Astrology is something I feel more strongly about than I’m willing to admit. It’s something that deeply defines me and yet I still suppress it because I worry what others will think of me. I worry that people won’t think I’m smart, or worse, will think I’m an idiot. I recently admitted that my inferiority complex isn’t that I have the need to be the smartest in the room, it’s that I’m afraid people will think I’m the dumbest in the room.

That inferiority complex was inflamed in early August. In fact, several emotional blocks came front and center for me last month.

August was emotionally and psychologically challenging for me, and I’m glad for it. It didn’t end like I thought it would, but when I look back at my journal from the last full moon, on July 29th, I shouldn’t be surprised.

On July 29th, I was nearing the end of a month of meditation and reflection that began with the full Strawberry moon of June.

On July 29th, I wrote things like:

I am open and ready for my next chapter. The shop is done. I am opening up to all of my possibilities. To all of my potential.

I’m letting go of the shop, of the emotions that come with publicly closing (shame, embarrassment, defiance, blame).

I’m letting go of feeling like a failure, letting go of being a business owner in Petersburg.

I no longer need to be so wrapped up in Petersburg (drama, politics).

Stop proving. Just be.

I am creative.

I am an empath.

I am a storyteller.

Just paint, write, create, teach, love, touch, run, workout. Laugh.

It is ok to laugh: through grief, despite the grief, because of the grief. It doesn’t diminish the love I have for Sera, Ahsoka, Lloyd (my cats that all died here in Petersburg).

Honor the memory of those beings and my past self by laughing and embracing joy & happiness.

It was in the days after that big things began to shift inside of me and around me.

To begin with, my partner invited me to participate in his executive retreat in Utah. That was big because he, historically, hasn’t been good at blending his personal and professional life. The trip was healing because we both got to spend ten days in the Rockies. Though Utah isn’t home (Montana), it’s close enough to it. Being in Salt Lake City encouraged even more discussion around my partner’s past in the Mormon church (and by “encouraged” I mean “dredged up”). And, one evening dredged up the worst aspects of my inferiority complex, namely jealousy.

Jealousy is one of the ugliest parts of me. I’m loath to admit to it. When it rears up, it’s not subtle. Active jealousy is an inferno I have never been able to get under control, even when I feel the slow burn coming on. All of my fears are the driest kindling. Shit goes up in flames fast. The second I realize the early warmth of my jealousy, it’s already too late.

When I describe it as an inferno, I mean I feel it in my body.

My guts are warm. My heart races and burns. My flesh more than tingles, it feels like it’s covered in sparks. My pulse pounds in my eyes. I see red. My vision narrows, the edges go black. I don’t notice anything but the person I feel jealous of and the shame of my intense jealousy of them. My focus is on the person who I’ve decided is doing things I think I should be doing in life. The things I’ve failed to do because I’m not good enough.

The sensation in my body is a kind of rage. Not anger. Not physically violent. And not outwardly projected - not intentionally anyway. It’s all an inward rage. I point all the flaming arrows toward myself, toward my heart and mind, the places where they’ll hurt the most, where they’ll do the most damage.

I tell myself horrible things. I blame and shame. I compare. I say to myself, “See? You didn’t do those things. You could have, but you didn’t. You didn’t follow through. You made terrible decisions. You failed. You’re a failure. A fake. A wannabe.”

While in Utah, I experienced this burning jealousy one Tuesday evening.

A woman who was invited to consult for the team seemed to my jealous self to be all the things I wasn’t, all the things I should have been, all the things I failed to become: successful at her own business, a mother, fit, put together, well manicured, attractive, thoughtful, empathic, intuitive, a natural leader, a healer.

(I was hesitant to share the list of things I saw in her that I didn’t see in myself because I don’t want anyone to respond with, “Oh, Burg, you are most of those things.” It’s not helpful. This jealousy isn’t necessarily about how others see me. It’s about how I see myself. Sometimes it helps to get reassurance from others, but not always. I shouldn’t have to be in a position to only find confidence from external sources. I need to be able to believe it internally.)

When we got back to Virginia, I took up our entire 90-minute couples therapy session crying about all of this. And then again in my next one-on-one session.

