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What I learned by 70 years of age.

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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.

Dishevelment

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The whirlwind of appointments one after another meant I had to exit my house, eject out of the atmosphere of calm and order and routine. Day after day the objects I touched quickly then abandoned contributed to more chaos: brush on the counter, dishes in the sink, clothing thrown on the black metal stand disturbed my peace.  Each time I returned home and walked through a room the disorder had mysteriously grown. It became like a haunting, like an invasion of mayhem. It was unsettling.

As I quickly threw back the covers and dismounted the bed, there was no time for anything more than assembling my presence for the next appointment. All of the segments of the maintenance of a life fell due at the same time. The drains needed cleared, the tree trimers were ordered up to come and prune, the deck was cleared for the painter, my teeth needed cleaning, the cat’s thyroid medicine was waiting for pick up, my hearing and eye exams were both scheduled.The more I pursued continuity the more I had to sacrifice the habit of order.

The more my calendar became scribbled with enclosing words, the more the house was closing in on itself.

I like calm, order, tidiness and have a life of a caretaker in any space I choose to live. My eyes are trained to sweep a room looking for what “needs done.”

I operate on three levels. There are the someday things that cannot possibly be attended to now. I have to wait, to push it off into the future as a plan forms. There are the more urgent actions on my list. This plan is motivated by the scratching sound of irritation.

“I can’t take this anymore.”

And then one day I attack a corner, or a room or open the drawers and go into a trance like state. My chest of drawers with shirts and sweater is waiting for me to surge at them with a reptilian glow in my eye. All of the orange items will be rolled and snugged in together one day soon. All of the lighter sweaters sill be arranged by style in the second drawer. It is a  future I am creating in my mind. As the seasons change, I will have to open a lower drawer for the heavy winter protection.

I have begun that part of the plan by sweeping all in the bottom drawer into a bag that sits waiting to be flung out of my car into a thrift store box.

And ,then, the third level is the automatic, ritualistic movement of my hands as I do the daily things. The dishes go in the cupboard, the laundry in the basket, the pills are lined up for my daily blessing of self care.

trapped in thoughts

But when the repair, the maintenance by experts in the outside world becomes necessary, I leave the house feeling I have abandoned my relationship with my daily life. I will drive away and see in my mind’s eye my hair brush thrown down, my dishes piled in the sink, the notes I took from a book piled up unfiled. It feels chaotic, risky, wild, out of control.

But then I remember that I am simply shifting gears between one system of ordering my life to another.

“Not now,”. I say this to myself. “ Not today. It will happen.”

I can relax because I know I always keep my promises to myself.

Serious People

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My druthers

I hear this word around me. Perhaps it was floating in the air of the ancestry story. Perhaps it was transmitted in my DNA.

 

It seems folksy and from the type of hard scrabble, unbreakable stubborn people who would choose to grow crops on rocky hill sides. The smashing or lifting or rolling of obstacles out of the way was the way. Not once, did these obdurate people say, “Oh let us move to level, greener, more civilized fields to plant a life.” There was joy in effort.

 

And so, I hear the word “druthers” inside my head as I think about my choices. I would rather paint my deck than paint my nails. I would rather mow my grass than build up points with video games or cards. In my past, I would rather go to the stacks in the library and learn about the Victorians than sit for hours in a coffee shop at University. I prefer pruning my plants in my garden to following the neighbourhood drama and fear of the homeless walking our back-alley way. Some here have put up cameras as sentries to protect their territory. I choose to walk barefoot on my piece of land and watch for new buds, or the green tiny globe of a hot pepper’s promise on the corner of my deck transitioning to a delightful scarlet red.

 

I see my hands, my bent over back, my strong legs as a source of joy. It means I can strive upon the earth. Hundreds of ancestors watch me and cheer me on.

 

Time is not meant to be squandered, burned down to ashes without forming a prayer to be sent up. “What is the outcome?” my non forbearing forebearers would ask. Why would you wrap a ribbon in your hair when you could be wrapping the base of a tree to protect it from clawing animals? Be sensible always.

 

Silly choices, trivial choices, no account choices were condemned. I can feel the presence of my ancestors standing in rows behind my shoulders observing me. They ask me to consider. They ask me to take time to dissect with discrimination what I hold as a vision in my heart.

