1. Truth: I am obsessed with peonies right now. Just like I do every year around this time, I attempt to drown myself in them. I can’t get enough.

2. Truth: This post usually happens on Tuesday and is only three truths. But this has been a busy week, the last week on my contract, finals week at CSU, and I’m sick so that makes everything harder, and I wasn’t going to write this post at all this week, especially not today when I’m home sick and just want to sleep, but then I remembered…

3. Truth: Five years ago today, Kelly passed away. This day doesn’t pass just like any other. I’m not sure if it ever will. This whole season, the shift from winter to spring, all the blooms and the rain, the flowers and the flooding, reminds me of her, and then that reminds me of Obi, and that reminds me of Dexter. I’m acutely aware of everything I’ve lost, and everything I have because I was so hurt, all the ways I opened up and let life in because I had no other choice — tender and terrible, beautiful and brutal.

4. Truth: I’m sick because I worked too hard, didn’t take care of myself. More than anything I need to learn how to be of service, to give, to be generous and helpful and compassionate without running myself into the ground. I need to figure out how to care for myself as well as I do others, to make sure that it happens so I can keep going.

5. Truth: My life would feel like enough if I truly let myself experience each moment, each breath. For example, I could stay with the joy, the creative energy of learning and putting together yoga classes for yoga teacher training, just that and not project myself into teaching this weekend, worrying about maybe getting sicker, all the things I need to get done in the next few days, etc. — I could be calm, peaceful, at ease, well, content right now. All I need to do is be in this moment, rather than carrying the weight of all the possible moments.

6. Truth: I don’t practice to feel some things and not others, I practice to feel all the things. I want to meet whatever is arising in this moment, be open to all of it, be vulnerable. I put so much energy into resisting, forgetting, running away when it’s so much easier to relax with what is, to be here now. I listened to a Daily Dharma Gathering talk with Koshin Paley recently and he said, “The more I become intimate with old age, sickness, and death… the surprise is I feel more alive and joyful.”

7. Truth: I want the last thing Eric and I say to each other to be “love you.” I insist on it every time we part, so that our last words don’t end up being something like “are you coming home for the dogs?” or “don’t forget your lunch.” It might not work out, but I’m still going to try.

8. Truth: I’m so tired right now I’m about to fall over. So, I think I’ll go finally take a shower and then take another nap.

One wish: Even though the first noble truth is that life is suffering, may we find ways to ease suffering, for ourselves and each other and the world.

1. Truth: This is one of my favorite times of the year, as well as one of the hardest. It’s the busiest part of my whole CSU work year, but it’s also spring — the smell of the lilacs, my irises starting to bloom, buds on my peonies, the trees getting their leaves, the bird song, the promise of a garden and summer, the rain, the rain, the rain.

blergh…

2. Truth: I have Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’m very aware that S.A.D. is the kind of condition that if you don’t have it sounds like a made up thing, but trust me — it’s real. It’s some kind of trick the light and moisture and temperature plays on my brain. And when it’s as gloomy as it has been the past few days (and will be for the next few as well), I just want to stay in bed. I feel like I’m carrying the full weight of the sky and the weather in my body, like the whole thing sits right on top of my head, settles in my chest, and it’s too heavy. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I just thought I was a gloomy person. Then I moved to Colorado and realized it was actually the weather.

3. Truth: I’m ready for this semester to be over. I was playing around with my new work camera yesterday, and my friend who’d stopped by to have lunch took this picture of me. It makes me smile because it’s so ridiculous but also so accurate — this is exactly how I feel right now. I have two more weeks of CSU work (fingers crossed that I finish what I have to by then, but even if I don’t my office has to be packed up so they can move it back into our newly remodeled building, thus the chaos behind me in the picture) and three more Sundays of yoga teacher training, and I’m so ready to be done, to rest.

One wish: That even if we are busy, overwhelmed, sad, tired, confused, we are still able to see and appreciate the beauty amidst the mess, still able to laugh. That we do what we can to be gentle with ourselves and others. That even as we surrender to what is, we don’t give up.