Thursday, March 2, 2017

Thanks again Jon

I've *found* Jon Carroll again and his lovely voice!  How I missed his quirky, down to earth, frank musings when he left the SF Chronicle.  Of course, he's the reason I started intermittent spirituality all of those years ago.   Of course it was in some of the best parts of my passiams lodge blog.  Sometimes, amid the self-resolutions, the hate mail to myself and others , the ranty whines and polemics, I find echoes of that voice here.  Mostly, it has faded away.

I miss that me.  She's so funny and strange and weirdly even in the fact of bad things.  I think that's the thing that was the most interesting...her decidedly off-kilter but generous nature.  She existed and persevered through entire decades of awful shit.  As I sit here, now retired (PTL!) in my cold living room with the amazing sun shining through that window, I think...how much worse is this time (at least at the present moment) then times before it?  It *has* been worse.  I *have* been closer to the edge (or so I believe) in the past and I didn't succumb and devolve into such a one-note horse (there were noted exceptions of course, real milestones where I just lost it.  The Davis cemetery.  The crying jags after Uncle Paul died.  All the times I thought I was going to quit my jobs, etc.).  Is it only when I graduated to this Shangri-La that I became so neurotically focused on my navel and how it wasn't getting everything it needed?  How did I let it all get so grave when there was no real reason for alarm?

I think after the 2016 election...is this what must be done now...is this what hard times are about...to punch us out of our own pity parties and into a more expansive and luminous way of being?  Remember when you'd listen to Pacifica radio every morning before work...its infectious and dogged sense of the possible was what informed you...what kept you going every day!  Back then, buying a camera and a newspaper were the best things.   Eating your one meal out each week at the Chinese restaurant, that was the best thing.  Having a computer or more simply, a word processing machine--that was the bees knees.  Heck, you even gave back your cable TV for privilege of just writing and reading and thinking about those one or two very precious books you bought.  Why should this time be any different from that?  Why do you need more?

Truth...you do not.  You do not.

Choose wisely and do what you came here to do.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Clean it, Dump it, End it, Fix it

I am in high electronic sorting mode.  Careful readers will see that the url has changed: I finally attached a custom domain.  The blog is growing up.  I also slightly changed the layout...and I'd like to customize it more soon.

But I am not stopping there, with the coming retrograde, I'm planning on seriously updating two other blogs, the numerologica.net site and the icookandeat.com site.  These sites along with this one actually have a chance of being something that I can be proud of.

Mercury retrograde, help me out!

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Reality strikes

I usually like to craft my posts here a little more elegantly but I made a promise to post more in 2015 so...here it is...

Just a tad over a year ago I wrote here and I must say...so much changes in a year.  And so much changes with the advent of a Solar Eclipse.  Back in 2014, I had no idea that 12 and half months hence I'd be experiencing this spring's solar eclipse in a way that I could never, ever have imagined.  Though the big changed happened on the last day of last year, I am vibrating with the shift in energies NOW.  Big reveal...I am now retired.

Through a series of events that one could only term fated, my partner (actually wife now) and I figured out how to transition into a lifestyle that incredibly financially mimics what we had before I retired.  We are whole.  Not rich, but not poor.  We are amazingly ok.  I am sleeping a whole lot more than 4 hours each night.  My deep, deep anxiety-filled depression has lifted.  My various chronic ailments are beginning to dissipate.  My understanding of life, minted when I was just five years old has been confirmed.  Retirement, the kind that gives you what you need for a simple, sane life IS BETTER.

And today, less than a week after the eclipse, I see that things that were cluttering up my life...the noise, is starting to fall away.  A mailing list I subscribed to for technical writing is being discontinued.  My sister is developing a partnership with another gal and will no longer use my technical services for her blog.  The offer from my former workplace to do some small freelance jobs essentially evaporated.

In the face of this I am capitulating...acknowledging slowly that my life is changing and affirmatively deleting various expenditures for things that I have no need of in this new life (technical education & business blogging education subscriptions).  These were big...because I thought I needed these accounts just in case.  But I know in my gut...I don't.

In its place?  More time at the gym...I'm finally getting the motivation to exercise seriously every day.  I've decided that in 2016, I'd like to try to run a half marathon.  Will I make it?  Who knows. All that's clear is that this is something the wife and I can do together in our joint retirement.  And who doesn't want to spend more time with the love of their lives?

She and I are also thoughtfully considering classes to do together, a language class (probably Spanish, one bucket list dream locates us living in the Yucatan Peninsula one day.) and an art class -- sculpture is something we both are passionate about.  And I am beginning to look at volunteer opportunities.

