DatingGod

Releasing Into the Interior

The posts here get further and further apart. There are lots of stories occurring over here, but the directive around them is clear: not for the blog.

Some get told to clients, as a way to help them see a bigger picture or to show a concept being explained in motion. Others get shared with loved ones, for whatever reason that arises in the moment. Most don't get expressed into the world, at least not to other people. They stay contained inside this body-mind-heart where they appear to be distilling down into something closer to the truth, which is an impossible statement, but again, as close to the truth as can expressed at this time, in this space, for this reason.

I don't experience the telling of a story as a bad thing, that there's anything inherently wrong with the human desire to tell stories from the unfolding of a life. It's just that it's so clear for me at this time: it's about holding the stories, watching the desire to story tell as a way to somehow capture what's flowing, pin it down, make it stay. Which is impossible. And by its very act kills the germinating seed of Yes.

There's a way to tell stories so they become empowering, for both the speaker and the listener, a way to tell a story that includes the listener in such a deep way that the story being told is actually their own story. This blog used to be that, and maybe still is if someone stumbles here and goes back through the nine years of archives. And maybe it'll be that again, maybe the stories occurring over here will request they be posted, let loose on the internet in this form.

But for now, the writing is pouring into two places: the extensive handouts created for the Integral Shamanics Training Program and a private doc and notebook where the words and concepts and stories don't have to be shaped - just flow out fingers and heart and mind and simply exist without further input, from anyone, anyone, no judgment or editing or backlash. Just flow. 

Because the current underlying awareness is around something I've known about for decades, called different names by different teachers I studied and apprenticed with. Grandfather Albert, a Mi'kmaq shaman, who led a four-day total fast in the forest - not even water - because he said at the end of the fourth day, the bad spirits would see you as dead and release you. Fiona, who showed how to disappear from the entities' sensors by repatterning emotional and mental frequencies. Laura and her many tomes about the aliens. And then the gift from The Vine a month ago, where she showed me for five hours, relentlessly, mercilessly, who we are, why we were built, who built us, why, what it all means, what we have to do to be free. Now Paul writes about it in such a straightforward way, calling it wetiko. And David Carse and Jed, who keep saying: further. 

A few months down the line, I'm going to offer up all of the Integral Shamanics training program handouts for you - some sort of free ebook I want to set loose in the world. For today, here's an exerpt from the handout for the first class in the training program:

Participant introductions: telling our Stories of Yes

Transparency is one of the core principles of Integral Shamanics, along with mastery and tribe.  We live in a culture that celebrates two extremes around this flow of energy: perfecting an opaque image and TMI (too much information). Perfecting an image is about creating a physical, emotional and mental mask that fits with cultural norms and usually allows its wearer access to more resources (money, other people’s time & energy, etc.). TMI is an energetic response some people have to the cultural norm of projecting a perfect image, and is also an attempt to clear the mind-body-heart of the tension that results from the tremendous energy it takes to project and maintain an image. Rigidity and withholding is another attempt to deal with the buildup of tension, as a way to tightly control and hide what lies underneath the mask.

Antidote. One antidote to the extremes of image, withholding and TMI is to simply hold the energy, to not release into talking or showing how either happy (positive charge) or sad (negative charge) you are. To hold energy, simply remain silent, breathe, watch the thoughts but don’t express them, let the world swirl around you, only take action you need to take, either for practicality’s sake or because you feel to move/speak. This is different from  withholding in that it’s conscious holding, so that the barrier of control can be felt, the boundary seen and moved when it feels safe and advantageous on a level behind/beyond world and it’s desire to amass resources.

Holding. In this moment, what energy  (emotional feelings, intense thoughts, physical sensation/pain) can you feel pushing at you, either from outside, or inside? Hold it – whatever it is – without trying to change it – to make it better or less or gone. Be with it. Breathe.  Say Yes and Thank you. Allow the vibration of these words, the feelings and sensations that come with them for you to move through you.

Stories of Yes are also powerful antidotes to the energy drain of keeping an image alive that is not Who You Are. They can be joyful or sad,  from this moment, from your recent or distant past, or echoing to you from the future. They can be spoken, sang, danced, drummed, presented as artwork or crafted object to pass around, as silence, or whatever else you feel tells your story.

