I’m having trouble putting my finger on how I’m feeling presently, so I’m going to write to see if I can figure it out.  I’ve been spending a lot of time doing what feels like gathering up loose threads of my life that need reweaving back into my life tapestry.  At the same time, I’ve been working on three book projects that all tell my Story, but in different ways: my personal memoir, my family cultural and religious genealogy, and a semi-fictional rendering of the last eight years.  The books themselves are loose threads dropped in the past that I am simply picking back up.

And yet despite ‘picking up’ these loose threads, I feel unburdened in a way I don’t quite understand, as well as unhurried, which is new.  I’ve been feeling this immense tension and pressure to hurry ever since The Madness in 2019 (or before), and that’s gone now.

I think that’s also due to timing, which has been quite synchronistic with dates from my awakening eight years ago.  I really do feel like I’ve circled, or more accurately, spiraled back around to a similar point in time and dimension that’s allowing me to end one phase of life and begin a new one, a repeating theme in my life right now.  It’s hard not to ignore the fact that this phase of my transformation perfectly aligned with the passage of Uranus through Taurus.

There’s also a pretty big sense of relief that a door is closing on certain things.  Like I don’t have to worry about the proverbial piano dropping on my head without a moment’s notice.  I’m feeling more relaxed overall, like I’ve been running for a long time on some level and now I don’t have to anymore.

I also feel much more put together and whole, like everything about my life is actually in one accessible place for the first time in a long time, probably since before my son was born in 2003.  That was two Jupiter cycles ago (expansion, growth, abundance), perhaps that means good things over the next year, including a better relationship with him.  

I just know I keep stumbling across bits of myself from the past that I’ve actually kept and have value for, such as my Journey book from Spiritual Nomad (search my blog for that term to see older posts on it).  I also made a new digital guru board, also from Spiritual Nomad.  It was interesting to see how the faces changed over time.  The only two that are the same are Trent Reznor and Neil Peart, but I still need to add Socrates and Plato, at least, perhaps Aristotle as well, as those three were also on the old board.  I don’t even remember who else was there, except maybe Stephen King.  An odd choice for a ‘dispelled of shadows’, but his stories usually have a relatively happy ending in which evil is vanquished.

This time the board had, in addition to my two favorite musicians: the psychiatrist Carl Jung, Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Zen Buddhist priest Thich Nhat Hanh, JRR Tolkien, and Keanu Reeves, in addition to Doctor Who.  I know the latter isn’t a real person, per se, but The Doctor has certain dispelled many shadows in my life and given me a beacon to follow when all of the other lights in my life had dimmed.

It’s been very interesting to be on this portion of my Journey since about last August when I started to condense and flense my life.  First there was the organization and unpacking of the boxes detailed in The Alchemist, then the getting rid of all of that unwanted and unneeded stuff.  Assembling all of my music in one place followed that, then I was going through photographs and activating old memories.  Every time I pursued a completing activity, I felt like I was adding an important piece to a puzzle.

Then there was a sha-manic cycle in March, as I’ve come to call them, that resulted in the tying off and snipping of various emotional connections to the past, and now I feel yet more whole and condensed in a way I can’t quite describe: it’s totally foreign.  The closest comparison I have is when I was 23, happy, and successfully independent.  Since my cycle, my husband and I have been having quite a bit of fun in the bedroom.  I can tell I underwent a measure of healing of some kind that repaired some very old wounds, it’s not just an artifact of what Western medicine would just call “mania”.

Then I picked up Spiritual Nomad again, and once again I have that feeling of having re-established energetic or temporal continuity in an important way that I didn’t realize I was missing as I do the exercises of the life path, the guru board, and the Journey book.  I filled in life events on my life path since the time of making it in April 2012, but not before reading it first and once again being rather astonished at the preponderance of varying kinds of suffering throughout my life.  I’m honestly not sure how I’m still here sometimes.  Spite?  Stubbornness?  *shrug*

In any case, I am not just all in one physical piece, but (mostly) in one mental piece, one spiritual piece (though not yet a fully integrated system), and one whole but very closely guarded soul.  I am also all in one physical place with everything I own in active use for the first time in ten years.  Whatever began in my life in 2016 with moving from one house to another in Austin seems to be drawing to a close, or at least resolving in some way (she says at the risk of jinxing it).

