Spiritual Memoir #5: My Life is My Creation

For an explanation of this Spiritual Memoir
blog series, see THIS post.



Radiant Rider Waite Tarot



Tarot Card:  Four of Wands
(See pics in this post from various decks)

My Interpretations of the Card
"The first-fruits of independently mastering one's creative power"

Ahhh...the first victory of the wands suit - it isn't total fulfillment or seeing something through to completion, but a stability, an achievement.

Wands are interesting cards.  They symbolize the element of fire, and are an active male force (as evidenced by their phallic shape).  Fire represents passion, creativity and to a certain extent sexuality.  They are tied strongly to second-chakra energy.

Fire, passion and sexuality are all exciting things, but it's important to keep them in check, to understand their power to consume our time, attention, and relationships.  For this reason, the four of wands is an important card - because boundaries have been established, and the fire contained to a point of it actually supporting a laurel full of fruits and life.  In the Rider Waite symbolism, two women raise cheers of celebration for the accomplishment of mastery of the fire.  The wands are close to a large city, and the inhabitants look secure and comfortable with the proximity.  I can't help but wonder, though, if the small bridge in the right-hand corner insinuates a stream separates the city from the fire of the wands.  If the town represents our home and lives, our habits, or even the hegemony of the culture we live in, this mastery of passion and creativity has happened outside of the circle of familiarity - it's been compartmentalized but not hidden.  And it is accepted by the townspeople, it is celebrated.

Legacy of the Divine Tarot

In the Legacy of the Divine tarot the four wands create a center of life and prosperity in the midst of destruction and death.  I find it interesting that it looks like everything outside of the wands is burning, since wands themselves represent fire.  It looks like the crystals at the tops of the wands are tempering the fiery heat from the sun to allow life to prosper inside of their perimeter.  Once again, the small victory over fire, the establishment of success and safety using the power of fire.  Beautiful!

Spiritual Memoir: Four of Wands

About two weeks ago (April 2012), I was lying in my bed one afternoon, thinking about how delicious death sounded.  Life just felt ... flavorless, pointless, like a rat race in an endless maze of dead ends and disappointments.  I'd been dedicating my life to "connecting with God" but found myself without the energy to really do more than just hope and think about it, and only on occasion.  It all felt so hard, so pointless, so out-of-reach.  "God," I would pray, "make this better, give me the energy, the strength, the desire to feel like anything in this life is worth pursuing."  In response, I felt nothing.

Exasperated, I went to the A Course in Miracles study group that I lead, and found my good friends Gail and Gary Sauter there.  After some small talk about gardening, I expressed my frustration.  The frustration had been building up for over a month, and these wonderful friends had been privy to my mounting depression, and had always offered insightful, loving support and recommendations.  This time, though, I was done listening to them too - everything seemed terminally hopeful, without ever yielding fruits.

I posted a little about this experience in a previous post (see HERE), so I won't recap everything, but in short, I started reading Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsch, and there was a passage that struck me.  I don't have the book in front of me (bah!), but I found this quote from his website that says the same thing as the passage in the book:

"You were created to create - not to react.  

Creation is the highest form of Divinity, and your birthright.  Truth is, you are creating all the time.  The central question in your life is whether you are doing this consciously or unconsciously.  

Conscious creation is what is needed now.  Stop moping.  And stop thinking negative thoughts.  Just get on with it!  Tomorrow awaits your choice as to how its going to be.  Call the shots!  Make it happen!  You're in charge here." (my emphasis)

Here's the epiphany: in my praying and moping, I kept saying "God do this, and God do that - make me feel better, open my vision, fill my heart, etc., etc" ... but this quote made me realize that my life is my creation, not God's.  I call the shots.  I decide how it's going to look.  I am the source of my own feelings, my own vision, my own love, etc.  God cheers me on and loves me, but God doesn't create anything for me - She has empowered me to do that for myself!

Hmm...

A snap decision: I'm going to feel better.  Everything I encounter in life is going to be interesting and mysterious and adventurous for me!  I'm not waiting for anyone or anything to step in ... I'm going to use my creative birthright and make this life how I want it.  Immediately, the clouds dissipated, and sun shone in my heart and mind again.

Tarot of the Magical Forest

Like the four of wands, I decided to harness my creative power, to step out, independent of the city, of God, of culture, of anything, and start building my own world and life.  I like the Tarot of the Magical Forest, where the four wands look like they're the framing for a new house, separate from the main house of the estate.  It isn't about building on an addition to the existing home, to the status quo, to someone else's vision ... but stepping out and beginning the structure of my own experience.  I can go tour their mansion and get tips and ideas, but my life is my mansion, my creation.

