Lately, my favorite part of each day is that one brief moment when I emerge, groggy, from a night’s sleep that likely was disrupted numerous times by one nightmare or another. Nightmares don’t, as a rule, plague me often. But times like these, when Monkey Mind is my constant companion, there seems to be no escaping the rat wheel of my own brain. For much large and stinky shit has been hitting my fan of late, and as it happens, someone left the fan on high, and I can’t reach the pull cord to slow it down. So it’s just shit shit shit all over the place. Now, I am not a complete idiot—on some level I understand that while the grief that has been accompanying all this shit can, at times, feel overwhelming, in the long run, I’m going to be just fine. Some little part of my mind really does understand that the only constant is change. And the voice of experience, whispering way far in the background, may be faint, but at least it exists, and it reminds me of a couple of things. First, this too shall pass. And second, while grief is certainly not a competition, my own mound of doo-doo is, compared to that of so many others, actually quite small and manageable, or at least will be once I get my feet on the ground. more ›