Mindful

No one stays off the grid for very long without embracing mindfulness in a big way.

Motherhood comes with its own mindfulness.  Are lunches made? Is homework done? Are there enough pop tarts for the morning? Was that scream serious or silly?

But the questions and the questioning don’t end when the kids go to bed.

It’s 9:20 PM. Thing 2 is finally snoring, and I’m trying to retune in my schedule so there is more time to work tonight after work, homework, dishes, laundry, dinners, and that. Winter is coming, albeit  hesitantly, and I am trying to find a better time of day to wash my hair so I can find more wick at one end of my candle.

It should be a simple thing. Sadly, however, the hairdryer is the homemade energy grid’s natural enemy, and cold mornings make wet hair not just bad style such a bad idea.  So I make a plan to move a morning ritual to the evening.

I head toward the bathroom and turn on the faucet, looking forward to a wood-fired scalding. I shiver for a few minutes as I wait for the hot water to come in, but it doesn’t.  As goosebumps form, I am suddenly mindful of the dishwasher I ran earlier, but the wood stove I let sit cold on this cloudy day because the temperature outside failed to penetrate our sheltered walls. I think of the solar hot water heater that probably sat quiet under the cloud cover, and I think of the gallons hot water I wasted during an unusually long hot shower the night before.  And I am suddenly mindful of the reality that not thinking about the impact of my actions (and inaction) ahead of time is going to make for a very cold shower tonight.

Resolutions and Rituals

It’s 5:08 AM Thursday morning, which means it’s four days after I adopted yet another weekly resolution to lose weight and exactly twelve hours since I dropped it.  And it it is exactly 8 minutes into the beginning of a resolution that I hope will actually make a difference in my life. Today, I have decided to become a morning person.

I have always been a creature of the night.  When I was in my twenties it was when life began.  In my thirties, it was when everyone else went to sleep, and I could work on projects or have the remote to myself.  But as I have begun to seek out a creative life, I have found the need to create a new ritual.

Earlier in my endeavor, I was able to fit writing and sketching into my normal routine at the end of the day, but as holiday rituals begin to crowd my ever-expanding to-do list with cooking and cleaning and concerts, the ritual of writing has become harder to observe.  Now, I know that if you can fit fifteen minutes of TV into your life, you can do something useful with that fifteen minutes.  Lately, however, my  midnight moxie has been been AWOL, and I’ve been nodding off – and not writing – in front of the tube more often than I’d care to admit.

It is true that the more you write, the more you write.  It is even more true that when you start letting life get between you and your writing, the divide gets wider very quickly.  And, as tired as life makes me, for some reason, not writing made me more tired.  So last night after the kids were down, instead of falling asleep on the couch next to the Big Guy, I announced I was going to bed.

And now, at five AM, I’m starting a new resolution to make morning writing a ritual, and with each word and visit to the altar of creativity, it becomes not only more enjoyable, but more sacred in my life.