the fifth book rests squarely with me and I know in my body, as I did with that short story so many years ago, that this next book is mine: no fiction, no hiding. What has been buried in the fog of battle between ME as signal and the world my intellect is protecting are the words I choose to share, the story I want to tell. For years, what has percolated through the various shoulds and can’ts and musts and don’ts has been prose that to me feels wilted, crushed, unrecognizable. I have had to relearn how to write: not on demand and without thinking, as I have always done, not plucking the words and setting them down but releasing into the flow of energy that I am and allowing the words to surface. Sounds easy. Too easy, my brain hisses. And so I make it difficult, distracting myself, becoming insanely busy so I don’t have time to know I’m distracting myself … and all the while, my words, like the lilacs, fragrant and tenacious, wait for me to BE and notice.

I did that today. On this longest day of the year, and what has turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year so far, I spent the afternoon relaxing, listening inward, waiting for the physical cue saying Yes, it’s time, let’s write this. It may not read differently than anything else I’ve written. It may read worse. It felt good to write, and in all honesty, it has been a long time since I could say that. Writing had been at best a means to survival. I had never allowed myself to want it, to love it, to grow with and because of it. Just like with the man who inspired this writing journey, the man I call my Muse. I never allowed myself to own the power of our co-creations, the power of our interactions, the power of us just being in each other’s presence. It seemed too much, too unattainable, too good to be true. As I backed away, my words backed up and the book I meant to release five years ago remains raw, in pieces, and parts unwritten.

Today as I sat with my manuscript in progress, I found I had written about that, a massive metaphor.  Here’s a sneek peak at what I’m working on, shared here today in gratitude for my Muse:

With him I felt that I could not just write but feel beyond places and dates to the dance of the ocean, warmth of the sky, the aroma of joy itself. In his presence I awakened to the possibilities of a creative life, a connected life, feeling for the first time the essence of another, and being felt completely in return. And it was in his presence that for the first time, words failed me. We had been given a blank page for our co-existence upon which to create whatever we wished. I wanted to fill the page with adventures, experiences, memories. I didn’t want labels or constructs or obligations. But I had no words to explain, and when he would ask What do you want? I would mumble, repeat some well-worn story of ‘whatever was needed from me’ or ‘whatever I was meant to have’ with no insight, no hint even, of the person giving the answer.  So the page remained blank. Stuck, like the book I now struggle to write.

It hasn’t been easy for either of us in this world strange yet familiar, expansive yet fitting in nowhere and I’ve allowed my fear to govern my choices and reactions. Yet like the lilacs, we remain tenacious, coming back into each other’s presence and conversations, continuing to connect amid storms and stories that draw us in different directions.

Releasing into the chaos  means there is no fear, only awareness. Writing for me is no longer a means of survival. It is a key to evolution. It is a key to the life I want. It is the key to me being ME, because until I can be my full self I cannot have what I want with others. When I am ME, words never fail. 

The Finding Maria series produced, among other things, lilacs that will never fade 🙂

My creation from that first short story, in print and in life, is still revealing itself when I pause and ask to know more.  The blank page – of my story and in my life – no longer frightens. It does irritate now and then, which is a great invitation to embrace the fire of creative energy and get to it or, as my Muse has been saying for more than a decade, ‘get ‘er done.’

The lilacs have faded and light on the longest day is dimming. A new season and a new chapter has just begun.