friday afternoon update! 14: digging in the dirt

down the rabbit hole

oh foolish me. i thought this was the week to go through old stuff, material stuff, pieces of paper stuffed into paper sacks, bills and notices and stuff like that. you know, george carlin type stuff. yeah right. and why do i keep forgetting that everything material is a link to something…mysterious, intangible, otherworldly?

so i duly started in on my stuff. and made some decent progress.

• organized my email and got my various inboxes down to less than 15 marked as unread total, and all of those impersonal messages that i need a bit more time to act on.
• set up an easy workable solution to making sure all my bills get paid on time and all my bank accounts have the necessary balances to covers the paying of said bills.
• went through and organized the first of my three big sets of paper backlog, starting with the most recent first, under the premise that attending to message number 3 may preclude the necessity of even reading messages 1 & 2.

two days in and all seemed right in my world.

dunfordism alert

in accordance with some of the events of this week, all a result of digging in the dirt, letting the future take care of itself, ceasing all efforts at forward progress, and diving into unfinished business, i am herewith ceasing the censoring of my language. the dunfordisms shall fly. the pg rating will be shattered like so many pieces of plaster. c’est la vie. 

and then the pot began to simmer

after two days of progress things began to slow down. the proverbial flood of molasses. little things just took forever, or didn’t happen at all, or went in reverse direction. wifi began to fritz out, cutting in and out 5 times a minute…my housing situation began to shiver and shake, and the irony of being homeless in one’s own home, and not knowing if i was a prisoner or a refugee to be…who is number 1?

all i really wanted to do was make some forward progress on my back pages project…is there some irony here? was this desire to make progress getting in my way?

so i gave up, picked rowan up at school and went off to music class and then hung out with him all evening, doing absolutely nothing besides making dinner, washing up, brushing teeth, reading books, getting him to sleep.

and deep inside, something was fermenting, preparing itself to surface. the depths had been disturbed and something had awakened, alerting what john lilly dubbed the cosmic coincidence control center as to just what was needed to help wrap my physical, energetic, emotional, and mental aspects around an astounding fact:

i am not a number. i’m a free man!

easier said than done!

so blocked from moving forward, and blocked from moving backward, nothing left to do i suppose other than to just create some chaos right where i am standing. so thursday begins with a big shift in plans. what was to be a free day to take care of business, becomes a day to take rowan to playgroup and then whatever i can think of until 3pm, when i would get to cram an 8 hour day into 2 hours. that’s fine i thought…until my car got towed and i literally could not move forward or backward or anywhere at all except into the warmth of a school building to wait for a ride to the tow lot.

during which process i somehow manage to ignite a firestorm that once again threatens…

okay some beans of the spilt sort

my son is three and a half. i have a daughter who is 12, and whom i haven’t seen since she was…three and a half. the pot is boiling in the home that may or may not be my home. and i am wondering…

what the fuck happened to me when i was three and a half?

back to that firestorm

okay…ugliness and all that sort of crap that i won’t get into here except to say that it’s ugly when it happens. and my tendency in those moments is to yell and storm away. hence my homelessness/quasi-homelessness.

and if you’ve never felt compelled to leave the home of your child…to choose between your own ability to live in your skin and your own need to love, cuddle, nourish, and raise your child…

let’s just say that shit sucks.

okay.

angels from heaven in the form of 5 posts

in the midst of all of this chaos, the cccc began sending me guidance. in the form of blog posts. how very up to date they are. although they probably invented all this stuff in the first place. whatever. and the first post was the necessary first message:

you are safe!

he ain’t heavy

so thank god for havi brooks. wait a minute. i’m a tantric. so thank me for havi, or thank you for havi,  or thank havi for havi; or whatever. thanks. and extra special thanks for this particular post, in which the illustrious queen of shiva nata confronts a mental block of her own, and in the process creates a safe space for everyone who needs one. mama havi’s warm and cozy kitchen. please bring cheese!

the basic gist here was that i am safe, that someone believes in me, and that i can then be safe to believe fully in myself. regardless of what kind of crap is happening in my life. that i can rest in that, and from that safe place dig in a little deeper and find out what the fuck is up with this 3 and a half thing. 

