May 21, 2004

The weekend is nearly here and it WILL be a good one!  I am absolutely determined.  Last weekend was slow and lazy, an experiment in nonactivity.  Eric has to work a bit tomorrow, but not likely for the entire day.

Beyond that, there are no plans.  We're between moons (full and new) and there's no holiday until Summer Solstice, so we don't have a group meeting scheduled.  It's just a big ol' empty slate (nudge - Robbie - nudge).  The kids are gearing up for the last week of school this year.  They are nearly giddy about it and so am I!  The 45 minute bus ride is really hard on them, especially Dylan.  I look forward to slow, lazy mornings.

It feels SO COLD this morning.  Last I checked, this was midMay and yet, I had to build a fire in the woodstove this morning.  My hands feel frozen as I type this!  When do my beautiful mountain mornings hit?  Frozen mountain mornings aren't working for me!

Yesterday's journal was the beginning of a process that is going to take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.  I'm expecting shorter rather than longer.  Evidently, I underestimated the impact stress and a complete life change would have on me.   I've pretty much been denying it to myself (even if I've admitted it aloud), but I've been courting a pretty strong depression as of late.  I kept trying to point out all of the wonderful things in my life, but it didn't seem to curb the symptoms of continued fatigue, headaches that weren't even dented by OTC meds (and I was fresh out of UTC meds), irritability and erratic sleep patterns.  Usually, I have my dreams to guide me through the messages I'm missing, but since I moved here the end of March, I can't really remember my dreams when I wake up. I don't know if it's the change in bed placement (used to be North to South and now it's West to East) or the change in altitude or what.  I've never experienced this before.  My dreams, since I was a child, have been extremely clear and detailed in memory. 

Without my dream compass to point me to the places I need to investigate, I was a little slower to catch on.  Eric picked up on it before I did (he knows me pretty well) and bugged the crap out of me asking, "What's wrong?  What can I do to make you happy?" at least once a day.  Since I didn't feel like anything was wrong, it was making me crazy.  It wasn't until yesterday, when I was writing my journal, that I started to realize that I was the Zoloft egg.

It's not anything devastating.  Just an overall feeling of malaise and weariness.  Once I realized this, I spent the rest of yesterday looking at how my mood and feelings affected the rest of the family.  Within a couple of hours of being home, Eric was irritable, had a headache and was exhausted.  He came home in a wonderful mood and I just sucked that right out of him.  It wasn't intentional, but what my mom used to say is true, "If Mama ain't happy, ain't no one happy."  She said it as words of warning to us to keep her smiling, but I think we could all use it to consider the impact that our spirits have on our family.  I do believe that we are the heart and pulse of our families.  It comes with the uterus.  Whether our families are of the conventional, nuclear variety or of the Mama + four-legged children variety, it doesn't seem to change.  My kids have been struggling with Nathan acting out and Dylan fighting at school.  Delena is having all kinds of physical maladies.  "My head hurts, my stomach hurts, I'm going to throw up, my legs hurt, my butt hurts."

I had a good cry last night when Eric told me that his share of the pay that comes in next week would be considerably less than we expected.  I felt like we'd been striving toward that one thing, that one payment, and that once we got there, everything would be OK and we could breathe.  Hearing that we were likely going to have yet another month of struggling put me over the edge. 

As I went to sleep last night (around 9pm, I went to bed at 7:30 in an attempt to hide from the world for a while - ineffectively), I prayed that I could get the angle I needed to fix this. 

I woke up with a strong sense of well-being and understanding of why things are the way they are.  I have still been resisting and mourning the things in my life that I lost with the move.  I crave the feeling of safety and security.  It's been so long since I felt that way.  In fact, I'm not sure I ever did in my life.  As the ante was upped by our obligation into these house payments, I felt an ensuing panic.  The stakes are also higher because of how much I'm starting to love it here.  If I had to leave this house, I'd be devastated.  We have been through so many financial disasters together that it has become a way of life.  Always, we were protected in that we had the barest essence of what we really needed.  Luxuries have been expendable most of the time.  They're there or they're not and you just follow the ebb and tide.  There's never a baseline of safety from which to operate, with only occasional variations up and down.  It's always that crisis is the norm with variations into the lesser crises.  The lesser crises were the relief times. 

