What I learned by 70 years of age.

What it took me until I was 70 years old to learn:
#1 If you put it back where you keep it you will save 2 years of searching over a lifetime.
#2 If you stay in the now and not be in the future planning, or in the past rummaging through garbage you won’t slice into you hand or trip downstairs.
#3 When you have an appointment don’t just write Julia on the calendar. When the day comes you will have no fucking idea who Julia is.
#4 If you save all of your errands for one day, it will save you money. Suddenly shopping and running around will just exhaust you and you will go home with only what is necessary for immediate survival.
#5 The best gift for another person is something he or she has been denying themselves.
#6 Flowers in your house are a survival necessity. They release feel good hormones and fantasy stories.
#7. You will never have the carefully made list you wrote down to go shopping actually on your person, so give up on that one. Just grab strange things you have been desiring and go home.
# 8 Having a clean car is only important if you are picking up a celebrity at the airport.
#9 Getting into or out of any new environment needs as much focus as getting out of a space shuttle. Drop down into the body, pay attention, scan for danger and obstacles. It is the transitions where the broken bones, lost cell phones and left behind coats happen.
#10 The best thing to say in every single circumstance is nothing. God gave you a face, eyes and nice teeth. Smile sweetly.
#11 Always prepare for the apocalypse. There is never too much stored toilet paper, dried beans, cash in an envelope, water in the attic, printer cartridges and paper for the next 3 months, incense for clearing energy when the world ends, (or to prevent the end).
#12. If you can afford plastic surgery get a skin pocket done so you always know where your cell phone is.
# 13 If you don’t answer your cell phone or pick up your messages you will avoid those pesky appointments you did not want to make anyway. (Who the hell is Julia and why does North Dakota call me 5 times a day?)
# 14 Don’t care. Undertake the practice of NOT giving a flip. Until something comes at my house like a bulldozer, I pay no attention to it.
#15. Exceptions are: do sign petitions that push for social justice, do speak out for the weak, young, poor and unprotected constantly. It does make a difference if you are annoying the crap out of politicians.
#16. Speak the truth to beauty. Saying, “I love your scarf to a random woman in a grocery store,” allows her to stop and tell you she bought it on her trip to Italy. Her face lights up. She has happy chemicals releasing in her body. I call it giving a “bump up.”
It is social cocaine.
#17 The only thing that matters in health care is sleep. If you did not sleep deeply with Rem every night you are running on empty. You are like someone getting off of a 20 hour plane trip. Everything you think is just stupid. Get sleep and the whole world is better.
#18 Don’t put the fuzzy red towel in with the rest of the laundry. And if it shed the first time, don’t do it ten more times just to make sure.
#19 If it didn’t fit when you bought it, it will torture you and suck the joy our of your life. Be comfortable.
#20 If it didn’t make YOU look gorgeous, don’t buy it. Nothing is worse than having your clothing upstage you.
#21 Meet the challenge when it first appears. Run toward it like a Viking storming a village. Waiting only allows it to get bigger, more horrifying and weakens us.
#22 You cannot know who you are. That is absolute bullshit. Who you are is like a strobe light image. Now you are this, now that, now something else. Allow yourself to follow your joy and grow the hell up, why don’t you.
I am 80 in August and while I sat in the kindergarden desk with my knees not fitting under it for so long, I finally am learning some things.
Love yourself constantly. Coming to earth was the craziest decision we ever made. We are Navy Seals, Red Berets, our own brain surgeons and tough as nails. We are as tough as nails, baby. Don’t you ever forget that.

Time is a myth

I find I have slipped from one sense of time to another from month to month and from year to year in the last three years of chaotic awakening.

. As I have healed, as I have become a grown-ass woman and no longer a wounded adolescent, my relationships have changed.

In the climate of nowness, I am telling people, “I don’t do time.” What I mean by that is I have released the necessity of validating myself by the pulse of the beat between a desire or an event or the arrival of an Amazon package and that swack of the wish arrow into the bull’s eye. If I ” achieve” something quickly am I a more valuable person than if it takes me years?

