This might surprise some people who know me, because off and on over my lifetime I have been accused of being a chatterbox.

I am much more comfortable writing than talking; whether it is talking in person or on the phone, most of the time I find myself wishing that I had the option to just put it down in writing. I’d much rather chat on IM or text than pick up a phone and call someone. I’d rather write a letter than converse on the phone… I find talking about “serious” matters fairly difficult out loud…

Other than 2 message/emails on Facebook Reg has never emailed me anything that could be even vaguely considered “communication”. Sure, he’s emailed me a recipe here or there that he wants to try at my place… but he’s never emailed me anything beyond that. And despite the fact that our relationship STARTED via MSN messenger, that has been the FIRST thing that he dropped, and he’s spotty, at best, with texting.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if Reg was a good communicator by nature, but he really isn’t all that interested in communicating. Sure, he tries, but even after I tell him (point blank) that I need something from him he doesn’t bother to actually follow through – if he’s comfortable with “us” he drops the communication level to near zero… and that doesn’t work for me at all.

When we first started dating we chatted on MSN every night most of the night, I was comfortable in that medium and it was easy for me to create a rapport with him. For months and months that’s how we talked… how we shared the ups and downs of being single parents, dealing with our ex’s, and work and life stresses. When he decided he didn’t want to chat online but also didn’t want to be bothered to call or talk on the phone, he made it very very clear that I wasn’t important in his life. He rejected me through his actions.

Since we have gotten back together he HAD been way more diligent to communicate with me regularly… until recently. Recently he has had reasons not to be able to text in mornings or call in the evenings… and it might be true …

But it feels an AWFUL lot like the first rejection. I do not want to go through that again…

I have been reluctant to believe that he’s sincere because he doesn’t seem to GET how important this 30 seconds of his time IS to me (we’ve discussed the importance I attach, right or wrong, to the morning text message but he still “forgets” more often than he remembers)… The more often he “forgets” the less I believe that I matter to him, the more I want to wash my hands of this before it goes too far…

I don’t want to feel that I wasted my time by inviting back a man who really isn’t interested in a life with me.

I don’t want to feel like I wasted money – going to movies, buying movies, paying for meals, paying for trips, making my home available to him, buying extra groceries, paying extra in electricity, etc etc etc –  and to be left with nothing but debt and regret.

I don’t want to invest myself into someone who might reject me again.

I could forgive the wasted time and money… but offering myself up to be rejected a second time is freaking SCARY shit. The hurt wasn’t from him not calling, it was from him just treating the whole relationship as if it, and ME, were one big burden – the resistance to calling, the inability to make the effort to spend 15-30 seconds in the morning to let me know he cared, the acting as if my visiting was crowding him, zoning me out with tv, movies, video games or just sleeping, and the complete lack of sexual advances – was worse than being alone. When I was alone I knew where I stood, I could build confidence in myself, but giving it another chance, to go through the same bullshit? Not cool.

Maybe I am attaching too much importance to something “insignificant”… but I don’t think so.

To ME the morning text message is of PRIME importance – it tells me that he is:

1) WILLING to set aside a bit of time for me;

2) that he thinks about me;

3) that I have a place in his life even when he is away;

4) that he listens to what I NEED from  him;

5) and that he is willing to make a (small) sacrifice to ensure that we last

– getting that message in the morning is what gets me through my days at work. Being message less? Well… it makes everything feel 100X worse, seeds doubt, and makes me feel that I can’t rely on him at all (since, seriously, this is the smallest thing I could ask and he fails to do it??? How can I rely on him to be there for me when I really NEED someone if he can’t be there reliably for me emotionally?)…

 Now that time is more often anxiety related than joyful. More often lately I am let down instead of buoyed up.

I find that the days he cares enough to text me in the morning I feel happier and more satisfied by our relationship. The days he doesn’t care enough to do it I see myself wondering if the relationship is going south again…

This one thing was (is?) the best signal of the health of the relationship, of my place in his life. I have learned that when he can’t find the 30 seconds to type out and send “have a good day, love you. Xoxo” it doesn’t mean he’s really busy (because, its 30 fucking seconds … you can do that between parking the car and walking to the office and not even NOTICE it) it means that it wasn’t important to him.

When that was almost 90% of our communication in a week, the drop from every morning to every second morning, to once a week, to never (and never RETURNING a text) was significant.