getting it off your chest without ruining your life

and then this is where sonia simone comes in, with a blog post about getting all of your nasty thoughts down on paper via the ink from a pen held in your hand. literally 5 seconds after my posting a tweet about how it is that i can smile in the midst of a shit-storm (morning pages of course!). yes, the cccc is working overtime on my case!

being authentic without harming others

at which point we come to the ubiquitous steve pavlina, the garrulous personal development blogger who makes havi brooks look downright aphoristic in comparison. did i say long winded? thorough? in love with his own voice? whatever. along comes steve, the yang of authenticity to havi’s yin. no warm safe space here, more like the long arm and pointed finger declaring “you shall be free, and if you aren’t it’s your own damn fault.”

and of course he’s right. and with his declaration of the absolute lack of normal, which destroys the firm ground of support necessary for any kind of judgement, i am left with the quandary of how to be truly authentic without harming others. ay yi yi. that is a tricky one, and i’m afraid there is no easy answer. other than just holding those others in your heart as you expose your authentic self. and hoping for the best. and saying you are sorry when you fuck up.

did i mention crossing your fingers? asking the cccc for guidance? pondering what would havi do?

at any rate this is a new bridge to cross, as i slowly strip off the layers that are necessary to shed in order to enter the realm. which realm? well, that’s the question, isn’t it. zip.

creativity unbound

now in the midst of all of this, the goddess leonie posted her creative goddess manifesto, about the tyranny of art needing to look good, which of course is all about the primacy of process and which i want to share with you just because…just because i can. and just because it fits. and just because it made me feel good just to read the title, and it makes me feel good to see this goddess blossoming like a rose in the sun. an old school rose. fragrant and hardy.

treat your children well

well then. let’s full circle this and then put it to rest. as i keep saying whenever a shit storm blows up at home/not home/maybe home…

we have to put rowan first.

the three and a half year old. our son. the cause, in his own way, of all the drama, as we shall soon see.

one of my favorite bloggers, partly ‘cos he gets dreams and synchronicity and all that wacky stuff, and partly ‘cos he is concise and brief…the anti-pavlina as it were, is richard reeve of ccseed. oh yeah. i’ve mentioned him before. well he brought something up yesterday that i want to explore a bit, based on an idea from carl jung:

What if the world we live in today is a reflection of the sum total of all the abuse and greed, neglect and injustice experienced in childhood by today’s adult population?  What if by focusing on assuring the sanctity of childhood, we were to unleash a cultural revolution that would blossom forth into the hoped for reality we now fear may never get a chance to happen?  What if?…

and my own little riff on this idea, aside from the idea that children’s liberation is the final liberation, is that

when we make that shift with our children and raise them with respect and dignity and freedom and love…we also offer those same gifts to our own inner child…and transform our own childhoods in the process…

and if we don’t? well then the whole damn thing starts all over again, and we get to relive the hell of our childhoods all over again until we figure it out and change our ways. ack!

wrap it up

so there i am, standing in the snow, or rather being held in two of the many arms of shiva, who is standing in the snow, carrying me through a rough passage, as i dump my lousy thoughts onto paper while another of the arms of shiva points out to me the need to be myself regardless of what anyone else may say to the contrary.

and yet another one of those arms holds up an awe-ful creation of my own, revealing the beauty of its awfulness.

and in my own arms i hold my son, with tenderness and sureness, allowing and encouraging him to be his own fullest expression of universe, tears running down my face at the holding in my heart of my lost and someday to be found darling daughter, angelica.

this is where i leave it today. there are still 2 more weeks of the magic of mercury in retrograde. i love this life. and i love this world. and i love all of you. even the ones i can’t stand!

pax

chas

Tags: all will be revealed, god, mercury, motivator, number 6, patrick mcgoohan, shiva, synchronicity, the prisoner, the village, universe

If you liked this, you might might like these too:

• monday morning motivator! 10, talk about the passion (4)
• monday morning motivator!: 15, becoming the decider (3)
• monday morning motivator! 9, one day it’ll blow a hole in our heads (4)