I can feel that old addiction to adrenaline if I focus on time.

Alone with self

“Hurry up, hurry up or you will miss the train, the boat, the plane, the appointment, the opportunity. All will dissolve and fade.”

When these thoughts appear, I feel the flood of adrenalin surge as it rushes through my veins and my Fitbit will even report back to me my heart rate has gone up.

What if all of this projection about validation, about deserving, about achieving is created by my own thought energy?

And so I set out like a sandel-footed acolyte creating the no-path path with each step.

“Who am I now?” I ask myself. Then I drop the question into the void and turn away my narcissistic gaze.

Life is so much more peaceful without gripping like a starving child at the hand of time. Life is so much more peaceful without scanning the face of a person I meet to see if he or she loves me enough. Life is so much more peaceful when I don’t quiver in fear when I get a bill or pay my taxes.

At first, the feeling is of the life of a ghost creature. Who am I if I am not anxious, worried, fearful, and focused on achieving to prove I deserve to live?

Then nothingness appears. Then the sense of blankness appears. There is no avatar for transitioning.

receive the now

I spent years breathing through the storm of thoughts that showed up to lecture me, to urge me to audition to be me.

It is called faith. I had faith that eventually the release of time, and of identify and of chasing the rabbit like a greyhound on a track would be the correct behavior. What will happen without those defining neuroses?

Slowly things begin to appear in my life. I slept more deeply. I am no longer startled by abrupt sounds. I did not have flashes of trauma going through an intersection when I drive. I began to feel smooth and soft. The hard shell of defensiveness, the brittle layer of intellectual processing, the constant comparison of myself to another to see which one of us was the most something or another… just stopped.

I am most aware of my journey when I wake up. I call it surfacing. I float up from my dreams and my body becomes reborn as a casing, a home, a nurturing organism. I feel my bed under me and am grateful for its comfort and support. I extend the waking up process as long as I can. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

So I have given up time with the understanding that I am the creator of the time I live. And it stretches on and on like a desert of colored sand. I can go in any direction I desire. Now is perfect.

 

 

 

Time and Intention are the enemy of Unexpected gifts.

The day began hesitantly. First, the hot water run in the bathtub for the washing of hair and stretching of limbs was intended. The screen addiction’s blue light trance caught my mind. After going through the email and seeing possibilities; chaotic offers of peace; warnings that this class or video or lesson would become cannibalistic and eat itself out of existence any moment; the lost losers wailing in the valley of abandonment and those indecipherable messages from some long dead language from another planet I am by now too tired to try to decipher. I delete, delete, delete. Next, I must remove the dead bodies from the field and leave my trash as pristine as I found it.
I push back the cleaning, laundry and prep for new incoming guests in order to get into the tub before the thought of a hot bath had totally dissolved.
I wash my hair while listening to Jason Stephenson soothe affirmation towards me like a lover with his warm breath. “I am blossoming,” I repeat out loud as I soap up my head and dunk it beneath the water line. “I am at peace in the world,” I repeat as I smooth the conditioner through my increasingly longer locks. “I am supported by the universe,” I chant towards the bathroom ceiling as I douse my head with repeatedly used water.
After the ritual of cleansing, I go to the bed to breathe along with Wim Hoff. Almost immediately I feel prickles of energy along my flesh and inside my body. I feel like my cells are drinking tiny cappuccino cups of delicious caffeine liquid. I push against my capacity for breath and expand it more and more. I float in a sea of thoughts, plans, visions, voices, and intentions. All of the shards of half-seen things break off from their mooring and I watch them fly past me as I release them with my breath, through the ceiling into the field of what is.
After dressing, I dress the bed and address the new cat.
I walk out onto the lawn barefoot to feel the day all over me from foot to face. I say, “Hello birdies.” I always say, ” Hello birdies, ” when they sing. It seems only right.
The rituals of morning end up being the rituals of day because I have detached myself from time now. I justify it to my ego by reminding that cranky critic that I started my first job at 8. Now, 70 years later I chose to not be chained at the ankles by time. I am barefoot on the lawn. The birds sing. What will happen will happen.
Finally, I understand I do not need to have an opinion about everything that happens. Finally, I understand I do not need to have an opinion about every blade of grass, every leaf, and every passing being on my sidewalk.
This. This is now. My hair is washed, the room is ready for the next guest. I feel at home in myself.
May be an image of chess
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How do we understand ourselves?

