Dawn is still an hour or so away. I woke at 4am after going to bed too early. I marvel at how some people sleep 8 or even 10 hours regularly and then still claim they are behind on sleep. Juxtaposed with theories of how necessary sleep is to organize our thoughts and beliefs, and considering my struggles with my own mind and emotions lately, I conclude it is what it is. I am glad I don’t need 8 hours of sleep, as even 6 hurts my body. 5 is perfect for me, generally, and usually a sign my energy is good. I passed a period by recently, and now that I wrote that, it is still likely to arrive late. Frustratingly, I can’t find last month/year’s calendar, and can only guess at the dates, though I remember the last few months were regular. Ah–sifting through journals I see my last start was December 19, so I am not late yet after all. Confusing the full and new moon is an accurate summation of how out of tune I am overall. Overall, most or many humans seem to be detached from our natural cycles, or, neurotically attached. So I am 5 days out, and probably last week is the best I can expect to feel, hormonally, most of this month. That doesn’t satisfy, so I put plenty of space around it.
6:11am I feel that predawn chill and darkness coming on. I hear a dog.
I am proud of myself for trying to get help, and also proud of myself for realizing that there is no help to be had from decrepit systems and wounded humans. I will do my best to hold myself up, stay strong, stay healthy, plant good seeds. Climate change is threatening major changes, and the pharma wars are ramping up. Podcasting is my target, but I still don’t know how to earn a living and live alive at the same time. I am determined to figure it out. I am grateful for the clarity from the humans I thought were friends and family. I see they are scared and weak and not interested in playing with me. That’s good to understand. I will stop wasting so much energy trying to be understood or liked or make sense or be organized in the context of what is already obsolete.
My body is soft and weak as well, and toxically flooded. My sweat stinks. My eyes burn. I can barely see. Still, this body is incredible and offers to carry me farther. I don’t know how far. I think I need to be getting rid of things. I’ll get to lightening up. Strengthening. Stretching. I think I should give up on trusting anyone but myself, again again again, and this could use some help after trying to help other humans who only scorn, shun, and take me for granted or worse. Fuck all of them. Kindly. I wish them all well. They do not care for me and they are not aiming for freedom or communication or thriving. They are less interested in living alive than in belonging to a dead system. I am grateful for my perspective, and for the perspective shared by others online. I am not sure how long I will survive this next part.
Live alive. Die well. Die alive? Die dead? Live half alive?
I know which one I choose. I know what I’m going to do. Get it. Send it. Go!
(after the sun rises)
6:37 and still fucking dark and chilly. I am aware I would be wise to get to working on some grand plan to get my financial feet back under me. I reflect on so many times in my life that I believed so much in my own abilities, when I knew people were good and mostly aiming for the same sort of peaceful coexistence. When vibrance and wellness and doing things was ‘all the rage’ among humans. Now they are afraid. They are asleep. They don’t speak freely. They are forgetting how to think.
I am not sure why so many great ideas flitter flutter by and don’t get made…then again, I do, because making things takes time and energy and having ideas is passive…is it? I am not sure. I want to create, and I want to be secure. I leave society to its own demise to the degree I can. Stop trying to be of any service or do some good, as that only finds me resentful when other humans use me and despise me at the same time. Get clear on boundaries. I no longer make time for liars. I no longer make time for humans who are not at least trying to be alive, online, as in, really here, now, in space-time. Maybe that is an illusion. Maybe it’s a false light. Maybe it’s a lie too. Nothing matters, still. I want to write fantastic inspiring stories. I want to know myself and love myself. I want to leave good examples for those I love and those I will never know. I want to be a good human a good woman a good entrepreneur a good mother a good friend a good artist a good author a good snowboarder…
Ride It Out. Merch. Boxes? Fucking figure this out. I know I am so lucky to have the resources, strength, clarity I do. I know not everyone has this, and also, some others do. I know my body would do better with more dancing, more loving, less stress, struggle, isolation–that is tricky, because it is around or mentally juxtaposed to people that I often feel the most isolated.
