My Refuge

I love this blog.

I came out here earlier this week to write, and now, I'm back again. It's so nice to be back. For so long, everything I've been doing has been public. My blogging is public and about generating traffic. It's so nice to come back to a place where I can just be me and let my hair down. In the online world, that is such a treat. And that is why I've gone to such an effort to make this blog anonymous.

It feels good to have a place where I can just think and type and let the inner voice drip out of my fingers as fast as I can type. I've missed this. I've missed having a regular time and place for reflection.

I'm not in one of my best places.

There are many things around me and inside me that are not quite what I want for myself. The chall;enge is to be happy where I am as I make plans to make improvements. The trick is to focus on the journey. I can feel the shift in my energny just from starting to make the changes. That is enough! Yes, the outcomes will be great when they get here. But in the meantime, I can feel the joy of the process, and do my best to clear up the energy of the spaces around me to support those changes. It's time to reconnect with my tools and processes and get back to being the person I am on the inside. The person who knows this three diminisional reality is an illusion and lives accordingly. I've never forgotten this, but it certainly hasn't been my primary focus for a long time.

I'm feeling the energy of having a number nine house for sure!

Right now, there is a lot of mystery, but I've also had a lot of mastery, so it's just a matter of remembering, of reclaiming, and then finding myself back on top of the wave. I'm still in the water with my surf board. It's just a little bit of logistics to get back where I want to be, in the zone.

I can do this! I'm in the process of reinventing myself back in this space.

It seems like I live my life along a sine wave. Peaks and valleys. Energy shifts at the turning points. The path of the earth is a sine wave, so maybe this is a solid metaphor for life as well. I've been slipping, things have been tough and getting tougher for a while. But the energy has shifted and things are truly getting better. It's going to take some time to renew and refresh and get back my former good habits. But I can and will do this and it won't take much effort or time. It will be easy.

I'm really proud of my character. I'm not yet who I want to be, but I see glimpses of a kinder, gentler person shining through all of the time. I'm really proud of who I've become. I like myself more today than I ever have.

Less Flailing, More Surrender

It's been an interesting time in my life.

In the last month or so, I've broken two teeth, had an extraction, a root canal, and gum surgery on one side of my mouth. Tonight, I either broke another tooth, or lost a filling.

I've had a plumber out because there is no hot water in my shower, only to have hot water each time he came.

My desktop crashed two nights ago, only to be working fine when it arrived at a friend's for repair.

I fired my accountant 10 days before my taxes had to be filed by the extension. I've interviewed and not hired an accountant, and now I've hired an accountant.

I've had more scorpions in the house than I like. One appeared to me energetically in my sleep at the entry point. Christine suggested that it might be my shadow totem.

I'm not sure how I'm going to pay November's bills.

And yet, I'm relatively calm and collected this week as I've traveled through the computer crash and now more teeth damage.

September was a really tough patch in the road for me. I hit a new low in confidence and found my way back from the edge. My new mantra is: less flailing, more surrender. It reminds me that wasting energy on emotional reactions doesn't help me grow or even problem solve. Instead, I need to embrace a wide-eyes factual view of the reality in the context of faith. The universe is either a nurturing and supportive place, or it isn't. And if I say I believe it is, there is no need to panic or flail. I need to keep treading water as I wait for the storm to pass, and the sun to break through again.

I certainly didn't need more dental problems or this week's computer problems. But perhaps these events were necessary to really give me the opportunity to sail through, cool as a cucumber, and to demonstrate my faith and inner peace. I am strangely proud of myself tonight. I can almost feel my guides around me smiling. Perhaps I have hit bottom now and things really will turn around. I could sure use some of that!

In the last three years, I've really learned a lot. I am feeling the huge mass of it before me now, and I'm surprised by the amount of it. Before this time, I might have suspected that I believed I was in control because I always had a plan, a solution, a way to make things better. But I had cut myself off from my humanity, my vulnerability, and my heart's depth. I was living a negotiated life. I was living on a movie set instead of living my adventure. I see that now.

Sometimes I imagine people who are living their lives, insulated from the economic challenges of the times, and I can't imagine their lives. I envy them, I must admit, working on their budgets and plans, feeling competent and powerful, making things happen. I remember when I felt like that. A part of me still wishes I felt like that.