Who You Are. Whatever story you feel to tell in the first class, let it be something true, something in its revealing that will illuminate Who You Are, how you got here, what place on the map of Aliveness you can feel yourself being drawn toward. Know that the story you share will shift the vibration of all of the folks who’ll be gathered during the first class. Let the story you tell be from your heart, mind, spirit, the organs and vibration, muscles and light, fluid and charge that is you in that moment. If you’re not sure what you want to say, sit with it between now and the first class. Right now, in this moment, be quiet and ask yourself: Who Am I? How did I get here? And when it’s your time to tell your story in the first class, ask yourself again . . .

 

Energy For Energy

So much happening. So much shift and change. It's the Yes. And it's unleashing itself inside of me.

Just to manage the influx of energy flow, I have to get out and walk, and run, and walk, and run, and do pushups. I have to play my new drum, to channel some of that intense humming going on inside of me out into the world. I have to eat protein and greens, take my multi-vite, drink lots of water. I have to say Yes to things that are scary but are the clearest next step when a next step is clearly indicated.

The energy continually looks for release. When I feel the energy damming up inside of me, the pressure that can turn into anxiety or depression or delusion, I find a way to release the energy out into the world beyond exercising and eating well: make or take a phone call or email with someone who needs help, take an action around an issue I handled poorly, to mend it or fix it or make sure it doesn't happen again when faced once more with the situation. And write, do sessions, teach classes, build a Tribe of Yes on facebook where folks can come and tell their stories of Yes.

This all keeps the cycle of energy going, energy in, energy out. And it builds. Doing this builds energy. 

It's about cutting off all of my hair, even though I intellectually know I look prettier with long hair. But I do it anyway because I can feel that my hair needs to be short right now. And it also needs to be purple and pink. And in a whirlwind on top of my head, all day, every day, which means that when I get up in the morning, I submerse my head in a flow of icy water, then shake it like a dog, like a mad grass-roller, and let the spikey ends find their own expression of direction. It doesn't matter what others think about my new headgear. When I look in the mirror, what I see is: Yes. 

It means refining the art of "energy for energy" with the flow of human connection in my world. For too long I gave myself away, for free, to anyone who would take me, until I was drained and in a miserable heap, full of blame and loathing, for self and others. I believed it was my only worth: what I could do for and give people. So I attracted lots of people who liked to take energy and not give anything back.

But then I woke up from that false belief. And in the flow of the bounce back, I stopped giving anything to anyone unless I absolutely had to for survival. Until I saw the false belief of that too. Until I saw that we all depend on each other for survival, that we may enter and leave this life alone, but that while alive, we are truly connected, and that we can choose the web of people that occupy the spaces in the weave closest to us.

In this living of mine, it's now energy for energy. Sometimes it's money, othertimes it's because Grace says to do it. Sometimes it's because they are a loved one and the Yes says: do this now, and then later when it says don't do this now, I listen to that too, with no guilt. When someone gives me something, I find something to give them back, or pass it along to someone who needs it. Keeping the flow going.

I'm learning to get out of the way of the takers, the folks who have refined the survival technique of getting other people to give them things, and not giving anything in return, and not copping to it, and so the cycle goes on and on, as long as they are engaged with. I'm learning the difference between being of service, and of servitude.

It's a hard lesson, and sometimes I feel like a jerk, because the ideal for someone doing the sort of work I do is selfless service. I do as much selfless service as I can, because when I serve, we both benefit.

But when I allow someone to set me up as their spiritual vending machine, we both lose. Using another person as an energy source stunts growth, and servitude isn't any fun at all. A system of taking and no giving will ultimately cave in on itself. And so now I opt out. They often get peeved, I sometimes get squirmy. But within days, hours, minutes, balance makes itself known as they either come back and offer energy, or freed from the negative energy loop, they wander off into the world to find another possible spiritual vending machine to work their pattern with. And again, we both benefit.

