Feeling Support

The energizer bunny was out of sorts all weekend with dearest one gone on a men's retreat. Two nights in a row she sat crying in the bay window looking for him to come home. Yesterday she was in full blown mourning. Poor thing. She understandably nearly turned herself inside out when he came home last night. We let her sleep in our bed. Dearest one told me through bleary eyes this morning that we let her sleep with us for her sake not ours. Amen to that. My God, she has nocturnal ADHD if there is such a thing. She's snoring away as I type.

It was wonderful to have dearest one home again. I love nothing better than to clean, clean, clean when I have the house to myself. I had a pretty good balance between work and play over the weekend. My house hasn't been this clean in a very long time, though. Dearest one looked around and said to me, "Were you bored?"
I even made the bed. Most people probably make the bed every day. I don't. I don't care, either. I can crawl into a bed and if there are covers to cover me all is well. Dearest one, on the other hand, comes to bed, looks at the disarray and says, "this will never do." I then grumble about having to get out of bed so he can straighten all the covers out. It's a near nightly game we play. Last night we didn't have to. Wonders never cease.

I have had a on again, off again relationship with centering prayer for the past year. I start it, I get scared, I run the other way. I start again, I make it through a week or so, I get scared, I run the other way. I did manage it for most of Lent last year and for a few months afterwards. I know of no other discipline that puts me in the here and now so quickly. I ordered a timer CD that starts with gregorian chant and then has the 20 minutes of silence and then gently comes back to gregorian chant to let you know a session is over. I put it into my computer yesterday and thought to myself what a weird place to do centering prayer, sitting in front of my computer. Usually I do it at the tail end of a yoga session. But I started anyway and stuck with it. Before long I noticed I was sitting ramrod straight and decided to ease back into my desk chair. I noticed the chair back wrapping around me as if it was hugging me. As I let the chair embrace me a thought popped into my head "It's okay to feel support." Well. That sentence came out of nowhere and had so many ramifications for me that I cried on and off for the remainder of the 20 minutes. Fr. Thomas Keating says that emotions are energy and what we suppress is stored in our body. Sometimes in centering prayer it surfaces. Tears no longer scare me. They did for much of my life. I'm learning to honour them and let them be. Who knows what those tears were yesterday. I'm okay with that.