Yet again I am trying to downsize and further compartmentalize my life. Shed some of that heavy weight that no longer serves me. It’s hard to do because it requires me to dig into my past and this time it went to an even weirder zone.

Did you ever see that movie “Stranger Than Fiction” with Will Ferrell?  If not, you should and then maybe you will get the same sensation about your own life, especially if you are the artistic or wordy type.

Basically, today I got the sincere feeling I have been writing my life out, before I actually live it… or something to that degree.  I can look at a piece of writing and know when and why I was writing it at the time, but the way I write things is subconsciously coded language.  I don’t know how or why this happens specifically, but I have some assumptions.

The thing about all of this is, I haven’t had a bad life, over all.  I’ve had a rudimentary amount of pain in comparison to other people.  My family is full of good people who tried their best to offer what they could within their means, and probably unbeknownst to me, went above and beyond when needed.

So all I can do is ask myself  “What the actual fuck?”

I am going to admit that most of my journals are a massive spiritual battle. It has been that way as far back as I have recorded my life.  The journaling started around age 12, but I can go back to certain creations done in Elementary School and see a depth that is or was seen as somewhat abnormal for a kid that age.

“She is five- going on thirty five.” My grandma would say when I was little.  I wanted to sit at the adult table.  I wanted to converse.  I had questions and quips beyond my years.  Spirit has been speaking to me forever.

Now perhaps this is just the byproduct of losing a parent at a young age and the feeling that I had to grow up quickly to compensate. Maybe I was just born this way.   Who knows?   I do know that I drove my mother crazy when I was just a small child.  Enough so, for her to strip me down to basically nothing and leave me on the front stoop with the old adage “If you don’t want to be here, you are going to leave the way you came in.”  Naked and shivering.

It’s okay.  My aunt lived a couple of blocks away, and my mom would call her and tell her to come pick me up.  She would come over, packed with some over-sized clothing that belonged to my cousin.  She would wrap me up and take me back to her place until the whole thing calmed down.

Once my dad said, “If your mom was still alive, you would probably be at each others throat.”  Sometimes I feel like I am getting that experience with my grandma.  It isn’t a “hate” or loathing issue… it’s just this weird temperament that arises out of our idiosyncrasies and difference in ideologies.  It’s the byproduct of being stubborn and bull headed while still having the best intentions in love.

A stranger once told me “It’s easier to paint yourself into a corner than it is to write yourself out of a box.”  That has stuck with me for over a decade.  I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but today, I think I got it.

It goes back to Abracadabra. A spell or incantation using the ABC’s.  This is why writing and words are magical.  This is how words hold a vibration that can influence the reality we live in… it’s the way you can send prayers or well wishes or destroy a life in a single breath.

My family can be traced back to the Druids on my Mother’s Father’s side.  There is some witchery in the blood, and that blood still courses through my veins.  I don’t purposely perform rituals or magik; I have a feeling there are a lot of us who don’t.  We settle on titles like “artist” or “writer” or “musician.”   We feel and feed on an indescribable power that fuels our creative spirit.   Words will almost magically manifest on the page without too much work.  We feel born knowing the Muses.  At least, this is how it has always been for me.

I haven’t had to try too hard in creative ways.  “It just comes to me.”

I don’t profess this as any sort of braggart, in fact, in this moment I am questioning all of it.  My family is a mixed up match of “tight lipped” and deceased, I don’t know where I can go to discuss this openly, so I leave it here for you, my few but beautiful readers.   I am realizing that I need to figure out a way to console myself.  Feel free to send suggestions.

“The calm before the storm” is over. I know it and I feel it with a force that is hard to describe. As I read through these papers and place them in a new container, I am god smacked..  I’ve predicted future patterns in my life with no intention of doing so; in alignment with that, the writing has predicted patterns of humanity and what would be worth our attention.  This leads me back a post I made about a week ago in regard to purpose and being a dreamer.  In this moment, I want nothing more than someone I could share the depth of this with, but I don’t have that someone, which is a reoccurring theme in my  personal writing that I rarely share.

I see in this moment that this specific loneliness is a representation of that spiritual battle.  We are all looking for connection in various ways.  I believe in Creation, I believe that Creation will not be out done.  I know I can’t out-create Creation.  That knowing can be overwhelming, like “why even try?” not to mention the clutter!  I make and make and make a mess and an abundance of stuff that may end up at a thrift store or a landfill.   I’ve carried paper around, weighing many many pounds over thousands of miles for what?

This moment.

This is the moment it all shifts.  I might not see the evidence of it immediately so I will leave room for it to shift as quickly as it wants to.

While going through things I stumbled on a good-bye note from a woman named Cecily Monk.  I didn’t know her well, or for very long but I really liked her personality.  She felt like a person that I would have had a long friendship with if we would have had more time together.

Anyway, when she left Keystone, Colorado I was at work and she left a note.

