I'm not v. on point with it today. I've been working a lot of overtime, interviewing like crazy and I've been doing a lot of craft shows. (I've learned that Mojo bag oils and High John oil scare people at craft shows but the other oils sell pretty well. I sold the most oils at a church show funnily. I also started getting scouted for other shows at my last show and I rolled out my Dream Ambassadors which are little felted sheep that can be scented with lavender oil to help you sleep, all but one sold at my first showing of them) I got cleaned out at my last show and now have less than two weeks to spin straw into gold and restock for my next show. I have been too exhausted this week to do anything but order supplies due to the overtime and waking up super early and working super late. The getting up super early has been causing random strange existential crisises for me. I've also been clocking in time with friends who are having problems and spending time with my family and a little baby sitting for my nephew. Generally Jow and I have Mondays together to spend the day together but this week I was working. I'm having a vampire themed dinner party tonight and the house is still in disarray and I need to cook the dinner for the dinner party.
I'm totes crispy fried to the point that I need to make lists to get anything done because otherwise I frankly have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing and things that are important are falling through the cranks. I don't know what day it is really and I feel like a lot of my core priorities are slipping to the wayside in my Ferengi overzealousness to make enough money to finish paying off my debt and to save money for our wedding as well as having that crazy thing they call a savings account.
I used to live like this all the time. Have you ever seen The Rachel Zoe Project? When I get out of sync with my core priorities, she's pretty much exactly the way I am (except substitute "forget to eat" for "over eat"). I mean, massive credit to her for being so successful and doing what she loves and being so hardcore, but it's not the life I genuinely want to lead. I don't like the way I am when I'm too bogged down in the material and I start to feel empty (which i try to fill up with the material) and also I get a certain sharpness to me. Not the playful occasional cattiness, but a certain sharp cruelty and hardness that I don't like about myself. When I'm like that, I rarely do magic. While the material and the spiritual are not at odds per se, if you get too pre-occupied with one and not the other, you're imbalanced and it's hard to fully function I find.
(A sudden revelation: In Neo-Pagan Shamanism, it's often talked about that you need to be able to walk between the worlds. I always thought that's why I sucked with being a shaman - because I'm somewhat of a cement head and wasn't always having these big astral adventures like the Wasband but I think my real balancing of worlds is to balance my spiritual self [which is as much internal as it is external] and the material world which I got better at post-divorce but still sometimes struggle with. I tend to be too much material and not enough spiritual though when I'm losing the battle. Something to marinate on.)
Things that are currently falling to the wayside (which are most of my core life priorities):
Eating well
Exercising (which makes me feel completely disconnected from my physical body, though I've been focusing on my appearance - again, material vs spiritual for me at least)
Magical practice
My version of a meditational practice
Writing (for a while I was strictly doing freelance which is devoid of spirituality for me and I'm being pretty forcibly pushed away from that from my Powers That Be but I haven't been able to get back to writing things that help my spirituality)
Keeping my house in an orderly fashion
Of course, as I'm writing this what am I doing? Procrastinating cleaning for the dinner party and sending emails for wedding related items. Have I gotten dressed or brushed my teeth or taken my pills or eaten anything? Nope.
Sigh. Something has to change. I need to get refocused. I keep hoping it will magically happen but so far not so much. It's hard to get refocused when I feel so crispy fried. I guess I can start to try to have at least one of my core life priorities on my list to do on my daily list. Mostly though it just feels like being a hamster on a never ending wheel.
What are your core life priorities? Are you being mindful or neglectful?
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8 comments:
For a long time I languished in a dying relationship. That pretty much tanked out my spiritual and creative reserves. I spent about six months being "on empty" and just surviving. I managed to actually DO things (which I hadn't for the previous six months), like washing myself, cleaning the house, feeding the children, etc.
Now, in our new home... I'm a diva again. The house is *clean* (not tidy but actually clean). The meals are well made, served on time, and made from fresh ingredients. I'm up on time every morning to get the kids out the door to school. The chores are being done. I'm finding time for things like baking, which I did today (and blogged about).
And suddenly the wights (or land spirits or fae or whatever you want to call them) began calling to me out in the woods behind the house. My gods are talking to me again. My spiritual life is picking up. My weight is going down. My life is happy. I have sad moments, but they're *moments* and not the whole thing.
Right now I'm being mindful. I spent most of a year being neglectful, though, and I understand.
Funny, that is close to what I wrote about today... priorities and commitment, and the need to get all done. ^^
Looks like I"m not the only one, struggling to disconnect from the things that aren't working for me or on my path and reconnect with those things that were working for me and were on my path. I suspect it goes back and forth, rather like a pendulum and hopefully things will swing as high upward as they have downward. :D For all of us.
your core life priorities pretty much match my own. I'm also feeling a bit thin. time for me to take some time away from .... something? or reorganze. maybe less pinterest is needed in my life??
naw, who am i kidding?
must be that proverbial 'time of the year'....feeling the same..need to get back to the exercise (helps my knees), back to somethings which need to be done to achieve an end-goal. first thing going is my ultimate timesuck: facebook...down it goes to once a day, no more than 45 mins....
it does occur to me, though, that for those who craft as part of thier livlihood, this is the time when 'overdrive' is an expected part of the holiday season. so, provided you can survive the next 6 weeks, 'time' for your core activities should be back on the radar. how odd that high john would put people off...such a reputation he has, even among the mundanes ;) your dream ambassadors sound adorable!
Core life priorities...
1) Live by Art and Queer as much as possible (getting better at this, although I'm still On Contract for The Man, I'm at least only working half-days as of Monday and, otherwise, am working as a model, a rainbow health outreach person, and - when I can hack it - a writer. So yay!)
2) Maintain a steady, livable income (which is becoming less and less at odds with the first priority - YAY!)
3) Love openly, trust wisely but freely, be joyful as much as possible, and don't base my decisions on fear (working on it - this is a hard one in a number of ways)
5) Develop a savings account, pay off the credit card debt, and get an RRSP or three and start saving for (a) a house, and (b) retirement (ahahahaha... But at least I've got an ING account and am, in theory, meeting with my bank next week about RRSPs)
6) Write every day, and eventually turn my blog posts into books (doing better than I was. Planning to use nanowrimo to help me stick with this)
7) Get steadily better and more consistent when it comes to writing poetry and porn (er... this one is still "having difficulties" at best. It stopped being *easy* to write porn... shortly before my divorce, and it's still like pulling teeth a lot of the time. Poetry has fallen by the way-side in a lot of ways, too. Which sucks, but I'm not sure how to get my poetry-mojo back -- I'm open to suggestions <*shrug*>)
8) Spend more time in Pagan head-space, do daily (ahaha) offerings, and generally make my spirituality an active part of my life (currently this is entirely about blogging at http://birchtreemaiden.wordpress.com/, with plans to get the offerings back on track next week, when I start working half-days and may actually have Time and Energy to do so, and fewer excuses as to why I'm not).
9) Do yoga and/or other exercise-like things on a weekly, or more-frequent-than-weekly, basis. (Again, this is one that should pick up, at least a little bit, once I'm working from home half of every day. I can just roll out the yoga mat in the living room and get on with it. Though I'm also wanting to start going to a weekly class with my sweetie).
Uh... So, yeah. Huge long comment about core life priorities and where they're at, the short answer being: I have lots! They are mostly struggling along in a half-assed kind of way. Um.
Thanks for letting me blab! :-D
Thanks for sharing everyone! It's good to know I'm not alone! I think you hit the nail right on the head, @petoskystone. It's become my gritted teeth mantra, six more weeks, six more weeks . . .
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