~:: Direction ::~

I’m lost. Not as in: my soul has failed.  As in: standing at a complicated crossroads and turning helplessly round and around and around.

I’m at that place where a long laundry-list of delightful, challenging, loving to-do s (how the heck do you punctuate that???) turns into an anxious, rushing confusion. That should never happen. But it does. I think it’s because of time—that most limited of resources. Which thing now? Or now? Or after that?

Part of this is coming home after a week’s adventure in the mystical southwest. An interlude in the project madness.  I’ve lost my place in everything. But a good part of it has nothing to do with that at all.

There are three lives I would like to have lived.

One is the one I am living, or trying to.

One would have me living at the Parelli Ranch for a few years, learning all I can about interactions with horses, becoming kind and confident in my dealing with them.  Days and days of nothing but becoming wise and skilled and walking in the beauty of the creatures.

The last would have me living at Zuni, teaching and tutoring and learning to understand. Doing good in the world beyond this corner of my couch.

In none of these lives would I change the essentials. I would have the same physical and personal flaws – I wouldn’t be any taller or have a tendency to be willowy (because I wouldn’t be myself anymore, and somehow, that’s more important than beauty. Even more important than dignity and self-control and consistent patience and kindness—so I couldn’t change that either).  And there would be the same exact people, because no life would be worth living without the people I love—the family, the friends—regardless of conflicts and challenges and the vagaries that occur in the flow of life.

I’d just live those three lives in parallel—one life not taking anything from the other. Which you could do—if there was no inexorable direction to time. If time didn’t rush so to the precipice and then fall off the edges of the earth.  Where does it go, I wonder? Into some eternal sea, some reservoir where it can be kept for some other stage of cycling? Or maybe it just evaporates, like the mist off a mighty waterfall .

This is how I have to imagine the eternities: time no longer a dimension. Which might even eradicate space as well. That we may be and do all of the things we are made to do. All of the beautiful things. Without robbing one for the other. Growing into all of the things we could be. Without hovering nervously over our small caches of resource, worrying about allocation, robbing love for love.

What figures large lately in my prayers: knowing what to do. Which thing is important? Where do you start? Which thing is next? Which thing will have the most lasting significance and is that the most important consideration? Which can be dropped without harm or irresponsibility?

I find that I don’t know the answers. I do not know. Does this come of being so rich in life that the panoply of choices become a trial? Or am I just stupid?

Whatever it is, today, still with the flag-ends of all those major projects waving loosely, wildly in the wind (and why start anything if you will just drop the ball ten yards from the goal?), with the duties and obligations of the tax-payer, home-owner, citizen of home, town, community, church, country, planet festering still on the backburner, with friendships and fun that beckon, books to sell, horses to sew, camels to finish, photos to go through and process and share, relationships to tend, horses to ride and train, Photoshop tutorials to watch, potential always to fulfill – I am sitting here trying to explain this feeling of panic to myself.

So you know what I’m going to do now? I do know what to do first just now: breakfast, even though it’s nearly lunch time, to the tune of a library book.  The calming waters of a somebody else’s story. Irresponsible. But that’s what I’m going to do.

As for the anxiety attack that seems pressing? I’ll think about that tomorrow.

I think I secretly wish I was nothing but a happy little dog.