It was cathartic.

Those sessions sparked further conversation between my partner and I, as one would expect. Admitting to him about my jealousy was scary. If I think it’s ugly then so might he.

He did.

Maybe it would be ugly enough for him to leave me.

He didn’t.

Our conversations didn’t go smoothly, though. I blamed him unfairly for not comforting me or reassuring me after admitting all the things I felt toward that woman in Utah - as if it’s his fault I don’t feel good enough. Appropriately, he pointed out how I was being unfair.

I needed that. I needed him to push back. I needed him to call me out.

Though, I didn’t take it well. Oh no. I pouted and groused.

While he was at work, I was at home, since I’m currently unemployed (which adds to my feeling of not being good enough), and wrote pages in my journal. Far too many pages. When I write that much, I write in circles, I write myself into a spiral, I write myself deeper into a pit.

This time, though, on my way down into the pit, I hit boulders that held up walls I’ve needed, for years, to dismantle:

Inferiority complex. Feeling not good enough. Jealousy. Rumination. Addiction. Depression. Obsession. Ego-based focus.

My obsession is around body image. Basically, I blame Seventeen Magazine.

My addiction has been around perpetually shaming myself to keep myself in that state of feeling not good enough.

When I ruminate, not only to I shame myself, but I attempt to outwardly blame as a way to excuse why I’m not the person I think I should be, the person I think I should have been a long time ago. My blame is superficially directed outward because I’m ashamed to admit that I’m my own barrier. No one else is holding me back. In fact, many people are supporting me and cheering me on. My broken inner voice even takes the support as proof that I’m not good enough. I should be able to do everything by myself, including cheer myself on. It’s so fucked up.

The fact that I can even write this means I’m making huge strides in healing. To write it down means I had to admit it. First, to myself. Then, to my partner. I told him there wasn’t anything for him to do other than listen. This wasn’t something for him to try to fix. He can’t.

Part of the blame I’ve stopped is toward Petersburg. I’ve written several times about not blaming Petersburg for the failure, I mean closure, of my business, and the death of my cats. But this recent shift released even more. I can feel the change in my body.

In letting go of Petersburg, I feel lighter. My heart feels pleasant. I smile.

Sure, I still take walks and go on runs and see all the trash and neglect, but I don’t internalize it. For over a year, I would take a morning walk and come back furious. My heart would feel hard and rotten. Every step I took along the sidewalk I thought the words I hate Petersburg. That’s a lot of hate to feel after a 30-minute walk. A lot of hate.

Part of what has helped has been more honest communication between my partner and I. He no longer tries to pour sugar on my feelings about this place. If you know anything about sugar and fire, you know it stokes it. Since we’ve both admitted how we feel about where we live, and our future plans for helping the situation, I feel better. We’re on the same page. We can now acknowledge that we’ve lost quite a bit since moving here but it doesn’t take away from the things that we’ve gained, like amazing friends, important experiences, and more honesty - even when it’s painful.

Now that I’ve had a moment to reflect upon what I experienced in August, I think I see what happened.

Starting in April, my partner and I started to let go (i.e.; admit) things that had been too heavy to keep hanging on to. The wine shop, stuff from our past.

When we let go of those things other issues came forward that needed to be addressed. These memories, shames, complexes, and fears were just quietly waiting in line, some for decades, like the candies in a Pez dispenser.

Of course, I have no idea how many candies are in this dispenser, but I have a sense there’s still a big one jammed in there all wonky, blocking a few further down. I feel it in myself. It’s the thing that I’ve been trying to verbalize for a while now, the thing inside my mind that keeps me from going deeper in my writing, from being more honest. It’s a fear. I know that much.

But fear is vague.

To be sure, there’s more about this fear that I need to wrestle with and to suss out. What I think, based on a few books I’ve read, is that this big blockage is a fear related to being raised in a poverty mindset by emotionally immature parents.

There’s a lot to unpack, for sure. I’ll write more later as I flesh it out.

So, as of today, this is the status of my depression, or my “depressive episode” as my therapist calls it. I like that term, “depressive episode”. It means it’s not a permanent state. It means my depression is temporary. And, holy cow, am I glad for that.

