change – The Abysmal Witch

Things can change in an instant…but mostly they stay the same

Or change really, really slowly.

I nearly died today. One of those moments that happens periodically, when you feel the brush of death closer than usual. Not the slow caress of death from bad habits or long-term illness, but the flirtatious goosing from a near miss.

I was out for a walk, headed to a favourite park that requires walking past some major intersections. Please note that I was wearing a purple jacket, orange and black socks, and green laces on my shoes. Really, I was a jokeresque symphony of colours. Not exactly blending into the background. I have proof, check the picture. The pic is from after the rain (and thus my drowned cat impression) but at the time of this story, the rain had yet to start so visibility was perfect.

I had already started to walk across the street, cheerfully following the instructions of the little glowing white man on the pole across from me. That’s when a truck decided to run the now ended left turn advance signal. Thankfully, the person he cut off honked. I say thankfully because that’s why I looked up and paused and waited for the idiot to pass me by with a couple of feet to spare.

If I hadn’t paused, at minimum he would have clipped me but most likely I would have been perfectly aligned under his right wheel as he hit me.

He noticed me about ten feet past where he would have run over me.

I shared a bewildered head shake and shoulder shrug with the woman in the car beside the crosswalk. Idiots. What can you do?

Life can change like that, one instant to the next. Boom. Crash. Bang. (Anyone else remember that Roxette song? Well, Crash Boom Bang technically.) And all of our life can be gone, all those unique memories disappeared into shmutz on a road. We are ephemeral by definition of our lives. It pays to remember this, at least now and again.

Naturally I kept on walking. Because what else do we do? My life hadn’t actually changed. No broken bones, no death, might as well keep to my purpose. My thoughts churned around the importance of life and all of those typical things and then, as we tend to do, the moment passed and I was back in the musings I’d started with.

About a week before I’d done the same walk with friends. On that walk I came across some banana peels that demanded I take their pictures. Hey, it was my birthday weekend, I didn’t say I was sober during this walk! lol. Here are those banana peel portraits: Banana in Puddle and Banana with Bag.

So here I am a week later, on essentially the same walk, and what do I see?

Oh, banana, poor poor banana. Slowly fading into the past. As most of us do. Most of life doesn’t change in that quick instant, that lightening strike of a car. Most change is slow, changes coming in small bits, microbes eating away at who and what we are until we oh so slowly decay from living until death unto dirt.

Thankfully, it is slow! Meaning there is so much time to enjoy the moments, large and small, crazy and plain, thunderous and whisper soft.

Those goosings from death are a chance to take the appreciation for everything else a little deeper into ourselves. I know this in my head but it’s my heart that needed the reminder.

Time to go live some life. Because what is fed, grows.

Blessings of the deep and wild to you all.

Saturn,
The Abysmal Witch.

Tipping

It’s strange, being on the verge of crossing a threshold you’ve wanted to cross for years. The desire to change my life has been building for a long time. In the last couple of months it’s as if all of it has come to fruition almost at once.

This is my second to last night in my home of 11 years. It saw me through my maturation as an adult. It feels now as if it was my chrysalis and I now emerge out of that old life, changed and perhaps ready to be the girl I always meant to be.

The tug to leave this place started some time ago but it was weak compared to my enjoyment of the place, the comfort I felt in its security. Comforts, that’s all lot of what this place was about. Then the balance of that, of my enjoyment and that pull, it started to tip.

The need to leave, to change, to become was outweighing the happy, the familiar, the expected. Expected by me of myself as I let myself identify with the rest of the world, to let that part of me that is of the mundane reign and enjoy the enjoyable things in life.

I tip and I let go.

Second to last night in one of the two biggest markers of this chrysalis time. And the other may be bigger, but lacks the dramatic thrust of this one to me. Of the me-who-was. Her life. It is a-changing. The sail is set, the moorings pulled, the roller coaster tumbles down the far side in joyous abandon to gravity.

Held framed in trust by all that I am, have become, blossomed into. Trusting myself and in all that I am, no part left out, to do what I need, to manage and to dance.

Dance the manage.

Dance the tipping.

Dance the deepest, truest essence of who you are and She is there and He walks by your side.

It’s all about dancing, didn’t you know?

Old Lives

Today I visited someone I haven’t seen in years. An old mentor, no pun intended.

I see now , my life changed, the branch in the road, and the freedom I have claimed.

In ten years she has spun into a dance with her antithesis, her nemesis in flesh. A woman in opposition to all my old mentor holds dear.

The conflict has taken root in old losses, or so I believe, and it has flourished. It nourishes in bitter twists of familiarity. It is embraced for its definition of boundaries, its comfort in the emptiness.

It has become a core piece of her world, a focal point to be shared, the story of life to be told.