Energy for energy. Win plus win. Do what feels true. Watch the results. Identify the energy pattern in motion. Adjust the output and input accordingly. Energy for energy.

Build energy. Plug the holes. Build energy. Find a place, person, situation to flow it into.

This is the flow. This is dancing with the Yes.

Zoom and Stillness

It's been a roller coaster couple of weeks inside this brain, body, heart. Nothing going, of course, according to plan.

The plan was to do a deep cleanse for the nine days after leaving the fellowship. Water fast, yoga, walking, lots of sleep. Instead I sort of crash landed into a pile of No, and spent the time mostly resisting the urge to pack up the kitties and flee to some cabin in the middle of nowhere. 

Partial cleanses occurred. Lots of sleep occurred. Days free of burning and fermented and caffeinated plants occurred. Carby snacks found their way into my belly, via a tunnel in my mind. Kitties snuggled the heck out of me, then avoided me when the No got too noisy. Joyful interactions, and less joyful interactions. Stepping up and backing away.

I got a lot of work done. Okay, maybe not a lot, but enough. Over the next couple of months, This is happening, and there's lots to do to build it in a way that's strong, stable.

Part of the last couple of weeks has been questioning whether or not I can pull it off. I've been doing this work for almost three decades. Teaching others how to do it for the past fifteen years. Planning it for over a year. But putting it all together, in three local and global online locations? This is new.

The tagline for the training is: Mastery, Transparency, Tribe. It's technique based - shamanic skills, psychic skills, personal development - a very practical way of learning how to access, translate and utilize the data stream that runs behind, underneath this world. Gold standard methods used worldwide, across all times. Clear, straightforward, easily learnable, like playing the piano, or learning to read.

But a vital aspect of using these skills isn't so head-on and has to do with transparency. It's around how to do healing work without pretending to be sunshine and light, without wearing a mask of "perfect". Because trying to show up in a certain way blocks the flow, actually decreases access, and limits the ability to translate.

And yet sunshine and light is generally what's expected of healers. Being respectful, being kind, is simply about being decent. Whether the healer is a physician or a massage therapist or an energyworker, decency goes a long way in helping clients, patients, relax enough, feel safe enough, to enter into their own space of healing. But the dynamic of healer as perfect, and client as broken, needs to change.

We're all - every single one of us - in various places of aliveness and decay. It's the way of this place, this world. Enlightened people get the flu, die of cancer, go bankrupt. People with abusive tendencies and lots of cash have access to medical treatments that 99% of the world barely knows exists. There is no "fairness", only flow, movement, change.

We take the actions that Life is urging us to take. Or we fight the urge, based on some sort of "should" lodged inside the body-heart-mind of how we believe we're supposed to show up in the world. We find a hole in the wall of resistance, and take action to release the should. Or we sit at the base of the wall, and eat cupcakes and watch tv to pass the time, trying to ignore the drumbeat inside that says: Further.

Facing who we are, and who we're not, takes courage, fortitude, and usually comes packaged with suffering. Grief and mourning are part of it. Anger and depression, too. So is pointless joy, random moments of synchronicitous hilarity and revelations of perfection. And on the other side? Immense gratitude. 

The past couple of weeks have been about asking myself: how dare you step up to take on a tribe of folks, to teach them, be with them as they navigate their own storms? It all just seems too big, so impossible, so foolish to take on. I feel inadequate to the task, afraid that my own patterns and struggles will keep me from being there for folks in the ways that they need, from engaging with them in a way that facilitates Yes for both of us.

But where I keep coming back to is this: it's still about individuals, helping them see the map, teaching them how to read a word, a sentence, a paragraph at a time, showing them how to access their own individual way of translating this for themselves, the people they serve in their living. It's about doing session with them, entering into the landscape inside of them, helping them unweave the No a strand at a time, see the story they surround themselves in. It's about feeling such profound joy whenever Life gives me the opportunity to do this with someone. It's about showing up, over and over, even when fear is present. It's about being still and knowing All Is Well. 

