DatingGod

Spiritual Bon Bon or Hard Work or Just Plain Good Luck?

I had an amazing day yesterday. 

• I woke up, drank my yogurt, flax seed oil, maca root powder, green food powder water. I felt sad and tired and hopeless. "Do you feel awful?" I asked myself. "Yes," I answered. Then I went for my three-mile walk and as my feet flew ever faster, and the cobwebs and funky mental fog blew away, I planned out the summer - work on the novel and my health May, June, July, post audios of the Sunday night journeying classes and launch combined websites in August, begin doing a class or two a month starting in September. I arrived back at the house happy and joyful and full of vim.
• I cleaned my house, and the resulting feng shui-ish quiet had me walking room to room, just to inhale the Yes radiating in each room.
• I got my car back from the mechanic, a friend of my sister's who installed a brand new radiator (how awesome that I won't have to fill the radiator up every few days!). He also did new brakes, spark plugs, air filter, oil change, and I'm sure some other stuff. He picked my car up from my sister's place on Thursday, took it Leland, then brought it back yesterday afternoon. All for $200. Which my sister paid for, and refused, absolutely laughingly refused to let me pay her back for. So I took the money I'd saved and went and had new tires put on the car, which I'd been meaning to do for many months because the front righthand side tire was so bald it was totally smooth, not even a hint of a tread left.
• I ate only healthy, clean foods all day, avocado and tomato, pineapple and watermelon, rice crackers and organic cheddar, hazelnut coffee and almond milk. 
• The kitties attended the soul retrieval sessions according to some calling only they hear. A guy arrives and Baby Wallace sits at his feet, staring at him with the sweetest of expressions. When we do the healing work, Wallace jumps up on the table and curls into the space between his feet. When the guy leaves, Baby Wallace goes into my bedroom. A woman arrives and Jacinta comes out, which she very rarely does, and talks to the woman, these pointed mreowwwws that has the woman leaning over and talking back to Jacinta in a very caring way. Jacinta stays with her for the whole hour and a half. The woman leaves, Jacinta disappears into the apartment. The next client arrives and Emmaline and Malcolm come out, Emma spending the first ten minutes sniffing and licking the woman daintily, which delights the woman, and Emma gives her the love look, you know the one, over and over. E and M then nap on the floor, Malcolm at the woman's head, Emmaline at her feet. After she leaves, all the kitties come out, and sit, watching me as I shut things down, turn off the drumming track, blow out candles, fold the blankets and put them away, fold up the massage table. Then they all disperse. I know this is a main reason I knew I needed to work from home - so that the kitties could do their work too. 
• I went to the grocery store and stood in the cake mix and frosting aisle, eyeballing something called "chocolate explosion- just microwave and eat!" for many long minutes. It took that long to get to the knowledge: this will make you sick. As I put it back onto the shelf, I felt a sliver of gratitude, the smallest poof of virtuousness, but mostly what I felt was a profound grief that stayed with me for approximately one minute, then was gone. When I left the grocery store, without a single product made from wheat or chemicals or sugar, the sun felt brilliant and healing, and I smiled all the way to the car and back home.
• Instead of going to the movies to see Iron Man 2 and eat popcorn, I drank a banana and pineapple and vanilla rice protein shake, and scratched and rubbed various kitty pelts, and watched Fringe and Medium and Flash Forward and Stargate Universe off of  Side*reel and Hulu. Then I went to bed, read some more of The World Without Us, kitties all up in my stuffs, and listened to the suburban soundtrack of birds and squirrels and dogs and wind as we drifted off to sleep.

Maybe this would have been a more or less normal day for some folks, or for others, with the economy the way it is, a freakin joyride on a magic carpet. For me, it felt like everything that's going on is a confirmation of the hard ass, bone grinding work I did the past few years. 

But then I think: maybe I'm just having a streak of good luck. But I remember I don't really believe in good luck, or at least good luck in the form of Yes just randomly zipping into a life, then zipping back out. And then there's the fact that this "good luck" always always seems to come in the wake of doing hard time in the inner mines of spiritual work. 

Then I think: maybe this is just what happens when someone quits being all erratic and flighty and buckles down to a regular "normal" job. I've been working seven days a week - five days in Hiveworld, then shamanic healing work clients for three to five hours on Saturdays, then shamanic journeying class on Sunday night. A phone session or two on the weeknights. Keeping my apartment clean. Being on time. 

