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.

What is happening when nothing is happening?

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As the sun translates itself into golden leaves and the sky shifts to a watercolor mix of grey and blue, the sense of waiting for clarity, the prescience is heavy all around. The world is holding its breath.

There is no “thing” to cling to today for me. For over a year, I have been floating on a raft sometimes carried by the current and other times just caught in the protruding tangle of tree roots. At these times, I become an immobile witness to the flow of time and events in the outside world.

Never before in 78 years of life have I been so detached from what is considered the 3 D normal world so completely. Sometimes I feel as if I have been attacked, bound, and thrown in a white van to be taken to a rehab temple high up in the mountains.

When my hip first failed, I had some difficulty walking but as the year went by the grinding of bone on bone in my hip joint ramped up the attack of pain, and the impossibility of trying to live what was my “normal” life stopped me in my tracks. I had been forced into complete submission.

My work addiction has been stripped from my mind violently. There is no joy in pushing myself to achieve a task. It sends me into three or four days of recovery and reclining on my pillows like some aged Cleopatra carried on a barge unmanned by hope.

I visualize deep black space and I as an astronaut float tethered to a source of oxygen. I have no references left, no gravity, no routine, no date on the horizon for when my spiritual plastic surgery will end and the actual hip surgery will begin.

No one could tell me what would happen next. The phone calls I made went to an answering machine that had a series of polite words that translated into “FUCK OFF.”

“We will call you if we have information.”

And so the patterns of the last few decades came to a halt. I dare not risk social contact because someone somewhere might be rubbing the lamp of my deepest wishes and a surgery date would magically appear. I had to be COVID free, totally well.

Since 2020 I isolated from COVID. Then on September 20, 2021, I isolated more vigilantly. When my ship-hip came in, I would be allowed to board and be carried to a magic land without constant pain, loneliness and the companion of exhaustion from nothing at all.

I felt much better when I researched the effect on the brain of chronic pain. I laughed out loud when I read the medical definition of “chronic ” as being three months. I was not weak, crazy, or incompetent on purpose. I was not a lesser being. It was normal to feel as I was feeling.

This green beret, marine, navy seal training in spiritual submission has been extended for 409 days thus far. And so I can forgive myself for bouts of depression and weeping. I can forgive myself for asking the question, “Is it worth it, this life?’

The time that I have found myself the most triggered and emotional is when someone sends me a message, “You are strong.”

My mind resents the implication that somehow because I have endured childhood abuse, cancer, Rheumatoid Arthritus, raising two small children alone that I have somehow shallower emotional roots. Things don’t hurt you as much as they do other people… seems to be the message. But I know this is just my ego trying to get me into a mind lock.

To see someone dressing up in their victim clothes and dancing at a martyr party curdles my blood. My ancestors were staunch, unflinching, and capable of enduring beyond what was considered the normal limits.  I know I can get through this long period of solitude and pain. But the thing that most fills me with grief is the question, “why?”

And so there were two periods of time when all I could do was weep. It was like a storm at sea carrying me wave after wave, out of control. There was no date on the horizon offering me optimism that it would end. There was no comfort in watching the health care system with the valiant nurses and doctors desperately trying to help people and not succeeding so many times.

The grief was like a bleeding. The pressure had built up and it just had to leave my body. I resigned myself to being human. I resigned myself to the feeling of being abandoned. I resigned myself to enduring pain with every movement.

It was what Joseph Campbell calls a heroes journey. It is a twisting dark path that suddenly appears. All who are alive on earth have traveled it at one time or another. “When will this end?” we ask. It is part of the human contract we sign when we choose to be born.

It is as if the very cessation of this one particular challenge will take me to the land of pixies and fairies. There will be unicorns being fed rainbow popsicles by flower sprites. At the end of this stage of my life, all the roses will have butterflies and dragonflies lighting on them. This is what I tell myself.

I have had to travel into the deepest tangled wood of submission and understand that my brain chemistry was changed. Pain and stark solitude have a cost. It changes us.

At the end of the journey, we can only hope it has taught us compassion. We now understand intimately that just to stay alive in a challenging situation is courage.  Those walking past my picture window are in the process of learning a lesson. Each of them is meeting challenges, making brave choices. It is why we need to love one another, no matter what.

Every struggle is a chance to grow, to learn, to be kinder. The lessons are why we were born.

 

Sannyasa: The Fourth Chapter of Life

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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

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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.

 

Transitions Are Constant

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In Western culture we are not taught to see transitions. Or if we do see them we are taught to fear them. Our fragility spiritually is magnificent and stunning. It keeps us adolescent, dependent and irresponsible.

One way we are shown our error in judgement is our agape, stunned surprise when the world does not roll down the bowling alley lane like an expertly thrown ball. Control, we are told, will stave off disaster. We still have not made peace with mortality and it makes us half blind.

Control will protect us

As I watch thousands of homes swept away by the clearly, repeatedly, scientifically predicted vulnerability of coast lines, I see how the Western mind seeks shelter. “If we only had better tornado insurance, or earthquake insurance, this loss would not be happening.”

A gigantic yacht tied to a now shattered pier is reported to have been swept inland. It destroyed small nestled homes.The destruction is impressive on so many levels. As those who have lived in cabins for decades and have learned how to endure the predictable chaos of clinging to a shore line have their homes erased, I picture the reaction to a violent intersection of these two worlds.

If only there were insurance for the damage that climate catastrophe is expending on the earth, then all would be well. ‘Somebody’ is supposed to protect us from our own bad decisions.