I've worked so hard to keep the faith and trust the process during the hard times that I failed to recognize that doing it for YEARS was wearing me out.  Not as much as flailing about, worrying incessantly, wailing, moaning, feeding the panic, crying, cursing the world and decrying my misery wore me out, but it still took its toll.  I find that as much as I anticipate each blessing and trust that miracles are right around the corner, I also fully expected that each day would bring a new crisis that I would have to best through faith and prayer.  I figured if I braced for it and shored up with absolute faith, I wouldn't be blindsided.

I woke up this morning knowing that I was not let down in either of my expectations:  the miracles were there and the crises were there, just as I programmed. 

What I have to do now is just program for the miracles, for the peace and for the joy and let the rest come as it will.  The more I expect it, the more it's going to manifest.

I also have to slap myself out of this feeling of depression and weariness.  Nothing is constant in life except change and I have to get better at adapting to and welcoming those changes instead of doing the "Why God Why??" tortured soul routine.  I didn't think I was doing it, but I know now I was just doing a classier, more serene version of the flailing about, worrying incessantly, wailing, moaning, feeding the panic, crying, cursing the world and decrying my misery.

Now, I get to work on embracing the joy and welcoming it in, working with the life I have and stop fussing about the challenges.  I have a puppy when I didn't want one >:< and the majority of its care falls to me.  Regardless of whether or not that's fair (it's NOT!), it IS and I've got to stop complaining and just take care of business.  I am far from civilization and the activities I used to love to do, so I have to find new ones here that I love and fully experience all this place has to offer.  I have dial up internet and have to wait forever for anything to load, so I need to use that time to do other things, then come back to find tra la!  The page has loaded. 

I'm ready to tackle life now and sort it all out.  Like I said before, it's a process and I don't expect to be healed tomorrow (although I won't argue if it happens).

I'm going to further the process by doing a full house clean today.  As soon as I got up, I lit a sage stick and smoked out the house with it to clear the air and neutralize the negativity (it really, really does work).  The kids gave me that look ("there she goes again"), but we had a lovely morning and they were out the door without a hassle.  I'm going to scrub down the house, top to bottom, including cleaning carpets.  It's not in bad shape, but under-cleaning always takes longer than the basic straighten.  I'll channel the energy of the cleaning into bringing about the positive changes I'm wanting.  I can do it with joy instead of resentment (this time, anyway).  I'm going to make a nice dinner for my family (not sure what yet) and infuse the food with love and joy.  If I'm going to be the pulse of the family, it's doggone well going to reflect the atmosphere I want in my home.  This just isn't working otherwise.

I went over the budget and saw that we will (barring unknown tragedies) have enough money to pay our bills and get by.  Since that's the most OK we've been at any given point over the past several years, I'll take it.  It's progress, at least, so no tears are warranted.  We may not be in the "safe" place yet, but we're going to make it and I need to welcome that rather than lamenting the loss of the abundance and prosperity.  Well, it's not really lost, just delayed a while.

Since harvest begins on August 1st, I guess it's silly for me to get all bent that my life's "garden" isn't producing a huge larder when it's not even summer yet.  I've got to pace myself, be thanking that we now have an income and allow the process to unfold.  Pushing the river isn't really one of my talents. 

So now I'm off to start the cleaning.  With any luck, I'll be finished by noon when my soaps come on and I can relax for the rest of the day.

I mean really, what would I do without you folks here to help me talk this through and work it out?  Life just feels so complicated sometimes and until you put thoughts down onto print, they don't seem to have validity or sometimes even make any sense.  Writing it down solidifies the thoughts and helps them to find their way into manifestation.

So here I go to clean!  I wish Carolyn was here to coach me.  :)

I hope your weekend is positively brilliant and that the miracle party is one we can all share.

Much Love!
Katrina