And then I get: this is the beginning of Human Adulthood. This is what a life is like when a person drops the emotion, the batsh*t crazy rage and judgment and addiction and depression and hopelessness and victimy blame and romantic love and delusion and belief that anything means anything (the ones most people pretend they don't feel, but which all but the tiniest percentage of members of our western civilization tribe indulge in). It doesn't mean these vapors don't still come around - it means they are so much less attractive that a person doesn't stare at them, reach out a paw to grab them as they whirl past. This is what happens when a person stops buying into the insanity of the demons that nip at their heels, not turning to fight them, just flinging them off, keep climbing, further, always further. This is the beginning of Human Adulthood, and it isn't something that is achieved so much as surrendered into.

I highly recommend it. I give my stamp of Yes approval to turning toward whatever horrible awful No is vibrating in your world. I support and encourage you, as the No begins to surround and then consume you, to chant the mantra "Yes, yes, yes, Yes." And then as the No changes into Yes, and you begin to laugh at how hard you fought all these years against the supposed No, when you see how it always was and always will be Yes, go sit in a chair, and watch the wind move the trees, and watch the movement of your mind downshift into floating, and the pointlessness of your life to reveal itself as quiet joy and sweetness and hilarity.

It's not your life. You just travel in it.

What a beautiful day . . . 

On The Move

While I was in grad school, I quit exercising. I tried, but I just couldn't make myself. I was so exhausted, so verklempt, that I just couldn't do it. I can look back and think something like "I would have felt a lot better if I could have made myself exercise", but when I look back, all that happened when I exercised was some body part of another went wonky and painful and I'd quit. And it never ever made me feel better. The sh*tstorm I was in wasn't about exercise. It was about burning the muthaf*cker down. I'm glad I didn't force myself to exercise.

When I got to Wilmington, I did a soul retrieval with a woman in California. Afterward, I was able to start exercising again. I rode my bike, did some light weightlifting. It was that same old way I'd always exercised, full of high mythic push, supercharging mixes of adrenalin and serotonin, always a feeling of aggression, of Just Do It shoving me on, a feeling of arrogant accomplishment, a kind of smug satisfaction with myself afterward. But there was also something different in the mix. Anger. For some reason, as I exercised, rage would roar through me, thoughts of hate and pissiness, belligerence at everyone from the mothers who blocked the paths with their enormous strollers to the cars who passed on my left mere inches from elbow. I'd arrive back at my apartment wanting to punch things, but instead I'd lift weights.

Then The Hoon got sick. And after he died, I found that I couldn't exercise anymore. At all. Even the thought of it caused nausea to roll. It felt like an obscenity - to pursue joy and UP when The Hoon was dead. I walked around my apartment asking over and over "where is he? where has he gone? where is he?" My bike rusted into immobility on the porch.

It took a year before I tried to exercise again. I don't remember what it was. I think it was a walk, or some light weights. But my body hurt too much. I backed off. Art and his machine helped break up a lot of the scar tissue, and that brought less pain. Then I did the journey, got the directive back this past March to get out and walk/run, so I knew the practical aspect of what I needed to do. But it wasn't until I had the endoscopy and got on the IBS and ulcer meds that the physical pain diminished enough for me to start moving and keep moving.

It's been a couple/few weeks now. I walk four or five times a week. I started out with a mile. And was aching and sore afterward. But not so much that there was injury. I kept it up, a mile and a half, two miles, two and a half miles, three miles. And that's where I'm at. I do a brisk three miles, come home, do a few sets of upper body and arm, back and shoulders. Takes a little over and hour, spit spot.

And the payoff is marvelous. All that remains of the excruciating pain I was in just three weeks ago is down to a some very mild aching in my back, and a swollen stomach that looks kinda weird - is my sigmoid so relaxed it's expanded several sizes? - but isn't painful at all. But the best part? The sense of super chill. You know the one - it's as if someone dialed the radio station in and all the static is gone, like a resounding gentle hum of Ahhhhhhhh vibrates through the body, like tequila without the hangover, like, why yes, the dance of the happy serotonin that we all know and love.

And surprise, surprise, the Waking Up stuff is ramping up again. There's something about the walking that is causing this huge release of stored past. As I walk the anger kicks in, but instead of turning it into a Kick Ass/Take Names exercise routine, I just walk, and watch. No running, no pushing, just walking. Sometimes brisk walking, sometimes my arms are pumping, but there's no manic drive, just motion.

I don't try to stop the thoughts, or change the thoughts. I just watch, follow them to their conclusion, and a new one arrives and roars down the canyons of consciousness. The meds make me tired in the mornings, so I lay in bed for a while before I get up, and the past does another big dump. Things, people, situations I haven't thought of in years arise. Even in the middle of the night, suddenly awake at 3 am, thinking about the series of sexual abusers that started in my early teens, that I just stopped letting into my body a few years ago, or the people I loved and trusted, who walked away and couldn't have cared less.