When I look back on how bad I felt for a year and a half, the worst I’ve ever felt in my life, it feels so good to be where I’m at (emotionally) right now. I’ve let go of so much.

The way I see it, even if there are still issues to work on behind the other candies, I want to fill all this new-found space with new thoughts and new artistic skills. I want to investigate new paths and new ideas. In this extra space, I will allow myself to become the person I want to be - not the person I think I should be.

More on that person in upcoming posts.

I’ve been trying to use my downtime (unemployment) effectively. I spend hours each day being honest with myself about my next path. What’s interesting is that while I put in all this hard work to dig deep, be honest, etc., I think the Universe is just being patient, waiting for me to realize what it’s already known. I imagine it like I’m standing in a forest with a compass looking for true north. It’s always there, I just need to follow the gentle magnetic pull.

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My heart lurched. Whatever I was doing, I abruptly stopped. I looked at him, my eyes wide. I felt struck. Stricken. My breath caught in my throat. I felt a strange combination of 5% desire to have cats in the house again and 40% continued grief, 40% fear of not being able to keep them safe, either, and 15% desire to never again feel the kind of pain I’ve felt since December of 2024.

Ready?

Ahsoka only died 2 months ago. Lloyd, last June. Sera, December of 2024. Three cats in 18 months.

Was I ready?

No. Psht. Absolutely not. Ready. Would I ever really be?

Hanging out with a friend a day later, I mentioned what Clint proposed. She asked how I felt about it. I told her I still have dreams about Sera.

I dream she’s in our back yard. “Oh, look! She’s been outside the whole time,” I say to Dream-Clint. In my dream, I’m never able to bring Sera into the house.

My friend - a psychologist - said the dreams may never go away but that still having the dreams doesn’t mean I’m not ready.

I noted that in a page of my heart.

So I told Clint that if we adopt a kitten, we have to get two, so they have each other. Either two boys, or a boy and a girl. Two girls is a hard dynamic to get right.

That doesn’t mean I’m ready or agreeing to anything, I tell him. I’m just sayin’.

Last Saturday, we put our two remaining cat carriers in the car and drove 20 minutes to a shelter that ended up being closed because of a ceiling leak. All other shelters in our area are closed on Saturdays. A Petsmart 40 minutes away was open. We agreed to make the drive. That day felt like The Day.

If Petsmart was a bust, that was a sign, I said.

On the walk into the store, I told Clint the cat adoption people may be out to lunch. The right cats might not be there. Maybe they wouldn’t approve us to adopt because we already tried to adopt earlier in the year but had to take them back. Maybe they knew we’d lost our three cats and were clearly terrible cat people. Maybe it was for the best if we were turned down since I felt responsible for the deaths of our cats.

I said we would leave the carriers in the car.

I avoided anything that might create a sense of hope. I tried to keep my expectations low.

Inside, I was momentarily distracted from my self-admonishment by two young men in slacks and button-up shirts crouching in front of the glass reptile enclosure. One had the Book of Mormon in his back pocket. Before he could say anything, I told Clint he wasn’t allowed to engage.

God damn, they’re everywhere.

We walked up to the adoption area. I scanned the windows. There was a tuxedo curled up in the kitten room. I kept my eyes moving. Still avoiding getting excited.

Since we wanted two, kittens were a better choice, the cat lady told us. She let them out of their room. We sat on the floor.

Two were too playful - too kitten-y. More interested in treats, toys, and crinkly things than us.

A grey one called Ralph warmed to Clint quickly.

A black one had the same energy and temperament as Ralph.

The tuxedo played from the sidelines and hissed when the others walked past her.

My heart melted and I smiled. Clint and I looked at each other. He knew that I knew. Sera was a hisser. It felt good to put my eyes on a little black and white body again.

It’s a girl, the cat lady said about the tuxedo. She’s low-key. Not too playful. She doesn’t engage much, she told us.

She seemed to be un-selling us this little tuxedo. She didn’t know I was already sold. All of the negative points the lady listed were positives to me.

Since the black cat was her brother, that made the decision for us, though Ralph sure was adorable. We didn’t want three cats.

