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“The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another.”  ~ Henry Miller

The road went by too quick. It was a mad dash from destination to destination like we were finally free and wanted to make the absolute most of it, but we so easily lost our heads in quantity, and lost the quality of our deep breaths. We didn't get many chances to simply stop and look at what we had, then before we knew it we were wishing we had it again, but here we are, doing something beautiful. At our core we want to be of service, whether that be spiritual or creative, or just practical help, and getting the opportunity to care for our family was something we always talked about being a possibility. 

I feel like the universe gave us a beautiful opportunity to just be here and appreciate this, and there is a part of us that has been fighting it because it doesn't look how we wanted everything to look, and we aren't connecting with community the way we so desperately wished for.  There is still time to manifest our beautiful world, but our time with Grandma Spitfire is limited, and we need to remember that. I also need to remember that this is a perfect opportunity to look over everything we accomplished without stacking so much on top of it that I forgot what we did last week.

 

Wait a Minute...

After the last post I was a bit down on myself for being so "negative," but it wasn't negative; it was real and vulnerable human emotion.  That is exactly what I want this place to be. I want anyone in creative or spiritual communities to feel welcome to write here about all their raw human emotions, without judgement or guilt, but with support and open hearts.  So there it is.

We went for a hike one day after dropping the girls off at their nature class, and found this massive oak tree that had fallen down at some point, likely by eroding from the creek next to it and triggered by a massive flow of water.  It continued to grow, though, with the half of its roots that were still in the ground. If that doesn't sum everything up beautifully, I don't know what does?  We only shot for about 15 minutes, stopping a couple times for hikers meandering by, hiked over to a dam that was built in 1803, blessed and picked some black sage, then hiked back to the car in the rain, and it was beautiful. 

Dkyil Khor

Every moment of our existence is accidentally building the mandalic patterns of our lives. The intricacies of which would be barely recognizable if we were to step out of our bodies and gaze upon the complexities of it all... the unconscious patterns of our every breath. The beauty of a tangible mandala is the meditation that goes into building it, and the ritual destroying of it, only to begin on another. That is kind of the point… circles on circles on circles in life. While the evidence of each of those structures may be destroyed and started over, each one lives on forever within us.

So many times in my life I have attempted to start over because the holes I dug were too deep, searching for a new center of a new pattern, but I usually found that though everything may have looked or felt different, I was still lost in the delicate details of the old pattern, refusing to let it go until I realized some conclusion... some complete pattern and work. What I was actually doing by trying to start over was making the older work that much more complex, and I feel that instead of letting everything go, I am actually dooming myself to the madness of layering all of these individual circles in patterns on top of each other.

I set the expectations on myself too high, too soon in life, and I have wasted my life trying to live up to that madness. I always understood that what we are working toward will never matter as much as what we accomplish while we are getting there, but everything I accomplished just seemed so petty in relation to my expectation, and everything about that is wrong.  I've been at a crossroads for years, but I just can't move. I have always prided myself on being able to be fine regardless of where I am, but I was also working toward something that seems so silly now. There is an energy in me that can't let go of what I'm trying to accomplish, regardless of how much sense I'm given, over and over. There is a part of me that feels all that doubt and... what? Do I give up like my dad did and just live the numb existence that everyone tells me is normal? How does one do that when they are standing in such a complex mandala, and the more they try do destroy it and start over, the more complex it gets?

I've tried writing this post a handful of times, and I just can't get it past this. That's where I'm at... deciding to keep trying or give up, and I hate feeling like this. We were on the road for 3 months and I was just enjoying time with my family. We never found what we were looking for, and instead of saying it doesn't exist, I simply believe that we just haven't found it yet, but it is out there, somewhere. Now we've been in San Diego for six months, and the road, which is severely missed, feels daunting, like an unrealistic ideal all its own.

Every morning I walk Grandma's yard and pull flowers from the lawn, because here they are considered weeds, but to the bees I have to gently shoo away to get to these "weeds", I am a threat to their very existence. 

My goddess is off visiting a friend in the desert, and I've got to get up early to treck to Mexico to get some pretty painful dental work done.

The upside that I am choosing to focus on in all of this is that I finally sat down and cut a little video together, dating way back to the night before we left our little mountain. This probably should've been done a little sooner than 7 months later, but I can at least say that I added another complex circle to my pattern. On top of that, I actually started a YouTube channel with that one video. On top of that, I actually sent an email to Alexa Sunshine Rose to get permission to use her music, and her quick and sweet response gave me some hope in finding the spiritual and creative community that we long for.

“You don’t drown by falling in water. You only drown if you stay there.” ~ Zig Zigler

I really wanted to test YouTube's nudity policy, because according to them nudity is allowed as long as it is instructional, documentary, or artistic, but I decided to go with the blurry version because I don't trust any of it at this point.