Is bitter comfort, not yet still comforting? Does it matter what sees us through the night?

I believe it does. Yet that belief is in degrees, to the best that we each can attain. Always we can reach for more (and sometimes we need to sit on our heels and *reflect*). We can be more, for always we are becoming. Or we can settle into a pattern of predictability and certainty, an old pair of uncomfortable shoes that we have adjusted to as much as they adjust to us.

I am happier for the road I have taken.

Barefoot and dancing. Sharp stones scrape my heels, my toes dug into soft earth. Living.

Next Life Crisis

You heard the term here first! LOL

Screw the mid-life crisis and the quarter-life crisis, let’s just call them our next life crises.

What do I mean? Well, it’s just what it sounds like, I’m trying to decide what to be next. We go through many transitions in our lifetime, the obvious ones of entering the workforce, the quarter & mid-life crises of whether we’re doing the best thing for us, retirement. Let’s not forget puberty, major relationships, etc.

I think we have more of them than we used to, or than our parents had. It was one mid-life crisis. Now it’s a regular change-over event, a re-inventing of self from one set of circumstances to the next.

I evolve spiritually, the rest of my world attempts to evolve. Because the more I change on the inside, the bigger the discrepancy between who I truly am and what I do. And the greater that divide, the more intense my cognitive dissonance.

Hehehe, fun to use that phrase. Perhaps it’s spiritual dissonance. Or just personal dissonance.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what career to move myself over to, in order to reduce this dissonance. And then figure out how would I do it? How do I switch practical paths? The mundane world isn’t as easy to shift zones in as the spiritual one. I can’t just make a decision and do/study/practice something else. There’s this thing called a job, and it pays me (rather well, actually), and that puts a roof over my head, pays for food, clothes, pets. Things that can’t just be tossed aside because I feel like doing something different.

So I’m working on it. Planning and figuring out where I’m going to go and how I’m going to get there.

My Next Life crisis.

You know the best part of the phrase? It’s completely open-ended on how many times you can go through one in a single lifetime. Yippee? lol.

Happy changing!

Saturn

Much Love…and Who We Could Be

For all of you who keep checking in on me, so much love your direction! I know I’ve been very quiet. Vewy quiet, though I haven’t been hunting wabbits, I swear! In fact, yesterday I was accused, oh so sweetly and gently, mind you, of becoming a hermit.

A semi-fair accusation, I must admit. Given that I’ve been trapped on my couch (I’m sitting up as I type this because lying down and typing is an exercise in aggravation) and up to so little, it’s been pretty easy to put off blogging and, realistically, all kinds of human interaction.

Add in the brain mush that resulted from all the pain and drugs, and I really didn’t feel like blogging. After all, what was I going to say? That I’m still recovering? Still suffering pain? Oooh, I’m off drugs now? This is not the type of thing I find interesting to share. So I’ve stayed quiet. (As for the friend anti-socialness, that’s probably a result of all of this plus the mindless distraction of reading & tv. Easier to vegemetate than to interact with real, live humans.)

I think my brain is coming back. Sssshhhhhh. We don’t want to scare it away. 🙂 So hopefully you’ll be hearing from me more often. Hope. It’s an enduring yet elusive thing. But that’s a topic for a different day.

Instead, the topic of the day is something I tweeted this past weekend. I asked “To become your dream self, you have to say farewell to who you are now. Is it worth it? Would you do it?”

And I got some great replies. Ranging from others who are asking themselves this type of question to the other extreme of being content with their current self and feeling no need to seek out their dream self (as that would be too much like living in a movie ((a fabulous comment!)) ).

The origin of the conversation arises, naturally, from my own personal contemplation. I’ve had a large amount of time for such thinking endeavours (though less than it would seem given the limits to said thinking), some of which I’ve actually used. The specific that triggered this instance of this train of thought (I’ve had it before) arose from dealing with my food issues.

I lost a dozen pounds during my incarceration (sounds better than illness, doesn’t it?). Turns out that you can counter a complete lack of exercise and even movement by an even larger lack of food. Between the pain and drugs I just wasn’t hungry, and it hurt too much to get food, and so I lost weight. Then I was able to move again and got off the drugs and rediscovered the joys of tasty food. Okay, so I was treating myself. 🙂 And the weight went back on. It’s been a see-saw which ultimately led me to contemplate my issues with food.

But that isn’t today’s topic, per se. Instead I’m focusing on a particular aspect of the situation that generalizes to many other aspects of life.

Obviously I have something of a preferred ideal in mind when it comes to my weight. I also have a preferred relationship that I would like to have with food. But my reactions to food are too often emotionally based which, as you may know if you’ve ever tangled with your own emotional demons, are nasty trixy things to combat.