A part of me wasn’t sure I even wanted the two.

Was I ready to take care of cats again? Could I keep them safe? They’d be indoor cats this time for sure. I defended myself to the Universe and reinforced that I didn’t feel like these were replacements for the others. I wasn’t just replenishing our stock, though that’s what it felt like.

I felt the need to over-explain the situation to people at the pet store who I know don’t really care. It’s partially penance, to admit the tragedy, to admit that my decisions lead to their deaths. I didn’t tell the entire story, though. It was enough to say that we didn’t have any animals in the house - anymore.

On the drive home, I held the tuxedo in her carrier on my lap. She’s not Sera, I reminded myself.

After we let them out of their carriers at the house, they low-crawled around the living room, found the ashes and cobwebs in the fireplace, and hid behind the big chair.

They didn’t climb up inside the fireplace and get stuck like I was afraid they might. No cat of mine ever has, but still. I may be prone to catastrophizing.

While they checked out the room, we thought about names.

At first we tried to call the boy cat Poe. (Edgar Allen Poe was said to have loved Petersburg and to have had his honeymoon here.) I petted him over and over while saying, “Poe. Poe. Poe.” But we eventually decided Edgar fit him better.

The tuxedo is called Lily’s as a kind of twist of Lenore.

It’s been a week since we adopted them. They’ve gotten over their fear of the ceiling fans upstairs. They enjoy playing with us and with each other. Edgar likes to crawl under pillows and blankets. Lily likes to be chased for fun and morning exercise. She’s also a serious biscuit-maker. Neither are interested in laps. Yet.

The kittens are good for us. They brought back an energy, a joy, that evaporated from our house when Sera went missing.

There are a lot of similarities between Lily and Sera, more than just being tuxedos. Personality quirks and body language nuances. A certain kind of playfulness. I’m convinced Sera had emotions, understood humor, and sarcasm, and I think Lily shows those same tendencies.

The similarities bring back the familiar for me. The differences are what keep this healthy.

Lily looks just different enough from Sera that my brain pauses before saying her name. “Sera” is easy to say and was said by us so often. “Lily” doesn’t roll off the tongue. But then, it took me a long time to say “Clint” instead of “Aaron” when Clint and I started dating.

Clint isn’t Aaron, Lily isn’t Sera, and Petersburg isn’t Missoula isn’t Ohio.

Not all change is the same. Chosen by me, chosen for me. There’s a loss regardless. A loss of routine. A loss of something familiar. Familiarity creates is a sense of stability.

My heart settled when Sera walked into the room. I knew where she was. Knew she was okay. Knew she was still sassy. When I lost her, I unraveled. I let a lot of things in my life fray.

It feels good to have little beings in the house to take care of again. It feels good to my heart and it helps fill a void in my mind. Even this long after Sera, I still have to remind myself that I don’t have to look for her, it’s not time to medicate her.

My brain was connected to Sera, and our other cats, for so long. In fact, from mid-June (after Ahsoka died) until this past Saturday (when we adopted Edgar and Lily), I hadn’t been without an animal in the house for decades. Life felt askew.

With the kittens, something in me feels back in balance. These little beings help to refill me where most other things only deplete. They help to fill up my soul, like power pellets.

I’ll take it wherever I can get it.

I still can’t say that I was necessarily ready to have cats in the house again. If I waited until I truly felt ready (or what I considered to be “ready”) for anything in life, there’s a likelihood most of it would never happen. What I do know is that I needed them. We needed them. Their energy and joy are medicine. Much much needed medicine.

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I readied myself by setting an intention in the event the events were waiting with a pitcher full of stardust to pour into my open heart and palms. Unfortunately, or unsurprisingly - if you believe in cosmic inevitably - yesterday was the day after a 3-day migraine. I was raw, exhausted, and mentally limp. If there was any energetic shift yesterday it was a downshift, which is probably what I needed.

Yesterday, despite my expectations, my brain didn’t work very well. I had hoped to feel inspired to write something whimsical - and, in fact, started a piece called “Leaning Into Whimsy” - but what I felt instead was sloggy. It was more than just the average brain fog. It was 95% relative brain humidity. It was like trying to run an uphill marathon in the jungle. Everything I tried to think and do felt so much harder. It was almost as if the universe was on the other side of my thoughts, pushing back.

