I am just letting the words fly with misspellings, lower case errors, run-on sentences, all sorts of mess. I am not a finished product, but one feeling her way along the path. There is a tendency to only write in a I’ve figure this out sort of way for me at times, but what i find more interesting is what each moment may look like. Here I am standing in a certain spot while taking steps, full of questions. I am not pressed against the wall of decision making – I am staring back at my own naked face in the mirror of this rectangle wordpress box.
change is in the air. We go from hot to cooler, overhead to slanting sunlight and I project this shift to my own shifting seasons, as a mother, as a person. i’ve known no other way to be than a mother who merged with my children – not in a controlling way but in a borderless existence of OURS, not mine. My room has been open all this time; My clothes, my shoes, my jewelry, my bed, my skin, my nutrients, all fair game. My girls psychically curl up inside me even still; it seems to me as if they remember the start of their journeys here inside my body. They push on me the way they push against themselves. They look into my face, my words, my silences to reflect their existence. And yet I can sense the change of seasons; as the morning light recedes, they too are moving into their self-contained vessels; they move into darkness all their own, an inner seeding, toward a winter before a dawning of light and sprouting come spring.
as this season moves closer still , and these beings transcend each stage, my space is being returned to me in micro increments, almost indiscernibly so until I stop and see where I am now compared to a year ago and a year before that – a sky as large as montana is brimming if I squint. Here it comes but i do not know how to repurpose for this planet at this age in this body with this lowgrade fever of ambivalence I seem to stew myself in. the joys i experience alone are so simple, so strange, so lonely – while I crave no one. I wonder if i can sustain myself as a lone, wondering weirdo. Have you seen any job ads for Lone Wandering Wondering Weirdo? My resume reads: I will walk in nature, clearing my mind, for the rest of humanity for a modest income. 🙂
i fantacize about walks in dense and hidden woods, chilly beaches, rocky cliffs. I march into brambles and sticker bush zones for the novelty and for the solitary nature spots such as these provide. I enjoy my interaction with strangers more than I do acquaintances. the smile at the car repair shop or with the bag boy seem more poignant than with people I am supposed to know. I do not fit any molded role anymore. I am my own path and it is solo. it seems to me that taking this solo path is always the path of eccentricity. I no longer can rein in the outlying of my personality. I have no role model, no clear expectation of what happens next.
My 5 year plan is to listen to the rain when it starts falling, to stop what I am doing and try to hear who is talking to me, to welcome the visitor who appears in the costume of cat, tree branch trimmer, package delivery door bell. The life as a stage art is A Happening, a flow of unpredictability. I am not intending anything but flow – I allow a softening of myself like Pooh bear – I hang my hat up on the simple rack – I sign up for the back seat and trust the scriptwriter for the rest. And yet I still ask, is this wrong? Should I map it out, chart my course, steer my ship? Where does the balance lie between flow and directioning?
Charleston rivers are full of abandoned boats, pulled off their moors and washed up on the marshy shores; some of them have sunken to the bottom of channels, leaving danger for boats passing by. Some have washed up together and form a jumble of wreck and loss for all to see. I once kayaked over to a graveyard of boats and listened to the eerie creaking the wind and water played through abandonment.
Is emptying myself out of steering my own vessel the same as choosing to wash ashore? Am I not taking responsibility for my journey? Do I need to plan and trust both? Or do I trust and know that whatever I could plan doesn’t match a fraction of what is possible? But if I do not plan, how do I avoid getting washed up on shore? Or steered by some other ship master who may jump aboard my ship?
I have ridden the edge of this particular wave of paradox for years. I think it is a mind trick. I think I am clued in when I trust the moment to present to me what i need. To anticipate or project into the future is not of the moment, but of the mind. But from here I often am not sure. It seems that always the answer to paradox is an adjustment of the dial of distance. From up close, it appears either/or. From a step or two back, the paradox disappears and the millions of options appear in every grey scale between black and white.
Perhaps… I’ll let you know what I find from the bottom of the channel, or from the graveyard, or from the open sea – after all is over, and I am gone. Perhaps there is a knowing on down the way – but by then, who cares? the next horizon is so alluring and this world is but a dream barely remembered in the new dawning.
mirror mirrormirrormirrormirage
Life as Improv 
I get a kick out of spontaneous conversation and laughter with strangers than people I am acquainted with. It’s a real pleasure and it’s happened more frequently in the last year as I’ve been on this awareness journey. Love this entry. love your style.