And of course, as usual, Life has shot me through a tube, dumping me out with a thud in a land where only one path is available. I suppose I could listen to the fear that says I'm an idiot for not being in a job with health insurance and 48K a year. But that path disappeared a few months back. I hunted around for it for a while, and still am open to a trail if it happens, if I find it. But for now, there is only this one path, called Tribe of Yes, and the landscape is mostly unknown, and the flow of dark moon and bright sunlight cycle quickly, and the razor's edge between delusion and vision is hard on the feet.

Maybe I'm throwing a party and no one will come. Maybe this is just another emptying out. Or maybe this is when it all comes together - the shamanic, the psychic, the science, the muscles gained from years of mountain climbing - to create something that assists this huge shift in consciousness we're all deep inside.

I want to teach as many folks as possible about the data stream. How it's there for all of us, like an infinite library that contains all times, backwards and forwards, all dimensions. How the library card is our birthright, along with opposable thumbs and highly functioning frontal lobes. How to use that data stream to help connect the global biosphere in a way that sings Yes, that births a global organism that joins in the conscious, universal dance with truth, eyes wide open.

And as it all unfolds, I'll write more about the process. Transparency was taught to me here, in this digital stream that connects humans across vast distances of time and space. And so the word, the vibration, that I'm aligning to match is: courage.

Courage in the face of the No.

Courage in the midst of storms.

Courage in the quiet, the stillness, the Nothing.

Courage.

Failure and Flight

This past Thursday was my first day free of the fellowship I've been in the past year. My friend Kelly sent me this in a series of back and forths:

You have a cubicle hangover. Your body and mind are coming out of autopilot defense mode after almost a year, right? Totally good to just accept it and take some time to integrate the freedom and process the feelings of rejection and relief.

I read those words and felt: okay, yes, this is what's occurring, this is the Not-Me that I am very aware is coursing through mental, physical, emotional bodies. It's what's underneath the recurring startle, the cascading knee-jerk responses that say Do Something, do something Now, what are you just sitting there for when there are broken things that need to be fixed?

It's from a year of doing things, not sure if they were being done right, doing my best, and so often receiving only a response of a frown and silence. And then taking that and going back and trying again. More frowns. More silence. More work. More trying. Until I woke up one morning back in October and got: this sh*t feels awful and it isn't Who I Am, and they know it, and I know it.

That is the point where the lawn and the moon and stars and the burning and fermented plants and Florence and the Machine came in. Where this combination of their energies crashed into me, hammering at the wall of No that had been created, a kind of jailbreak that was surprising, not just in its content and methods, but also in how successful it was. Frowns and silence lose their power when the previous night was spent with the universe flowing through body, mind and heart, dancing outrageous gorgeous electrifying Yes until I fell down on the lawn in a heap of wonder.

But there was still work to do. I needed income. The fellowship didn't finish up until December 31st. There was no next job to move into yet. Then they asked to extend my contract until the end of February. With still no next job, I accepted, put my head down and worked. Stopped socializing with the folks I worked with. Stopped taking a break for lunch. Stopped trying to make any of it anything other than the work, and getting as much of it as I could done. Total focus on what I'd agreed to do, committed to seeing it through until Life released me from it.

I stopped writing. Stopped trying to do anything other than work, then come home, watch tv shows and movies, read, sleep, with forays out onto the lawn every couple of days. I ate a lot of healthy food, continuing the healing of gut and back pain through energywork and compassion and acceptance and release. Spent a lot of time outside, on the lawn and on the back porch, day and night, watching as the land around me moved into winter. I spent a lot of time doing this:

 

And I learned that being still and quiet for long periods of time facilitated both the snuggle and the flow. And I also learned that I still have many friends in the world, friends that call and text and visit, friends that skype and do sessions and send long emails describing their own process of setting themselves free. Friends that are planning their own escape from the No. Friends that filled my entire 46th birthday day (February 16) with wine and song and hysterical laughing and music and the magic that is facilitated via smartyphones and skype.

