Float don’t force — a reminder to myself
There comes a moment in any journey where you lose sight of the city. What was once a crisp familiar outline of buildings becomes a blurred and distorted backdrop. If we attempt to look back, we are greeted with a series of mirages and ghost. Haunting images resembling the past.
Nothing looks quite like we remember.
I consider this on-going experience of living through a pandemic to be our collective walkabout.
It is disorientating, claustrophobic and chaotic at best.
The shedding of illusions is supposed to be the beginning of the alchemist journey. During these strange and disorientating times the emerging of base emotions, irrational thoughts and internal conflict are to be expected. It doesn’t make their arrival any less jarring or their presence any less difficult to manage.
We are well into the journey of this Pandemic and have travelled for some time becoming more familiar with the treachery of this unfamiliar terrain. As we fumble through the wilderness of our new normal there are those among us who are tempted to sift through the emotional/mental/ psychological fog, searching for meaning. The Alchemist in us all seeks to reveal what is authentic and dissolve illusions. True illumination.
I am not ready to be illuminated.
There are days where I cant see myself clearly, this is an unexpected part of the journey for me.
I have always been so certain, purposeful, but I feel robbed of that too.
I have left all the messy emotional and mental clutter on the floor for the moment. I gingerly walk past them, trying to ignore their presence as they gather dust and take up space inside of me. It is getting crowded in here. There are moments that make me feel like I want to crawl out of my skin. My breath catches at the most unusual times.
“It’s the back end of the encounter that will produce the most acute wisdom, the maturation. That’s what gives most people the jitters. Holding your nerve.” — Martin Shaw
Intuitively I know that the shedding of old skin and traumatic patterns of beliefs are a painful but necessary part of the work that is being demanded of us all in these uncertain times but that doesn’t mean that its what I want to do.
I don’t want to “work” on myself. The thought makes me resentful. Fuck the work.
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
―Alan Wilson Watts
So for now I float, I feel the water surround me, I taste the panic and I attempt to relax, I have no choice but to surrender and hope that the current will carry me through this part of the journey.
All the energies , moods and Emotions C. xx
