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A friend is packing up to relocate here once again. Packing to move is the truest image of eternity you’re likely to get in this dimension unless maybe you’re a lifer at San Quentin.

She wrote about the door slamming shut which gave me an immediate image of a house where all the windows blow out at once. I told her to get that stepstool, climb out, toss the duffle on the ground first. Leaping into your 70’s is thrilling & dangerous.

Wanderers don’t get as many options as stay-ers. But that’s also cuz we looked them over & said, “nope, nope, nope, nope” while casually flipping through the stack.

Arriving is Step One, Job One. And you have to want to be here in the moment. Desperation should not be our prime choosing criterion, yeh? 

I described a bit of my life this morning to a subscriber on Substack & typed “I’m the unicorn in the meadow” as an image for having no interactive family left. Thus my limits fall away & my Circle of Life expands to this imaginary/real world. Choosing what I want to empower me is magical.

Belief, not bereft. It’s only us – front, middle, back. I’m just the envelope. That tickle in my brain means the message is still in composition for delivery. The Lord is still scribbling on my edges & I’m down to seven stamps & it’s Sunday.

When the metaphor of life as a roller coaster was popularized, it immediately caught on.

The past two weeks have been a long, slow uphill of clacking spokes catching the rails. I’ve been so far under I’ve got gills on my face & scales on my back. In my day only knights & miners wore helmets. Mine is long gone & the blows life wants to deliver are regular & routine. Give me shelter!

Today it seems I’ve almost reached the top of the climb. I can see the sunshine & feel some warmth as my iced heart thaws. This veil thinning out is disconcerting stuff! The dizzying downhill run is about to rush me through once again, albeit rusted over & kind of gray.

One by one dreams come true, but I sometimes groan & roll over, pulling up the covers once again. When there’s no more sleep to be had, reality asserts & I rise to face it in all threat & delight.

The unicorn image? Not for purity or magic, but because I’m pretty rare in the general scheme of things. Yet I’m the most commonplace of God’s vagaries, wandering around in the alleys of a place where I no longer speak the language & can only smile as the world tries to sell me sunglasses, or throw on a harness.

I not going to be contained anymore, tho.

There’s no limit to my life unless I allow blinders. There’s no movement unless I cast off the anchor on my camp chair & hope someone brings breakfast soon. Holding myself prisoner to a failed power struggle is a slow go. Screaming down the steep incline is tiresome. I’m too old for that. I don’t mind plodding along, watching my steps. I may be carrying a miracle on my back. I walk softly & carefully & for the most part, cheerfully, onward.

I feel there is so much information defying gravity within & one day it will bubble out to be shared. If not, it will grow from wherever they choose to plant my grave.

My music sustains me, and of course, the writing is my best possible outlet. Sometimes, the days are so long & dragged out, tho. I find myself hauling my shadow behind me, trying to wring it out when I’ve no recall of walking in any waters.

When I look down, I might be dragging myself by my scruff to another path…

I am doing a lot of reminiscing. I’m finding my way through a life review (Revue?) – memories surface & I’m not even sure what time zone they’re in – let alone any location. Or the order in which I lived them.

I am able to see that being sad or picking on myself for the state of the world is one which I no longer choose to energize with attention. Don’t care what you say, it’s not all my fault.

But it is also that my brain is letting go of a certain discipline it had, shifting tracks you might say. This seems to involve much spitting on hands & pulling levers. I cannot help but know it is true for me that I needed to keep my thinking in a more reactive mode when working – staying responsive if not predictive. I am no longer capable of maintaining that life-mode for extended periods.

I can feel lights shutting off – like in old movies when the character looks over a shoulder & bids an entire life goodbye, shutting the door. If I had to take over an office, I’d need to hit the fuse box & do some fiddling.

I’m not saying anything other than that, for me, where I am is still unusual. I look out at the panorama of 60 years of employment & find it a matter of quantum un-entangling!

