Old Lazy Days

I've been awake for way too many hours already--tossing and turning for half the night in a half sleep, disturbed by thoughts that I am dying of cancer.  WTF?!  I don't do this.  This is so not me.

Another friend died a few days ago and only 4 weeks after he was diagnosed with colon cancer.

My mama is dying.  I know I keep saying this but she is still dying.  The living part isn't so great these days but there are moments of sweetness that I'm clinging to.  I was just talking with a friend who lost her mother recently and she said that even though it's difficult, it's also very life affirming.  I get that.  It feels like I'm preparing for a birth.

Another river of tears this morning.  Grief has gotten a grip on my insides.  So much loss everywhere I turn.  What is wrong with me?  Why am I judging all this loss so harshly?  Why am I judging myself so harshly?  I'm feeling so worthless.  Pathetic is a good word to describe myself right now.

An old friend visited yesterday and it made me sad.  He's not a friend any longer.  I felt the loss.  I used to care so much about him.

My lover doesn't want me (as his lover) anymore.

There is a hole in my life where my juicy women were.

I miss the old lazy days of lounging with my girlfriends and yakking incessantly.  Girlfriends who didn't care about my worth, only my heart and loved me in spite of my foibles...and defects that weren't so slight.

Maybe I don't really miss those days.

But my defects are definitely looming larger than foibles.

On a brighter note, I'm cleaning out the motorhome and got the refrigerator all sparkling clean and cold.  Preparing for Burning Man feels good.

I need my best friend to come and stay with me for several long lazy days of yakking incessantly and loving me in spite of my large looming defects.

Sex Sounds

I've been listening to my neighbor in the back house making sex noises all day.  Someone is fucking her really well.  I actually think that it's the house sitter that is making these noises as my neighbor's car hasn't been around in awhile and I saw a young woman I don't know going into her house.

Whoever it is, her noises are fabulous.  It sounds like new relationship sex and someone is giving it to her very deep and very hard.  Very slow and repeatedly.  In and out.  In and out.  Plus, he must be loving on her pussy and pleasuring her with his mouth until she bubbles forth.  Again and again. Part of me loves her sounds and they most certainly added to my horniness and where me and my husband took our sex play tonight.

Another part of me has been agitated by her sounds--this morning they reminded me of how K. isn't interested in having sex with me...but that awareness didn't stop me from opening the side door to make her sounds more audible. All in all, I am pleasantly pleased with her beautiful moans.  I love the sounds of lovemaking!

Love is good.  Fucking is good.  Making love is good.  Crying out in sex because that cock feels so damn good inside of your pussy, is an awesome gift.  Being human is outrageous!

Watching Dan Savage with Bill Maher right now.  Appreciating my life.  Today I sewed a lot.  Talked to my BFF who may be coming to stay with me for 5 days...(fingers crossed, hope and pray).  Had a nice bike ride.  Dinner with friends on the river.  Friday night concert in the park and sweet connections with friends I haven't seen in awhile.  Good wine with good friends at a good restaurant.  Making love with my husband who now rubs my feet while I blog.   Texting with another love under the full moon.   Tomorrow we'll be in a boat, on the lake with kids and grandkids.

I am blessed.

Life is good.

The Gap

From Chapter Six of When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron:

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

It's a lifetimes journey to relate honestly to the immediately of our experience and to respect ourselves enough not to judge it. 

Here's the rub yes?  Letting go of the judgment.  It's difficult to want something and to have that thing pulled away from us and then to not judge that as "bad".  Judgment of our experiences automatically colors and changes the experience itself to become not of that original thing but of the so called badness of that thing.

The next step is refraining.  Mindfulness is the ground; refraining is the path..It's the practice of not immediately filling up space just because there's a gap.