There is no Poor Me in any of this, just remembering. It's simple to say: stop being aggressive, negative, fighting. It's quite another to realize that rage is an effective tool to chase ass*holes away. It's one thing to say: lose weight. It's another to understand that fat makes great armor against possible romantic advances. And these huge releases of past show how it all fits together, the connect-the-dots. And then it's gone, and another begins opening up.

It doesn't matter to me that I'm not a Nice Person anymore. I could care less about soul mating. And while the fat is bothersome on a health level, I'm fine with it otherwise.

But I get that the walking and pieces of past that are rising up out of me are changing me. I'm ready to let her go, this person I've been for so long, who isn't me, but someone I wore for a while. But I'm okay if it takes another direction. I trust the process. If I fully Wake Up, fine. If I don't, if the rest of my life is spent with stuff like this, this peeling of Katherine one layer at a time until the day I die, I'm okay with that too.

What I get now is This Is It. This is the deal. This really is all there is. Publishing a book, or losing thirty pounds, or having the holistic stuff I'm creating gain traction and substance - all of it might change the sheen, the reflection coming off my living. But it won't change what occurs inside of me. It is the freefall to the inside that's important, and the only function, the only worth of what occurs outside is how it cuts me free to fall.

I think it's hilariously funny that this part of the Waking Up journey is comprised of western meds and 3-mile walks in leafy suburbia, a job in a cubicle and hours and hours of silence with kitties in the sun. Life's sense of humor with all this stuff is just so awesome . . . Who needs enlightenment on mountaintops when there are so many split level ranch houses and their azalea and roses and pine tree filled yards to breathe in and feel the Yes over?

Yes.

Ramblin' Squirrel

Whither we goest . . . The Barnacle goes too . . .

At night, before we go to bed, Daughter of Conehead snuggles into the leopard blanket of warmth.

In the mornings as we wake up and breakfast and caffeinate and fishate.

At night we surrender to the magic that is hulu.com.

At dawn we greet the day with glowing eyes and electric hearts.

And Jacinta the Bristly says: your love makes me slightly irritable but I'm okay with it.

We congregate and fill the Vibrant Living Room with the healing powers of Fuzzy Yes before the Shamans' Circle Journeying group on Sunday evenings. Come lovely humans! The Yes is waiting for you!

We greet the day, hanging with our homies, the platonic greenery known as Phil and Nettie and Basil.

We prepare the Vibrant Living Room for it's function on weeknights: the place where Katmama shucks (most of) her duds, partakes of grainery and greenery, and shuffles off the No, replacing it with Yes, and Yes, and YES.

(Kelly! Where are you?!? Luscious vibes of Yes, groovalicious Speahead calls us forth! Dance, mama, dance!)

 Life is good . . .

Gorgeously Lost, Always Home

During the work week, I wake at 5:45 every morning, in order to be at work by 7:50. On the weekends I sleep in til the grand hour of 7 am, which means that I loll around snuggling kitties, drinking decaf coffee, surfing the net, eating breakfast, and then it's still just 9 am. 

On Sundays, what that means is that I pack up a water bottle, some aromatherapy bug spray, some SPF30, and Burt's Bees honey lip balm and head out for a hike somewhere. Today, I went to a state park on one of the local islands. I hiked around in the marshes and alongside the sound, tromping through sand for a while, then forest for a lot longer. Five or six miles worth. Spiderwebs rigged between bushes and trees and sturdy grasses, boobytraps for getting webs wrapped all up in my hair, my mouth, until I wised up and swished a stick back and forth in front of me as I walked. Little crabs scurried, creating a wide path for my passage.

I've been to this park before, walked on all the trails that said OPEN. And so today I let myself loose onto the CLOSED trails, and happily got lost for an hour or so, winding back onto the regular trails, then skipping back offroad for another clandestine romp. I found a broken footbridge that I shimmied up and over. I walked around a pond that was ringed with thousands and thousands of broken glass bottles, most of them from the sixties, seventies. I saw two deer dash away from me, elongated shadows gently crashing through the underbrush. Butterflies, so very many butterflies, bright blue and black and yellow, pale white. A brief flash of bright red, a cardinal with a long white string in its beak.

I start out the hikes a little crabby, a little argumentative in my own head. I know better than to fight it, or to try and force it to be gone. With about an hour's worth of patience, the sea breeze and smell of forest and sense of excited adventure that yes, I just might indeed be Really Lost, the crabby turns to sweet, the landscape of my head widens out and releases the tumbleweeds from the week, and all is well in lungs and heart and head.

By noon, I come back to the apartment. I've discovered that going back to the computer quickly drains the bank account that the forest and the sea just shored up. So instead I clean my house, do laundry and hang the sheets out in the brilliant Carolina sun to dry, make ridiculously healthy food for the coming week's lunches, run errands to the co-op, the gas station, come back to the loll about inhoo the barcalounger and read (today's offering was Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter). 

