Hi Peter:

I like it that you mirrored my “🤔” and ending your post with your name.. relational 🙂

Raining here 😾😾😾 and dogs (lost the dog emojis), it’s been totally dark since 5 pm, the neighboring beagles playdate earlier failed (beagles don’t like rain), and there was no one at the dog park downtown but me and Bogart. And too rainy to do a walk or work outside.

The Winery where I used to socialize and work at (unpaid), and the taproom that I frequented since 2017, both closed by April this year, and I’m socially deprived and unoccupied, although it helps to have a beagle resting on my legs right now, basking in the warmth of the woodstove fire, typing into the phone, imagining a Peter whose real name I do not know reading my words many, many miles from here sometime from now.

You wrote this afternoon that you’re moving toward putting down your maps, finding yourself with only silence or metaphore, being alone, but not lonely, and I wonder how that looks like, if you too are sitting by a woodstove fire, if it rains where you’re at.. concrete vs abstract 🤔

Anita

Hi Anita, I appreciate you working to understand me—I’m afraid I don’t make it easy.
That said, I think you understand more than you think… if we return to your first response to Kevin:
“What worked for me was the felt-experience of what it is that I was so very hungry for. I was hungry not for food, but for feeling like a child, a carefree child playing with other kids.” perhaps no further map is needed

Peter

I’m going to reshare something I seem to keep playing with as a felt experience..

The Matt’s Yes
In yoga, I don’t always give much thought to the mat, yet I wonder if it might stand in for the source from which all movement arises and to which all movement returns.

After every posture, whether graceful or awkward, we come back to it. Back to stillness. Back to silence.

The mat does not judge the pose we just left. It does not measure progress or keep score. It receives warriors and beginners, balance and falling, effort and exhaustion with the same quiet generosity. If it asks anything of us, it is only this: return.

Perhaps this is the cosmic game of peek-a-boo.

We step into a pose and, for a moment, forget. We become the striving body, the comparing mind, the story of success or failure. Then the pose releases, the breath softens, and we remember. We return .

This Yes we return to is not a yes of approval or resignation. It is not saying that everything is good or that nothing should change.
It is a deeper yes… the yes of seeing.

The yes that notices trembling legs and steady balance with equal clarity.
The yes that meets sorrow without calling it a mistake, and joy without trying to hold it forever.

Again and again we leave. Again and again we come back.
Returning to stillness. Returning to silence. Returning to Yes.

Perhaps that Yes is simply awareness itself, patiently waiting beneath every posture, beneath every story, beneath every effort to become something else.

Like the mat beneath our feet, it has been there all along.

Thank you, Peter… I just found out that my emojis feature is gone from my phone and I don’t know how to bring it back. Maybe it’s a good thing.

“Perhaps no further map is needed”- as I was just missing my personal favorite, pondering face emoji, I sensed the difficulty in changing old habits like using emojis, and over- explaining myself to myself.. and others to themselves (smiley face)

I’d like to be more like the mat in The Mat’s Yes- to return to silence, to meet people with quiet generosity.. Being quiet can be, at least at times and in certain circumstances, the most generous thing a person can offer others.

And I would love to read more from you, Peter, here, in other threads, anytime you feel like sharing more of your reflections.

Anita

Interestingly, Peter, just as I was writing about being more like the mat (3rd paragraph in my post above, at about 10:30 am), the sun appeared out of the dark clouds for the first time in days, and it’s still bright outside.

Yes, me too. Actually, I will take it as a grounding thought this late morning and for the rest of the day.

Anieta (real-life smile)

Hi Anita

I picked up a picture from the charity shop the other month. It looks like a bunch of stacked books showing the title on the spine
BE HAPPY
Help each other
DREAM BIG
BELIEVE IN YOURSELF
LOVE
try new things
ENJOY LIFE

It is in my entrance hall to gently nudge me & my visitors

I came across these two reflections from Carl Jung today that he wrote near the end of his life, and they hit right at the heart of my own late-night Wednesday restlessness… that searching energy so many of us carry around:

“I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about.”

“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer… What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

There is something freeing in admitting one can’t add up the sum, and trusting that what truly matters is quietly holding us up out of sight.

Hi Peter 🙂

* The emojis are back, I’ll try to not overuse them.

As I read the first quote from Jung, I thought I was reading your own words. Sounds like Peter.

In the past (silly me), I would jump in with analysis of what’s behind your “late-night Wednesday restlessness”, introduce concrete clarity, and carry your restlessness away forevermore.. I may be exaggerating some but not by a lot 🤔

I want to offer something different in a later post.

As far as your message to me- thank you.

When I first read “and then reading your last post…”, I braced myself 🫣 for criticism, and a moment later I noticed the bracing for an attack. I expected you to say that the last post contradicts the earlier one, and that contradiction means something negative about me as a person (that I’m dishonest, a liar, something like that). And that’s not because you have ever done such a thing but because it was done to me so early on and repeatedly, that it got imprinted in me.

I then read and reread and learned that there was no criticism, a mild challenge perhaps in regard to being the same mat to ourselves.

I’d like to get back to you with more later, this evening I think.

Anita