DatingGod

High-Quality Delusions

Had a huge realization the other day. Like watching as an entire wing of the mansion light up. 

I don't recall the first thought, or memory, only cluing in as I saw the first job I had in HR, working for a huge clothing corporation in NYC. Then I saw a series of old boyfriends' faces flash. And a picture of my job in Hiveworld.

And then I got it.

BAM. 

First wave of seeing: Instead of accepting, being where I was, I projected forward into a realm of fantasy so fantastic that I didn't want to be anywhere else. It didn't matter that what was occurring NOW was so often pretty awful - be it a friend who lied to me, a job that sucked the life out of me, a mate who took enjoyment from causing me pain - what I focused on was how it COULD BE, if only I tried hard enough, if only the other person realized what they were doing and chose to do the right thing.

Second wave: It was a survival strategy from my childhood, with one parent abusive, an addict, mentally ill, the other distant, unreachable, checked out, manipulative. I disappeared into books, then tv and movies, until finally they were much more real than reality. I took my cues on how to dress, how to behave, what to expect from people, situations, life, from them - a rather insane mix of Man's Search For Meaning  and Desperately Seeking Susan. 

Third wave: It'd be easy to judge it all -as a time suck, or a huge swath of my living under deep delusion - but the truth of it is that it was a fun way to live most of the time. It's all delusion anyway, and what I did was just make it Brighter and Louder and More Dramatic and WOW. Instead of becoming a depressed shut-in, someone who closed into themselves in a dull retreat, I bought a convertible and rode around in it with my shirt off and a sparkly bra on, thinking about how I was going to save the world with lovelovelove and hoochiecoochie dancing. Yeah, there was a lot of Down to follow the Up. But, hands down, it was a heck of a ride . . .

Sure, part of it was youth, and a part of this realization is simply growing older. But mostly it's about how I see things as they are now. (Even as I struggle with what to do with that knowing, how to live out my life with folks who can't see.) And also how I don't hope for More so much as deeper and deeper layers of knowing that All Is Well. 

The fantasies, the hope, still runs. But it's not about some sort of Living Large life anymore. It's so stylized, so primal and elemental it's like what a kindergartner imagines: living on a farm with a hundred animals that all live in head-bitey harmony and we dance under the full moon; traveling to other planets to meet the aliens who seeded our world; eating pie every day, all day and being fit and healthy. Simple yet weird stuff that flashes through my mind and then is gone. 

I really do think hope is the killer. Much worse than it's cousin, fear. At least with fear, you know something bad and unphun is going down. With hope, you can float in a grape-flavored disco bubble for decades before you realize you've been scammed.

So yeah. F*ck hope. What's happening right now, and what do you know to be true?

Patterns of No, Wrought In (Faux) Chains

I'm not ready to post the post I need to post, and so I went back to the posts I wrote, or partially wrote, and then never pressed publish on.

These drafts - and there are hundreds of them - some only a paragraph or two, some quite long. And they're all unfinished in one way or another, or sometimes just spew. But for the past year or so, they're usually about something I want to write about, need to write about, and used to simply just write about, but for the reasons explained in the previous post, don't see the light of Internet.

The one that follows is a partial. I'll let you read it, then talk to you on the other side. Here goes:

***

October, 2010

So, the past month has been about one pattern. Just one very specific pattern. A pattern of suffering in my living for the entirety of my life. Even past lives, if you believe in that sort of thing.

It's a pattern that's had me cast in the role of victim, with the other person playing the role of abuser. And wording it like that, it'd be easy to blame the other person for being an ass*hole, a jerk, a rapist, someone who stole my energy, money, lifeforce, time, good will. Someone who yelled at me, or drew blood, or created bruises. Someone who told me over and over I was a wackjob, a loser, a bad friend, a bad girlfriend, a bad familial linkup, not to mention ungrateful, flaky, willfully inattentive to their needs, and just plain not good enough.

But in every single instance, I chose it, chose them, chose to stay when I could have stood up, said finito, and walked off into the sunset or rain or fog or whatever the heck weather was passing by. 

The past few years have been about all sorts of Deep Sh*t, all of it around waking up to what's really going on, and what's not. And to see, really see, how I've chosen this role for myself has been mindboggling. Of course the trick has been to see how I'm responsible for my reaction, but how I'm in no way, whatsoever, not even a tiny little bit, responsible for the actions of the person maligning, attacking, or saying repeatedly in a hundred thousand million ways that essentially I'm a waste of air, skin, and other spacial molecules.

