Tag Archives: taking risks

I Don’t Know Why You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

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Last things often precede first things. The last night in a familiar home precedes the first night of a new life in a new place. The last oatmeal cookie precedes the first taste of a new cookie never imagined before. The last time ever I saw this place, comes just before the first time ever I grew wings and tried a new life in a new place with new people doing new things.

That’s where I am today, Christmas morning 2018. My cozy, beloved home of several years felt like “life as I know it” just weeks, maybe even days, after moving in. I’d moved out of a house I lived in for over 25 years—my marital home, no longer marital and then, no longer my home. And yet I truly believed, up until the moment I decided to move out, that nothing would ever feel “right” again. But guess what? It felt perfectly right.

Staying put was right until leaving was right. Goodbye became a big hello.

Ease and comfort, the familiar, are like a plush blanket that, with a deep breath, I push off myself. I stand up and walk to a door. This door was not there before. Curious and brave and a little scared (and shivering a bit because the blanket is gone), I fling open the unknown door.

My door…

Don’t get me wrong. I created the door. Now I have to use it. So, wearing my scarlet cape and witch’s hat, I will leap through it and suddenly the fear of goodbye becomes the gift of hello.

I’m leaving where I’ve been. I mean, really leaving! It’s a big deal for me. I’m not just moving two towns over, either. I’m moving a whole state over and taking a boat to an island. I’ll settle in on the island of Nantucket like a seed in fertile soil. I’ll grow and give and I’ll learn and thrive. I can’t wait to connect deeply to people and to the ocean, and to sink in to parts of myself that have been muffled by the familiar and safe.

I used to fling myself off the cliffs of opportunity all the time, without fear, and here I am again.

So much of what changes in our world is outside our control. The anxiety about how our leaders let us down every day, putting us in harm’s way, throwing our best outcomes away in favor of their personal gain—that is something I face head on in the middle of the night, a pillow clutched to my stomach as I coax sleep back towards me.

But there is no anxiety about my own personal changes. I choose them just as they choose me. Starting a new job, making a difference in the lives of people, forging a new and creative path for myself and my new employer—I have every confidence in those truths. I am not afraid.

What did you once fear… then embrace? What did you once imagine would never come to pass, only to welcome it as a natural next step, hardly remarked upon in the perfect flow of your timeline? Was there a day you dreaded, only to find that when it came, it lay the greatest of gifts at your feet?

My new Nantucket tree ornament.

The best thing about my move? It never occurred to me. My job? It was not something I would have imagined or considered. The feeling of lift-off reminds me of flying dreams I’ve had through my life. I’m ready to say: Hello.

 

Big Rambling Houses, Cliffs to Jump Off, and the Power of Flight

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After more than a decade during which I almost got used to the fact that access to my sleeping mind had been cut off, I’m remembering my dreams again. There is more than one way to tap the unconscious, but dreams were always my fallback. The membrane was reliably soft and easy when I awoke, and I could ease back through it, take a look, and know what my message for myself was that day.

Well, it is all there for me again. Over the years, I had invited my dreams back now and then with not a lot of success. They say you can train yourself, but I think there is more to it than that. I guess I’m ready for them again. Ready to hear what they have to say and see what they want to show me. (In other words, ready for what my higher self needs to teach me.)

Lately, my dreams have had three common threads. Aside from a series of dreams in which I see someone I badly miss, I’m dreaming about rambling houses, edges off which I jump, and the power of flight.

As a child, my dreams of flying were so constant and so real to me that I spent a few years around the ages of 6 or 7 secretly believing I really could fly. I just though I wasn’t good at controlling it while I was awake the way I could when I was asleep. I have not flown like that in my dreams for over 30 years and I have missed it very much.

flight

Flight. In childhood, I usually flew to save myself, in an often-narrow escape from someone or something. And sometimes I flew just for the joy of it. Now that I’m flying again, the frequency is reversed. The occasional “good thing I know how to fly so I can get out of this freefall” but with a lot of “damn, I can FLY” kinds of dreams that I wake from feeling good and filled with a glorious POWER.

staircase

Big rambling houses. In one recent dream sequence, the staircase to the basement was made of empty wine crates. (Hard to navigate but begging the question: where did all that wine go?) I made my way down that scary staircase, without fear. My cats are occasionally with me, familiars even as I sleep, and they often do a good deed or exhibit impressive supercat skills, sort of the way I superhumanly fly all over the place. Not to be sidetracked by the props and minor characters  — these dreams are about dank basements, endless hallways, doors…and me, always faced with a CHOICE.

cliff two

Precipices. In one badass dream lately I took a bad guy (faceless, nameless, but menacing) by the hand and jumped with him off a cliff. Even though it looked like the edge of a porch, it was indeed a very intense cliff, and we ended up plummeting through dark bottomlessness until I conveniently let go of his hand and flew to safety. Though I made the choice to exert my power and avoid termination at the bottom of that particular precipice, cliffs are about risk and facing fears and, in my mind, they are about MAJOR CHANGE.

moon

The recent full moon (which was ruled by Virgo, as it happens) still holds sway over us all. And over me, telling me that change is inevitable, that it is time to live truthfully if I’m not already, that everything I’m going through inside and outside of me is prepping the stage for my future. Sure, I know that every act and thought and feeling is, in a sense, doing that. But we all know when the shit that’s going down is BIG and when it’s not. This feels big.

So I look at the dreams (and so much more) and conclude that I have the power to fly. I can fly away, I can fly up, down, or in. I can save myself, and I can let go of what is not serving me. And I can fly just to fly, for the joy of being weightless and free. And I have choices and they are forcing themselves into my consciousness so I’ll make them. Not all of the choices are easy, not all of them are safe. Just like the big houses. Scary basement or door number three? And I am on the brink—of something. The very knife-sharp edge of whatever it is, I can make the leap… and be okay.

goddess power