Ramblings, rants, musings, explorations, ideas, fears, loves and... Perspectives.
My favorite places to hang out as a child included the tops of trees, the insides of couch pillow forts, the underneaths of tables (especially when the grown-ups had forgotten I was there), and just about anywhere where I could watch the clouds going by overhead. The outskirts. The edges of where the action was happening. Places were I could observe but still stay separate if I wanted.
It's a new year (according to the Common Era Gregorian calendar) and I've completed my first week in a new position at work. I'm moving from working in a production area supporting the manufacturing areas with data analysis to the human resources department and I won't mince words: It was a challenging week. There's so many new processes and systems to learn that, even though I've been with the company for over seven years, in several ways it feels like I just stepped in off the street.
The last card of the tarot that we’re exploring in Lyn Thurman’s “Writing the Wisdom of Your Soul” is The World and it extended an invitation to us to share what we’ve learned through this challenge. It’s been a good journey and still, somehow, the lines from Wordsworth’s poem, containing its own title, were the first words that occurred to me:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers
For the past several days, I have allowed Overwhelm to creep in and make itself at home. Being one to offer hospitality freely, I figured it might only need a day or two before it was ready to slink off to its next destination. If I was kind enough, I reckoned, it might even be lighter on the next person’s resources, a sort of pay-it-forward karma, if you will. Overwhelm took advantage of the opening and wedged itself in there so firmly that I can’t even distinguish the space it has taken over as my own right this moment. I’m now faced with taking back some of that ground more forcefully than I’d like.
You know what? An act of bravery can be as small as getting a haircut. You don’t always know what’s going to happen on the other side of the act, even how YOU will feel about it once it’s done. It can be refreshing and terrifying. It can be uplifting and degrading.
In those darling details, the Devil awaits, don’t you know?
At last count, I have at least four primary email addresses and another three secondary addresses. I have fourteen RSS feeds to different blogs. I am the owner of four different blogs (three of which have been woefully neglected this year). We have a many-bedroomed, many-bathroomed, many-closeted home.
When I first started making my own soup from scratch, I would test it, batch after pitiful batch, on my beautiful (and apparently iron-stomached) friends who gathered at my home on Wednesday evenings so we could allow our kids to run roughshod over the house and nobody cared (too much) how much noise they made as long as no one was bleeding. Kids get tired of being hushed and parents, if they’re honest with themselves, get tired of hushing, so it’s a win-win to establish safe spaces for chaos.
The appearance of the Death card from the traditional Tarot has never bothered me because it was introduced to me as being synonymous with change rather than any specific loss of physical life. In fact, today it feels more like an invitation.