What sort of person sticks around when the person they're with says and does these sorts of things? Intellectually, we all know that hanging out with mean people is a drag. But even smart people stick around with folks who like to use knives, both real and metaphorical. But why?

Because we think we don't have a choice. Because we believe it's normal. Because we don't know another way. Because at some point in our development of ego/self, we bought into the interpretation. Because it's just another set of false beliefs in the bag of tricks known as personality.

And because it seems so real. It's as if we're just standing here, trying to live a good life, when yet again, some ass*hole comes in and harshes our mellow in a most unphun way. 

Damn you, we shake our fist at god.

F*ck you, we say at the monster in front of us.

But then I began to wake up.

And I looked down at the iron manacles around my ankles, the ones connected to the iron chains bolting me into a dank cell, far underground, just a small shaft of light coming in from high above. Until I looked at the manacles, looked and Looked and LOOKED, and realized: that sh*t is loose, and if I stop eating so much bullsh*t, I won't be so puffy, and if I'm not puffy, these weights are gonna slide right off me. And I'll be free. 

I'll be free.

And it seems so simple to put it like that. We can smile and laugh at how silly and cliche the metaphor is, the image of someone sitting in a cell for decades on end, heiney parts all cold for no good reason whatsoever. But that image is us. That image is me. That image is you. 

A month ago, the Hilarious Coworker left Hiveworld for a new job elsewhere, and a few days later, a new coworker was assigned to come over from Cubicleland to help me run our program. For obvious reasons, I can't go into details, but the important part isn't who she was or what she did, but how she fit into this very specific, very detailed role of abuser.

They're always the same personality type, and the same unfolding of circumstances: They come off as incredible nice, very charismatic, do small, thoughtful actions, or give small gifts. They tell me I'm amazing, and tell me so often. Based on this, as they have things come up they need, they present these needs to me as issues they're dealing with. And I offer to help. Or sometimes they're in some sort of crisis, and say they desperately need my expertise.

It's usually at this juncture that I lose time, when I submerge into some weird sort of autopilot. They become such a constant flow of intense work, so quickly, that I don't notice what's happening.

Then the next part: It starts as small judgments: I didn't do an action right, my choice of words was poor, I was slow getting something done, I looked bizarre or unattractive doing it. Then it ramps up, to outright insults, hardcore judgments, patronizing looks, things said to other folks with rolling eyes or a sneer.

By the time I realize I'm cringing every time I deal with them, the roles have been set: I'm working as hard as I can, but nothing I ever do is good enough, and the person in front of me expresses continual contempt, ridicule. The understanding is that the effort I'm putting in is so shoddy it's pointless, so they don't owe me anything, especially not thanks, because in fact I should be thanking them because having to be around me and my ridiculousness, my inadequacy, having to put up with how disappointing my efforts and in fact my mere presence, is a deficit.

But what's really happening is that the other person has me doing things for them, a continuous stream of energy draining out of me, filling them up. Until I'm empty, and they toss me away, and there I lay, poor sad me, all sad and empty and drained of lifeforce. Until I slowly stand, build my energy back up, until I'm strong and vibrant, and the next wave of feeding begins.

To my credit, I don't hang out with people who outright (metaphorically or physically) punch me anymore, and the time frame and level of interaction has moved from a two year relationship with a man I cohabitated with, to a one month back and forth with a coworker. 

***

... and that's where it stops. And why I wanted to publish it today. It's such a great signpost for level of distance travelled. Just eight months ago, I was still in a place where someone could pull me into that level of drama.

The coworker I wrote about actually quit the job a few weeks later, of course stating to my bosses that it was because of me, but it was so clear she was a bundtcake with blame and hysteria frosting, I just shrugged. And my bosses didn't much care about anything either way other than the excellent numbers my program came in at, so it all slid away with very little fanfare.

The coworker to replace her came in with another level of blame and hysteria, but this time, I literally just kept walking away. She'd cry, I'd walk away. She'd blame, I'd walk away. She'd go into Poor Me, tell her sad, sad story, I'd walk away. She'd come in with anger at my lack of grandmother compassion, and I'd walk away.

By the time I left in April, she didn't like me very much, but I was decent to her, respectful, and she knew where my "walk away" line was. I watched her pattern of needing to turn people inside out, to get them to give her time, money, problem solving, and saw clearly that it had nothing to do with me. I wished her well, and opted out, over and over and over.

And I got strong.

