Spiritual & Emotional Wellness

I confess I meditated in a traditional sense very little this week. But by the week’s end I had a long car trip and the drone of a treadmill for silent contemplation. I would need them and copious amounts of deep breaths to summon compassion and tolerance amid a cacophony of red-necked native bellowing and blustering. A walk through a used bookstore that might as well be called Book Church was the most spiritual I felt this week. The rest was hard tolerance work. There was also a five-hour stretch of time during which I was very uncomfortable but I worked my mindfulness practices to keep complaints in check. Be the change, right? But it wasn’t all bad.

Emotional Wellness includes fun, so Peaco came out to play this week. Peaco’s enduring message is that every day is a beautiful day, not just the days with sunny weather. Our weather included rain, lots of rain, hella rain, thunderous rain, omg rain, snow, and a tornado. Peaco made the best of it, albeit indoors.

The Magic Teacup also brought the fun this week. I found a mouse in my tea. Notice the perky tail, as if the tail is a super-surprised exclamation point while the rest of the mouse appears calm and relaxed.

This is probably the mouse’s primary method of expressing surprise since mice don’t have eyebrows with which they may emote. I know this because I googled Do mice have eyebrows? and was treated to this response.

Later in the week I found a flower.

Physical Wellness

Since I had to listen to many a congested head tell me that everyone in Mercyburg is sick because the weather is hot one day and cold the next, I googled this myth too. I already suspected weather doesn’t make people sick because weather is not germs but if you’re going argue with sick people you’d better do so with more than suspicions. As I thought, fluctuations in temperature (even big ones) do not people sick. However, if people are already sick a drastic fluctuation in temperature will make their symptoms feel worse. So all these people who are sick now were already infected before the cold snap, which means they were infected during sunny warm weather they described as beautiful.

Most of my physical practices hit the skids this week. I had one of those sick people in my house, which meant compromised sleep for me. A late-night event midweek and weekend travel also wreaked havoc on my routines so I had to shuffle running and yoga to fit them in on the fly and upon the hotel treadmill. I continue to rely upon this super-thin travel mat from Jade Yoga because it folds to the size of t-shirt, weighs next to nothing, and is perfect to roll out over hotel room carpet. Say it with me, there is no such thing as clean carpet.

This week makes 9 months vegan. You may have noticed I didn’t post a plant-based meal plan this week. This is another thing I had to forego due to schedule/sleep chaos. I’ll just give you a highlight. To nurse my sick Chef through his germ-fight I didn’t make a soup made of birds. I made a soup made of roasted eggplant. Vegan breakfast in the hotel was oatmeal, bagel with peanut butter, and fruit. I brought my own plant milk. Lunches on the road were sandwiches made of plants and some sweet potato fries. I had popcorn during baseball while my companions noshed on hotdogs. Dinner on the road was tacos made of plants. Not a hardship at all.

Intellectual Wellness/Creativity

I managed another self-portrait this week. This is not a selfie.

And right after the tornado hit I made one attempt at travel photography. These food trucks battened down the hatches and hunkered against the wall to wait out the gale. Another storm followed soon after with sideways rain and the next day had such icy wind and snow I couldn’t bear to bare my hands for any available grey-scale offerings. This shot and the Peaco pics were all I managed to get over the weekend.

I am still reading An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew.  At the Book Church I picked up some heavily discounted Maya Angelou for the hotel bedside.

The Chef and I spent this wet wild weekend with a journalist of over 40 years. We shared four meals together and a doubleheader baseball game so I came home with a noggin packed full of new learning and old history. We took turns with the storytelling so there was nary an area of the brain not stimulated.

Occupational/Financial Wellness

I maintained my Spending Fast, which means I only spent money on essentials. Until we got to the weekend, of course. More on that below. All extra money saved isn’t really saved since it goes to knock out my one last debt. This week I was able to pay off another $560.00 toward that balance. I made $56.00 extra dollars this week from my side gig. This extra dough paid for beauty products; I’m still conflicted on whether or not these are essential. In the coming weeks the extra money I make from freelancing will cover flea/tick preventative (’tis the season) for both the dog and cat.

Social Wellness

The Chef and I packed a bag and snuck off to the Ozarks with a couple old enough to be our parents. Good company transcends generational differences; sometimes to the point that those differences all but disappear. This was the aforementioned journalist and his wife. My social practices got more exercise over the weekend than I typically get in a month. Give, receive, listen, speak, walk, talk, eat, drink, make merry, make memories. This was the easy part.

The time spent with our friends was lovely but our hotel was overrun with screaming, whining, ill-mannered children and parents for whom the preferred method of management was to yell at them in the public spaces (including the hallways), particularly early in the morning. And unfortunately, the hotel had a pool. An indoor pool. In addition to the noise pollution there were no dry surfaces on the entire first floor. My powers of patience and compassion were heavily taxed. Never was I so happy to come home to an empty next, despite the fact that the cat had broken into the kitchen cabinets and filled the floor with dishes while we were gone.

The sun came out as we rolled into the homestead from our journey. Laundry and recovery are underway. Sometimes travel makes us look forward to staying home and doing the usual. I will be grateful for the routine of Monday. Have a well week, friends.

— Mercy