I take a minute to allow hope and sadness to commingle like sharks in a tank.

I run laps and count my breaths panting. I watch the liquid silver reflect everything and almost faint from pure beauty.

Yesterday my shining daughter and I traced the path around the lake slowly, because Captain the dog took his sweet time sniffing everything and lapping up the liquid lake. Though inpatient around the edges, each time we stopped and let in the nestled mercury, mountains, sky, I felt more grateful than the time before. Toward the end, my patience ran thin and I found myself tugging at the leash. Harmony stepped in and led her dog like a stubborn cow toward the gate.

I watch my ego make demands and get stressed and try to scream like a general taking charge of a situation. The rest of me watches like the lake. I long to stop and behold this cantankerous fist-raised angry one, but I’d also like to just write.

Once I realize that a false belief exists, I cannot help but heal her, because it’s what I do. I stop to do a beholding meditation with her.

She went willingly into this good night. She thought she had to take control of every situation and run the show. I said; No. And through a healing conversation, she got willing to die in the larger I that is God. As she went gentle and got willing to allow and to trust God’s will. I heard Queen’s song “And another one bites the dust” in my head as she surrendered. We die every day as our egos give up the ghost for a more big and real life beyond themselves. When I asked at the end of the beholding meditation if she had anything to say before calling her back inside me, she told me to be patient with myself if I felt weird.

I feel weird. I keep changing and changing and I don’t know how to feel or be or find my feet. I feel totally unmoored without that cantankerous dictator. She’s been the captain of my ship. I pray for God to guide me because I have no idea what I’m doing here or how I’m doing it, or really, who is doing it.

She-boss has never given me a moment’s peace. Now that she’s officially off-duty, my heart leaps away free but the rest of me trembles. Hold me, God.

This all reminds me of a dream I had recently, where I sawed though the tendon connecting my body to my right leg with a toothbrush. I got such glee from being able to accomplish the task only to think “Uh-oh” once I’d severed the tendon. Like maybe I shouldn’t have done that. My dad, who is a doctor/psychiatrist told me he knows some people who function well enough without that tendon. I try to stand on my leg in the dream and it feels weird, unmoored, spacious, maybe even unstable…but it doesn’t hurt and I don’t fall down. I think “Huh. I wonder how this will go.”

Maybe it was my dream showing me that my skills conducting surgery on myself were getting into some pretty deep functional attachments. I think I’m okay, but even basic typing feels strange as hell, like someone other than me types.

If I am not that general, I am only God, but that doesn’t make any sense.

Stop making sense.

Rest.