The Magic Is Back

It's always interesting to see what I wrote the last time I was here.

Just this week, I have the last appointment to fix my teeth from that event. It ended up to be 4 broken teeth and nearly $15,000 to repair the damage. I had no idea when I wrote the previous post the extent of the damage, the size of the bill, or the length of the treatment plan.

It's been a journey.

For severall years, I have felt like the magic was gone from my life. I used to feel that my life was blessed, that I could really just think of something and it would suddenly appear in my path. Not perfectly. My life was full of imperfections, but the level of magic made me feel so happy and so much appreciation for my life.

Then the magic seemed to evaporate.

Then hard times set in. It has pushed me to rething my entire life. It has also pushed me to clean up bad habits and thought patterns which I had just allowed to stick around. It was like cleaning out the basement. I kept reaching back for my faith, my trust, that all was well in my world. I would stumble, pick myself up, and set back out.

I've arrived where I am today thanks to perserverence, and the momentum of truly good things in my life.

Today, I've still got some evidence of the hard time in my daily living. But mostly, I see signs of a magical spring. The magic is returning to my life. It's gone from a trickle to a steady stream. I've not yet erased the signs of the hard times, but I feel for the first time like I can returnn to my previous life. It hit me on Friday and I literally felt the wind beneath my wings. The optimism was so strong that the feeling stayed with me for days.

That's why I'm here tonight. I want to record the magic being back. The twinkle is back in my eye. The spring is back in my step. I'm looking forward with a great sense of potential. I'm starting the dream again.

I'll be back to write more about the journey to this place, and the lessons I've learned in the last few years.

But for now, it's enough to just sit and breathe into this feeling of being connected to the magic of life. Of my life. And the feeling thgat life is good.

Solstice

I'm feeling so many things tonight that I feel I need to type my journal entry. There's too much to say to hand write tonight.

For the last week, I've been feeling drafty or exposed in my life. Like I'm trying too hard to be heard or appreciated. Like the people I'm reaching out to don't want as much of me as I'm offering. It's such a subtle thing, but I trust my instinct. The primary person is someone I like, someone of high quality, someone I would like to have as a friend. But it feels like I want this more than she does. So I'm going to pull back by choice.

At the same time this is happening, I'm feeling a need to examine her and figure out why she isn't a good match for me. To find out what is wrong with her, or at least, wrong for me. I don't know if this is a smart thing, or something I'm doing out of self defense. I do feel at some level that this is a follower, someone who doesn't feel capable of having her own backbone, creating her own life and business. She wants to follow, to be part of the respected entourage of someone famous in the petri dish. While I understand this, it isn't a quality of a person I really want in my own inner circle. Especially because of the galaxy she has chosen. There is a real disconnect here. And yet, for the most part, I do know that she forms her own opinions and speaks her mind even in that geography. And good for her.

She's connected to another person that I had wanted in my life in a larger way. This other woman has limited her access with me very clearly. It's so funny... when we see each other, when we speak, she says that she wants to spend time with me. But when I initiate contact, she diffuses it. I realized with her a long time ago that her actions are not in sync with her words, and listened to her actions. These two women are connected, that's partly why this other woman is coming up for me now.

But really, I'm feeling the pattern. I'm feeling the other times I've felt this energy with people. I know I have a lot to say tonight, but I truly don't want to just vent about these uncomfortable feelings. I really want to move beyond this level of processing to reach a new point of clarity. But I'm willing to explore and see what is coming up, with the intention of releasing it and moving on.

I think I've almost always felt either that the people around me don't want so much of me, or that the hollowness around me is good because it is honest and there isn't really anyone who wants in. I wonder if this is a true understanding of this experience. I'm certainly open to a new way to see this, and to reach a new point of healing on this. Both of these are extremes related to feeling disconnected, one while surrounded by people, the other while being alone. That's certainly a theme of my life. And yet, it contains profound truth at the same time.

But what catches me here tonight is that this is about the duality of life, and I really want to transcend duality when possible. I know that transcending doesn't mean I won't still breathe in and out in this world of the illusion of separation and duality. But I can step into the space where I recognize duality and find the oneness solution point. I may not be able to live in that space, but I can make it a habit to return there when I find myself outside it.

