the.way.i.bee

So I started out fairly strong and quickly seemed to stall.   I need to freely write just to find a starting point again.   So excuse me if this is a bit rough.  I’m just going to keep typing until I start to develop some direction. . .

I am so easily distracted and quick to turn on myself.  The critical me is disgusted with my lack of discipline.  How can I manifest any of my dreams if I can’t stay focussed?  The softer me says that’s just life.  It creeps up on you.  It’s never still.  And that’s not a bad thing.

There are the glitches like spotty internet connections, summer colds, flooding rains.  The unplanned speed bumps. Some of those I can do without. But there are also all these ideas and projects that pull my attention in so many directions.  I have classes to take, veggies and herbs to harvest, tinctures to make, a blog to post, a story to tweak.  These things that maybe aren’t necessary but call to me and feed me in some way.  

And then there are those spontaneous moments that beg me to live them.  Moments that just captivate me.  Which brings me to my family, my people . . .  My people have needs.  They need to eat, they need to be places, they need clean undies and they need love and attention.  But more than all that, I need them.   They are my home.  They are my foundation.  My sure ground.  They are my motivation.  They inspire me.  I could be content with my life’s pace and activities; happily content with doing the 9 to 5 thing as long as I have my people.  And to a certain extent, I am.  But oddly enough, it is being so madly in love with them that makes me push myself to be more.  

Hmmm. . .  sounds like I might have found a starting point.

I love writing stories for children.  They have no limits.  They haven’t started to consider where their ceiling is in life; though, at any age, none of us should. Life usually hasn’t given them doubts in the basic good of all people or drawn any boundaries around their imaginations.   Nothing is impossible.

Everything,  every thing, has potential.  Every idea, every word can launch a dream.  But then in life we have to, as guides through this world, sometimes say to our children, “You can’t”, “We can’t”, “I can’t”.  And as much as it is needed, once introduced to “can’t”, how can they not begin to wonder what else they can not do.  It starts to seep out of the necessary world of safety can’ts (“You can’t cross the street alone”) and into the world of potential can’ts (“I can’t do better.”). 

One of the saddest can’ts to me is the one that limits imagination.  Specifically the one that limits imagining itself.  The one that labels it as a waste of time, silly, pointless.  I’m not sure what it is exactly that creates this particular can’t – realizing the movie isn’t real, your favorite superhero is fake, or, like me, Mrs. Butterworth is not going to talk to you over your morning waffles. Whatever it is that causes us to belittle the importance of our imaginations, it has to be unlearned.  Imagination is the catalyst to change.

How can we not stretch the boundaries between what is possible and what is not possible if we do not imagine what lies beyond that point and believe it can be reached.  And it truly is only a point.  One second separates possibles from impossibles.  We have already seen the impossible become possible.  We landed a man on the moon!  In fact we’ve traveled so far beyond that point, that landing a man on the moon hardly seems all that impressive.  But alot of us don’t really  remember it’s time of “can’t be done”.  We didn’t really experience the breakthrough.  And that point only gets passed because one person or one group of people never truly believed in that particular kind of “can’t”.

Yeah, that’s what I love about writing for kids.  Their imaginations’ boundaries are hazy.  They can grasp an impossible idea and ride with it.  A story can open the mind.  Not even because of the story itself.   Stories give doubts a chance to rest and may just make way for inspiration.  Creativity comes out to play.  A story can exercise their beautiful imaginations.   And maybe that one particular kind of “can’t” doesn’t get a chance to build a wall, leaving intact their boundless potential.

Eight hours a day, five days a week, I sell my time.  I spend it doing work that holds no meaning to me.  I push paper across my desk, knowing there’ll be more behind it.  I spend invisible money (it might as well be play money) buying things I have no interest in.  Then out to a shop to move those things to where they’ll sit until needed.  It is hugely  unsatisfying.

The world isn’t made a better place by what I do.  I see no one helped or touched by what I do.  Myself included.  Does that matter?

I can certainly do work that would benefit others.  But then my thoughts turn to money and health insurance.  And here I sit having chose my wallet over my conscience.  I do the same every week at the grocery store.  Choosing the eggs produced by the miserable chickens instead of the free ones, milk from the sickly sad cow instead of the happy one.  But organic costs so much more of your money . . .

. . .  but so much less of your soul.  Because you know it is right.

And so it is like my choice of career.  It feeds my wallet and nothing more.

(Clarification here – I don’t work for an evil empire.  I just get no satisfaction.  Paperwork is never finished, nothing feels like it ever gets accomplished.  I never have a sense that I’ve done some good at the end of the day.  I’m part of some bigger process that must do someone some good to still be in business but I’m not connected to it.  I feel no connection to it.  I feel like I traded my passion for a co-pay.      It’s just now I want to buy milk from the happy cow.)

I hit a point where I know I need to put up or shut up.  Either stop saying and stay where I am or start doing and get to where I want to be.  I have a tangled mass of ideas of what I want to have happen.  How I got to this point is less relevant anymore than where I am going from here.

So I sat with this seemingly impenetrable mass – I mean all the dreams, schemes and ideas mixed with real commitments, needs and the everyday circus.  In my mind all these things formed the tangled ball of twine that, with every attempt to unravel, would only get tighter and more knotted.  It became frustrating to figure out, enough so that I would lose focus.  And to lose focus in the task of prioritizing, well, what’s the point in continuing?  Every now and then I would revisit this knot ball, sometimes making progress but always coming back to that point of frustration only to abandon it again. 

It isn’t that this is all heavy, do-or-die stuff here.  More, it is a realization of just how precious time is and how important it is to spend it wisely, doing things that resonate with my Truths.  But what exactly are my Truths anymore . . .  back to the ball of twine.  As long as I don’t allow myself the time and space to sit and unwind and as long as I don’t accept this cannot be accomplished all at once, it just ain’t ever gonna happen.

Writing this blog, which is a bit out of my comfort zone honestly, is part of this process for me.  This jumbled mass of ideas in my mind seems more easily managed if I can take a few out and put them on paper (er… monitor?)  And I just have to write.  I go crazy if I can’t write.  So I know this is somehow essential to my progress. Having some eyes on whatever I’m currently processing may just help get a fresh perspective and also serve to help me conquer my fear of putting my work out there (as you can imagine, that would make the aspiration of becoming a published author a bit slow going . . .).  Having it as a blog, somehow commits me to make the time to do it.

I’m also trying to get back on track with being more self-sufficient.  I want to keep bees (which, somehow in this journey of mine, the honeybee has become my guide).   I am a massage therapist and am studying herbalism.  I want to do something more with that.  Do work that makes sense.  All these mixed up threads, all twisted together yet definitely all connected.  I will write until this connection becomes apparent to me and my path through the forest becomes clear.  Until I figure out the way I bee.