And I snuggle kitties. Oh, how the kitties get snuggled. Friday night I went back to the local pet-megastore, where the local cat rescue had a new passle of kitties for sale. The goal was to bring Baby Wallace home a brother. But the brother wasn't there. Lots of cute fuzzballs, but none that I looked at, who looked at me, with recognition, revealed that I'd found Beauregard, the next member of out family whose black and white face I've begun dreaming about. 

I smooch Baby Wallace's sweet face (even though he is big and not a baby any more) and tell him: next week, my little fire puma, next week we'll bring you home a brother. And he licks my fingers, much like The Hoon used to do, and sighs, and does that heavy breathing purr of his, and curls up in my arms, and passes out, small snot snores in my ear. And Jacinta says, yes . . . yes . . . yessssssss . . .  

Doing

Utterly consumed with practical things . . . 

Clutter cleaning every single drawer, closet, shelf, cupboard, surface in the apartment. Boxes and boxes of former belongings, things I've been carting around for years, get thrown out with the trash, or passed on to someone else, or donated to a shelter.

Thanks to my "digestive illness" I'm down 13 pounds. For the past decade I simply haven't had the willpower to stop using my food lust as a way to cope with emotional distress, and so Life helpfully gave me two choices: utter agony or eat simply and cleanly. Of course it took me three weeks to settle in to choosing the latter . . .

I live on grains, beans/legumes, vegetables, and fruit. Twice a week or so I have some sort of animal protein, like an egg or some plain whole milk yogurt, but other than that, no animal fat of any kind (except for about a half tablespoon of butter I sometimes put in my morning hot cereal). I no longer eat dinner, but instead, depending on what my body tells me it wants, I make miso soup with seaweed and kale and gomasio, or I drink a quart of fresh juiced apples. 

I eat a lot of digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acid, niacin, ground flax seed, colon cleansing herbs. I drink a gallon of water a day. 

Sundays find me cleaning my home, making food for the upcoming week's lunches. I saute an enormous bunch of greens in water, add some balsamic vinegar, gomasio, sometimes a little hot sauce. I roast broccoli, beets, yams. I make brown rice with curry and raisins and almonds. Or quinoa, fluffy, simple, plain. I simmer a pot full of onions for three hours and make "onion butter", which gives lunches an extra hit of umami. I make daikon pickles with umeboshi plum paste and rice vinegar that I eat like candy through the week. 

I'm lifting weights again. When Calhoon got sick, I simply didn't have the fight in me any longer to keep pushing myself to exercise. All violence in the form of force, as in using my willpower like a sledgehammer to shove me through a bike ride, a weightlifting session, is gone. What's left is a desire to get my body moving again, squeeze out the kinks. I'm dancing again too, but now without any wine or self-consciousness or belief that someone is watching, or that it means anything other than the moment.  

I send out resumes, go on interviews. Another one five hours away. One two hours away. Several more set up over the next few weeks. I've put my landlords on notice that I'll be moving out in the next month or two. 

I work five days in cubicleland, or work four days in cubicleland and spend the fifth going on an interview. I work one day a week doing holistic work. On Sunday, I rest, and cook, and snuggle kitties, and dance, and feel the sun on my face. Evenings are spent with hulu.com, and The Dollhouse, and Fringe, and Lie To Me, and Kings, and 24, and Southland, and Rescue Me. Baby Wallace passes out in my arms, doing that purr of his that is really just heavy breathing, with the tiniest of sounds. Jacinta comes around to park her sweet self on my legs, or in my lap wedged up by Wallace, or on the window sill by the barcalounger where she can watch the birds as Baby Wallace and I watch tv.  

Slowly, slowly, I do another edit of the novel. I entered a writing contest on a whim, two days before the deadline for it, and sent in the first 20 or so pages. It made it to the finals in the "paranormal" category. The judge for the paranormal category is a big deal editor at one of the big publishing houses. The winners will be announced sometime at the end of this month. 

I don't care about "enlightenment" or "waking up". There is only the next thing to do, then the next. I'm not lonely or in pain or in drama or fighting my circumstances. If any of it arises, it passes, and then it's back into the practical. 

What I can say, without doubt, is that the seeds of whatever liberation I'm in right now are a direct result of turning, finally turning, and facing the things I was most afraid of. Then embracing them, bringing them close. All the while letting go of the old, the dead, and looking inside for where the energy wanted next to move. 

It's a tricky thing to distinguish between what is really going on and what the mind thinks is going on, what it's convincing you of. But to see the difference between the two, and to go with what is genuinely occurring, changes everything.

Who knows what tomorrow brings? Right now, some rice, a dvd, and perhaps some kitty snuggles.

Onward . . .