“I am not crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”- Cheshire Cat” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: With an Excerpt from the Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll

I can’t tell whether I should be excited by all this change or terrified.

Truth be told, I am a little of both.

My life is revving up in a way that I haven’t experienced since Pluto started to transit my astrological chart in 2005.

I have had Pluto – the great transformer – sitting in my 5th House of creativity, children, and play since I was 45. I am nearly 58 and the transit doesn’t finish for a few more years. I interpret its meaning as a wide swath of transformation – painful, messy, chaotic, emotionally exhausting – in the area of my creative life.

And boy has that been true.

I hardly recognize the woman and writer I was back then. She’s shed so many layers of skin, she is raw and newly born.

But she’s still here.

I haven’t blogged much over the past 12 months largely because of the whirlwind that life became. I used up all my fucks on the books I birthed.

I wanted to focus. I wanted to root and grow. I finished a skeletal draft of something last August and plan to workshop it and finish it this year. (I won’t talk much about the details until that baby’s ready to come into the world.) I gathered together a very rough draft of a collection of poems in November and plan to refine it this summer.

I spent a great deal of deep time working on myself.

Not in the sense of sitting around navel-gazing. More in the sense of realizing that my life depended on me learning to love and care for myself in a way that was tender and totally foreign to me. I started to know my inner self in a different and profound way.

I stopped wasting time.

Now, I tumble down and down and down, looking for the missing bits of me. I sweep up what I find and keep moving.

I start a memoir course in California next month. I won a scholarship and am fundraising to pay for the rest. (Feel free to donate here, if the spirit moves you. Every bit helps.)

For the next twelve weeks, I am taking an online course on entrepreneurship and one on motivating the masses through speaking and writing. I am getting ready to finally launch a writing workshop online. I am ruminating about products and books and original cards.

I have so many ideas I easily get overwhelmed.

However, I am not letting my terror stop me.

For such a long time, I let fear stop me. I let fear tell me its sad-sack tale of woe, wasting precious days and hours and minutes I can never retrieve.

I can’t do that anymore.

“Impossible is my specialty.” – Marissa Meyer, Heartless

So, I ground myself – imagining a silver cord, a swirling root that stretches from my center to the center of the earth, allowing me to sit in the present moment, unworried by the past or the future. I sit and I breathe. I breathe. I sit. I quiet my monkey mind and see myself as perfect as I am now – at midlife – with a shock of beautiful white hair.

I watch that root stretch within me until it reflects all the branches of my life above it.

Do you realize we are seeding the next 30 years? We are choosing our tribe and our path.

Pluto stands in my doorway, ever the teacher, the awakener. He’s blown up my life and set me on a new path.

Now, I see myself  – a wildwood-warrior-woman- writer – on the verge of something juicy, something big.

I meet myself for the first time and realize I’ve arrived at last. I pull leaves and dirt from my hair and set out in the direction that most scares me.

Life is about stretching our hearts and shedding our old familiar skins.

By the end of it, we should be as vast as the stars we sit under.

We should contain a multitude of memories fluttering and flickering like fireflies in jars.

We should be filled with god damn darkness and light. You see, I believe we are meant to arrive at the end of everything, disheveled, eyes shining, our shirts half off.

Otherwise, what have we done with our time?

Otherwise, what was the purpose of this whole ragtag journey?

I want to get off this merry-go-round all used up, words spilling from my pockets, a stack of stories still to tell.

I want to be full. Of life. Of joy. Of everything I ever wanted to do.

Then I want to turn the page and begin again.

***

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© 2018  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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