Falling in love and all the emotions that come with it can be SUCH a distraction from the mundane necessities of life. It'd be funny if it weren't also frustrating. :) More in locked posts.

In other news, after 3 weeks of me being sick, and finally recovering from strep plus the side effects of related meds, the very next day my kitties came down with colds. Sniffling, sneezing, stuffed up. Poor babies. They're clearing it and healing up well though.

A part of me can't believe it's mid December already. And a part of me saw every week passing, and knows that December is, of course, what happens after November finishes. Another part of me desperately wants to skip Jan/Feb and jump ahead to when Spring comes in March. It's COLD out there, people! I hate being cold!! Oh well.

I have some time to wait before I head out for my flight today (business travel), so kind of daydreaming and thinking. Sad that I will be away from my comfortable routines for a week... moreso that it will take me a bit offline and distant. I have plans for phone calls to some people to stay in touch, which should help.

My mind lately is awash in the warm fuzzies of new relationships. Feeling really fortunate for how things are working out. Also, reflecting on how the years have changed me. deaconobvious saw me at the very beginning of my first year at IMSA, and thus saw me while I was still really shy and uncertain... many of my other friends/partners only met me later, after I'd gained confidence. I always felt like that quieter/shy part of me got left behind because no one else who knows me now, knew me that way years ago. So it was an interesting discovery that he remembered bits of that. I was so very quiet back then. I had no idea how much possibility and strength was locked up inside me, waiting for the right conditions to grow.

I've spent a lot of time in ritual work trying to reconnect with and reclaim bits of who I used to be; not the powerlessness and fear, but the simple innocence and emotionality. For years I wanted to see myself reflected in another's eyes. Known for who I was behind the fears. I have a large part of that, now, and more coming as I set up opportunities for it. Healing work runs deep back over the years.

Sometimes I wonder about writing the stories of my grade school days, the ways I remember them. All the pain, all the struggle, all the tiny buds of hope that poked through in spite of it. I couldn't do justice to the other characters in the stories, but maybe that doesn't matter. My writing would be for others to understand me; the rest is just circumstances. And then I wonder, would it really turn up anything my friends don't already know? I live so openly anymore. I don't know; maybe I will write, someday, and give that little girl more voice. Who knows what impact my stories might have. Meanwhile, loving relationships are bringing healing even without the stories; it's amazing what acceptance and trust can do.


Life has changed so much. Never as a child would I have dreamed I'd be doing this well in my career, surrounded by wonderful friends, deeply in love with multiple awesome people. The contrast is stunning between now and where I came from. For that reason alone I sometimes think about writing the past. Just to play with the contrast.


It's a gray wet November over here, the kind of day where reality pauses and time freezes, just for a day; no wind, no leaves stirring, no rain. Just soggy earth and stillness. Waiting.

(Reposted with permission.)

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In 2010, Diana’s Grove Mystery School will be working with the story of Persephone. It is a story of cycles, and as we all know, part of the wisdom of cycles is that all things come to an end. While it is our intention that Mystery School will continue, Diana’s Grove Center, as you and we have known it, is coming to an end.

( details )
Next year we will be working with the story of Persephone. It is a story of cycles, and a fitting end to this cycle of an impossible dream, made manifest for so many years. We plan to re-tell and live out this rich, ancient story through the year, in full and reverent awareness that a beloved form is ending, as well as in joyous celebration of our years together, on this land. We anticipate a year of profound, deep and healing work, intentional farewells, glad welcoming of new Mysteries, and laying the foundation for the continuation of this community, this philosophy, this dream that has touched the lives of so many.

Please join us.

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So speaking to MY friends -- If any of you have been curious about the Grove programs... If you have wanted to come but were uncertain... This is the time. Next year may be all there is, on this land, in this form, that so many of us have treasured and loved. The priestess training work and personal growth work that happens during weekend intensives is phenomenal. The land contributes in countless ways to the success of the process, the feel of the community, the ways we all come together. The land itself holds some of the magic. And, quiet but I believe no less important, the land has the privacy to support skyclad labyrinth walks and such physical ways of self-awareness and peace with nature.

One year. One year of Mystery School and open events, and then we will have to say goodbye. Will you join us for the depths of Persephone's story? My tears know that I will be there, working with Persephone, learning to embody hope.


You can read more in their Between the Worlds online magazine, winter issue.

Any friends reading my LJ through RSS, log in for recent fun poly updates.

It's my birthday! Woo! :) 32 is looking promising.

For the tarot folks out there, I'm moving out of an Empress year and into an Emperor year... which seems absolutely perfect with how the last two months have gone. I initiated a new project/process at work, and with the change of this weekend, it now moves from observing and nurturing into active intentional structure-setting and structure-discovery.

