Must be funny.

Etc.

I’m working through the #moneylove course with Vix at New Age Hipster.  Today I’m reflecting on what it means to be prosperous, and wondering what my life would look like if I had all the cash stuff completely sorted.

And it surprises me.

I fell into self-employment about eighteen months ago and since then I have been in a metaphorical hamster wheel of frenetic activity.  I began working for myself after having to resign my job due to poor health.  So then I panicked.  Must provide for family, like Boxer in Animal Farm, must work harder.  I pulled out all the stops, gathered all my tradeable skills, set off in several different directions at once and haven’t stopped since.

On one level this has been great.  I’m better now on so many levels.  I’m bringing in enough money to cover the bills and sometimes there’s spare cash.  I don’t have any consumer debt.  But it doesn’t feel like enough.  So I keep chasing the bookings, and the training that will keep me up to date and in demand.

Thinking about this question today I feel like I don’t actually need “more”.  I need to simplify. Clear the decks. Cut back.  Like pruning back the dead wood after winter.  I feel that I will be happier if I can learn contentment, to honestly take control of my work and my spending and know what is sufficiency.

For me abundance will feel like a lack of worry about money.  It will feel like it is a tool, something useful, but not something which carries any emotional weight. I have a lot of emotional baggage around money! Who knew?  Fear.  Desire. Anxiety. Confusion.  If I think of it as just the notes and coins in my purse then it seems so small, but the idea of wealth, and the fear of poverty are such strong ghosts to contend with.  Shadows and illusions.  Nightmares sometimes.  Like running from something that’s always at my heels, or frantically trying to get to a destination that is always just out of reach.

Money isn’t really what it is about after all. I know it helps.  I’ve been in places where it was a serious concern, but that isn’t this time, that is a previous chapter of the story.  Instead it is about learning what I need to be content.  The basics are covered.  What else?  Time is important, having choices and not being tied to someone else’s timetable. Health is also vital, the sense of wellbeing on all levels to live life with energy and enthusiasm.  Enjoying the natural world. Family.

So I am hoping that over the next four weeks I will be able to deal with not only the practicalities of getting finances in check but also exploring the emotional baggage that goes with it and letting that go.  And then get on with living.

I met a friend today.  We haven’t seen each other for a decade. The last time we met was her wedding day, we said goodbye in a marquee, disco in full swing.  She and her husband were heading off to teach overseas, we were preparing to fly to Canada for a two week vacation.

Life happens.

She is now getting ready to celebrate her tenth wedding anniversay, and has two young children.  My children have grown to adulthood, our job roles have come and gone, I have faced health crises,  marriages ending and beginning, life re-evaluation, and further major changes are on the cards this year.

We drank coffee and ate cake and tried to cram ten years of everyday life into an hour.  I left feeling thankful for the reconnection and dizzy at the amount of change that has taken place in the past decade.

I have a tendency to criticise myself.  The whole story, when laid out for inspection, looks piecemeal.  A scattering of attempts and trials, ventures that didn’t quite work out as planned, unexpected dead ends or U turns.  I can see this as inconsistency on my part.  An inability to stick to one path.  Or I can see it as life. And how we respond.  Knowing when its time to quit and start over.   They have been ten very full years.  I have lived what feels like double that time in terms of experience and internal shifts.

Today I want to give myself an award.  I will stand at the podium and invite myself to the stage.  Today I will receive an award for ten years survival, for overcoming unexpected obstacles and maintaining my sense of humour.  For raising two children to adulthood and still holding onto a shred of my sanity.  For not being afraid to try new things and equally being able to admit when I’ve made a mistake.  Loud applause.  Resounding cheers.  And for you too.  We made it this far, who knows what we’re capable of next.

I didn’t know it was there.  For the first thirty five years.  I was too busy.  I was immortal.  Building a legacy, carving a niche, making a name.

Until something went wonky.  My legs wouldn’t work. I was dizzy.  My words muddled.  Thoughts fogged. Grip weak. There were blood tests.  Scans. Inside the tube while it hammered and buzzed around me, recording my cells, my veins, my insides coming out into black and white etch-a-sketch images.

In the doctor’s office she handed it to me.  It is carved, mahogany maybe, shining with a burnished gleam.  Two globes and the sand an emerald green, already trickling.  She shows me the scan, this patch, she says, shows that part of your brain is dead.  We think you’ve had a stroke.

I tried to leave it in the office.  I didn’t want it.  I didn’t want to know I was human, finite, limited.  I can remember the white of the fluorescent lights and the lilt in her Danish accent as she spoke.  Clinical.  Professional.  I propped it in the corner and left, trying not to think.

