I woke up at 3:00am parked in the Post Office parking lot. I'd been asleep for 15 minutes, when my phone rang. I met Stefanie and her boyfriend Drew 370 days ago, on the train from LA to Chicago, and this was our first non-facebook communication since that trip. We talked until my phone died; we talked until nearly 4:30.
Right now I'm feeling the wreck that my body experiences when I eat or drink too soon after waking up. In the light of that wreck, all my conversations from last night are crashing together. Stefanie and I (and, earlier, Leslie and I) talked about our experiences over the past few months. Like everyone else I know right now: life is changing like earthquakes. Like everyone else I know right now: we talked about how these changes appear to have huge implications for The Future. Personal experiences finding resonance with community experiences; social experiences full of synchronicities and connections. I am glad to see this happening in my life, and am encouraged to see this is happening to others around me, and excited to hear it happening to Stef on the other side of the country.
She asked me, "Have you ever made an attempt to do something other than the get-a-job, life-as-normal life?" It struck me as odd at first, considering when she met me I was homeless and talking about a farm and Leslie & Charles & Adrienne & Valerie & Scott & I occupying it with hopes and dreams and intentions.
It also struck me as odd that my answer to her question was, "No."
I've had some relatively epic adventures over the past five years, and many (if not most) involved or flirted with being homeless, jobless, and discussing alternatives to that "normal" life. But when she asked me that, I realized that I never took both feet off the "normal" path. I only stepped far enough off to appear to be on the adventure I craved--appear, to myself as well as others.
Right now, I feel like I'm in a place much different from anywhere I've been before. Over these months... hell, over these years, I have tested and discovered my beliefs. I have always wanted to live by those beliefs HARD. And yet, only one foot off the path of security. And now, revolution seems nigh. It feels like time to move forward.
I don't want to be swept forward.
I want to walk forward, boldly. I have allowed my beliefs to represent me for so long; now I want to represent my beliefs.
I am up against my own walls in every direction. Any moving forward requires me to do things I am desperately afraid to do. I have to make myself vulnerable. I am so afraid.
I almost didn't go to Leslie's birthday supper last night, because that is one of my walls. And today will involve that wall and another: discussing intentional communities with her & others also faces my fear of having a role in a community; a role I don't want, a role I have refused to accept, but that Life keeps trying to hand me. Fear of vulnerability leads to my walls, and I feel like those walls would be faults in the foundations that I'm building.
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Boom. This blog was expected to be cohesive, but the fact that I slept fifteen minutes, then almost an hour, then an hour, and then immediately drank coffee and ate.... as I said: a wreck. So, derailed.
Now about rationalizing.
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In the book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, two characters (Richard, Dirk) are walking near a canal, talking. Suddenly, Richard disrobes, jumps into the canal, and nearly drowns. Once Dirk brings him out, Richard explains: he suddenly remembered that he'd missed his morning swim, and decided to take it at that moment. Dirk then plays a recording of Richard under hypnosis. "When I say x, you will take off your clothes, jump into the canal, and find that you cannot swim."
This is a shameful summation of the event that very elegantly describes how I rationalize things. An example from my own life: Whenever I drink to excess, I spend the next day experiencing intense panic attacks. It is a chemical reaction, however I feel something and so I create a story to explain the feeling. I tell myself stories about how everything I'd done the night before was a terrible thing.
Ugh... my brain is working less. My stomach is cramping. This topic will be returned to.
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