Petaluma has been filled with smoke since August. I’ve gotten used to breathing it. I’ve also started waking up at 4 a.m. again, which is the time connected with the lungs in Chinese medicine. So I place my hands over my lungs and send them love, I feel them filling up with air I’ve purified through the strength of my not inconsiderable will, and I imagine them filling with gold light.
I also bought some herbal sleep drops that I’m taking three times a day, because there’s hippie and then there’s hippie. (Herbal sleep drops are hippie, filing your lungs with golden light is hippie. In case you were wondering.)
I don’t know how new parents do it. Two weeks of five or six hours of broken sleep a night and I can barely function. And it’s not like I’m also caring for an infant. I’m just … not sleeping. Not sleeping means watching Netflix or reading a book or lying in bed praying for sleep to take me, not feeding a tiny wailing human or praying for sleep to take it.
Despite the hazy, wildfire-filled air, I’m so happy it’s fall. I’m pulling out my sweaters and painting my nails autumnal shades and putting pie spice in my coffee. While my boyfriend yells at the maple leaves that fall on his head, I’m super excited to pull out my furry boots and put them on my feet.
Work feels like it’s shifting, I feel like I’m shifting, but I’m not yet sure what we’re shifting into. I’m doing my best to just exist happily in the mystery and do whatever feels right in the moment, rather than worry about it incessantly as per my usual. The thing I do know: Writing has been feeling like a big focus again, after years of putting all my energy into the channeling / healing / and other intuitive hippie pursuits. Now I just want to write atmospheric novels like Night Circus and Candy Queen and take naps. While this particular pendulum swings wildly back and forth (one month it’s on one side of the spectrum, the next month is the polar opposite), it feels like I’m supposed to be channeling healing and guidance just for me right now, and not so much for everyone else. It feels like I’m meant to be going through my video archives and receiving all the embedded channeling and healing for me, and maybe repurposing what I’ve already created to share with people in a new way. That feels really fun right now. Like my creation is supposed to be sharing stories and experiences rather than channeling.
It feels like I just need to choose what I want and follow it - subtracting worry and over-thinking and weird self-esteem nonsense from the equation. It feels like I’m supposed to fill my cup and let that spill over into the rest of the world, rather than me trying to fix anything for anyone else.
P.S. Out of sheer curiosity, I just checked the official Pantone color for 2020. It’s blue. This feels wildly appropriate psychologically and wildly hopeful politically.