{"id":1288,"date":"2009-10-13T13:33:15","date_gmt":"2009-10-13T20:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coolkarma.com\/dharma\/?p=1288"},"modified":"2009-10-13T13:34:59","modified_gmt":"2009-10-13T20:34:59","slug":"before-the-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/?p=1288","title":{"rendered":"Before the Storm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fingerlessIt was cold in the room this morning as I slid out of bed.\u00a0 I remembered the frigid chill of my adolescent Pennsylvania winters.\u00a0 Back then, before I could get ready for school I had to take a wooden match to the gas tailor burner in my bedroom because we rarely turned the heat on in that old Victorian.\u00a0 Yet on this\u00a0 California autumn morning even 60 degrees felt cold in my bones.\u00a0 I reached into my knapsack and pulled out a well worn pair of velveteen gloves that I had pinker-sheered the fingers off back in the day when I had committee meetings and network crisis.\u00a0 On second thought it was probably more likely\u00a0 network meetings and personnel crisis.\u00a0 No doubt people thought I always looked so silly in my Birkenstocks, long black dresses, handmade fleece shawls and fingerless gloves.\u00a0 But for me it was about being as comfortable as I could make my body.<\/p>\n

The gloves felt good on my cold hands and I picked up a leopard fleece wrap for my bare shoulders, when I heard what sounded like a thousand tiny glass beads fall and bounce upon the Pergo floor … t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-tit.\u00a0 I looked down to see what I had dropped and saw only our small dog standing by my feet.\u00a0 Then the sound once again, t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-tit … Dalai’s tiny yet decidedly too long toe nails were ever so lightly tapping the hard pseudo wood floors as she shivered in the cold.\u00a0 I quickly gathered my belongings and picked up the snack-sack that Richard had prepared for me, if not ostensibly the night before then literally a few hours earlier since he had only come to bed just a little while ago.<\/p>\n

Neither pup wanted to venture out the dog-door when I made it downstairs.\u00a0 Somehow they just knew the ground was wet and the wind would be terminally cold against their naked bodies.\u00a0 I checked the hour-by-hour weather bot to see if I had time for just one load of laundry to wash and hang up on the line outside before the serious rains were expected to start later in the day and last through most of the week.\u00a0 Of course, our idea of California rain is different than nor\u2019easters, but still when we live atop bedrock and boulders our misplaced non-native trees have no opportunity to tap root and so the slightest moisture in our gravel-type-soil combined with even momentary gusts of winds find us with broken branches and toppled trees strewn all over our lawns, patio covers and broken car windshields.<\/p>\n

Sipping a cup of Yogi calming tea, I re-read the tag because I had already forgotten what it said when I glanced at in the kitchen — “You are unlimited.” <\/strong><\/em> Easy to see how that tidbit could have escaped my mind.<\/p>\n

The clouds were darker now than even an hour ago, and the washing machine had finished my one prospective load of clean clothes for the week.\u00a0 So good that my kids completed their wash over the weekend yet even so with the chill in the air, both had to bring them in and hang them up in their rooms so that something would dry for school today.\u00a0 I reminded myself to look for umbrellas in the garage because they will each need one to walk to the bus stop in the coming storm days ahead.<\/p>\n

As I hung the clothes outside, I was reminded of how hard it was for me to lift three sheets<\/a> up onto the line last spring and it was still a struggle for me on some days.\u00a0 Yet on this cold morning, my body was keeping pace with the tachycardia and I could sit up on a barstool and carefully flat and stack each shirt and slack on top of one another.\u00a0\u00a0 Taking four or five wet garments at a time from my very tall neat pile on the ledge of the spa, I could gently place the stack over the rope and slide them easily off one another and out to the sides.\u00a0 The clever little maneuver allowed me to make far fewer trips to the line and much less time standing on my orthostatically challenged legs.<\/p>\n

I wandered over to the little water garden to see the fish before returning to my daybed.\u00a0 There was no sun for the solar pump, so all was quiet.\u00a0 The cold front had begun to change the bio-chemistry inside their little goldfish brains and they no longer came running up to feed.\u00a0 Yet in their peri-hibernation state, a few fish caught a glimpse of my shadow and swam to a clearing in the last lily pads of summer.\u00a0 I leaned over to turn off the hydro-scarecrow and scattered a few pellets for my aquatic friends.\u00a0 Dalai was still cold and tried to jump up in my lap as I crouched down to enjoy the Zen of the garden.<\/p>\n

It may not have felt like what I imaged “unlimited”<\/strong><\/em> to be … but in that moment before the storm, there was peace and endless possibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was cold in the room this morning as I slid out of bed.\u00a0 I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dharma"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1295,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions\/1295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}