Photo by col_adamson (cc)
The Time Clock started as an offshoot of Havi Brooks’ nifty weekly check-in ritual, now known as the Friday Chicken, over at The Fluent Self. After years in the kitchen, and because we’re all about the march of time here, my weekly review involves gratuitous photos of clocks and often notes about food. If you want you can join me in the comments, too.
It is an amazing day outside. Like, almost impossibly nice for a day in Seattle that’s not in August. True, I am sitting inside right now anyway, but I’m one of those people that goes to the beach and then sits in the shade so it’s not much different from that. All my windows are open and that counts, right?
But yes, it’s deconstruction time now. In the last few weeks I’ve been pulling all my routines to pieces and looking at what is working and what isn’t. Most parts of my life have ground to a complete halt, but I’ve also gotten more old business taken care of in the last couple weeks than I have in years. Now I’m making a more deliberate effort to start from scratch and add the things that are good (even if I don’t want to do all of them… baby steps) and spend less energy on the things that send me off in the wrong direction.
Hard stuff this week:
Feeling like I need to be EXTREMELY productive.
Especially now that I’m not getting up and going off to a job in the morning. Part of the point of leaving the day job was to give myself some space to recover and rest a bit since I’ve become very depleted in the last few years. But that sets off all my security scariness alarms that are now saying Warning! You must now extract maximum efficiency from all your days or you will end up sleeping in a cardboard box. And not be able to afford internet. Gaah. In the coming week I will definitely be spending some time coloring monsters and working on this one.
Feeling kinda bad about feeling hermity.
I have gone into serious 12th-house retreat mode, which I need, but it leaves me feeling like I’m letting people down. I’m so used to being the rock of stability for folks that it’s extremely uncomfortable to start shamelessly doing things for myself. Mars has just crossed my ascendant which gave my do-stuff-for-myself impulses a boost, but this whole good-boundaries thing is ever a work in progress. At least I’ve reached the point where I can hold them and just feel funny about it, instead of capitulating. Still nerve-wracking though.
Fear of failure.
For a really long time I’ve been avoiding taking my work really seriously, and hiding behind the “I don’t have time to really devote to My Thing because I’m so busy taking care of people and working myself to death” argument. And now fsssst! Gone. Just like that. And I’m left with these wide-open spaces of time that I can now choose to fill with the things I really want to do, and share, and have been kicking down the road for years for just a little longer, until I have time to really do it right. So, now is the time to do them right. It’s terrifying as hell. So many things I want to write, and make, things I think need to exist that don’t exist anywhere yet.
Good stuff this week:
Abundance, baby.
Trust me, I’m nowhere near sleeping on a pile of money at night (I’m not even sleeping on real furniture right now, since my whole house of furniture is still down in Florida and I’m too stubborn to replace anything I own there) but I have definitely felt a shift in my thinking over the past several weeks from that old fear-based routine into… well, the hippies call it a love-based mindset which I will have to use for now, because I can’t think of anything better. I still think the crass Secret/Law of Attraction stuff is a bunch of bunk, but it is nice to go around feeling happy and grateful for things, rather than constantly being tense and worried. A very slow change but steady progress here. Saturn is in the last few degrees of my second house and will be making a more permanent exit soon, so hopefully the mental load will continue to lighten.
Camaraderie, and some intellectual stimulation.
Last night I went to see Mark Dodich give a thoroughly interesting talk on prenatal eclipses at the monthly Washington State Astrological Association meeting. It was great, and I came home with pages of notes and a new tool. I love learning about completely new stuff. He also piqued my interest in esoteric astrology- I don’t think I’ll be incorporating it too heavily here for a while but my brain is happily puzzling over the rulership chart and a couple other facets now. I also got to finally meet a few other great astrologers in person, and I’m really looking forward to NORWAC now.
An avalanche of awesomeness.
So many opportunities have been coming along for me in the past month or two that I feel like I’m running as fast as I can just to keep up with them. It’s scary but amazing. Trying to just roll with it and not worry too much, and so far that strategy is working pretty well.
That’s pretty much my week. What was good for you? What was hard?