The measure of a man is a function of the methodology of assessment. When I put my feet on the floor next to my bed to push myself up into the day, I already begin the egoic interview. It is like being hired to fill the position of “self”.

How am I doing? I will inquire. How did you do yesterday? What have you achieved? What actions held virtue and which were simply a weak wristed attempt to burn up time?

All of these questions are the Ego’s job to assess how well I am protecting myself from mortality. “If you are not careful, “my bodyguard explains, “there will be trouble ahead.”

I have learned to treat this prodding and poking as no more than having an incredibly irritating four-year-old as a constant companion, I visualize this annoying brat as handing me calipers and tape measures to assess my success or failure as a human being.

However, I have gotten very practiced in refusing to fall for the attempt to make me feel weak and unsteady. My bodyguard wants to keep its job.

through the fire

My mind in this last year has become better and better at selecting my own, very personal criteria for living a life. The questions are so simple. “Did you sleep well? Did you feed yourself with foods that are supportive of your health? Did you learn something? Have you been loving and kind in your interactions with others?”

It makes life so much simpler when I refuse to appraise my value as a human being from outside criteria. My life is not a performance. I am not playing to an audience and hoping for applause. I have learned to drop envy and comparison. Those do nothing for my contentment with this present moment.

I am more childlike after 13 months of my exodus from public life. Each moment, each hour has a unique aspect to it. I see the white lilies bloom in the window against a backdrop of white, newly fallen snow. I find a recipe for soup I have had for years and enjoy preparing it for myself. My neighbour walks by knowing I am behind the drawn diaphanous curtains in my living room spending this day as I spend all days laying down with my leg elevated and she waves knowing I can see her.

stillness

It is like coming off of a drug, this year. I have had all of my toys, my trivial distractions removed and it is just me and my ego now. And the only way around the babbling repetitive negativity of that conversation is to choose to be at peace. And so I do.

Sannyasa: The Fourth Chapter of Life

Awareness of the movements, chapters, seasons, and acts of life are distinctly different when viewed from a distance of age.

The contained existence in my childhood through grade school to high school was controlled, enforced, and structured. Those who lived before me had stories, egregores, and trauma-marked cells that surfaced in my own biological blueprint. That era, the abraiding of intersecting cultures wearing away to a single smooth surface of belief, I see as almost cult-like. We believed what we were taught to believe.

at 4 years old

My arrival on the earth was the year that WW II ceased. I shot out into a time of rabid hunger for growth. The depression reduced choices for my grandparents and in the childhood of my own parents. But NOW we were like the starving crowds let loose in a field of food. The norm was for us to gorge ourselves.

We paid close attention to what our neighbors had newly purchased. The fins on our cars grew to sci-fi proportions. We were propelled into competitive hedonism. My father bought the first TV set in our neighborhood. There was a cache´, an undisputable sense of status that a family could achieve instantaneously.

One could move ahead of the pack. One could be the house that people pointed to as they drove past. The Thunderbird in the driveway; the TV antenna reaching out beyond the roof to outer space; the books lining the bookshelf on hypnosis, self-improvement, some with bright pictures of modernist houses insistently and rebelliously sleek; the lounge chair covered in orange fabric in the living room that was impossible to sit upon no matter how one contorted the body, all signaled patriotic dedication to consumerism.

And so as I moved through my life, I watched the carefully cultivating craving. If only…. if only I could get good grades. If only I could graduate from university. If only I could earn a master’s. If only I could find a husband, a house, and have children. Always, always moving toward a goal whose dopamine hit of pleasure disappeared as soon as it was achieved. It was decades of crawling through the sand to arrive at a mirage.