I see it happening again… he’s too busy or too rushed (or just couldn’t be bothered, really) to send a text in the morning. He doesn’t respond to me when I text him. He wants to get off the phone within 15 minutes… soon he won’t phone at all and he’ll have an excuse to get off (videogame, movie, tv show) as soon as I call, if he answers at all.

I am steeling my heart against another hurt as the frequency of the texts drops dramatically. The phone calls have already gone from being 1 hour conversations about EVERYTHING, to 15 minutes whenever he remembers (or answers) when we discuss what is on tv and then he tells me  has to go have a shower. I have started to feel uncomfortable calling and talking to him on the phone because he’s always busy watching football or some show or he just really wants to rush off…

He’s noticing, but in his world we communicate a “lot”. We talk but usually only at the tail end of the day when I’m exhausted and all the hurt and disappointment of the day has built up. I would prefer a few nights when our lives don’t revolve around what is on the TV… when it isn’t about the show we’re watching or what he could be watching or me feeling disconnected because he’s tuned me out for hours. I have been feeling, lately, that I am not as important as what is (or might be) on TV… and that makes me uncomfortable interrupting him.

As texts and phone calls decreased I have found that I have become less comfortable asking anything of him.  When I felt secure in our relationship, when I felt that I could call or text and I wouldn’t be interrupting something he wanted to do, I was able to communicate my needs to him. Of course, the texts and the phone calls were an essential KEY to those needs. I needed to KNOW that he cares enough to text me in the morning. I needed to feel important enough that he’d call me and talk to me in the evenings. I needed to feel, frankly, wanted and needed by him.

I have learned, though, that you can’t force anyone to communicate.

As was the case last time, as time together wears on I place MORE importance on knowing he cares (after all, there isn’t anything compelling him to stay with me as he gets to know me better) and he places LESS importance on showing it (after all, he’s with me, isn’t he?). He gets less attentive because HE is secure, and the drop makes me INSECURE.

When I get insecure I don’t feel SAFE communicating my needs to him. All I know is that I no longer feel important to him. Instead of asking for more attention from him, I pull away – I can’t trust him to meet my needs so I meet my OWN needs without him, effectively cutting the reason I’m in a relationship. The more I meet my own needs without him, the less I need him. The less I need him, the more I resent having him in my life because he’s not there to meet any needs and he’s just cluttering up my life – I can’t do things, go places, eat things, etc because I have a boyfriend.  The relationship dies.

He’s starting to backpeddle… instead of wanting to discuss how we could make a life together he wants to tell me how much WORK we have to do to get to the point where we can even discuss it. I will never demand, but if things continue to look like they will never develop into anything more than a limbo-life of bullshit I will just make my way alone.

After all… he’s not even meeting my basic belonging need right now since 140 characters and 30 seconds of his time are too much for him… why trust him with more of my heart to break?

I have suffered through one mild (but painful) bronchial illness (exacerbated by my asthma) which I had caught from my Love and one horrific day with a migraine just in the last 2 weeks! I rarely get sick anymore, so what a shock to the system to feel the slip-slide of reverting back to the days of frailty and illness that I thought I had left behind.

Now, exactly WHAT does this all have to do with celebrating?

Well… quite a few things, really.

First, even though I have been feeling frustrated with the Man for being sick (even though it can hardly be his fault, it’s more the fact that he almost gets better only to suddenly come down with another illness later that day!) I wish to celebrate that I HAVE The Man in my life to take care of! Yes, I do get tired of playing nursemaid, and it isn’t necessarily fun to catch something no matter how you catch it… but…

I wish to celebrate my happiness in my relationship. So, yes, it can be hard when he’s sick and sleeping all day or not feeling well and not wanting to do anything… but I wish to celebrate having someone there to cuddle and care for (and to care for me).  I accept that with intimacy comes the risk of catching colds and flus and illnesses from my Love, and I realize that I am not willing to give up being close for anything… I will joyfully love and care for him even if I might catch an illness once in a while. It’s a small price to pay for love, and I know that he would do the same for me (because he has).

I also wish to celebrate my health. Sure I got sick… but growing up I would have bronchitis and colds every 2 months in the winter and randomly in the summer. I was sick ALL THE TIME from as early as I can remember until I was 20… and now I am blessed to only catch a cold or have a bronchial event once a year… IF THAT OFTEN. Sure, I still have asthma that flares for a few moments when it gets cold or there is smoke around, and yeah I still have seasonal allergies that make me wanna knock myself out every spring. I am near sighted and I have had to undergo a cervical cancer scan… but almost 90% of the time my body works and feels good! One cold here and there? Pshaw, nothing I can’t handle (and shake off apparently)! I’m gonna celebrate my health WHILE I have it good!