Tonight, I also starting retreading the worst professional experience of my life, the worst points of the entire two year time I spent in that job. I know that tomorrow's event is triggering this memory in part, but it is also related to this feeling.

Perhaps this hermit life, this connection/separation lesson that I have come to believe is part of my life lesson, perhaps this is actually little more than a myth that I've taken on as a mantle, and that I can cast off just as easily. Perhaps I wrestle (that's too strong of a word) with this because I expect to wrestle with this.

I dozed on the couch tonight, and when I awoke, a PBS special was playing. It talked about how people are frustrated, how they feel beaten down because their business efforts and financial life during this economy are not what they expect. I found myself listening, and taking a strategy. I thought that if I could take this knowledge, this position that people are reaching, and accept that it is real, that I could find a way to transcend it. As I woke up, and as I observed this thinking, I was first disappointed with myself, and then, I felt enlightened. I was disappointed that I would allow other people's experience of their lives to limit what I believe is possible for my own life. That I would accept this assemblage point for myself. And then I realized that my strategy involved finding a way that I could feel good in the midst of this feeling bad. It was me trying to find alignment in the midst of misalignment. That's something I can celebrate. The entire strategy is flawed because it started out from frustration and lack of vision, but the fact that my entire being is oriented to finding alignment, a way to feel better and more powerful in my own life--that's something to appreciate and celebrate.

As I lay in bed reflecting on these many experiences around this theme, I realized that I had some things to process (hence the writing) and that the most helpful thing I can do tonight is to meditate. To clear my own mind, to find my alignment with my own dreams and aspirations, to gird my loins with my own vision and empower myself to launch fresh tomorrow. And every tomorrow that follows. That's true alignment, and the greatest path to my own empowerment.

People. Relationships. Space. Silence. Doing it my own way. Stubbornly, sometimes. Dreaming. Working hard. These are the themes of my experience so far. I suspect that I can just drop many of them and they will melt away like a mist around me. I feel that as I stand here this morning in the near solstice pre-dawn hours, that I'm reaching some deep core place inside me. That's I'm seeing what is essential with x-ray vision, and that I can step forward when I'm ready, when I feel compelled to step, into a fresh life, a fresh vision. Unencumbered with baggage. Strengthened with clarity and courage. Inspired by my own dreams of what is possible in my life.

I've been putting up with a lot of things in my daily life that I just don't like. I've gotten used to wrestling with them. I'm ready to step out of this cloak into the fresh new day that awaits me. That my soul longs for. That I've been dreaming about. The space around me begins to fill up with the things that are a match for me now. Now. Now. As the universe responds to who I feel I am. Who I choose to be in this instant.

I stand waiting, eyes closed, mists whirling around me in the darkness. Feeling goosebumps of anticipation. Waiting for the moment when that inner nudge says it is time to step into the magic of who I choose to be.

Dream Window to My Soul

My dreams have been quite rich lately, but last night was especially vivid and full of images.

I was visiting my mom at the house where I grew up, only it was different from my real home. Mom was working in the yard, working to manage the land. She landscapes and manages it, maybe I should say manicures it, into submission. There was a side of the house with almost an alley that I had never been down. I walked down it and realized that it opened up to a large field, and that were was a series of these large fields that turned corners and traveled a path between open farm land. I wasn't traveling between crop fields, but open spaces of land with grass, like a plain, and trees, and along the edges of thickets.

I set out to walk to the end of the property, and it was several miles away. There were some farm houses, and from my perspective, they seems to be landlocked, but they had long, winding driveways. I never encountered a road, only this open space land and some trees. I was walking mostly on grass the entire way. When I reached the end, the land came up between two homes, and a woman came out of one home. I watched a mother and daughter walk up to the other home, and knew they maintained a garden on that land. The woman asked me who I was because she knew everyone who belonged on the land and she didn't know me. She said the people who belonged there were so close that they participated together in a blood drive. I told her my relationship to my mom, and immediately I was accepted.

