My social skills have suffered during our COVID isolation. I find myself cutting people off in conversation. Wanting them to yield the floor so I can speak.  Excited to share my thoughts and impatient to do it. Where did that come from?

Our time alone certainly rewired our brains, as humans are social animals. Meant to roam in packs. It helps to read about the parts of my experience that are shared by many of us.  I don't feel so alone.

Back to yielding the floor.  Is there a signal that can help me get back into the normal ebb and flow of traditional conversation? Like raising my hand when I was a child in school.  Signaling that I would like to speak and that I am waiting for the speaker to finish. Zoom allows a hand raise or you can raise your actual hand.  Clunky yet maybe necessary until I learn again how to manage the flow of speaking to someone other than myself.

Practicing patience with myself for needing to relearn a skill I already had mastered. And yet what if I could come out of COVID sheltering with even better communication skills than I had previously?

Photo by William Zhao on Unsplash

With each step forward, obstacles grab at my feet to keep me from stepping.

A child grabbing at my ankles... insisting on hitching a ride with my gongfu stepping legs and body.  I dragged him along the mats with me undeterred from my traditional Chinese gongfu practice. His weight was a test for my correct alignment, posture, stepping, strength and focus. I was reminded of the gongfu master who was imprisoned and perfected stepping with a ball and chain around his legs.  He created the half-step method of practice. Because his cell was small and the leg irons didn't allow a full step for his five elements practice, he found a new way to practice. Undaunted. Well maybe he was a little....

The constraints which would have stopped many people from practicing fostered a firm resolve in him and unleashed the creativity to make gongfu practice work in a small space with limited leg movement and dragging a heavy ball with each step.  Without the obstacles would he have reached this creative level?

If weights were not heavy, how could our muscles grow?  It is the resistance, the tension, that builds muscle.  Just as long-term space travel contends with muscle atrophy from the lack of gravity pulling our bodies toward the ground.  In the same way, an easy life is not a gift.  It creates laziness and atrophies our creative fire and strength of will. In contrast, focusing on how hard each step is distracts us from seeing the opportunities, the gifts folded into the obstacles.  To level up our game.

Photo by Johan Fredriksson, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27724401

Saying no is such an important tool for getting what you need.  If you are a people-pleaser like me, it is a critical skill. There is no happiness if you are spending your time, your life, advancing someone else's agenda. Or if you are teaching people to be demanding by acquiescing to their every whim. It's nice to feel your work is needed or wanted.  And you must define which requests are within the limits of reason. Someone who asks you to wait on them hand and foot may make sense if the person is The Queen. But there is only one of those I know of.

It is uncomfortable to say no, especially to people who seem to need help. And yet you are robbing them of the ability to learn to stand on their own two feet.  Instead you teach them that they can only make it with help.  We all need help certainly sometimes.  Needing help all the time should set off some warning bells.

Photo by Johanna Baca on Unsplash

So little time.
Make each moment count.
Important over urgent.
Prioritize.  We can only do one thing at a time.

"Mi casa es su casa."
A core value of the family I married.

A posture of generosity and welcoming.  Of sharing what we have with others.
Of letting go of things being just so because it is our home.
Allowing others in.  Free to be themselves.

And not allowing others to destroy our home.  Having boundaries and demanding respectful sharing.
Mutual respect. Mutual support. Making the world hospitable one person at a time.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Keeper of the flame, the Gate of Life stores our prenatal essence.  Our life ends when it is depleted. This point, the Gate of Life, is a direct connection to the Kidney organ which governs water. 

Fire and water balance here.  Or not.
So many people have low back pain.
Our modern world is not well-guarding our ministerial fire from harm.

Eating cold foods, stress every day, and lack of activity combine to challenge Mingmen, the Gate of Life.

I have focused my efforts on making movement videos to aid the Kidneys.  With good reason. This one organ needs as much support as we can give.  And the Gate gives us access to it.

Photo by Quentin Bounias on Unsplash

Life-time and life-space. Time of life. Space for life.

Life goes on always. In one form or another.

Teenagers believe they are immortal. Death is outside their scope usually. It's why we help keep them alive with our warnings and reminders to be safe.

Perhaps humankind is merely the teenager of Earth's children.  Oblivious to the danger.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Nowhere to go. Nothing to say.
I've hit a wall. Looks like a dead end.
And yet I often climb walls.
Or go under them if there is a gap just big enough for me.

What looks like a dead end is merely an obstacle to find a way around.
I can make a game of it, like playing hares and hounds. 
What is the quickest way over the wall so I can snare the hare?
Quick, the rest of the pack is coming... and there goes the hare....
One of my pack gives me a boost to the top.
Then it's an easy jump down to the other side.

Photo by Jakob Braun on Unsplash

The sign went down on the land for sale behind my house. I am filled with dread now.  More yellow machines of death will disrupt my peace and hurt my heart. Goodbye carbon sequestered in trees and living plants. Goodbye native Sonoran Desert. Too bad bobcats. The humans have come with their overriding needs.  They come first, you see.

We wonder at the illness, physical and mental, more pervasive now than 100 years ago. Symbiosis with our natural world. Is it any wonder we are poisoned as much as we poison our Earth?  We fill her waters with fertilizer, pesticides, petrochemicals and industrial waste. We cut down her forests and destroy indigenous life, plant and animal. We tear open her mountains to mine what we think we need.

Some children use up their mothers.  The selfish ones. Others respect them and care for them.

Photo by Ali Kazal on Unsplash

Sleep interrupted despite owl-given wisdom and calm.
Thoughts wrestle for pillow-locked holds.
Peace eludes me, though I know the way.
I refuse to give myself the gift. It’s in my grasp.
A promise would set up my day.

Have you ever known what is good for you and not done it?

Photo by Cameron Venti on Unsplash