Crossing the Rubicon of Middle Age

This is one of my la-la-la posts.  It won't be peppered with anger about racism or shitty public education.  Or marriage and taxes.  All that is the background noise of life today.  (My NSA listener must be bored to death.  It's not like 2005 when in the middle of a phone conversation with a friend I'd gratuitously burp Fuck Bush and then continue with my conversation.)  What I wanted to mention is that for the first time in my life since I started to garden I hired someone to do some of the work.  The simple fact that somebody else's arms and shoulders were digging holes and turning soil and pulling bushes out by the roots seemed to inspire me.  I realized then as I watched J. work in the rain that the dread of going down on my knees was keeping me from turning the front yard (my patch) into a grass-free oasis instead of the weed factory farm it has been since the snow melted.

You may think that you are 30 but your knees and hips will tell you otherwise.  Now if I want certain kinds of physical work done I'll have to pay for it; either in cash or aching muscles.  Now that I think about it did Michaelangelo get winched up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling every morning after a mint latté?  Don't think so.

Animal You're Most Like?

I finally figured it out:  I'm a hermit crab.  Met the little buggars walking to the beaches of St. John.  I don't know what sets off their sensors -- perhaps changes in air pressure as you prepare to step on them?  They retract into their shells, and like infants, think themselves disappeared.  As you can imagine, it hasn't been working all that well for me either.

My vow this year is to do less.  That translates into less studying (but more learning), less eating (period), less worrying and less carrying the same old baggage in the same old ways.  Some days are different; others a repeat of the past.  No need to catastrophize, though, I must try again.

So, yesterday, in the spirit of Doing Things Differently I went to a workshop organized by New Haven's Just Moves and I danced.  You could say it was dancing for social justice, which doesn't make any sense if you haven't done it yet, but the longer I've lived here during a time where there has been so much violent death, the more the work of Elijah Anderson and others I've read, the longer I've been conversation with people who classify disfiguring and murderous violence as a public health emergency and a human-made disaster, the more I am convinced that smart policing alone is only part of the solution.  Part of the solution comes from the heart (connectedness) and the belly (having a primal hunger satisfied in communion with others).

So, here I am a self-professed human crab who cooks two times a year (if pressed).  This should be an interesting experiment.  to be continued ...