Journal. An actual bear, meditation, good behavior
How am I this upbeat??? I’ve been up since 3:30, when I heard something tugging on the back doors of the van. First response after waking: the sick thud in the pit of my stomach—the “here’s trouble” dread. Then, as the door kept rattling, the sudden awareness that a bear was trying to get in, and the instant waking to life and action. I really did do things on autopilot, and nothing complicated—reached for the keys and smashed all the buttons (including the Unlock one…) (and then the Lock one in a hurry) before hitting the Panic button. After the first beep of the horn the bear stopped. After about five I shut off the horn, because I might be under bear attack, but let’s not wake the neighbors??? What kind of idiot brain do I have????? To be fair, I could hear the bear moving off by then, so maybe it was a sense of job done. But there was a ridiculous dose of unnecessary politeness in there, too.
Since then I’ve been high as a kite. It’s about 6 now, and I’m completely out of routine, and I imagine the adrenaline will wear off hard in a little bit. I’m looking forward to going out to see the footprints when it gets light. And I’m very glad I have a solid steel cargo van and not one of the paper-thin RV’s. The hinges didn’t even budge, though the bear didn’t really get a chance to get serious.
Here’s what interests me, though. I made my tea and sat down to meditate like usual, because by golly, a bear might wake me up two hours early, but it’s not going to change my routine. Why am I even saying routine? I’ve been meditating for all of four days, but it was my plan to meditate, and I wasn’t going to let some piddly emergency stop me. I don’t even like meditating. I’ve always hated meditating. I lead a very quiet, low-stimulus life, and now I’m supposed to shut up more? No one else wants to hear my thoughts, and now even I don’t get to hear them? I hate it, hate it, hate it. But something in the Renku book clicked—about the world being a kaleidoscope of impressions. It was about poetry, but it made sense about thought, too. And I’ve been looking at meditation since then not as a behave-y practice but as a way to get really entertained by what bubbles up, and then letting it go to find out what pops up next. Oh how funny—it’s like a social media feed, complete with the occasional dopamine hit amidst a lot of nonsense.
So predictably, the first 10 minutes were about BEAR, BEAR, BEAR. But after that my mind wandered into the key lime pie V is making this afternoon, because a friend is coming to get the ATV/snow plow that a BEAR fiddled with and wrecked the mechanism, and my sister would not be my sister if she didn’t turn that into an occasion for a little festive gathering. And because I was thinking about key lime pie, I realized that maybe I didn’t need to take the bear all that seriously. Correction. I take the bear very seriously. I don’t need to take my reaction to the bear all that seriously. The reaction is still working its way out, and that’s fine. I’ll give it the time it needs, and the catharsis here, but I don’t have to be all impressed by it.
I was going to write more about behave-y practices, but I think I’m done for the day. Do I have final assessments? I think it’s time for a motion detector alarm. And bear spray. Confirmation of the wisdom of parking nose out. Habits are awesome—I could grab the keys without even looking. GIRLS SHOULD NOT BE RAISED TO BE POLITE. I’m glad the bear got scared off when it did, because V would have walked out the door 15 minutes later to drive into work.
Ha! Yesterday I was miffed because I couldn’t scare off a rabbit. Today I scared off a bear. (Well. The horn did.) Rawr. I feel like an apex predator again. :D