The Key Ingredient

 Some rights reserved by tonymz

I've started the work of recovery, and it has opened a door I didn't know existed.

You may expect that skeletons were behind this door; but no, those skeletons dance out in the open, disguised as a normal life. What I did find was more like a map, or a key that turned the tumblers and opened my perspective. I tasted a familiar dish and found it different, changed.

Life Update!

 Some rights reserved by gbus22

It has been a while since I've updated the blog...have you been wondering what I've been up to in my absence?  I have been:

- Crocheting like a fiend (ALH taught me how to make granny squares! Yay!)
- Reading and absorbing the Codependents' Guide to the Twelve Steps; giving myself enough time to let the material really sink in and take hold.
- Recovering from outpatient surgery (whoop whoop!) which was really just me sleeping for three days straight.
- Thinking and pondering and writing, oh my!
- Exercising my butt off at Urban Active (and waking up at 5am to do it...ooph.)

It's nice to have a lot of stuff filling up my days. Life is complex and meaty and good.

What has been keeping you off the internets?

The Road to Life

John William Waterhouse: The Danaïdes - 1903

‎"Is there another destiny for you? Do you choose a road that will take you to a place foreign to your own becoming? This question is sincere, it is not meant to deceive. No matter which road you take, you will become; but all roads do not lead to your becoming. If you think they do, it is you, not I, who is given to deception. All of your roads will end in death. Not all roads lead to life." ~ Cynthea Jones

Lots of personal work coming down the pipe lately, specifically relating to codependency in behavior and thought. The work is both gentler and deeper than what I have experienced in years past, heck, even in the recent past. It is more like a river wearing away rock than lighting taking out a tower, and I am thankful for that.

I've known I've had codependency issues for a long time. Early home life (which included living with a dry drunk and a codependent, a topic that will probably get its own blog post in the future) set a secure foundation for this pattern, but I've built the grand landscape I've been living in, and it's high time I made some architectural changes for better living conditions. It became abundantly clear to me that this is necessary and timely work a few weeks ago, and the Universe has conspired to get me moving through a variety of synchronistic events.

And so: I started reading "Codependents' Guide to the Twelve Steps" by Melody Beattie. The work is deep and appropriate and just challenging enough.

I am sure I will be able to write about this process with more depth and specifics at a future date. Today, however, it is enough to write that I am actively working on recovery.

Seeing the Bottom

 Some rights reserved by StarbuckGuy

I'm always working on something, it seems. Lately, helpful stuff has been coming to me month by month from an interesting and insightful little book entitled "The Art of Extreme Self Care:  Transform Your Life One Month at a Time" by Cheryl Richardson. Each month, a different aspect of self-care is brought forth to be contemplated and worked with, from self love to creating spaces at home that are nurturing to making pleasure a priority to learning how to say no properly.

I will admit, when I first started working with this book, I thought it was going to be a frothy and saccharine little jaunt. I was wrong. This book has given me some serious things to think about, and I keep going back to it when issues crop up in my life. 

Necessary Space

Dawna Markova says you can't grab God; instead, you have to become empty and make some space for God to enter.

After a beautiful, relaxing vacation full of rest and reading and long walks and time to just sit and be still, I can say with certainty that Ms. Markova is right. 

Full of Life

 Some rights reserved by Roger Lynn

The seed that is to grow

must lose itself as seed;

And they that creep

may graduate through 

chrysalis to wings.

Wilt thou then, O mortal,

cling to husks which

falsely seem to you

the self?

~Wu Ming Fu, Twelfth Century

It's not so much about being prepared for death as it is being full of life. I want to be so well practiced in crossing thresholds that dying is merely another step in the dance. i want to be so comfortable with stillness and silence that I can root in them. ~ Dawna Markova, "I Will Not Die an Unlived Life"

Admittedly, I can be a turd. I am not always Suzy Sunshine and I am definitely not the person who always looks on the positive side of things. I generally think of myself as a Refreshingly Honest Person, but sometimes I overshoot and I end up being an Oversharing Bummer of a Person.