It followed me home.  Growing stubby legs like a Disney teapot.  It sat in the corner, humming to itself, sand trickling.  I was determined not to let this stop me.  I wanted to live even more then.  I needed time to recover but once stronger I kept building, my Tower of Babel was back in full swing.  Make it higher, write the list, tick off the things.  Do it. Do it all.  Now.  There is no time to waste. It is already flowing, the lower bulb filling, the upper emptying.  It created a quiet panic in me, which I still feel below my rib cage, catching my breath.  When? How stealthily our bodies deceive us, how cunningly they plot our downfall.

I have not learned yet how to live with this.  Ignoring is no good.  Confronting also ineffectual.  How to accept it, hold it, polish it, tenderly cradle it like a baby, rocking the sorrow and grief away?  How to be thankful for this?  Harbinger.  Fate.  Death.

We have come to an uneasy peace.  An uneasy piece.  But I cannot forget.  Now that I have seen it.  It cannot be unseen.  Now that I know it cannot be unknown. I cannot pretend it doesn’t exist.  I can’t ignore it.  In the solitary moments, I can hear it whispering, shushing into oblivion, the quiet fall of my moments.

How to live with fullness and joy, with abandon, with fire and passion, with delight and freedom, while being ready to release it?  To let go.  How to be grateful for this knowing?  How to embrace the hoped for decades ahead, when they are not owned, and cannot be promised?

Maybe I will say “hello”.  Maybe I will imagine my life to come, complete with rocking soundtrack, making a giant scrapbook of memories big enough to climb right into, and share it with loved ones as I get ready to leave.  I like these ideas for getting practical and getting on with it .  And maybe I will look my Death in the face and like Arya Stark politely say, “not today.”

I’m taking an online mini-class.  It’s become a thing, over the past eighteen months.  You sign up and receive a daily prompt or meditation.  I have learned a lot.  My question today was “What do you love?” Which got me to thinking.

Now this has been a question I have lived with for over fifteen years in one way or another.  Around 2002 I took an Ignatian retreat in daily life.  The focus of much of the work is around what brings life, what brings joy and energy to your life, and how this connects to your vocation, or “life purpose” (life porpoise).

For the longest time I tied this in to my life of service.  I wanted to be a priest and I was sure that once I got there the aching hunger in my soul would be gone.  That path wasn’t to be and once set aside I spent another nine years searching.

In the past year or so I’ve been considering the four elements. My main element is air – ideas, thought, I can easily get lost in my head for days.  My second is water – emotion and feeling.  These are both fluid and amorphous, hard to tie down and see or hold.  I have this sense often.  The minute I try to embody a thought or feeling it slips away, wraith-like, a half-remembered dream lost in daylight.

Thanks to a long period of work with an excellent therapist I’ve reconnected to the earth.  Grounding practices, practical craetive work, time in the natural world or working in the garden make this a real and nourishing part of my daily life.

It’s the fire that’s missing.

Pondering yesterday I was aware of a dullness in my stomach.  A heavy, leaden feeling.  It might be called depression, ennui. It felt like a black and empty hearth-space.

To get anything done right now (and honestly for some time) I have to drive from my head, from air space. I have to find a reason and force it into being, daily chores, work, “leisure” activities.  It works most of the time but it’s draining.

It seems to me that if there’s fire there, passion, then that heat will do the driving.  It might not be my work that provides this, it might be an interest, or a community group, or a cause.  But the fact that that is my passion will mean that I haul ass to get my work done so I have time for it.  It will be the power, the energy, flowing through everything.

I am wondering if when I became a mother that fire went to my children.  I didn’t take to motherhood  easily, I grew into it with them, and then out of it as they changed, and then back in.  It’s been a woven dance between us, me and my sons, for over two decades.  And I wonder if the passion and energy doesn’t end up poured into raising them.  Not because it’s an endless joy, or the most fulfilling thing I will ever do (much of it is hard work and routine) but because it has to be like that.  Not only my physical energy to care for them and work to provide for them, but my very soul poured out to make their life and growth possible.

And I wonder if, now that they are grown, the fire is all gone, the purpose served.  It is an elemental thing, mothering.  My blood given to make their flesh, my life given to make their life.  Of course.

And now.  I wonder.  What will kindle that flame to birth again, what will grow the tiny spark, feed the glowing embers, what is possible, waiting in the wings.  I burn candles and am hypnotised by the flame, watch the smoke of incense rise and dance. I breathe into the deep space in my stomach, and wait.

