Morning!! - 9spiration

It is a path that I would not have willingly chosen, and yet I would not change one thing.

These are the words I am borrowing today, the ones that seemed to reverberate as I read them. In life's journey, the path may seem obscured, or leading right over a cliff, and sometimes through the delight of a sunlit ocean swim. Some parts of that path seem chosen by me - usually the pretty parts I tend to claim - and some parts I want no ownership over. This morning, sitting on my balcony with the fan blowing on me, in sweltering heat and to the sounds of a full Filipino life around me, I ask if I can say in this moment, "I would not change a thing."

All I do know, is that every time I have surrendered to the motion within, to the flow of my heart, I have found immense beauty, wonder, and love permeating all parts. It is the non-surrender that is the suffering, the closing off of, inability to surrender to, where I find anxiety and pain. This long weekend I have surrendered to one very simple, moment-changing thing: sleep!

After a week starting with a 24 hour travel block and working nights, Friday was a blur of exhaustion. Trying to string words together, figure out what I was doing in the kitchen (again!), the tired had both muted my mind and sharpened my experience. The heat was hotter, the dog barking louder, and the heat rash growing by leaps and bounds in this sleepless space. Two full nights of sleep later and I'm almost recharged to the point I need to be. Almost.

I am flinging myself yet again into the wind of the universe and hoping to find that I will yet again not change a thing. Well, the winds of the Philippines, to be more specific. A wind that has effectively died out to humidity, but of course I'm talking of the metaphoric wind.... A real wind would be nice....

The weekend passed...

It's Tuesday night. Work hours. It's almost midnight and I have surrendered to the energy enhancing effects of caffeine. I hope it's enough to keep me going another 3+ hours and not too many more beyond that. The weekend was a whole lot more sleep! If I had the urge, I laid down and gave sleep a shot.

Our maid, Terry, cleaned on Monday, finishing out her day with a broken English lesson on how to cook hipon (hip-pon) with mami noodles. Butter, garlic, shrimp, and coconut milk - what a combo! I ended up with a crime scene style mess when I peeled the shrimp out - a coconut milk and butter splatter that Dexter might have analyzed like this: "The shrimp was already dead when the perpetrator tore off its head - see this misting here? Then the shell was removed with bare fingers, the body dropped twice as you can see from the puddling right here, the arterial sprays of pure yummy coconut here, and all over the perp's blouse."

The rest of the weekend was spent either working in Aaron's classroom or in our four walls, relaxing. I am able to use my decades of experience prepping classrooms and living with teachers again. Can't really call it coincidence when after having both parents be teachers, doing some teaching myself, marrying and divorcing a teacher, to find myself head over heels for a teacher. No need to waste psychoanalysis time on that one! Why am I not a teacher? That question will get its own post someday. I am proud to say that I'm pretty handy in a classroom.

Tonight we had a storm roll in, huge clouds, lightning and thunder, followed by a wind that blew over orchids in our windows and capriciously opened and shut doors. But enough talk, here are some pictures:

Eucalyptus Street