Starting Again

My horoscope on the day I was attacked read as follows: "You're in high gear and can count on the occasional flub. Let nothing stand in the way of your productive mood."

Makes me laugh! I fully intended to "let nothing stand in the way" of my "productive mood" on that day-- and since. I was indeed in "high gear," working well and effectively on my most important creative project. I was goin' places and gettin' things done along the way!

...Oh well! What I've noticed is that, since then, certain areas of my living just stopped-- this blog, for example, along with another blog I'd been in the process of developing. There have been some friends I haven't contacted or kept in the kind of regular contact with that I had at the time. Looking back, I believe I kind of "pulled in." I think being assaulted effected me in ways I didn't anticipate at the time, and have not been able to reverse since.

So this post is Step One toward getting back on track! I can say that I managed to maintain enough focus that the creative project in which I've been involved has gone forward-- albeit at a slower pace than I would have liked. So my life did not come to a complete halt. But it shrank. It definitely shrank.

Before I was attacked, I'd been playing with the notion of "Full Catastrophe Living." I got it from the title of a Jon Kabat-Zinn book. I'd been feeling like the last two years or so of my live had been kind of inadvertent "full catastrophe living," and I'd wanted to embrace that notion more intentionally, both to bless what I'd been through, and to see if more good might come out of it.

Then, of course, another involuntary "catastrophe" literally struck, and suddenly the notion of embracing "full catastrophe living" had a connotation that was more than disquieting! Not more of that!, I silently screamed.

But before that catastrophe befell me, while I was still innocently toying with "full catastrophe living," a friend sent me this quote from Joan Halifax, author of Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death: "Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth." Indeed...

Of course, something along those lines was what I'd been contemplating, before... The challenge now is to contemplate them again. Now that I am proabably physically as healed as I will be, how to contemplate what happens when figure of speech becomes literal, when the dust from which we are created becomes ashes seeking to be dust again that it might be re-created?

OK, I went back to metaphor there... Can't help it! You can kill the poet but not the poetry!

And I guess, in that quick way, I've answered my own question: How to embrace the spiritual essence of catastrophe? By finding meaning in the meaningless. With the triumph of the figurative over the literal. By surrendering again to the Creator...

I'll write more in this space... Soon. Thanks for following...