Thanks for Nothing

This Thanksgiving weekend, I am grateful for the impermanent nature of reality.

Didn’t see that coming, did you? Neither did I. Looking back through the blog log, I haven’t always posted about Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October, and I was disinclined to write about it this year, too. After all 2018 has put me through, gratitude, despite being the fundamental concept of my path to happiness, has been hard to come by.

Which doesn’t explain why I felt compelled to write about it anyway. I resisted at first, stubbornly loyal to my sentiment that life has sucked since last spring. True, I have seen glimmers of light in the overarching darkness—I can’t not see them, given my equally stubborn loyalty to understanding contrast—but how blatantly cock-eyed does this optimist want to be? As a cherished colleague recently observed, “ ‘Committed’ has two meanings.”

My gratitude list always starts with Ter. She’s the rock in my life. Batman to my Robin. The yin to my yang. My cool inspector, armchair therapist, sounding board, heavy lifter and nutrition coach. From her, one thing leads to another and my list gets longer almost by itself. Family, friends, co-workers, abundance, prosperity, health, creativity, yaddayaddayadda ...

Though I remain deeply grateful for everything on it, today that list feels more like a rote recitation than a genuine expression of thanks. So when my little voice urged me to write something specifically for Thanksgiving, my first response was, Forget it; I’ve got nothing new to say.

Nothing new? Really? Maybe you should ponder that more closely, Ru.

So I did. I gave it some serious consideration, and this is what I came up with:

I am grateful for the impermanent nature of reality. To be clear, of this reality.

Everything in this 3-D world is temporary. Everything. Our homes, our jobs, our money, our families, even our compostable containers—everything we think we own can be gone in a heartbeat. Be it by fire, flood, divorce, disease, crooked accountants, you name it, there are no guarantees. None. Zero, zip, zilch. And you know what? There aren’t meant to be. It’s strangely liberating to realize that no matter what happens, you can overcome it. You may not think you can (alas, too many people don’t), but humans are resilient, resourceful, and more adaptable than they’re taught to believe.

Coincidentally, even as our possessions are temporary, so are the less tangible things. Like heartache. Like grief. Like sorrow. Even happiness is fleeting, so best to embrace it while it’s here. This very moment is already over, never to return, and don’t look back at it else you’ll miss the one you’re in and the next one will be in your face before you’re ready. It might be the most joyous moment in living memory, or it might bring physical pain like you’ve never imagined. Whatever it brings, the moment and everything in it will surely pass. It has to. While time is relative, it’s also perpetually in motion. We’re always moving forward, back to where we came from, where the only thing that does matter, the only thing that does last forever, is love.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience. I admit, Spirit Ru has not liked the human part of this gig one whit of late, but everything I have endured, everything I have lost (or thought I’ve lost), has brought me to the point where I can honestly say how grateful I am that nothing here is permanent. Live the moment. Good, bad or indifferent, it will not last forever—and in the end, the one thing we take with us is the one thing we brought when we were born:

Ourselves.

With love (and gratitude),

The Frankincense Incident

Ter called it “a room interrupted”. Despite rearranging the furniture to open up the feng shui, I remained so reluctant to go into my writing room that I began to wonder if it wasn’t me so much as it was the room itself. Sure, my writing had been stalled for some time, but on any other day I was eager to revisit my half-finished projects and maybe start something new ... but whenever I went into my room, I couldn’t settle. I couldn’t lose myself in the flow. I dotted around from piece to piece, getting nowhere but frustrated and quitting well before tea time. Eventually, excuses not to write became conscious decisions not to write. “Nope, not today,” I would say, and eventually I had to ask myself why not. And I had to be honest with the answer.

I think I always knew, but it seemed so silly and implausible that I was embarrassed to say it aloud. It couldn’t be right. It had to be something wrong with me, with my conviction, my commitment, my whatever. It couldn’t be what immediately came each time I asked the question.

Finally, I bounced it off my cool inspector. She would tell me if I was losing it or making (more) excuses. She would also tell me if I was on to something. So I said to her one day, “I don’t want to go into my writing room.”

“Why not?” she asked. “Don’t you want to write today?”

“I think it’s the room, Ter. It doesn’t feel right.”

She gave it a little thought before she answered. “That’s no surprise. It’s a room interrupted.”

