Newness

Well I started off my last entry by saying that I was going to just write and not try to produce a major synthesis on the page. Turned out to be just as long as most of my posts! I don't feel pressure to express big ideas here, though, so it's all good. I just end up having a lot to say. Some of it seems like it would be good to read. Other stuff's a little more for me. Yep, that's ok.

Anyways, got some stuff on my mind. This last weekend was Chuseok, which is basically the Korean harvest festival. It ends up being almost exactly like Thanksgiving except Korean. I received an invitation from some friends, for which I am still grateful, to go with them for a trip to the country--way out in the country apparently--to a Buddhist temple. There would be some Chuseok celebration there, as well as lots of time to relax and chill. I think they were planning to study the Faith together some. Everyday would involve some time in the sauna and alone time just walking in the woods. Fresh air. Lots of stars at night (as opposed to zero here in Seoul.) It was also a chance for me to hang with Lex, my old friend who I knew before I got here but haven't been able to see much of since I got here, and get to know some other foreign friends better. So it was an ideal situation.

In the end, though, pretty much at the last minute, I decided not to go. At that moment, as great as it was it just seemed like another thing I needed to do. I wasn’t feeling joy at the thought of it. I also did NOT want to get up at 5:30 on Saturday morning to go catch the bus and ride on it for 5 or 6 hours or whatever after staying up late celebrating my friends birthday. So I didn’t go.

Why am I going on about this? I guess because what I wanted to do instead was stay home and have time to myself and do all these things I said I was going to do. Well I didn’t do most of the things I said I would do. I simply fell into the same rut I so often do when completely left to my own devices with no outside pressure. I surfed the internet, played computer games, watched movies, read a novel, annnnd….that’s about it. Yeah. At the end I definitely felt like I’de had a break but I felt just as worn out from it as rested. I felt so weary, like “so this is it?” This is what I do? This is my life? Just carry on like this?

Going to the Buddhist retreat would have been a more awesome thing to do, but I don’t regret not going. In the end I think this long weekend was useful. It was like a trip through all the things I do that I’m really tired of and ready in my heart to change. A tour through my vices and weaknesses. A chance to really look at them and how they arise and what they produce. It’s like all my weakness was a basket of peaches and I devoured every single one. I really tasted the fruit of my lame habits.

It also felt like it was right on time in this process I’ve been going through. After the first few months of Korea I was fully recovered from the divorce and the culture shock and able to start really living my life here. Then I started being truly active in the work of the Cause here and imbibing the spiritual juice from that. Then I went to the meditation retreat. During and after the retreat a new understanding and awareness of mindfulness in the present moment sprouted out and started growing in my mind. It was definitely a turning point for me. I was finally able to Be Here Now and feel the joy of that and make decisions coming out of that. Then things really turned on for me in serving the Cause and I found my way of engaging, of starting to give my all here. Then Hailey came back into my life from the brink of just letting each other go on into separate lives most likely. We started talking a lot and then spent a whole lot of time together for a week and a half here in Seoul. I really saw and felt and was deeply moved by her energy, her passion, her drive, her questing nature, her urge to create, experience, live! I realized that there’s not enough of that in me, that there used to be more. I think it kinda got tamped down steadily over time. I didn’t even realize how much the excitement had gone out of my life until it was rekindled by my friendship with Hailey.

I guess I have been through tough times of late, the kind of times that wear you down, make you stay in a shell without even knowing it. You feel enough stress and pain and the first priority becomes avoiding stress and pain! I guess that’s where I’ve been though I knew it not! I sure have felt a lot of stress and pain over the years, especially the last two. Oh man. But I witnessed a fire in Hailey that I recognized, a fire that has always burned in my heart, too weakly of late. It’s the fire of questing passion! The fire of the love of God! The blaze of attraction to Him as He appears in infinite manifestions of His beauty and power and wonder!

She saw that fire in me as it blazed more brightly in her presence and was attracted to it. Unfortunately that flame in me is fickle and much weaker than it should be. It should be a raging bonfire! It once was and can be again!

I feel a change inside. Now I know what’s been missing. Now I can begin to fill the hole, exercise the atrophied muscles. Other things have come together to make this next step possible. It’s all part of a process, a positive process of spiritual growth, and of healing it would seem. I’m ready to take action, to stoke the fire in my heart, to come out of my shell and sally forth on the ultimate quest, the quest to draw nearer to and live in the service of God! And what’s different now is that I can see that past ways I that I thought were on that path were really not actions but words and wispy thoughts. That’s the new thing! Seeing what is action on the path of God and what is not. It’s definitely part Be Here Now but it’s also just as much Sally Forth!

More soon on what Sally Forth! is to me and how I plan to act on it. One thing that feels like an important part of it is doing new things. Doing things I’ve never done before or doing things in a new way or even a new place. Newness! Freshness! Sally Forth! So I want to put down here the new things I do as I do them. here’s a few to start with.

- Today I put beautiful and profound things to look at up on the walls of my apartment for the first time.

- Today I lay down on the floor and listened to exquisite music on my headphones for a while, just relaxing and enjoying and doing nothing else, not even thinking. That was new and I realized as I was doing it that it was a concentrated dose of what I need after work. I’ve been whiling away the hours on the computer trying to get that kind of satisfaction from a terribly diluted source.

- Today I completely tidied up my apartment on a normal workday for the first time.

- Today I put an extension cord on my headphones so that I can listen to awesome music as loud as I like and with that nice headphone effect as go around the house and do stuff. First time for that and it was niiiice!

- Today I danced full on dance floor style to some sweet electronic . Not the first time for that but there haven’t been many. It was the first time, however, that I realized that I need to do that on a regular basis!

That’s it for today but that is JUST the beginning! I’m excited! More later!