Ramblings

As winter arrives…

The weather is finally starting to commit to winter around here. As I’ve lived here for the last 20ish years, winter has been an elusive beast that tempts you into thinking that the season exists right as it morphs directly into spring.

But that seems to be shifting, as more and more winter comes out of its hiding place and firmly displays the 20 degree temperatures and the copious precipitation that comes with it.

It starts with the rains, they come heavy for days. Then the temperature drops, and the water begins to crystalize and the scent of outside begins to give off that pure scent that says “snow is here”. This is how we renew, casting off the things that die and no longer serve us, so they can become the nourishment for the new things allowed to grow in the space where death once roamed.

I think this is one issue we have in our society. We no longer have an acceptance of death. It’s more of something we either seek to hide away in hospitals or communities of elder care facilities and cemeteries. We look to modern medicine and “fountain of youth” treatments to avoid the natural progression of life. In our great progress to treat our disease of self, we’ve created a new bug. Not one created from a virus or bacterium but one that is in our heads and our social structures.

It makes us immune to the effects our words and conduct have towards others. The “sticks and stones” rhyme made real. Failing to see the consequences of our thoughts made real. And if we do, see those consequences, they’re shrugged off with simple dismissal that it’s someone else’s problem.

I walked alone along a star lit path.
Frozen air kissing my face.
The lonely call of an owl echoing across the trees.

“Give in,” it says.
“There is nothing here for you.”
A rustle of the leaves.

The chittering of night squirrels.
“But there is…”
“Just listen.”

My eyes close.
Breath smoking away from my lips.
Snow begins to tickle my forehead.

Everything must die at some point.

Hrm…

So, with my world in absolute chaos due to tricksters making evolution happen, it dawned on me that I’m having a creativity drought. It was thrown at me yesterday as one of my gymnasts let out a huge groan followed by a very loud “Oh MY god!!!” as I tried to wrangle her teammates into setting up our stations. Granted, my usual passion in what I do has been tempered by the adult realities of life and I find myself regressing back into a few points in my life where I felt my fires either being snuffed out or just quelled to smoke by a dump of cold water.

But in my time off, my creativity has been seriously stifled. I remember days where I could churn out poems, most of which made no sense, doodled new animals to life, or imagined symphonies that would make the masters weep. But here I am, grasping at what others have created, in hopes that it will kick my muse back to life. Be the lightening that rekindles the flames. But always, I come back to the person(s) that would rather let someone suffocate, just to see those lips turn black. Those who I ultimately don’t know whether I should pity or ignore. The killjoys.

She is right. And that’s what those people do, they make you question everything. Feel worthless in your talents. All so that you eventually wither away and die. The Echo to Narcissus.

Going semi-public…

As my business starts to take off more, I’ve found I actually need to create a public profile for FB. I’ve always much preferred to be as anonymous as possible, and to keep everything out of the light. Well, seems it’s that time and I’m having the most difficult time of it. I’ve never been one to stand up and go “look at me!” and here I am pretty much requesting it.

The most difficult thing is trying to define how the profile should be classified. Public figure, entrepreneur (I hate that word), fictional character, teacher, coach, motivational speaker….Seriously, too limiting and too much BS. I’m just human, and I do things that seem to help people out. Can’t say I’m anything overly special. Yet here I am, watching my center expand in its offering and watching my role in my community grow. It’s weird. Good in an uncomfortable way because it means I’m headed in the right direction. But I really don’t like the idea of going that far out of my comfort zone for all of this.

There’s also the factor of announcing things that I view as “just being”. In a society that values labels over everything I don’t like the idea of having to list all my labels. They’re just a factor of my life and my work. While I respect the duality/multi-facetness of pretty much everything, I also view that duality/multi-facet as being just an aspect of the whole. You can sit and separate everything out into its parts, till it ceases to be anything but a bunch of parts laying around. No one wants to look at the whole picture anymore. They want to deconstruct and judge, diminish, extoll, whatever, based on a single part. I don’t like the idea of being out there and being just parts. And I’ve been so out of the idea of writing and being a wordsmith these last 15 years, that I don’t know how to fully convey the entirety without sacrificing it for the parts. It’s one of the reason I had my descent into hermitdom in the first place. It’s quiet and on no one’s terms. It just is.

Who knows….

I have no clue where I’m going to go with this entry, maybe no where. I feel the need to retreat from this world, or at least this country. I’m proud that we’re finally waking up and the catalyst to do so was the result of the curtain being removed from around the land of Oz. And as always, there is a but here…

It saddens me, in all of this, to watch voices be silenced because of disagreement – even if they are of an opinion I disagree with. I’ve pretty much hit the point where I don’t feel I can even talk to most people, rationally, about anything these days. So I sit in silence, occasionally giving a thumbs up, going about my business, and keeping my head down. It’s not worth it anymore and I’d rather spend my time obsessing over philosophy and the trends of nature. But this is a trend. Chaos must precede order, death must come to make room for life. Just as the wildfires and floods cleanse the land for the smaller trees and flora that need the ash and space to grow, so too must the world of man exist in similar fashion.

There’s an extent to which I look forward to the cleansing this brings to the socio-political world, but it’s a question of who to trust in the aftermath and whether or not they are what they seem. There’s a lot of fog around me these days, physically and metaphysically. These days, it makes me wonder if it’s a sign of things to come and whether the idea of being a secluded mystic is more the path for me than being in public. And the more I contemplate the idea, the more life seems to work for me. It also seems to be the direction the universe is sending me.