 

I write stories, in my head.  These stories are what will happen in my life.  I can’t remember when I started doing this, I was quite young I think.  It’s the meta-narrative of my life, the overarching plot.  In these stories this action will lead to that event and then x, y and z will be possible.  Experience, though, is showing me that my stories are not always true.  The first time I came up against an uncooperative plot line I re-wrote the narrative.  Instead of the heroine following this path, she finds her way blocked and, full of resourcefulness, negotiates the obstacle and triumphs!  Huzzah!

Only the more this happens, the harder it is to keep a sense of the narrative.  The obstacles come more quickly, the story becomes twisted and confusing.  It splits from reality and the story life becomes so disjointed from real life that it’s hard to match the two up anymore.

The epiphany comes when I realise I need to let all those stories go.  Because they aren’t the real story.  The real story is more gritty, more powerful, more surprising.  It moves at such a break-neck speed, shifting like sands.  It changes constantly.  Releasing the old stories frightens me.  What if I am going to drift, like a post-modern novel, through surreal landscapes to inconclusive endings? If I stop writing the story where do I go next.

Shifting my metaphor I become an explorer.  Rather than writing about my travels through life I will be living it, rather than thinking I will be feeling, rather than planning I would be doing. It moves moving from air to earth.  And fire.

Releasing the stories means letting go of an illusion of control, of a sense of mastery.  It was a fiction anyway, but a comfortable one.  Releasing the stories means that I step beyond words and into the depths of experience. Immersed.  I may get lost here.  I may not be able to see the path ahead.  Likely I never could.  I will only be able to take the next step. The next breath.  To trust in the unfolding, the becoming.

Change doesn’t come easily.  It can take me a while to catch up with reality sometimes.  In my head I had an idea of what was going to pan out, and sometimes that’s so powerful that it’s all I can see.  The story is more real than reality and releasing that can take time.

Today I’m feeling the loss of story.

It was keeping me safe, wrapping me up.  It had furnished me with a magical pot of paint and I could run around life and gild all the crappy stuff with a golden sheen. I somehow got the idea that this was what I needed to do.  At church I learned how to count my blessings, that God had a reason.  From new age spirituality I learned that there’s a lesson in there somewhere, and you’re never given more than you can handle.  Kind friends offer these sentiments.  I know they want to help.

But I’m calling bullshit.

Because sometimes it’s just crap.

I have been telling myself a story about my life.  In this story I overcome all adversities to achieve complete well being and fulfillment.  It’s the Western, modern myth, an update on the fifties version of the American Dream.  Nothing will stand in my way if I’m positive enough and just have sufficient faith.

There have been adversities.  The sudden and traumatic end of a marriage.  Personal health issues.  Concerns around children and their additional needs.  Extended family dramas.  At each moment I have strapped on my Jane Austen heroine and overcome adversity.

This time it’s different though.

My mum has Alzheimer’s.  We noticed that her memory seemed different several years ago, though we only had a diagnosis in 2015. I was aware it is a degenerative illness, I have read the websites, it is a grim story.  But a heroine is undaunted.  We can make this work, I thought.   I see her maybe once or twice a week. She has grown frailer over the past twelve months.  And her short-term memory has all but gone.  But I didn’t realise, that when I saw her she has been pulling out all the stops.   Dad has told me this but I didn’t see it.  She smiles and chats, she asks appropriate questions.  I have still been able to see her.

I have seen my folks three times in the past four days.  And I see that I haven’t had the full picture.  Mum was here.  But not here.  She forgot very quickly that we had made her a drink.  I needed to prompt her to eat  anything.  She had no appetite or interest in food, she was withdrawn.  She sat in the chair and forgot to unwrap the gift in her lap, staring out of the window, or returning repeatedly to read a gift tag.  The effort of keeping up appearances was exhausting.  And although she spoke about going for a walk, when I took them home she struggled to make it from the car to the front door.  Dad says that this is pretty normal.

I am shocked.  I am angry.  I don’t know what to do.

I’m good at plans, I’m good at coming up with answers, with solutions, with finding clever ways round problems.  I am an organiser extraordinaire.

But I got nothing.

It’s just crap.

And the Jane Austen happy ending feels hollow.

Waking up today was like being in a new world.  I can feel the hardness there.  The grit of reality.  The slow ache of grief. The stone in my metaphorical shoe that is stopping me from sleep walking my way through the days.  There is a burning in my soul, a deep keening.  To be witness to this slow unraveling.  To know that it won’t get better, that I can’t make it better. To know that across the world millions are in this place, for a thousand reasons.  That there is pain and sadness and loss and fear.

My gut is restless and my head keeps trying to pull away.  My eyelids want to close and shut it out.   To run back to the sleep world, the dream life.

