Greetings From the Top!

If you follow me on social media, you may have noticed that in the midst of trying to “really own who I am,” the heavens opened up and poured glitter all over the land.  Not the good kind, either.  Sure, it looked like it would be awesome raining down from the sky but the shit is floating on top of my drinks, covering my clothes daily, confusing me about what is actually shining up at me from the plate of food I want to eat, and has gone from “oh, magical!” to “siri, do people die from glitter exposure?”

Mind you, I wasn’t asking anything too big from the skies.  A little more of this, a little less of that.  Some fiscal stability (I’m fine, don’t worry…but late stage capitalism…) and some motivation to get back to an exercise routine like the one I had in 2016 where I thought to myself, “holy shit, I’m actually STILL running!,” that was all I asked for.  

Well…I got pneumonia, met a murderer, lost my keys every single day, bounced an appalling amount of checks, broke dishes, broke glasses, broke casserole pans, got in arguments with everyone I’ve ever loved, accidentally insulted strangers, took someone else’s cart halfway through the Giant, and on and on.  

The weird, the wild, the utterly exhausting all happened these past 3 weeks at the exact same time as I was feeling like the 2016 version of myself running for longer than a lap thinking, “holy shit, I’m doing it!”

Because I was!  I am!

I’ve been showing up for my kids in ways I’m proud of with consistency and right on time.  I’m enjoying the wins of my meditation job with kids and seeing some real impacts.  I’m networking like crazy for Creative Spirit, connecting with amazing opportunities for this community, and remembering just how (pardon me) FUCKING good I am at what I do.  My sessions have been off the charts incredible and people are finding light in lives that felt full of stagnancy and darkness.  

I mean….Holy shit, I’m doing it!

Cue the cosmic “but.”

What was happening alongside the high, the growth, the pride, the success was the shame, the discord, the frustration, the utter “I just want to scream with my face in a pillow every half hour…”  

Winning and losing at the exact same time didn’t feel like a possibility in life.  Not in the way life was pitched to me, anyway.  You’re either winning the race or you’re not.  You’re either losing all your money on Black or you're not.  

WTF is this whole “have a little of both!” bullshit???

I’d like to think the good was all well earned byproducts of me adulting like a real adult.  But then the bad, man, it's feeling utterly cosmic!

So, if you saw my post on social media the other day, you’d recall that I kind of ended up turning to the one place that I normally don’t turn (which seems to surprise most of my clients): astrology.

Some of the scenarios that I have found myself in go far beyond the foibles of the working mom and dip straight into sudden impact stuff.  Like, what wasn’t there a half hour ago is now woven into the fabric of your reality for the rest of your life.  

You never see it coming.

You’d think that in my line of work, I’d have the foresight to at the very least know that shit happens when you least expect it.  As you might expect, it's so easy for me to see things for others that are hard to spot for myself.  It's not only a normal human flaw, it's a professional hazard in my weird and wonderful woo woo world.  

So where the hell am I going with this?  How am I going to drive this shock and awe train back to the station?

So glad you asked.  You see, life be life’in.  Life be doing what it does.  Life be making sure we don’t take anything for granted or get too damn comfortable for too damn long.  

And as exhuasted as it's all making me, it's also making me feel things I haven’t felt in a long time to the depths that I’m feeling them now.  

I’ve been having FUN.  Feeling excited.  Getting curious and digging into that curiosity with enthusiasm.  Feeling connected to my family and friends in deep ways.  Feeling optimistic about the future of everything, including humanity.  It's been sunshine across the landscape of dog-pee snowpiles and missing sideview mirrors.  And it has felt SO good! 

I’ve also been the most frustrated I’ve ever been in my life for more moments throughout the day than I think is normal for a person not committed to an insane asylum after accidentally eating a sheet of acid.  I’m moving between unbridled joy and utter rage in ways I can’t quite understand.  

But so many of you are feeling it too!  So many of you are reaching out about this North versus South experience and wondering the same things that I am.  Is it all out of our hands?  Written in the stars?  Fated right down to the smallest piece of glitter on your Kraft mac and cheese?

Okay, so what if it is?  Actually, let’s assume it is!  Where does that leave us all in this ant farm we call life?

My best guess is this:  to stop riding this ride alone.  

We need to share our losses and misfortunes as easily as our wins and we need to remember that people want to hear about both!  Don’t stuff down the wins because another is on the downswing.  Remind them the ferris wheel goes around and around and encourage them to pay attention to what’s happening during the ride, but not how to stop it and definitely not how to tweak it like a meth loving carny.  

We’ll all get there!  And we’ll all fall again.  And we’ll all get there, and oops, damn it, there we go again.  

Maybe your car on the ferris wheel is a little more souped up than others.  Maybe your parents were loaded and you have a car with a roof and windows!  Maybe it wasn’t so bad growing up and you got a roof, wide seats, and a reasonably stable looking safety gate.  Or, sorry to report, maybe you got the jankiest, wobbliest, most exposed piece of rotting steel with glossy paint car around.  

We’re all going up.  And we’re all going down.  

The key is to ignore how the others are protected from the elements.  

Some may not get rained on, shit on, or frozen from the wind while you might be soaked, scared, and stuck at the top.  

What good does staring at the others do?  What good does it do to lament their lights and windows in the torrent of life?

We gotta hang onto the people we’re sharing this ride with and find a way to make it through until we reach the top, or, more my speed, get the hell off.  

A carney is running this show and while I think God loves us and cares for us all equally and with great care for our souls and lives, I also think maybe he loves himself a little somethin’ somethin’ before his shift starts at the fair.  And when God is the designer of the ride, engineer of the ride, builder of the ride, and then…lord knows he must be tired a bit…the guy stuck letting people on and off all night? 

Well, we have to ignore that imperfect mystery that is cosmic carney life.   We just do.  

The ride will run, the sausage will get made, that show will go on.  We have to be good to each other throughout it all.  We have to value our own people and root them on while making sure we don’t make life hard for the other cars.  We have to drop a piece of pretzel down to the next car if we can, try to get the bic lighter up to the desperate smokers in the car above if we can.  

Celebrate our wins where we can, scream into pillows when we need to.  

This final thing I truly know we need to hold onto if we can is this:  the whole thing is made of love.  Its made for love, because of love, to love, and with love.  

Try not to lose sight of that when you want to get off.