Veteran Traveler

Veteran Traveler

"Carries a lot of suitcases but all of them are empty because she's expecting to completely fill them with life by the end of this trip & then she'll come home & sort everything out & do it all again."

~Brian Andreas~


This next trip is a visit across continents, and deep into interior spaces and unexplored landscapes. I hope I have the wherewithal to pay at least some attention to Australia too.

Second Chakra

I haven't had a very clear sense of how things would emerge over this period of time, but as things are finally getting clearer, and I'm emerging from this constant state of fuzziness, this I can see for certain: it's not going to end up looking anything like I thought.

I seem to simply feel my way into everything, and as I'm feeling my way into this, it feels so different and new and like I'm completely at home for the first time in eons. Literally - eons. Not figuratively, like, gosh it's been years. But literally. Like maybe lifetimes since I felt this much at home. Since my second chakra stopped spinning out of control in a frenzy of over-stimulation and fear, trying to respond intelligently to an unintelligible threat to the essence of my being. Eons since I didn't get wound up like a spinning top, in an explosion of responsiveness, feeling out of control and unable to slow myself.

I have tried to slow down everything in my life, get it all under control, keep it organized and efficient and moving forward the way I want. Now I'm just focusing more on breathing deeply and letting that lovely chakra, the energy center itself, slow down and become more naturally focused and concentrated without me exerting any kind of force at all. It's a great feeling. Try it next time you feel yourself spinning out of control, and are tempted to impose your will on everything around you. It'll be better for everyone.

Getting Started (Over)

What a long, slow unfolding this last year has been. It started with my heart feeling ripped open at the first viewing of Brokeback Mountain. It's a movie, I know, but it sped along some tear that had already been threatening the fabric of my life, turning a little tear into a rip, and then into the absolute shredding of the fibers that had barely been holding together an unsupportable attempt at a certain kind of reality.

Too many conditionals in that kind of living for sure. I have been surrounded by a fantasy of some kind of thinking that kept me comfortably numb, to paraphrase Pink Floyd, safely surrounded by a bubble that cushioned me from the harshness of a world I couldn't bear. For most of my life, I have been unencumbered by much feeling or memory or too much connection with any of the reality around me, instead directing all my creative energy into the invisible, the subtle, and the spiritual. But I don't want to live in my fantasy world, no matter how perfect, anymore.

So now it's time to get to fast work building a bridge between the perfection of that fantasy, where there is love and peace and pure joy, and the real world, where we are imperfect and broken and wondering. But I think this is the exact work I was cut out for - bridge building and translating, so I'm actually quite excited at this prospect.

An old astrologer friend, the first person to ever actually read my chart, told me I had the chart of a translator - someone who could make the invisible visible, the unknown knowable, the complex simple. A lot of times it's not about having the right answers nearly so much as it is about being unafraid to ask questions.