I watched as the cultural imprint caused people to balloon from an average size of 6 to size 16. I watched as the slavish pursuit of power, pleasure, and fame became currency.

what did I buy?

Today, our striving for clout on social media is like showing a membership card to an exclusive club. I am acceptable to myself because I have masses of friends, masses of followers, a new dress, and a new achievement. But I also watch as the fleeting moments of the new sign of personal value fade away. It is like having an entry card to a club that disappears in the hand. It was once in my grasp. But now it is gone. That sense of being special so we can be considered normal haunts us.

I worked 70 to 80-hour weeks for decades in the hopes that I could be recognized as a valid human being. It was a caucus race as in Alice in Wonderland. Quickly run to nowhere so you can stay in place. This was my period in life when I was in hot pursuit.

But now, now I am in Sannyasa. In Hindu lore, this is the period of time past 70.

Everything and nothing

In Eastern society, it is believed that everything is already in existence. Art is already complete and it is only up to the artist to remove the unnecessary. And that is the explanation for this time of life.

We grow weary of the accumulation; the caucus race; the unfocused blind pursuit of goals that do not serve our souls. Instead of a list to accomplish, we now have the wisdom to discard the unrolling scroll of itemized effort in the day. It becomes easier to say, “Does this decision, this effort, or this action make me a better person?”

We are now able to discard the trivial as unsatisfying. The imprinting of my culture, because of when I was born was to run on a track of acquisition of things, of pleasures, of status bijoux objects.

And now, in this last stage of life, it is easier for us to understand ourselves. We no longer pay attention to what the culture requires of us. We drive through the images, the ideas, and the demands like a car plows through the rain. The water just rolls off. And we begin to divest ourselves of all the burdens that we were told were treasures to be held close. We free ourselves.

We understand that an accomplishment can be just to sit in the now and feel the wind passing over us. We watch the clouds so carefully that we can see they are moving.

We are doing something. We are learning to control the mind. We are learning to be inner-focused, to be at peace, and to keep our flame of compassion for others alight. We are finally beginning to understand our purpose. It is the time for that.

Oh What Fragile Beasts We Humans Be

The illusion of toughness gets in the way of self-care. I often think of how my understanding of my “margin for error” has just been insanely optimistic. At 78 years of age, I have learned that we never know what is spilled milk and what is an irretrievable error.

self

learning the self

The car passing on ice cutting off a semi flips and only through the skill and intent of the professional driver do we survive spinnimg around, smashing multiple times into the guard rail, and sitting finally still and shocked in the totaled car. How many times previously had the driver next to me made that move with impunity? But this time could have been ‘the exit.’

The last straw, the last exit from disaster, the minor blithe ignorance of the howling voices of the carnivorous wolves in the forest is something we simply don’t understand. We are so disconnected from our mortality that we are like children.

My family narrative was that we were tough. My father and mother could take countless risks with their lives and their children’s lives because we were of sturdy stock. Two times I had pneumonia and because we were inordinately stoic, I was left at home with a tray of soup after getting a penicillin shot.

The message was: “Don’t be a wimp.”

My mother was enfeebled by double pneumonia when I was 14 and refused to be admitted to hospital. I was kept home to keep her alive. Even though she worked in a hospital, or simply because she served as a nurse in the hospital, she distrusted the germ-infested atmosphere.

And so we were praised for not crying; taking our shots without holding a breath; enduring small bone fractures without medical care and our very strength in never asking for help was a badge to be worn proudly.

But it was worn inside the clothing next to the heart. One never bragged about being a stalwart and resolute soul. That would be a sign of weakness.

For most of my life, I have been like a driver who has been given a new car. It is fancy and technologically complex and I have never been sure how to read the gauges.

I soldiered on through pneumonia without an adult in attendance. I healed angrily inflicted bruises quietly under clothing. I went to work every day for five years with bowel cancer that was undetected. I did not know how to advocate for myself and so I assumed the exhaustion was my mistake and I was unable to ask for tests from my doctor.

