Sitting still

"Ariane is sitting still," according to my Facebook page this morning. But as I've been variously sitting, picking, cooking, cleaning, posting shit to Facebook, messing around on the internet, and walking back and forth in my house, it has occurred to me that I have a very weird definition of what it means to sit still.

In today's case, I suppose sitting still means staying put, not leaving the house, not having a quick breakfast on a Sunday morning then dashing out for yoga at 8:30. It means not having a plan that involves running around in the car. It has meant, instead, that I've just been here for the past few hours doing whatever I wanted without thinking about its implications on the rest of the day... This is the activity that Joe and I call "beetle-ing," just going from task to task in the house, getting caught up in the flow from thing to thing organically [named after the time Joe was walking from the lawn to the shed for a rake, but then noticed that something else needed attention, and an hour later remembered the rake, and on his way to go get it noticed a beetle, stopped in contemplation of its movement, twenty minutes later remembered the rake, and so the whole afternoon went by. Beetling by nature is relaxing and thoroughly satisfying.]

So if today's sitting still means celebrating the bounty of the garden by picking a huge bowl of tomatoes and starting sauce on the stove, so be it. If it means watching Cherry Poppin' Daddies videos for a while on youtube, so be it. Uploading photos to flickr, watching the robot-vacuum on its rounds, listening to music loud, same-same.

Truth: I'm fried from a work-event yesterday that had me up at 4am (after not sleeping so I wouldn't miss the unusually-early alarm), at Lake Merritt by 5:30 am, largely on-deck until 6:45 pm, not home until 7:15 pm. So it's no wonder about the sitting still. But I also realize how little time I spend inside of the home that my hard-ass work pays for, so it's about time for some just kickin' it at my address. I need a steady week or two of exactly this kinda sitting still, but will settle for this sunny day.