Caroline Schmidt

“Are you sure?” I hear the voice of Laetitia my far distant grandmother who raised 17 children that she alone brought into the world.

 

“Is this wise?” I hear my Quaker grandfather speaking quietly and evenly.

Francis Cook, Pilgrim

“Does this create a more substantial life?” say my Lutheran forebearers.

Sarah Black, Grandmother

“Is this merely a fancy, a decorative gesture or is it solid and serious?” say my Puritan dynasty filling the boats to struggle in a new country.

 

I am pleased as I stand viewing what my effort has created. A cleaned out space, a weeded garden, a tidied shed gives me more joy than any layered chocolate cake, celebratory party can ever deliver. Now, I know myself and I do not struggle with my choices as I did in the past.

 

I know my druthers. I know who I am. I am home.

 

Time is a myth

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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.

 

 

 

Spring is an expectation

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Outside my window rain, rain, rain day after day the gray clouds are wrung out by wind and pushed high over the surrounding mountain ridges. A daffodil or two has survived the tourist deer touring through our neighbourhood. They used to feed on Knox Mountain but now with climate disruption, they come in family groups to treat our carefully planted gardens like a salad bar in a buffet. I cannot be angry with the eight in my yard today. Their ribs are prominent and signal malnutrition. Their world no longer supports them.

I have sprayed deterrent. I placed silver pin wheels to spin confusion and trigger the hesitancy of fear in their faces as they bend their heads to nibble down the burgeoning bulbs to the ground with one delicate bite after another.

The days play with us. The flirtation can come on in a moment with the clouds parting to allow sun to leak out and sometimes even allow escaping warmth. Just as quickly the clouds are blown back to cover the sky. The only variation is how high they hang. At times, they are layered across the tops of the surrounding mountains. At others they are low enough to form a backdrop to the black drama of branches in neighbour’s trees.

Next to the door are coats for protection against the shifting climates. The light weight one has been worn a few times but stays on the hook attesting to the optimism with which I face the two steps down into the outside world. My triple-layered, hooded blizzard coat hangs next to the lighter choice. Too many times I have opened the door to weak sunshine and had the whip of stinging wind slap me.

At least…. I keep thinking. Back East the maps have eliptical circles showing where the weather is to be feared either now or in the near future. ‘Guerilla hail’ is falling to create an attack likened to warfare on those who move along the sidewalk or rush to the car for shelter.

At least our houses are not being ripped up by the angry Gods of Valhalla to punish humankind.

And there are the occasional surviving bright yellow golden daffodills standing tall but with the petals closed around the heart. Volunteering in my garden bed out back, I found early snow glories. I pinched the tiny blue flowers off between my fingernails and placed them in a miniature clay pot I held with two tight fingers.

They sit now in front of the Buddha in the window reminding me that sometimes the subtle signs are a cause for optimism. At least…. I keep thinking.

 

How do we understand ourselves?

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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.

A Season of Change

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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

 

 

Is this a time to be conflicted?

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We are between two stools, sitting on two fences, contorted into a new yoga shape that is more Chinese acrobat circus than a pose that has a name. Shouldn’t we be more clear with ourselves than just walking around the gallery of funhouse mirrors watching our projected sense of self morphing into grotesque and incredible shapes.

“That is not me,” we say.

Where do we stand when the floor is lava, the once green and calm back yard is thrust up by earthquake? Where do we stand when the very topography of our reality has changed beyond any name we could dial into our label gun? What do we believe in a time when all beliefs are suspect? Who are we when the nicely-created cattle runs that separated us no longer work? What is our purpose?

I ask who are these people around me when I see a post on social media. A friend boldly emblazons in the status space, the idea that autistic children should be killed because of the drain on society and, you know, the gene pool?

How did we get here wherever here is now? But it all changes first in the dismantling of old systems. It all changes as we have to adapt our behaviour to the new threat to our continued existence. And what I, personally, can feel right down into the marrow of me is that we are just beginning to end it.

I see in my mind’s eye the depiction of an old method of killing an individual who contravened some subtle law drafted with the hope of maintaining a structure of beliefs for some perceived goal. ‘Death by bricks’ is what comes to mind. An individual lays down and is under a board. Weights are gradually added until all the life is pressed out of the person. And for so many that is exactly what it feels like now.