. I needed to be able to think in certain ways when working, but now I’m more playing tag in there with one memory or sharing sparking a time that exactly happened to me, then playing a kind of “fetch” to get back the memory.

Just when I think, “it’s not happening here” more evidence appears “I” am overtaken by more than circumstantial evidence that my disciplines are shifting. What did I accomplish that was for me & not just for the corporation? There is no balance I can see. I lived a purported life.

The paradigm has shifted into Retirement, a brand new place where I need to pay attention but am feeling a bit spacey/removed from right now. My clock has just hit the midnight reset here & I’m reactive, y’know?  My brain is rewiring for this life-time. 

I attribute this to the fact that so much of what I hear I’ve heard before & somewhere along the way I just stopped listening. Being told some stories causes a quantum resonance which brings the other 79 times I heard this story – in company or with this individual – front & center, happening on 79 other screens in realtime.

I guess getting older is complicated. 

I have less time for “political partying” as it should be known. I’m wanting to deal with my own allotment of wizards & wonders & words. Do I make amends? Amens? Move on?

Guess what? The memories skid on in, flashing the corners of my eyes & piling up in no particular order.

Impolite Society has already tossed me into the recycle bin…

I’m going to eat potato chips for dinner.

LETTING GO

There is a lawful order to letting go. Still, that law can be less punishing than the active suffering caused by holding on. It depends upon how much power & influence on us that the subject/object of the exercise may have, in all pluralities.

There’s a time in experience for many humans when the only key on the ring is the car fob. Things go worldwide when you’re down to that alone.

We outgrow our lives & our licensing. I’ve re-enrolled among New Mexico drivers. Florida wants the license plate back. I am “surrendering” my Florida license. That was an expensive rental, folks! When I think of the hours, the sweat, the money poured into licensing – now I’d need to be licensed as a food server here if I chose that field. Generally, I like to keep the paper licenses – they’re already nicely framed & scrolly-decorative; they have gold seals on them, or the signatures of others who were in charge in the moment. Important signatures that allowed me to work in that world.

And I can always donate the frames somewhere in the future. Think of all the photos that were in the hundreds of frames in one thrift alone!

At ¾ through this self-directed life, I will say if I had to do a Yelp review on myself, I’d recommend the writing talent, some of my better recipes & the yearning to continue to try to live a good life. Then I think it might peter out towards the end. Like this blog does.

I used to mock seniors in my own mind for their slow responses & even slower reaction time. True understanding occurs when age is a reality & not a perception. If nothing else, seniors have learned to allow for some thinking time & space! All are much-needed in our Microwave Society.

I am slip-sliding along & the slope slants unexpectedly. Fortunately, there are some handrails – if you qualify & are not so arthritic of digits you can still grab & hold. I know I prefer to watch my feet more than grab, but you won’t find me on a stairway without a hand attached to something, or splayed on the wall to slow gravity’s inexorability.

People prefer conditional love. They perceive even Love needs a boundary, a containment, a confinement. If it diffuses too far, involving a whole Universe or Galaxy, it seems too spread out to be effective. Which is not actually true, but which is difficult to convey to so many.

Our largest lessons always incorporate letting go. It should be obvious: we need our hands to live in the now, our feet to be in the present & the rest of us somewhere in between. I always have to put something down to pick up something else! Even to get into the backpack for storage…

NOT LETTING GO – a/k/a Cowlicks Are Forever.

I’ve set aside several suits of armor worn in this life. There’s a pile under the coats for the party in the second bedroom, matter of fact. I was a work-warrior except when I was not. I pushed thru closed doors to get somewhere else with lots of impunity. If someone shut a door on me, they’d better know what they’re doing!

My changes have involved more sarcasm than reality but doing ok for all that. The young have many advantages. The old just have insurance & some of that is pretty much expired.

There’s room for all of it is what I know. If I take down the diplomas, I just have to put something up in the space & I’m not sure I’ve got much that can go up on a wall anymore.

