Or so they say…when you’re having fun…
Or working your ass off.
I’ve been neglecting my blog quite a bit lately. Since getting started working in the woodshop and working 50 hours at my 9-5 I’ve had so much less time to do what I love. Even when I’m doing what I love.
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s the anxiety medication that I’ve been on for almost a year now, or the business, but I haven’t been able to write very much lately. It makes me feel not quite myself, even though most days I feel fully me. Or the me I am now.
I’m still figuring out who she is.
But it’s just ME making those decisions, choosing what is right for me as a whole person, and not part of some other group arrangement, or family. I suppose that’s what the term is these days. Even though the biggest decision in my life right now is where I remain, and that definitely is because of family. I stay here because of my son, but ache to get away from the city. Every day all I hear is road noise, even though I live in a nicer quieter neighborhood. It’s constant coming and going on the main roads close by, and the sounds of humanity choke out the wind and falling leaves and cries of birds. I choose to stay here physically but a very large part of me is just waiting, in the wild places, for me to come home.
It’s interesting to realize that so many decisions I’ve made over the course of my life were either altered or catered by my relationships with others. And alcohol. So very many choices I would never have made, if I wasn’t trying to smother my feelings and overwhelming sensory issues with booze. So many I wouldn’t have made if I hadn’t been brainwashed from infancy to believe in a fairy tale.
So finally I get to choose my life and where it will go in a few years, when my child is 18 and an adult and making his own way in the world. Right now I’m learning all the self-realization I never was allowed before, because I was either stuck in a controlling cult or stuck in a relationship I thought I was supposed to have. So now I try to sink into my inner knowing and choose what I want, rather than what I’m supposed to, or what someone else thinks I should.
It’s not easy, and I still slip up, but every moment I’m trying to remind myself that my choice matters most, that my knowing is wiser than all the “shoulds” in the world.
This weekend I get to escape the city and retreat to the woods for a few days…surrounded by chosen family with a tent by myself to retreat to alone when it gets overwhelming. When I attended the inaugural Texas Viking Festival in 2019 I never imagined that I’d end up vending there. Nor did I imagine that I’d learn how to make beautiful things from trees. This wood turning has become something more than I’d anticipated, and I’m excited to keep learning more. It feels right, to caress and care for something once living, to help it be more than just firewood.
I suppose in a lot of ways I’m doing the same with myself. Learning to care for myself, shape my edges, sand down the rough spots, seal and protect what is important. Being alone helps with that. Even if being in love makes me a poet. Even if I miss that burn. There are different kinds of love that don’t obliterate an entire forest with its heat. I feel safer here. Not letting anyone so close that I forget myself again. As expansive and delicious that feeling is I find I shrink from it now…even though I can feel my heart, just waiting for the moment to burst forth again.
I’d rather it burst from love of who I am and who I am becoming.
A Burd in Flight 