I'm looking forward to the year. *grin*

I made a couple recent posts friend-locked on Grove stuff. If you're a new friend and aren't sure what filters you're on or want to ask for certain filters, this is the place to speak up and let me know! Also a reminder for the RSS folks to log in if you want to see anything substantial. :)

The cashier who checked me out at the grocery store tonight was TOTALLY HOT. (Ok, "checked me out" is perhaps a bad phrasing. ;) Rung up my order? Heh.)

I was out with Daniel getting our pantry restocked, so very large cart full. As we came up to the checkout area, I saw the guy off a ways dealing with something else and immediately broke eye contact because of the WHOA that hit in my head.... followed shortly by I wonder if I can avoid him so this awkwardness is minimal... followed very shortly by realizing that he was going to be on MY AISLE. No way to avoid. *laugh*

He was of course polite and friendly and outgoing and wanted to talk, and so I ended up making eye contact for the initial formalities (and 'cause really, a chance to intentionally stare him in the face? too much fun to pass up, if it was going to be unavoidable anyhow). And then I started pulling groceries out of the cart, and totally fumbled the pasta sauce while thinking about mentioning to Daniel that this guy was HOT. And laughed at myself and refocused to actually complete the transaction. Laughed about it with Daniel in the car after. It's so handy that he is fine with my attractions. :)

There are precious few guys who are sufficiently 'my type' that simple eye contact sends me into embarrassed intense attraction (though I can think of a few...). It's even more rare with folks I don't know personally. But there are a few. And tonight was one more... Hehe. Yay for friendly hotties.

I've been interested recently in bento lunches as a way to get healthy home-cooked foods to work, especially because of all my food intolerences that make it impossible to safely eat out. I have to home-cook pretty much all the time anyway; so I may as well make it easier on myself.

Typically I have been using Pyrex and Rubbermaid containers, which are okay, but I've noticed I tend to pack just one entree and get rather little variety of foods. I don't have any convenient way to combine multiple size containers and not just have a bag of chaos. The upside of bento boxes is that they're made to travel, they have spaces for multiple separate foods, and they stack and nest well. They're also pretty/elegant, which is nice, though not strictly necessary.

Mostly, I look forward to the convenience of getting my food to work and into the fridge without the drive and carrying across the parking lot causing things to shift... and without hauling a plastic grocery bag full of heavy glass containers that bang around and try to slide away. I have the advantage of a refrigerator and microwave at work, and I always keep a microwavable container on hand there, so I can pack cold-stored food easily and heat things up later when needed. I do plan to get some of the reusable silicone "cupcake wrappers" that can be used to partition foods and keeps things from leaking all over each other.

So this afternoon I brainstormed on what sorts of foods to cook this week, and what kinds of things I can pack that don't require cooking (like veggies), based largely on what I already had on hand. I did end up making a small grocery store trip to fill out just a couple things for soups later in the week.

Today's accomplishments: carrot sticks, cucumber slices, bell pepper, baked potatoes, sliced apples (in water), and melon chunks. Also, Daniel cooked up chicken for broth and eating, so we'll soon have more canned broth and canned premade soup. Also still coming tonight, hard boiled eggs, and if we can manage it, zucchini bread. This is a lot of food for roughly 3 hours of work; it was quite productive. Daniel and I are a good tag-team in the kitchen.

Right now I have about a half-week's lunches and a lot of healthy snacks. With another day or two of cooking, I will have two weeks of lunches and even more easy snacks. I'm finding it very reassuring and helpful to have a bunch of stuff cooked in advance, because when I do, my daily life is easier and more painless. Getting hungry and then not having the energy to cook is a rough combination.

Yay food. :)

Today was a catching-up day. Got groceries, enjoyed food, did lots of cleaning, dishes, laundry got started, trash gathered and bagged. And my computer desk is now in a different room, out in the living room / family area, instead of a dark cave of a spare bedroom. Now I can still participate in family activity awareness while also doing stuff on the computer.

This probably opens up my energy quite a bit for learning new stuff... since I won't end up feeling isolated while I do it. And now my house is clean, too!!

Still a lot of decluttering and organizing to do, especially in the room I left behind. But that should be tackle-able in a slightly different manner now.

My landscapes/etc Photo Gallery is back online. Also, I fixed the stupid issue with it not letting browsers cache images, so, now after the thumbnails load, it'll keep them cached decently and thus be fast.

Yay! And yay to ddbrown for some of the behind-the-scenes work on making this faster, too.


Also, fresh content: I added in my 2009 photo journeys, which are mostly landscapes from Shaw Nature Reserve.

One of the things I've noticed about my life is that I often choose not to hold a strong opinion, resulting in me shifting to fit whatever space I'm in. That's not to say I don't have ideas and values that I hold as important, but... where ideas are more about local trends, I don't hold onto them much.