My learning has been slow and sloppy. My ego was puffed up and gruff when I saw other people whining on about hunger or cold, or disappointments. I was taught our family was superior. We did not need to be babied.

The family egregore was built around me like a walled castle. We were special because we were not special.

I remember as a teenager reading about a man who lost his legs in an explosion and crawled for an hour to help. I thought to myself, “I could do that.” I was 15.

The years have taught me to fall in love with my body as if it was my baby. If the body is hungry, I feed it. If my body is tired, I lay down. If my body is in pain, I cry out and ask for help. It has taken me decades to leave behind the ancestral trauma that made our family members feel ‘special’ because we lacked empathy for ourselves.

tough people

And always, always, always I talk lovingly to my body now. I thank it for warning me when I have drawn the last straw. The body knows far more than my mind can ever understand. It knows far more than my subconscious, my ego can ever know. It knows how to survive and thrive.

I am growing into myself, at last.

 

A Season of Change

The last year has been challenging for me. To move, to sit, to walk felt like a sword was stuck straight into my hip joint with the pain travelling down into my knee and like a true baroque expression of torture becoming a strip of fiery shin splint.
I am an active person emotionally fed by physical challenges. I have managed my Airbnb single handedly for 12 years going as much as ten months without a day off. My garden was so magnificent that people who inevitably stop to smell the roses which I kept tall so the elderly would not have to bend down for the perfume.
But then COVID hit and I folded my dreams and plans like an ivory ribbon fan and stuck them away in a drawer. It was useless to pretend. The choices of denial, or angry resistance have never been something I am drawn to. I know how to wait out the shit storm in periods of disaster. You get that skill when you are over 70 or you risk looking like an imbecile toddler throwing a fit into the faces of innocent people caught in your spewing inability to absorb the vicissitudes of life. After a certain number of decades one should learn that the elevator goes up and it goes down sometimes even getting stuck for no reason.

Working with Ego

So I stayed home and turned inward dedicating myself to learning, reading, studying and coaching my clients. In October 2021 when I went on the surgical hip replacement list I had finally lowered my proud head and given up on toughing it out.
The entire year has been one of deep and abiding growth. Submission to what is was all I could do. My choice was to deepen my grounding practices or to thrash around in the net of constraint I was now caught within.
When it came to me as a metaphor I thought of it as “the last firing” of a piece of pottery. I had been glazed and now I would see my true colors appear.
There were days when as I struggled out of bed the first thing I would do would be to weep. It wasn’t vigorous athletic/dramatic/theatrical sobbing but more of just a leaking out of grief.
I was 77, 78, 79 and isolated from real life contact with others because I was minutely aware down to the smallest detail carved with statistics that my age cohort had no room for stupid.
The deepest lesson that I received was that I am fully, inexorably and fucking human. My emotions would arise and I had to make choices. Would this hour be one of wise decisions, resignation, or of internal vitriolic debate of self with self?
I kept my compass out. I kept coming back to the question: Who do you want to become?
And what I mean by that is not how do I present to others, or how much status or power I can accumulate. What I kept returning to was the pottery metaphor. My clay was being thrown about by hands other than mine. I was being burnished, polished, placed in a fiery kiln of apparent chaos and something was happening to me.
The consistent restrictions on movement, the chronic pain, the disengagement from groups, from normative behavior, the Egregore of society was a full on attack from all sides.
This is not particularly extraordinary to my life. Most people in the last three years have had their contract with life put in the shredder. We have all stood and watched it cut into thin strips.
It became so very clear to me that I had little understanding of what depression does in a life. Because I was used to enduring, I came to see that this very habituation to the dissociative state was my greatest scarring from my childhood. I had no urge to paint, to write, to send in poetry or stories. I was used up in not allowing despair to eat me alive.
“How long,” I asked myself, “How long have you gone to ground, become frozen and paralytic when you are in pain?”
And then I remember where it came from. As a toddler if I cried, I would be attacked physically. As a child in school I would have the “silliness” slapped out of me if I looked sad. So now I was deep into the initial wound.