So I have this idea/dream/preferred (yes, all ranges apply) version of myself when it comes to food. There’s that version of me. And then there’s me. There is distance between the two.

There are a select number of dream me’s that are at some distance from my reality. And the gap between the two would seem to be a simple matter of choice, will and effort.

Ha!

Behind all three of those things lurks desire. And deep within desire is our emotional history and all the other desires that conflict with the supposedly easy and obvious one of becoming the person we dream of being.

And the more hidden the desire and emotional history is, the harder it is to overcome with any other more conscience desire that we have in mind.

Ha! again.

Desire that we have in mind. Desire doesn’t lurk in the mind. It may be informed by it, but desire is in our blood, our sinews, our bones and in our emotions and thus in our subconscious.

I believe that our cultural focus on the mind limits us in matters of the heart and soul. But that’s just my opinion.

Anyhow, there is this gap between who I dream of being and who I am, that is ultimately supported by some internal need of mine to continue to be the me I am now. This need can also be fear based, because changing from the known to the unknown (after all, we only have a concept of what that dream self in that dream life is like) is scary, so is the act of leaving that which brings us some strange level of comfort or satisfaction (if it didn’t,we would have ditched the behaviour ages ago).

And then there is the death of the I-of-now. In an easy, happy world, the change towards the dream self is gradual and you just look back one day and realize that you are not the person you used to be. But sometimes the change gets so focussed in that to go from old to new requires a release of I-of-now, a death as it were, and that, that is very hard indeed.

Thus leading to my original question “To become your dream self, you have to say farewell to who you are now. Is it worth it? Would you do it?” We are very attached to who we are now, and rightly so! This is who we are. Where we find our loves, our joys and our sorrows. Not easy to simply leave behind. It’s easy to talk about, just like it’s easy to talk about switching jobs or packing up and moving away. But the actual doing? That’s a horse of an entirely different colour.

Great kudos and power to you who are doing just that! I’m still a-struggling, but that’s part of life, too.

Well, that’s my $10.50 on the matter. For today. Apparently if I don’t vent thoughts now and again, I burst out with a profusion of inanity.

Much love to all.

Blessings of the deep and wild to you and yours.

~Saturn, the Abysmal Witch.

Changing Direction

I’m sure I’m not the only one.

There are days when I wish I was other than where I am.

Days when I look at what I owe (gulp!), or what job I do (sigh), or even just assess my general level of happiness with the particulars of my life and I come up wanting.

Wanting more. Wanting different. Wanting something other than what is.

And somedays I dream about the magic solution. You know the one, just wave the magic wand and have the knight in shining armour ride up to rescue me or the lottery website to shout out “yes, it’s you! you’ve won!”. It’s not very practical, but it can be emotionally satisfying. Until the water in the tub gets cold and it’s time to pull the plug and dry off and get back to the practicalities of daily living.

The answer of what to do is pretty obvious. It’s not even hugely difficult.

But it’s not at all sexy. Or fun. And the very simple steps it requires may spell the ultimate defeat.

It’s living life differently.

It’s not going out to dinner so often or not buying that fun gadget so that more money can be applied to debt.

It’s choosing the carrot sticks and pickled beets (okay, I adore pickled beets but some change is fun and tasty!) and saying no to the chocolate cake. Not every day, perhaps, but most days. Where most days = almost all.

It’s doing the small thing today that contributes to the future you want.

It’s NOT saying “I’ll start tomorrow”.

It’s about living today the life you want tomorrow.

And you know what? Sometimes living that life you think you want teaches you that you really don’t want it after all.

Being slim and fit requires (for those of us not endowed with a high metabolism and high athletic ability) EFFORT! Daily commitment to eating right and exercise. Daily. Every day. As in that is your life. You don’t get to the slim & fit by not living the lifestyle of the slim and fit. Just doesn’t work that way. Alas and alack.

I don’t get to be debt free by spending money rather than saving it and applying it to my debt. Just doesn’t work that way.

Our dreams don’t come true unless we live their lifestyle now, as in today.

And sometimes when we live that lifestyle we discover that we really don’t like it.

If I don’t like the lifestyle needed for my dream then I’d best be changing my dream, hadn’t I? After all, the dream is an image I’m attempting to create. If I don’t like what it takes to live that way, why do it? Time to think of something else that will make me happy, to dream of, where dreaming of means actively taking steps to make it happen.

Or maybe my dream is my life right now. Ummmm, no. I have more dreams than this. Time to go make them happen.

To change direction in life doesn’t require a winning lottery ticket, a rich and generous uncle, or meeting the perfect person at Starbucks. It requires taking a step today that will, if followed up with similar steps every successive day, take you somewhere different.

And hopefully somewhere you wanted to go.

Where are your steps leading you today?

~Abysmal Witch