Shuffling and Meandering

I'm still here.  Sort of shuffling and meandering my way through the holiday season this year, so far.  It's not that I'm depressed, really; I just don't feel that inspired.

Good news:  I received my work assignments for next semester, and they were basically what I wanted.  Now, I'm super nervous about teaching my first college class.  It's kind of a loosey-goosey, unstructured class about college success and good habits around: study skills, organization, time-management, health and stress relief, etc.  If anyone knows any great resources, please let me know!  I've been given very little guidance so far and am starting to research and figure out the planning process and logistics on the fly.  Hopefully, I will have a couple of colleagues' syllabi for guidance.

Tomorrow morning will find Zoey and I on the road to Oregon for Christmas.  We will be staying at my brother's house and splitting holiday time between his family's, my parent's, and my sister's family's houses.  As usual, I imagine I will have some difficult feelings come up...

To that end, my leadership program gave me a new process called "Trigger Tracking" in which you look at your feelings and stories around a particularly charged situation and try to gain perspective on the "source event" that initially created this trigger.  In the end, the hope is to release some of the emotion associated with the source event and establish new beliefs or stories.  I tried it out on a trigger that came up for me yesterday at a Transition community organizing retreat and it worked pretty well, so I'll have it on hand to work with the family stuff.

By the way, my leadership program weekend went well - sorry for not reporting back on that.  The sleeping situation kind of sucked, as I was on the floor in a cold-ish room full of people, the one nearest me a snorer.  So, yeah, not much sleep.  But it was wonderful to roll out of bed and head out into the meadow for an early morning "sit" (sitting awareness meditation in nature) with a group of my compadres.  I enjoyed the increased sense of community and belonging, also.

On the break-up front, S took off to stay with a female friend this week.  I met her previously and don't believe there is any romance there, but it's interesting he took off after we had some nice connection on my birthday and were going to talk this week about "us" and future hopes that were recently verbalized.  I'm feeling it as a distancing maneuver and am glad in a way because I am in no way ready to let him back in to my heart.  I may never be ready, but when we are talking about meaningful topics and are both in a vulnerable place, old feelings do come up.  I can't help but feel closer to him.  So, it's better to get some space and focus on my own life.  I'm doing some dabbling in online dating as a distraction.

I hope to post over Christmas, but just in case:  Merry, Merry Christmas!  May your holiday be filled with warmth and light and love.