Like in the Legacy of the Divine tarot, my creative power will redirect the scorching heat of fire to establishing my own oasis of peace and life.  But I have to channel it - nobody's going to do it for me.

And like in the Rider Waite card, the people from the city, the passersby, are cheering me on.  They aren't afraid of me competing, or withdrawing, but are celebrating that I've come up with my own design for my life.  I am not alone in this, never alone, but I am the foreman (or forewoman as it were), I call the shots.

I'll admit, that I have found myself backsliding here and there into the negative space of feeling life is acting upon me, or stagnant and stuck ... and it's a slippery slope.  But every time I step back into the driver's seat and say, "What if this is actually fun?  What if my life is actually delightful?" the clouds of my mind disappear and everything is bright and interesting again.  I think it's just a matter of habit.  Retraining habits.  And keeping the creative fire working within the four-wanded blueprint I've chosen for it: happy, delightful life.

Sometimes experiments fail. And we can talk about that too.

It's been two months since I posted.  Whew, time kinda flies (but also kinda stands still).  I think about posting a lot, but generally don't for the same reason over and over ... I feel performance anxiety.  People really liked my last entry, I say to myself, what if this next one is dumb, or sounds whiny or isn't well thought-out?!?!?  And so I don't post.

I don't regret it, but it is kind of inauthentic to only post the feelings, thoughts, conclusions and impressions that I deem "worthy" of the audience.  After all, I have titled this blog a search for and experimentation with Truth - shouldn't failed experiments be included in my reporting as well as the successful ones?  I think so!  So without a long expose', I will shine a light on the past two months.

It's been really, really rough.  Not rough because I've been busy at the grindstone, but rough because I've been beating myself up about not being busy at the grindstone.  I would wake up, usually at about 1:30 in the afternoon, and think of how pathetic and inappropriate such a late hour was.  I'd not feel like going in to volunteer at the coffee shop, and feel like a withholder and feel unreliable for not doing so.  I'd sit around the house in my jammies all day, and point out to myself that I am the epitome of white trash.  Of course, just about anyone I'd talk to about this would look at me like I was crazy and say, "I don't judge you.  I don't think that about you.  I actually don't think about how early you wake up, what you do with your time, or how you dress at all...  You're fretting over nothing!"  Their comforting words would provide temporary solace, but of course, the only true acceptance we can ever feel has to come from ourselves... and I was my worst critic.

I also read a lot of fiction and watched a lot of TV.  Hooray for the Mistborn trilogy, the Hunger Games, The Three Musketeers, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Spartacus, The Walking Dead and so on.  I didn't like Inkheart that much though, and started reading Inkspell and just couldn't get past the first 80 pages because it was for too young of an audience...  This was another tool I employed:  fiction/TV mixed with some wine provided a perfect cocktail of numbness and "checking-out."  I don't regret this, but have beat myself up about it.  Of course, like with everyone else, no one else criticized me about it at all.  It was just my own self-reproach that gnawed at me.

I got better at it, but I did pendulum swing.  It became about being proud and defensive about all of it.  I LOVE that I get to sleep in and pity you because you don't!  Or I'm not so shallow as to care about how I look.  Obviously WE'RE not on the same level!  Ah, the snide nature of defensiveness.  I didn't actually say these things to anybody, but I shielded myself with the words.  Of course, no one was shooting arrows, so a shield was pointless.  All that happened was my self-criticism grew ... and became charged with anger.

I felt abandoned by God.  (In this blog post I'm going to call God "She" for the fun of mixing it up.  I have permission from God to do this.  The "God" I know has no gender.)  She wasn't fixing it.  Here I was, "giving up everything" and She wasn't doing Her part of the deal.  She's betrayed me again!

Do you know that I went through 48 hours of pure hell because I knew my bank account was short the $0.93 needed for an upcoming automatic withdrawal, and I had the $1 bill in my hand, but it was a weekend and I didn't know the PIN to my new debit card, so I couldn't deposit the $1 through the ATM?  I mean, it's pretty ridiculous in retrospect, but it sucked to live through.  I knew it was ridiculous too, but I feel trapped, bound, worried, and betrayed.  God said She'd provide for me ... why was even the simplest thing soooo haaarrdd!?!?

And finally, in the spirit of transparency, I awoke last Tuesday, and laid in bed for about 2 hours, finding comfort in the thought of death.  Death wouldn't solve my problems, I knew, but it would at least change the scenery.  For the record, I had no intention of actually seeking death, but I did start liking the idea of an "escape."

And then a cat snapped me out of it.

