Committing Effort

In early June, I was taking my luggage out to pack for conference travel when I found a fanny pack that I’d bought a few years ago. Packs worn around the waist are more ergonomic, and I had bought it to wear before learning about the massive fibroid in my lower abdomen that was making a lot of things harder. It had been put in a closet because the friend whom I run errands with was aghast that I would even think of wearing a fanny pack. That interaction ran through my mind as I opened the bag up and contemplated whether it would be too attention-drawing while I was traveling. Inside, I found not-chapstick, a few odds and ends, and the mini Apollon pocket prayer beads that I have been missing for several years. Instantly, relief washed over me.

There are a lot of things that I miss from lockdown. During that period, my morning religious practice was able to be about forty five minutes to an hour long, with prayers to so many Gods and some time for Apolline contemplation. Structurally, I was in a space that I controlled, and I was able to be present and care for my supersenior cat Yoyo as she started her awful decline. My productivity with all sorts of activity was very high. I was rolling through reading, writing poetry, and so on. Acts of Speech came out on October 29, 2020.

I made a brief mention in mid-June of my current goals. This year is very much a kintsugi project — picking things up and putting them all together again, hopefully more beautifully than before, after the year and a half of medical discoveries and adventures. I have a set of lists in Google Keep of things I need to do as part of my reset project, ranging from more aggressive decluttering to ideas about how I want to live moving forward.

I stopped doing consistent weekly divination during the mourning period after Yoyo’s death and never picked it up again, instead doing ad hoc divinations. My morning practice was first simplified by RTO, and then Yoyo’s death, and then adopting one-year-old cats, and then adopting a kitten, and then health issues, and finally by the recovery period after my surgery last autumn. I wake up sometime between 5 and 5:30 AM on weekdays. I realized that my brain needs morning journaling more than it ever needed a morning meditation, so I journal and save the meditation for my evening wind-down. Young cats need a lot of entertainment, and my youngest cat is still in the process of calming down from her residual kitten energy.

There are fragments of things which I’ve enjoyed doing since I was quite young. The long mornings I spent at shrine during lockdown were a look-back at a period in my teens when I spent about forty-five minutes to an hour in the morning at my then-shrine. I’d made a bench back in middle school shop class to use as a shrine table, something that disappeared during my parents’ divorce and the house split-up.

My first goal this year was to have more opportunities for stillness at shrine, even if they cannot be long moments due to logistical complexities. Finding those small prayer beads when I did, several weeks before my birthday, was a good nudge and prompting to think further about this.

I had had enough time by then to mull over a few other things. In my early to mid 20s, when I ddi the Kyklos Apollon rite, I used to pull out my flip phone with the built-in keyboard and spend some time after the rite sending poetic fragments to a Twitter account that I’d used at the time. It was fun. I would fall into that space where it feels like one can feel the electric pulse of something under the tongue and the calm, elastic darkness of the mind, with thoughts and poetic images popping in and out like those pinpricks of light flaring up after the main firework has exploded. I did more of that composition in the year or two leading up to and after publishing Acts of Speech, although I didn’t do tweets anymore. Some of it ended up seeding poems in that work, and some of it is sitting in notebooks.

It’s something I would like to start up again. The Kyklos Apollon rite, performed at the hour when the sun rises in Delphi, is no longer something that I do — I’m an early bird, not a night owl, so whatever I want to do must fit into that schedule. It would end up in more poetry chapbooks, as I have decided to only share actual poem offerings here given that AI is harvesting online content, so I’m being more selective about what I share and where.

I’m also working on getting back into a steady grounding and centering process.

As far as goals go, these are enough for now, as the logistical simplifications in my Google Keep need to happen in order for me to free up time and energy for the bigger things that I want to do. Small steps, no matter how incremental, are still increments towards “working on my statue,” to pull from Plotinus, and creating a fully-functional, beautiful vessel of this life. Selling some chairs and a screen divider online may not sound like spiritual effort, and organizing a closet may not seem like that, either, but such things go towards creating an environment that improves my life’s logistical complexity and frees up effort for the important things.

There are no shortcuts with spiritual practices. There’s the space we carve out for them, and there’s the effort that we commit based on what we have available to give. In South Asia, there’s a symbol called the unalome that shows the ups and downs and twists on our journeys. Two steps forward, three steps back, one step forward, two steps back, five steps forward, &c. We all end up in Hades with only our education and our nurture, to reference Socrates in the Phaedo. There are so many opportunities to divert ourselves from that, just as Odysseus wandered and was beset by both pleasures and pains. I’ve had my share of maladaptive diversions, including some things that I’m finally sorting through now that I know what the root cause was. Finding the prayer beads was a nice joy in the midst of all of that future-mapping that I typically do around the time of my birthday.