Empty Time

Greetings all,

Here we are the last week of the first month of the new year.  We're just about 1/12 of the way through the year.  Time flies right?

This week has been about making it easy for myself.  The flu has been circulating around the gym where I teach and I had been feeling under the weather.  I made the call to not swim and not strain myself.  So most of my activity this week has been due to my Tai Chi classes and Qi Gong workshop.  It is winter after all and January through February tends to be when my personal rhythms are the slowest.  Trying to keep moving and productive often results in burnout and depression.  If I do get sick during this time frame I start thinking that I am probably dying.  When that happens  I just remind myself it's late January, I always think I'm dying in late January.

Structure tends to help with moods in the darker seasons, but since I am mostly self employed it is up to me to provide it.  I sometimes make the mistake over scheduling myself in a way that in the summer might be just fine, but in the winter leaves me exhausted.  There are times when people ask me if I want to do something and I am tempted to make up some other obligation so I can just stay in and relax with a book.  It's actually good for me to have some of that empty time, particularly in these  low ebb months.  I like company and people to a point.  After that point, well I remember one time I threw someone out of my friend's house because I was done with people for the night.  (My friend thanked me for it later).

Society treats people like mechanisms rather than biological organisms.  We have to be responsive to the environmental conditions we find ourselves in.  We are not clockwork automatons, but living creatures with needs that vary from one season to the next.  We have been brought up to believe in the myth of the "busy", idle hands and all that nonsense.  There is a time for doing and a time for being.  If you cut out or cut short the being time, the doing is not going to be done quite so well.

So why am I telling you this?  Well you may be trying to barrel full steam ahead against the needs of your body and mind.  Now while you may have little control over your work schedule, you certainly have much more over your personal life.  It may require you to disappoint some folks, but you never know they may take a page out of your playbook and give themselves permission to just be.  Other than your true obligations (work, caregiving, etc...) you really have a lot more leeway than you think. So I say don't plan anything if you don't feel like it. If people press you because you have that sudden opening just say you have an appointment.  The appointment could be you, the couch, and a warm blanket, but that's your business not theirs.  Take care of yourself and your time.  If you don't no one else will.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Walk Observe Repeat

Greetings all,

This week I had the opportunity to witness winter.   Right now I am witnessing the thaw which I am grateful for, but the snow did have its own teachings.

The thing about snow is that it shows your path.  Well it shows everybody's path and if the snow lasts for a while it visually depicts our path through time.  It was interesting coming across my own prints.  I walked a pretty regular route during the frozen week, a slightly shorter walk for our dog.  As I came across my own tracks again and again, I thought of how we all move through similar patterns across time.  How many times had I walked in this exact same place.  Each time I walked I was at a different point in my life's timeline tied together by this path.

January is a month where I sometimes struggle with seasonal depression, but I also mark the new year by seeing how far I've come (or not come) since the last time I trudged through this typically cold and gray month.  I tend to move slowly (some might say glacially slow) towards goals.  I also don't seem to move in a straight line.  There is a lot of retreading the same ground.  The snow was quite good at pointing out where I'd been before.  In my life I've had the same issues come up repeatedly which also makes me question how much I've really grown and matured.

The snow had one more thing to show me though.  Not wishing to mar the pristine surface more than I had to during one peaceful walk with the puppy, I decided to step in my own footprints.  This was a much more challenging prospect than I had thought.  Even though I was trying to match my own stride consciously, it was near impossible to step into the exact same configuration I'd previously walked.  Even when I did step into my own prints it wasn't the same.  The pressure would be slightly off on one part of the foot or the other.  It soon became clear that I couldn't repeat myself even if I tried.  For some reason this gave me comfort.  I think it is because I kept seeing the same signposts along my personal journey I got discouraged that nothing had changed. Well it was quite cheering to know that even if I tried  to it was not possible to repeat myself exactly.  There were always going to be tiny variations in the stream of time.

