Waking Up

Each time I sit down to reflect on not buying take-out coffee in take-out cups, I hear the phrase, "I need to wake up." It occurs to me that I'm in the midst of a koan. "I needed to wake up," is my excuse to drive up to the Starbucks window. Yes, indeed. Wake up. Wake up to my life. Wake up to my habit. Wake up to the fact that I'm running away from my fatigue, my fear that I can't go on. Exactly where do I think I need to go? Exactly how much caffeine do I need? When will I wake up to the wildly overextended elastic of my life? How about wake up to my need to take a nap?

I drove down to Indianapolis this weekend with my daughter who was performing in a cello competition on Saturday, and then in a Shakespeare competition on Sunday. I can't say I didn't ever go to Starbucks--I think I went once, with my take-out mug-- sometime on Saturday. But I made my own coffee for the way down, and I didn't drink any on the way back. I had a vision of Starbucks franchises closing left and right when people discovered they didn't need them after all.