Sunny day...

For a change. :)

People get giddy this time of year when the sun comes out. Understandable when we've had nearly non-stop rain since November. Everyone was cheerful at work and I tried valiantly to meet cheerful with happy, and although I'm not unhappy, as such, I am trying to hold The Lurgy at bay. So far moderately successfully, downing massive amounts of vitamins, but I can feel it creeping in. Ugh. I DONT want to get sick!

I should be taking advantage of the longer days and today's sunshine to take the dogs to the ravine this evening, but after a long day at work, and feeling kind of crappy and dizzy, I hardly have the energy. I spent the last three days on the couch, except for running the dogs yesterday ( when they had a great run and had squillions of fun, snarfing around, bareling full till up hill and down dale, jumping over logs and swimming in the creek, digging great wholloping holes in the path for which I had to reprimand them, and generally carrying on like happy wolves in dogs clothing, which of course they are, at heart), so I expect they will forgive me. They are playing outside in the yard now. Enjoying the late afternoon sun.

I dont know if it is the bug I am fighting or the change in climate/daylight but I've been lethargic lately. Physically and emotionally. And I cannot say either that I've been depressed, but the 'internal dialogue' which we all have in our heads has been particularly loud of late, and that wears me down. Sometimes the noise is such a cacophany that I become overwhelmed. Hearing voices? Maybe I'm crazy.....

I rationalise this by telling myself that I have many aspects to my Self, and right now they are all trying to be heard all at once, so I cant hear a damned thing, let alone hear myself think. Sometimes I shout at them, "Who are you?! What do you want from me?! What do you want me to do?!" Sometimes I talk to them softly, and say, "Just give me some space, please, so I can get this and that done, and then you can have the last word".

I've often wondered what it would be like to have multiple personalities. I think we all have a touch of this. Some of us are more border-line than others. It would make my life so much easier if I could identify the conversations, the running commentary and be able to label them, put them in a safe box and hear them out, one by one. Name them. Understand the bits of myself that need to be heard, that need to be understood or that need to come out of the shadows into the light. It would help to be able to confidently say: This opinion comes from the 'observer', this one comes from the 'judgmental bitch' that one comes from the one who worries all the time; this one is a frightened person, young, and she's lonely, while that one over there, very quiet today, says that things always work out, there IS a Plan at work, and we are moving forward in our evolution as a species, and there is beauty and HOPE everywhere, if we look for it. Probably HER name is Pollyanna...

Mental health is so fragile. We can be on top of the world one minute and slip off the edge in another, hardly knowing how it happened. I'm not falling off the edge, but feel rather like I'm sitting right on it, at the moment, with the sharp edge staring me in the face. And I dont know why. Is it because things are okay? Too okay? Is that it? Am I so used to drama, trauma, and struggle that coasting for a while, and the euphoria I feel, the well-being I experience with a daily rhythm which makes sense and works well doesnt give my brain the "I'm terrified' chemicals it is used to, so I somehow manufacture anxiety to feed that addiction?

Comfort, constancy and normalcy, the sense that all is unfolding gently as it should is a foreign experience to me. I fear complacency. Because usually, in my experience, just when you get settled, all hell breaks loose and the excrement hits the rotating blades. I mistrust happiness. How warped is that?! And yet I am reminded of what my step father used to say, bless him, he said, "Let the shit hit the fan... it makes good fertilizer". yeah, thanks dad! :)

I have been having heart palpitations and shortness of breath. It isnt my heart, I'm pretty sure of that. Could be I've been smoking less (a lot less as I am not 100% well), and my body is going, "Hey, where's my fix?" and offering symptoms to indicate its temper tantrum. It feels like the onset of an anxiety attack, but never goes there. Which might help, even, since after the horrible and frightening experience of freaking out (and inevitably there is the point where one feels for absolute certain that one is going to die - you will know this is true if you've ever experinced it, and if you havent, let me tell you, it ain't fun) . Usually I crash afterward, and dont worry about anything anymore. I'm too tired to. The calm after the storm. I havent had a full blown anxiety attack in years, but this feeling, this sense of anxiousness, these days this can last hours at a time.

I'm still taking my happy pills, but havent taken any anti-anxiety pills in over a month, and nor have I taken sleeping pills in 6 months (which I only ever took as a last ditch desperate resort anyway, prefering Nyquill,or gravol, limiting myself to two or at most three, of any of the above, nights a month). Time for a chat with Dr. wonderful, perhaps?