At my new job, it's at a level that can really only be seen internally. The folks it runs with probably only feel a weird sort of frisson, something that causes them to want to back away, but they don't know why. And as I master the last shards of this pattern, I watch as folks smile and are drawn to me, then pull away when the level of muscle tone I still haven't built yet causes me to drop it.

This is yet another reason I love this blog, love this tool of spiritual practice I keep: it shows the passage of time with an issue, shows the lack of mastery, then partial mastery, then full mastery of the tearing down of an emotional wall, a place in the living where a person stops. Translate this also as pain, then no pain. Or frustration and anguish, then nothing but a shrug and a smile. Or prison, then freedom.

I love this blog. I love this place I come to write. I love that you come to read. 

Yes.

Elucidation

I woke up this morning with another one of those messages.

What the heck else do I call them? It's like having a line from a technical manual read out loud. Utterly emotionless, without any sort of judgment or inflection. Just a statement of fact. Said once. Fini. And then I lay there, watching as my brain fills in the details of how it applies to my living, this thing I'm doing called Untangling, or Waking Up, or growing up, or Whatever.

This morning's was: It's Not More Story, It's Less.

It's not about adding anything in - a new technique or endeavor or plan or frame. It's about letting go of the different storylines of Katherine, thread by thread.

And I saw that "enlightenment" is about no more personal story, as in the person isn't seeking to create a specific storyline that they think is "good". It isn't about creating more, but about opting out, over and over, to the aspects of the story of world that are about more exciting, more colorful, more amazing dreams.

And even with this letting go of self-generated story, it's about surrender to whatever the storyline is that Life has for the living. To see Life's storyline, the personal, will-asserted storyline has to be released. Two competing plot generators is simply confusing and dividing.

The tricky segment of this surrender? Moving from the wanting that self generates, to the wanting triggered by the radiating from Life. The difference: one is a grasping toward, the other is a delighted, willing following of sign posts.

Yet there is creating story and telling story. And it's the telling that has always served my Untangling.

Which leads me to what to do with this blog. This blog here that turned eight-years old in April. 

In no particular order, the issues are:

• folks I work with, as smart and sensitive and evolved as they are, seriously don't have a context for what the shamanic life is about, or what psychic ability means, or how deep transparency is simply the next wave of human evolution. i've genuinely stopped posting details based on this alone.  it isn't about fear. it's about recognizing what another being can and can't take in based on how awake they are. and acknowledging that i love my job, the work i'm allowed to do there, in the environment that these lovely folks have created and sustain on a daily basis. this isn't opinion but statement of a recognized fact: appearances count, and to hang with a certain tribe means you have to dress in a way they can accept, physically, mentally, and emotionally. i toe the line on all fronts. but the blog, and even my twitter account crosses the line. 
• i hardly read anyone else's blog anymore, so it's more of a monologue than a conversation, which doesn't lend itself to the whole bloggy spirit. i apologize - something in me just turned off - like a switch - for all but a few blogger's stories. 
• i still have a hard time with the haters and semi-haters and advice-givers and general groove-harshers that like to enter a blog home, lounge on the sofa, partake of the snacks, and then poop on the rug. it isn't just me. every single blogger i know has to deal with this, and the ones that write/talk about it don't like it or enjoy it any more than i do. it is a very present, very sucky aspect of blogging. much like having a conversation with a friend in a restaurant and the person at the next table gets up and comes over and sits down and takes over the conversation with complaints about their many health problems and how you really are such a p*ssy and a loser and your fear of the dark is so pathetic, and then they laugh in sheer enjoyment, hahahahaha! seriously, it takes a tremendous amount of energy not to lean over and poke them with your fork. you know it is. and then you realize all restaurants are filled with these folks, and you wonder if you should just stay home, stop eating out, and yet you miss out on amazing meals cooked by other folks, and the ambience of favorite places to go, and the energy that's created when you go out with friends you know and love.
• blogs as they were - these amazing, intimate dwellings in the wilderness of the internet, a place where folks could come and hang out, love and be loved - is pretty much done. there are lots of possibilities for the next wave - letter.ly, less personal posting - but none of them feel right. 
• who the heck even reads this anymore? i know there are somewhere between 10-50 people. i think. since i backed away from responding to most comments and emails a couple of years ago, and the blog content got so intense, less phun, it appears that most folks wandered off. but then i'll hear from folks i haven't heard from in a while and realize i have no idea who still comes here. (except for you hardcore dozen or so who still regularly comment or send emails)

The real issue though, in this living called Katherine, is of course why I'd want to keep writing, what purpose it serves in my living, this Untangling.

