It's become my habit to do my walking on the treadmill inside the gym.  Everyday at lunchtime I'd leave my office and drive up the hill to walk for 30 minutes on the treadmill while gazing out the window at Monterey Bay in the distance.  Then one day it hit me - what am I doing in here when there is all that out there? 

     So the next day, I grabbed my hat from my truck and took off walking...............in the neighborhood that surrounds the school district where I work.  You would have thought I was a damn tourist.  But I couldn't help myself.  I don't think there are two houses or two gardens alike anywhere in Pacific Grove.  And in the middle of the day most people weren't home so I could stop and admire the houses and the flowers without feeling like an intruder. 

     Did I mention the fragrance? Sweet ocean breeze, new cut lawns, a wiff of a distant flower. There was none of this in the gym.

Okay so may I didn't walk as far as I normally do in the gym on the treadmill, but I will tell you this.  When I returned my office, I felt refreshed and reinvigorated.  That never happens at the gym.

     So I'm at this Haiku party because the hostess promised that she would teach us about haiku poetry.  It always looked so mysteious to me, especially with so few words.  Was it code?  Turns out the requirements are only syllabic - 5, 7, and 5 respectively in three lines.  And the subject should include nature. 

     So we were ten minutes to compose our first haiku poem. Outside the window was a tall tree that told me to write the following about the Big Sur Fires:

Tall pine shades small hut

Fire rages, heat melts, ash falls

Sky rains, tall pine sighs.

    The tree said thank you and I smiled back.  I do not remember the two other poems I wrote next.  I only remembered the first one, my first haiku adventure.

     Last week I had an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon to get his opinion on how my knees are holding up under the strain of maintaining my balance and walking.  I shared with him my latest theory of what I thought might be causing my idiopathic condition and what might assist me in walking "normally."  When I was finished, he took my hands and said, "You have a neuromuscular condition."  My mind took in those words and they didn't sound so bad.  In fact, they sounded less threatening, less harmful, less terminal than idiopathic peripheral neuropathy. 

     I had a chance to test this new label the other day when yet another well meaning acquaintenance noticed my gait and asked if there was something wrong.  When I replied that I just have a neuromuscular condition, she said oh and talked about something else.  Idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, on the other hand, only invited pitying looks and more questions. 

     The knees are fine, the ortho said, just very flexible.  He gave me some stabilizing knee braces to wear when I exercise.  I doubled my time on the elyptical trainer at the gym and was able to walk around the block without it feeling like an exhaustive aerobic workout. 

     Dare I try roller skating again?

Last week, with the sun rising earlier, I sat at my eastward facing dining room table, gazing through the window in awe of a beautiful sunrise. I marveled at the golden light that filled my apartment -- until I rose from the table and turned to walk across the room to my bedroom.  It was everywhere - on the bookcase shelves, the glass coffee table, the silk flowers - DUST!  I was late for work that morning but when I stepped outside I left behind clean surfaces, or did I?

It's in the air, everywhere and all the time.  Spectacular photographs have been made of dust - of inspiring light filtering through the trees, of massive bodies of shape and color in outer space. So why is it a cleaning crime to have it in our homes? 

When I wiped down all those surfaces I knew I was only removing what had settled up to that moment and that as soon as I walked away, new dust particles would begin to quietly collect on everything all over again.  I've been told that the central heating has nothing to do with the dust since it's an enclosed system and the window screens are designed to keep out the dust.  But still it comes.

So I will continue to vacuum the floor and furniture and drapes, and wipe down all surfaces to rid my domicile of its dust problem.  Years ago, when I lived very close to the beach and we spent a great deal of time on the sand, I recall little dust and lots of gritty sand on the hardwood floors.  Roseanne Rosanadanna was right! It's always something!

     During those years when I had regular monthly cycles, I would attribute this mood to PMS, knowing that within a few days it would blow over and I'd be my old cheerful self again.  But now I don't know what causes this dark mood and I don't know how to make it go away. 

     I'm usually pretty good at keeping my thoughts on the positive things in my life, or focusing on something that will keep my spirits uplifted.  But on rare occassions, when I am just waking up and before I can stop it, there is that parade spectacle that moves through my mind, caricatures of all the dreams I have tried to fulfill that were not succeessful and it slams me into a gloomy place from which it is very difficult to escape. 

     Perhaps this time it was prompted by my cousin's husband of 45 years dying of cancer yesterday, a premature death since he finally admitted he'd had the symptoms for a very long time and did not tell his wife or see a doctor. 