The ninth month. Oh, brother, I couldn’t wait to get born. For someone known for lack of patience, I did acquire me some along my merry way. “Patience!” my mother used to shout, raising her hand to God. I did give it almost a month of days before dialing into the month, drilling in to claim my place. A Monday Child – moon day child.

Septembers are a magical month, for me, the Unicorn Moon Month, School started & long hot days of amusing myself could shift to other topics – assignments to be filled, so much easier for the directionless. I could be excited about what I was ‘supposed’ to be doing. For the monk, it’s ‘meditating’ – for the student it’s school which embodies Nirvana.

My mind hears a buzz of connection; my higher or spiritual mind hears Silence. There is only one moment left of Life & that is all there ever has been. This instant of Present Being, the holy instant, when the angels dance on your fingertips & you know just how many are there, by feel alone.

I never quite bought in on the ideas of others, yet I find myself swimming in the same red plastic bucket, climbing out the slippery sides to stand a moment before diving back in with all, squealing & eeling into the cold water as though it’s all I’ve ever wanted.

It seems the further ahead I stretch, the farther back along my roots must I travel from & draw upon for balance. Since there’s a “wobble” on the whole thing, the balance becomes only possible through sharing – holding another’s shoulder or grabbing an arm. I have only to reach out. Reach. Out. Draw. Upon.

I have moved among these Standing Stones before many times. I have not come out at the same place yet many exits overlap. No one describes how the stones erupt a floor, so many shale shelves that feel right to the feet. Everyone presumes the stones only stand upright.

Beware the standing stones with mirrors. Engage to Emerge!

I’m that girl in the trenchcoat glimpsed through the mist, damp hair curling. My name was never the same in any of the places I emerged, either.   

I found my way here. I am aware of the me’s living in so many places in Septembers of Yore. Above a garage, duplexed in T-or-C, in mystic Hillsboro during a full-out rain that falls twice when it bounces. Every sidewalk square here holds a memory. Even the shapes of the trees in varied profiles are familiar – here along Riverside is where the turkey vultures roosted for a couple of seasons. There were always beautiful feathers to be had when they cried off for mountain thermals.

These are the Septembers I revisit, not even thinking about the ones to come where roads lead to crystal futures. The ones where there are always chimes to be walked among.

One of the themes Abraham/(Esther Hicks) spoke on with gusto was around “going downstream.” It said that everything we want is downstream & it’s so easy to get there.

This recollection surfaces as the bottom of the river becomes visible. This river will become a bit of marsh, a tiny wetland, a narrow silting space, an idea to live for a season unless we get rain.

In the geo-physical, the engineers turn off the Rio Grande. Now the Rio has its own stories to tell; a river twinned with a vortex of hot springs. This town was built beside the Rio Grande. It blows me up to think we turn off a river. It just never came up at the office in Sarasota, right?

With an entire river traveling in one direction, the energy of T or C diverts. (Feng-shui) The town is quiet. Empty-seeming. The “Police Reports” in the paper are down to two columns only. The vitality & luster seem asleep until some heavy duty revitalization. We exist more in the planning zone, but it’s 104 outside. Lately, it’s all downstream rush here. It takes some good times to offset that energetic, but we’re up for that.

The Science is in. However, the water is not.

The weather patterns were in a different place when these rules were set up & mostly the rules were results of historic patterns. Ancestral paths of least resistance were tapped. But civilization moved everything.

As I perceive the temptation to look back, I realize “We treat the past as though it were more real than the future.”    

I’ll go for the cork analogy: Goog-Monster says, “Cork’s interior structure is porous, making it highly breathable, lightweight, and buoyant.”

That sounds like a description I’d like to wear. I want to be porous, capable of new thinking. (I do a lot of new thinking; thing is I rub it up against old thoughts to get the sparks going. It’s what I have to go on.)

I know I’m buoyant. Have already talked overmuch about weight elsewhere on the blog. Go look, seek, find.

Cork only travels downstream.