In my relationship with K. I've practiced a lot living in the gap and I've been appreciating it.  Learning to refrain has made me a better person although being a "better person" is not what this practice is about.   But regardless,  I'm more allowing, more mindful, more grounded.   But also, and this is something that I particularly struggle with,  being comfortable "in the gap", not repressing and not indulging, seems to slow down the dynamic movement in a relationship.  It does allow for a natural evolution but issues that arise in intimate relationships need to be "pushed" sometimes in order to not to become stagnant, or boring or...lost? 

I'm in a relationship with myself, first and foremost.  But I'm also in a relationship with K. and I don't want to repress or indulge our issues but I do want to communicate in a timely fashion.  Mind builds castles from lack of communication and those castles can trap us, and devour our relationships.  K.'s way of being in relationship has taught me to slow down and allow for the gap, to move into it and experience it fully.   But K.'s tendency is to allow strong emotions to pass so he doesn't have to fall into the gap with them and sometimes it feels like I over allow for that with him.  It's as if he backs away from the gap and represses so he never has to fall in.

So what does that have to do with ME, being in relationship with him?
 

Freedom Dance

Just back from celebrating with friends in the mountains.  Went to a lovely music festival and shared some love with some good people.

I'm experiencing a lot of freedom today.   And I love my freedom.  Certainly, I still have many chains that bind me to the illusion of pain and suffering but dang, my wings have taken flight, once again.  I am still sad and disappointed over what has transpired between K. and I, but we are processing through it and I'm a lot clearer than I was a few days ago. Plus I'm not taking things so personally in regards to what is up for him cause ya know, we all have our issues and he's working through his just like I'm working through mine.  Just like we all are.  I totally support his process even if I don't necessarily like or agree with the way he chose to present this to me.  But I know he did the best he could, that it wasn't an easy thing for him to do, and that he didn't want, doesn't want, to hurt me.  I know he loves me.  And I love him.  Love is good.

The bottom line is that I am so glad that this all transpired just the way it has and I know there are many more chapters of this story.  Also, I've been hovering of the brink of the abyss for awhile now and K., simply gave me the push I needed to take a great and fucking scary fall into myself.  And I thank him for that.  I think about the only other thing I'm going to say here right now is that K. is not having an issue with perceiving me being old, fat, and smelling bad.  Ha.  Praise the good lord for that!  Always sweet music for a girl's ears.  ;)  If that was his issue I'd just have to say fuck him and move on...well after I had another good long cry of course.

I think I will try to describe what's going on for us, for me, in regards to all of this, by sharing some quotes from When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron.  In regards to allowing myself to fully experience my emotions:

When things fall apart and we're on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.  The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that's really swell. 

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us. 

Nevertheless, when the bottom falls out and we can't find anything to grasp, it hurts a lot...Love of the truth puts you on the spot.  We might have some romantic view of what that means, but when we are nailed with the truth, we suffer.  We look in the bathroom mirror, and there we are with our pimples, our aging face, our lack of kindness, our aggression and timidity--all that stuff. 

How we stay in the middle between indulging and repressing is by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment.  That's what we're actually doing in meditation.  Up come all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsess with them, we acknowledge them and let them go.   

After a while, that's how we relate with hope and fear in our daily lives.  Out of nowhere, we stop struggling and relax.  We stop talking to ourselves and come back to the freshness of the present moment.

So yea, anyway, continuing my practice of staying in the freshness of the present moment.  Acknowledging my hopes and fears in regard to K., and moving on in this beautiful dance of freedom.

Happy Freedom Day everyone!!!

Life is Strange

Take care of myself day.  Made pancakes for my grandbaby and then we walked to his swimming lessons.  Walking back home I decided that a good self pampering was in order, you know, treating myself the way we indulge our lovers to let them know how special they are to us.  And it's a given that we need to be good lovers to ourselves, first and foremost so...  I decided I needed a pedicure and manicure, a new blouse, and to make an appointment with my hair stylist. I stopped by her shop but disappointingly, her first available appointment was next Thursday.  "Oh darn, Rose."  I said, "You know I always do this last minute and I really want my hair done by my birthday which is this coming Wednesday."  She's seeing me today at 3:00! Then I got home and my lovely landlady asked me if I've been losing weight.  I told her "No!"  Then she said, she doesn't know what it is but I look so sexy and beautiful.  Life is so strange.

