March is already here, arriving with a fierce blanket of snow.  

Life is speeding by so, we did not yet get a chance to play in it.  If it had been up to me, I would have taken a snow day, but work called, so off we went, two hours late.

I looked out the window Monday morning and saw the piles of snow in my driveway, an amount of snow that I could never hope to shovel with my one-year post-op back.  How the hell am I going to get Sami to school, and me to work? I thought.  Then, it occurred to me to ask for help.  I’m grateful for the kindness of my neighbor, Mr. R, who drove us to Sami’s school, who shoveled the driveway for us.  Mr. R is a treasure.

He will soon be getting his favorite kind of wine, some White Zinfandel, from me.  

***

I am pleased to report that I have been taking full advantage of the Friday night to Saturday late afternoon time slot when Sami is with his dad.  These Friday nights have been a tremendous gift, although it goes without saying that Friday morning drop offs at school continue to be very sad for me, knowing I won’t see my sweet boy again for 36 hours.  I’ve teared up just about every Friday morning for the last month, since we’ve started the overnights.

Yet I go out on Friday nights, usually.  I insist on doing just about the most un-kid-friendly things you can do.  Last Friday, I got tickets to Thievery Corporation, one of my favorite DC bands - a hot, spicy DJ duo with diverse international influences.  I asked a mama friend of mine to go along, and it just kind of came together spontaneously.  We journeyed to Baltimore, to a fantastically hip waterfront venue, and I felt very much like a grown-up.  I had forgotten about those adults who go out at night to revel and debauch and basically misbehave.  It’s nice to be one of those people again, every so often.

It was utterly fabulous to get trashed on red wine, to dance like a teenager for two and a half hours straight, to be surrounded by hot sweating bodies and noise and to feel all my senses alive and vibrating.  

I’ve always been a sucker for fleeting, earthly pleasures.

***

I’ve been reflecting a lot on the speediness of my life.  I love it, I’m addicted to it, I’ve sort of accepted it as a given. But then there is a little part of me that remembers what it means to be quiet and mindful and slow, and the gifts that come with slowing down.  So, after being out until past 2 am, that morning, still hung over, I took myself to a meditation retreat with Sharon Salzberg on “working with our enemies–” “enemies” being defined as “difficult” states of mind like anger, greed, and hate.  

Sharon talked about learning to balance between the extremes of totally giving into these scary, difficult, all-consuming mind-states or pushing ourselves away and judging ourselves for feeling the way we feel. She talked about mindfulness as the way to create that balance in life, to create a buffer between our emotions and our actions so we don’t hit “send” on that ridiculous rant of an email that we are sure to regret later.

I half sat and half walked and slept part of my way through the retreat, and it was a big deal for me — my first silent retreat in quite a while.  To journey within, to look at myself, away from the computer and the text messages and the iPod, all the ways I check out on a daily basis.  I don’t see these things as bad, but all of the input and output can definitely serve to cut me off from myself.

During one of the sittings I had a powerful insight about love and my deep need to be loved.  I peered into the depth of my attachment wounds.  I was keenly aware of how I have so long given up my freedom to others–the people I have made responsible for my happiness or unhappiness. Like a slave I pant and have panted after their approval, always putting on a show designed for me to get external appreciation, to get my “hits,” whether I realize it or not. The rage and the sadness and the depression has often come from people refusing to do my bidding or not giving me what I think I need.  As Single Mom Seeking once noted in a comment here, she is “learning how to hold herself.”  I am, too.  

I would like to know the happiness that comes from giving up attachments - it doesn’t mean I become detached from others, or cut off, or above it all, but that I am not dependent on anyone else to “make me feel OK.”  To learn to be responsible for own happiness, my own freedom, my own sense of inherent worth and beauty.  I’ve written here before about being an approval junkie.  I’m not saying that I want to change myself, change into someone different or better, or to kill my approval junkie — I know those kinds of proclamations are just another form of self-hatred and totally miss the point.  

I’m aware that I’d like to pay more attention to my inner approval junkie and see what she has to teach me.

Tomorrow night, on what would have been my mom’s 59th birthday if she had lived and not died in 1996, I get inked.  I’ve been wondering this week as to whether or not I’ve totally lost it to be getting such a giant tattoo, but it feels like a plunge into a new level of commitment to wake up, to honoring the Buddha nature that is already within.  I’m ready to jump.  

No one is going to liberate me but me.