Experience

I wrote the following fantasy on January 17^th 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.