Reflection 2

A steady paycheck not withstanding, working a corporate job has it's drawbacks. I've adjusted fairly well but on the way home yesterday - imminently frustrated and not long from being told (albeit gently and with not so much disagreement from me) that I'm abrasive and perhaps it's no wonder folks don't necessarily care enter the Maintenance Shop that is my lair - I made a note to myself to print a sign for my toolbox that would read "This is not where I live; this is not who I am". For me, a kindly reminder of the As Above perspective. Read... "The world is wide and this place is really just a gnat's bellybutton - chill darlin'".

Well on the other hand, friends and neighbors have said that to find in me my not-so-state-of-the-art Workshop at home is to find me as close to Zenning & Creation as most have ever seen me; the overly caffeinated, all-but-chainsmoking, cranky hermetic seeker of enlightenment that I am. Again, not much disagreement from me...

So Below... I am not my protruding and painful cervical discs any more that I am my gifted hands that just seem to know how to build furniture and carve beauty. I am not my knee that dislocates at will any more than I am solely my brilliant IQ. I am not my sour kidneys, overworked liver or decreased lung capacity to any greater degree than I am my chrome bicuspid, cast-iron stomach or the heart that some say is o'erly kind. I am all of these things and none of these things yet Mind, Body, Emotion and Spirit are often capable of some transcendence regardless of the totality; all the gifts and shortcomings of the Inconsumate Work-In-Progress Incarnate that walks around here and calls this life.

"This is not where I live; this is not who I am". But for the time being, I am choosing the gnat's bellybutton; in much the same way I happily choose my Workshop as is, as I choose a willful knee rather than have surgery. How is it that I can achieve a modecum of Zen & Creation in my Workshop with it's limitations, with my leg and it's drawbacks, and yet lose most of it at my job and the less-than-ideal it often is?

Better question - How to hold my modecum of Zen & Creation in the face of the paycheck I'm choosing?