I don't know if this is a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing. At the moment I'm sorta rolling through the ideas, examining it.

Sometimes, it's because it's easier to not claim an opinion than to hold onto an unpopular opinion. Who will claim enjoying country music in a group of rock fans who disdain country? And, it's just music; it's not so hard to walk away from, when there is a pressure against it. Likewise for television; it's not so important that I can't just walk away, and it's not worth the effort to set up time alone to watch things I like that no one else likes. It's unimportant and gives me little value.

It's not so important... holding onto ideas, opinions, preferences, that don't fit socially and which I can't share with much of anyone. I let go, they fall away.

Sometimes, it's because I don't have factual background to sufficiently support a theory or opinion, and it's not worth arguing with angry/pushy/bully folks to try to put forth my own idea. I get nothing out of arrogance or my-idea-is-better-than-yours posturing, and the arguing is stressful and annoying. People arguing are rarely actually listening to what I say anyhow, so there seems little point in speaking. I let things go, they fall away. Life moves on.

Sometimes, it's because holding onto a hope, a dream, a direction, a wish... just seems to set me up for disappointment. If I don't make plans, the universe can't move in a way that breaks them. If my dreams don't take form, they can't take a form that breaks the dream. It's safe... but in the long term, it's also dead. The opportunity passes, the window closes. Dreams fall away. Life moves on.


Some say that if you let everything fall away, what you're left with is your essential self; that which you cannot lose. But I look at all the things I identified with for a short while, things I enjoyed, even small unimportant things, and I feel loss that they are gone. Yes, I went on. And yet, a piece of me died and fell away. I can continuously create new me... but what if I want to hold onto something, even unimportant and such? When do I establish, this is me, take it or leave it, and claim what I want even when others don't?

What happens when Aries (self identity) battles it out with Scorpio and Pisces (death and sacrifice) or with Libra (connection/relationship)? What happens when the source of the battle is not some grand values and non-negotiables, but the smaller things, the things where just one or two compromises isn't so much, but a hundred sacrifices makes an impact?

How do I find a way back to claiming the unpopular and quirky things I care about, in spite of those around me not supporting them? What's worth fighting for?

I don't even know what I "like" anymore or what are my "favorites" or whatever. It's been too many years, I've changed so many times. Adaptability turned to wishy-washy and I'm left with... what? I'm not sure.

Who am I?

*pondering*

I had a great weekend with friends in Champaign-Urbana... it was my first opportunity to be social in a very long time, and it was so worth the effort. If I prepare a bit better in advance, I might even be able to do it more often. It did convince me just how much I miss friends and loved hanging out talking.

Even if I did (somewhat embarassingly) not remember faces well enough. Sigh. (I swear, it's the way a few years and a change of facial hair makes the guys look different. It's only ever the guys I get confused on! Sorry guys. It's not that I don't care about you, I'm just bad with faces!)

Anyway, despite my struggles to put names to faces at first, it was a great weekend. :)


Folks on RSS readers- there are quite a few locked posts in the last couple weeks. You may want to log in.

I'm making progress archiving negatives from family photos. Looks like I've got a good span of years - probably have the majority or all of the boxes of photos that existed. I've been discovering film formats I didn't even know existed. I'll also have to get some medium format envelopes, as there's more medium format than I expected to encounter.

It's been fun. I found a clean print of a set of formal portraits taken of us kids, when before I'd only had molded dirty copies, so that was a gem to find. And the negatives overall are in excellent condition. I did have to carefully separate some stuck ones, and one pair I even soaked in running water to get it to let go. Even it came apart okay, and then dried back out just fine.

My parents were taking photos to document their lives from 1970/1971, when they were dating in college. It's been awesome to see the transitions over the years. It'll be even better once I have things organized, scanned, and easily sorted and viewed. Fun fun.

More blog entries friend-locked, for those who are logged in.

I am reading Living with Intensity - and actually read about 2/3 of it already tonight since it arrived in the mail today.

The full title is: "Living With Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and the Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults" which hints at the rather clinical language used throughout the book. It's definitely written with therapists as a primary audience. Regardless, it's a pretty cool book, in that it goes into some depth about all the different areas of emotional difference that come with giftedness, er, 'being smart.' It especially dives into overexcitabilities (OEs) and Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration. (Those are short articles from SENG's list of articles on social and emotional aspects of giftedness - an excellent intro set.)

