My mind is always in two places simultaneously. First it is like someone crawling in an unlit tunnel. I reach out in front of me. What is there? What is the shape of possibility? What sharp edge of struggle will I tear my palms upon? What opening unseen will explain itself to my touch?

Secondly, there is what I call the predictor mind. I will achieve only the kind of love that I have previously experienced. I keep my focus on what I have left behind me in time to allow what is now or what is revealing itself.

The narrative of bygones restrains the possible map of my life. Only those small rivers I have previously sailed upon will be found in my future exploration. The past is the predictor. Only those horizons I have crossed into will appear on my journey. What was becomes what is and more firmly what I can expect of later.

What is expectation? Expectation is a reaching out, a feeling around, a replaying of the old story.

The mind works diligently to keep us safe. If your ship crashed upon a shore in a narrow river and you were abandoned to the lost land, you will steer away from the delta that expresses a topography reminding you of your last disaster place.

The mind works incessantly to prevent the very thing that cannot be prevented. The assaults of happenstance have already happened. The scars of old wounds are already etched upon the skin.

The mind remembers the sense of the punishing helplessness of abuse, disaster, ill conceived choices. It remembers all of it.

And so when I get up in the morning, I look at the sky. I ask the sky to show me what day this will be. The questioning dialogue is about my safety. What promises do you bring to me oh vault of heavenly blue?

I open the door expecting the clarity of clear sky to engulf me in warmth. But the wind attacks as soon as I turn around the protective corner of the house.

The act of dismissing a story about the sky and the wind and my place in all of it clears space. Dismissing the protective thoughts that arise like a body guard sharply speaking to me to ,”Be careful. Be very, very careful,” creates a place for promises.

Like a child, we can choose to move out the door into a new story. What if everything was just exploration? What if I am ultimately unaffected by the past? I can ask: “What skies are these?” And in true wonder, simply go find out.

The balance toward lofty goals and maintaining the foot hold on the place on the side of the rocky mountain side is always the issue. I cannot move further, level up, grab the next hand hold, slide my foot into the new foothold unless I am secure in the purchase I have now found.

The pause, the breath, the settling fully into place is something contemporary society does not honor. We are taught, I was taught that only activity and pushing oneself was a sign of strength.

But mountain climbers, rock face climbers, athletes of all disciplines know that it is in the resting that the readjusting takes place. To sit meditation is not a turning away from activity. It is a time to clear the mind to see what activity is in fact going to grow the spirit.

I struggle with my mind programming which tells me more is better. It tells me that moving through space is somehow creating something. As I was lifting the space heater today because for some mysterious reason the gas furnace has stopped producing heat, I felt the urge to hurry.

I thought, “Isn’t this curious. My anxiety about the furnace is causing adrenalin and the urge to move faster.”

I took a breath and spoke to myself in my mind. “Pick up each heater slowly and mindfully. The amount of time it takes you to get the heaters in the house will not change whatever ails the furnace.”

Looking with clear eyes at how weak and ineffective I feel when systems fail was important. It is not my skill to repair failing furnaces or washing machines or a list I could scroll out like the strip of paper on the old adding machines which would then turn round itself into a delightful pile of paper curls.

Things that I did which I could not do before: I removed the thermostat cover and replaced the batteries. Victory. I reset the clock on the thermostat. Victory. I punched off the programmed low heat. Victory. I flipped a mysterious switch on the furnace. Victory and nothing. Nope I got no response.

So I will phone someone who charges by the number of revolutions their tires spin as they head toward me. It is not the kind of magic or power or understanding that I can speak to. I have no language with machines. I fail them or they fail me.

Right now, apparently, the universe is asking me to focus on maintaining.

I am perennially curious. I move into areas of ignorance slowly like water on clay. Defining who I am and at the same time desiring to be more at ease; more at home in life; more at home in my body keeps me constantly seeking.

This last binge of understanding came when I stumbled upon Esther Perel. I had had no previous contact with her work. But after viewing one you tube video I binged.

When a starving person sits down to a plate at first, he or she needs to go slowly. So I watched the one video. I took notes. I shared the lessons on social media. I slept on it.

And then I spent four hours the next day learning.

The dissatisfaction which is central in my life is and always has been the deep well of loneliness. So many times I have read that an individual’s social connections are the greatest predictor for longevity and contentment. I read the statement in the writings of various researchers in its various formations. I took notes for years. I “got” the concept.

But what had always blocked me suddenly came to shining clarity as I listened to Esther. She talked about the Dowry of Relationships. The inheritance of ability to live in a kind, loving and intimate way with others is the legacy each of us carries from our family’s experiences.

