I slept better last night after that lousy night's sleep I had the night before. I did have a period of anxiety. There was no reason I could figure out, just a racing heart and unexplained fearfulness. The best I could come up with is that I am alone without someone to watch my back. I had a few episodes where I felt people I relied on weren't that interested in being with me. It felt as if they brushed me off when I asked to spend time with them. (When I checked with both, it was a miscommunication more than anything else.) Those experiences left me feeling unprotected. I think I did an exercise where my conscious mind informed my nonconscious mind that my life was not in jeopardy. I may be alone without someone to watch out for me with the consistency that Mike did, but it is not a life-threatening situation. I fell back asleep.
Sometime last night or this morning, there was a new development in my body. I was able to use my upper body differently in breathing. The book on breathing says that the inhale should start at the top of the lungs and move its way down. It is my habit to initiate the inhale by expanding my abdomen. That gives me a big belly — another good reason to change my breathing pattern.
Heather helped me experience shoulder relaxation, which has led to a change in my breathing. When classes are small, she comes around and puts lavender soaked cold washcloths on our faces. As she applied the cloth, she pressed my shoulders down, so I relaxed them more. Sometime last night or this morning, I allowed my shoulders to move back as I inhaled and found it much easier to start the inhale from the top of the lungs instead of the bottom. It looks better too. I don't think I would have been able to relax my shoulders this much or coordinate the shoulder movement with my breathing if I hadn't changed my head and neck position, also recommended by Heather.
When I got home, I quickly changed to dry clothes and went out to continue cutting down the blue flowering shrub, which grows like a vine and is intruding on my neighbor's property. This might be a nice thing, except he is a commercial farmer growing crops. He does not want my blue flowers. I have been moving along the fence, cutting the shrub back and pulling the vines off the fence. It's hard work, but lots of fun. I did the second eight-foot length of the fence today; there are eight in total.
I started on this project because he said he was planning to cut them back from his property; it was next on his schedule. If he had pointed out how the plumbago was impacting his property, and I would have worked on this problem a long time ago. Unfortunately, this couple does not have the aloha spirit of Hawaii despite having lived here for quite a while. I had no idea how bad the vine intrusion was. When I told Yvette what was going on with the shrub, she was also surprised. Again, neither of us thought vine; we thought it was s shrub. Either I have the wrong idea of how shrubs grow, or they grow more enthusiastically here in Hawaii than on the mainland where I lived. It's very possibly the latter.
The gardeners are supposed to come sometime this week. They are going to have fun collecting all this garden waste and dumping it. I even have more in the back yard from work I did earlier this month.
Damon has made airline reservations for my trip to the west coast to visit my family. Mike had over 80,000 miles on Delta. We couldn't use them because we couldn't figure out the key questions. "What was the name of your first pet? And. "What is your father's middle name?" I knew that Mike had had no pets before he met me, so his first pet was a black cat named Melissa. But what was his father's middle name? Neither Damon nor Shivani knew it. I asked them to ask Randy, Mike's sister.
I remembered that Mike's father's name must be on his birth certificate. I checked it; there was a middle initial, P. I tried Paul first. That's a good middle name for a Jewish boy from Brooklyn. That didn't work. I tried Peter. That was a possibility since the family came from Eastern Europe. Neither worked. I realized it is possible that no one alive knows Mike's father's middle name, and that Mike didn't know it either. I tried, "I don't know," as an answer. The autocorrect dropped the 'I" leaving, "don't know." It worked! It worked! Those 80,000 plus miles are mine. Yeah!
For the record, I'm voting for Paul as his father's middle name for future reference.
I did a little more straightening in the library before I went to bed. There isn't much left to do to have it look it's best. I'm putting off the final moment, the moment all the books are gone. Once I have moved a few things and polished the glass top coffee table, I will take pictures of Mike's beloved library and start taking it apart. I already have a request for 100 books from the librarian at the seminary in New Orleans. I couldn't give Mike's whole precious library to a single recipient; no one wants books anymore. I hope he will be pleased with what I can accomplish, placing what books I can in hands that will value the gift.
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Musings: I'm putting this separately so those who are not interested can choose not to read it.
Who would have guessed that I share the point of view of man's nature with devout Baptists, but it seems I do. (I think most Christian religions hold the same point of view.) Brooks wrote a chapter specifically on Bayard Rustin and generally on the men involved with the civil rights movement; King, Randolph, and Rustin. These men did not believe in the perfectibility of human nature through education and the evolution of culture. They believed that we could never escape our 'dark' side, the parts of our selfish motivation, which is destructive for others, and I also believe ourselves. (Again, I think religions also believe that if we pursue our 'dark' side, it isn't good for us either.)
These men understood that their 'enemies' were not going to give up ground easily and had to be forced to do it. They shunned the liberal point of view of the essential goodness of man. Their skepticism did not just apply to their political enemies, those who opposed equality of the races, but to themselves. They were ruthless with themselves. Brooks wrote:
"Even in the midst of these confrontations, Randolph, Rustin, and the other civil rights activists were in their best moments aware that they were in danger of being corrupted by their aggressive actions In the best moments they understood that they would become guilty of self-righteousness because their cause was just; they would become guilty of smugness as their cause moved successfully forward; they would become vicious and tribal as group confronted group; they would become more dogmatic and simplistic as they used propaganda to mobilize their followers; they would become more vain as their audiences enlarged; their hearts would harden as the conflict grew more dire and their hatred for their enemies deepened; they would be compelled to make morally tainted choices as they got closer to power; the more they altered history, the more they would be infected by pride. P.148 Brooks. Road to Character.
These men were prepared not to just put their lives on the line for this cause, but also never let themselves off the hook. They understood that being human, they were capable of becoming the very evil that they were committed to combatting. These men realized that the enemy of their cause was not just external but internal as well.
My view of human nature is not quite as harsh but just as complex as the one I think these men held.
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