at 4 years old

By nature, I think I am quite stoic but there was also a large part of the residual scarring in my experience of cruelty under the age of 6. It was violently taught to me that I had no rights to host the demons of negative emotions. Only my parents could be angry.
I could see how deep in ran in me. But now in this retreat in the hermit cave I faced the fact that I had to forgive myself for everything that made me human.
I am still and have been in pain for a year. Because of that, I will be triggered into the helplessness of no rescue in my early years. Who will protect me? Who will make it stop? There is no one.
But I have me now. And I have given myself permission to shut down and just tend to my body. I have given myself permission to see the victories I have achieved that don’t shine out into the world. They are private between me and me. All of it is the clarity of seeing how strong I have made myself.
And now it all changes. I am going through three surgeries in a month. I am promised a new hip.
So many of my ancestors were knights. They knew about battles, self discipline, stoicism and skill in the face of the enemy. I know my enemy has been my own ego and I feel the ancestors in me as I have faced the lesson these past three years. The sturdy warriors had the wisdom to leave old wounds and battles behind and trained for the next battle. They have much to teach me.

 

 

The knights in my ancestry

 

 

Learning to Let it Go

I was sitting on the deck today and the sun burned through the clouds in a miraculous halo of heat. On the line, yellow sheets were lined up sailing somewhere new. They were Sailing away from the thoughts, sweat, unseen microbes caught in their folds. The wind did it all. It cleared the last week’s memory from my four shades of yellow sheets.

Closing my eyes, I could see an image I had just captured to the left of me. Two pots of snapdragon plants were far apart and yet their flowers leaned into one another. Were they conversing? Were they drawn to one another? Is there a secret language called Snapdragon?

I am as you find me

As I usually do when I am checking in, I felt around in my brain/mind subconscious for the rolled up scroll of drama words. I visualize a hand, a giant hand like Alice’s when she grew suddenly large in the room.

“What is here?” I asked myself.

Nothing but wind, the sheets billowing ritual of cleansing, the snapdragons chatting with one another.

“What should I do?” I asked myself.

My history of work addiction causes a reaction like that of a former alcoholic walking past a bar and smelling the seduction of destruction.

The answer was clear: “Nothing.”

The day will bring me suggestions, hints, nudges, to let me know which activities are arising.

It is no longer about a drag race on a crowded street with the pedal grinding down into the floor board. I have washed and hung the sheets without the presence of planning, pushing, the surge of energizing adrenalin. Now, I correct my former blog for no previously established intention.

I think to myself, “You are like a child just exploring the world. You pick up a rock and pile it on a larger rock without a plan.”

I think to myself, “I think I am going to enjoy watching you explore what calls to you. This will be fun.”

Always alert

Well Slap Me with a Dead Fish and Call Me Alive

The past three years I have been secluded, taken the veil, married the Christ of chastity and solemnly withdrawn into my own cave of unasked for lessons. I have developed patience with not having patience. I have learned how to move my cursor from shock and anger/awe at other people’s choices and responses to a softer reaction. I have learned to live with absolute silence day after day so great that even the songs that my refrigerator sings are important in my ambience of reality, my projected biography.

self contained

I ask the question: Was this period of time absolutely necessary, was my reaction to the changing world a revelation, was my resultant mindfulness practice pre-ordained?

And I think it is a tremendous sign of my growth that I can answer firmly: “I have no fucking clue.”

I think of the Tarot’s fool card depicting him just stepping off into the unrevealed with his happy dog beside him and a few necessary provisions tied to the stick over his shoulder.

Everything and nothing

Today, I am three days living after a tooth implant. I was unusually nervous as I walked to the oral surgeons office so I had a self interview. I find that emotions are clarified if I show up with a microphone and ask myself questions. Listening to the answers is a skill.

“Why are you vibrating with a flood of energy?” I asked myself.

