Mama said there’d be days like this. I’m having a day. It’s been kind of gray and rainy all day–I decided not to walk the Park this afternoon. I sat for a few moments in the parking lot staring out across the Bay at the Golden Gate. Visibility was good, but a driving rain prevented me from stepping outside the car. Neither my power walk nor walking meditation was going to happen out there today. While I gloomily watching the rain fall, I received a text message that my regular Thursday afternoon appointment wasn’t going to happen. This threw me and my evening schedule out of whack. I came home hungry and cranky, trying to decide what I was going to fix myself to eat. I had allowed myself to get too hungry. Fortunately I found some leftover roasted veggies, which I quickly nuked then came upstairs to scour recipes on-line for what I was going to do with ground turkey or red beans or….I still haven’t landed on a meal option and will likely not prepare anything much as I have to leave in an hour for Thursday night meditation. I hope I have worked through enough of the crankies to have a satisfying sit. We shall see.
I’m grateful for one thing in this moment: that this too shall pass. I’ve heard that when you refine gold in order to purify it you heat it up wicked hot and in the process substances that are not pure gold burns off. (I haven’t googled this so I don’t know if it’s true or not.) Or when you make certain kinds of soup or food, the grease sort of bubbles to the top and you can siphon it off. Well I am going through a refining, cooking process of a sort, and lots of things are bubbling up to the surface where they can be eliminated. Even the nutritional cleanse that I recently completed is about removing toxins from my system and sort of shakes things up physically, mentally, and emotionally. This is all good to know. This too shall pass.
I also know that gratitude, generosity, mindfulness and other practices are increasingly central in the ways I walk in the world. Although I am in many ways just beginning to practice with intentionality, I have already seen the positive impact in my life and in the world around me. I am practicing extending compassion to everyone around me, and equally important I am also learning that with all that’s happened over the past few months I need to turn this compassion toward myself. So when I have these days that the omniscient “Mama” said there’d be, I accept that and know that it’s alright to be bummed and cranky and hungry. This too shall pass, and until it does, I’ll just let it be what it is.
© M. T. Chamblee 2011