Around lunchtime, I accomplished a workout, but that sucked up any energy I had in reserves. From that point forward, I was officially functioning on fumes. Whatever I had written earlier in the day couldn’t find its way the further I got down the page. It’s no secret that I’m prone to meandering, but yesterday’s writing was bad. It wasn’t as much a meander as it was stumbling delirium. Oh, there’s a wall there? Oh, there’s a wall there? I spent all day bumping into myself.

At 3 PM, I gave up writing and decided to read something inspirationally whimsical and then take a nap in the hopes I’d wake up refreshed and bursting with a story to write. In our house, inspiration isn’t far. My shelves hold plenty of books on gnomes, fairies, mushrooms, minerals and crystals, and other illustrated reference materials. One shelf supported two books that I’ve had for decades but have only ever mindlessly flipped through. The Art of James Christensen: A Journey of the Imagination and Gnomes by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen.

Thinking A Journey of the Imagination looked the most whimsical, I piled pillows in the darker corner of our couch since my eyes were still sensitive, positioned myself so my legs could support this oversized hardback, and began to flip through the opening pages. The first nine were purely illustrations. Lumpy people with large ridiculous hats, pink and blue faces, mismatched shoes, and fish paraded through forests with fairies, butterflies, squirrels, knights, and all manner of storybook creatures.

Then I came to the copyright page. The top listed out acknowledgements, and I read them. After a lovely dedication to his wife and kids, the author thanked an art history teacher from Brigham Young University. And that ended that for me.

Last week, we visited Utah. The first few days, we stayed in a large, expensive yet cozy cabin mindfully built in the mountains of Sundance.

Those mountains are an extension of the Rockies that I know from Missoula, so I felt quite at home. In the mountains, in a forest, I feel closer to magic. In the mountains, magic is possible and probably there if I look close enough.

In contrast, here, where I live, it’s hard for me to imagine that magic would stick around if it had the ability to be someplace else.

Sundance inspired the feeling of magic that I need.

The magic I need involves sparkles, owls, frogs, crystals, skeleton keys, and hidden doorways. It uses potions made of herbs, roots, and flowers from a garden.

Magic, to me, isn’t spells and conjuring. Well. Yeah. That’s a kind of magic, but I need ordinary magic.

Ordinary magic is the magic we’ve forgotten, but that I’m trying to remember. It’s what at one time was usual, expected, and entirely made by hand. Now we’ve synthesized, manufactured, and commercialized it so much that something like dill seed tea sounds hippie and woo-woo.

Sundance was a nice change of pace.

The city around me at home is over-stimulating. Being in it - on the freeway or any of the main roads, really - feels like an assault on my senses and my general energy field. In the mountains, there’s space for more time. There’s so much to look at, investigate, and explore that there’s no need to doomscroll. My doomscrolling in Sundance was spending a bizarre amount of time watching the gobs of hummingbirds that zoomed around the five sugar-water feeders. Until last week, I think I had seen ten hummingbirds in my entire life. Maybe fifteen. And only three or four at any given time. Here, there were over a hundred. I took it upon myself to refill the large feeders everyday.

It felt nice to slow down and untangle. To settle because there’s no time like the present.

When was the last time you heard that phrase, “There’s no time like the present”?

I wrote that in my journal earlier today and then thought about how it used to mean something entirely different.

When I was younger, my mom, grandparents, or a teacher might say, “There’s no time like the present” to mean “Come on! Let’s get it done because you need to learn time management and responsibility and I’m busy/tired/available right now.” The present or now was urgent. It was made to feel like a hustle. “Let’s get the grocery shopping done right now because I’ve got shit to do later and now is the only time.” The present was more like a small pocket of time that needed to be packed full because all other time would be, too.

Now, to me, “There’s no time like the present” means, “There is no past, there is no future, there is only right now.”

These days, I’m trying to unpack time, to loosen up all the shit jammed into a moment - like trying to untangle Christmast lights or the chain necklace I let get balled up in my jewelry box. You can’t undo it by pulling harder. You have to loosen the knot so the thread, rope, or chain can fall away from itself.