I wish to celebrate having the Man in my life. A year ago things with the Man were bad. Over the course of the first year of our relationship the Man went from being interested and caring, to not wanting to talk, text, chat, visit, or touch…  So I gave up on Reg after a year of nowhere dating.

For 4 months I didn’t see or talk to him at all. Then, out of nowhere, I received a “message” on Facebook from him – the only EMAIL I have received from the Man!!  I responded and a dialog opened. Eventually he found my new phone number and called me and we started talking on the phone for hours every night – something we had NEVER done in the year that we had dated –until he convinced me to get together with him and talk it out.

We’ve been communicating ever since.

To say that things are better now is pretty much an understatement. We communicate regularly. He texts me on the mornings he doesn’t stay over, and he has been staying at my place about 50% of the time. Every night we make a point of talking to each other either on the phone or in bed, before we go to sleep, and when I try to avoid something he knows and he helps me voice it.

I wish to celebrate that we did find each other and that we have decided to work on having a relationship and work towards creating a LIFE together instead of 2 lives completely apart. Instead of avoiding his stressors he’s actively working to fix them and discussing what is going on, and I am doing likewise. I still have issues letting him know what I want (ooh, there is a lot that I would want from him) and I am still a little leery that there might be another “shoe” to drop, but we talk and discuss and PLAN for a future together. And that is worth celebrating.

And I wish to celebrate my new blog:

SoulfulWhimsy.com

Please join me there…

As Samhain approaches I become more and more conscious of the wanting to let go, to leave things behind in this year and step through the veil into the new year.

So what do I wish to shed?

I wish to shed the desire for perfection. I realize that this is one of my “all or nothing” views that I have been oh-so-slowly and painfully removing in my life. While it is not yet severe, my desire to do things perfectly has made me self conscious about a lot of things, especially when it comes to creating. I need to shed the idea that I can’t do things if I can’t be GOOD at doing them.

I wish to shed the need to have a spotless home. This is related to the fact that I want everything perfect, but its also very much about 1) not facing the reality of my life and 2) learning to balance. In reality I only have 168 hours a week – in one week I need the following time:

• Between 40 and 56 hours of sleep
• 40 hours at work
• 5 hours of travelling to and from work
• 3 hours for self care
• 10 hours for meal preparation and cooking
• 5 hours of extracurricular activities outside the home

This leaves only 49 hours a week to clean my house, get groceries, socialize, relax, and spend time with my children and Reg! While I could easily get my house cleaned in this amount of time, the stress of keeping it “perfectly” clean would drive me to distraction. With 2 kids living with me part time and 2 cats living with me FULL time I could clean 80 hours a week and still feel like I am “failing”… for right now I need to find what is “good enough” for me for each room.

I wish to shed my fears – the fears that everything will come tumbling down, that I am not enough, that I will die alone, that I cannot do it, that I do not have a destiny, that I am not liked – and learn to accept myself and my situation.

I wish to shed my shyness, my inability to ask for what I truly want and NEED, especially from my love and my self.

I wish to shed my anxiety related to food.

I wish to shed the romantic notions that I have of what love is, and accept love for what it really is.

I wish to shed this blog, and welcome the newness of my continuing journey… but that’s not ready yet…

THEN: I was a 33 year old woman who had done the seemingly impossible by walking out of an almost 10-year marriage with an “upwardly mobile” engineer. I was living in a tiny town in the middle-north of Saskatchewan, sleeping on my parent’s basement couch. I was practically broke, because the husband that everyone thought was SO wonderful had decided to try and break me by not paying child support while spending as fast and furiously on our joint accounts as he could before I could slap him with official separation papers. I had full custody of my children, and was trying my best to meet their emotional needs while balancing his excesses, my more-than- full-time job, and trying to find a new home. I was distraught – and I was emotionally frozen.

NOW: I am a 36 year old woman with her life moving in the direction she wants it to be. I live in a condo I own, share custody of my children with their father, and date an incredible man that I am considering moving towards a life with. I have 2 insane feline companions who keep me company, a lover who cares enough to make the effort to erase the mistakes we made in the past, and goals that I am working towards. I live in the biggest city in Saskatchewan, and while it isn’t the place I would have ultimately WANTED to live my life, it is better than the middle of nowhere. I am hopeful – and I am emotionally BLOOMING.