Why am I telling you this?  Well some of you may have vowed that this year was going to be the year that you were going to make sweeping changes in your life.  If you are like many others, this is about the time where resolutions lose their steam.  I'd say take heart though, things will be different even if just slightly.  Each moment is new and unique.  That is the secret of time.  Each second is a jewel that will never be held again.  We often get overwhelmed when we try to account for the larger patterns we wish to contend with in our life's path.  What is a path though but a series of footprints?  Each moment a new footprint is unique even when it crosses the same landscape.  What if we gave ourself the freedom to simply walk our path without judgment?  What if we honored the little things we noticed along the way?  Try it for a bit and see what comes forward.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Let It All Burn

Greetings all,

Welcome to the post holiday blahs.  For me the tree is still up but the lights are off.  It will come down this weekend.  Currently the white death is falling outside, or at least that is what the TV forecasters frame it as:  Snowmageddon, Snowpochalypse, or the Great White Death Storm, although that last one sounds more like a white supremacist metal band if I think about it.

Lately my posts haven't been as visceral, they've felt more like assignments that I have to get done.  This happened to me before when I was working on my first book.  It's not surprising that as I contemplate my second book I'm feeling the well running dry.  However there is more to the story than that.  When I committed myself to writing each week, I was recuperating from heart break due to the ending of a core relationship in my life.  In the past three months, I've parted ways with several people and I've not talked about it on here.  I didn't want to air my dirty laundry for the world, but in suppressing my feelings my creativity has similarly suffered.

I tend to love my friends fiercely.  I think this is due to the fact that growing up I had few if any friends.  Being generally liked was never part of my experience.  It still comes as a shock when random people are kind to me.  So when I forge a friendship I am loathe to give it up, because of this I tend to quietly put up with a lot more bullshit than most people do.

I had a group of friends I would get together with for fun and games.  It had been going on for a few years, but for the last two I found myself existing more and more on the periphery.  I'd go to gatherings and say hello and I'd barely get a word in.  I'd be talked over, around, or simply ignored.  I sometimes left with less than a paragraph of actual dialogue between myself and others.  I started to bring other people to the gatherings so I wouldn't feel so lonely and it worked for a short while.  I was ignored while people checked their text messages, twitter, and Facebook.  I started noticing that the rest of the group was out together at a movie or other event when I got online and saw their check ins.  For a while I rationalized this, maybe it was a spur of the moment thing, but it kept happening.

  This went deeper than not getting enough invites.  After a decade of trying to get my artwork out into the world I was in two gallery shows this fall.  Nobody from that group came to either of them, they barely acknowledged I had something important happen.  When I published my book not a single one of them came to my first local book signing which literally took place around the corner from their house.  They never attended any of my events (which were free).  In short, they had no interest in my life.  I was their mascot.  Something to trot out like a curiosity.  This was shown to me clearly when I sought out a secondary group to get my gaming fix met.  This second group made me realize how unhappy I'd been, because they cared not just about me but about everyone in the group.  They showed up at my openings.  They talked with me and with each other.  They put their FUCKING PHONES DOWN!!!  It was this shining of example of engagement that demonstrated how much I didn't belong in the other group.

I decided I would slip away quietly.  I just wouldn't be available to the faux friends as much.  So I began to reel my energy back in.  Well they must have felt it because they latched onto some drama to pull me back in.  I will sum it up. They wanted my help to attack someone online for the ignorant thing they'd done.  I refused. They attacked me.  Another friend intervened letting them know I had been upset with them. They promised to work on it so they could fix the relationship.  It was ending prior to this blow up, but in my mind it was officially over the moment they publicly attacked me.  I did give them a final chance and went to one last gathering.  It embodied everything I had felt in the past year or so, nothing had changed.  Before the drama explosion I had known the truth, there was no place for me there.  The drama just hammered the point home.


