Now remember when we returned from our trip to North Carolina and Vermont and I stopped teaching and practicing in August? That decision was necessary and super helpful for me to just take a break, free up my evenings, and simply rest and recuperate following the stress and trauma of Johnny's dad dying.
At the time I made that decision, I was dimly aware that what was most important was to get back to my normal life, back into exercising, climbing peaks, working productively, sleeping well, all that stuff that I simply had to do, and my awareness of that included the fact that practicing yoga could potentially slow or, god forbid, halt that process. So I just stopped, and I got my life back to normal pretty fast.
So guess what is happening now that I am practicing yoga again? Correctamundo! I am now going back in time to early August and processing more emotions surrounding the Event in the water. There has not been a day, and some days not even an hour, that I have not thought about John. But there were very few feelings that accompanied those thoughts. I thought about all sorts of things relating to the Carmolas and the beach and our trip, and was actually surprised at times by how little I actually felt. I would check in with myself and think, huh, weird, kind of okay with it all while deep in the recesses of my little bird brain there was that little tickle of don't fool yourself.
The past few weeks have brought nights with interrupted sleep, unpleasant memories and a whole host of emotions that I had to set aside until I got back in my groove and got the kids back in their groove. It is no secret that our bodies have a knack for stashing emotions and memories in all sorts of places, leaving them in wait until the time is "right" for them to start to ooze out, maybe even splatter out, and fortunately we have ways of moving our bodies to facilitates the process. Yoga being one of them.
So there you have it. Everything has a timeline and that timeline is, typically, not really up to us.
On another note, Johnny and I had an interesting occurrence at the library, where we went to each pick up a new book. We have one of those couple-y things we we love and suspect other people find annoying and probably roll their eyes at, which is: we take delight in continually discovering similarities between the two of us, most notably sharing the same birthday. I finally forced myself to the bitter end, giving myself a smug little pat on the back for marking another lame Pulitzer prize-winning book off the 'ole list, returned it and sought out another work of American literary genius.
Johnny disappears in the stacks. I look up one book and find that it is not on the shelf. I go to the next one, pull it, find Johnny and ask, what did you get? He holds up Faulkner's "Go Down Moses" with this photo on the front:
He says, what did you get? And I hold up "The Known World" by Edward P. Jones and on the cover is the same photo. Weird, right? And what are the chances of us walking into the library and selecting the only two books with the same photos? Although now that I have been reading mine for a couple of days I have become suspicious that my author is perhaps trying to emulate Faulkner and the photo on my cover is no oversight by the publisher? We shall see. So far there are too many characters too soon with little to no character development early enough for me to care about anyone. Tough crowd, right? Always a critic. It could just be that this kind of writing forces me to slow my reading down to a pace that I find uncomfortably slow- excruciating, really - and it is vaguely annoying that I cannot read as fast as I want to or I will have to go back and try to re-find where he tells me who Caldonia is.
We are saving our voting for Tuesday the 6th, as we find it kind of exciting to vote on election day!
Anyway, we have a change in the weather by Friday. I predict that we will see it all turn a chilly corner and we will suddenly be confronted with Winter. Bring it.
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