I'm sure there is more.  Especially writing more.  But the shift is palpable.  A great description of this change is described on Astrobarry's website.  A apt quote for what I am experiencing is this: "What liberating visions for a radically different future have started to emerge? How do the developments of these past few weeks resonate with and/or reinforce these insights?"

What a wild, wild ride...

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

It's complicated

I am a spirit living as a woman living in a body living in 2014.  It's surreal.  I don't always understand it, know how to do it, nor have the words to describe it.  But I don't want to give it up.

It's crazy but it's mine.

Earlier today, the dog, confused about how to proceed because he could neither hear or see his people peed and poo-ed to excess in our hallway.  He just woke up, shook his collar, took a little walk around and decided huh, well no one is here to help me so I guess I better get this over with right HERE.


 You know, I wanted to get angry with him, I really did, but he's a dog, he's old and it's my responsibility to be there for him when I know he needs it.  Still, I didn't get to him in time and he walked through the nasty several times with an 'oh well' attitude.  I can't say I wasn't a little pissed and nauseated.  But ya know, a dog's gotta do what a dog's gotta do.

I say this, not to highlight the fact that I am not a dog person (I'm not) nor that I am a bad dog mommy (the dog may agree with me on this last point). But  with some distance the episode, it did make me think about times in my life when I felt, HEY, I JUST GOTTA DO THIS!

Like said dog, I couldn't see my way forward, felt the urge to just let things rip and just to act out of panic and when I did, I simply made a big old mess. Sometimes someone was there, to clean up after me (like I did with my pooch today.)  But sometimes, it took me years to clean up my own excreta.  Years to fix stuff that could have turned out ok if I had just WAITED.

Humans may be animals but they are mostly capable of thinking beyond their immediate needs. They can do it so they SHOULD do it. I need to act more human like...and when I feel the need to relieve myself, be a bit more strategic about it.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Solar Eclipse Best Wishes

Pay attention to your dreams tonight...who do you want to be? Who you want to be is a gift to yourself. Concentrate on this eclipses' season of growth.

Monday, March 31, 2014

I've been delving into the world of Type recently...and it's been fascinating. Careful readers of this blog (namely ME) will see that I've been interested in human development for ever.  I'm always trying to GET why I don't ever feel satisfied, why I don't feel like I fit the norms.  Why I am constantly searching.  It is irritating, I must admit.  Reading about type, like reading about the nodal drama which I discovered late last year seems to me to fill in some of the holes in my gaping hole of knowledge.  I do feel a certain amount of relief borne of basic recognition.

This morning, in a fit of trying everything (as is my wont as an INFP/INTP) I am sitting at Christie's desk, which has a wonderful view of the living room.  Of course, it would never work for me to do this when she was home.  She'd feel like her space was being invaded and sullied (because that's what I do, I conquer all space in this house, colonizing it through possessions).  But it is nice to sneak in and try it out...because this seat is one of the best in the house...the room is big and expansive, it has lots of light and windows and it is a proper desk...not the slapped together collection of tv dinner tables and tiny night stands that comprise my non work area.  That whole room feels scary to me....it's over colonzied with papers and books and aspirational shoe choices.

I understand Christie when she says the entire lot of it needs to be junked.  Besides helping Gina get her business elements together, I considered seriously attacking the closet because that is the genesis of all big bad things in that room.  The closet the loci of the most angst ridden yearny parts of the whole house.  It's filled with papers from old classes, clothes that no longer fit or are out of style, dentritis from almost every single move I've made as an adult.  I know that if I can crack the code of the closet, the rest of the room will be much easier to address.

And here's the thing...sitting here in the main body of the house, maybe I'd rather be part of the stream of things than separate from it?  Separateness is what makes being in that room so problematic...it makes C feel cut off from me, it creates a barrier in our togetherness.   So if I were here and not there...if that room could be switched back to a guest room with bookcase and sensible storage for my clothes, perhaps, perhaps our lives would not be so topsy turvey anymore?  I mean, I can put earphones on if the TV is going.  But I can't heal the rift created when I falsely sequester myself from the rest of my life.





Friday, October 18, 2013

Transit strike...so last century right?

No, not everyone can work from home.  And the rights of working people are important.

 But the fact that we are so disabled by transit strikes in this century, the century that touts the information highway, shows us how much old paradigms hold on with a vice-like grip.  The machine (a.k.a society) hasn't learned yet.

But we need to get with the program people.