Another week of wellness. Time to show my work. Time to show you the treasures I found while out on a run. This week it is treasure singular. Singular treasure. The Chef says this is a practice golf ball. No. This is a sphere used in fairy festivals featuring athletic games and exhibitions of skill. This one was probably left behind after the merriment of the vernal equinox. Humans never seem to lose their fascination with doing tricks inside various kinds of giant balls but where do you think we got the idea?

Now it’s a cat toy until such time that a fairy comes to reclaim it.

Physical Wellness

Back to my blessed routines; yoga four days, running/walking three days, butt-tons of yard work (Nature’s Gym) on the weekend. Still eating vegan. Still taking no medications or pharmaceutical drugs. I know you think I’m exaggerating on the butt-tons. We finished building the herb garden on Saturday. It took SEVEN hours. Seven hours is three butt-tons. What took so long?

• Till the ground. Remove grass, roots, rocks. This step alone will take one butt-ton.
• Lay flagstones so the humans and dog can pass through without stomping on the edibles. Level the stones.
• Go to the river. Search out and haul out big rocks for the border to keep the grass from invading, hold in mulch, and control erosion. Trench the border and plant the rocks. This will also take a butt-ton, since the rocks have to be hauled from river to car and then from car to backyard.
• Remove herbs from the pots growing in various locations around the estate. Some of them will be horribly root-bound. Some of them will need to be trimmed or separated.
• Plant the herbs.
• Mulch the herbs.
• Water the herbs.
• Be grateful your home gym serves beer after a hard workout.

Old Lady Bedtime was a sweet reward after all this. While we were away on our trip last weekend I sat downstairs in the communal hotel breakfast area sipping brown water (awful coffee) with our travel companions. I found myself explaining Old Lady Bedtime yet again, only this time to people who are significantly older than me. The irony. And shouldn’t they have figured this out by now? They were stymied as to why I don’t like sleeping in on the weekends or vacation. The first reason is that I hate sleeping away my days off. For real y’all — this is a no-brainer. Why crave time off so we can do the things we want but then squander it sleeping instead of doing those things? The second reason is that it sabotages Old Lady Bedtime and reduces my overall pleasure the next day.

It has nothing to do with being a morning person or a night person. I like to feel good. It’s that simple. Most people groan when the alarm sounds in the morning and their first thoughts of the day are negative. Most people feel like crap in the mornings. They drag themselves out of bed in the mornings with bodies and brains feeling like crap. I don’t like to feel like crap. It’s a stupid way to start the day. I figured out a way to feel good in the mornings so I simply do what makes me feel good. It’s a priority of pleasure. If you want to feel good (or better) use night for sleeping and morning for waking instead of the other way around. Practice, repeat, explain a thousand times.

Occupational/Financial Wellness

I didn’t do much freelancing this week. I had to play catch-up after leaving early last week for my trip, so the primary job took priority over the part-time gig. I made a pittance in extra coin on the side but extra is still extra. And bonus, I broke completely even on my income taxes. This is my favorite. I love, love, love receiving all my money as I earn it rather than receiving a refund in the middle of the next year. It is always my goal to break as even as possible or pay in a small amount if needed. Here’s a newsflash for you, folks:  No one saves her income tax refund. Everyone spends it. Why let someone else dictate when you will spend your money? Shouldn’t you decide when to spend it? Don’t you need to have it to spend it?

Which brings me to the Spending Fast. One of my trolls sent me an email this week and called my bluff on the Spending Fast. She wanted to know how a weekend out of town to watch baseball games with friends is considered essential spending. Well madam, although he is supportive of my efforts my spouse is not on a Spending Fast. The baseball weekends are for him. However, while travel for such purposes isn’t essential to living it is a practice which supports social and emotional wellness, so I make an allowance for it via my participation. Such an allowance stipulates that nothing — no thing — is financed with credit. Nothing gets paid with a credit card. Everything must be paid in cash. Hotel, food and beverage, gasoline, something we forgot to pack, everything.

