Rainy Saturday

The rains have come with a vengeance. Tasche finished our sukkah, but it has been too wet to eat out there and it promises to be wet all week. The temperature is 57 degrees. The rains are a couple of weeks early in arriving this year. I’m not surprised since it was a cool summer.

I’ve started a new writing class which is put on by the Write Around Portland folks, hosted by the Quest Integrative Center. It’s an interesting mix of people in the class. I really like the work that is coming out of it. It’s quite inspirational to be in a group, churning out stuff, finding out where it will lead. I wrote this piece:

I Can’t Explain

I can’t explain what happened that day. I just know that in an instant everything changed; all of the sudden I went through the bottle neck, released somehow into a new understanding.

It was a moment I didn’t know I’d been waiting for, and I had no idea it would take this form. I hadn’t expected it, but I then again I had, only not on a conscious level. I’m just not that perceptive.

Oh, and I try to be so perceptive, so damned perceptive. I ask for it every day, “Just allow me a little more perception, some intuition, please. I know you’re up the, giving me all this great guidance, but I’m so tired of being deaf and blind to it. Allow me to open like a flower to your rays of light.”

Well, someone up there must have heard and took pity on me because one day it happened. I was walking down the stairs and I didn’t touch the last step; instead, I floated above it. I floated forward effortlessly. “Whoa, I’m levitating!” I though excitedly and immediately dropped to the floor. Hmm.

But it kept happening, usually when I least expected it and always when I was alone. When I wasn’t paying attention, when I wasn’t trying to make it happen, I would float off the ground a few inches, and sometimes as much as a few feet. As soon as I realized I was floating then whomp! I fell back to earth. One time I was crossing a parking lot and I floated up about eight feet in the air. “Oh, wow!” I thought, “This is so cool!” and I immediately plummeted. It was a pretty hard landing and I sprained my ankle. I hobbled around on crutches for days. When people asked me how I injured myself I made up a story because the real story was, well, improbable to say the least.

After a while, though, I began to get a handle on it. I could sustain the float longer, rise higher, and I learned to descend slowly. I found that strong emotions, surprise, pride, or alarm, for instance, caused me to drop precipitously. I learned that if I breathed evenly and kept my mind empty I had more control. I could even move forward and direct myself where I wanted to go.

Then one day I was walking with my husband and began to float up while he watched in astonishment. I looked at him and grinned and gently drifted to the ground. I knew that I had made some sort of breakthrough. Another person had witnessed me levitating.

But of course, it was another bottleneck. Suddenly my pride, my egotism was lit on fire because someone else knew, even if it was only my husband and best friend. I wanted him to be my witness, to brag to our friends about my new ability and I knew that this would spoil my fledgling attempts at control and mastery of my new found ability. How could I overcome this new challenge?