Can't Stop This

Week 9, 10, maybe more

In one of my recent dreams, I was running from attacking pandas (once I realized they weren’t friendly) in an urban environment and missed the party bus which meant I had to follow a dark tunnel where I got mugged and then befriended by a man who simply wanted the world to hear his music and then found my way to the open street only to see that the Walgreens pharmacy I needed was out of reach. I couldn’t reach it.

Sometimes, I don’t want to be watched or report on myself.

Sometimes I don’t want to explain why.

You too?

In waking life, Eula started middle school and Bo Neve finally recovered from a long bout with chicken pox contracted in an airport (oat meal baths galore). Chris and I recently spent a long late evening on the hill communing with the trees. We walked down in the pitch black smelling cottonwoods and listening to our own breath and the scurry of rodents and bird wings and the presence of larger mammals somewhere.

The siren of September is ripening my ideas! My horse legs are growing stronger. I am exploring the pendulation between Full Attention and ‘Side Attention’—a name I made up for allowing the wave of passion to come and barrel over the earlier intentions. Not to take them out but to scoop them into the fold. As in, YOU CAN’T STOP THE NEW IDEA simply because you thought you would spend x # of months on the original idea or plan or vision. Beckon the new, invite it in, allow it to mix the paint colors into a new shade. The Walk is still happening but my focus has gone horizontal. Part acceptance. Part do it anyway. Part integration.

Why? I’m communing on ATTENTION. The irony/natural flow: forest mountain walking at long duration has inspired a deeper curiosity on attention which now has turned my actual attention away from training for my walk and toward addressing “attention” in a workshop setting. Trying to hold both/and. Can I do both?

Tried to photo my own listening ear, beloved friends on the ridge with me, alpine prayers

Mytho-poetry

Earlier this month, her legs fizzed in the dark quiet of the bedroom. They began to communicate clearly, with words: we need to move, we are so sad to have not been moving. [Lack of exercise now leads to insomnia and restlessness legs]. She began to follow the rope of her memory backward. Had she distanced herself from her athlete self? Yes, she remembers the moment and why. She also remembers moving to New York City at age 26. Her first desk job. Within two weeks of sitting at a computer in a windowless office in midtown, she had developed shingles and shooting pains down her legs. The protest. Move me. Move me. Move me.

Physical Stats

• I’ve done four 10-14 mile mountain walks (+ lots of little walks) in preparation. The hills are alive. Finding crystals on the alpine ridge.

• Breathing heavily uphill somedays and somedays not.

• Making peace with the long game being longer. Grief about smokey skies.

Nervous System

• I began my walking “project” trying to stack my life (a phrase and concept from Katy Bowman) because it was the only way I could logistically ‘do’ 2 hours of walking a day. While walking, I could talk to friends, write my newsletter aurally, even make life phone calls (ex: doc appts for my kids), and work to some extent. What I’ve learned: that is fine and very efficient and I need to separate the types of my walks. Now I have Talk Walks for all of the above and Wander Walks without a phone where I am fully immersed in whatever is unfolding on the walk and therefore open to the creative channels. They are very different.

• Freeze. Acknowledging that it’s hard for me to keep my focus if there are too many forces vying for my attention. I’m not alone in this, I know. For this reason, I am continually paring down.

Prayer

When I stole away to a writer’s residency for 12 days to draft the first version of my second book, Body Full of Stars, I could hear the murmured voices and songs of my future readers beckoning the story up and out of me. Truly. I believe, especially after that experience, that creative projects are energetic collaborations between creator and receiver. Everything I’ve “made” since then has had that tenor. The voices come to me in dreams, in waking life, and get louder and louder. Right now, I’m a listening to a LOUD insistent and excited chorus and my walking prayers are full of my outloud responses to these voices. MUCH IS BREWING.

Love,