It’s been weeks since I saw the moon.

Usually I track it almost unconsciously – watching as it grows fatter, rises later, visits in the middle of the day.

But at this latitude, at this time of year, the days are just barely long enough that I’m never outside when it’s dark. And I miss it.

All of those cycles

For all of our electric lighting and thermostats and dehumidifiers, I am still affected by the cycles of the world. I still want to hibernate in the winter. I still get energized by the spring. And I still thrill to the waxing and waning of the moon.

But there’s this modern story that none of that stuff matters anymore. We’ve conquered those changes; we’ve made it so that we can pretend that every day is just like every other day.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t WANT every day to be just like every other day. That way lies boredom, and that way lies madness. The variety, on the other hand, is nice. The variety is life-giving. The variety keeps us anchored to this moment, the one right here, not the one that looks exactly like this one sometime further down the road.

I mean, is there any way to see the particular green of new shoots or the rich russet of falling leaves and not stop for just a second, at least once, to goggle over the colors and how it happens again, this year just like last?

And even more, assuming I live to a ripe old age, there are only around four dozen springs left to me. That’s not very many. I can see how someone would find that depressing, but I think something like it every year and it makes me appreciate this particular version of spring.

Calling the moon

Watching the moon wax and wane is one of the ways I stay connected to all of these cycles at a level shorter than a season but longer than a day. The seasons are too far apart to keep me noticing change, but the days are too easily caught up in routine and tasks and running hither and yon.

The moon, on the other hand, changes visibly every single day, with the possible exception of the three days around full, when it changes so little to the naked eye that it appears to stay the same. Even then, though, if you pay attention you can see it.

And yet, it has always been around twenty-eight days since the last time it looked like this.

Right here, right now

But even this – the not-seeing the moon because the sun is hogging all the daytime – is part of the cycle. It’s part of what happens in the flow of time, all these fractally spirals on top of fractally spirals.

So even though I’m looking forward to seeing her soon, I’m okay with being right now, bathed in daylight. It’s just another part of the cycle, one I’ll feel a little wistful for when the daylight has been squashed down into a period of time shorter than I’ll be at the office. And then, when the moon and her cronies have elbowed the daytime into submission, I’ll remember the days when the sunlight bathes everything and I’ll snuggle into my blanket a little deeper and notice the crisp clarity of the winter stars.

This week I decided that no, I really do need my Franklin Covey planning back, so I ordered myself a lovely spring green planner with daily pages.

The thing that makes Franklin Covey stuff different from other planners is that it is designed to help you focus on what you really want to do and be. And one of the ways it does that is through a guided series of questions and exercises.

I had never actually sat down and done them all, despite having been a devotee for years. But today I did sit down and work through them — outlining my values; my roles; what I want to do, be, and have; what has worked in my personal and professional life. And two things became abundantly clear.

I really do like my life

While there are lots of things I want to do in my life, they’re all aligned with my life as it is right now. Teach yoga and shiva nata, open a yoga studio for fat girls, sing in a band, become a really great photographer, go on retreat, take lots of classes — these are all things I’m either already working with or which are the next steps for things I’m already working with.

Even more interesting, when I was trying to figure out what I want to have, I couldn’t think of much. Oh, I want the Bungalow (our code for the perfect little house we’ve envisioned), and I want some really good camera equipment, and I want more clothes that feel like me, but really? I couldn’t think of much I want that I don’t already have or have access to.

And that’s really freeing. It reminds me that I can settle back into where I am right now. I can be here. There’s no need to live for some mythical future.

All I want is presence

When I thought about how I could distill everything into a mission statement, a guiding set of principles for my life, I realized that the only important thing, the only thing that mattered at all, was becoming radically present to and expressive of Spirit.

Everything else — my crazy business ideas, my desire to help people — comes out of that. They’re expressions of that central mission. So rather than pushing, pushing, pushing on all of those other things, I need to keep working on presence, keep focusing on my spiritual life, and let all of that unfold as it will.

That doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop doing the things I’m doing for them all, only that it means that the priority, the thing that cannot be ignored or put off until later, is my spiritual practice. I need to prioritize time for journaling, for inquiry, for talking to monsters, for yoga, for meditation, for art. This is the center of my life. I need to arrange the rest of my life so that its centrality is taken for granted.