 

The last line is quite potent; “…and remember the journey of self discovery comes not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  So obviously she was a fan of Proust, or one of her teachers had the actual quote “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” on a motivational poster or something.

I like that she added the word “self” and “journey” because the timing is perfect for today.  Journey vs Voyage is appropriate because I perceive a Journey to be far more relaxed than a Voyage.  Voyage makes me think of a specific conquest, for which I have had none up until this point.  The actual Proust quote takes on a deeper meaning when I rehash my words and see that in fact, I have been on a Voyage but I didn’t know it.  And I have had conquest but I didn’t acknowledge it.

It all comes down to love and forgiveness. And this is going to be so hard because there is a lot of bad shit happening in the world right now.  But just like I am finding illumination in my own writing, we are going to find illumination in just how fucked up humanity has been by bringing it to light.

Today I wanted to get rid of EVERYTHING.  I was feeling oppressed at how much garbage we consume and throw away.  I was overwhelmed by the massive pressure of pain that is the human condition.  I wished I wasn’t part of it because there is no easy solution and by the looks of it, it’s only going to get worse.  I thought about all the mundane stuff we do on any given day just to maintain a “standard” of living.  I thought about all the people who loath the work they do just for a paycheck.

I kept thinking, and thinking about all the stuff I can not stand.  How disappointing all of our entertainment is because it’s coded and getting increasingly ominous in content. I thought about how my creative spirit has been lost because I can’t imagine things getting better and I am sick of rehashing this old script that we are being fed on the daily.  Believe it or not, I believe this rumination to be a good sign.  My art and dreams and writing tell me so.  We really are dancing on the tip of a needle right now.

As I dug through this box the skies turned dark outside.  A while letter the rain came pounding down in sheets.  I laughed out loud and asked if this was a baptism and as I went to shut the screen door the water was falling so fierce that it was splashing out of the rain gutters.  In the few seconds it took me to move the block in front of the door (which is actually a heavy concrete lawn statue of a sleeping man wearing a sombrero) I was soaked and a bit elated.

This isn’t over, though.   I had just begun this excavation and there were more treasures to dig up, so this is only a taste of what that was.  To a certain degree I’ve been pulled into my own mystery.  I am sure it is appropriate timing as next month I will turn thirty-eight.  My life has been amazing, it’s hard not to think it’s a shame that I have felt so heavy through all of it.  Even in times of levity, the gravity of reality has kept me solid and grounded.  Luckily people like that about me, but if they didn’t it wouldn’t really matter because it feels unchangeable.

Last night I re-watched Eternal Sunshine of the the Spotless Mind for the second time, since the first time years ago when it came out on video.  I saw it with new eyes, but I knew the story and when I watched it the story came flooding back.  Looking through my life in writing produces the same feeling.  (Another topic I could probably go to length writing about, but not right now.)

I sense that things are starting to sync up for me again and I am not sure what that means.  I will probably be able to glean some knowledge from further exploration but I don’t know if I will wake up with the energy to keep on tomorrow… or if I will sit in stasis again for a while.  I’ve been practicing forgiveness for myself, and part of that is finding patience when my desires are so vast.  Giving myself time to figure things out without a strict timeline.   It isn’t easy.  It’s hard not to compare myself to other people and their obvious accomplishments.  I think “I’m just sitting on a stack of paper.”  But that “stack of paper” is the analog archive of my life experience in a very raw form.

I like to journal like I like to go bowling.  I can have a couple of drinks and do something to the best of my ability in full enjoyment even if I suck at it.  I feel fulfilled by slapdashedly swinging my dominate hand around without expectation of high results.  It’s something to do that is totally dependent on my personal attitude at the time. I don’t fear judgement because most times I keep it to myself.  If you want to bowl alone, go at 1:30 pm on a Tuesday.  The only people in there are over 60 and there aren’t many of them.  Most are there just for the bar.  Every once and a while a bold elderly man may stop by and offer tips on your game.

It’s like this blog page.  I have like eighty people who follow me.  I get very little engagement and I am fine with that.  Sometimes I just have to express myself out in the world.  When I was younger I was under the impression that I didn’t actually have a voice in the world, or that no one cared what I had to say; now I think that just the right people stumble in at just the right time, not only for me, but for themselves.  My delusions of grandeur have been over for quite some time now.

This digging and sorting is going to continue.  It has to.  Something about “getting your house in order” feels appropriate right now.  May you find patience and forgiveness in yourself, and the strength to get your own house in order.

PS.  The heading image was something my mom wrote on a piece of paper.  I don’t have much of her writing, on the other side is a poem that many people find haunting.  I am not sure if the cipher works for the poem, but if I feel like it, I might see if it does.  If it does, that would be so cool.  On my mom’s typed page it is titled “Love Poem” and instead of “he” it is “she.”  Who knows?  Everyone loves a mystery and the author is unknown.