So continuing my blog as i am sleepless. I think i am sleepless because i decided yesterday that i need to not go to a taught session today. A decision i haven't made lightly. As a mature student i'm aware that when i miss lessons taught by professionals i am throwing away something i cannot get back. But sometimes it is necessary to let go. I feel at the moment simultaneously full up and empty. If i was describing this in chinese medicine i'd say i am slightly qi deficient. Both yin and yang stretched to a limit. I feel this as exhaustion. That's ok i know that if i give myself a moment to pause, to rest, to assimilate and be quiet within, if i take things in only a little at a time and let go when i need to, and allow myself to hold still when i need to too i will come back to balance. One of the beauties of getting older is understanding my body is not a machine to be forced but a delicate thing to be treated with respect and gentleness, listened to and cared for. It is this that has driven my decision to not take up the opportunity to be part of the group crit session this morning coming. I know that if i give my ideas to the group i am not strong enough to hold them in the face of criticism and by the same token i am also not strong enough to absorb and digest the ideas of others. 
Its ok not to be strong. Its ok to need to be weak. In the stations of the cross Jesus falls three times, maybe this is a fall, each time he falls he gets back up. I am not really likening myself to christ although maybe the archetype that is christ is something we all have access to should we wish to encounter this aspect of ourselves. 
It seems odd that i'm writing about not going to a class, what is there to reflect about that except perhaps that it is exceptional because my attendance is good. I enjoy being taught and my teachers are good. But sometimes intuition is a better guide than a timetable and when it comes to mind and body matters if the gut says no its best to follow the gut. I guess decades of practicing shiatsu has taught me to listen to signals and pay heed, it doesn't mean i always get it right but it means that i honour my elemental creature body. Man is a funny creature, civilisation has brought benefits but has also cordoned us to walls and forced our growth to obey unspoken rules that may or may not suit the individual. 
Its timely perhaps that i come up against these rules at a moment when i was needing to meet my ASU project with open arms and the chaos element that Marie spoke of yesterday afternoon in the SNU lecture. In chaos i encounter Jesus sweeping the tables of the money men in the temple, in chaos i encounter a young Mary pregnant, who knows how, with the child that would become Jesus, I encounter Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, I encounter Mary holding the body of her beautiful strange and beastly son, broken on the cross, both Michelangelo's Pieta and Bill Viola's Pieta inspired by Michelangelo's Pieta spring to mind. In chaos i am a fly on the wall at the last supper, Da Vinci's last supper, and other last suppers including real and imaginary last suppers, or not suppers maybe last kisses, last points of eye contact, did Jesus catch anyone's eye as he walked the via dolorosa or hung upon the cross his life ebbing from him or was he contained within himself and his only moment of not being contained his cry to his father that is written as anecdote in the gospels (i must check if this is in all the gospels).
I wonder if now i have written out my thinking i might be able to sleep. I'd like to sleep. Have i justified my decision to let go of the morning's ASU session. My intention is to go into the print studio in the morning and play a little on some copper test tiles making marks in hard ground and the same marks as dry point. Play making as a way to try to find my "chaorder" a new word tho not a new notion to me. In the afternoon i'll be working on metal things that need finishing or discarding. And at some point i need to re-submit my learning agreements which like my Bishops Prize registration of interest is not readable as the attachment i've sent, its readable on my computer. but not the ones at NUA. Resubmitting forms is frustrating. I guess receiving attachments that can't be read is also frustrating. I wish my computer and NUA's computers were more compatible.