Intellectual Wellness/Creativity

Another self-portrait this week. This is not a selfie.

I read this post by a lady named Silken (← yum!) about dropping our masks; especially loved the part about crafting the masks because we were taught as children that our expressions make the adults around us unhappy:

Some time early in our development, something tragic happens. Maybe it happens the first time we are given signals that being jealous of a sibling is not appropriate, that crying when we are hurt is being dramatic, or that being loud is annoying. We get signals that the way we are behaving is not making the adults around us happy.

Little by little, bit by bit, we adopt socially acceptable behaviors, facial expressions, voice volumes, and agreeable ideas that harden into a series of masks.

In any given moment, our truth lies beneath the masks we wear, sometimes screaming for oxygen. We work really hard to stuff our truth down, to temper ourselves to fit in, to follow the rather rigid rules of social acceptability.

I watched this documentary (it’s a docu-series) about the late Indian mystic Osho. I studied some of his writing early in my days of rounding out my religious and philosophical knowledge. I call them the seeker years. I read Oshos’s writings with interest at the time. The information in the documentary was previously unknown to me. I had no idea. I mean, oof, no clue about any of the stuff in the documentary.  Especially not the suggestion that we should euthanize babies born disabled so they can immediately be reincarnated into a better existence versus living out a disabled life of compromised quality. By that logic I would have been euthanized at birth. It took four years and surgery but I was able to overcome my disability before I made it to first grade. Full recovery. Full life of quality. No, I don’t think killing imperfect babies is the way to go.

Like all documentaries about cultish activities, this one serves up sensational shock by pre-script. But if you want to see an earthly embodiment of the goddess Kali, she shows up in this story. That tongue. That fire. Took my breath away.

The Magic Teacup sent me a lady kneeling beside a smoky fire. See her?

And a butterfly. See it?

And a kitty. Meow?

Social Wellness/Relationships

I continued to enliven and uplift my coworkers but other than a few insightful offerings on Instagram I didn’t do much social work this week. During my drive into work each morning I directed the Universe to break, stall, and silence the work of racism, fascism, sexism and homophobia. May the proponents be liberated from fear and ignorance. May the victims be healed and empowered. It is a ritual. I forget that when it feels like I don’t do much in one aspect of wellness work there are still the things I do every day, like say this prayer.

I did spend a fair amount of time working to quell the fears of immediate family who found themselves in crisis. It feels somewhat awkward to count this as social because we are conditioned to think of social lives as being outside our immediate family unit. But my unit is far away. When I reach for them (or they reach for me), it’s across 1000 miles or more. But social wellness is basically wellness in relationships. Family is our first relationship.

Late in the week I did contribute to the cult of coffee cups gallery on Instagram. With a message. As shown above. The office goddess mug shot was not submitted.

Spiritual Wellness

It was a great relief to get back on the cushion again and settle back into my meditation practice. I spent time in Nature Church. I made my food, flower, and scent offerings. I studied the wisdom of healers. I analyzed my dreams. I observed my sabbath. I made a robust fire in the backyard and burned my regrets.

I sat in silence. I sat in song. I walked in both, making soulful circles around my backyard. While doing so I found a bird’s broken wing.

I blew away the tiny ants who were eating the wing but after I took this photo my dog ate it anyway. He will poop in the yard so the ants will get another shot at it. I said a prayer for this Nemo bird and hoped he survived. This time of year he probably lost that wing fighting for a mate. In my heart I wrote him an alternate love story in which the ants were mobilizing en masse to bring it back to him (since he is presumably grounded or flying in small circles) and then reattach it for him. With magic ant saliva and tiny knitting-needle ant mandibles. He is thereby transformed from a regular bird into one who doesn’t fight for mates anymore but through his affection for healing ant colonies he attracts a mate more interested in lover birds than fighter birds, which means she was probably a loner too.

I’ll be listening for their song. Manifesting, y’all.

Have a well week.

— Mercy