I had the most wonderful time in Asheville this week! I've heard so much about it in the 16 years we've lived here, but we didn't even make it to Knoxville until last year on our heavy metal tour, so it's definitely taken time for us to explore that direction on I-40. Wow! It was a gorgeous drive through the mountains and then Asheville itself is a lovely, funky city full of shops and restaurants. I'll definitely have to go back with my sweetie in the near future.
On top of getting to go to Marie Manuchehri's book talk at Malaprop's (the reason for the whirlwind, mid-week trip), I got to have dinner with her and her lovely assistant, Elissa, at Tupelo Honey Cafe. Such fun! Having listened to podcasts of her radio show non-stop on the drive there (it really is the perfect driving companionship) I tried not to come off as the total fan-girl, but I might not have completely succeeded.
One thing I really noticed on the trip and afterwards, likely because Marie is such an advocate for being in one's whole body and not just in one's head, is how addicted I can be to thinking and planning. At the hotel after her talk I watched myself space out on the internet for a couple of hours, looking at what it would take to become a certified applied poetry facilitator, not even something I really want to do. It was just impulse/action/impulse/action, clicking down the rabbit hole of the web for hours. I did manage to find some great dharma talks by teachers who will be leading retreats at the Southern Dharma Retreat Center in the Smokies this year (now that's something I would really love to do), so that was the background soundtrack to my web wanderings and likely the only way I ever came back into my body and realized I was exhausted and needed to go to bed.
So when I was chatting with Joe Z. this week I told him how addicted I am to thinking and planning, nothing he hasn't heard in our Thursday morning conversations. When he could get a word in edgewise he asked if we'd talked about scraping. I immediately thought about how Marie says to scrape one's consciousness out of one's head and into the second chakra, so I was interested to hear what he had to say about scraping. He's getting ready for a daylong retreat about Celtic spirituality and he'd been reading about how they felt like when we see a shortcoming like this our impulse is to scrape away at it. But to allow healing, we need to see it and then allow the soul to do its work.
Since then when I catch myself scraping through the same old grooves in my mind, worrying about the past, planning for the future, I've started just lifting the needle, like on a record player. It feels so good to be suspended in the air, lifted back into the present moment.
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