Obviously I’m in a new phase of my life now… I am divorced (finally and I think legally, although I have to get paperwork from that somewhere thanks to douchebag lawyer for never actually sending it), I own my car, I own my home, I am steadily lowering my debt, I have RRSPs, I have a steady job and I have a GOOD relationship (something that the relationship with theEx never was) with Reg.

I am finally taking time to do things that enrich my life. This is the second year that I am taking Irish Dance and the first year I am taking Tae Kwon Do. I am taking a class with my son, and hoping that as my daughter gets older we will be able to take a class together as well. I am trying to keep up with my blogging and my writing. I have been dabbling with art journaling. I have started constructing a personal space of sanctuary in my home.

I don’t want to be stuck in the world that was my frozen nowhere, telling myself the stories of a life that is no longer. I don’t want to live the rules that governed my marriage with theEx. I do not want to give in to the chaos that was the brief and horrible period of time with the Stalker. I want to step forth… I want to dance into the new part of my life, in a state of constant renewal instead of being dragged down by the “coulda been, shoulda been, woulda been”…

I have made a commitment to myself to seek out a new name, to metamorphose into something that describes not the state of being I am in now, but how I am growing and changing for my eternity. My intention is to get at least a new name by Samhain/Halloween… stepping from the detritus of one life into the next part, as befitting my lifestyle.

Just what to call it… that is the question.

I have talked about Goddess Leonie and her wonderful Goddess School in the past. I have only been able to be through one of her classes (Decluttering your Sacred Goddess Space) due to financial and space-time-continuum issues*, but I have gone through the 2010 Goddess Workbook and Planner, and I hope hope hope someday to be able to join the Goddess Circle.
* I have yet to discover the way to turn my 24 hours into 36 hours… not that I’m not trying…

I have talked about Connie @ Dirty Footprints Studio and her 21 Secrets: An Art Journal Playground (which is yet another thing I hope to find time and space to pick up), but she also does BIG art for those who want to live a Fearlessly Creative life…

But this is different!! This is something that pretty much everyone who wants to write (especially if they want to write for NaNoWriMo) can use – the World Changing Writers Workshop (WCWW) and until Sunday Oct 24^th it is ON sale!!…

The Pay What You Can (Yes, We Really Mean It) sale!

If you have wanted to participate, but were not able to at the regular price, now is your chance to get it at a price YOU think is fair!! But if you ARE able to pay the full price of the course ($297) Pace and Kyeli will donate a WCWW 2011 scholarship in your name to someone ELSE who might struggle to be able to participate.

This is your chance to learn some ways to make the very very most of your writing, and to gain that sense of accomplishment and community that is so essential for those of us who write – even those of us like me who have struggled to come to terms with the fact that we ARE writers (even though we don’t make a living doing this)…

So, sign up today!! Just in time for NaNoWriMo!!

Pay what you can World Changing Writing Workshop  <–CLICK THERE TO SIGN UP!!

Whew… glad I could get that off my chest.

Anyway… the point is that the prompt comes from a line in a poem, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver (click if you want to read it yourself) that implores the reader to accept what they love, not to try and deny themselves for the sake of acceptance (and, if this is way off… just read the first paragraph and shake your head at me)…

So, what DOES the “soft animal” of my body wish for?

• My body wishes to be cuddled, to snuggle up with BoyChild and GirlChild, without feeling frustrated over behavior issues, without feeling our relationship is under the microscope by the school system or the school counselors or social services or theEx, or to feel like I am an absolute loser mom.
• Roundness, to feel the quicken of life beneath my ribs.
• Family, belonging, completion, grace…
• Silk and softness against my skin
• A warm bubbly bath
• To be massaged and touched and fussed over instead of always having to be the person doing the massaging and touching and fussing over everyone else
• To stretch and bend and sweat
• To sit still
• To run my fingers over a blank white page, tasting its possibilities
• To WRITE with ink on paper
• To CREATE beauty with words and colour and string
• To DANCE

These are the things my soft animal body wishes for, without judgement, without reservation… without FEAR.

I don’t think you are frozen nowhere anymore …maybe you could conjur up a new title that reflects your movement instead.

I have been feeling this sort of disconnect from the blog name for a bit, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it, since I have been writing here under this name for going on 3 years now.