But I am resolved.  To feel this.  To let it be.  To sit with it.  To look it in the face.  To keep my eyes open. To make myself look, not turn away.  To allow it.

The paint’s all dried up now.

It feels like the only things is to sit in the dark, holding hands, and sing the songs we love.

Heart to heart.

Scar to scar.

 

 

 

 

It begins each time like a quest.  The journey itself has taken on a symbolic feeling.  At first the roads are wide, a dual carriageway leading to country B roads, well made, clear, fast and free flowing.

Passing through villages there is a shift, a valley opens up, steep sided, cattle grazing the meadows, isolated farms.  The houses are scattered now and there is a little used sense in the road beneath me, rougher at the edges, potholes. 

I turn into the lane, it winds around crazy bends, hugging close to ancient cottages, twisting up steeply between high, tree clad banks.  There is no space here for passing.  This day, as I climb, the mist thickens until I’m driving through the low cloud which mantles the top of the downs.  Finally, a gate tucked in the hedge and arrival.

A journey into the wilderness, the unknown and hidden places.

I’ve been making this journey for a year and a half.  During this time, I have changed in ways I didn’t know possible, peeled back layers of life and history, of ancestor story, worked through healing in both mother and father lines. Today I’m fretting again about work.  This has been an irritant for decades.  What shall I do?  What am I here for?  I have tried to weave a career making sure of space for family, I have sought to be in service to others and brought myself to burn out in the attempt, I have wanted to create and build though what comes out is never quite what I had imagined.  And through it all a sense of restlessness.  An inability to stop.  Filling each day with activity.

Identity.

As I reel off the frantic mind-muddle of the past weeks the word comes as a question. Yes, I say, without a doubt.  Work is how I represent myself to the world.  It is how I find who I am. I don’t know who I am without it.

She asks me to sit with this.  She asks me to sit in my body and feel it.  Where is it, she asks, that feeling?

Everywhere.

What does it feel like?  Like I’m trapped, I want to escape, everything feels tight.

Allow it, she says, sit with it, if you’re ok.

Part of me wants to scream. To get up and drive away.  It is uncomfortable, my breath is stuck in my throat and my skin itches in response.

What is underneath that? She asks.  And where?

In my stomach, in my chest.

What does it feel like?

Anger.  Rage.  Fire.

Yes, she says, stay with it…. years of doing what’s expected….

I am crying now but it doesn’t seem to matter.  I allow the fire to burn inside me, a fire I have squashed for years.  I have tamped it down again and again because I don’t know what will happen if I let it burn, I don’t know how to live with the raw power, with the heat and the passion and the strength and the wildness.

It feels like a friend.  Here to warm and protect me, to light the way.

Time passes, I am sat deep inside myself, in the landscape of imagination.

What is behind that? She asks, can you feel it?

There is a space, behind the fire.  An opening.

What does that feel like?

It is elemental.  Forests and storms, oceans and mountains, free and strong and wild.

This is you.  The essence of you…

I have never been here before.

…..

I breathe differently now.

The things which have harried and preoccupied me for years seem less.  I can feel this elemental self, whispering in my soul.

 

She needs time to grow and strengthen, she needs to know she is safe to show herself.

But she is here.

I was about three.  It was at our playgroup, in Allhallows village hall.  I remember lying on my stomach and watching it move towards me, a long, brown, speckled line, maybe six feet long, tongue flickering.  I wasn’t scared.  Amazed maybe.  Interested.  Fascinated by the touch of its smooth, soft skin.

Since then though I have feared snakes.  Something made me shudder.  Maybe all that old Eden myth, the voice of temptation and disobedience.  I never learned that there is wisdom in the snake, and the lesson of constant rebirth, the old skin dying away and left, just a husk.

This is what brings me to snake medicine today.

About a week ago I read something which jolted me.  I don’t remember where now.  It said that the snake sheds it skin, and leaves it behind, it doesn’t go back to it.  So when a friend pulled this card from me from Ethony’s Awakened Soul Oracle it was timely.

I have been shedding my skin.  Actually literally shedding my skin through chronic eczema for the past four months. But also shedding my emotional – soul skin.  The ways of a lifetime do not work anymore, old patterns, ways of being.

It reminds me of Jesus’ parable of the wine skins, you don’t put new wine in old wine skins, they’ll burst.  You don’t put a newly reborn soul in an old soul skin, it won’t be able to hold it…it’s not the right skin to be in.

But I have been running back to it.  Picking up the translucent shell of my old self and trying to stitch something together from it, create some kind of patchwork self, afraid of letting it go, of leaving it. Of releasing.