But I'm confident that as I get over my shock and the wounds heal, that I'll appreciate the richness and new depth that I've reached in this stage of my journey. And one day, I'll look at my life and feel in my depths appreciation for everything I've gained during this time of shocking loss. And because I know that is my future, I can start to embrace those feelings right now. Tonight. I have no idea how the solution will unfold, but I do know tonight that the solution is already seeking me as I am seeking it. It's just about exercising my surrender muscle without flinching until the events of my life no longer cause me to jerk flinch in response. Until I can breath in and out, taking in the fullness of life with each breath, and feeling my place in the universe.

All is truly well.

Emptying the Gaps

It has been an interesting few months. I've gotten more done, seen more dreams realized, and had more projects going at the same time than any other time in my life. The cost of this uberproductivity? Sleep. The ability to fall asleep, to be more specific. Once I'm asleep, I usually can stay asleep until I'm rested, except for the fact that I've set an alarm to keep myself at least close to my normal working schedule. Which means most days, I get between 3 and 5 hours of sleep, not nearly enough for days and weeks at a time.

I realized this morning that my uberproductivity has shoehorned productive time into all of the normal gaps in my day, from the time I wake up until I'm laying in bed to fall asleep, with a pen in my hand while I envision the future I want to create for myself with the DVD of The Secret playing in the background. What ever happened to just going to bed in the dark without any noise in the background?

Somehow, I've lost the gaps in my timeline. They've been filled in, mostly I think through the 1) excitement of what is going on, and 2) the stress of so much going on has pushed me to find more time to address things. But it isn't good. The gaps are also essential to living my life. The gaps are where I just hang out with myself, where I face the void, and where I anchor myself in the stillness of everything greater than myself.

I used to keep myself frenetically busy because I couldn't endure the gaps and the stillness. Over the years, I've embraced the gaps and found myself in the stillness. They have been vital parts of my life and awareness. They have been the places next to my places for reflection. I sit in stillness and then emerge to reflect on my life, my thoughts, my journey. But now the gaps are filled, flooded with words and thoughts and motion that overflows from my cup. But not the good kind of overflowing, the kind that comes naturally when I tap into a spring of life-giving energy. No, this is more like a clogged sink that fills up and overflows onto the floor. It's not caused by tapping into a source, it's caused by the blockage of a flow. It's a negative direction flow instead of a positive direction flow. It's a symptom of a problem that needs to be fixed.

I need to drain the gaps. But more than that, I realized yesterday that I've been filling the space around me with excess words. In a fews days time, two different people told me that I've been quite talkative. Well, of course I have been talkative. My life is very quiet, no one around to listen to me, and the world has been dropping the most amazing things at my feet. I've gotten ideas for new things I want, and they have started showing up fast and thick. It would seem miraculous, except that I know exactly what caused this to happen. The only miracle is that I've somehow managed to get out of my own way so these things could come straight to me instead of hovering around me for a time until I remember to let them in.

When the second person told me I was talkative, I realized I needed to get quiet again. Not because I need to conform to some behavior standard imposed on my from the outside, but because I had failed to observe my behavior myself. I have realized that I've been talking more than usual before this, and I understood what was going on, and I thought it was just a phase so I didn't think any more about it. But now I see that it is a sign of something out of balance in my world. I'm excited. I'm happy. I have so many new things going on in my life. It's not like I need to talk about what is going on to process it for myself, or to see it clearly. I'm wanting so much to share the new and overflowing joys of my life with the people around me.

It's really too bad that I don't have a better support system in place around me yet. I would love to have people who know what is up with me, people who can hear a sentence or two and be up-to-speed on what is going on with me. That is the challenge of living alone and working alone. No one knows what is going on with me, and the stories lately are so big and so plentiful, it takes more words to share them. Too bad no one really wants to hear them. That is my conclusion. These people are busy with their own lives and stories and just don't have room to take mine in, or the time to hear me lay them down.

Yesterday, I came to the conclusion that I need to return to this journal for a time to help myself process the events of my life. I need a place to reflect on what is happening. Perhaps then I will not have the same desire to tell the world about my life, and if I do have some desire, perhaps having reflected on it, I can tell a more succint and elegant story than I can without the reflection. At any rate, the solution seems to be for me to sit with myself and my thoughts and process them alone. The usual. Isn't this the path of the mystic? Isn't this the reality of every person's journey -- we all travel alone even if we don't realize it. Isn't this the way I've lived my life for decades? I'm not sure why I thought this thing had changed. I have the tools I need, I understand what is happening, and I can manage this process.

Expect to hear more from me.