She joined me and started talking to me about the land and about mom. Later, we were joined by another woman from one of the farmhouses I had passed. She also knew mom and told me that she was having financial troubles and I was to keep that information to myself. She was trying to sell some land to turn her situation around. She told me there was something I should see. We walked just off mom's land to a sort of thicket of sycamore trees. They were so tall I had to lay on the ground to take in the height of them! They were about 300 feet high! The second woman had worked to get this piece of land a special designation to preserve those trees for future generations.

The whole time I was walking, I kept thinking that mom will be happy to know how nice the rest of the land is, but that she will overextend herself to control it and manage it so it is as manicured as the rest of her land. I remember that as I was walking out alone, I originally thought that she should fence off her land to protect it, but realized after a while that some of the beauty of the area was from the openness and that fencing it was not only not necessary, but it would diminish the beauty.

The snakes. While I was with mom, I had three separate snake incidents. First, there was a huge snake that turned towards us and I feared we would be bit so I killed it by slicing it with some papers I had in my hand. I picked up the pieces and took the carcass to the trash. Later, there was a garter snake that I saw but was going to ignore until it starting flying through the air and on its second pass, flew right at me. I grabbed it, and pinched it behind the head. I think I decapitated it, or it stranged, because it was dead also. There was a third snake in a pile of dried oak leaves, but I walked in a different direction to avoid it.

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Blogger lost most of this entry. I spent a lot of time interpreting this dream and it is all lost. I'm going to recap what I learned, but the magic of what happened in that time is lost.
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There is a classic Jungian dream where your home is suddenly larger, and it signifies that you have made a leap in your consciousness into a larger world. This is my ancestral home, so I believe it relates to my core, the deepest and oldest part of myself. The fact that it takes place outdoors instead of inside the house indicates that it is part of my instinctual nature. Jung makes a distinction between domestic and wild animals, and I'm drawing the same sort of parallel between indoor spaces and outdoor spaces. The expansion is not part of the person I've learned to be, or that I've been socialized to be. It is within the part of me that came into this world. Could this mean that more of my self is present in my daily life? That would tie in with my latest round of heartbreak and healing, releasing old energy that fit the pattern of disappointment and heart break that allows more of me to be present. I have to believe these things are related.

The fact that the land is cozy, not the desert where I live, means something to me as well. The desert is a great teacher, but she is not a place where you go to refresh and recoup. This land, with the openness and naturalness (not farmed) filled with grass and thickets of trees, this is the kind of land that embraces you and allows you to explore and feel safe. In the desert, you must maintain vigilance at all times.

I walked to the end of the land alone, and then was joined by two other women in my return trip. Women I didn't know. One told me about her financial challenge and her plan to alleviate that. I'm not getting anything about that.

The whole "blood drive" bit is also somewhat confusing. It seems to indicate a blood bond between the people, a family of choice perhaps. The mother and daughter were there to garden, to work the land, to be fruitful. That draws up the image of nurturing and being part of the larger cycle of life.

The large trees could be phallic, but it seems more that they represent the growth of a person. The roots providing the grounding, and the branches showing a reaching towards the heavens and enlightenment. They were extraordinarily tall, and they had just been designated as a trust so they would be saved for future generations.

The snakes are another story. The snakes represent transmutation, and I remember thinking that when they appeared in the dream. Jung also says that snakes represent a conflict between the instinctive nature and inner person. It echoes the outdoor setting for the dream, something about my instincts not being in synch with who I truly am. That is a natural effect of personal growth. The instincts are developed through experience, and they are a bit slower to change because they hang on to past experience. I can't remember ever killing a snake in a dream, or even being attacked by one. I think this image is about fighting my instincts, about not trusting them. There is so much change going on in my life right now that I often observe my instincts and impulsive behavior and hold them before acting. Most times, after a little time passes, the wisdom from within me bubbles to the surface and I realize the folly of the original thought for a course of action. That is being deliberate instead of impulsive.

In summary, I think the images of this dream are talking about the large change taking place in my life. I feel it confirms my own thoughts and awareness that a deep and important change is happening from my core outward. I do see some awkwardness in my daily living and awareness as I try out new behaviors and put myself in new situations. I can't trust my instincts yet, they are tied to old patterns that I'm choosing to change.