I am not even sure anymore how long I have been under this current deluge of work. All I do know is that I am tired beyond belief and the work seems non-stop. As I wrote to my students …”This Fall is turning into a season of too much work spread over too few hours for me. …I am swamped.”
This is hard. I have not been this busy for a very long time. In many ways, I am out of practice and that, in it self, is a good thing. I am now more acutely aware of how much my body suffers, my mind turns to mush, and how the entire outer world seems like an intrusion.
Every conversation, every phone call, every request for advice, an opinion or a commitment feels abusive, intrusive and out of bounds. But at the same time, I am acutely aware of how much I need these people in my life, and how much I crave their crazy weird phone calls and lively dispatches from the outer realms.
I am hunkered down in the salt mines and any glimpse of sunlight is like a jewel. If I could only get these people to stop talking to me! If they could just sort of drift into my awareness and brighten my day then float right back out … so I could get back to work already. It is maddening. If only they could stop being so … alive! Uh oh!
What I want and crave contradicts so readily with what I need and require. I want people in my life but I want them to leave me alone. It is a paradox.
This seems so familiar. I spent a great deal of my late corporate career in this mode. Working long hours, feeling the weight of the world resting on my lonely, tired and aching shoulders. Dragging one leaden foot after another to be with people in order to connect and relate. Along with days, weeks and months of extreme solitude.
And so this morning, as I sat bleary-eyed looking out my front window, I said enough. I need a larger frame of reference. A frame that puts my need for focused attention alongside my need for human companionship. I cannot expect the people I love and who love me to act like inanimate objects, like pet rocks! It is exactly their aliveness that enriches my life.
First I need to comprehend what operates like the law of “gravity” and what is malleable and flexible about my current situation? As an introvert living with an autoimmune disease, I do need more time alone than most folks. This is a core gravity issue for me.
Additionally since my business is irregular, it is difficult to plan for “busy periods” like in retail. The work comes when the work comes. And quite simply, when I said yes to teaching at Cherry Hill Seminary, I had not envisioned having two major web design contracts back to back. My business may expand and contract with very little warning. That is also gravity.
I also lead a school, coven and tradition, which each deserves my time and attention – also gravity. And right now I do not have time to focus on them the way I normally do nor do I have time to do the work required to finish my book. These are also gravity issues for me.
But I am unhappy with my lack of focus in these areas. And it is this unhappiness that is causing me to feel guilty. And it is this guilt that makes me feel intruded upon when the people I love call or come by. I am responding to them as if they are reminders of all I am not doing, they remind me of my sense of guilt.
Ai yi yi! It is *my* guilt that is souring my connections to the very people who can help me to endure this crazy period.
I am the one who does not get just how busy I am. I keep thinking about all I cannot do and the accumulated weight of all this guilt is wearing me down. And truly, the work I am doing is big enough of a burden as it is.
The larger frame of reference I need is the one where I can see myself more objectively. I am super busy, yes. But I want to be available to the people I love and I want very much to work on the areas that give my life meaning and purpose. And sometimes, it is simply not possible to do the things you want to do. And … that’s life. And life is not an intrusion; it is in fact a lot like gravity.
So I sit for a few more moments and contemplate ways to give myself a break. I see the guilt being borne off by the wind to become compost for the creative aspects of my work. I pray for the help I need this week, this day and this moment … to endure and embrace the work that is in my hands.
I thought my eyes were bleary because I was tired, when all along I had been driving blind. Now with my newfound clarity, my wings unfold … and I take off into the bracing air … and take flight. Seeing you, seeing myself, and seeing the world as if it were all new … again.
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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".