PSI: Special Treatment Unit

today marks the first in a series of life-recalibration efforts that we are calling (with redundant sarcasm) the Special Treatment. after meeting this morning with the director of seattle pacific's mfa writing program (now cemented as our #1 target school) we had a lunchtime session with the venerable bonip, our therapist. (seriously--"venerable" is the word for her: she's getting paid to sit there and listen, but she does so with a quiet grace that leaves us feeling distinctly like we are being granted something.) it was here that the term "recalibration" escaped our lips maybe 14 times in 45 minutes--but in a good way. which is to say that we have some momentum going in matters of both brain and spirit, and it feels real nice.

is a welcome change... to paraphrase bonip, it seems to her as though now i am standing in a grassy field, while my prior state called to mind the image of looking up from an empty grave while simultaneously standing on the edge of a cliff. which is fabulously paradoxical. it's as though, were i fortunate enough to climb out of the grave, i would take one step and promptly tumble into the abyss. ..it is perhaps fitting that my f'ing therapist's conception of my dark side looks to have been produced by mel brooks. but the point is that i am in a field; before, grave-perched-on-edge-of-nothingness; now, a field. (around me, each blade of grass is sunlit. soft pink worms leap from the ground into the happy beaks of waiting robins. in the cooler, the ice ne'er doth melt.)

so the task before us is a simple one: to keep the momentum going. and for this the Special Treatment is required. it is exactly one step long, consisting of: get up early. my life currently involves no daily obligations that begin before 10am, so my arising "early," as it is commonly understood, takes some doing. why it has to happen is twofold: i need to write; i need to pray. and any honest approximation of either happens only in the am, before the spindly pokey wires of daily life have had time to close in and begin jabbing at me. how praying and writing affect me on a given day is a known (not to say understood) quantity: writing--something that is my own--sharpens my eye; it lends my verbs a certain tartness, and these things cannot help but carry over into the rest of my day. meanwhile, prayer--thankful prayer, as opposed to dear-god-don't-let-the-bank-call-till-tuesday prayer, which bonip calls Vending Machine Prayer--serves to make me almost palpably more thankful and loving and honest and capable. we have been terribly unsuccessful in recent times at both of these endavors, hence the application of the SpecTreat. we'll see how it goes; while there are only a very few things i know about myself for certain, putting a personal certitude into play has always proved harder than it has any right to. but i like it, here in my field. very much.