I'm not sleeping well. I've mentioned that already, I know. I'm repeating myself, sorry. Sleep deprivation is something I dont deal with in a good way. It just makes me totally crazy. Quite literally. Emotional, wobbly and irritable. Paranoid even. So maybe I'm just run down and sleep deprived. Maybe the noise in my head is about some stuff, inner garbage, old baggage that is rearing its ugly head so it can be released. It has to come out somehowm, Goddammit. I know that right now I'm relatively stable ( reality being relative) so its an opportunity for the crap to come out. Maybe its an old anniversary I've forgotten.... I was sent to an Aunt in Newfoundland for temporary fostering probably close to this time of year when I was about 4 and 1/2 or 5, or maybe its a miscarriage. One of the three. I cant remember when they happened... Blocked them out... but last night I dreamt I had a miscarriage. I just know something's going on and I cant connect to it, give it a NAME, reason through it, or rationalise it away. It is happening and I just have to trust the process and ride the wave. There is something percolating, bubbles rising, and when they burst at the surface, I expect a word, or a picture/memory or a REASON to be born into the air, to be expressed into consciousness... something, tangible, on the lips of the mouth that whispers in my ear, "Something is going on...". But no....

Meanwhile. Spring is making herself known day by day and warming the earth. Softly softly. The baby little plants are beginning to stick their fragile tiny fronds gently out of the ground, so tentatively, and buds are forming on trees, unfurling just ever so slightly to make that inimitable Springtime green peach-fuzz haze... almost there, but not quite yet. My forsythia is blooming and the crocuses are up; daffodils are putting up their long, spiky leaves, but not ready to bloom. Like me maybe? The clematis didnt die after all but is putting out a huge cluster of shoots, as is the honeysuckle, prolific and mad with winding up the wire fence surrounding the veggie garden; although it seems the trumpet vine went the way of Vaudeville..... sadly. The deer didnt help with their brutal 'pruning' last summer.

The idea though, the dream of green, is at hand, and we all know by now that ideas make our reality. Our thoughts can and do shape our reality. We know this. That which we hold in our thoughts and dreams, is that which we manifest....

Are the trees thinking of Spring? Are my poppies thinking, "Right, days are longer so its time to send up those leaves"...? Are the wild roses, still asleep, dreaming of sunny days as the nutrients slowly are drawn through their roots, into their sap, bringing the message that its time to wake up and make flower buds? Do we all grow instinctively, like this? Maybe that is what sets us apart from plants and animals, ultimately.... the need to understand the process and to know why. The need to measure it, to mark it. To know, be aware of HOW to do it. To choose how to do it.

Frankly, I dont know how.

In shaping my own reality I know my attention to things, and my perspective is everything. I can chose what colour my lenses are. I can chose rose coloured glasses, or not. I can choose green or grey or black. I am noticing more and more that when I do that, when I look at things a certain way and set/choose my 'intent' my life opens up. 'Coincidental' events seem to bring opportunities to make me happy. 'Coincidence' seems to conspire with sweet Serendipity and I make connections, with people, with events, with my conversation with Life. 'When I change the way I look at things, the things I look at change....' I know all these things in my head and am working with them consciously, and with a lot of attention and effort. Why then do I feel like a bag is over my head and I am walking blind?

I went into the studio the other day, and left soon after, noticing the mess, and feeling resentful about it. Not all of it is my mess. Some of it belongs to the renovation and its materials being stored there. Not using the space for that reason is a pitiful excuse. Maybe that is what this flatline feeling is about. Guilt. Every day I don't do something in the studio, I feel guilty. (AHA! THAT'S the internal judge, jury and executioner, right there! That's good. I named that one.)

At the end of the day, I suppose, the best thing to do is accept that there is a process at work here, an internal process that has no words to offer me, and one that I cannot name. No explanation. I have to trust that the Process itself knows, like a tree waking up, what it is doing, and it is going about its business as it is meant to.

I feel strongly that I need to have a conversation with Life. A dialogue. A living, breathing give-and-take. I need to know why. And likewise, I need to have words so I can box up an experience and tell myself, "This is what this thing is" and make it safe for myself. Or at least understood. Contain it.

I am not getting the feedback I need here, and I'm feeling lost and afraid. I have no words to rationalise this. Maybe that's why my head is so full of them, clamouring, tumbling over each other, like a river of words, tumbling over stones, rushing over me. Its not that I am not listening, is it? Are all of the scattered bits of me, floating out on the ethers, buffeted by the winds, lost in some vortex of Gods know what, crying to be called back to me, to come back Home? I miss them, need them as I know they need me, to be whole. I'm trying, I am, but I dont know how to contain them, how to hold them, protect them, hear them all.

But just maybe, perhaps, the words jangling around inside my head ARE the conversation this process is trying to have with me, to tell me that the lost pieces of my Self are finding their way back to me, back Home, bit by bit, little by little; and they all have something to say about it, but I cant decipher their feelings and thoughts. I cant understand what they are saying...... not....

Yet.

Soon. Maybe.

I hope.....