If having nothing to say was the same as saying nothing then political spots would be fewer and shorter, and half the Tempe public library (both fiction and nonfiction) would disappear so having nothing to say can never be an excuse not to sit and write my 1000 words. That is my next goal, Not just to awaken at the ungodly hour of morning and open the laptop with a loose connection (subject of a whole other blog someday) and begin typing but to actually complete a minimum of 1000 words a day.

During Nanowrimo the goal on non working days will up to 3000, this lets me complete the gazillion word novel in the 30 days. OK, not really a gazillion but I don’t remember exactly what the number of words is and stopping right now to go to the page and look it up would be one of those distractions that I am observing and not indulging at the moment.  In the interest of knowing the number of words I am actually writing I may start composing in Word. Not to say there isn’t a way to count my words in LiveJournal itself but once again, looking that up right now would again be a distraction from writing.

On paragraph three, not bad for having nothing to say. Or at least that is what my brain said when I rolled over, looked at the clock and saw it was 3:48 AM and knew sleep would only come again if I got up and increased my water intake, while also beginning my output totals for the day. My brain immediately suggested that I reset my alarm from 4 AM to 430 AM, walk without turning on lights to kitchen, then bathroom and grab another 30 minutes of sleep. I could always write tomorrow it whispered. I would just turn on my Meditation Podcast and pretend I was getting in some subliminal meditation time.  When my Authentic self replied that I had made a commitment to myself to write every morning and discipline was the important principle here, Ego retorted that I (we) had absolutely nothing to say and no one was reading it anyway. Which Authentic self just sighed at and put my feet on the floor.

It is true. I really have nothing to say and my readers are just almost as few as if I were writing in my paper journal but that is and is not the point. This journal is about discipline and about my continued work on separating myself from my enslavement to ego. If I wanted to be read I have other venues. As to having something to say,  I am committed to listening and understanding first. I have been talking or writing my whole life, trying to be understood and equally trying to subvert truly being understood and then defining my worth or lack thereof through others acceptance, inclusion, admiration and inevitable betrayal/departure, and then filling the holes in my soul with habitual consumption.

I am in short an American Human who is now out of time way before rambling around to any brilliance or point. Except the point this morning was to get up and write. Which I have done. My thirty minutes "about me" cause now I shower, don the scrubs and head back to another 15 hour day where it is not at all about me, if I am doing it right that is. 

 I did it. I am writing at 5:15 AM for 15 minutes before running off to my 15 hour patient day. I was kind of slow moving this morning because of having to lift a 115 pound patient yesterday as well as lots of bending and suctioning, and gloriously it is raining this morning. However that was of benefit as well. No long walk this morning, LOL. My decade+ old dog refuses to do anything more than pee and bolt back for the door when its is raining or over 100 degrees.  So here is one to the discipline I need to complete nanowrimo again. Then comes the rewrites on all three books since the last three years have been a trilogy of sorts, not linear but more like a triangle placed in of course that moment when the world is about to end.

Now to pebbles in a pond. I am still to wrapped up in the actual magic of the whole event to write well about it. I am holding it close to my chest like my ongoing faith in Santa Claus, just enjoying the joy of it. I was anything but happy that I had been called to go to this patients house. He is really too big for me to handle safely and so when he contracts and coughs it takes all the strength and dexterity I have to suction his trach clean again. However, I believe nothing ever happens by chance and this was true here as well. This patients life is small, filled with love but due to medical constraints and developmental disabilities limited in scope. I grabbed James Owens "Here There be Dragons" and threw it into my nurse bag yesterday because when I go to this patient,  I usually turn off the TV and read aloud (honestly I do this everywhere I can get away with it because books trump TV in my world). Where usually this patient falls asleep within 10 minutes of me beginning to read, yesterday he was entranced. Every time I would stop reading to do care, whether feeding, suctioning, etc, he would begin emphatically shaking his head no until I began reading again. When I would read he would just lay there and listen and smile. Now I know it wasn’t my reading cause i have read him Twain, Stevenson and Lewis; it was the story and the way it was being told.