The virus is not real. COVID is only in some foreign land and surely the border mark made in the invisible marker will keep it isolated to hurt only the not me people. COVID is shutting down access to the shiny distractions that have kept us running in place. The second brick is that we can no longer just run in our lives the same pathways we have always run. The third brick is the economic distress now dispersing like ink dropped in a pan of water. People are struggling with fear of the virus while some refuse to believe and are hosting happy COVID spreading demonstrations.

Alone with self

And then we are alone

We no longer have the distractions, the drug of the usual, the mindless actions that we have invested so much time and energy into the building.

And then we are alone with ourselves.

As we sit like those arrested and sent to the involuntary walls of the monastery, we endure the results of climate disruption. Thousands endure storms. Spain has snow. Earthquakes continue. Mountains, we are suddenly reminded, are volcanoes await the moment of release.

As we are like those who are trying to adapt to the weight of the bricks. We see political chaos. We see that which we cannot believe.

But we are getting better and better at absorbing shock. The concept of “It is impossible. It will never happen,” fades away.

The vaccine is created. The virus mutates. The storms throw trees through houses. The crews show up to return electricity.

The stock market keeps track of how happy the corporate rich are in any given situation. And we are envious. We are envious of their invested point of view.

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Our very sense of self erodes. Who am I when I am at home? That is a British saying I have always loved. When you are not involved in the performance art of assuming a character in the eyes of the world, who exactly are you?

When your sense of self is built in the spaces between the restrictive pillars of society, of family, of your role at work, of your star-like coming down a stairway in your costume then who are you?

As we sit at home we are mightily irritated by the sense of being conflicted, of being confused and, may the saints help us all, ignorant.

“I did not know that!” is the beginning. It is where we all become submissive to the idea that what is manifesting in the future will be unlike what our past experiences have lead us to believe was reality.

“I don’t know what all of these bricks of fear are doing to me.” We say this to ourselves as we release expectations.

Some will find it too crushing. Some will decide that it is too much to stay with the transition and to keep creating space within themselves. Some will not make it through.

But others can, at least, build their skills at surrender.

“Yes, I believe two things at once. Yes, I was wrong in my perceptions and I might be wrong even now. Yes, I allow myself to transform.”

And so the old life gets crushed out of us as we teach ourselves to stay loose. We teach ourselves to breathe deeply and not ask for assurances.

The greatest teachers for us are our ancestors. They went through periods wherein the very paradigm of reality shifted. The earth was no longer the centre of the universe. The upstart middle class refused to be slaves to the lord of the manor. Cars and horses shared the same streets. Black death, smallpox, polio swept through towns and villages. Thousands starved because of food emergencies. Wars brought the harrowing Vikings, knights, warriors that decimated the work of generations.

I look at my ancestors and know that in each of us there is the ability to survive even as the very nature of our concept of reality is destroyed. They rebuilt. Those that survived were more creative, more energized and more likely to bring forth an unforeseen future.

I look to my ancestors to understand that what is happening now is simply a new formation of something we don’t understand yet.

The bricks will not kill us. The events will not end our curiosity, our creativity and our desire to participate in a new way, in a more mindful way in the life that is arising.

Embrace the conflict. Shout loudly, “I don’t know. Yet.”

 

Background Trauma Sounds

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Like a martial drum beating, the sounds of shuffling feet from some invading army still unseen over the hillside, we can hear it. There is a sense of a lined up, designed, patterned chaos that is coming at us. We don’t have words for it. We don’t have words for the shivering anticipation that we are feeling in our bodies. And like a person in an abusive relationship, many individuals have become overwhelmed and collapse in a heap.

“What can I do?” we ask. “How can I stop any of it?” we cry out on social media.

The battered wife is so exhausted by just dealing with the next and the next inevitable attack that she loses the ability to remain in even a fight or flight stage. That was months ago. That sense of urgency of activity is long sense gone for most of us. We are now just frozen.

My brother and I used to play frozen rag on the front lawn on summer nights. He would grab my arm and fling me into the darkness and as soon as a car came past flooding the moving person with light, we had to stand in place. The car’s headlight were a ray that made us into an inhuman stone-like form. I remember holding on tight to the paralyzed shape that the sudden headlight rays had created of me.