But, those words don't do justice to WHY I'm reading it or what I gained already tonight.
* the realization that I deeply need friendships which mirror back my intensity and passion
* the realization that some of the traits that irritate me in coworkers are also OEs and actually indicators of good things
* the realization that a few of my own annoying traits (yes they bother me too) are also driven by OEs, and while I may be able to adjust their expression, I can't "eliminate" that which is essentially me

Probably the single biggest for me, though, is getting a gut level "oh yeah, that!" on the idea of mirroring and having someone who can reflect back the intensity, passion, verbal connection, and imagination that I have. I have a lot of years of experience of people not understanding me, or my feelings, or my hopes, or even actively telling me that it doesn't matter, don't worry about it, it's no big deal; dismissing my feelings and needs. I have very little experience with validation until pretty recently. And it's so rare that someone has enough time to connect, even if they do have the passion for it, and it also relies on seeing each other enough to build comfort and a strong foundation of shared interests, so the conversation can go deeper than surface events and casual games.

Then to complicate it further, since I rarely get to share with intensity at emotional depths for hours/days at a time, the experience of doing so tends to draw me past friendship and into attraction, which is usually highly inconvenient, depending on the person. (Doh.) I feel a bit less strange about that, however, since reading in the book about it being a really common effect among gifted teens -- that when they finally find authentic connection and intellectual peers, there's a strong tendency for romantic relationships which may or may not be a practical way to connect. It comes with the intensity. And the emotionality and intensity can knock me off course by complicating a friendship. Not that I get much choice in the matter of attraction.

Anyway. Much of my life in the last several years has been about learning to quiet and make moderate my intensity, to try to make practical things work better. Simplify conversations, make peace, etc. Some of that is my own need for safety and peace in my environment. And some is, well... hm. What's the word for a blend of overbearing, stuffy, formal, grudgingly tolerant, cooperative, and wary? Something like that.

My power is trying to find ways to shine, and I want to find ways to let it. And I think, since others mirroring my thoughts, feelings, and experiences back, seems such a foreign experience, that I've probably had rather little of it over the years. I was simply always the one who was "different" - no one was like me, so it seemed that of course no one else had experiences like mine. I finally just settled on always being alone with that. It was settling, though; I wanted more.

Of the OEs (psychomotor/activity, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional) I have all of them, though psychomotor somewhat less than the others. It still comes through in verbal enthusiasm, and if someone responds well to that, I get more expressive with my whole body too. I often don't feel secure enough to do that, though.

The one I have the hardest time living with is emotional - relatively innocuous conversations or (especially) turn-taking slips around me can set off a surprising intensity in my verbal reactions. I get cranky with people and it surprises even me. It's triggering, yet unpredictable; at best, I notice it once it starts and try to modulate it in the moment. Never easy tho. (And of course... what I worry about for days was objectively no more than 5 seconds of interaction. Heh.) But it made my rock unsteady, and I got crabby at someone, and that bothers me. I expect more of myself. And yes, it takes time to grow into that.

Anyway I stayed up way too late but it was excellent reading and I have a lot of thoughts on ways to share this around groups where the dynamic is happening and I'm not sure we're consciously aware that OEs from giftedness are probably playing a large role. And my own need for intensity and intense verbal expression is also likely contributing to my random outbursts at times I consider inconvenient, meaning beneath that is an unmet need for that expression in healthier ways. I'll have to see what I can figure out for that.

Being kind to yourself could help you get through stress. Seems like an obvious thing, but also interesting.

Watched my friends get married (yay!) and met some new people there, helped other friends whose car broke down on the way to the wedding (and they made it anyway), and then today had my own car break. Such fun (well ok some of it). My car has a broken radiator fan, resulting in an overheated engine. Pretty easy to diagnose - the fan doesn't turn.

So we're down one vehicle for a bit, and low on groceries, with a heat wave smacking us around for the week, and I still have a lot to do...

But just for tonight I am taking it easy and just resting. 'Cause it's been a busy weekend, and although seeing friends was great fun, I need my routine back, and a chance to just -be-.

More posts to see recently if you're logged in.

Congratulations to aabassplayer and poppins17!!

It's been a while... my random "ugh I'm tired" and "oooh pretty thunderstorm" have been going to Facebook, leaving only meaty posts for here. And not many meaty posts have I made. Heh.

Today brought one, though friend-locked, so rss folks are gonna have to log in. Work life, social life, value and worth. Contemplating what I need socially to feel whole.

I'm back from the Grove, where I had an excellent week-long event, and did a lot of introspection and had a lot of fun with friendly folks. Over the next few days I may try to get caught up on LJ reading, but for now, assume I'm approximately 9 days behind. :)

Today is a day of settling, integration, daydreaming, and laundry and bills. I can tell I'm not really resettled into daily life yet. Still feeling fuzzy and drifty, and that's normal too.

From artemis112, five words she associates with me, with the caveat that I elaborate on them in some way. I'd pass the meme on, but I'm going to be busy for the next 9 days or so, so instead I'm just going to write.

Photography
Self-Awareness
Curiosity
Beauty
Lifeforce

( cut for length to save your friends' page )

That's all for tonight - time to get some sleep. Yay words. :)