That’s a lot of stuff for a Saturday morning

I’m having a lot of wonderment right now, because only this week I’d had a little fit about not being able to handle having this life as it is for three more years (when my lovely wife finishes seminary and things change on a macro level).

But the life I was talking about then, that was the life that had the dayjob at the center, that was surrounded by Work and Effort and Pushing. It’s the same life, but somehow shifting the center makes all the difference.

Now the trick is going to be remembering this when I’m caught up in the trance of Professional Life Is All, which is a serious occupational hazard in this city.

I’ve gotten obsessed with Zentangle in the last few days (more on that anon), and in reading their description of the pens they prefer, I came across this line:

We provide Sakura’s Pigma Micron 01 black pen for drawing Zentangle patterns on our tiles. This pen uses pigments instead of dyes (dyes are more susceptible to UV radiation and pollution) to draw its 0.25 mm width line.

In addition to indulging my office-supply fetish (forget a place for everything and everything in its place — I’m rapidly heading towards a pen for everything and everything with its own pen), this immediately made me want to know the difference between “pigment” and “dye.” Because, you know, I tend to use them interchangeably.

As I contemplated this, I realized how often this happens, the papering over of small but important differences. Soil and loam. Pigment and dye. Bumblebee and honeybee.

This, right here, is why poetry sings: because it invests in the precision of the exact right word, the exact descriptor, and refuses the vague almost-substitute.

I still don’t know the difference between pigment and dye, however. Dr. Google, here I come.

Raymond Carver has a poem called “Late Fragment,” one I’ve had posted on my wall for years.

And did you get what
you wanted from this life even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

That’s it. That’s the whole poem.

For all this time I’ve loved it, I’ve connected with it as a longing to be loved.

Yesterday, though, I noticed a different word: “myself.”

“To call myself beloved” is different from simply “to be beloved.”

To call myself beloved will be to get what I want from this life.

I’ve been experimenting with mindfulness at work. For a long time, I had Gmail, Google reader, Facebook, Twitter, Thunderbird, my work email, and my work chat open all at the same time. It’s the 21^st century! Aren’t we all supposed to be multi-tasking our brains out? Isn’t that what counts as work these days?

In some ways, it literally counts as work — my workplace actually asks us to be on AIM so that we can check in with each other with the immediacy of the phone without the noise. And all of those things are, in their times and places, both work and pleasure.

But I had noticed that when I’ve got that all open, every single time I hit an attention-bump in the road, I check my mail. I check Twitter. I check Facebook. I check to see if any of my favorite blogs have updated. I’m like a freaking rat in a cage, hitting the food bar and wondering why there isn’t anything coming out. It’s not only a time-suck — it’s an energy-suck of the highest order.

I have to say, it wasn’t something I wanted to learn about myself. I already tend to think of myself as too delicate, too habit-bound, too ill-equipped for the modern world. But it was true nonetheless. So I unplugged.

Lest you think I went cold turkey, here’s what really happened. When I got to work, I read my personal email, my coaching email, Facebook, and my favorite blogs. I also stepped into the Twitter stream and said hello. Then I closed it all. About four times a day — late morning, lunch, afternoon, and right before I left, I fired them all back up and checked in.

Here’s what happened:

• I got more done. I was able to focus on projects and tasks for longer stretches, meaning I didn’t have to spend time refocusing and figuring out what the hell I was doing.
• When I did stop in to read things, I enjoyed it more, because there were things there to read (no more pouting that no one had posted anything in the last five minutes and clearly my internet world is Too Small).

I also noticed, however, that I really want to avoid my work. That is, much of what I’m doing is either routine and somewhat tedious or it’s challenging me to think about things that are hard. So I’m either twitching to avoid boredom or I’m wanting to distract myself from the itchy distress of deep practice.

This is not actually how I want to live my life. Especially the latter. So I’m working on paying attention to what, exactly, the distress is.

What have you noticed about your own mindfulness at work, however you define and experience work? What helps you be mindful and present? What draws you away?