Perhaps the acquaintance relationships have constraints of roles where the interaction with strangers allows for the improvisation of the moment and flexibility provided by lack of definition. I am taking an improv class with a special topic of trust and it is so magical the way we can play with each other having worked on trusting so pointedly – makes me aware of the full potentiality of our relationships when we can be open to the moment and present with each other! The journey does become much more playful, it seems to me too!
“” I will walk in nature, clearing my mind, for the rest of humanity for a modest income. 🙂 “””
Wouldn’t that be lovely 🙂 I can relate!
Makes more sense to me than most jobs 🙂 Would be lovely!
It is a strange thing to write without answers..figuring out together..
Inspiring.
♡
So beautiful to walk along with questions with one such as you, Laurie. Thank you for giving me the space for questions and ponderings. xo!
xo!
Raw mama energy. I am feeling this bigtime! It is such a selfless act, opening yourself so completely to your girls, allowing them to have that safety and comfort, and then allowing them to slowly make the journey into their own beings. Getting yourself back, how wonderful and bittersweet. I feel like, when I get a little back, I am happy to reclaim myself, but also sad to see a part of them go, and finally, I don’t really know what to do with myself sometimes when I have the piece back! What is it for now? I am feeling this in your writing, and I love how you are just allowing it to be, to flow on its own. It’s not such a big deal after all, just an experience a dream.
You capture it so well, wonderful and bittersweet and a moment of what the hell do I do now, haha 🙂 I steal moments here and there to connect with the souls who share so much and dig so deep with me here – but then I have to run out for drop offs and pick ups…I still am in the thick of activity, no matter what I sense on the horizon. Joyful wishes for hallow and samhain and pumpkin seed times to you! xo!m
xou.
http://seeingm.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/i-cant-figure-out-how/
Amazing representation of the 3 shifting souls sharing space here. Your connections through images which evoke and point leave me woozy 🙂 XO!
Wow, this post is splendid. I wanted to cut and paste so many sentences to tell you much I loved them, but really, I loved them all. I related to them. Thank you!
Oh, Kelly. Thank you so much for sharing the experiences with me here. I am running around, trying not to be a chicken with her head cut off, finding a few stolen moment finally here after the sun has gone down. I have set the task bar high for my own learning! Yay! I have had your latest post open on my computer a few days and am so excited to finally read it this evening. Much love to you! Marga
Wow. I felt so much in reading this post. I have been struck like a drum, and left resonating. One sensation was that of familiarity. Familiarity with the sensation of a life slipping incrementally, in tiny moments stolen from behind your back, into something unknown, more spacious, neither hot nor cold, something different, something for which we know not whether to yearn, to resist, or to simply crumble into. How to deal with this- fingers losing their grip on the edge of the cliff, the sky into which we are falling no longer really feeling like a pending disaster, feeling more like what’s next, perhaps even a delicious flight, yet climbing is what we have known. What about those people farther up the slope? Will a distance open up between us? What would that mean? And likewise, all our 5-Year Plans depend upon a form of time that we can no longer be certain exists. And then of course, the question, who is driving this bus? Should we grab hold of the wheel once again? Does it matter that the driver is invisible? If we don’t grab hold, will the primrose trail lead to our undoing? Will the world peopled by our past acquaintances, a world glued together by skins we are now shedding, rise back up and swallow us in the end? I think many of us share these questions, as beings staring into the sky that has snuck up behind us, and which has come to accept the gift of our falling free. Michael
Ah, so wonderful, your writing, Michael. You use language – yet I love how you stretch it out in new ways for such clear pointing! I see your words superimposed over my own in a song composed with sympathetic resonating drums! Your overlap loosens my fingers’ grip that much more, knowing the sensations are shared – Such a life journey is this in which we are ever leaping into new having to let go, shedding again and again while holding on to our old skin shyly feeling naked, craving flight, fearing freefall down into the depths. Ever grateful for your willingness to share in a vein so deep, nutrient rich, oxygenated, life giving! As the Bears are heading into their caves – you are emerging. 🙂 Healing vibrations sent your way!
Thanks, Marga. PS- the post I ended up writing today comes right out of our dialogue here. This is perhaps, the way of Creation, of beings resonating in the exchange of ideas in a way that gives rise to something altogether new. Right now, it is the rhapsody of joyous words, but I think there is something more behind all these words, and by that I mean I think there is a world, this “new dawning”, taking shape quietly behind the scenes, a world that needs to be carried by and within the human heart to be nourished. Simply by being ourselves, responding to what moves us, are we not as human beings in some way participating in a vast and creative sympathetic resonating?