Obviously not writing much. Except for work. And that is a different kind of writing. Eviden*ce-based incent*ives and benef*its for the research project I work on. How to incentivize folks to take better care of their health. Dozens of documents, reports, briefs, summary reports, literature matrices, graphics depicting full-color attempts made to render pictures out of a sea of eggheady verbiage. For this fellowship whose contract ends at the end of this month.
Where will I go after that? I don't know.
I do soul retrievals and psychic sessions on the weekend. I spend the week feeling like a flow wedged into a narrow tube, the flow getting all hectic and chaotic from trying to shove itself through such a small aperture. Then the weekends overflowing with cracking through what built up during the week, and submerging down into sessions with folks, feeling like Yes again.
I spend a lot of time out on the small back porch, watching the trees. I spend a lot of time on the front lawn, watching the night sky. I drink a lot of wine. Burn plants. Look for the throughline with it all. What the truth is.
Patience is growing deep roots inside of me, as I surrender to what I can put into motion, what I can't or won't force to happen, what Life has in store for me next but hasn't revealed yet.
I send out resumes when it's true. I submit a proposal to a local, well-established holistic center for an Integral Shamanics Training. I hear nothing from the public health stuff. I get a go on the shamanic training. And so that's what direction I head in. Even as I wait to hear from the state public health job, which I interviewed for over two months ago, but because of the slow creaky machine of the state, I may or may not have gotten.
The worst scenario is that I get unemployment until I can find a public health job (I have yet to figure out how to make a living doing holistic work). I have no idea how the best scenario plays out. I try not to go there. To ask for a scenario from Life. I take actions when they feel true. I refrain from action when I get a No or I get no action to take.
I don't feel afraid. Not really. Just in a strange sort of suspension.
I don't like how the current job has curbed my willingness to write here on this blog. How there is something hard and intense and unYes about it. I do the work they give me, do it to the best of my ability. In a workplace full of teams and interaction, my project is solo, and it's been like working inside an echo chamber, only coming up for air for an hour or so every week when I get to update my supervisor on the latest things I've researched and written.
They don't like me there. They want to like me. But they don't. But they can't cop to it. Just radiate their discomfort when I open my mouth. I do my best to keep my mouth closed, to simply do the work. It's helped that I've been "remotely commuting" two or three days a week for the past month. Then I can simply sit at home, with the kitties, and write, do the work, create the widgets, deliver the widgets when I'm back in the cubicle farm. That small, windowless wedge of space in the corner away from everyone else where I can hear them talk, but not to me, and so I refrain from answering, because if I do it's just weird, like dropping into a conversation with the people eating lunch at the next table to you. But mainly sitting in that cube by myself all day, five days a week, just feels like a shriveling kind of death.
I saw Jin again this morning. Surrendered to the brutal needles and muscle manipulation that is Korean Chinese Medicine. Except it wasn't that brutal this time.
"It doesn't hurt as badly this time, Jin. Are you going easy on me?" I asked.
"No!" he laughed. "I never do easy!"
Which means that my exploration into being with pain that I've been dealing with the past few days is working. I'm not so afraid of pain. It's there. I can feel it. But I don't need to run and take acetaminophen or a scalding hot bath with aromatherapy. I can be with it. The pain. I can let it inform me of its message.
I talk on the phone with people, more social interaction than I've done in years. My sister, some friends. But I don't know how to do "friendship" anymore so I end up doing a session of some sort with them, in a conversational way, and it feels both true and weird. Especially if I'm drinking wine.
I'm reading about all sorts of things. Downloading enormous sh*tloads of documents onto my kindle, my smart phone. For some reason, I've become obsessed with predators, how they operate, what they take, what deflects them.
I read about the aliens who use this planet as a feeding ground - what my old spiritual teacher used to call "the entities" - who feed off of human emotion, and have come up with ever inventive ways to stimulate emotion, as high and as low as they instigate. An email from a blogger I follow linked to this a while back.
I read about sociopaths, how they operate, how intuition comes into play long before they make their move. I read about guns and haikido and crisis intervention. An old college friend whose become an FB*I agent who is going through a divorce and has been calling me and chatting turned me onto what agents read and use.
I read about chakras and auras. A kind of refresher course. From a new book out by my old spiritual teacher. An excellent book, and I do some of the exercises I use to do (the book doesn't go into new things, just the things we all learned some ten years ago, but which is very good, distilled Yes.)
But mostly I rip tv shows and movies, learn the new pathways put into motion since the S*OPA crackdown, which in spite of its not passing, shut down most established pir*ate sites for a while. And again I ask: please, all of you media outlets: give us a place where we can watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it and we'll pay you our 30 or 40 or 50 bucks a month. But the choices are so silly that ripping is the only option, even as annoying as its gotten.
And I cut off all of my hair last week. All of it. No trauma. Just a feeling of freedom. From tangles and mess and laborious machinations. And a chance to let the grey grow in. Facing the loss of youth and the oncoming time of crone. Took the action. Feel the Yes.
Near-constant physical pain. Mental and emotional and spiritual pain that comes and goes. No clear throughline. And so I just wait. Do what feels true. Release what doesn't. Hold my death in one hand, Life in the other.
Patience. Just that one word.
Oh yes, and Further.
PS - and new pic posted on site with shorn locks and freaky vibe. Yes, freaky vibe occurring. N'est pas?