I have come to find that all I need to turn my attitude around is a little health scare.

Dream a Little Dream with Me

 Some rights reserved by Temari 09

"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." - Carl G. Jung


"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." - Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory


I've been thinking about how we make our own reality...how our expectations and beliefs are mirrored back to us in the world around us. We see what exists...and what exists is a combination of our thoughts and fears, hopes and expectations and everyone else's thoughts/fears/hopes/expectations/beliefs/etc. We are the kings and queens of our own little kingdoms, ruling with wisdom and ignorance, dancing up against other kings and queens, constantly jostled about.

Haiku

 Some rights reserved by xsphotos

cashmere morning mist

dusted bronze haystack bathed in

white light, liquid sky

 Some rights reserved by Fungman

white willow, woodsmoke

bittersweet winter oak sighs

gray earth, gray morning

...and this may be why I am dragging ass lately.

"I restore myself when I'm alone."  - Marilyn Monroe

A Post About How I've Not Posted In A While

 Some rights reserved by andrewr

Yes, my lovelies, I have been doing other things. What other things, you ask? Well, aside from fretting about getting my car inspected and paying out the wazoo to get that accomplished, I've been doing the usual stuff...with one little additional thing.

I've been trying to reclaim my life from the clutches of the internets.

I am sure I really don't have to explain this- it's pretty easy for the modern individual to get caught up in Facebook updates and constant email checking and blog reading etc. etc. etc. I've been fighting the good fight and trying to do something other than plop down in front of my computer and clickety clack my life away at a keyboard. So I've been taking walks...and reading...and cooking...and stuff like that.

Still, I do miss blogging about things that are of interest/importance to me, and I can feel Pretty Darn Good about blogging because it is a Way to Foster a Writing Habit. So, I will be coming back to the blog and hopefully writing more consistently. My overall goal is to reduce my Facebook consumption and increase my blogging output.

Would you like to help me, readers?  I'm sure you would!

If you are reading, and enjoy what you read here, comment on this post to just say hi.  I am curious to see who is out there, reading this blog and coming back to it (because if my statistics are to be believed, there's a small group of lovelies out there that stop here once in a while).

Thanks in advance, honeybadgers!

Oh How I LOLed

My Own Little Magic Circle, or, Becoming Real

The Magic Circle, 1886 - John William Waterhouse

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?" 

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

~The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams


The Awakening
by Anne Hill

If I touch you I will know you
Though my veil be drawn, you're glowing
In my mind and soul and body


I feel compelled to hide details and information about myself that I feel others wouldn't like, wouldn't care to know, couldn't accept or wouldn't understand. I generally err on the side of squishing myself in a little box of Acceptable Things You Can Know About Me...generally choose to make myself smaller, silent, bland and uncomfortable rather than risk making others upset, or unhappy, or uncomfortable.

Rooted

Some rights reserved by BlueRidgeKitties

“Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.”
~Anonymous~

ROOT

noun, often attributive: an underlying support

the essential core : heart

RADICAL

adjective: of, relating to, or proceeding from a root

noun: a root part

a basic principle: foundation

Learning to be in right relationship with myself has been (and continues to be) a very interesting process. Holding my relationship to self in the center of my life can be downright uncomfortable.

It takes more work than I expected to not abandon myself to whim and desire.

Basketweaving

Some rights reserved by Colleen Curnutte

It's time to be more conscious of my energy, to put less of myself into some baskets in order to fill other baskets.

This is really important, as I want to add some new baskets, too. I have a list, in my head, of the things I want to manifest in the next ten years.

Back...Again

No Escape by Sylvie Pickering

The Uses of Sorrow
by Mary Oliver

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

I am never more tired of speaking than when I first get back from a trip home to see my family. Actually, it would be more accurate to switch it, to say "when I first get home from a trip back to my family" but that makes little sense to the average person that is not acquainted with my past, with my personal way-back machine.