My legacy was that those who were closest to me did the greatest damage. To be within an arm’s reach was damaging. To be dependent on love to a parent who broke my bones and another one who blamed me for angering her partner left me feeling only safe when I isolated myself. I escaped to the world of books.

I saw my parents form friendships which were to be quite frank, weird. The fat family with boils on their butts came to the house for my mother, the nurse, to inject them with penicillin. The woman who sat at our dining room table telling my mother about all of the ways that we, The Coach family, were lower status than her family was. Her daughter got awards. The mother had a new watch. See it. Then there was the hairdresser who hated her husband. She would show up when she had a truck load of stories about what a failure he was as a man. She marked the sides of all of the containers in the house to make sure the children were not taking any food she had not specifically given them.

And then there was my mother’s family: the brother that showed up to borrow four thousand dollars from my mom. I had to listen for years about how he “took” her money. The sister that stood me next to her nakedness in the shower and scrubbed my hair with some acid like soap that stung my eyes. When I cried, she told me what a baby I was. The other three siblings I only saw once, thankfully.

So the script I inherited was that friends are always in an unequal relationship. One is the status person and the other sits meekly while being bullied.

“Oh, that is the way you can be a friend,” I thought. “Smile and take nasty comments.”

And then at school I learned that my vocabulary, the way I spoke would cause others to gather around me and kick me while telling me I was a monster of arrogance.

My Dowry of Relationships is now the Hope Chest I am opening. I am taking out each experience and looking at it.

To be close is to be betrayed. To be close is to inevitably let in pain. To be open and honest is to attract rejection.

The results are so built into my mind habits that I am quite impressed with the strength of them. I dislike eating with others because my father beat me at the table. My mother force fed me in order to make me fat and not competitive with her as the “beautiful one.” I dislike riding in a car with someone because it means I can’t escape. I am trapped. My father had me sit where he could reach around and strike my face.

Groups of people cause me to feel like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I am watching my tail and ready to move should that person become unmindfully cruel. I will not go into an environment with alcohol. The loss of control, the verbal jabs that pass as humour, the group decision to choose one person out to humiliate inevitably happens in the presence of alcohol. I no longer wish to be a witness to this behaviour. To see others demeaned causes me physical pain.

The inheritance of distrust goes back at least to my grandparents. Their children suffered from the experiences that the parents had to endured. In their social interactions there was a wary circling kind of ritual that I liken to two people about to engage in a knife fight who are slowly moving around looking for an opening. The watchfulness of defence and protection was the over riding necessity in both of my parent’s families.

So my Dowry of Relationships is that in order to have a close relationship, one must endure being hurt, betrayed, disrespected. Inevitably, there is an ultimate price to pay. I get the same feeling when I watch film noir movie or detective show. Cynicism is an armour.

I am sitting with this new clarity of information and letting myself “real” ize it.

I do not see myself as a victim or as lacking social skills. I see myself as merely human.

What I do know now is that the inheritance of experiences will always script our lives until we clearly see the source of our decisions.

There is a time to just stop and sit. There is a time to forgive ourselves for not supplying the necessities of life to ourselves. There is a time to simply see ourselves as a vulnerable entity who is on a journey. I am grateful to the hours I spent listening to Esther Perel. She showed up because I was ready to learn.

The day started slowly. I took my time. The Kicking Horse Grizzly Claw coffee so dark in my cup, I sip slowly. The laundry is running again, redone because both my house guest and I put soap in so it was an explosion of bubbles creeping out the door. After four rinses the sheets are floating around and around in clear water.

I listen to CBC and learn about the Dunning Kruger Effect when people misjudge how much they know. Basically, knowing a little bit is dangerous but knowing more means individuals know what he or she doesn’t know. Got it?

Then I boil some potatoes with no plan. It is, after all, a Sunday and calls for a kind of vagueness.

I can still feel the nagging pain of tight muscles across my shoulders from my four days of shovelling snow. It was fun at the time. I felt powerful and useful. Somehow I invested the act of destroying the obstructing snow plow wall with some virtuous behavior in action.

The day is in between. It is not cold nor is it warm. There is no snow falling or predicted. But the sun comes out only like a feather’s brush of warmth on the skin and then disappears.

I think about the idea of a day holding promise. Each promise to the self, each action moves us closer to a new future. When I first wake up, I visualize the day bringing in gifts. I visualize myself moving into new habits and toward new possibilities. It is a dance. I move toward it. It moves toward me.

What will happen next has already been triggered on past days. What will happen far into the future is being created now. It is all a dance.

I sip my dark coffee and think about all of the things I don’t know yet. I fully understand the Dunning Kruger Effect. To know what I don’t even have a shadow of understanding about what I don’t yet know is to float in possibilities. I will be open. I commit to Sunday’s soft edges and shifting sunshine.

