So I’m sitting here first thing in the morning, waiting for one of my housemates to get out of the shower so I can get in and get ready for work, and I find myself wondering what I’m doing …

It’s not often I wake up already trapped in the midst of a nearly full-blown anxiety attack. I’m sitting here with waves of near-panic passing over me, and it’s all I can do to not just crawl back into bed and pull the covers up over my head.

I’m not even sure what the trigger was this morning; I just felt it coming on.

So … now, a shower. A long hot shower, and breathing deeply, trying to relax. I think it’s time to start focusing on some of the basics of either sitting or standing meditation; to be able to calm myself down, to let myself go blank, before the fear and anxiety has a chance to latch on.

The Bed

  The pulsing stops where time has been,
    The garden is snow-bound,
The branches weighed dow and the paths filled in,
    Drifts quilt the ground.

  We lie soft-caught, still now it’s done,
    Loose-twined across the bed
Like wrestling statues; but it still goes on
    Inside my head.

  — Thom Gunn (1929 - 2004), British poet.

Return

Return often and take me,
beloved sensation, return and take me —
when the memory of the body awakens,
and old desire again runs through the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.

Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember …

  — C.P. Cavafy (1863 - 1933), Greek-Egyptian poet, journalist and civil servant.
      Translation by Rae Dalven.