Well, the cat started the chain of events that did.  I was house-sitting for a friend, and needed to go feed her cat.  I'd just spent two hours in a class where I'm supposed to lead a spiritual discussion, that turned into two hours of me venting about my sense of betrayal (BTW thanks to my two special co-students for hearing me out and offering love and support!!).  After my class, I intended to walk into my friend's house, dump food in the cat bowl and walk out.  But instead, this adorable little furball named Duchess enticed me into an exchange: she'd get snuggled and loved, and I'd get someone to listen to me vent some more.  That got boring after about 30 minutes so I decided to play my friend's Game Cube while snuggling.  That got boring really fast, but the cat was simply too perfect to leave behind for the evening, so I looked at my friend's movies, and found an Abraham-Hicks lecture on video.  This is the last shot You've got, God.  I'll watch this for 10 minutes, and if I don't feel better, I'm done with You.

Four hours later (2 full DVDs of lectures), I couldn't remember how I'd even been so upset in the first place!  It was all Law of Attraction - I was focused on betrayal, so my life dished up more time and opportunities to fit into the lens of betrayal.  I was focused on justifying my anger, so I had an experience of ever-increasing anger.  And so on.  The only difference between Eeyore and everyone else in the Thousand Acre Wood is where the sad little donkey puts his attention -- his attitude -- right?  (Thanks FB friends for winning me over to the philosophical power of the Pooh stories!)  And I could believe it was real because the minute, while watching the DVD, I looked at my situation through a lens of maybe this is actually a fun experience, it started looking pretty fun.  And funny.

Then I read over the next few days Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue by Neale Donald Walsch, which is rocking my world, and helping me see that all of the negativity I was drawing from my "spirituality" was because I was kinda seeking the failure as a means to justify my anger.  I wanted to be angry.  I still do a lot of the time.  But I feel empowered to accept that there may be a better way.  Instead of seeing this life as a challenging task of overcoming the ego, Conversations with God has helped me to see it as my personal creation of a story of Ascension.  That has a better energy to it, right?  It even sounds ... (dare I say it??) ... fun!

So it's been a good week :)

It took about 3 days, but after conscious attitude shifting, and taking a little accountability for my life, and enjoying the mystery a little, and especially asking for help with an expectation of receiving it, instead of with anger for needing it, things started turning better.  I feel hopeful and even a little delighted, and the perceived entrapment has faded out.

And now I have that off of my chest.   

Dreaming of Failed Triathlons

Last night I had a most vivid and frustrating dream. I almost never remember my dreams, and even less frequently do the feelings from my dreams pervade my life. But last night was different.

For the past year I have been actively training and participating in Triathlons. I've just recently lost some weight, and so they are more fun than ever, and I'm getting more competitive with them which is very fulfilling. I train for the races with my sister, Sunny Jo. She is very athletic and keeps me on my toes. We almost always race together too and she always beats me :D

My dream started off with me standing in line inside of a barn waiting for my turn to start a triathlon in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In the barn came a little stream of water, kind of like a deep canal, with a current. This is where I would start the swim portion of the race. When it came my turn to jump in, I was given a floaty and a paddle. I hesitated - since when do you do a triathlon with a floating seat and a paddle? I noticed the water had a current. But I jumped on the seat and started paddling away.

Everyone else ahead of me in the race was casually floating down this wide canal as I vigorously paddled past them. I was excited to be passing so many people. No one else was paddling but me. There were spectators all around cheering us on.

Normally, a sprint tri will have a 300-900 meter swim. I would say this one was closer to 150 meters in the water. Before I knew it, the current turn and I was carried back to the barn and I had passed a LOT of people. Now was the time to put on my helmet and cycling shoes and take off for the cycling portion of the race - the funnest part for me!

My bike was sitting in the barn amongst some hay and dust, and there were only 3 or 4 other bikes there (usually in a tri the "transition" area has hundreds of bikes - one for each participant). I found my race number and snapped it around my waist, but for the life of my I couldn't find my helmet and shoes. I kept looking down and finding my running shoes on. I'd sit down, take them off, and look for my cycling shoes. Then, a few seconds later, I'd look down and my running shoes would be on again. Arg! It's SO important in a race to HURRY during the transitions. Probably for 3 hours of my sleep I was desperately looking for my cycling equipment. In the dream only like 40 minutes had passed, but in 40 minutes I should have been almost done with the race, not looking for my shoes! I remember that I started my swim before my sister Sunny, and during transition as I searched for my shoes, she passed me.

