Good Morning. It is Katherine today.
We just returned from Santa Fe. I learned so much. Part of the learning process was the six hours of riding in the car on the return trip. Jim did the driving. I just rode along and thought about stuff. This time I made shawls in my head and painted our house in my head and moved paintings from various walls to other walls in my head. I kept trying to look at the scenery and pay attention to where I was, but my mind kept jumping hither and thither.
This ride I found myself searching for ways to keep myself in some sort of Zen life "in the moment." Pretty ironic. You can't analyze living in the moment. You just kind of do it. I still analyzed it anyway while endless New Mexican plains rolled by.
I figured out that Jaydee is a pretty nifty teacher for living in the moment. All I have to do is keep a one year old around all the time. Not happening. The kind of awareness Jaydee uses and takes is exhausting. That's insight number one. Living in the moment wears you out.
Jaydee forces me to live in the moment simply because of her age and language abilities and her total lack of concern about her physical being. Jaydee has no auxiliary verbs. She talks up a storm in two word sentences that point the way to seeing the world without future or past. "I scary." "I running." "I excited." "I funny." "I sorry." I could go on and on. She has lots of these sentences and each is executed exactly at a perfect point in time and simply tells you what she feels or what she is doing right at that very moment.
I love it when she says, "I funny!" the most. She tells numbers of jokes. One of Jaydee's favorites involves offering a tidbit of food or a toy to someone she loves and then withdrawing the tidbit with a simultaneous giggle of satisfaction at having pulled off a very funny joke. Then she says, "I funny." There is no judgment or concern. Jaydee is simply reporting the truth. "I funny." She is right. She is funny. She is truly one of the funniest people I know.
Mostly Jaydee just lives. She does stuff and reports it and feels stuff and reports it and she moves on. It's a way of life I've been trying to figure out for most of my life. That's lesson number two. I need to report my life and not label my life. "I funny" can work for me too.
I can capture that same in-the-moment feeling Jaydee models sometimes when I leave home. When I am away from home, life is newer. Doing the laundry is rarely new. Trying to revel in the moment when I'm moving a load of towels from the washer to the dryer is something for a Zen prince--I just can't do it. Paying attention to a hail storm hitting you sideways as it blows in from a Teton canyon is easy. Picking out the correct setting on the dryer--not so much.
That's lesson number three. Living in the moment is easy when the moment is new.
The trip to Santa Fe was a real in-the-moment experience because is was new. This time Santa Fe kept me awake to reality because walking there became very Jaydee-like and I kept saying "I walking" over all the uneven surfaces. And then there was the opera. I don't know how anyone can go to a really fine opera and not be overwhelmed by the moment.
None of the sidewalks or floors are even and flat in Santa Fe and pretty soon "I walking" was my mantra. Walking from place to place was a balancing act in Santa Fe. Really. The streets are made of concrete or bricks, but are not flat. The wooden floor in our hotel room was uneven. It rained one day and after the rain, the sidewalks were pocked with water puddles where tree roots or haphazard construction created dimples and dips. On the stairs to the opera, the rain moved east to west on the stairs and puddled on one edge. No parking lot, street or sidewalk was even. There were a few moments walking the Plaza when my mind drifted and I inevitably tripped. Living in the moment while walking is a real safety necessity in Santa Fe.
The opera is a very in-the-moment experience as well. The theater itself is gorgeous and worth just looking at. When the opera begins, there is just so much going on. The orchestra conductor is a joy by himself. The fellow who conducted Rigoletto had a left arm that just made me happy whenever he flourished it around. Then there are costumes and dance and the voices and the music and the set and the actual content of the story. You hear words and music flow by and you read the script as it flows by on a small screen in front of your seat. It takes an ability to let your right brain relax and capture the whole aesthetic experience while your left brain makes some attempt to make sense of the experience and classify it in some appropriate spot in your mind. There is so much that it makes your head explode with awareness. There is so much that is new that it is impossible to miss the moment.
We spent three days in Santa Fe toddling along the uneven sidewalks and watching opera. When we returned home, we spent a day watching Willa and Jaydee and I'm full to the brim with lessons about staying in the moment. At the same time, the mundane chores of my life are piled high in front of me. I need to tackle them with joy. I want to tackle them with joy.
We will see.
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