In which I slept until one o’clock.

The Yeti is off at Microsoft for a week-long tech conference, and I have a cold or something.

Started out yesterday feeling tired after a good night’s sleep, swollen glands, and a vaguely sore throat. Went to work, came home. Woke up today feeling so incredibly meh I don’t even have words for it; took the day off work and went back to sleep until the afternoon.

Now I’m vertical and outside a cup of pour-over coffee with fresh creamery cream, and about to finally do my morning meditation, once I’m done writing here. Then I’m planning to eat scrambled eggs, cheese grits, and sliced tomato.

I put in five tomato plants this year. Two are struggling and look pitiful, but one of them has given me three very nice and dearly won tomatoes. The other three plants are absolutely jubilant about their situation, and in a week I’ma have way too fucking many tomatoes.

I’ll probably freeze a bunch for cooking. (A thousand years ago, I stayed with a woman who was too busy to can one summer, so she just quartered her tomatoes, froze them on a sheet pan, and then stuck them in ziplocks. I cooked tons of chilis, soups, and curries with those frozen tomatoes over that winter, they were so handy and much more wonderful than canned tomatoes! [That woman later went on to move into my ex-house, bed my ex-husband, and hate me—there was some online bitchiness at some point—idk really, but they never returned any of my Christmas cards.] Point is, everybody has something to teach you, even if they later choose to weirdly betray you for mediocre dick.)

Just logged into my main credit card—the one with the awesome points that I use for absolutely everything—and there were two $16 charges from something called Maya Mobile, so I reported them as fraud… and now I’m cardless for five days, waiting for a replacement. All over barely thirty bucks. WTF.

Aaaaand I have to quit smoking again. About a year ago, I picked up a pack just to have one or two, for fun and nostalgia; of course that slowly, slowly escalated, until last week I was very nearly up to a pack a day again. So I very deliberately did not smoke one day, charged up my vape batteries, and am getting my head set to Quit Smoking yet again. Fucking pain in the ass, I dunno why I decided to do this to myself. Heh.

The Yeti bought himself a new computer, finally, after eight years, and I got the old one! It’s finicky, but to sweeten the deal he also bought me a second monitor, so it looks really cool and is far more computer than I need, considering I never compute and only use the browser these days.

After deciding I had to go to India to see my Sadguru because the inside of my head was totally full of shit, it was announced that She was coming here. (!!!) There were barely three weeks between the announcement and the Seattle programs, so I guess it was a fairly sudden decision. I went, and it was the cleansing, nourishing wonder I so desperately needed it to be. Five years without darshan fucking sucked.

I volunteered for greeter seva for the first program, and heard that we were only allowed one darshan per tour stop (I have no idea now if that was true or just a rumor), so I didn’t get a token the first day. After satsang I served lunch and then went to the kitchen and made a ton of puris.

My darshan was during Devi Bhava, and there’s no point in attempting to describe the interiority of it, but Her sari was gold, She said “My daughter, my daughter” in my ear, it was of typical length, and otherwise, externally, a completely average darshan. It was not like the time I got to be there in Her arms while she had a very long conversation with another devotee and some swamis; it was not like the time I was doing lap seva and suddenly the stage was mysteriously, impossibly, and incredibly empty for what felt like minutes while She made fun of Puffer’s awesome sari-fabric suit. It was just a normal darshan. And perfect. And seared into my mind for eternity. To know and be known, to love and be loved, to be grounded in That.

I kinda wish I’d just abandoned my job and my home and my life and just… gone on the rest of the U.S. tour, like so many others do, but I didn’t. I never do. I’m too shy of God to just blurt out “Let me COME WITH YOU, You’re the only thing that matters!” She’d probably send me home anyway. Go home and meditate, do your sadhana, silly.

I know most religion is political bullshit, that most people can’t tell the difference between politics and religion because of it, and that the majority of humans have yet to be able to want what it really is, but I no longer care. Most of my favorite people are atheist or agnostic, and that’s okay. I know an Avatar, I have seen God born into a human body and experienced what that is, and my gratitude is abject. Nobody else needs to care.