These first two long-term goals are associated with having a sustainable lifestyle and a soul nurturing social life.
Spiritual, Sustainable And Healthy Lifestyle
This goal is the linchpin for all my other goals. As I struggle to create healthier habits, my lifestyle also needs to change. I cannot continue with my current level of work while simultaneously having the time to exercise, plan healthy meals and slow down my hectic pace.
So I need a new lifestyle, a lifestyle makeover. I need to continue to simplify, lower expectations and shed unrealistic standards. The life I lead today is so less stressful than when I worked in my corporate job. But with all my goals pulling at me, I often find it difficult to pace myself and I feel like I need to do everything at once.
But there is another way. And this is the path I hoping to discover. As I slow down, experiment and discover new ways at approaching my life, my dreams and my visions, I am hoping to craft a new way at approaching life itself. I am not trying to create a life devoid of passion, challenge or mystery, so I am not complaining about the stress, obstacles and limits of everyday life.
I just want to imbue my spiritual work within the very soil of my everyday life. I want to live the life of a mystic and shaman in the middle of a bustling city. I want to find out just how much magick you can inject into the everyday so-called mundane world before it begins to morph right before your eyes into something we have not experienced as a species in a millennium.
My waking life already resembles a dream more often than not. Now I want that dream like world I inhabit to teach me more about navigating my way through to actually changing the manifest world.
My Life Has Room For Me, And My Chosen Family
As my brother said once as he walked through a room filled with my friends, “You have a *lot* of friends!”
And I do have a lot of friends. It is one of the things I enjoy about my life. I can make and keep friends of such depth, talent and authenticity. All my friends seem to me to be such smart, beautiful, talented and down to earth people. Most of them I do not get to see much anymore, but my feelings for them have not diminished one iota.
It is the main thing I miss about teaching at witch camps. I always felt that witch camp teachers were like this big network of best friends that you got to work with in different combinations each year.
In fact, I was really tired last year of not having time in my life for the people I enjoy the most. So I changed my life. These people are my chosen family, so I sought ways to see and talk with them more often. I managed to keep up with more folks last year because of my commitment.
So this year, I need to free up even more time and headspace to keep in touch with other folks too, especially those who are local. And there has to be a way to mix teaching more often with visiting friends when I am on the road.
One strategy that has worked beautifully is my annual New Year’s Day dinner party. Every year I get better at spending more time enjoying my guests. And my commitment to acknowledging birthdays has been a smashing success. I just need to keep up the momentum.
I think one way I can help make it more likely that I have time for my friends, is to have more time for me. The more open my schedule, the more likely I will be able to say yes instead of no to my social life.
2008 Goals
- Openness in my schedule so I can have a social life
- New glasses
- Improved health indicators
- Normal blood sugar (A1c ~ 90)
- Lowered overall cholesterol levels (< 200)
- Baseline weight closer to ~200 lbs
- Walk 30 minutes three times a week
Ongoing
- Radical self care routines
- Weekly & daily planning
Posted in
Submitted by katrina on Mon, 01/21/2008 - 7:49pm.
Wish I could be there. Very well spoken.
Katrina,
I wish you all the blessings and power you need on your journey. Thank you for these words. It is good to remember that returning to work (and thus returning to grace) bring a chance for us all to rest and have joy.
Wishing you joy in the Work.
David
Dear Katrina- Thorn reposted your blog and happy am I. Your passion, always so immense, comes blowing out in these words. So akin to my own heart and soul that it makes me have a bittersweet smile.
The Storm is only now coming to the edges of our universe and yet it will sweep and consume all that is. In the end, our beautiful universe will be so much...more? Different? Complete? Who knows?
All I do know is my soul came here to witness and be part in this period. I cannot shrink from the work. I am here with you, fae sister!
Thought-provoking piece, Katrina. Thanks.
I don't know what to call myself either. In Pagandom, I've taken to referring to myself as a Witch at Large. In the interfaith world where I'm active, I call myself a Pagan. Sometimes I call myself an uppity woman or a Second Wave Feminist. I've never really thought to publicly identify myself by my sexuality, het woman, which is very "white bread" and old-fashioned. Not only het, but serially monogamous for the most part. It seems almost a liability these days to say you're het, but I am proudly and happily so. I tend towards intellectualism but only have a BA, which doesn't carry much weight, at least in public and professional worlds, no matter how much you've studied, trained, and can articulate, even teach.
My biological heritage is Irish, Dutch, French Huguenot, Euro-mongrel. My social heritage is Roman Catholic on one side and conservative Methodist, temperance-crusading, women's rights and education on the other, with distinct East Coast sensibilities, now mellowed by more than half a century living on the Left Coast. My maternal political heritage is conservative Republican (altho what my relatives might think of current trends in the GOP I cannot imagine, since they did have brains and they did think and they did have a social conscience), yet I am much farther left in my outlook than any elected official I know. My paternal political heritage is blue collar Democratic, except that my dad broke with his family on politics and allied with my mother's family's conservatism.
I'm a former hippie, a home-birth advocate, a home death and green burial advocate, an opponent of capital punishment and resorting to warfare to resolve humankind's differences. I support the right to conscious self-deliverance. I rejoice in any and all consensual expressions of love and eros. I'm a lover and a mom.
I have never missed voting in an election and I disrespect those who don't avail themselves of this hard-won right. (I have ancestors who fought the Brits in the American Revolution.) I support workers' rights. I recognize our interdependence on this planet, so could be called a greenie. I'm a committed environmentalist in my day-to-day life (in terms of eating locally grown food, expanding public transit, recycling, preserving open space and wildlife, opposing exploitation of natural resources [strip mining, oil-drilling, nuclear facilities, agribusiness, monocultures, clear-cutting timber, overuse of pesticides, genetic modification, etc.]) I want to make the city streets "safe for dancing," as my old friend Tony Serra said when he ran for mayor of SF on the Platypus Party ticket.
Well, you got me going there, my friend. Thought-provoking read, as I said. ;-)
xo,
Macha
Lovely azaleas!
[cough][gag][snort][sneeze]
Just lovely...
I know what you mean.
I feel you. There is too much bs- particularly when people decide that their temperament is tantamount to truthful and ignore everyone else.
I get irked by immature extroverts or closet introverts who ignore you REPEATEDLY and then pretend you're out of line for being upset by the time they can't pretend you didn't say anything anymore. I find that the same people will ignore you if you blow up right away, too, and that it's because they just don't think that honoring what you value is important to maintaining a relationship, or even worse: that you don't know what you value at all and that it's all a mind game for their pleasure or annoyance. Then they call you passive-aggressive, aggressive, moody, touchy and temperamental. I call them "not listening".