I want to thank the old skin.  For the lesson.  For carrying me and holding me when I needed it.  For being my edges and my boundaries for a time.  For knowing when it was time to leave, even when I didn’t think I was ready.

It is dead now, brittle, only a wraith-like cocoon.  It was the space in which I grew for a while, the womb of my new self.  But it has served its purpose now.  It does not  mourn for itself.  It is not sorry.  This is what it was for.  And I no longer fit it.  It was too small.  Too tight.  Too restrictive.  So it died and I wriggled free.

To be free.

 

 

I recently read Brene Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness.  One of the key things that struck me early on in the book was the idea of permission.

Quite often, no, honestly, all the time, I am waiting for permission.  I give my “power” away and look to external authorities.  In one way or another this has been, and continues to be, parents and teachers.

In her book, Burning Woman, Lucy Pearce writes about the Good Girl:

“The Good Girl learned her lesson well: she knows that she must submit to survive…She looks outside herself – to parents, peers, and her bible of choice…to dictate how she should live, what she should wear, how she should speak, what is acceptable.” (page 126)

It is paralysing.  This need, deeply set in my mind.  A chain around my ankle.  Shackles. Quite often I come to a decision, feel that the time is right, and then I wait.  I talk to people about it.  I pull cards.  I talk about it some more.  I journal.  I read books.  I create vision boards to explore my idea further.  I speak to my mentors.  But I don’t act.  I do not trust myself to take that next step without someone telling me it is ok. I am looking for validation, for approval, for someone to sign the slip, that says I can.

I have done this for my entire life. I didn’t realise how powerful a habit it was and that I was still doing it until I read that section of  Brene Brown’s book.   She says that she started writing herself permission slips on post-it notes… right now I am still struggling with the fear of taking that step, what would that be worth? Who am I to say it’s ok?

Who else can though?

The journey I am on now is about reclaiming my own power and trusting in my own inner wisdom.

It doesn’t come easily.  I have a sense of being untied from the moorings and bobbing about in a vast ocean.  The obvious thing to do would be to pick up the oars and start rowing.  But somehow, I’m still sat in the stern looking around for the captain.

Increasingly though there is a sense of a hidden part of me yelling as loud as she can to get my attention. To break me from my stupor and shake me into action.  I have woken up, and stand here, still blurry with remembered dreams,  in the light of a different dawn.

I watched our priestess circle call yesterday.  Our teacher was talking about intentions and about our commitments.  She talked about her own experiences, and how there are some intentions that she continues to set every day.  For her this is part of committing to that intention and keeping it alive and present, as well as reminding herself it is something she is working on.

Then she spoke about commitments.

Now I have always thought of commitments as the things I do.  In the past, when I went to church, that was one of my commitments.  In the years when I served on various committees those were my commitments.  And I would say that I’m committed to my family.  They are important to me.  In this sense it’s about loyalty and showing up.

But she gave me a new way of looking at commitments.  She asked us to look at our lives and see, in real terms, what we were committed to.  She said that we manifest, make real, the things we are committed to.

So, I looked at my life.

Now, as prelude to this, I will share that I have set some intentions in the past few months, about the work I would like to do, and the direction I would like my life to take.  I’ve spent time journaling and visualising and creating rituals to set my intent.  I have taken some steps to make this real, setting up a business website, completing my 100 readings as part of my initiation as a tarot reader, taking a life coaching class…

But when I look at my life it isn’t that stuff that I’m committed to.  What I’m committed to, it would appear, is over work, being too busy, and being constantly tired.

Because that is what is here. And that is what I continue to create.   I say out loud that I want to have a different life.

But it scares me.

I keep the door to another life open.  Because I know it. And because in practical terms it pays the bills and provides for my family.

Now I’m not advocating throwing it all in and leaving my loved ones homeless and starving.  But.

Then, later in the circle, we made a journey together.  We went to visit our inner priestess who we’d encountered right at the start of the programme.  In the vision she showed me something I really didn’t expect.    I saw myself carefully moving obstacles into my own path.  I was shifting giant boxes so that the way ahead would be difficult to navigate or completely impassable. And I was doing it all very quietly and subtly so that my “waking” self wouldn’t see.

Sabotage!

It is both ridiculous and shocking.

I am left with a sense of having been woken from a dream, and also, utter bewilderment.  I can see now the pattern I’ve been creating and living and reliving.

The question remains, if that is not the “real deal” what is?  Is my new dream valid, or is it another impossible construct that will prove unobtainable as my inner self works to undermine?

Time is needed.  Have I got the courage to step into a new way of being, to unstick myself and be free?  What comes next is a mystery…