And then I created something that blew my mind, and my heart, wide open. It's been in the works for over a year. Something I took extensive notes on as new aspects popped into my head. That I wrote narrative around when I came in from hanging with the moon and stars, communing with Florence. That seemed more like a dream than anything else. That I kept adding to only because it felt more real than the supposed real life I was living. It was the answer to the obsessive questions blaring through heart and mind the past couple of years: what do i have to offer? is it valid? is it genuinely of use? does it genuinely make things better for people? do they want it? It was this: 

 

 

It's all still in motion. More will be revealed. I just need more time on the couch. More sleep. More time outside walking. More yoga and hot baths and green smoothies. Less thinky thoughts and connection to the stored past inside me that allows fear to deliver its electroshocks. Less contraction. More expansion. More time to process it all. More time to allow the Yes to flow more seamlessly now that the ordeal, the training, the trial, the test, the Whatever is done for this leg of the Waking Up process.

And as she has been for months now, the soundtrack is courtesy of Florence and her Machine:

     

 

Shift and Flow

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?

2012 and a Happy Colon

My digestive system didn't feel well on Friday morning, so before I left for a session with my Korean Chinese Medicine practitioner, I only had a spinach and strawberry green smoothie. Eating light before Tui Na massage and acupuncture with Jin is always a good idea, but that Friday, it was a very good idea.

Jin put me on a 48 hour water fast, noting in his stern, yet kind way that it might be difficult, what with New Year's Eve and all. No lemon, no herb tea, just water. I'd never done one before. I was nervous. But I trust him. He's very, very good at what he does. 

And so after two days with nothing but mug after mug of steaming hot water, this morning at 7a the fast was broken with a mug of ginger tea, with just the tiniest dash of stevia, about a tablespoon of vanilla almond milk. Delicious. Now I'm drinking a mango, strawberry, blueberry, spinach smoothie, and holy cannoli: it is fantastic. 

The fast itself wasn't that big of a deal. I woke up the morning after the session feeling like usual, that I'd been in a car wreck the day before. Jin's stuff makes swedish deep tissue work or rolfing look like a back tickle. But once the bruising and pain subsides, the range of motion and absence of pain, the sheer feeling of flow in the body is . . . fantastic.

A pretty monstrous headache kicked in yesterday at around 3p yesterday, but aromatherapy oils - tangerine, camomile, peppermint - massaged onto my forehead and neck helped, as did a long aromatherapy bath with eucalyptus and lavendar. A lot of napping occurred, as did hitting the bed early, along with much aimless, random kitty snuggling, both feline and human instigated. And four pounds were missing from the scale this morn, mostly bloat of course, but four pounds of bloat is a beautiful thing to have vamoosed.

I thought about food a lot. I discovered that pretty much everything triggers the desire for food for me. Tired, bored, up, down, happy, sad, confident, confused - all caused the bright idea to pop into my head: let's get something to eat! But I kept coming back to the fact that Jin said my digestive system needed it, and so I trusted him, and trusted my trust in him, and hung in. But what I also noted is that I craved for the largest part, healthy stuff - veg stir fry and green smoothies and such. 

The real parting gift happened last night, at a little after midnight. I went to bed at 8p, covered in toasty kitties. I don't remember anything waking me, just opening my eyes, a phrase from the dream I'd just been in looping round and round. I got out of bed, had a glass of water, took a tee-tee, sometimes whispering the phrase, sometimes just watching it repeat inside my head. Then I crawled back into bed, pulled a kitty up into my arms.

Then I noticed the sound of explosions in the distance. It took a few moments for it to register that it was fireworks, not gunshots. And then I realized: It's 2012. 

Then the significance of the phrase made itself known, how it was a message for the new year for me. I got out of bed, walked to my desk, and wrote it down:

Transformation: it goes in as one thing and comes out as something completely different. . . transformation . . . it goes in as one thing and comes out as something completely different.

So, that was my new year's eve. How was yours?

 

Wasteland

 . . . brother chuck on waiting: wasteland.

Winds, Smoke, Freedom

I understand that the time of grainery and greenery is coming to a close.

It's been a medicinal two months, using fire in the form of alcohol and burning plants to break through the stone walls of No my living became encased in. Listening to music and dancing on the lawn under the moon. Sitting out on the back porch in fuzzy hat, fuzzy gloves, fuzzy coat, and fuzzy pajamas, watching the changes to trees and sky and wind as winter slowly strips everything down to its essence.

