The world has been tense for so long and desperate to find that new normal we've been promised... eventually... but I doubt very much that any of us had a war, record inflation, and the rising price of everything in mind. While the pandemic isn't over, it's fading off the news and collectively we are beginning to hold ourselves less tight and as we do, the difficult things we've been avoiding are loosening too and we find ourselves at the edge of overwhelm. I hear it in the conversations around me. I feel it inside.
How are we? How are you? These are good questions. So is... how am I? Checking in with ourselves to see how we're copying can be scary especially when we sense the answers aren't going to be as healthy as we'd like.
I feel fragile. I feel like I can't quite find my feet - like every time I sense a way forward and begin to work in that direction something else beyond of my control happens. It is not about me and yet, it impacts me because the rising cost of everything affects the number of people willing or able to travel to take a workshop like the ones I'd like to teach. That awareness throws into doubt the decisions I'd made to write and to teach and I have to work to remake them.
I was so grateful to go to the retreat in March and while the workshop itself was fabulous, the very best thing was to leave here and go there. I have another workshop booked in June that I feel like I should be cancelling, just to economize, which is rather strange since the class and the accommodations are already paid for. There's this external pressure in the air that makes me think food and fuel are not a good idea only I have to eat whether I go or stay and that leaves fuel. It's not very far away. The amount is doable. As I debate, I am reminded that if I'm not careful to focus my thinking in positive, self supportive directions, I could easily become the one pushing myself over the edge. This could be true for you too. Are you supporting yourself? What more could you do for you?
I don't function well with clutter of any kind, or with overfilled spaces, or with the inability to find things easily. The feeling is sharp. It cuts. It sits on my nerves making me so jittery that I can't think and I can't make. And when I can't make, I can't function which becomes a viscous cycle. The most important room in my home is the studio and my morning hour spent making whatever I want to make for myself is necessary nourishment.
Making can't happen when my studio is a mess. It's a gift to myself to stop and clean up. It's also a gift to others in my life who would prefer I wasn't cranky from lack of making. For as long as I can remember, I've controlled the size of my stash by designating space only I'd begun to ooze... into the laundry closet... into the hall closet... into the guest room closet... all over the guest room... and like an open wound, it was raw on my nerves, needing to be bound, needing to come back to one space. As I see and touch, sort and sift, I am grateful for the potential of the stash that I already have and have already paid for.
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. - Nora Ephron
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'm writing a book about bags. I was somewhat hesitant to say that out loud. It felt like for the millionth time, I was stopping this and starting that - more shifting - a tremendous amount of shifting. Would you think I was unstable and unfocused? Would you believe me? Would you support me? I really don't know and it's okay.
What I do know is that writing this book is my engaging project and while how I present it may be fine-tuned to accommodate the reality of the rising cost of everything, it is all right, right now. So right that I shifted supplies around putting the less frequently used ones away and making the bag ones more visible and easily accessed. I keep moving forward in spite of the tension, the fragility.
My birthday is in just under three weeks. The Year of Turning Sixty is coming to an end and soon I will actually be sixty and living the first year of a new decade. I was told that time sped up as you aged and I am finding it to be true. In that truth, there is a determination to make the most of life, to be on my path, living my best life joyfully, abundantly, with growing creativity, and with ever increasing holistic health. You can't do that without upsetting some people, even people you care about, but you can't survive, and thrive, and blossom in any other way.
Talk soon - Myrna
Grateful - Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. - Rumi
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