That’s why I moved to Missoula. To get into nature. To slow down. To get away from so many people. To loosen my knots. To fall away from myself.

To allow magic to fill the spaces in the present.

In Sundance life felt magical again. Perhaps it was the elevation. At the resort that was down the mountain from us, the elevation was 6,100 feet above sea level. Here in Petersburg, it’s 130. Since I’m writing from my second story office, I’m perhaps 144 feet above sea level.

Regardless, everything around us in Sundance was alive. Trees, rugged ground cover with delightful little flowers, purple sage bushes, and all those zooming hummingbirds. We hiked and ran trails. I sat outside to do watercolor. We kept the sliding door open to blur the boundary between outside and in.

My body felt good. My heart felt light. When I looked in the mirror, I liked what I saw. My glow came from the inside.

Midway through our trip, we moved an hour away to Salt Lake City, into the land of the Mormons. The land of business and institutionalized organization. Of gym bodies and manufactured beauty.

Salt Lake City feels as devoid as its salt lake.

We were able to find areas of natural beauty, wildflowers, and dusty trails, though we had to run past the white, angular temple, visitor center, and horrendously ugly admin building to get to it.

The contrast was stark.

We spent much of our time in Utah talking about the church’s secrets, the trauma so many have suffered, and how each ex-Mormon deals with their own deconstruction.

There’s irony in the “magic” that Mormons pedal and believe in - like reading the word of God off gold tablets inside a hat, becoming a god one day, and earning your own planet after you die if you tithe enough - and yet, the church squashes anything natural like emotions, individuality, and curiosity.

My point isn’t to knock the church, necessarily, or to insult its followers. My point is that I’m not a fan of the Latter Day Saints and it crushed my spirit when I found out that this book I hoped to gain inspiration from was laden with funk of the church. I’m not one that easily separates the artist from the art or the creator from its creation. My every day, now, is spent dealing with some kind of fall out from how that church has hurt the person I love. I’m not about to knowingly and intentionally snuggle up with a book on imagination that was influenced and supported by a group that systematically crushes it.

So, I snuggled up with the book on gnomes. I made sure it wasn’t written or illustrated by a Mormon (it wasn’t - though Rein Poortvliet was raised Calvinist). My only complaint is the outdated patriarchy in the gnome world. Given the book was written in 1976 and the worst offense to my feminism is that the female gnomes mostly stay at home while the men have tool belts and adventures, I was able to find the right amount of magic and inspiration I was looking for.

At 3:45 PM, after reading about how gnomes get help from rabbits and moles to build their underground houses (turns out, there’s a great deal of work involved in digging out the passages, chimney & air vent, as well as the indoor water well and toilet), I closed my eyes for a nap.

Still hoping for obvious magic, I reset my intention in the hopes some sprinkles of something might rain down on me while I slept. My daydreams were disjointed, and I’m not sure how much meaning could be made from any of them. Earlier than I wanted to, I awoke because of the notification from an incoming junk email. It was 4:19, I felt a little bit better, but nothing magical had happened.

An hour later, my partner came home from work, we made eggs, sardines, and ramen for dinner, then sat outside to eat.

Being back in the humidity of Virginia after a delightful week in the dry air of Utah has been tough. Last night, though, we were able to comfortably sit outside, and it was good that we did.

The sunflowers in our garden boxes have been fun to watch grow. Each plant is well over 14-feet tall. Half of the heads are drooped and drying out. Others are still popping up, even on the plants that broke and tipped over from storms we’ve had in the past several weeks.

Early in a sunflower’s life, bees and other pollinators will bop around, finding little bits here and there. The dried heads, though, have attracted yellow finches. While we ate our ramen, we watched four of these little birds hopping around, chirping, and digging out the tasty sunflower seeds.

It reminded us of the hummingbirds.

Like I briefly mentioned earlier, I’ve recently started to lean into whimsy. It’s the magic I can make until I can get back to the place I belong.

Whimsy, for me, feels like intentional randomness and delightfully perfect imperfection. A striped top with a flowery skirt. Unconcerned hair. At the moment, no bra. Underpants with goats on them. An amethyst and citrine crystal pendant during the planetary parade and new moon, just in case.

