What’s on my mind: Mental health. How it can be robbed from you. How it is rather fragile although we believe our state of being to be robust, to be “us”. In fact, our mental state can be drastically changed by medications, by gut bacteria (how dare they?!), by adverse experiences - all of which can alter the delicate balance of brain chemicals that make us think that we think, and participate in what we feel and experience. It is beautiful and awesome in its delicate and adaptive complexity, and also disquieting. What you might think is your identity, bedrock, can be shaken.
Cold snap! A first big, decisive snow and a frozen week. I’m glad and proud that I acted on intuition and got my bees wrapped for the winter and my chickens moved into the greenhouse, where they have worked diligently to de-leaf all the remaining kale (I plant it on purpose for them to eat when they move in. That’s the last of your fresh salad, ladies!
I “have a pet porcupine”, possibly orphaned, who spent the last two months living among my chickens. He does not seem so thrilled about the snow. Foraging may be thwarted.
What I'm excited about: My latest iteration of Soulcrafting (™Sarah Lin). It’s like morning pages, but bears no resemblance to Julia Cameron’s free-associating dumping, and it’s like a gratitude practice, but not quite.
My current iteration very intentional writing (quickly and scribbly) about what I am grateful for, what I know, what I believe. Most of my sentences begin: “I am so glad that/to know; it feels to good to/when/to imagine; I am so grateful for… the evidence that, when I notice, what I have/know/am capable of; I look forward to; it feels to good to imagine the peace and relief of…”
It is a development of my earlier practices of “I am grateful for, I intend, I want.” That was more limited.
When I encounter something that I want, I write that on a different piece of paper. “I want - “
Oh! And the clutch element is that I chose 9 aspects of my life (randomly, that seemed to matter), and I work through ea one, in the same order. Turns out they blend, they overlap, they are interconnected.
It is powerful. I work up the energy of momentum through the pages. I witness things change in me by the day. Things melt off the want list and show up in “It feels so good to imagine when - “ I feel more closely connected to the peace and safety of what I imagine having (being whole), than I do the wanting, which is, in fact, holding the thing over there, in the “I want it and don’t have it!” place. Which is why there’s a paper for that. The wanting is the beginning of drawing the thing to yourself, bc someone said, if you have the ability to yearn for a thing, you also have the ability to have it. Or something like that. It is the seed.
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