I'm very clear I don't owe anyone anything. That used to be a huge deal. It isn't anymore.

My heart still cracks open in Yes when I read an email or comment from someone and they share a connection they felt reading a post, or how a post triggered something, a light or a signpost, for them. The feeling I have that the blog serves a kind of "breadcrumb" purpose for a few folks is validated.

And yet there isn't a doubt in my mind that if this blog receives no more input - from myself or from others - Life will simply redirect us to wherever else we need.

So why write? And how to create a new environment that the writing can thrive inside of?

The former is the same thing it's always been: this is a main channel that Life uses as a guru-process for the Untangling inside of me. If I show up, and write, with the lights on in heart and mind and body, something Not Me falls away, and the process of this living is made more clear, less tangled.

I haven't figured the latter out yet. Or rather it hasn't revealed itself. And it's like a splinter in my mind. Energy is building, but no direction yet in where to direct it.

And so I do this sort of posting, feeling uneasy about it all, even with it's infrequency and lack of detail. 

So, if you feel moved to, leave any insights or feedback you have to all this in the comments section . . . maybe you have a tool I can use to help navigate this new landscape . . . and this is also helpful if you're someone who reaches out infrequently so I know you're still around and want to be included if I do some sort of disappearing act to another place or format . . .)

The Sweetness

Day 1 of a cleanse. Yet another cleanse. The latest in a long line of hundreds of them, stretching back over 25 years.

The first impulse was to deem them all "failed", but they all served a purpose. I dumped some of the toxic load in the body, heart, mind. Lost some weight. Gained a fresh perspective of food and eating and the emotional ties I have to them.

Yet none of them ever were part of a big breakthrough, a big enough breakthrough to hold and not go back to the patterns of dis-ease, the dark ignorance that lies between desiring a refined carb and putting it into my body. The Big Breakthrough where the light goes on and stays that way.

It seems like such a simple thing, and it is. But it isn't easy.

Just don't eat refined carbs.

But for 40 years now, I can only do that for small amounts of time.

I'm facing something at my current job that I faced in my holistic work: I can't go further, can't really do the work I was meant to do at the level I'm capable of if I don't break through this wall of illness, dis-ease, discomfort, fogginess, emotionality, addiction. 

By most anybody's ruler, I'm doing good work, sometimes even excellent work. But I know this body-mind-spirit is capable of so much more, like seeing a door cracked, brilliant light pouring through. Would you be able to resist the urge to open the door, let the light fill the whole room?

And so: cleanse.

Yoga. Green smoothies. Green vegetables. Raw eggs. Herbs and supplements to assist - olive leaf and triphala, ground chia seeds and probiotics, green powder and digestive enzymes. This is the plan for this cleanse.

Will it work?

Even now, as I sit here typing this, it occurs to me that what I most want to do is go into town to try out that locally famous diner that serves amazing omeletes and home fries and coffee. Yes, that would feel good.

And it would. For a while. Til night time came and the desire for more hard core Up kicked in, and I moved on to key lime pie and gluten free pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms. And then wake up the next morning with heaviness in body and mind, a swollen face like I did this morning.

Food is my great comforter. My favorite thing to do is what I did last night: eat pizza and pie, snuggled in on the couch with the kitties, watching SG1 episodes, the sound of life in the country - trees and wind and small scurrying  and flying beings settling in for the night too. My whole body and being relaxes. Kitties prrp. Daniel Jackson discovers the stories of The Ancients. Dinner is delicious.

But then, as I go off to bed, belly swollen and back aching, I get that this is just another favorite thing that comforts me that is rapidly reaching the critical point of having to be jettisoned. If I could just do this one night a week, maybe it would be okay. But I don't seem to have the desire, the will. 

All I want is to hang with my fuzzy guys and snack, watch stories. Just drift.

During the day I do work that brings change into the lives of other people. I always have. I make big changes in my own living. I always have done this too.

Just in the past few years I went from being a feng shui consultant to academia, then to the state and social work while simultaneously working as a shamanic healer, now as a health care reform chronic disease research fellow. Since 2005 I moved from Chester, NY to Kent, OH to Pulaski, VA to Albany, NY to Troy, NY to Wilmington, NC to Chapel Hill, NC.

I'm as afraid of change as anybody. But I'm more afraid of stagnation, inertia, settling, giving up on having an adult life that is enjoyable to live inside of. 