February has the ability to put us into a thrall hypnotic state of dull dissatisfaction. My mother shared with me the statistical data she had collected when working for a laboratory that tested people to see what malaise was at work in their bodies. February, she informed me, had just as many blood, urine, saliva tests as the proceeding eleven months all together.

The humanly shared urge to solve “the problem” hits the population in the North American dark sky cities in the most desperation. Why do I feel as if I am walking in a bog, or a tar pit? Why do I see my interior ability to generate energy declining and my exterior ability to solve problems declining?

When we look out on our psychic landscape it is like a desert. Flatness. No incoming delights; no wandering tribes of goodness coming toward us to set up tents and hold a May Pole dance.

The mind is like a bowling ball. We throw a thought… oh maybe when we are six and it just keeps rolling. The thought just keeps travelling on the same trajectory. We stand in what we see as a wet, gray sun deprived landscape. We stand in what we see as a white, cold, landscape of deterrence. And that tendency for our thoughts to roll on in a negative manner is most difficult in February.

I don’t think in all of my 74 years I have heard one person say, “I can’t wait for February. I love that month.” And Valentine’s day is planted there in that ice and rain and darkness. It is almost as if the depression is not thick enough: Someone decided to add another level.

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Sickness is more likely to occur in February. My neighbours are falling for it. Meanwhile at home, I sit next to my SAD light, gulping giant spoonfuls of nice cod liver oil. I go into a kind of Medieval villager’s response. I have a cross carved into my door… or at least I want to. My body begins to store fat so I can survive any possible apocalypse. I smudge my body, my house. I sit meditation chanting to clear the dark thought gremlins that try to attach to me. I watch comedies and turn away from the news.

I know it is a time that makes us yearn for another time. My mother told me of her experiences in the laboratory. People want to know why they feel like crap.

February is the month to just survive. We are mammals. We have all of the needs of animals. We are like plants. We thrive on sunlight, human contact, fresh clear water and the desire to look out and see some caravan of happiness working its way toward us.

There will be a May Pole. There will be a celebration of life. Neighbours will be working next to one another in the yard making flowers happen.

But now is a time of learning. When we share a state of darkness, what can we learn? We get to the very point of life and that is knowing full on standing nude in the mirror looking at our undressed souls. What is it I need? It forces us to look. It forces us to create our deeper relationship with ourselves.

February is a desert with fewer distractions. We can see farther. We can see more clearly. What are we learning?

The snow has finally come to us in the Okanagan Valley. We have passed through a warm early winter with the deepest excursions into winter being the gray spray of clouds on the water and the obscuring trail of dark icing on the hills. There have been winds warning us something was coming. And now it is here. The snow fell through the day, the late afternoon and at night. As I stood in my upstairs window, I could see it floating down under the street light.

And today the blue sky is crisscrossed by tree limbs obscured by clinging snow. The birds who disappeared somewhere, I don’t know where are back showing themselves on branches. They are absorbing the sunlight, taking to the air, enjoying the opportunity to fly.

Tomorrow, I will be back on the sidewalk with my broken handled yellow snow shovel attempting to keep the walkway clear for those who want a solid footing.

It is a lesson in attachment. The reaction and emotional involvement in the weather is tiring and ultimately useless. Watching weather front move across the lid of the valley is mindfulness practice.

The wind came. And offered me a chance to be fearful that branches would break off and attack my house. The gray graffiti mural artist wrote across the sky some message of clouds. I could have told myself I was deprived of sunlight, or connection to a more spacious view of the vault above us. And then the snow. It fell. It fell. It fell. And it brought with it obstruction of the roadways and highways.

I watched social media fill up with reactions that reminded me of people lashing out at old mean natured ex partner. I hate… him, her, that. I want another…person…partner…reality.

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And watching the patterns of the seasons in my life, is very instructive. At Christmas, because of past traumas, my mindfulness practice is abysmal. I choose to be depressed for weeks on end. I choose to feel unloved and incapable of positive change. It is a yearly season of the monsoon of mind flooding.

But now, now I can say, “How do I feel about this weather?” And the answer is the weather doesn’t care. It is now and now changes. It is the particular combination of moisture, wind, artic conditions. My job is to find a way to fit into what is.

The way I train my mind is to say, “Well, this is an adventure.” Yes. I do say that. It is like jollying on a dog to go outside and be in the day.

Yesterday, I walked 11 thousand steps shovelling my sidewalk. And I said to myself, “Look, you are having an adventure.”

The weather does not care what I think of it. It is up to me to find a way to live in whatever is happening. And, hey, I had heat and Netflix. It was a good month with lots of weather adventures.