I can’t help but notice the date, which is almost exactly 8 years since my Awakening first began ramping up.  I find it fitting that I seem to have recently undergone a Second Awakening, one that is serving to wrap up the First Awakening as well as The Madness.  I feel as though I was spread out and stretched thin across nearly a decade for a while there, but the Second Awakening seems to have repaired that problem through a lot of shamanic work on my part as well as that of my Spirit Healers: retrieving and healing missing soul parts, extracting damaged parts and putting them back, plus the processes of integration and fusion.

I feel much better than I did at Imbolc, which turned out to be the beginning of a ramp-up to the Second Awakening.  Unfortunately, awakenings bear too much of a resemblance to insanity in a society where mystical forces are considered heretical, demonic, or imaginary.  Hence, there’s been a lot of tension between my husband and myself.  I keep trying to reassure him that this episode/awakening is actually wrapping up all that stuff from The Madness and the First Awakening and was far less intense, but he doesn’t seem to be buying it.  I don’t blame him, all of that stuff was…extremely unpleasant, to put it politely.  Anything that reminds him of that time makes him very anxious, to say the least (and me, as well).

In light of all of this inner work I’ve done lately, I’ve decided to take a year off from as much as possible.  I was becoming overwhelmed by calendar reminders and notifications.  My phone was constantly blowing up and it was making me nuts.  So I contacted everyone at the church necessary to let them know I was pulling back on all of my commitments and obligations, and deleted everything I possibly could from my calendar.  It is now gloriously empty save for my biweekly therapist visit.  I have already made two passes through my inbox to unsubscribe from things I never read.  I now have a hard rule about not keeping things only because I somehow feel obligated to read them or use them.  Consequently, I get a lot less email than I used to, and I love it.  Same with notifications.  I severely restricted sources of notifications so my phone isn’t blowing up every 5 fucking minutes.  It is now a tool that I control, not the other way around.  Now both my physical life as well as my digital life are much more controlled.  I’ve become somewhat ruthless when it comes to how much chaos I’ll allow in the house by others (or myself).

In the same vein of pulling back on time commitments, I don’t attend book group anymore (for now), I’ve withdrawn from the gardening group as facilitator and organizer, and I don’t participate in CUUPS much either.  It’s all part of the minimizing process I began last year when I finally began unpacking the last of the boxes.  It just feels vitally important to my continued healing and growth to focus on myself right now.  My life has never really been mine, and I want it to be.  I’ve spent my entire life having to focus on other people, even as a young child.  I am 54 years old, and with the possible exception of my mid-to-late 20s, I have never had an opportunity for my life to be truly mine. 

Which is to say that all of the above are a part of a greater process of minimizing, winnowing, distilling, and tempering my life until all I have left is what I truly care about or must keep out of necessity.  By the same token, I’ve spent the last 8 years in Deep Thought, and I’m pretty sick of it by now.  I want to be done with thinking all the time and replace some of that thinking with just…being.  Not to mention some ‘doing’, rather than sitting.  I have plenty to do now that the house is all put together.

I also want to put a great deal of the last 8 years behind me.  It’s time I did what I’ve done to the first 46 years of my life and cherry-pick what I want from these last 8 years, and leave the rest behind.  I’m closing the Volume of Life that encompasses the previous 54 years of my life, with the exception of what I’ve chosen to carry with me into my future, however long it may be.  After nearly 8 years of weekly or biweekly therapy, I’m ready to move forward with my freshly flensed and refurbished life.  Plus, in the words of the song “Bloodletting” by Concrete Blonde, “I’ve got a lot to think about”.