I'm grateful for the family I was born into, the life I've lived. So grateful for how strongly forged I am from living in such close proximity to roaring fires. And I've spent my entire life working so hard to shed the darker parts of my familial birthright: shards that reflect physical and emotional abuse, drug addiction and mental illness, ignorance and unwillingness, violence against self and others, a distaste, disdain for work and love and honesty and forgiveness and spirituality.

It's as if I looked around inside of me, my head, heart, body, life, and saw what wasn't Yes, what I could feel wasn't me, and I spent four decades aligning myself with people who could help me jettison those shards. But then I reached a place where the only person who could go on was me. The teachers and fellow students grew smaller and smaller in the distance. The solo journey began.

It all sounds so self-absorbed, so egotistical. And it is. This ego inside of me has grown monstrous. 

But I don't know how a person could survive what I've been through without having such a huge, mirrored ego. Maybe it is monstrous and should die. But I feel grateful to it. From the perspective of inside looking out, it has a certain billion-faceted radiance, like an emotional prism. And it's carried me to the place I now stand.  

Maybe other places have been more still and quiet, more fun, more "spiritual", more happy, but this life I now inhabit is more self-sufficient, more honest than any other. It's fierceness, it's utter coldness in divvying the landscapes - both inner and outer - into Me/Yes and Not Me/No has given me the gift of living with a lot less Untrue than probably 99% of the population. The sheer bullsh*t quotient is now so low in this living it's like an extended bass note of Yes as backdrop to everything.

Which is maybe why the ego now shows up in all its vibrant monstrous glory. The very vessel that brought me here, is now the vessel I have to move on from. Maybe ego is a boat and from here on out it isn't a journey by sea. Maybe I can break it down and use its components to build a nice house in this pretty land whose shores I now walk on. 

Or maybe it's bonfire time...

And so this all brings me back to the cleanse. It's really so very basic, so very bottom line: if I don't empty out, there won't be the room, the energy to do the next part of this journey.

It's so simple. So straightforward. 

Yoga and 5 Tibetans and Tabata to gently, fiercely break open the physical and energetic bodies from scar tissue and rust.

Clean, pure, vibrant, simple fuel to nourish the tiny organic machines and systems that power this living called Katherine.

Simple. But not easy.

Unless it's time. When it's time, the path clears.

Is it time? 

I stand trembling at the gate. Scared, alone, but here. Scared, but standing at the gate.

Survival Tips For Life in The Land of The Blind

I don't want to write, then I do, then I don't again. I wonder if writing ability rusts from lack of use.

The things going on don't feel important enough to write about, or important only to me, or important in a way that still doesn't have focus, stability. I'm not sure if what's going on makes sense, not sure if it's Waking Up or mental illness, not sure if the actions I'm taking will lead to healing or just more endless loops.

And I'm more reluctant to write because I know folks at work are reading - either the blog or the twitter feed which links to the blog. They don't know that I know but I do because of the fear and anger they slide between when they see me. Supposedly I'm a psychic, which is scary to them because they think it means I can read their minds, and then they get angry because I can go f*ck myself because they have nothing to hide from a wackjob like me.

They don't understand I'm not interested in the contents of their mind. They don't understand that human minds, mine included, are roiling pits full of fear and judgment and rage and pettiness and pointlessness. Looking into the minds of kitties is pretty fun actually but humans, not so much. 

I got bored with it all sometime around last year. Unless someone was paying me or asking me or something in me pushed to give the info, all I did anymore became a cursory scan to see: yep, naked roiling pit, or roiling pit covered with a joyful Happy Happy tarp, or roiling pit buried under several feet of geometrically superior architecture, or  . . . yeah. It's still like this, but the scans are even more surface and quick.

Why don't I use my psychic abilities for something amazing? Why don't I use them to win the lottery?

I have a friend who works for the F*BI, who asked me to help him solve a case. It was one of the most horrible experiences of my life, looking into that metallic razored shredding violence, and then not being able to give anything helpful to my friend to save someone's life, other than this person had cancer and the particular emotions and random past experiences of that member of the gang and what the neighborhood boy who was helping them was mentally experiencing. What was the point of any of it?

And I have won the lottery. Well, $100 bucks. I was walking past a convenience store and felt the energy of Now, This that kicks in when it's giving me A Download of informational truth. I walked into the store, it pointed me to one of those scratch offs, which I purchased, and found I'd won $100. I've never been able to duplicate the experience, which makes sense because I didn't create it in the first place, only followed up a directive with an action.

