This essay is kind of a follow up to my mid summer clash with the limits of time and space. Consider this my second foray into the muck of Living In Time
Katrina
Not too long ago, I had a dream where I was driving very fast down this narrow road. I was driving so fast, it was difficult to steer, difficult to control the car. I was struggling to just keep the car between the lines and pointed in the right direction. Till finally I just gave up and purposely crashed into the trees along the side of the road thinking ‚ "Good, then maybe now I will just die". As the darkness descended, I heard my self saying. "Sorry, Sister," over and over again to my traveling companion. Suddenly a light flashed briefly in the darkness and I began to sense movement. And slowly I realized I did not die after all.
I woke up thinking, whoa. My only way out of this madness is crashing and hoping to die?
Part of my current personal spiritual work is in my accepting that I am a very driven person, that I am the stereotypical type A personality. Acceptance is only a portion of my journey however, because I also am working on finding ways to balance this energy within me and within my life.
I have had dreams of driving for almost two decades, but this was the first one that had my dream-self welcoming death as a way out. It was literally a wake up call for me.
This dream occurred almost two weeks after I fell off my front porch further aggravating my infirmed and restricted left hip, knee and shoulder. It came after four days of extreme frustration and anger. It occurred four days before I fell ill with a pretty nasty case of stomach flu.
In the four days before the flu knocked me off my feet (again), this dream forced me to endure some of the most searing soul searching of my life. I was forced to admit how I set myself up for so much of my frustrations; and how many of the illnesses, falls, and mishaps bore the energetic signature of that dream crash.
They were two sides of the same coin. The frustrations came from my driven nature. And the crashes were my only way out.
I needed to learn how to slow down.
Posted in
- Printer-friendly version
- 822 reads
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".