Today was the first day back to school.  It was painful to wake up at the early time but we did better than I expected and made it to school early. My daughter was eager to go back and see her friends and teacher but at the drop off she expressed some separation anxiety.  I was awkward handling it but her ex teacher stepped in and took care of it.  I need to plan a strategy.

I seemed to regain my meditation ability today.  That is, I regained my control of mental focus.  I thought of the mind as a corridor, at the end is God, the light.  Along the walls are doorways.  Some doors are opened some are closed.  Some should be opened, some should be closed.  Some have the doorways broken off, but there is a door of spiritual force closing the doorway.  The doors that should be opened are the affairs in my life.  I must move back and forth and attend to them at the appropriate times.  I must glance in them and sometimes enter into them partially to plan accordingly.   But they all beckon me, and sometimes this becomes a din of voices sending rushing back and forth in the corridor fretting over my plans.  This can assume a frantic pace.  I can get crazy and plan incessantly and excessively.

In meditation I focus on the light at the end of the hall and gently close all the doors.  If I lose focus I begin to hear the voices from behind the doors clamoring for my attention.  Sometimes the forces within the doors throw them open and chatter incessantly until I draw power from the light to close them again.  I may go back and forth like this until I achieve focus.

When I spend appropriate time here I draw enough strength from the light to control my attention span.  Then I can plan on goals of virtue in all my activity for the day.  In this way I carry a vision of God's will into all my activities.

This also got me thinking about the doorways that must stay shut.  In most of those doorways are a variety of spiritually taxing pursuits like politics, celebrity gossip, selfish pursuits, etc.  In some are vices like resentments, personal injunctions, self pity, self centered thinking, etc.  In one of those doorways there are two hookers and an eight ball.

This morning my wife informed me that our dog was missing.  I was a little upset by this but I started thinking about dog psychology which eased my worries.  I thought about how she was probably wandering around a small radius in our neighborhood.  I noticed some evidence of digging in the ground outside the front window and envisioned her finding her way back in the middle of the night only to be locked out and then wandering away again.  I drove around after dropping the kids off but didn't see any sign of her.  Later in the morning I set out to look for her again.  When I walked out the door I found dig marks that I didn't see before.  On a hunch I went in the direction of our walks to the park.  At the park I saw two men staring in the same direction across the busy thoroughfare as if they might have just seen a stray, aimless dog almost get hit crossing the road.  I went passed the intersection but turned into the neighborhood in the direction the men were looking and doubled back to where she would have entered.  I circled around a couple of blocks and found wandering aimlessly in a yard.

I brought our dog home safely.
I helped do kid drop offs and pick ups today.
This evening I got to play Wii games.
I got to take my middle son to buy shoes tonight, it was quality one-on-one time.

Thanks be to God for all the good things He did for me today.