Usually, I am very calm during procedures. I trust the medical practitioner: I trust my body: I trust that the universe holds me in love. But this day, I was slightly triggered.

My answer came quietly. “My hip hurts.”

I have had chronic pain in the failed joint since October and it has been a challenge. And so I forgave myself for telling myself that I was a victim of pain, a victim of my body.

As soon as I called in my guides and angels I settled the hell down. And today, I am three days living after a tooth implant. I surprised those doing the gum surgery with the fact I scarcely bled at all. I had no pain. I slept peacefully for 8 hours last night.

training the mind

But the surprising part of this voyeurism that I indulge in upon my own psyche is that I feel like I have landed like Harrison Ford in the Raiders of the Lost Arch ‘ping’ off of a cliff onto the rock bridge below leading to ‘the other side.’ I felt that I had pushed through challenge after challenge that would not be understood by the public at large, however large that still is in today’s fractured Gregore.

I have a story I tell myself and I hold it up to the light to see how negative it can be. I have won prizes in three local writing conference competitions. I have not thrown arrow-of -death words at others when I drive. I have fed myself well and made good choices. (Well, there was that pile of mashed potatoes but I won’t talk about that.)

September is surgery month. I have gotten my implant moved forward and down into my gums. And at the end of the month I am having my pull up balloon curtain eye lids remodelled so I can see and be seen more easily.

But most surprising of all for me today is the sense that the anesthetic numbness I have felt since 2020 is wearing off. I feel like my vision is clearer. It is as if the path that I cannot and have not been able to see is under my feet again.

The smack up side the head is necessary sometimes to get some energy flowing.

Do I feel certain of what is next? oh, hell no. But I am signing up for it without reading the contract.

Quo Vadis

 

Do I Trust Myself? Do I Trust the Universe?

I spend each morning with teachers, books, YouTube, Gaia and continue to absorb information. Frequently, it seems like a visit to Bed Bath and Beyond and seeing a new device I had never imagined previously.

“Oh,” I think, “that would make cooking easier.”

My path in years past was about stubbornness, refusal to adjust my steps, following the only map I had access to without stopping to sit and ask, “What am I not seeing?”



The last year has been a time of stripping away. Because my hip joint has failed, the simplest physical effort has to be executed like I am climbing a rock face. To get out of bed, I talk my way through the actions of my legs, the alignment of my knees, the seeking security in my feet for the great push upwards. If I try to ‘accomplish’ tasks physically, I may well find myself down on my carefully constructed incline of pillows until I recover.

I am in a state of struggle with the frequent feeling of being overwhelmed by pain. I float hopelessly depleted with the ache, lost to who I once was, grieving for the time of excitement for the hunt after the forms of success that I could capture and bring home.

Now, I repeatedly say to myself, “trust.”
It has become a prayer.

I am careful with every movement. I am delicate with my thoughts. It would be so easy to turn on myself and screech like a harridan at this creature I have become.

“When will my life begin again?” I ask myself.

almost done



I have been so depleted that I no longer have dreams. I suppose because a stretch of sleep is so hard to enter with the joint firing sirens of pain, I am reluctant to use it up in mere visions.

I imagined a figure stroking my hair once when I fell asleep on the couch. She touched me with such gentle love that I felt it through my entire body.
When I woke up, I thanked her and I thanked myself for seeing comfort rather than following the path of anger or frustration.

One thing I have had fall on me like a boulder suddenly appearing on the road in front of my car, is the realization that I cannot know what happens next. The truth I am facing is that the old rewards that programmed me are not available and it is up to me to understand. It is up to me to grow up.

“What are you doing?” I frequently ask myself and my answer is ,” staying calm.”

It is a skill not recognized in the old, dark ages of work addiction and outside validation. It is a prowess that creates strength within me.

Allow now



What is next? Where am I going? What project should I devote myself to?
These questions are no longer relevant. I am too tired to close my mind around them. There is no space for this doom scrolling on my screen.

To stay in the present moment takes a mage’s skill.
I have come to understand that surrender is the opposite of defeat.