When I started the blog it was just another place to write. I had previously spent 10 years writing on the Open Diary, but since the privacy of that space had been violated by my then husband, my words twisted and turned and used to cause me injury… well… I no longer wanted to continue on that path, but I knew I had to write. So I decided to be more open about where I was in my life, what was going on, and where I was heading…

And I started FrozenNowhere

At the time it perfectly described where I was in my life: I was living in a small town in Saskatchewan that was pretty much the middle of nowhere, it was the middle of a long cold winter, I was feeling like I was frozen into place waiting for my (now ex) husband to get off his considerable rump and deal with the fact that I had asked him for a divorce AND he needed to deal with being a parent and having to pay child support to me even thought he resented ME.

It was a COLD period. I was unsure of everything in my life, some of my important relationships fell to the side because, well… I was too afraid to reach out. I always felt COLD COLD COLD… so out of touch with what I needed to make myself WELL, I felt as if I had a permanent chill and I could not get warm even with a heater right beside me or a heated wheat bag (or three) in bed with me.  I was FROZEN in myself…

I was suddenly aware that the person I had once been, that fierce little woman, that learner, the Witch, the GODDESS, had been frozen in a big gigantic block of necessity-ice… the person I used to be was there, under layer after layer of hurt and pain… and ICE. And the process of defrosting my SELF, of taking out the window scraper and clearing away the years of hurt and abuse, of figuring out how to get my head free, and my arms free and my heart free and then my body free… well… it was all leading to me getting my legs free…

As I went through this process I realized that I had really lost touch with who I was NOW… I had an image of the woman I had been at 19, before going through the wringer of abusive relationships, and I had an image of the woman I wanted to be – but I was so far removed from BOTH of these women and I didn’t know which way to move.

Now I’m changed. I am ready to move towards who I really am, what I really need.

As Sarah Lulu points out, I am not really in a land of “frozen nowhere” any longer…

The question is, where AM I?

Neither of my domain names – FrozenNowhere or FacingEastAgain – describe the me I am becoming. I am no longer in a frozen nowhere land and although I am still “facing east” in my spiritual journey, the true person I am becoming isn’t JUST about that direction anymore.

I need to turn a new page…

What do you wish to fly free from?

I wish to fly free from SO many things lately:

• I wish to fly free from the need to work outside the home.
• I wish to fly free from the overarching financial anxiety that comes from being alone
• I wish to fly free from the feeling of loneliness
• I wish to fly free from the unreasonable expectations that people place on me – the simple fact is that sometimes I cannot accommodate a request, even a request to help my children fit better into society, because I have to maintain my employment or my financial balance.
• I wish to fly free from the COMPLETELY unreasonable expectations that I place on MYSELF all the time
• I wish to fly free from anxiety, especially the panic that sometimes overwhelms me at night when I am alone

So… what do YOU wish to fly free from?

I’ve been noticing this in my own life… and I’ve seen how this can get out of hand in the lives of those around me. I know that the invisible energetic things pervading our stuff hold them to us… for a multitude of reasons. The head knows that we do not need this item or really WANT this item, but the heart knows that this item is OURS.

My sticking points tend to fall in 2 areas – things that have been given to me and hobbies – where the pull to keep things I don’t really want or need becomes stronger than my resolve to get the item out of my home.

For instance when my grandmother passed on my aunts decided to divide the costume jewelry between the 4 granddaughters. I have had 2 boxes of rhinestoned, glittery, unwanted costume jewelry ever since!

I don’t NEED these pieces for anything. I don’t want them. I don’t even remember my grandmother wearing any of these so I can’t have any memories attached to them!! But the idea that they are somehow, someway my HERITAGE, which they were given to me, that I should be grateful to get even this much… that stays with me.

The same goes for craft supplies. I have had several “crafty” hobbies over the years, and all the bells and whistles to prove it. I have taken up and discarded:

• Crochet
• Embroidery
• Beadworking
• Scrapbooking
• Altered books
• ATCs
• Cross stitch
• Sewing
• Art Journaling
• Knitting

Each time I start off very gung ho about the new hobby, am absolutely FILLED with inspiring ideas and dreams.

But the dreams don’t LAST. And I end up with bits and pieces for craft projects and things that I desperately want to do… but I just don’t do them. I don’t get rid of things because, well… I want to do something CREATIVE… I just have no clue what that is.