She went on the remind me of its history. It began as her bedroom, but she had to give it up because she couldn’t sleep with the neighbour noise downstairs. Her armoire and all her clothes are still in the room, and so, perhaps, is the residual energy of that frustrating time. Then there’s the bathroom upstairs where, as she so eloquently put it, “people shit on that room every day. That can’t be good for anyone’s creativity!” She thought a little bit more, then suggested we do a space clearing. She pulled out one of our trippy hippy guru books and flipped to the applicable page. “Frankincense will do it.”

Not a lot of people have a bottle of frankincense on hand. Naturally, we do. “How much?” I asked, pulling it and the diffuser from the cupboard.

“Eight drops,” Ter replied.

“Does it say that in the book?”

“No, it’s just my sense.”

After thirty-plus years together, I no longer question Ter’s sense.

We set the diffuser on a shelf in my room, cracked open the window to let the negative energy out, and went about our regular business.

I cannot explain how, but it worked. Almost immediately, the room felt better, as if the energy vibration had lifted to a cleaner, more positive level. Since then, I’ve been happy to come in and write. I’ve been comfortable, motivated and able to go with the flow. Whatever magical properties were in that oil, the end result was success!

I suppose I could try to explain. It’s probably better that I don’t. Maybe it won’t work for someone who doesn’t believe it will. So many of our perceptions are based on what we believe. Physical laws always apply, of course. An apple won’t fall up just because I believe it will—but because I believe in a friendly, loving and generous Universe, my reality reflects this belief. I understand and accept contrast (another pesky physical law), but on the whole, my life is charmed in ways I would not change for anything. I know people who fear everything. Their Universe is cold, harsh and frightening—and so the energy of their belief creates a life riddled with things to fear. It’s simple and it’s complicated and I think I just tried to explain the Frankincense Incident, didn’t I?

Slipping Into Fiction

The problem with a long weekend is its inevitable end. I got so much writing done over the past three days that this morning I’m finding reality an uncomfortably tight fit. What do I do for a living again? And do I care? I should, but let’s just say I’m exceptionally grateful that I only have three days at the office before I get another three days off. I think I can fake it to Friday.

I’ve been all over the space/time continuum, that’s for sure. Present day angels, 17^th century paragons, my imaginary lovers in Castasia ... I even got some historical blog stuff written, though I forgot my flash drive at home so the post intended for today will go up tomorrow instead.

My reality is surreality.

I worked with Cristal all day Sunday. The story is slow, but at least it’s progressing. I actually over-wrote in that I pushed past my fatigue at the end of the day and wound up finishing at a less than satisfactory point. Having thought about it, I’ll be rolling back and rerouting the scene, most of which is salvageable though I see where I stumbled. I’ve also noticed a few Lincoln Navigators in the ’hood since I started writing this story – have they always been there, or have I dreamed them into being by putting one in Cristal’s parking space?

I’m also resisting the impulse to plunge headlong into my old affair with King Charles – without much success. Though I’m engrossed in the “Weather Warden” series by Rachel Caine, yesterday I pulled Antonia Fraser’s biography of Charles II off the shelf and apparently intend on reading it again. I have to, in fact. “A Royal Encounter” is just too good to let lie, but wouldn’t you know, the next scene ended abruptly and I mean abruptly. Fifteen years ago, I quit writing a scene in the middle of a sentence! Who quits in the middle of a sentence?? Having no idea where the character was going with his observation (and it wasn’t the King, by the way), I must now delve back into the time and see what the heck he could have been about to say. There might be a slight roll back in that scene, as well, though it reads smoothly right up to the thought falling off the page. Mostly I think I want to be in love and I’m pretty deep into it with Old Rowley.

As if that wasn’t enough creativity, I also resumed work on the novel! A cup of Persian Apple tea got me into Jannika’s head and pushed me back to the scene where I left her, and darned if I didn’t get us both out of the mire by the end of the day! Joe Elliott’s birthday probably kicked that one into gear. Lucius is going to be her father-in-law (is that a spoiler?) and she’s finding him easier to comprehend than his eldest son. I thought this romance would be easy. Roll your eyes here.

So, with Right Brain fully in charge, I’m looking at a pile of invoices and wondering what I’m supposed to do with them ... is it Friday yet?