My contract at work has been extended for another couple of months. And I had a good job interview a couple of weeks ago for a truly interesting position working for a government agency. Sending out my CV every couple of weeks for other new and interesting jobs. Surrendered to whatever comes through with a resounding Do This Now. Even as I'm fine if something comes through and I get Not Now, or No F*cking Way.

The years of harsh Waking Up, after the first step, were about backing up and watching as my life tumbled to the ground, crushed down to rubble, only a few structures still standing. After that, it was about sweeping away all the little tendrils that tried to grow back. 

Now, I let the tendrils grow - if it feels true - then watch as they fall away on their own. I'm still not making friends or hanging out with folks, but interactions are occurring and it's fascinating to watch on the back side what purpose they served - for me, for them.

New subtle rules of the game - don't push away, don't pull toward. Just show up as long as it feels true. And when it stops feeling true, just exhale. It takes so much less energy.

The kitties have gotten even more insanely snuggly. The Hoon and Grandma Booty and Jacinta and I had something special going down in our tribe, and we snuggled, and it was good. But these new kitties? Snuggling is a freaking Extreme Sport meets Feline Performance Art, and they dedicate themselves to its perfection on an hourly basis.

I've figured out my role is mostly as human chaise lounge, an organic, bendy, toasty blanket, a mostly furless massage tool. When one of them approaches, I've learned to just be still, let them find the perfect feline contortion, then drape my arm or leg around them so to better facilitate their toasty. I wake up in the mornings covered in kitties. It's awesome.

Back pain is down to merely annoying. Digestive pain is down to intermittently somewhat uncomfortable. Emotional pain is down to gusts of small crazy followed by short bursts of random Doing. 

I see a few clients via telephone every weekend, and begin to get a clearer picture of what I offer, what I can genuinely do to assist. It'll take a while to flesh the process out, but the shift is happening, and in a very easy going, gentle way.

I house hunt via the internet, looking for a place within 30-45 minutes of where my job will most likely be. 2 acres or more, away from highways and busy roads. Older, smaller house with fireplace or woodstove, big back deck or porch or sunroom, big garage or barn or workshop. Less than 100K. There's quite a bit out there that fits. I've been pre-approved through my credit union. Once I know where I'm working, I'll take the next step. 

So that's it. Not really. But it's all I got in me to write about for now party peoples. The writing thing is still problematic, but the pain around that, too, has gotten merely twingey.

All is Well.

All is F*cked, actually, of course. Which is the point. I'm much more comfortable with it.

And for that, any many, many other perfections, I am grateful . . .

Pods

Last night, while I was sitting out amongst the stars and sky and trees, letting the grainery and greenery have their way with body mind spirit, in a flash of awareness, I noticed what was going on around me, and it was so loud I wondered how I could have not heard it before. And what I saw was that it had been going on all day, ALL DAY, and I'd edited it out, as unnecessary, as unimportant, as lacking meaning. 

Ha.

It was the trees. Spawning. Pods bursting open, the large, dark brown seeds exploding outward, pinging through the leaves, landing on cars, crackling against bark and stone and branch. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Pa-pow-pa-pow pow pow papapapapow. Pow. POW. For hours. Raining life down to the earth from the safety of the womb.

What a courageous act. What a frenzy of possibility. What a massive, hopeful flinging of more hope in all directions with as much force as could be mustered. Natural selection at its finest. 

Most would probably land somewhere and die sooner than later. On the road to get squished. Or on the lawn to get mowed. Or amongst too many of their brethren and only a few survive past initial sprouting.

As midnight closed in, they began to quiet, all spent. By morning, silence. I'll be looking for them again tonight . . .

***

And a shout out to all of you folks who did sessions with me the past couple of weeks. It has been transformative . . . showing how willing folks are, how open to love and truth and Yes . . . showing me where my own wounds are, and how to heal them . . . showing me that I don't have to push so hard with people, that they find their way in on their own time, and that's it's perfect and perfect and just so Yes . . . showing me that this is the sort of work I want to be doing for a long time . . .