Late Summer Ruminations

I’ve spent these waning days of summer in the shallow end of the pool. By this, I mean that I don’t spend a lot of time ruminating, studying…doing much of anything, really. I sit outside, surrounded by my birds and my flowers and my animals, and I just…soak it up. Maybe it’s good that I don’t live inside my head so much right now. Maybe this is was where I need to go—to live in the physical world, to connect with the sensations and reality of the here and now, rather than always puzzling about what could be or should be. It has been valuable, I suppose, to focus on what life—MY life—is, rather than regretting what I am not.

I challenged the Universe to plop a job in my lap if It wanted me to have one. When that didn’t happen, I interpreted it as a sign that more was being required from me than to sit around and wait for the Universe to act. Which led to the ridiculous trauma of freaking out over the specter of pursuing a job I did not want. A couple of weeks further along on the journey—with a dozen or so stops at the Wayside of Guilt along the way—have brought me to a place where I’m beginning to understand (again) that perhaps what the Universe is requiring of me right now is to completely divest myself of my old rote attitudes.

All my adult life has been conducted according to the formula of money=job…if you need it, you get one. Though this has never been a particularly successful or rewarding formula for me, it has been all I’ve known. Or perhaps, given my Heron tendency toward “aggressive self-determination,” it was the only path I could ever consider. Even leading me to grasp at the “entrepreneurial” straw when I finally understood that the formula of me working for someone else was a non-starter.

I find it interesting that the Universe would reveal Heron to me as my power animal, and then lead me on a path completely counter to the essence of that Spirit. Because now, as I’m stripped of all the “should be’s” and “could be’s” and “gotta do’s” of my life, I can see what is going on. Not what I am providing or worrying about providing for myself, but what the Universe is providing.

No, the Universe hasn’t dropped that job in my lap, and it’s obvious that I am in no shape (yet? ever?) to go out looking for one. But our little household is not headed toward financial disaster, either. In the past month, we sold off a few pieces of left over restaurant equipment; we’re looking at signing a re-fi on our mortgage that will save us $100 a month. And the husband got a raise—2%, which pencils out to just over $21 a week—laughable, but out of the blue. Perhaps its value lies more in the fact that we don’t have to worry (today) about his job going away, rather than in how much it will increase his take-home pay.

I’ve written before about finding “balance” in my life. I really believed that I had to aggressively pursue balance; which in itself, if you think about it, is a completely off-balance course of action. It put, as always, all the responsibility on ME. Put the entire burden squarely on my shoulders, with no other power or entity to share or balance it. Which gave me all the power—exactly what I wanted. There’s that old “aggressive self-determination” again.

What is being revealed to me is that if I was meant to be completely self-determining, I would not be who and where I am. I would not be a wife. I would not be part of a family. I would not live in a neighborhood. I would not be a citizen of a town, a state, a country. I wrote in my last post that humans are communal animals, as if that was some kind of a slam on humanity…a weakness that we have to bear. It chafes on me more often than not. But, for whatever reason, the Universe seems to want me to understand that I am not—cannot be—the sole source and/or procurer of everything I need or want. I have to let others in. I have to let the Universe in.

This, for me, is going to be a hard nut to crack.

I wonder how long it’s going to take.