Finally I found them. I put them on and hopped on my bike and headed out for the bike ride... only to find that the path wasn't marked. There were spectators everywhere and nowhere did I see anyone else on a bike or a sign that said "BIKE -->" or anything like that. I rode my bike down the sidewalks, up the boardwalks, and through the crowds, but could never find the route. Once, I though I'd found it and I biked as hard as I could up a hill. The road seemed unreasonably rocky and steep. I kept wondering if I'd misread the information about the race and if the bike was a "trail ride" and if I should have brought a mountain bike instead of a road bike. But when I got to the top of the hill, my breath was taken away by the Tetons - it was the most spectacular mountain scene I'd ever seen - and the path I was on split in 1,000 directions - none of them marked for the race. I thought to myself, "Yes, this is beautiful scenery ... but I'm not here for scenery. I'm here for my race. And where the hell is my trail?!?!"

I rode my bike back down the hill and around for a little while longer. I had a moment of clear thought where I thought to myself, "You know, none of this would have happened, none of these surprises would have challenged me, if I'd come early and walked the course with a guide before the race."

I kept seeing people finish the run - it was obvious where the run started and ended - if ONLY I could find the bike trail!

At last I gave up, hopped off my bike and decided to start the run, if just only to "finish the race." When I got my running shoes on and left the barn, the race was over, spectators were cleaning up and leaving, and the "RUN --->" signs had all been taken down. I was FURIOUS. I found my phone and called Sunny. She answered asking if I was at home. "AT HOME!?!?!" I asked. "I'm here at the race with YOU! How did you forget about me?!?! Where the hell is the bike route?!?!"

Sunny Jo found me and was trying to calm me down. She explained that for her the bike route had been perfectly clear and obvious and she didn't know why I'd had such a hard time finding it. She took me outside and showed me one of the signs marking the bike path. I'd been looking for a great big sign that said, "BIKE --->" and the one she showed me was a little piece of paper with a strip of road drawn on it. She thought it was a perfectly reasonable sign. I hadn't even noticed it once.

I told her that even though I didn't finish the race, at the very least I wanted my T-shirt. We went to go grab it but they'd run out of my sizes, and I had to settle for a men's shirt. When we returned to grab my stuff to leave, my bike was missing and we couldn't find it anywhere.

At this point I was going totally crazy, and beginning to wake up. I'd wake up, go to the bathroom, lay back down, and would instantly be asleep and irate in my dream. Then I'd stir, pet my cat, close my eyes and be back in the barn frantically searching for my bike. I was going to find the race director and chew him out. I was going to yell at every spectator. I was furious, humiliated and utterly confused. What was the DEAL with this race?!?!?!

----------------

I'm wondering what this dream means for me in my life. Surely there's something I can learn from it! Here are some possibilities:

1. I have been building up to something in my life, working towards it, and I'm incapable of achieving it because I have expectations of how it should look. And I'm blinded by the fact that it looks different. (ie - the swim was on floaties with paddles, the sign marking the bike path being different, etc.)

2. I have been working really hard to achieve something and at the last minute I fail to put in enough effort - at the last minute I get proud and cut corners, and it spells my failure (ie I should have come a little early and walked the course.)

3. I'm so focused on the stupid and pointless races in life that I can't enjoy the true miracles and beauty that are surrounding me (ie the Tetons being so beautiful)

That one feels the least true though, because my desire to do the race is not stupid, and I love racing so a pretty mountain is no more important than a race.

4. There's no point in surrounding myself with beautiful scenery if inside I'm tangled with frustration and lonliness

5. I'm mistaking the challenges in my life for triathlons, when really they're something more like "floating in the current on a floaty" - am I overtraining in my life?

That's a hard question for me though, because what's wrong with training for a triathlon and wanting to compete in one? There's nothing innately wrong about it - but what's wrong is when I show up to a fun-athlon and get frustrated and angry and lonely and I fail because of it.

6. If I keep looking down and seeing my running shoes on my feet, and I can't find my cycling shoes, and everyone else is running - maybe it's a sign that I need to forget the cycling and go for a run! Am I too stuck on following "rules and order" in my life instead of choosing flow? Am I paddling down the current instead resting and allowing life to carry me?

I think lots of these could be true for my. My sister Crystal does spirit guide readings - like she psychically speaks to spirits/energies that are assigned as guides in our lives. Kind of like talking to your guardian angel for you. Some of my guides in my life are silly little Sprites. Every time Crystal does a reading for me, and asks my guides to give me, well, guidance, the Sprites say over and over, "Tell her to have more fun in life! Stop taking life so seriously!"

Is this dream giving me the same message? Am I not taking time in my life to relax and be led, because I'm so determined to do everything the "right" way?

I'll be honest with you: It's still a mystery to me. But I'm trying to work through it, which is why I'm writing it down. It's therapeutic, ya know?

If you have any extra insights, let me know! :D