So it's a passive kind of skill, this psychic ability that lives inside of me. It can be pointed at things, people, situations, but it seems I have no choice in what gets seen. When clients are paying me to look, I can look at basic streams of a living - the relationships around them, the work situations, the health of the various bodily systems, organs. The probability of where these streams will end up shows up clearly, but it doesn't mean it's where they will end up.

And usually it's not what folks want to hear. That's been one of the most shocking and hardest truths to face: folks don't want the truth - they want to hear nice stories about themselves. Ironic, yes. 

And so I work as a health researcher now. The money is good, the company I work for is outrageously kind and adult and respected and cutting edge. I had a two-month review last week and got "outstandings" which was nice to hear. But the job I do uses so little of me. It's like Einstein working as a cake baker. Maybe the cakes made are really yummy, but not a whole lot of deep mining occurring.

(Did I just compare myself with Einstein? I did! How can you not feel kinship with a person who envisioned quantum foam???)

But the truth is that I'm still settling in to these huge life changes. I'm having to relearn the language of science, and the folks I work for and the job to do: absolutely perfect. And the folks I work with - how could they not sense that I'm a freak? Not like the others? A threat? I'm the actor on the stage with the smirk on their face, messing with their Actor's Motivation Mojo, and we're in the middle of Act Two, with a full house.

They're fine. It's me that's the problem in this scenario. I need to just keep my mouth shut other than to say my lines. I work very hard to do just that but I'm not pulling it off very well, and the audience just thinks I'm a sh*tty actor.

I feel so apologetic these days. Seriously apologetic, walking around feeling so badly that I can't play with others any more. They take it so personally. They don't understand that I want to, but I can't. I don't know why. It just is this way. My eyes are open, and they won't close. 

Or maybe I'm just a butthead with delusions of depth. Could go either way, don't you think?

I don't know what any of it means, or even if any of it is true, or if just another looping time-eating path. I don't know if I'm healing or just playing a healer on tv. I purposefully choose to live in an apartment outside of town, away from most folks, chose a cubicle tucked into a corner away from everyone, and yet then I'm left with only the sound of my own roiling mind to keep me company. 

Okay, there's kitties here too, and the occasional human to have a laugh with, so it's okay to put away your tiny violins . . .

I've been this way my whole life. Interspersed with soaring leaps of fascinating side trails and bursts of amazing color. But always back to this. Sitting away from others, failing to integrate my freakness into the general population. Always with someone who is willing to pay me for some work, a place to live, access to goodness, warmth, food, kitties.

I'm so grateful for my life. In this moment, I could just weep with how fortunate I am, how grateful I am to be alive and in a living so filled with goodness. 

Is this it? Is this all there is?

I can admire the folks on the stage who still want to put on the big productions - the Cirque du Soleils and Death of a Salesmens. But I know that no matter how amazing, difficult, expensive, fantastic the show, it's still something that will end when the lights go out. And off stage, behind the theater, off in the distance, the dark, something thrums, something vast, something still, something . . . 

Logic says that all a person has to do is walk away, just leave everything behind, kitties, job, everything. Go live the life of a hobo, a nomad, a traveler. But I know this is a trap too.

In my heart I know that the stillness has to happen in the mind, in the actions taken out of the web of beliefs, picking them apart, letting them fall to the floor. 

Yet how is this different than any other person who drops out of Life?

How am I different than the woman who lived downstairs from me - with her disability checks and diet related health issues and medications and cigarettes and crap food and isolation and incessant tv watching and anger and neediness? Am I different, better because I claim to be psychic, Waking Up, have an eight-year old blog and a master's degree, am a member of a CSA and shop at Trader Joe's?  

You are now experiencing the confusion, the weirdness, the judgment going inside of me. The back and forth. The judgment and release. The expansion and contraction.

Is it Waking Up? Is it mental illness?

All I know is to keep following the the strongest push of Yes, the direction Life makes larger and more bright.

My car broke down on Thursday night and after three hours of calls on Friday morning I was still unable to find a mechanic or a rental car. And so I let go and find that without a car I can't escape to prepared foods, yoga, errands. And so I sit, and then am moved to write.

Maybe more distraction. Maybe drilling down. 

All I know is that something connected inside of me that wasn't connected when I began writing an hour ago. 

That pointless smiling Yes is gently pulsing inside of me now. 

But mostly I see how beautiful the kitties are. Yes they are.

The rest of it? Who knows?