 This is probably the most detailed personal rant I've given.  Let me be clear I don't hate anyone in the group that I left, I just didn't belong there. This is not the first time I've found myself in the center of a group I didn't really belong in.  I've seen this pattern repeat every so often for about two decades.  Each time though it has gotten less intense.  The first time it happened I nearly died, because I hung on to the group identity long past the time when it turned toxic.  I tried to make do with people and I let myself be hurt in the process.  What was interesting about the pattern this time was that the initial decision to disentangle came from seeing the example of something better.  I almost got out of this situation drama free, and I tried to be adult about it.  I didn't add anything to the drama except my frustration that their had to be any in the first place.  I let others do the heavy lifting when it came to tearing down the structure.  I just lit the match once the debris pile was ready.

Why am I telling you this?  Well to be honest I needed to vent, but I also realize that many of you are in similar situations.  Many of you have stayed in hurtful relationships or situations because you just didn't want to bring it all crashing down.  In staying though you have lit a beacon for all types of disrespect and abuse.  I just let myself be numb to it so I could have the illusion of belonging.  I was lucky enough to have true belonging come to me whilst I was still partially engaged in that illusion.  Most of the time we don't find anything until we let go of what we stubbornly are trying to hold onto.  We worry about being cast as the one who burned the bridges.

So how about you?  Where are you sticking around long past your welcome?  Are you miming the part of belonging even though it is slowly draining your life away? Are you afraid of going it alone?  Well in the words of Aerys Targaryen I say, "Let them all burn." You are not the ones who hosed the structure of your relationship down with noxious and flammable materials.  You are simply the one with the matches.  Be like the cat in the picture above, riding the unicorn of righteous fury, delivering the rainbow, and breathing fire.   Sometimes you have to raze the old structures of your life if you want fertile ground to plant new dreams in.  Don't let fear stop you.  Let all the false things in your life burn.  What's left when the ashes fall away is what matters.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle

Greetings all,

Happy new year! Today I am grateful because the deep freeze of arctic air has lifted and we have come up above freezing for the first time since Christmas it seems.  We ushered in this year with a full moon, the first half of a blue moon.  It was also a super moon as will be the second full moon of the month.  This will be coinciding with a full lunar eclipse.  So if you believe in astrology that's quite a bang to start off 2018 with.

Months before I had discovered what was going on in the sky during the first month of the year, I had high anticipation that 2018 was going to be a powerful year for myself and for many others.  It felt like it was a year for manifesting and coming into your own.  For myself I had several projects that felt like their time had come and another one that landed in my lap unlooked for, but welcome.  On the Medicine Wheel of the Mesa I would say this year the energy of the East is strong.  In the East we step into who we are becoming.  That's what 2018 is for me, stepping into and embodying my own power, and letting my light shine out strongly.

Manifesting our dreams is exciting, but it also a bit scary.  We have to open our hearts, be seen, be vulnerable enough to allow ourselves to receive. We have to take responsibility for our desires and our actions. If something goes wrong who is to blame but ourselves.  This worry of screwing up grows out of my old nemesis perfectionism.

The worst thing you can be is wrong, if you are a perfectionist.  Making a mistake is something you punish yourself for repeatedly. It is one of my primary blocks in creating art and life changes.  Failing of course is part of the journey.  You learn quite a bit from failure, but perfectionism expects you to know without any of the messy screwing up phase.

Why am I telling you this?  Well the new year is here, and there is quite a bit of extra possibility magic floating in the air right now.  Before we fall too far back into our old routines it would be a good idea to commit to creating the changes we want this year.  Now is the time to get our seeds for what we wish to plant and grow in our lives in this coming year.  I myself am knee deep in planning for my teaching this year, testing out a new healing method,  kicking around the idea of doing a Qi Gong video, and brainstorming for my next book.  So dream along with me.  Come up with at least one thing that you want.  Begin dreaming it into your world.  2018 is for all of us.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle