The Change
“rabbit, rabbit, rabbit”
I called off work yesterday. I never don’t show up to teach. In my 25+ years of teaching, I have missed classes twice. The first time was in the late 1990s—I spent the day in bed, delusional with the flu, reorganizing my body in shapes that allowed it to remain three-dimensional.
The second time was yesterday.
Monday was a fitful day—my mind was cluttered with frustration, anxiety, and confusion. Ground zero was impossible to pinpoint, but the fall out from whatever exploded in me Monday worked its way into every nook and cranny of my being.
At 8pm Monday, I took a yoga class for the first time in a while, and I was the only person there. It wrecked me. Everything we did, save for legs up the wall, made my body scream in against it. But I didn’t hear screams of pain (though the movements had significant “sensation”), I heard screams of refusal, of grasping, of the clawing stiffness in my hips and back being dragged under raging protest out of my body.
I did not sleep well that night, and by 4 am, when I was again or still awake—not quite sure which—I began to think teaching class might be difficult.
Yet, for about an hour, I contemplated drugging up and powering through. I don’t miss class. I have a course outline to maintain. I have a reputation for reliability to uphold.
And then I thought, for whom? My students are not going to be crushed. My peers won’t even know. And my supervisor won’t likely reply to my email stating I was canceling my classes for the day (note: she did—2 days after the fact).
I spent yesterday recovering from the day before—did some writing, sent some email, did some surfing from bed. I walked the dog and took a bath. By evening, I felt better and this morning I awoke at 4:40 without an alarm, got dressed, and wrote two blogs.
I have not felt this good in months. Months.
Is my dramatic recovery the result of taking one day off work or was it simply allowing myself to take one day off work?
Or did the combination of pain and resentful release create a kind of catharsis in me that made room for feeling something new?
This time of year—late winter/early spring—always triggers an awakening in me. A switch gets flipped, and I find myself deep in the sensory experience of writing—I feel the thrill of writing in my heart, I can smell creation all around me. My hunger for food abates as my craving for time spikes the glucose.
Curiously, I am writing this blog to share that I am taking a hiatus from this blog, frayed asterisk, for Lent. It’s not that I am giving it up, but for the next 40 days, I will post a daily reflection and journal prompt on another blog on this site, fast | pray | write.
Daily blogs are challenging, inconsistent, and magical. They change things. I hope to see you there.