As for my spiritual system being intact but not quite fully integrated, it did occur to me that it’s become much easier most of the time to negotiate with myself, as it were.  It used to be very difficult, and I was often left with the impression that I was arguing with a 3-year-old.  Well, I was, and everyone knows you can’t argue with a 3-year-old, you just give them three options: #1, #2, or nothing.  That meant a lot of inner tantrums, which translated into a cranky adult.

I didn’t know how to give her what she wanted, a father, so I gave her the best family I could: the rest of my Inner Selves, from the ages of 7 to 46, with the 23-year-old serving as The Captain, the one in charge of all of the others who has their shit together (that would be me: my body isn’t 23, but my Spirit is).  Fictionally, you could equate her to Ellen Ripley from ‘Aliens’ or Sarah Conner from ‘Terminator’ (thank you James Cameron).  In the course of having my 3-year-old self ‘hang out’ with everyone else in the inner living room, she seems to have either grown up or integrated.  I feel her energy, but I don’t see her.

I’ve noticed it’s gotten easier to negotiate with myself, and it occurred to me that my active inner psyche is older now, at least 7 years old, but also simultaneously the 11-year-old and 14-year-old.  They’re like three siblings separated by seven years (I’ll have to look into the numerical significance of that) with the 11-year-old right in the middle.  They like doing the same things despite their age separation: the 7-year-old is old enough to think hanging out with the 14-year-old is cool, the latter isn’t too old to hang out with the young one, and the 11-year-old is happy with them both.

I’ve been trying to give my younger inner selves the things they need or want, which until recently I wasn’t quite clear on.  I had my IFS spreadsheet from two years ago, but hadn’t looked at it in a while and was wrapped up with other stuff.  Then during this most recent cycle, I ran into my most damaged inner child (age 7) and my Higher Self asked if I had anything comforting I could give them.  I suddenly thought of my stuffed CatBus from My Neighbor Totoro, which was perfect because it’s a cat and it’s a sentient bus that rescues lost little kids.  She wants her stuffed animal collection back, so I’m going to try to do that to the best of my ability.  I had a LOT of stuffed animals when I gave them away at age 24.  Dumb decision, but I didn’t think I’d ever have children of my own, or a reason of my own to want them again.

Then my nephew brought a jar of peanut butter home that turned out to be exactly what my inner child wanted: Skippy crunchy peanut butter.  It’s even low-sugar so it’s diabetic friendly.  I practically squee’d.  Mom would never buy Skippy (‘too much sugar’) or crunchy peanut butter (she didn’t like it despite NOT BEING THE ONE EATING IT, bitch).  So now I’m eating fucking crunchy Skippy peanut butter and loving it.  I think I should allow myself some sort of cereal I was never allowed to eat.  Corn Pops!!!  I used to eat Corn Pops all the time, I’m not sure why I stopped.  It was very definitely something Mom would have NEVER let me eat, so every time I eat them, it’s like a big ‘fuck you’ to her.  I love it, it makes them taste better.  Mmmm, spite, it’s what’s for breakfast.

Those three aspects of myself have been enjoying working on Spiritual Nomad together.  All three of them seem to think it’s fun.  They like my art supplies, some of which are watercolor crayons, the perfect art supply for kids: you get to color AND paint!  They’ve also been having fun shopping, which is something I’ve indulged in lately at my two favorite clothing websites, Torrid and Midnight Hour (all goth, all the time).  I have some nice new dresses and the best bras I’ve ever owned to go with them, and several pairs of gothy, witchy print leggings that I call my ‘huggings’, because they make me feel like I’m wearing hugs on my legs.

I keep getting messages from the Universe in the form of memes, quotes, and other sources that it’s time for me to start building my life, that the time of shattering, scattering, gathering, cocooning, dissolving, and reforming is over and now it’s time to take the cleansed pieces of what I collected along the way and put it all together into something new so I can fully emerge into my new life.  I sense I am not yet done with the alchemical process of transformation, that there is another step to go through.  I’m looking forward to it, as I am to the lead-up process of continuing to explore and deepen myself with music, photos, art, and other creative pursuits.