I keep these things, not because the OBJECTS have any intrinsic value (financially or nostalgically) to me. To me they are just clutter, pushed from one home to another, on and on. I have no use for them myself. As objects I find them neither beautiful or fascinating, or evocative of a memory of the loved one they belonged to or the dreams that inspired getting them.

When I knew my grandmother she was an austere, formidable, strict woman with super high standards that no one could live up to. She rarely wore jewelry, and the few pieces I remember her wearing were of the higher upper-middle class women of her generation. What I inherited seemed so out of place with the grandmother I had known. So why did I keep them? What purpose was it serving me?

When I picked up a ball of wool or a set of fancy scissors, what did I really envision doing with them? The supplies, on their own, do not mean much to me because they are not the dream that I had but the raw materials to get there. Somewhere along the line the dream disappeared, or my confidence in it disappeared, or something else happened to make me re-think things. And the remains are piles of STUFF that itself has no meaning or draw, but which contains within the pile the ENERGETIC things of my dreams.  Why do I keep these things? Can I tease out the dreams or recreate them?

Do you see what I see?

The items, the pieces of jewelry, the individual papers or pens, scissors, images, patterns, none of these THINGS have a hold on me individually.

What is holding them to me, the ties that bind, are the energetic things attached to each item.  It isn’t the brooch that I want to keep; it’s the CONNECTION to my grandmother who has passed beyond the veil. It isn’t the pretty yarn or the fancy paper that I want to keep, it is the dream that I have of making something of beauty, of wanting to pull something out of my SOUL. Letting go of supplies does not destroy my desire to find a creative outlet any more than letting go of unneeded jewelry will destroy the memories I have of my grandmother.

What ties me to these items are ENERGETIC bonds – connections to something larger than myself – the connection to my heritage/family or a connection to my innermost being are not things that can be easily dismissed either.

Despite the fact that I don’t particularly feel attached to any of these OBJECTS themselves, there is an intense feeling of guilt and regret when I do let them go. Why?

Because, I have come to realize, I am not honouring the energetic things that are part of each item. I am not honouring the REASON I have these things, and I am not CONSCIOUSLY allowing myself to accept what the energetic aspects are telling me so I can gently and mindfully sever the ties (SEVER is such a harsh word for what I imagine is akin to setting adrift a helium balloon…)…

sometimes the decluttering of stuff is more than it appears to be…

Seems like something that could use a ritual cooked up for it…

I wasn’t always this meek.

At least I don’t think I was.

I remember being told I was such a “fierce” girl, that I was going to do well in life… that I knew what I wanted and wasn’t going to let anyone else tell me that I couldn’t do that.

Who is that girl? Where did she go?

I wish for confidence in my SELF. I wish to know who I am, what I am meant to do. I wish for confidence in joining with other people. I wish for the confidence it takes to place my fists on my hips, spread my stance wide, and state;

I am HERE. I am WORTHY of being LOVED.

Why is it so terribly hard to feel confident that I am worthy of love? Or of a good life? Or to have a DREAM? Or to belong somewhere??

Where did my Fierce Girl go?

I wish for the confidence to once more enter my life fully – to make friends, to love, to make mistakes, to pursue my dreams, to not have to beg and plead for acceptance  — and to help my children become their very own self-actualized FierceBoy and FierceGirl that NO ONE can take away.

But is that all there is to the Energetic Things?

Nope. Not by a long shot.

The fact that I NOTICE how physically draining an activity is does not negate the fact that the same activity might be spiritually filling. It might emotionally suck me dry or intellectually feed me… or BOTH, at once. Hell… one activity might have physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energetic consequences at the same time

As each situation is different, so each PERSON is different too…

What I might find rewarding my best friend might find too draining to be worth considering… or vice versa.

And you know what else is trippy?

Something that used to be “worth it” at one point might grow to become one of those unexplained Energetic THINGS that drag you down.

It happens.

This is where I find myself… exploring the energetic levels of activities I do trying to determine why suddenly my balance is off. I am no longer finding that the energy I am receiving is equal to what I am expending. I am finding myself slowly drained, as the activities and relationships that once fed my energetic self are now a source of energy leeching.

It seems something is no longer working for me and the Energetic things need to be taken out and looked at before I become so drained I get ill.

So I have decided, as part of my decluttering of my life, to take a serious look at the variety of Energetic Things I am juggling.

Samhain is a time to review, after all…

So what can I tell you about what’s going on, energetically, in my life?

Firstly, I need to examine the things I have in my life – my life style, the objects I surround myself with, what I do in my free time, my relationships – that have energetic consequences.

