I can think again

Living one and a half blocks away from Castro street has its benefits, but being around on Halloween is not one of them. Thankfully, the festivities stopped, and with them the rhythmic vibration of all our windows.

A & I managed to have a nice night together - making a small feast of our newly arrived produce box (tonight we snacked on a pomegranate while preparing fresh Blue Lake green beans, baking an acorn squash, and accompanying it with a great spanish rice...

Which brings me to a book I just starting reading, After the Ecstacy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield. I'm barely past the introduction, and no, I don't claim to have achieved enlightenment (though I personally believe enlightenment to be a state we get peeks at, not achieve permanantly), so I may be off base here... It seems the gist of the book, fairly self-explanatory as it is, is how to deal with the really real stuff in your life regardless of where you spiritual path takes you.

I feel like that's what I've been doing for the last month or so. The accident, of course, brought things back to some fundamental basics - the life part. After a pretty spiritually heavy couple of months, I have let life flow a bit, without tripping myself out. Too much.

I came to two realizations on Yom Kippur (where, btw, Jack spoke). The things that were really weighing heavily on my mind were a need for community - real committed community - and the fact that our trip to India really changed my life. The first of those I have been putting a lot of energy into at Beyt Tikkun. It is a work in progress, but has brought me great joy so far. The second bit I am just sitting with for the time being. Just allowing myself to think that has changed the way I'm approaching people, work, and life at the moment.

Speaking of life, again, I had (am having) an amazing re-connection experience with a long-lost friend. I haven't seen Joe in over seven years, and have thought about him, off and on, all that time. We were really good friends in college, and I always felt a psychic bond with him, even when we were apart. So, I would occassionally try to feed his name into the latest search engine or people-finder, and always came up empty. My last attempt was a few months ago, when I found him on our school's alumni finder. My luck with that thing hasn't been great, so I didn't hold out much hope. After a few days without a response, I forgot about it. Imagine my surprise, then, when I get an email from him 10 days ago from GREECE of all places! We have been corresponding (I owe him a note - I should be writing that instead of this), and it has been amazing. Joe - I love you!!!

One last thing, for those of you thinking I might be a Halloween stick-in-the-mud (a not entirely untrue characterization). A & I dressed up for a party last weekend, as skeletons. After 3 weeks of thinking pretty intensely about my health & wellness, it was pretty liberating to be dead. (No, that's not a cry for help)