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trees in Forest Park[/caption]
I'm running late so I'm kind of doubling up here. I didn't do any fancy meditation this week anyway, just snatches here and there. I like to use my hands when I'm playing with energy manipulation so I'm working on finding gestures that bring my energy down and use them when I need to calm down. I'm hoping I can train myself to calm down just by doing the gestures? I guess we'll see.
Other things I did this weekend... Druid Party was on Sunday. There were some new folks there, and we did our first nature hike. There was discussion of identifying and using indigenous plants, which was pretty useful. All my plant identification skills are from scout camp on the east coast, so not terribly helpful here.We did this in Forest Park, which is, like Washington Park, amazing and gorgeous and reachable by public transportation.
Hail Portlandia, Lady of Effective Public Transportation! Hail Portlandia, Who Is Both Wildness and Urbanization!
I also took a soldering class at a local craft store this weekend. As has become tradition for me at this point, the first piece I made was an offering to Ilmarinen, and went on his altar when I got home. Actually, it was a good weekend for metalwork - we went to a community yard sale on Saturday and I got four obviously well-loved and cared-for hammers (two ball peen and two cross peen) for a ridiculously low price. The older fellow selling them asked me if I was going to use them, so I suspect he didn't really want to let them go.
Most of my soldering experience is electronic, and applying silver to copper tape to make jewelry is definitely a new one on me. It was fun, though, and the act of soldering is actually really calming for me. I spent a bunch of the class explaining things to the older woman next to me, which was probably the only thing keeping it from counting as my weekly meditative session.
I do think I'm seeing benefits from the regular meditation, though I'm hesitant to write about it as always for fear of jynxing it. My baseline level of anxiety seems lower, and I'm more aware when it flares up. I noticed that last week when, well, it flared up. Not going to bother with details except to say it was driving-related and stupid but nobody got hurt. I almost immediately wanted to go back out again because I didn't want to give the anxiety time to settle.
So I guess the summary version is that I'm doing pretty good, all things considered.