Sisterhood Ramblings ~ Module 43 A Year With Myself

I never had a sister. And what I know about sisterhood is limited.

I know what I have observed. I know what I think I saw among sisters I knew and grew up with.

And I mostly only know what it is to BE a sister to a brother. And that’s really NOT what I imagine sisterhood looks [or feels] like.

I have had friends. I have had lovers.

These have been something like sisters, but only almost and never quite. The hardest relationships for me are the ones where we’re BEing friends after having been lovers.

The past few years I have BEcome more like a sister would BE, I imagine, to myself. Even if that’s NOT quite what I am, it’s pretty darned close.

I tell myself the truth and stand-by with sufficient patience to help myself absorb that truth. And I’ve stopped lying to myself altogether.

When I fail [which is often] I try to cheer myself on for the effort, the guts, and BEcause it feels much better than kicking myself when I am down. And I’ve stopped replaying my mistakes, sometimes even forgetting them altogether.

I think the good thinks when I think about myself Now. And I’ve stopped playing Devil’s Advocate and Worst-Case Scenario choreographer altogether.

If I am hurt or scared or angry or lonely or fed up or simply having a bit of a mood, I’ve learnt how to give myself space and stay close enough but NOT too close. And I’ve stopped trying to fix or change myself altogether.

MayBE this is what Sisterhood, having a sister, or BEing a sister to a sister would look like. Or mayBE it is just what I think it would BE or look like.

I’m good with NOT knowing. I really don’t need to…

Collaboration… Some Thoughts On Playing Well With Others

Knowing well there is no such thing as falling BEhind in A Year With Myself, I am still glad to have Now caught up with my original pace. I had a daily practise that was working just fine until it didn’t, and along the way from There to Here I have been muddling about far more than I would like to BE.

Module 42: Collaboration. The Joy of Joining Forces with Kindred Spirits. I have to say this one sounded like it would either BE really juicy and inspiring or quite the opposite, for me. Although I am indeed someone who loves working alongside and collaborating with others, I’ve also had some real stickiness and difficulty in this arena.

Let me say straightaway that neither of these outcomes happened. In fact, I found much that was juicy and I found much that hit me sideways, but in both cases this felt completely different than I would have expected.

Here are a few bits that really sing to me.

“… And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in.” Derek Sivers

What a wonderful perspective, truly.

“… I assume people know what’s going on in my head because I always have access to my thoughts… I assume everyone else thinks as I do…” Molly Cantrell Kraig

Never really saw this in quite this way. Brilliant insight.

“… but I will tell you this, bliss matters. Creating and living in joy makes a difference…” Kathy Sprinkle

Indeed. Although way too many times I have settled for creating and living WITHOUT JOY, I can point to where I did with it with far more amazement and Gratitude.

Here’s my take on collaboration. The sort I think this Module is about…

We all have ideas and inspiration and individual insights. Though we might BE at completely opposite ends with one another, the combining of our ideas, inspiration, and individual insights has a wholly separate energy.

Using it for good is collaboration.

What Is Grief?!

Grief is… the price you pay for love…

~ Earl Grollman

Grief is both a mystery to me and an old and well-loved friend. Grief knows me, my ways, how I slip out back doors and hide under the stairway. Grief respects me and I long ago came to have deep respect for Grief.

Emotional Turbulence: Understanding and Navigating Challenging Emotions. This is the title of Module 41 of A Year With Myself. My printed-out copy sits BEside me in a faded purple-ish hue where the grayscale was too worn out to work. It looks weary. And I am weary of it, though it is wise and thought-provoking.

Grief is like that. Worn out AND wise. Mysterious and familiar. And yet the words of Grollman stopped me. Granted I picked and sorted, but that is how I understand. And it is how I navigate. Especially when my emotions are in some turbulence.

Simple. Keeping things simple. This is my intention. Grief doesn’t play simple too well. Grief is more layered and juicy and its ingredients myriad. Still…

The price you pay for love… REALLY?! I think so. Well, this is what my experiences have shown.

I know Life was designed to have time alive and then death. But the price you pay for LOVE?! WOW!!!

I have to say that the one common denominator in all Grief’s guises is that there has been a loss of love. Some losses feel BIGGER where there was MORE love. Some seem more manageable where there was mayBE NOT so much…

The most important thing, though, Grief is a verb. It is a part of living human, BEing human. It is active, has legs to run on and a brain to accommodate.

Even if I completely accept that Grief is part of living AND loving, I don’t find it anymore [or less] enormous and confounding.

It is a little like most things that I DO without thinking, this grieving. Like breathing, I can’t turn it off or regulate it all that much.

Yet like writing, I can focus on it in a certain way [or NOT] and this shifts the experiencing of it.

I can hardly BEgin to enclose my thoughtsandfeelings about Grief, yet I have a sense of more having been revealed and understood.

I think understanding it as the price for love will likely stick with me though...

And that is enough.

Module 40: Connecting My Dots

Love is … a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

~ Brené Brown

“We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks. That's what connects us--that we're all broken, all beautifully imperfect.” 
~ Emilio Estevez

Connection is one of those seemingly simple words with a truckload of meanings. And if our meanings don’t intersect, there’s only disconnection.

I chose these quotes BEcause they equalise one another. I mean, there is a balance in each and a swooping sort of gentle keeping together, in my mind alone perhaps, that they each make sense of for me.

These past six years there has been much composting in me, and only the very slightest of cultivating. In particular where connection is concerned. That is the way of connection for me, I think. Neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. Just what is, what I see when I don’t avert my eyes or my heart.

I hear sometimes some concern that I am “too much alone,” even a bit too enamoured of my solitude. It is how it looks from There I suppose. From Here there is an entirely other sort of perspective.

