Yugo

It is Sunday: the yoke is easy and the burden is light. 

I saw the girls at Nuestra Casa this morning. They continued with the same drawing exercise, this time with a fresh package of 60 sharpened Faber-Castell colored pencils. They listened to tranquil instrumentals, mainly piano, synthesizers, drums, and bass. The girls chose the music themselves—rhythmic and meditative, both sad and serene. Melancholy, yes, but with linings of cheerfulness. I liked what they drew because I liked the music they chose, and their drawings drew me back to the music. I think most of them have got the idea behind this exercise now. The next time we draw together, I would like to try a new exercise that my sister Jennifer recommended to me. I hope the girls will be receptive. 

I’m still tired but I am getting through it today. I slept through the first three hours of the night, from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. Then I woke, which is always a concern for me, but to wake that early was especially concerning to me. Thankfully, I was able to return to sleep during the night. But it was peculiar. I woke up and went back down to sleep again at least six or seven times through the night. Never before can I recall waking up and going back to sleep, dreaming, as many times as I know I did last night. How many hours of sleep did I get? After the three solid hours, between 2 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., who knows? 

If I lived in a world where the day started at 8 a.m. instead of 6 a.m., my sleeplessness would not be a problem. By nature my body prefers to fall around midnight and pick up again at 8 o’clock. But I don’t get to live in that kind of world; friars don’t get to live in that kind of world. And with an unrelenting daily schedule of morning classes, there is no way to mask the morning fatigue that has been with me all my adulthood. Still, I will get through it, as I have today. I was not that tongue-tied around the girls. A few people stopped me on the street to talk to me, and it was okay, not awkward: nearly normal. Bashful as I am to enter into many of the routine interactions of this immersion—classes, the friars’ meals, Nuestra Casa, random encounters on the street—once I am there, then I am there. It goes much better when I have access to 100 percent of the energy my body can provide, but even when I have less, I have learned how to deploy it. 

Now, to rest, perhaps to exercise, perhaps to write poetry in the cloister garden, and do whatever I need to do, whatever I can, to ensure a week to come during which I can wear the yoke and carry the burden with ease and lightness, in the body and the spirit.