Manatee musing

I am listening to a play list I just made for a friend. I am not a skilled song arranger so I always listen to the play list once through before committing it to a cd. I'm plugged in with my ear buds. The kids are on my periphery watching some Duck Tales (cold and dreary fare...it is really cold and dreary out). Cap is up at school.

I listen to these tunes and am pulled under an emotional sea. The songs that draw me lately are sad songs. I was beginning to read into this until Kelly mentioned that according to TCM this time of year brings on the sadness. Sadness for no reason. Sadness for sadness' sake. There's actually a beauty and poetry to that. The earth is tilting away from the sun in our part of the world. It's a time of dying...of shutting down...of slowing down.

I am feeling so done with myself. Not suicidal...just, frustrated, let down, simultaneously parched and damp, both brittle and softest-parts-exposed...

This weekend has been about slowing down. Regrouping. I've been knitting. I've watched two good movies (Head-On and District B13). I've gotten a bit more sleep. I've read. I've vacuumed.

(My problem with focusing on "home" is that I don't come by home-making naturally and therefore don't typically gain intrinsic satisfaction from it. Home-making is relentless. There is always something more that needs to be done. Or, in my case, most likely needed to be done weeks ago and is still hanging over my head.)

Enough complaining. I've got a good life...a really good life. I'm trying not to think too much (what every single TCM practitioner has ever told me). But, sometimes it's hard for me to deal with emotions and I find myself quickly constructing scaffolding with my mind... A series of planes and lines of meaning, explanation, idea, epiphany.

Something to ponder as I continue with Dragon's Way, as unique as this journey has become (not practicing daily and eating pretty much whatever I want?!) My liver has been the other aspect of my health that every TCM practitioner has agreed on. My liver the beacon. The liver the organ that processes emotion.

If I can create and collect more Qi, there will be more of an allotment that can flush out stagnation in the liver and enable easier flow. As the channel widens, I should be able to process emotion more naturally, and more easily. Then I won't have to be knocked over every time I hear a certain song...or be memerized by someone's turn of phrase... I won't have to apply some external meaning to make sense of an intense emotional reaction.

I wonder if this means I will lose some of the intensity I feel. But, I think my gradual opening has brought on an intensity in experience: sensory, emotional, physical... There appears a possibility that whatever I experience, subtle or intense, will simply feel more comfortable and normal. Nothing that has to be explained by something else. Nothing that has to mean anything other than what it is.