Over and over and sadly over yet again I have had a loving and wondrous partnership come apart. A bit like Ikea furniture, they may have been too haphazardly put together. I may have simply decided I needed to HAVE a relationship and forgotten the essential connection piece.

After awhile a relationship without true connection grows unsteady and falls apart. As Brené Brown wrote, connection can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them. Does this surprise me to see from Here?! Nope.

Of course, the reason for my over and over and sadly over yet again track record in partnership is 99% about what didn’t exist, that DOES exist Now. Only in me. I can’t speak for anyone else.

I never KNEW what loving ME was. How it looked or spoke or dreamt or sounded. What made it and what hobbled it. The past six years have cleared that up. Yes indeedie!!!

Thus Emilio Estevez’s We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks… What I never saw, until just recently, is that I am a “wonderful, beautiful wreck” and NOT just a big fat mistake with torn paper all round it from vigourous erasing!!

A gorgeous patchwork of optimistic starts and reasonable unfinishednesses.

Brokenness doesn’t fix brokenness, no matter how hard I insisted otherwise. Love finds love where it does, and generally it gravitates to similarities. NOT pointing fingers, mind you, I’m just saying it’s NOT that much of a news flash that my connections have tended to fall apart.

Loving myself requires knowing myself. It’s no wonder I’ve spent so much time alone these past years.

I am too easily distracted, I’ve discovered, and I need TIME to get quiet enough to really hear myself.

Intuition Reflections

 “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. We will not solve the problems of the world from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. More than anything else, this new century demands new thinking: We must change our materially based analyses of the world around us to include broader, more multidimensional perspectives.”
― Albert Einstein

I have been a bit scarce with A Year With Myself the past couple of months.

It happened gradually. Initially I took a break for a couple of weeks.

I came back to it and realised I’d lost momentum.

I tried to get excited again and quickly realised I was pouring a lot of expectation into something without seeing it properly.

I was disappointed. I wanted to feel the way I’d felt as 2012 BEgan. I wanted to feel I was on a Journey and that there were [are] others travelling their Journey too.

I took another week off and then another, to think about that. Funny thing, when I came back to Module 39: POWER OF INTUITION, I quickly saw that I’d started to look down at the pedals.

You know, when you’re learning to ride a bicycle, how it’s NOT wise to look down at the pedals?! For one thing it can make you a little dizzy, for another, it’s just another example of taking your eyes off the road…

As I return, at least to my little blog of this year-long adventure, I find myself less inclined to BE prompted; wanting simply to reflect.

And so it was that I dug out Einstein’s quote. He’s long been a quiet hero of mine.

Intuition isn’t some mysterious commodity that is found, given, or plays peek-a-boo. It’s taking the longer look at what floats up when I am NOT trying.

Intuition is why I get up early and write for a couple of hours each day, FIRST THING. It is also how I made my bedtime 8PM. In just DOing these 2 things for the past 2 years I have changed my whole way of BEing in Life.

Intuition is why I don’t have television, don’t listen to radio, and choose deliberately where to find out about news I’m interested in knowing.

Intuition is why I live minimally. Sparely. More simply than I could ever have imagined wanting to.

Intuition is what lets me work within the context of who and what and how and where I AM. What keeps me from chronic bouts of comparison. What has encouraged me to listen to my own drum beating.

Intuition isn’t out there anymore than my year with myself can only to BE found via A Year With Myself. 

Nobody has my intuition. 

No one can get me to it. 

It’s the truest form of An Inside Job.

I am glad I know this. I am very glad indeed…

Thoughts on Great Work & Cosmic Job Descriptions

My Journey through A Year With Myself has consistently aligned with my Journey with Social Security’s Ticket-to-Work Program. 

I found MODULE 38: GREAT WORK Building An Authentic Strategy for Doing Your Greatest Work deLIGHTfully serendipitous. I think my little sabbatical taken back in August and early September was also timely as it turns out THIS VERY WEEK is the one where I have been asked to recreate my “resume” to BEgin work with my Job Coach.

Sometimes I have BEcome agitated with the time it has taken for all this to get completed and to each next phase. And then, with a simple backward glance, I see that the timing is actually quite wonderful.

Funny how that happens, eh?!

As I have participated online with Lisa Sonora Beam and read her book, The Creative Entrepreneur prior to BEginning A Year With Myself, I was quite inspired to find her Vision Interview full and overflowing with goodness, inspiration, and just the sort of just-in-time and at-the-right-time insights. 

In particular, mindful of her term, Cosmic Job Description, I have found the entire resume dog-and-pony show to BE so much more fun and effective than trying to conform to the standard and dull-as-chalkdust process.

And though there are still parts and pieces that I am attempting to bring into a whole for my meeting with said Job Coach this week, I don’t feel in the least bit at odds with it. This is an extraordinary sweetness for me, she-who-likes-to-BE-prepared.

The “greatest” gift of this glorious intersection: I Now Know Myself. [at least far better than when the two processes BEgan in January] 

AND, I am able to BE straightforward, clear, and concise about the work I am looking for.

What I really want to DO/BE.

Same as I am able to sit down and write this post without feeling the least bit of angst. After 9+ months of posting on my blogs this year I am no longer intimidated or overwhelmed by posting.

This is quite nice. And so different from how I WAS thinking of all this BEfore January.

My GREAT WORK is the work that engages my heart and myriad skills/skillsets to make a difference, no matter how small nor how far-reaching. Like Lisa, I have had a difficult time defining what I DO and have done, writing a bio, or wrapping any of this succinctly inside that simple document the World of Work likes to “have” on someone. A resume…

I have learned through my Year With Myself that I don’t HAVE-TO fit inside someone else’s box. Or DO things someone else’s way. 

My way is good, for me, and I am ENOUGH. As I am. As I am NOT.