Morning Fog

What a beginning to the week! I awoke from a restless dream - Grandson's energy still in the house - and reached for my clock to press the light on it and see the time. But my hand brushed my water bottle, which is one of those things with a straw in it they give you in the hospital, and it fell to the floor and spilled. Water, water everywhere. Sitting up, I lit up the clock, and then it fell from my hand to way under the bed somewhere. The time, BTW, was 5:00 a.m. I usually get two more sleep cycles.

What a mess, trying to mop it up and not wake up Tom. At least I got in the linen closet for an old towel and didn't use one of the new ones. Back to bed, I lay there thinking about Things To Do, worrying about getting my computer backed up. Thinking this is the result of watching all those explosions before bed, on TV. Eating badly over the weekend. So much excitement with grandson. It had accumulated in my patchwork body/mind. Sleep was not going to come back.

Get back up, drink a cup of lightly caffeinated coffee, find that an important e-mail has bounced, yet again. Research the student, find a different address, try again. Resist getting mad at the student. It is now 6:00 a.m. Here I am. Morning fog.

Yesterday it was warm - 40 degrees - here, rainy and foggy all day long. We were on the freeway, Tom driving, me in the back of the van with Otto, and I was admiring the beauty of the city resting in layers of fog. It is a peaceful look. Then Tom said, "What an ugly day."

He meant it made driving hard, mostly, but also, that it wasn't sunny. It usually isn't - I've heard that Columbus gets as little sun as Seattle, we just don't think of it that way, and continue to be unpleasantly surprised. People complain about it as if overcast skies are an unnatural deviation from The Way Things Supposed to Be. I certainly feel this way about the ridiculous state of being I'm in. I seem to be on a roll of clumsiness - last night a glass slipped from my hand and fell a few inches to the table, and shattered. It shouldn't have broken, but it did. Last week I dropped the sugar bowl. I don't like this not-with-it state, and am inclined to fix myself. Coffee, blogging, meditate, come on, get fixed.

In my morning mail, the daily dharma from Tricycle magazine happens to be about equanimity. Gil Fronsdal is talking to me. I think about standing calmly in the middle of it all, including the awkwardness of my body, dropping things, spilling things, making messy karma everywhere.

Of course, we love morning fog when we're at Grailville for Ama Samy's fall retreat. It is usually foggy at 6:00 a.m. when we walk toward the Caravansery, the lovely arc where we sit. The fog doesn't interfere with us or make it hard to walk. We are aware we're sitting in a cloud. We trust it to burn off.