When you come to the same place.  Revisiting. Wondering if you are repeating a pattern and finding instead you are standing on the spiral path, there are echoes, familiarity. But a different perspective. Viewpoints shifted.

Here we are then.

History repeating in a rebooted version.  My counsellor asked me what I have sent myself back to learn.  I am still wondering.

Today, heading down the A20 after an afternoon ramble, I dropped down into my life with the sensation of dream falling. I’ve spent weeks since our move trying to fit the previous strands of work and plans into a new mould.  Of course they don’t fit.  Nothing fits. But, waste not want not, I’ve been chopping and shifting and remodelling, those old wineskins again…My biggest worry has been about altering commitments. One of my work roles is regular, but uncontracted. I’ve been anxious about it, wondering how it will play out in the new term, what shape it will take this next year. I’ve been waiting for emails, full of tension, waiting for the reprimand, the call into the boss’s office…

Until.

Hold on one moment.

I’m the boss.

I’m self-employed.  I work for people on a casual basis, I go where the work is.  I weave together a range of different roles in a range of different places and this is how I earn a living. It’s a way of working which is in transition now my own children are grown and the need for a work pattern which fits with school holidays has gone.  It has been helpful though as I have recovered from burn out and had the flexibility to deal with family needs.

I have been working in this way as if it is for someone else.  I want to have happy clients, I seek to offer my best whatever I’m doing.  But I struggle to remember that there is no performance management coming up, no achievements to reach for promotion…So this anxiety is misplaced because the choices are ultimately mine to make…

Which spirals me back to another quest.  To claim my power.

Not the power of a dictator, all high boots and grandiose schemes, but the furnace-fire of my soul, bright jewel and essence, warmth, home.

I give it away. Locate it elsewhere. In others. In concerns and thoughts. I allow it’s energy to seep away and leave me cold. I fritter it in worries or fuss it away in perfectionism.

Perhaps I’m here again to reclaim that power. To uncover my maiden self and restore her, to recover the energy which fired me when I was younger, to reclaim my edges and the wild expanse of my soul.  Perhaps there is a chance to walk the shadow path to the edge of knowing and dip into the wild unknown.  Perhaps this turn of the spiral takes me away from one pattern and opens up a new way of walking through life.

The rules, it turns out, are just ideas, once questioned they disintegrate, rice paper on the tongue, dissolving. I am full of wonder that I can have taken so long to wake up to this.  Again.  But patterns have a power of their own, they are well established and easy. What if I run into this spiral, though, if I charge headlong beyond the next bend, beyond what I know and feel safe with, if I go fast enough, will that energy throw m outwards, into a new orbit?

A sense of expansiveness and promise now at the edge of perception. Freedom and hope.