Every time the distance between blog posts stretches from days to weeks to months, an entire season elapses between moments spent tethering thoughts together and spinning words into stories, it's a safe bet that I haven't been keeping good care of myself.
It's not that the last couple months have been incredibly busy, bursting at the seams with work and play and adventure, though there has been a fair amount of each. It's not that I haven't had time, or couldn't have set aside time, or didn't want to spend the time writing. It's just a pattern, a way of living that's worn like a familiar path through the woods, that I stumble back onto despite my best intentions not to.
For me, writing is like so many other practices that fill me and ground me and connect me back to my senses, opening my eyes and my heart to the nuances of life that otherwise slip past unnoticed. And like all those other practices, photography, meditating, journaling, praying, yoga, exercising, sipping on lemon water and green smoothies while the morning sun turns wispy clouds cotton candy pink, practices that I know from direct experience make my life rich and substantial in incredibly tangible ways, I gradually grow away from doing them.
Instead I barrel through my days, muscling my way through the routine, crashing into bed worn thin and empty. I make excuses that there isn't time, I don't insist on making time, I put myself, my soul, on the back burner in the name of caring well for the ones I love. And it doesn't occur to me until I've come completely unraveled, flailing and grasping in the most ungraceful ways, clutching desperately to my last shred of peace and sanity, that it might be wise to reintroduce those tools that tend to keep me from careening so dangerously close to the edge.
When things are going particularly well, it's so easy to toss them aside. Who needs to meditate when life is unfolding smoothly and easily? And when things are particularly rough, and busy, and overwhelming it's easy to justify that those frivelous little indulgences are obviously the first ones to eliminate. Who wants to write in a gratitude journal before bed when your eyes are burning and bloodshot from lack of sleep? So, unfortunately, it isn't until I'm out of control and relatively desperate that I reconsider the importance of maintaining these practices consistently. Even then, I cling to the hope that maybe if I just do a little yoga, say give it a good week, it will miraculously mend everything allowing me to resume my haphazard, nonstrategic, relatively careless manner of existence.
Deep down, though, if I'm being completely honest, I know that it's the act and art of maintaining these practices, consistently, daily, that makes them so healing and grounding. I know that grasping for them wildly only when I'm on the brink of certain disaster, and sticking to them for a brief time won't impart lasting peace. It's the discipline of returning to them again and again, steadfastly, whether life is in the ebb or flow, easy or menacing, that will shift my experience.
Just like Rumi encouraged:
Submit to a daily practice
Your loyalty to that
is a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who's there.
And so I set the intention, in my heart and here in words, to keep much better care of myself. To return to this page and the mat and the mantra, and to all these sacred, time tested rituals that root me deeply into peace and well being,
with much more consistency and regularity, in good times and in bad, till death do us part. Or until I forget again and wander back down that old familiar path, and find myself a little wild, unraveled and desperate.