I look over at Katy who is also perked up and listening intently.
It sounds as though something is crawling around in the walls.
And then, the branch nearest the window swayed violently.
Two very fat squirrels had just launched themselves off the roof and into the tree.
(And what they were after were the carrots I'd left for the bunny in the front yard.)
Nick got home about the time I was watching them come out of the tree with a bag of ice for the elbow and a round of the TENS machine for some sore muscles.
It's kind of mesmerizing to watch:
And while the rest of my afternoon was back at work, three of the five furry members of the family took up their usual places:
The morning routine is settling in now at the end of the first week of the year. 4:45 wake up, home from the gym at 6:00, shower, breakfast, coffee, watch the sun rise, take Sam to school, sit at the school traffic light for 10-15 minutes to get out of the parking lot while the sun grows more and more fierce to the left, over the middle school building. Typically find Adele's "Set Fire to the Rain" playing on one of my radio stations. Watch the same kids on their same schedules in the crosswalks and waiting at the corners. Smile at the one boy I've decided I like more than any other. He's a skinny, lanky junior high kid with a backpack on his bike that he rides without touching the handlebars through the crosswalk, squinting, tossing his longish blond hair out of his face that shimmers in the morning light.
On the way home, at least every morning this week, I find myself settling on the acoustic coffee house station's song which will stick in my head until I cue up my iTunes while I work. Yesterdays' was "Chasing Cars." Today's was Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic."
The bunny who's taken up residence in our juniper bushes is usually out in the front yard, either when we're heading for school or at least by the time I get back. (All bunnies, by the way, require me to cry out "Mr bunbun!" when I spot them.) This morning I left him a sliced up carrot in the spot in the yard he's always sitting in. He ran under Nick's car when I came out the front door, but I'm hoping to find the little orange circles I left him gone by lunchtime.
I did break with routine yesterday completely by accident when I didn't hit "done" on the alarm app and ended up being 20 minutes late to the gym. Instead of hitting the track I dove into the weights with a vengeance and woke up every time I moved last night with an "ow." Guess that means I'm doing it right, but still... ow.
But it's almost the weekend and a week from today I'll be waving Nick and Clay off to Texas with tears in my eyes so I'll cherish the minutes, routine or not, for as long as I can.
Forgive the one-off here by linking instead of commenting on your blog post directly. I love my spaces too much to try and pack a response into a single-spaced comment box.
I was thinking about your comment: "There seems to be something authoritative about this miracle worker that sets him apart from other rabbis" and the obvious connection to this: "2) Why are Simon, Andrew, James, and John so immediate in their response to Jesus?"
Now, I've run into a few charismatic people in my day. You know the ones. You know them the minute you make eye contact with them. There's something going on behind their eyes that is magnetic, that draws you in immediately. They can make people incredibly uncomfortable, too.
It reminds me of this, go to :24, where she sees for the first time, and we see it reflected in her eyes:
Wow.
Ok, now back to Jesus standing there watching these guys do their thing with their fishermen's nets.
Can you imagine making eye contact with Jesus? Just his mortal form has about half a dozen different cures for leprosy up his sleeve, not to mention instant healing from every other incurable disease -- physical, emotional, mental -- to hit mankind. Don't you imagine the energy was enough to cause all kinds of crazy things to happen? Probably would've shorted out every electric device we've got these days if he let it loose for a nanosecond. This is the power of creation out of nothingness in human form. Don't you think universes danced behind his eyes, if you looked? No wonder he scared the crap out of the establishment. No wonder men who were seeking a higher calling (even if they hadn't known it until that moment) were magnetically drawn to him in that instant.
This is what I've been longing for my entire life.
That has to be what they thought. It's the only thing that would make a man walk away from his life without pause.
Deana messaged me yesterday evening about what will be our second annual ski trip. With passes to Monarch saving us about $100 each on lift tickets, we're down to picking a weekend and making it happen.
To be completely honest, I was figuring the ski opportunity would come up and I was a little afraid of it. I remember too well the complete lack of control I had on those contraptions, the fear of hurtling into a tree, the falling, and my stars, the difficulty of getting up. I remember being exhausted at the end of the first run, although, to be fair, it had been three hours... I wasn't sure my quads weren't going to burst into flame before we got to the take-off-your-skis point. I remember thinking, "well, I can at least say I did it once" and never again.
But like anything worth enjoying, this takes practice.
And it takes a letting go of fear.
I'm not good at letting go. Of anything. Control is a very sexy word to me, in all contexts.
(I also think the obsession with photography is very intimately connected with this personality characteristic.)
But I knew, when asked, that I would go. Out-of-control if need be, fear or not, I would go.
This morning, though, I came across Amy's talk. And something akin to excitement, even of being out of control, started to creep in.
And that happened a few hours after I'd come to the decision that I am not stepping on the scale again this year. Yup. You heard it here first. There will be no weight check in 2012.
And that's part of the more basic need to learn to let go, of fear mostly, but also of letting a number -- a number that fluctuates drastically depending on the time of day and month -- control me. If I work out relentlessly for a month and the scale doesn't budge, it does nothing to motivate me to keep going. And even when it does budge, when it climbs back up a pound, or three, or five, in a day or a week later, it becomes another negative obsession. It doesn't tell any part of the story I'm interested in telling.
So I'm done with it. And I'm done being afraid of failing. Or falling. Or hurting.
Because all of those things will happen. That's life. It's also love. But it's only a small part of either. Fearing them, or trying to control them, does nothing to enlarge the bigger part, the part that is the core of my life and hopefully, moreso now than ever before, also the "limbs and outward flourishes."
Ah, New Year's resolutions. Yep, I still make 'em. I still break 'em, although they're probably not quite as broken as they seem to me.
This time last year I was recommitting to the gym, but in all honesty over these years it's become more of an every 90 day pledge to work harder/more consistently than once a year penance for doing nothing the rest of the time. The 2011 doctors visits and worry and surgery and looooonnnnggg recovery from February to July sucked the life out of the majority of last year but I never stopped going, except for the part where I wasn't allowed, but it wasn't with real consistency until December when I'd gotten back to the four mornings a week rhythm.
I took last week off. The allure of sleeping in late with no rides to school required was too tempting.
But I was back at it again this morning. And even with the week off here, or the long months off with the surgery, I'm still treated as a regular, with the guys asking about the kids and waving across the gym. This is makes so much easier to return time and again.
And yesterday I spent some time putting together a new pump-up playlist for Nick (by request) and decided to get myself a new workout list at the same time. It worked -- I was on the track about twice as long without boredom and got to the "okay my legs might buckle here in a minute" spot before I moved to the weights for strength training.
One of the keys is finding the right instrumental music. I've learned listening to lyrics keeps me unfocused and less motivated. It also has to be relatively short and fast throughout. The problem comes with the typical rise and fall of good cinematic scores -- it doesn't work for this. It's got to be "go go go" from the outset to keep me from slowing down. The catch word for searching YouTube, I've discovered, is "epic" -- sigh. "Epic" is quickly overtaking "awesome" as the most abused word of the hour. It always reminds me of that C.S. Lewis quote, "Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very' otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."
The list itself is a constant work in progress since I wear out songs and can't stand to hear them again for a good while.
So of the ones that worked well this morning is a new (for me) find: the now disbanded group E.S. Posthumus (whose name I'm dismissing entirely).
The Immediate/Globus group that creates cinematic music for both film and video games can generate some short but heart-pounding stuff, too.
