Emotional Emetics and Realizing I Don't Know As Much As I Thought

Snow turns to ice. The clouds of the past few days have traveled east and left the sky a brittle blue filled with floating crystals of glitter. Too bright and too cold, but refreshingly beautiful.

I feel like that has been my life the past year and a half...stuck in the storm and left in the foggy aftermath encased in ice. The depression was numbing; a feeling of being half alive and dream- like. Creating anything artistic was becoming impossible. Writing was a way to regurgitate toxins, but it didn't allow me to move or create. It was a little like being stuck in the maze in the movie remake of 13 Ghosts. There were nightmares being discovered, moving through it and then redicovered and the sheltered from it all to realize I had come to the center of the problem and so what now?

I purged.

I purged my wardrobe, chest of drawers, desks, closets, book shelves and cupboards. The garden was next and then every box in the garage. Things were taken to thrift in truck loads weekly. If I hadn't used it I threw it out or donated it. My vast library of occult books that I had carried with me like icons for decades were destroyed. Some people say that books, being paper do not pick up negative or positive energies, but that isn't true. Everything is influenced in one way or another, because energy keeps everything on the planet together and is a part of every thing. Divorce, bad relationships, worry, anger by the truckload due to family bullshit and backlash, moving, vibes from years in Fresno and desperation to leave the negative vortex had built up into a soup of negativity. The past few years it didn't matter how mundane the topic was, I would start to read a few pages and feel zapped. Dulled.

The whole experience was leaving me emotionally crippled and I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself and decided to walk again.

It's not been easy, but it has been an eye opener.

I went out and listed with an employment agency to go back into the real work force. I landed what I didn't think I wanted, another Engineering firm gig. But this was different. Oddly, the people I have wound up working with are intelligent outside of the engineering realm, happy, joking, eclectic and not cardboard. They think outside of the box and I didn't expect that. I also didn't expect the variety of pagans and eclectically spiritual individuals there. Or maybe, just maybe it was me that had opened. I had found a home.

I began to create...knitting hats, ponchos, scarves. Stitches were changed, patterns altered. Shrines began again and I made one for Marie Laveau to send to my brother in New Orleans. The Yule decorations went up on Thanksgiving weekend and I felt the season creeping in slowly. I was melting.

My life was changing. Gut wrenching at times. The panic attacks had ceased...Thankfully. I turned to my husband again and found it comforting instead of demanding. I'd never shut him off, just wasn't sharing or feeling...like wrapping your arms around yourself in self-protection and hermiting. I needed to insulate. I needed to strip my wiring, but just didn't realize it.

Then there was the fiasco of my father-in-law and the death of his wife. What to do with Dad. Move him up here with us, move into a different place completely that wasn't my choice. Be someone else, be supportive to him and get smacked around emotionally and mentally for it by him. He was short, ignorant and plain rude to me no matter what I did. The idea of living with this man was not appetizing in any way, shape or form. I washed my hands of the entire situation three nights ago when I had found he wants to live in a condo in the downtown area and gamble all of his money away. He, of course, hasn't said he is going to throw it all on the ponies and roulette wheel, but he's made his intentions known by his actions.

On that final letting go, I found not only was I walking, I'd sprouted wings. I awoke at 1 am that night after sleeping 4 hours and thought of ways to make our house more or our own. I was looking at furniture design, sculpturing the walls, mosaics for the bathroom. I was looking a plaster, resins, stone and glass, envisioning an elvish home with a backyard forest retreat in the middle of the desert. Sleep was gone and my mind went childishly berserk.

The baseboards would be changed, stone on the floors throughout the house, stone on the walls inside in stacking fashion up the walls, glass mosaics of all sorts in the baths, carving, painting and woodburning of Celtic, Scandinavian and naturalistic designs on the baseboards, faux ceiling beams, above the arched entryways and on the hearth. I would paint a mural above the fireplace from the Lord of the Rings...or at least inspired by it and the Book of Kells. Latex mold work and wax casts for creating my own space. Finally, I was free to start living in this house...and started the projects by buying two bags of frosted and vitrioled glass pebbles in shades of medium to deep purples to clear. I will buy a bag everytime I go to the store and begin the project in my hall bathroom.

Reading? Yeah, I'm, reading again. Starting with books I have wanted to enjoy for a long time. I jealously guard my reading time. The Silmarillion and the Lost Tales, Vol. 1 are being read simultaneously. (Best way to read the Lost Tales or you will get lost.) Re-examination and baby steps back to faith, and all the things I don't know. Re-reading the details and not glossing over or skimming through anything.

It amazing how much stuff I really don't know.

Wow! I have no clue!

What a great feeling to be curious again about things I was taking for granted or felt stiffled by. I thought... was more than sure that I knew so much...or believed I did. Amazing how we trap ourselves with that. I wasn't even aware I had done it. I didn't know that I was stagnant intellectually or spiritually...well I take that back. Spiritually I was recognizing something for years, but it wasn't clear (nor was I motivated) and there was no idea on where to start to work on it.

So off I go to clean house, plot and, well do who knows what....delicious!