I wrote the following fantasy on January 17th of
last year. A little over a year ago. I had no idea at the time that fantasy was
a strong form of manifestation.
I have been
fantasizing about opening an oddities shop where I sell crystals and candles
and bells and bones and other witchy knick-knacks. In the back room, through
the wood beaded veil, I’ll have a table draped with printed silk and I will
read palms and do tarot readings. I will ask for your birthday, time and
location and tell you your moon and sun signs, rising sign, and where the
planets appear in your houses.
Then I will tell you what that all means. The information will hit home
with you and you will leave with a greater sense of purpose, an understanding
of your place in the universe, and the grace and ease that comes with the
confidence that everything is exactly as it should be. Ideally, my shop will be in the floor
level of an old house that my family lives in. As customers come in a bell will
ring, but when no one comes in, I will just be at home with my family. The shop
will be open most times, unless I am not home (and after 7 pm). I will drink
tea and invite groups of friends and philosophers to come over to tea. Perhaps
it will be a central meeting place for a book club or a drum circle. There will be an area for meditation
and yoga. I will also have lots of plants growing in a beautiful window
wall. Kilim rugs and other woven
textiles will line the floors and walls. My personal collection of oddities,
carved book holders, brass crabs, bundles of dried sage, will fill shelves and
deep windowsills. Vintage chairs and tables will be situated randomly. A basket
overflowing with brightly woven Mexico blankets will casually ask all who enter
to bundle up and stay a while. I
will play music. Whatever is tickling my feet to bump around at the
moment. And there will be books
everywhere. For sale, rent or trade. I will try to read all of them and
organize them in a way that makes sense to me so that when someone comes in
looking for something they might be turned on to something in a different
subject, but maybe leaning in their direction of interest. And of course I will
be able to find exactly what they are looking for when they come in asking, “I
just want to know what types of things I can eat and do to balance my internal
organ function with the changing seasons.” I will direct them to a practical guide on Eastern Medicine,
or some such, and send them home with a little bag of herb tea to sip while
they read in a sunny window, my acupuncturist’s phone number, and a big warm
smile. This shop will be
profitable, but really just enough to pay the bills and fund more finding and
collecting to keep it freshly stocked.
People will come, more and more, all by word of mouth. It will be aesthetically pleasing and
interesting. Visitors will see something new each time they come in. I may even sell vintage clothing.
Leather boots and purses will line the wall in one room and above it will be a
line of easily wearable day dresses and sweaters. Wallpaper. Beautiful wallpaper. A beautiful little space that I can live a simple life in.
The writing went on to expose an internal paradox I was
experiencing at the time. On one side of the paradox: Attachment- the fear of
this fantasy and all that its fruition entailed, including losing my current
house, the restructuring of the foundation the last 13 years of my life was
built on, and the consequences of such restructuring. The other side of the
paradox: Freedom- letting go of my foundation and all that tied me to it, allowing for creation and reinvention. My heart's unquenchable longing for this
fantasy to become my authentic reality was pounding on me and forcing me to
come to terms with the fact shit was about to change. "Get yourself ready," it beat into me.
And man, did shit ever change. Starting massage school began
a cascading, cataclysmic, and completely healing and transformative process that I am still
engaged in nearly a year later. So much has happened I don’t even know where to
start. How about this, another excerpt from my “prophesy” statement from last
January:
I feel like I have
been living in a dream state. Or waking from one. Every time I clean a toilet I
am aware that I may not be cleaning this toilet by the end of this year. I may
be cleaning a different one. One that someone else I don’t know has been
shitting in for years. There might even be some of their piss under the tile
that can never be reached.
Life is not without irony. I have moved. I
moved out of my house. Into a little rental. And yes, its filled with all the
things I mentioned in the fantasy above, the good: kilim pillows and rugs and
mexico blankets and sage and meditation and yoga spaces and books and tea and
drumming and all of that stuff, and it had the sort-of gross: the remnants of
the prior occupants pee at the crease between the foot of the toilet and the
linoleum floor (but seriously, it wasn't that bad. A little windex cleans
everything.) And the reason I
moved is that I divorced my husband. And the reason I divorced my husband is
complicated, as you would expect. Pages can be written about this, but the
simple reason was that it was time for us to part ways. The rest of my fantasy
is still coming to fruition. The tarot/palm reading part isn’t quite happening
yet, but massage and energy healing is on the horizon. People do come to my
house for healing. And we have tea and I send books home with them.
I had been doing so much internal changing and shifting, as
recorded in the later entries of this blog, but over the last year I finally
started changing the exterior environment of my life. It has been my experience
that internal change is not enough. Once authentic internal changes take place,
the outside material world must shift to reflect it. It’s the law of
correspondence (as discussed in an earlier post). I think more than anything
the past year has taught me that its not enough to just read and understand
concepts. Experiential knowing and doing creates a physical understanding and
helps to form authentic truths.
There has been a whole lot of experiencing over the past
year.
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