Secondly, I have to tease out all the energetic components that are part of each thing… just lay them out

Thirdly, I have to consider the implications of each energetic component – is it draining or filling, what type of component is it?

Lastly, I need to decide FOR MYSELF what needs to be released, what can be modified, and what is valuable to keeping me going. This has to be about what is best for ME, rather than trying to do what will most likely please other people… people pleasing in inevitably more draining than filling.

The idea is to come up with a way to review and process the impact of the quiet energetic things that are attached to our lives, evaluate our life choices based on whether it is draining us, balanced, or feeding us, and thus allow us to make energetically conservative decisions on the peoples, places and things that we let into… or out of… our lives.

Who’s with me? (Anyone??? Anyone??)

And yet I’m running into a great deal of resistance with other things.

Especially my MacBook

My MacBook seems like a trivial thing to hold onto… I have a new HP laptop that is faster, shinier and which has a hard drive that is almost 10x that of the MacBook. The MacBook takes 5 minutes to load up Word 2008, whereas the HP starts up Word 2010 in seconds. The MacBook has battery issues (after 5 years that isn’t surprising) and lacks hard drive space. For obvious reasons when my company stated they had a computer purchasing program, I decided to get a new computer – but decided I didn’t want to pay the “cool fee” for an Apple this time.

(Not that I won’t likely get an iPhone when they become available on my carrier… or an iPad… but that when the price of the MacBook was double what I paid for the HP I couldn’t really justify the expense for what I use it for)

That puts the number of computers I have in my home (all laptop types) at 3 – I bought my son a netbook last year (which I do not feel comfortable allowing him to take to his father’s place) which we rarely use, I have my HP that I am using as my daily computer, and I have the MacBook, which is sitting unused right now.

I want to try to sell it, even if it is only for parts, but I find that the idea of doing so makes me nervous. I’m not SURE why it makes me nervous, it just does.

I have never sold anything on eBay. I do not have an eBay account. I do not know all the logistical issues that will come with selling something like this on eBay… and I don’t really know anyone who has done any selling on eBay.

For example:

• How do I list this? The computer seems to be in working order right now, other than normal slowness that seems to come from being almost 5 years old and the normal wear on the battery. Should it be listed as “in working order” or “for parts”?
• What work should I do to it to get it ready? Since it was one of the first generation white MacBooks there is a discolouration on the keyboard area that I am not sure how to clean off. While the Stalker did upgrade my system to Leopard, I do not have the disks needed to do an erase and install… which means that my system will have to be reverted back to Tiger (Oh, the horror). Should I buy Snow Leopard (OS X 10.7) in order to make it marketable or just let people deal with the Tiger (10.5)?
• How to ship it? What do I need to ship a computer? Are there any regulations?

I find myself wishing that I knew someone who wanted to buy something like this so I didn’t have to try to go through the gristmill of eBay…

Of course, I have other things I need to find a way to sell – 2 iPaq hand held PDAs, some vintage costume jewelry, cross stitch patterns that I realize I will likely not “get to” doing – and maybe there is someone out there who might WANT some of this stuff???

The MacBook presents a quandary. I know it is worth a little bit, but I don’t know how much and I don’t know if anyone would want it. I realize that I will not get nearly what I paid for it, but that’s not the goal either. Letting go of this is letting go of 5 years – of working in an AppleCare centre, of being cared about by coworkers (and also stabbed in the back by coworkers and HR), of surviving emotional abuse, of playing WoW, of the support network I had when I left theEx, starting my blog, writing, moving, growing…

But I know, also, it is time to move on. And if I can get even $100 for it for parts, that will really help me.

Has anyone out there ever done the eBay thing? Any tips???

We acquire more THINGS – both physical and energetic – when we are in a deficit space. The need to “fill” ourselves or to “fill” some need that we have causes us to seek out more. Some of the things we acquire fill the needs, and therefore enrich our lives.

But some of the THINGS are just an expression of the process of feeling a lack in our lives.

I know that I went through a process of gathering when I went through the process of divorce. I mostly gathered notebooks and pens and creative supplies. I tried to find an outlet for something that I felt, but could not put my finger on – a niggly wiggly sense that something was MISSING for me.

The process that I have been going through, the process of SEEKING, has been one of discovering not only who I am, but what it is that I am feeling. I am chasing that niggly wiggly feeling down the spiritual “rabbit hole” to find out what it is and why the hell is it whispering “I’m late!”…

Oh… sorry… that’s another story altogether.

