Yesterday, I went to the regular meeting of a poetry group that I’m part of. I read aloud the draft of an ekphrastic that I’ve been working on as part of the at home exercise. I didn’t have as much time to work on it as I would have liked, and it feels incomplete. I think I’ll set it aside and perhaps come back to it on another day. I streamed my reading of the poem on Facebook as I start to experiment again with live streaming video.

Afterwards, Kim and Fiona met me at the library. From there we drove down to Hammonasset beach to collect shells and driftwood for a project Kim is working on. Hammonasset means “where we dig holes in the ground” in an indigenous language. Originally it referred to farming, but these days it better describes the activities of young settlers or European descent during their summers.

In the evening, I read, and went to sleep early. I’ve been feeling at loose ends a bit recently. The past couple of months have been particularly trying, between twists and turns in my spiritual journey, a rash of funerals, the election of 2016, NaNoWriMo, and simply trying to keep up with everything else.

There is plenty to write about and some emails I need to catch up on, but I haven’t had the time, energy, or sense of direction to get much of it done. In the middle of the night, the dog woke me up again with his barking. I got up and wrote for a little bit. I organized my calendar and my thoughts and while I’m still at a place of not knowing what I should be thinking about and working on next, I am at least feeling a little caught up.

The question of “should” is interesting. What should we do? Where does that “should” come from. For me, some of it comes from my upbringing, my family of origin. Some of it comes, perhaps from what Viktor Frankl calls “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Some of it comes from a life long love of learning.

I need to reconnect with my connected learning friends. Perhaps I need to learn more about the indigenous languages where I live. I was supposed to be Santa Claus at a holiday party, but at the last minute they decided on someone else so they could have a bi-lingual Santa. Perhaps I need to learn Spanish.

All of this fits back to the spiritual journey. How do we Love the Lord your God with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our minds? How do we love our neighbors as ourselves? How do we practice the presence of God and do all things out of the love of God?

Here, I return to both absurdist theatre and Zen teachings? What do we do while waiting? We could do our exercises. We could wash our bowl and gain enlightenment.