Ramblings, rants, musings, explorations, ideas, fears, loves and... Perspectives.
Posted in: PermissionGranted
"If I can't be creative, I'll die."
While I'm not often given to being that hyperbolic (because thoughts have great power when you put them in words that strong), I chose them purposefully when I spoke them to a group of co-workers during an off-site annual planning meeting this past week.
I'm good at telling my stories but I'm also pretty proficient at playing my cards close to my chest. Should I elaborate? Alrighty. I'm good at telling the pretty stories - the happy endings, the inspiring snippets, the silly happenings around my home involving my two precocious young men. The stuff I tend to hold back? All that other stuff. The shame stuff, the guilt stuff, the shoulda-woulda-coulda, want-it-so-badly-but-I-don't-think-I-really-"deserve"-it stuff.
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.
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.
If I hear the word “poop” once a day, I guarantee you that I hear it a hundred or more times. My boys seem to grow more fascinated with the word the more anathema I deem it. At ten and five, I wonder when they will outgrow their preoccupation, when it will cease to be so seemingly endlessly obsession-worthy. I wonder, too, whether my calling attention to it, demanding the constant references end posthaste, serves to prolong the behavior.