When Things Fall Apart

My husband texted and told me that he thought I should read When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron and my husband is a smart and intuitive man so after making myself a cup of coffee and checking on my straw bale garden (which isn't doing very well) I sat down and read the first chapter, Intimacy With Fear.  The tears are back.

I already knew that I'm a courageous woman.  Duh.  Pema says, "When I was first married, my husband said I was one of the bravest people he knew.  When I asked him why, he said because I was a complete coward but went ahead and did things anyhow."

My journey with K. has always been a spiritual journey.  Sexual too,yes.  But my sexuality and spiritually are so intertwined there is no separating the two.  So when he said he was no longer sexually attracted to me, I interpreted that and him saying that he is no longer attracted to being on this intimate spiritual journey with me.   Telling a lover that you are not sexually attracted to him is one thing.  Breaking up with them is another.  I'm very unclear about what it is he wants.

My heart calls, always urging me on to persevere through difficult situations such as this in my intimate relationships.

When things fall apart...I think I need to experience the crumbling.

So much more in this first chapter but I need to dry my tears and wake my grandson up and make him pancakes.  He has swimming lessons in an hour!

Love and Fear

Awake again too early after hours of tossing and turning.  Good solid sleep evades me.  My mind is restless.  My heart hurts but the numbness that saves has settled in.

 It's like the rug as been pulled out from underneath me.

Yesterday was a good day all things considered.  I worked my last day of the summer at the college and I'm so relieved to put that behind me for awhile.  I picked up my grandson after work for an overnight visit and took him to see Green Lantern in 3D.  It was tough for me to sit though but he really enjoyed it and I feigned pleasure afterwards as he went on and on about his favorite parts and asked me about mine.  A couple of the themes in the movie were will versus fear and running away from the things we love which gave me something to occupy my mind while the silliness ensued on the big screen before me.  I also pondered love and fear and how it's impossible to do both at the same time.  I've surely been vacillating back and forth between those too polarities a lot these last few days.  After the movie we enjoyed a nice dinner on the outside patio where my husband plays music every Thursday night and then stopped by for a visit with my son and two grandkids who are here for the summer from out-of-state.

I'm realizing how much I've been depending on my relationship with Lover Who Is Not My Lover Two (really not resonating with calling him this and think I should stop.)  He's been standing in the center of what has become an important part of my life,  and now he's no longer comfortable in that position.  This place I've found with him and his...has served mostly as an extension of my joy, but as I'm becoming more aware of now, has also been a refuge from the storm.

It's not like I don't have my husband to depend on.  He is my rock, my heart, my home.  My life depends on him.  But ya know, I'd found another comfortable place to rest my head and now the pillow has been pulled out from underneath.  I feel liked a toddler who is being weaned against her will, "I know this will be hard on you and I want you to know that Mama still loves you, but no more nice warm milk from the soft tit. Here's a hard cup to drink your cold milk from." My immediate reaction was wanting to rest my head on R.'s shoulder and have her hold and comfort me but she isn't around.

My mama's dying has been hard on me.  My mama isn't dead.  She is dying.  She is living in both worlds.  My eldest son is going through an especially rough time right now and his immense pain is breaking my heart.  Then my daughter's cancer.  My friend dying of prostate cancer.  And I really miss my Lulu who is in Guadalajara with her father for the summer.  I worry about her.  When K. hit me with this it's like my house of cards came tumbling down.  I'm a strong woman too.  I can shoulder a lot of burdon. I keep on keeping on.  But I feel on the verge of crumbling.

And I have a damn good, happy life...