If we fell or could not keep our balance, we were dead. The lawn had transformed into some lethal contact zone that would dissolve our very person.

As I scan the social media posts and see 500 fires in California, dismantled post offices, the history of the connection to beauty obliterated in the Rose Garden at the white house, two tornados headed to the south, and locally two fires nearby creeping the hillsides, I feel like that child on the lawn. I have been thrown. I am off balance and moving through the darkness. The sudden flash of car lights would freeze me in space. I don’t want to be frozen in this time.

Can I keep my balance? Can I find a way to hold my shape, my person, my hopes without falling on the dark ground?

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Someone said on social media, “What can happen next?”

His friend answered, ” Don’t even ask that question.”

So now we need to reconnect to the sense of our own bodies; the bottoms of our feet where we can stand; the small decisions in our daily lives. We have our breath; our practices of self-care; our intentions.

And as the loud sounds of the cracking walls of the old system fill our space, we are called on to trust. The only thing left is to trust that we have the ability to stay undisturbed and centred. We have the ability to disconnect from the childlike urgency of expecting more powerful people to protect us. We have this opportunity to strengthen the sense that the universe supports us.

We choose our actions. We choose our emotions. We choose to stay focused on becoming the person we desire to be. It is more difficult when there are no pats on the back, no outside validation routines. But there is also greater freedom. Having the structure collapse means that we are now not walled in with rules and rewards. We choose to not be thrown across the black night lawn and frozen in fear by the next event.

We seek out our own expression of self. And throughout history, we know for a fact that following chaotic events such as plagues, the collapse of nations and warfare, there is a period of great creativity. New social classes emerge, new forms of artistic expression, new methodologies and cosmologies are created. And it is because of those who choose to see an opportunity arising as the old restrictions fall away.

Refuse to be flung off balance and forced into a state beyond action. You are creating a new way of life. Dare to trust yourself.

Virtue Signals and Promises

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On social media, I have observed a hair pulling and kicking in the knees caps type of fighting. One person calls out another with a snarling tone. “You are virtue signalling,” the troll that lives in feeds says in a deep, accusatory voice.

Beware those who have the unmitigated gall (or any other ancient tribal name such as Celt or Galli) to brazenly state that they are not face down in an alcoholic daze during COVID. They will be attacked.

Shut in

The social fetish with victimhood, suffering, repetitive self-destructive behaviour has become more fashionable during the COVID retreat for some. Post that you are day drinking, have put on ten pounds, no longer comb your hair or can’t stand the smell of composting armpits when you lift your arms and the congratulatory messages come flowing in like a waterfall under your Facebook status comment.

Some are applauding paralysis and dysfunction as if it were a superpower. It is, indeed, a strange time. It is an open competition for those who can be the most worst. It reminds me of a bicycle race where the person who stays upright and has covered the least ground is the winner.

Virtue signalling has saved my life. Each time I chose not to tumble down the cactus-covered hillside because I wasn’t watching my steps, I start to trust myself more. Each time I look at my options and ask the question, “Who do you want to be?” Or visualized the person my actions will create, I become more gently optimistic about my own ability to run my life.

When I work out instead of binge-watching Netflix, I talk to myself. I will say, “Look at you go!” I will keep track of my walking, my eating, my sleeping, my reading, my meditating so I can clearly observe my growth. It is a necessary part of my personal growth journey to virtue signal to myself and to others as well.

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There is another way, another path, another reality to step into when I pay attention to my small, mundane choices. Every decision creates an entirely new world. The tiniest act is powerful.

I watch a lot of HGTV and I have a clear sense that we are constructing the place we live within at this time in history. Our home is in our thoughts. And every time I rip out old inefficient wiring and have a more functioning pattern of thinking installed, I congratulate myself. And every time I rip out old inefficient wiring and have a more functioning pattern of thinking installed, I congratulate myself. And every time I rip out old inefficient wiring and have a more functioning pattern of thinking installed, I congratulate myself.

Keeping promises to my body, my health, my garden, my friends, my family makes me stronger and more trusting. I am not imprisoned by my own interior troll voice cackling gothic noises in the background.

Virtual signalling tells me, “Woman, you got this!”

It makes me stronger.