I am absolutely clear I do NOT want to sell people the way so many do. It feels so fucking yucky when people do that to me, I can’t fathom the thought of creating a business that requires me to do that to people. Manipulative and dishonest. This is what is destroying us, from my perspective, so I absolutely cannot do that. That doesn’t mean I can’t sell the way the EPM course keeps trying to push me to do, I just need to figure out what the fuck I have to offer that is of any use to anyone…I think everything is turning free, and even though I appreciate how paying creates commitment and increases the value of investments, I also appreciate that most value is relative and everything is shifting so rapidly, it is difficult to put value on information. So time, energy, attention–a fucking coach or therapist–these are services that help me, and I pay for, yet, not quite in the straightforward way other humans seem to get things to work. They just don’t work that way for me.
I’ve reflected a lot on the items-story test that I went through last week at the autism specialists place–the only one in the state, maybe, and completely overwhelmed, underfunded probably, and insufficiently networked. The objects the tester personified and then made a story out of seemed to me to be less creative, but I see how humans are generally blinded by human interactions, and unable to see things for what they actually are. This is a big aspect of incompatibility between ‘the engineering brain’ and those of what seem to me to be brains of ‘lesser capacity’. I could make up a dumb meaningless story about the objects being people and acting out some inane, meaningless, stupid human scenario, or I could get creative and imagine personifying the objects, or creating a story to explain how the objects got where they are or what they are doing together. The story the assessor told seemed very dumb and was essentially unrelated to the objects, unless he really did know a girl named Susan who looks like a yellow sponge.
Incredible spread of hate available from anyone claiming to have good advice. You’ve got to add sugar, salt, spice, space to all of it. Judging others as toxic, shaming others for lying, comparing my level of chaos to yours…that all seems like an exercise in futility.
8:52a
Listening to replays of authors talk about narcissism, and I am struck again by how my last partner was/is obviously some twisted version of this, and so am I…I have read that autism gets misinterpreted as narcissism, and I guess I can maybe make a distinction, but I am not sure. Speaking for myself, I definitely care, deeply, greatly, about others. I also have a capacity to be hard, or to close off parts of myself, as a matter of preservation, and do hard things. This is what makes a great leader. My last partner had many of these traits as well, perhaps to a greater degree, or perhaps just differently. Much of what I hear from psychology is to ‘cut off/out’ narcissistic people, which I guess makes sense of why I have few people in my life, except those who really understand me, and/or those who don’t fear me, even if they don’t understand me.
Yesterday that was Bo, and Joe, and by extension Susan, Spirit, Jules, John. I am super grateful for those. My son and I had a great conversation during our weekly supper meeting, about honesty, lying, gender, public personas, and my autism assessments. He said he would certainly tell a story about the objects themselves also. Then he shared something he hadn’t shared before, about his high school experience. It felt like one of those significant tiny steps of progress. I love those. Those are the moments that make life worth living, that give me hope, that give the whole thing meaning.
Woman’s search for meaning varies from that of man’s, but it does have in common the aspect of being all made up at the beginnings and ends.
The sun is up and clouds are gathering, though no moisture is in sight around here. That is of future concern, but today it makes it more likely I might get to fixing my car. I think I know what I am doing…that’s just how it’s going to be.
First Principle Rituals
Humans need ritual in our lives for at least a few reasons. Throughout our history, and no doubt well beyond, humans have used a variety of rituals to help us process, punctuate, add meaning and significance to our lives. All the religions use rituals, to help bring clarity and order to the follower’s lives, and though they vary in detail, they have some commonalities I have gathered.
1. We want to be witnessed, and anoymous. (Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, ongoingly…)
2. We need a reset button sometimes for a complete renewal. (annually?)
3. We do well to have regular cleansing routines. (daily)
4. We need to pause and reflect. (2-3 times daily)
5. We need complete removal of rules in a safe container now and then (annually, seasonally, every 7-10 years?)
Begin again
1. Cycles of things, rituals, habits, relationships, processes
2. Ancient to Modern History–various religions, earliest signs, modern examples, usefulness, risks
3. What Serves Me? (and other great questions to frequently ask) how to evaluate the usefulness of specific rituals in your current life, what is practical, what do you desire?
4. Examples, Templates, Permission to get it ‘wrong’, digging a bit deeper into psychology, formulas and templates with examples of variations, and assignment to create one of your own*
5. What is it’s purpose? Reflective process after implementation, early, mid, when to habitualize the ritual? practical uses, ceremony
6. Life by your own design. create your ideal day, week, season, year, life plans with rituals and ceremony pencilled/colored in.