On the beauty of rebirth

Yesterday was Vesak.  That was the Full Moon in May, which also happened to be in Scorpio, and while I’m not a religious Buddhist, it is kind of a big day.  Somehow, though, I couldn’t find it in myself to pull up the PBS special on the Buddha or even to break out the comic books devoted to the Big Guy.

Instead, I did what I think might be even more in the spirit of the day and I left my actions and choices up to the universe.

Apparently, the universe thinks I’ve been sitting on my ass for too long.

I finished out the craft cubby thing I started building a couple of days ago.  It’s kind of brilliant, actually, and solves a lot of problems.  Since we tend to get pretty sick when we drink tap water, we buy 2.5-gallon jugs of spring water from the grocery store.  It comes out to just under $1 per gallon, which is a better price point than getting it delivered and it tastes better than having a faucet filter.  (The Reverse Osmosis system we had wouldn’t fit in the new apartment, so I sent it all back.)  Unfortunately, it left us with all these plastic jugs everywhere, and that kinda flies in the face of the whole green living thing.

So, I used them.  I cut the fronts out, used double-sided foam tape to tack them together, and then I lashed them together more with some clothes line for stability.  And it works great.  (I actually got the final inspiration from Instructables.)

After that, I really got crazy with the Cheez-Whiz and decided to pull the trigger on setting up my very own room.

It’s kinda weird, but I haven’t had a proper bedroom to myself in… well, a really long time.  (I count married life as having “my own room”, so this is just referring to these past couple of years of single-ness.)  I’ve slept on the couch for the last several months, or on the massage table, or wherever, all since we realized that something in my old mattress was making me very sick and triggering nearly non-stop migraines.  Now, I still don’t have a “bed”, but the couch has been moved into my office, and the extra bins have been stacked in the middle as a kind of dividing wall.

It’s really kind of brilliant.

As though that wasn’t awesome enough, the whole process was mainly comprised of going through all of these extra boxes and bins, trying to reduce what we’ve got so that we can live comfortably in both less and more space.  Many things are being given away to charity, lots of my mom’s stuff is being staged to be sent off to her and little odds and ends that just don’t belong to me are being boxed up for delivery to other people.

In many ways, this marks at least a minor rebirth for me.

If you’ve been reading this blog with any regularity, you know I’ve been trying to decide on my Next Big Adventure.  As much as I’d love to do it all, being the head of a household means having to weigh my desires against what will benefit my whole tribe.  Web comics? A fun pass-time, but monetizing will take a long while, if at all.  What about the crafting thing with the necklaces and stuff? Not a bad idea, but again, questionable time to profit.  Clothing? Long-term. Writing? Long-term, usually.  Teaching Reiki? A little hard to build from the ground up, but still slightly more immediate potential…  And any of these requires an initial investment before anything can happen to create a brand, a style, a voice.

But answers weren’t coming in terms of how even to start any of these.  Everywhere I turned, I felt blocked, bogged down…

This new emergence actually started a couple of months ago when I met K.   I found myself drawing again, spontaneously and without self-consciousness.  I started singing again.  I realized that I’d been a little more tense than I’d imagined, and since then, old wounds that were poorly bandaged have come to the surface and been dealt with – and not just internally.

So, this Vesak marks a pretty massive turning point for me, I think.  I’m releasing old attachments, getting rid of “stuff”, using what I’ve got and improving thing overall flow of my life.  I know it’s not going to be easy (and I’m not just saying that because of the aches and pains from lifting and moving stuff until 1 in the morning), but devotion to the process is what gets us through things like this.

Only this time, there is no bright heaven at the top of the mountain, just the path in front me and the unwavering faith that it will take me where I need to be.

Namaste.

Dawn Written by:

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