     Perhaps it is that when I stop trying to create a happy, fulfilled life by constantly blowing air into that balloon and just stop trying and the balloon immediately begins to deflate, dragging me down with it that causes me to wonder what is it that I keep doing wrong or am not doing right.

  Yes, I know. Everybody gets the blues sometimes. 

This morning, as President-Elect Barak Obama became President Barak Obama I had the good fortune to be sitting at the back of our middle school library with a group of sixth graders who would otherwise be in a P.E. class at that time.  These are 11 and 12 year olds, still on the safe side of adolescence, or so they appeared to me, who sat quietly at tables and looked up at the television.  Granted, the ceremony was only about 30 minutes long by the time President Obama finished his inaugural speech; but those kids never fidgeted in their seats, never poked the person sitting next to them, never took their eyes off the television.  I was in awe.  Were they truly mature enough to understand what they were watching?  Did they comprehend what an impact this President would have on their lives?  All doubt was removed when Obama took the Oath of Office and they started clapping.  They did not clap when Aretha sang or when Vice-President Biden took the Oath or when Itzah Perlman played.  But they just started clapping when Obama finished reciting the Oath of Office.

Back at my desk in the District Office, I pondered what I had just witnessed when suddenly I became aware that the energy around me was changing, as if a breeze of clean, fresh oxygen had just blown past my window.  It made me smile as I envisioned that clean fresh air blowing all around the planet.  I want to believe that today people all around the world stopped what they were doing to watch Obama become President.  At that very moment, millions of thoughts shifted from anger, despair, shame, and hostility to joy, hope, pride and compassion.  And in the shifting of their thoughts, they raised the collective consciousness of Planet Earth, blowing away the stagnet black smoke with clean, fresh air. 

In my exuberance, I told nearly everyone I talked to today about that breeze that blew past window and what I thought it meant. I did not care that most of them have no clue about my deep spiritual beliefs.  But all of them said they felt it, too, a sudden lightness in the air.  Did you feel it?

What an incredible idea - to simulcast an event so that others unable to attend, can still be there.  I'm talking about watching a live performance from the Metropolitan Opera at a local movie theater.

When I mentioned this to a friend, she said she'd also "attended" Celine Dionne's last performane in the same way.  What an awesome use of sattelite transmissions.

The trip to the opera was a birthday gift from a diehard opera fan.  She'd not attended these simulcast performances before, but was convinced that arriving 30 minutes eary should pretty much give us our pick of seats in the modern movie theater.  We landed in the third row, slightly off center and vowed that in the future we would get there 60 minutes early.

The trade off of attending an opera is that you want to sit in the mezannine to hear the music more fully.  But in that third row, with the upclose camera shots, visual details were distracting.  Not to mention the feeling of motion sickness when the camera moved too quickly.

But it was a perfomance from the Met and I can hardly wait to go again. 

Twelve years ago I was told I had peripheral neuropathy.  The doctors, all noted neurologists, told me they did not know what was causing the numbless in my feet nor did they know how to stop it from spreading.  They did say it would probably worsen and like my mother. grandmother and greatgrandmother, I would eventually end up in a wheel chair.  I refused to accept that as my reality.  They were heavy smokers and drinkers while I detest smoking and am a social drinker.  At first I wanted to know how this happened, and consulted with other doctors about my difficult birth.  All they could tell me was that it might have been a factor.  I call that my denial phase and it was followed by my fight back phase.  I read in Dr. Peter D'Adamo's book, "Eat Right for Your Blood Type" that my particular blood type is predisposed to neurological disorders.   I immediately changed my eating habits to align with what he perscribed for my blood type and within a couple weeks I noticed how much better I felt overall.  Still, the symptoms continued but at a slower rate.  Seven years later, my legs were like rubber, making it impossible for me to stand without holding onto something and looking like I was drunk when I walked.  People would stare at me when I was out in public as if I were under the influence of something.  I learned to hold my head up high and look them right in the eye when I saw someone staring and I would smile.  When I told an acquaintenance at church that I was told I was born with this condition she offered to do past life hypnotherapy on me.  We discovered two past lives whose guilt and shame had affected their lower legs and we set them free.  Again, there was a relief of symptoms but not a cure.  I am unable to raise up on my toes.  I have read all of Deepak Chopra's books on the mind/body connection and firmly believe that I - in my mind - am standing (no pun intended) in the way of my own complete healing.  If the clue is in front of me, I do not see it.