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Explorations of mind, paths, and life

Unfurling (March Thoughts)

Posted on April 14, 2015 - Filed Under self reflect

April 1 Flight…

I haven’t felt too inspired to write much of late… pictures are easy, and the movement of wheels in my head shifted by a plethora of play and distraction. There is a deep part of me that doesn’t want to move back into the world the way I have existed in it. I reflect on what has been over 30 years of “working, working, working.” The story of late has been around heartbreak and losses. I have moments where I just breathe in the air and watch the sky, lost in the movement of nature beyond the edges of my skin. I rock in the hammock, grieve, smile broadly, laugh. My feet are bare, my skin exposed to the sun. Eating has fallen away, finding nourishment in being…

Some ideas have been snapping into place about my life that I hadn’t quite seen. After the loss of my father, my job, and of love, within moments of each other, I spiraled. I began to wonder about the purpose of these events in the scope of how I come to know the world, or the meaning that I make of it. What purpose, what synchronistic anomalies, have bounced into play to pull me through these bundled events to this moment, or this one… or this one?

Love cradled me through the heartbreak of my father. My job loss made me cognizant of my father’s passing, the lost communication that indicated something was wrong. My father’s passing nudged me into wandering and essentially, adventuring, through my grief and self awareness. So many connections, such blessings, such heartache.

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In the early morning, before consciousness pulls the blankets from my quiet, reflective mind, I discover these lucid little morsels of awareness about my existence that a regularly assiduous day buries under the sand of “being busy.”  I turn around, in my mind, failed love, successful love, the art of work, the art of play, who I am, who I have become, where I am to go… This all churns under the unconscious guise of sleep. I have been on the brink of throwing up my hands and announcing, “fuck it!” while running wildly through the untamed flowers of my own dreams. There is a strong desire to just explore all the things “I didn’t” during the work laden days I pressed into my being, shrouded in the idea that somehow this created in me a sense of worth. My over-responsibility, my constant “doing,” often for others more than myself, the record that played about being a burden unless I did, and did more, and did the most. Suddenly, there is no need to work so hard. Suddenly, I feel as if I have a choice. There is nothing to lose, because things will be lost. It is inevitable. Death rides the edge of life, until one day it jumps the tracks, and there we are – with a pile of stuff and a few souls grieving the loss. What is the point other than taking life a bit more adventurously, because I have no idea how much time is left to play and explore.

• I want to see Spain.
• I want to see Italy.
• There are many more museums to see, art to explore, and meals to eat.
• I want to spend several weeks among family in Colombia.
• I want to drive across the USA and find all the Art-o-Mats and buy at least 1 piece of art.
• I want to submit my own work for Art-o-Mat machines.
• I want to take art classes again so my hand relearns to sketch as it had so fluidly before I finished college.
• I want to see every sunset.
• I want to bike more.
• I want to teach all over, not in one place… all over.
• I want to dance more, and play Pandora loudly in every room of my life.
• I want to giggle with my sister.
• I want to revisit Chicago.
• I want to see more moonsets.
• I want to find more hot springs and disappear into the water, naked and smiling
• I want to clean up what doesn’t matter

I’ve had a strong desire to clean out, purge my space, of all the things that mean nothing if I am not here. I’ve been looking at things and asking how they bring me joy, or what purpose they have in my world. If none, then it goes in a bag to be gifted, donated, or destroyed.  I am stuck on a few piles… like the piles of drawings and art I created in my 20’s, the love letters between Gary and me, and the pages of poetry and stories I wrote when I was on fire with creativity. I think about repurposing them into my art, or letting them fall into the firepit for a burning of the endless thoughts and serenades my heart spilled into the arms of others so long ago. All of these moves into the edges of my own creativity…

I think about creating – and yet my inspiration is shifty. I don’t seem able to hold it steady, once I sit alone with a page, or a canvas. What if the world wants more? What if  I am expected to create more… What if I can’t? What if I am empty?

And I hear her, the creative part of me, she says, “You do what you can, THAT is your pace; like the pattern of your breathing, the pattern of your heart lobbing and moving life energy through you, it evolves as you do. It moves as it does. There is nothing more or less to do.”

All of this is important because I am very aware that I am refilling a well, long emptied and ravaged by the drought that my “work-worth” had created. I am aware that keeping myself on the hammock, by rocking and taking in the clouds, by exposing myself to nature and movement, I am filling that well. Travel and hiking and eating and art and taking the world in, is doing more for the repair of my being than anything else I could venture into.

“There is nothing more or less to do…”

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