This current post is far more...detailed...here you go:
The Full Moon is, like so many other things, a Door. It swings open; it swings shut. I have spent many Full Moons working with, and working within, these Doors. I never like to open Doors for others, but yesterday I had to open one for R’s dog Shadow. Shadow passed last night, into the next world. He went with peace, with dignity, and with grace. He also went w a smile, as if he were a younger dog again and it was time for him to chase rabbits. Maybe he’ll even catch some now. I know he is no longer in pain, but we miss him dearly here. He was more than just a good friend.
It is not with a somber heart that I greet this day; it is with a light and open heart. Death is not an ending; it is only a beginning.
The Full Moon. I have listened to the whispers at the nape of my neck for long years, those soft sibilant seductions stroking my flesh. I do not ignore them. It may take me a bit to reach out to fulfill them, but I always move towards these goals.
The whispers have been getting louder lately. More persistent. They are not things that I have never heard, nor never desired. To say they are the same old, same old, however, would be misleading.
There is the Rescue Ranch, which comes nearer and nearer every year. There is the drawing and painting. There is the writing. There is the growing things. There are the animals. There is the spinning. There is knitting and crocheting. There is sewing.
If you’ve kept up w my blog for years, you’ll know, I have been trying to get out of the Priesthood, for lack of a better term, as my everyday life, for a long time. I am not about to drop everything, as healing is in my DNA, but I have wanted for years to shift the focus away from my healing work and back to my artistic work, back towards my green lifestyle work. I have also wanted to focus more on my family, have more children, firmly anchor us as a family and build upon the foundations and become the rock that I try to be in the shifting currents of the world.
Strangely enough, as we were going through the houses to gather things to donate to the abused women’s charity that came for their pick-up this morning, I kept thinking to myself, if I lost it all, what would that mean to me? What would I really miss?
See, my one year anniversary is coming up, the time to take stock of everything. In early April. Nearly a year ago, well, fine, more than that, but the ‘official’ date is in early April (more on that as it approaches). In November, 2008, we had that accident. We almost lost everything then. The car. All our stuff. All my writing. Anything that might have been important to me…was not actually lost. The most important things to me…were and are…my children and the people who love us. My dog was safe. The dog traveling w me was scared, but who can blame him? The bird was ok. My daughter was fine, save for a small bump on her head. The rest, it was just stuff. In the end, I could have lost all of it and still been happy, still been alive. Even now, as I watch one friend pass on, I am struck thinking, one day it will happen to all of us. There is no way around that.
Another thing that came up as I was sorting through clothing and whatnot at my own house to donate was one question: why am I doing this? Every time I would open a drawer, look in a cabinet, whatever, I would ask myself, why am I doing this? It had nothing to do w why am I donating this…that answer is simple. One, because I want to help those less fortunate and two, because I need to pare down and stop holding on to things that really do not mean anything to me. It’s a win-win scenario there. I lessen my load and my burden, while helping someone else who has nothing, but needs so much. My real question came more from the …am I getting rid of this because I don’t want or need it…or am I getting rid of it because I think someone else would want me to get rid of it?
R always spicks on me about my jeans. I don’t like plain old regular blue jeans. I want jeans w stripes, or with embroidery, or that are made differently than any other pair. I wear jeans that have leather laces up both sides. I wear jeans that have fabric cut-outs in places. My favorite pair of jeans is an old pair of men’s jeans that I found in the thrift store for $1 that are worn and thin and velvety soft, with a button fly and weird bleach stains here and there. The jeans have character. I like that. I will buy weird things because they are weird and I like it. I went through my jeans and pulled out several pairs of jeans, some with purposeful bleach patterns, some with embroidery, yada yada, and every time I pulled out a pair of jeans to get rid of, I stopped and thought…am I doing this for me…or am I doing it because R would like it if I did it? Am I doing this because I am trying to fit into some sort of mold that is not me…or am I genuinely doing it because I want to do it for me?
You see, I have spent more than 30 years living my life for someone, anyone, else but me. That is truly what is precious about my life right now. I can and do live for me, not because some man thinks I should behave this way or dress that way. Not because society says I should do this or I should do that. I have had the worst issues since we moved out of WV, trying to figure out exactly who I am and what I want. You would think I would know, having lived my own life for so long, but honestly, I never allowed myself to actually live my own life.
The Rescue Ranch is something I used to think about now and then, when I was the walking dead, working as a telephone operator, stuck w T of the wandering pants. I always planned to buy property and have a farm of some sort, after he died. I knew I would never have a life of my own, until after his demise. He would never allow that. Now, with hindsight, I see he could not allow me to have my own life because it would have interfered so with his. But I made the choices that kept me there, even though I thought I was doing it because I loved him. I allowed him to abuse and torment me. I could have left. I should have left. A million times over. I don’t bother thinking about what might have been if I had had the courage to walk away from him at any point before we got married, before we took the SBC jobs, before we moved to St Louis. The seed of the Ranch has always been there. I’ve never really acted upon it.
Now I can. Now I am. I get lost in the wonder of being allowed to do things sometimes.
By the way, every item I got rid of, every piece of clothing I purged from my wardrobe, every dish, every skein of yarn, every knitting needle and bit of fabric I donated, I did it all for me. One step at a time, I am reclaiming my own true self by pulling away all these fibrous layers of stuff with which I have long wrapped myself to protect me from…me…trying to please others over myself.
There is nothing actually that surprising about the things worming to the surface of late. All these ideas have been here lying dormant all along.
What is so spectacular at the moment is how I am embracing the ideas, be it one at a time, be it at a snail’s pace, whichever way things come to be, but I am more than willing to see me, to embrace me. That is the best thing. That is something I did not count on.
The picture of the Fortune Cat on my dreamboard is merely a representation of how I feel about the coming future. Ever so lucky. Good things are already on my plate. More good things are coming, even now as we speak. I am thoroughly enjoying this new round of nesting, the one where I am not building and clinging to my nest, but rather sorting out the wheat from the chaff and letting all the unnecessary things float away, on whatever breeze will have them.
My only real goal is to hit the miscellaneous boxes that await in my basement. You know the miscellaneous boxes. After you’ve moved, you have this box where you keep sticking all this little stuff that doesn’t really have any other place to go, but you don’t want to let go of it and you don’t really have a use for it, but maybe one day you will, so you hold on to all this stuff in this box…well, I have a box like that for every move I’ve made since we left AR. Sometimes I have shifted items around, changed things from one box to another. I have even gone through the boxes, pondering what to do w everything, more than once after every move. Now I have I think two, maybe three boxes of miscellaneous garbage sitting in my basement, waiting for me to do something with all that stuff. My goal is to go through it without mercy and to toss everything that does not have a purpose…if there is no room to keep it, it’s gone.
This is more than just preparing to move in w R permanently, in one big house, rather than the way we’re living w him now, between the two houses. This is my own nesting process. I feel like a silk worm coming out of her cocoon.
I like this. The world is my oyster these days. I like that.
Peace.
