Making sense.

It feels like forever that I've been tweaking my days and my schedule, trying to find the best, most peaceful rhythm. I will keep trying, though it often feels like running against the wind, and often the wind is of my own making, as I get sidetracked by emergencies, my own anxiety, and the internet.

Sometimes I only consume, when I would rather be creating. 

I have a set of words that I want to form the essence of my days:  Creative, Sacred, Peaceful, Together. Now that my kids are older, we do so much together. We talk together, work together, make things together. But sometimes I forget how to really be together when I want to work on things on my own. When my novel is waiting and I really want to get back to it, am I fully aware of all the minutes we can spend on making things together?

Abby is our friend who came to stay here for three months to help with our kids. I can't even express what she has given me during this time. We were building at our new meditation center, and she gave me the freedom to mull over things with Chinua, to drop everything and hop over to the space for opinions and dreaming. She's lifted the weight. I haven't felt like "everything is too much" for a long time.

In a couple days she is leaving, this sweet girl who joined our family for a few months. (I cannot say enough about Abby- what a wonder she is. She couldn't be more fun, more interesting, more easy-going, more considerate. It's always an adventure to invite someone into your home for an extended period of time, and in this case, it couldn't have gone smoother. Abby is a treasure, and her leaving is going to sting.)  

I am casting my thoughts forward, thinking of how I can arrange and rearrange things in my life to make them more doable. More peaceful, more like the life I want to create.  

These are the things I'm working on right now: 

* Homeschooling my kids. We go year round, taking time off when we travel.  

* I just finished the third draft of my current novel and am writing the fourth draft. (I got a tattoo from a friend recently, a rather large tattoo which took 12 hours of work. I wrote the last two chapters, previously unwritten, longhand in my notebook while my friend was working. They were emotional chapters, and my thought was that pain would help me to write them. The other thing was that I was stuck in a chair! I wrote and wrote. See? All I need is to be restrained.)

* Painting

* Learning Thai

* Working on the meditation center- we have to build the earth walls and do the landscaping. 

* My own spiritual life- the life of prayer, contemplation and study that I want to cultivate. 

* This blog, which suffers neglect, (not from painting, as some of you feared in the last post, but from general lack of focus and time). 

* The Shekina Community blog, which has a string of drafts that I have started and need to finish. 

* The meditation e-course that I have been meaning to produce. 

* My bookcase. The wood is still sitting in the studio. 

* And of course, life. All the emails, phone calls, cooking, shopping, laundry, housecleaning, fighting back armies of ants, gardening, documenting, and time spent with my husband, kids, and people I know in this town.

Put all together, it sems like a lot. It adds to my sense of defeat, sometimes, that I give myself more than any person can accomplish in a day.
I have some ideas on working this through. I'll share them in the next couple of days. For now, I'm thinking and drawing some things out.

What do you think? How do you put rhythm and sense into your life so that it doesn't feel like a series of things that only happen to you?