It’s been just over six months since we relocated to the Pacific Northwest from Central Texas.  In many ways, I still feel in limbo, suspended between the two places because there are still a few tasks to be undertaken before we’re truly settled.  I keep chastising myself for not being fully moved in because I’m comparing my situation to times I moved as a child, but times are different now.  The effort it took to get us here sapped us of a lot of mental and physical energy that we’re only just getting back.  Our current goal is to have the house all in place by Thanksgiving: an early Christmas present to ourselves.

Overall we’re greatly enjoying our time here.  Summer was glorious compared to Texas.  While there were some hot days, it wasn’t weeks on end of relentless heat like it is there.  I’ve had to slowly train myself not to fear the Sun: I still have a knee-jerk reaction to daylight to just stay indoors.  Here, unless it’s really hot, I just have to wear a hat to protect from the Sun.  Even when it is hot, we can still get outdoors by driving into the mountains or over to the coast, where it’s always about 20F cooler.  I always wanted to live somewhere I could drive to different landscapes in a relatively short period of time: now I do.

On a personal level, moving here has been very interesting for me.  I grew up in the Detroit area of Michigan before moving to Houston around age 10.  Northern weather was one of the things I missed the most about having to move, and now that I am back in northern climes, my inner child is quite delighted.  I keep catching these little snatches of distant, forgotten memories, induced by anything from the feel and temperature of the wind while out walking to the sensation of cool sheets on my fingers.  It’s like being transported back in time for a couple of seconds.

This all dovetails nicely with my trauma work in therapy.  I’ve been digging in the proverbial dirt for long enough that I’m really getting down to the root causes of some of my worst problems, root causes that stem from childhood largely.  I did a lot of logic-based therapy work when I was back in Texas, and now that I’ve moved to this place that reminds me of childhood, it seems it’s time to shift to more emotion-centered work.  I admit a great deal of trepidation regarding that.  My brain decided to shun emotional input a long time ago as a matter of survival, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen now that I’m asking it to at least crack that door open again.

Most of my current personal work involves figuring out who I am, because I’m not the same person I was a few years ago.  This has been a jarring process, because I still remember the Old Me and keep thinking I like the same things they did, and New Me doesn’t.  I keep thinking of movies I used to love and go to watch them and sometimes have to turn them off because there’s some element I no longer enjoy or tolerate, usually involving sex and violence.  I’m just a lot more sensitive now, so it’s much easier for me to place myself in the shoes of whoever is on the screen, and that’s not always a good thing.

Another thing I’m working on is spending less time sitting and thinking and more time living my life, whatever that looks like now.  It’s not that I’m not entitled to time thinking: I have a lot to think about from my nearly 51 years in life.  But I’m starting to feel like I’m wasting my time to a certain extent.  There are other things I’d like to be doing, like making more art and reading more books.  While those may seem like luxurious ways to spend one’s time, for me they can actually lead to even more fulfilling time spent doing things like writing.

Making sure my time is fulfilling is an important part of my work right now.  I’m a follower of the philosophy of thelema, a Greek word meaning “divine will”.  The philosophy is simple: everyone has a divine will and it’s our purpose in life to figure out what it is.  Discovering your divine will leads one to one’s Great Work, and that’s what I’m trying to figure out right now.  I have some ideas, but it’s like having a destination in mind without knowing how to get there, or if that’s even where you should be going.

Regrettably, the Western world is not friendly to those seeking to carve their own path, so there’s a lot of conflict between my Will and the demands of the “real world”.  However, I am largely incapable of doing things against my Will, which makes things like making money difficult.  Tight finances have been the only real damper on our new life, and it’s been a struggle to come up with ways to make ends meet that don’t involve me taking on things that are detrimental to my mental health.  I can’t be in denial that I have a disability that prevents me from doing certain things.

I feel I have what it takes to earn money with my art and writing, but I have to do it in such a way that I don’t suck the joy out of those things.  They have to be done for their own sake, not for the sake of capitalizing on them.  I’ve made this mistake before when I was a henna artist.  I used to adore doing henna, but within about a year of elevating (or lowering) my art to the level of doing business, I lost that adoration because I had turned it into work.  The purpose of my creativity is not to make money, it’s to continue learning about myself and the Universe.  If the products of that creative process happen to be lucrative, then that’s a bonus, not the goal.

I am looking forward to seeing what the next six months bring.  It’s Autumn and the leaves have been changing for at least a couple of weeks now.  It’s been nice to experience a real fall for the first time since I left Michigan 41 years ago.  It doesn’t snow here like it does where I grew up, but it will still be chilly and gray like I was used to growing up by Lake Erie, and the occasional snow day does occur.  If I do want snow, I just have to drive an hour or two into the Cascades and go for a snowshoe hike in the woods, which I am greatly looking forward to.  In fact, it snowed in the higher elevations just last weekend.

I remember writing a poem long ago in my twenties that I am sure is lost by now.  It was called “Metamorphosis” and told a story of my desire to sit beneath a tree beginning in the Autumn, allowing the falling leaves to cover me.  Then the snow came and covered the leaves.  Finally Spring comes and I sprout from beneath the rotting leaves into something new that blooms to full life in the Summer.  I sort of feel like that right now.  I keep feeling like someone new, and I sense that feeling will be more intense after Winter passes.  I wonder what I’ll look like.