But the contemporary world is taking the protecting wrapping away from those who believe that there is a way out of mortality. COVID showed up and no matter how expertly the political leaders spun the narrative, we all began to see that if one is vulnerable then all are vulnerable.

Fragile people

I liken it to Voodoo… it is that primitive. We will make a chalk line around ourselves, our families, our cities, our race, our social purchase place and then we are not vulnerable to the vicissitudes of morality.

I remember watching a special about a rural Canadian community that offered no jobs for those who were growing up in the village. They developed a tradition of buying a lovely new suitcase for the high school graduate (usually male) and put the person along the road to flag down the Greyhound bus. It was time to grow up. This was the initiation ceremony.

The show impressed upon me the idea of a group of people realizing that they could not deny conditions. The protected child now had to take responsibility for the future.

In some ways, I think we are like that now. We can dither and cluck around like frightened poultry. Or we can decide it is time to make the difficult choices.

A person interviewing others who have gone through war, famine, plagues, the depression, a carpet bombing of their town or village always comes away understanding that the human condition is not one of weakness. The goal is not to extend adolescence past the 40’s or 50’s. And inevitably a sense of altruism grows in these conditions. What happens to one, happens to all.

And perhaps it is the time for learning from those who trust the universe enough to find the strength to endure the inevitable “slings and arrows.” Perhaps it is time to realize that each individual person is strong and capable of growing up enough to take responsibility for his or her own decisions. Perhaps it is the time to realize that we can change the way we live with one another so we understand how fragile we all are. We need one another in order to survive. What happens to one, can happen to all. It is called mortality.

We are one

 

 

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

 

 

Reconnecting with My Past Identity

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I awoke at 4 am with a hard sore spot behind my ear. Since my eyes are not on two fleshy protuberances, I cannot swing them around to see what it is. I suspect I have just experienced my fourth spider bite this year. The poisonous brown recluse was apparently able to shed its shyness long enough to crawl down my shirt and leave its acid flesh-eating gift on my back. I immediately called the doctor and began antibiotics and antibiotic creams. The brown crater of dead flesh is a permanent testimonial to the beast’s intention. Next, within weeks, I attracted a black window bite and took precautions quickly.

I used to be on fire

This last one surprises me. There is some form of Jack London survival short story about how a spider found me at night, crawled into my hair, and settle on a place behind my ear to attack.

I thought about why these events all happened in a few weeks and then just let it go. I am, after all, a mere mortal. I cannot know the intent of the Spider Gods.

I am preparing for surgery #2 and #3 as I limp around the house using my time travel mind to imagine what I will need next to me in the future.

Oh, I think. I forgot to select the poems for the October poetry reading online. I interrupt my slow hobble around the house and sift through the piles of poems I have printed up. Too many computers have died taking years of creations with them for me to any longer trust them. But the paper is reassuring.

As I sift through the poems I am surprised.

“These are good,” I think.

I had forgotten myself in the small, quiet life since 2021. I had forgotten that words of intimate intensity would flow through me into my writing. I had forgotten standing on a stage performing my poems and having people say, “You frightened me. I was shaking. I cried.”

Intensity of beauty

So I am curious as to the layers of the self. This Victorian housekeeper with weak eyes pulling aside a curtain to observe others on the street is not the same presence as the Tank Girl Punk poet, is she?

Or is the mistake I have made about myself that the chaotic passion of my words and the days of reclusive, shy silence are both aspects of “the self”?

Even holding those poems in my hands and reading them reminds me that there is the fire inside me. It feels good. I have not felt its heat for 1,723 days, but who is counting?

fearless expression

I move past the spider bites, the year of stabbing hip pain, and the deep isolation into the next transfiguration of my identity. It is complex, multilayered and dynamic.

Let It Rip!

September is Gently Leading

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September has an agenda. It begins to shut us down. Because it is cooler, we close the doors and windows. We begin the transition. I found the summer’s relentless pounding heat unpleasant. If I had wanted to live in Death Valley, Algeria or Iraq, I would have purchased a ticket and packed my body armour sunscreen.

We were protected this year from the toxic air lung destruction of past years. The fires were mostly far away. Because only other people suffered, I did not have to think of it. The flooding of past years that washed away the highway and isolated communities was not part of our story this year. Because only other people suffered, I did not have to think of it.

And then at the end, as if to remind us not to celebrate too soon the toxic air floated in for a week to obscure the hills, obstruct the breathing and send us indoor with windows firmly closed.

It fascinates me how my defacto setting is “separation.” Not me is the first message on my assessment dial. I observe myself following the stone path laid out for me by my culture. The lines, the boundaries, the subsets of reality so carefully drawn that rule my thoughts.

September is not summer. It is more contemplative, reclusive, and harder to know. Is it predictive, is it compliant with some nature Gods that rule the universe?

We just sit back and observe it. It is like driving on a highway and going up into the hills. Will there be fog, ice, and danger around the corner?

The volunteer pumpkin lantern plants were profuse this year. The blackberries baked on the bushes. The grapes began well but were eaten by the animals living under my shed. Everywhere around me I see that there is no probable outcome. It is a game of chance this living on the earth.

I watch September’s days expecting some form of climate insanity to manifest. I do this to protect myself. I want to be ready for whatever happens next that I can’t possibly know. That pattern of logic is the very definition of instability.

 

Where are you taking us September? What next?

Learning to Let it Go

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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

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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