But the journey never really ENDS either.  As soon as I discover one thing, it leads to a whole bunch of branches that lead to more niggly wigglies and more rabbit holes…

The more rabbit holes I went down, the more energy I expended SEEKING, and the more THINGS that seemed to collecting in my home. As I sought out parts of myself that I had denied or forgotten, as I flexed my new found freedom, as I tried to extend myself… I found that there was a LOT of EMPTINESS inside of me.

I had felt empty throughout my marriage, and leaving it didn’t make me feel any less empty… so the seeking of things to fill myself was my way of coping. I didn’t have a marriage where I felt I could talk to my husband – he was emotionally and literally not THERE for the marriage – and because of his insecurities I didn’t have many friends or family connections for support, instead I had hobbies and collections and objects.

It has taken me a long time to realize that what I am missing is connection to people. Only… right now I have very LITTLE connection to anyone and it hurts a lot, and I fill that hurt with physical things and energetic things… but what I need to do is connect to things that bring me joy and love.

I’ve lived my life in fear of other people – I’ve feared their words, I’ve feared their disappointment, I’ve feared their rejection – and I haven’t really allowed many people to know me or love me. I am distant from my parents, I am distant from those who I call friends, I am distant even from my children…

And I am working on no longer being DISTANT… I am removing the STUFF that stands between me and MYSELF, I am letting go of the energetic things – the RULES, the OBLIGATIONS, the WORRY, the FEAR – and I am letting myself BE with the people I care about.

I am trusting ME to find what makes ME happy, instead of listening to the unhappy people or the unhappy voices in my head. I am no longer living my life to please my friends or family or ex-husband…

I know that I might lose people this way… the fact that I am realizing how unfulfilling doing what I have been doing has made me, and what has made me feel connected and loved is NOT what the people around me would choose for themselves, and therefore unlikely that they would want me to choose for MYSELF.

It’s OKAY not to want the same things everyone else does. It’s OKAY to have different goals than other people want you to have. It’s okay to change your goals. It’s okay to let go of things, even relationships, to make room for support in your life.

Sometimes these are the hardest lessons to learn.

It’s not that I am still not committed to it. It’s that it’s harder to get things done than I expected with the full time job and the full time kids, activities, and housework.

Consequently, things are sitting in my house waiting for a weekend that is slow enough for me to drag it all out to the Salvation Army. This weekend doesn’t look like it will be “the one”…

Part of my wanting to get rid of things in my home are about making more space – both physical and energetic – for the things in my life that matter the most.  I’m learning about what I value – family, simplicity – but that I am not necessarily the most sentimental person either. I love keeping things the kids made, but not forever (and unfortunately, some had to go), and while I value the fact that I was given jewelry that my grandmother’s wore I don’t want to KEEP it and I certainly will never wear it so it’s better off finding a new home.

It’s all very exciting… only… it really IS. Every single thing I get out opens a space to let something IN… even something as small as my wedding ring or a few tangled gold chains will make space to let in something beautiful, in time.

I seem to be missing the TIME bits.

It seems that along with getting rid of the physical things that are taking up my life energies, I need to be letting go of energetic THINGS.

This is WAY harder to do than it sounds like.

Why? Because there are a multitude of energetic things – promises, requests, obligations, guilt, responsibilities, hobbies, interests, hopes, dreams…. – that pull at us every day. It’s what makes us feel so rushed and so tired and so… lacking in time and mental space.

And they ARE hard to let go of.

I have many different categories of energetic THINGS in my life

• RESPONSIBILITIES to people  — children, employers, family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, my pets
• RESPONSIBILITIES to things – my home, my vehicle, my community
• OBLIGATIONS – legal, financial, relational
• PERSONAL things – from maintaining myself to improving myself
• WORRIES – relationships, home, kids, work, finances…
• HOPES and DREAMS

I have slowly been letting go of Energetic things that don’t “give back”… but its slow going. I am unsure as to what I CAN say “no” to right now… There are things that I might want to dump in the spiritual trash, only to realize that it will have ringing effects if I do that… but that in the end some of the consequences may be necessary to push me forward.

I find that I am a hoarder of responsibilities. I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders a lot of the time, when I really have no reason to. I feel that things are my responsibility, that I am the cause of a lot of problems in my world.

It is time to lay the burdens down and declutter my energetic things.