Unfortunately, I had to leave at the end of my ten hour shift with John and Jack and Charles and Artus and their company in the greatest of peril. So I decided to use my Borders giftcard to get him the book on CD and drop it off  later this week. And I was very reassured to know that it was no happenstance that I was the nurse yesterday but had through Owen’s talents made a real difference in his happy quotient.

Then to make the story even more magical, I had sent a letter of thanks to James Owen last night telling him how lovely it was to share his transportive magic with my patient, he wrote me back that he is sending the CD’s for me to deliver. I cried a little, then almost said no since it was not at all why I wrote. But maybe he is also feeling some of the heart swelling joy of making someone truly happy and it is n’t my right to be selfish so I sent him my address, because yesterday was physically hard, skill challenging, and yet a fabulously spiritually fulfilling day.

Life is magic and life is good and yes, there is a Santa Claus and he lives in every one of us.

Now off to work.

This is not so much a title of this blog as what I am having for breakfast this morning before heading off to work. It is harder to fit in writing on a work day, although today is not so bad because I do not need to be at my patient’s house until 10AM. Tomorrow, however, the day starts at 6AM at the patients house. I may do the old yellow tablet at her house during a nap and then just transcribe at home, or if I am disciplined enough I will get up earlier and write a brief blog, which may or may not be lucid, before leaving for work.

Fits and starts towards running again, walked a quarter mile this morning and managed to breathe in a small flying insect while increasing my pace. Still incredibly grossed out by eating a bug, and not just cause I am a mostly vegetarian! The air was finally crisp and cool enough to make me want to break into a run, I refrained. The patient today is a pediatric patient in designation only and saving up my energy to keep him clean and dry. I adore his family and the patient but keep asking my agency to NOT assign me there because he is toooooooo big for me to do alone safely. However, they just care about filling slots and know I need the hours and if I say no they won’t give me anyone else. I may be job hunting again as soon as I am settled in my new home unless they are able to fill my hours again with patients for whom I feel comfortable caring.

So absolutely nothing meaningful or even enlightening in this blog; just random life being regurgitated onto the page but then that is the point, writing. Writing daily is like meditating daily, the habit is an important part of occasionally achieving the goal. Habits are created by repitition, habituation then allows my Ego to get out of the way and let my Authentic voice slip through onto the page.

In creating new habits, I follow the laws of physics. Getting up the initial thrust of effort to change behavior takes something BIG, like a crisis, unbearable pain or Nanowrimo. Then however once in motion the beginning is easy.  But days or weeks into the new behavior my motion begins to peter out, I find excuses to not do it, do something else, and slowly the object is again at rest.

Maybe I will try defying gravity this time……(hee hee, listening to Wicked) . Today I did OK so far. I started with my gratitude list, the dog and I went out for exercise, am eating a healthy breakfast and did my writing all before heading off to work.

…and now off to get ready to live my childhood dream of being a nurse yet again. Life today is good.

 So I have a dozen filled or partially filled blank books, a half dozen other Blogs, although two are linked to social networks so don’t really count as Blogs, so why start another one? Excellent question, other self, let see if I, the authentic self can answer that for you. 

Why do we blog at all? Why do we journal? Is it because we are all so busy "communicating" with the plethora of instant electronic devices that we can no longer hear ourselves or anyone else and therefore find a Blog the only way to speak out truths? Is it a need to speak or a need to be heard. If it is the latter then Blogs are not the right approach. As of right now, we (the Ego, the Observer and the Authentic Self) are out only readers.

If it is the former, then maybe the answer to the question is similar to the answer to "why do we need mirrors?" I Blog to see myself from the outside, as others see me, and then adjust the necklines and comb the hair to bring that written image closer to the one inside my head.

So OK, I blog to produce a verbal mirror of my Ego so that Observer can adjust it to more closely overlay with Authentic Self, so why a new Blog.
I guess because the other blogs, like so many of my rediscovered half done knitting projects, lurk here in my cyber attic missing pattern and with clearly dropped stitches. It is easier in anything to start over than recover and repair a past whose threads are tangled and original inspiration lost.

And so I begin…