Light

I have been working all day today on the pre-tenure portfolio...the "service" part of it. There are moments of insight in this process; today, I experienced a genuine feeling of membership to the university where I teach and research. As I was composing my rationale for my commitment to serving my institution, I felt like a part of a larger picture; I'm not sure I know what that is yet. But it was interesting...illuminating.

Last night was hard...insomnia has me these last few days. It's laughable, almost; my daughter gets up her usual once a night, and I'm quite used to it. But to have insomnia? Seriously? I planned to go to bed at 9:30 last night so that I could start my day early with Mysore...I finally got to sleep at around 1:30am. Much, much later than expected. It's contextual, of course...it has its causes. Stress presses on my heart and no yogic breathing or sutra can help me in that moment. I get stuck.

No Mysore for me today. I can already feel the ache for tomorrow morning's class. Early bedtime tonight, if I can.

I find — don't you? — that nighttime makes most things dark. An argument before bed can feel like sleeping underneath a bookcase. An argument nowadays feels like a knife in the heart; the grown-ups were right about how significantly a child changes a union. I am flabbergasted by the shifts that have taken place, humbled by our bravado that we were so extraordinarily strong that we would sail through our first child without a scratch, determined to find my way back to what he calls "the core." This struggle hearkens back to the second sutra, I think: if our minds are the lenses for our reality, then we must change the noise in our minds. We err when we continue to look at the present through the lens of the past, when we mourn the way it used to be and become entangled in wishing for the before. Why, when we are so blessed by the now? Because we want to have it all...the upheaval with the comfort of predictability.

That's not how it works. She is like a star that we've been looking for. And now that we have found it, how can we expect the light of her not to change the way we see one another? She shines so brightly that we look toward one another and see things dimming...it does not have to be that way. There is a way, I think, to make light in this new darkness. He says that things begin to separate when people stop trying. I will never stop trying, even when I cannot see a thing in the dark.