I’ve even started wearing patchouli. What the hell is going on with me?

In some of my watercolor now, I enjoy drawing not-so-straight lines for leafy leaves, petaly flowers and mushrooms that may or may not be homes for gnomes and mouses. My pigment slips past the wiggly boundaries and sneaks into the space around it because in the grand scheme what really is the difference between the bark of a tree and the blink of a firefly’s butt? It’s all connected. We’re all mostly made of the same stuff. Why be so rigid about it?

In my experience, magical creatures live in the wiggly space where many adults have stopped looking. I’m tired of straight lines and staying within them.

Whimsicality, for me, is a personal act of gentle yet necessary rebellion. I’m the rule follower who runs when the crosswalk timer has “only” 10 seconds left. Attempting whimsy creates this general sense of worry that people won’t see me as a grown-up with life experience or won’t recognize my glowing intelligence.

What will people think if I use words like “petaly”, “mouses”, and “whimsicality”?

But wiggly, earthy, absurd whimsy feels real to me. It feels like ordinary magic. It’s what you would find if you opened me up. It’s what’s going on on my inside.

What’s outside, this circus full of clowns, is loud and fake and full of itself. It makes me want to open my front door a crack and scream out, “What the fuck is even wrong with you?!” and then quickly pull it shut.

Instead, I stand in my yard to investigate the shape of leaves and count the number of petals on various flowers. The purple ones that hang above the huge Hooker’s Green hostas have six petals that, when drooped upside-down, could make a lovely dress or perhaps the perfect rain hat.

Eventually I get around to loosely sketching them. Then I figure out how to capture them using only pigment and water. It’s interesting the rules I’ve placed on art and life, and the things that have helped me break loose. Artists I follow flick extra blops after everything dries - they could be bugs, dusts, tiny fairies, who knows! Those extra flecks, they feel magical to me.

~

While we watched the finches eat the sunflower seeds, I mentioned that we needed to stay up to watch the meteor shower. We agreed that would be the way to get the most magic out of the day.

By 8:30 we were in bed.

This morning, as I drank a glass of water to take my vitamins, I remembered that we forgot. By the time we went on our morning run, the meteor shower was over.

Oh well. Sometimes the magic is simply sleeping well so one as the brains to finally write a little piece about Mormons, gnomes, and everyday ordinary magic.

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As many of you know, I’m 50 and I’ve been job-hunting for a couple of months. So far, no interviews, only generic emails telling me “While your resume is impressive, we’re going in another direction” or whatever.

First of all, don’t fluff me with flattery about my resume. I know you didn’t read it.

AI did.

Also, what am I, stupid?

It’s so insulting to receive this falsely flattering email the next day telling me how amazing my resume is when the first email said you were inundated with resumes and your response time might be slow.

At least be honest.

In your rejection email, tell me that your AI assistant scanned my resume and didn’t like that I have far too many years of experience or not the right keywords to meet its algorithm.

We’re all trying to play the damned game - at least tell me what the rules are. You’re missing out on a lot of great potential employees. And you’re just pissing me off.

So then I think: Maybe they don’t really want employees. Maybe they are trying to hire me based on my AI algorithm-beating skills. Maybe they’re trying to get to my AI through me.

Fuck, I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that AI isn’t taking our jobs. It’s changing them. And we need to change, too. The problem is that this was mostly just a feeling I’ve had since I started the job search. And then, this morning, in one of my nerd newsletters, I found this article:

You Just Hired a Million Bad Employees: For the first time in history, humans are cheaper than software.

I don’t know what it was about the title that intrigued me, but I opened it and read the first few lines:

AI was supposed to replace human labor.
It did the opposite.

For the first time in history, humans are cheaper than software.

As I read this article I thought, “Yes! This is the kind of information I’ve been looking for to back up my opinion about AI actually creating more jobs instead of removing them.”

If this is cognitive bias, so be it. The result is what matters. Read on.

As I kept reading the article, I realized that I understood a majority of the jargon.

Ho, ho! What’s this? I understand tokens, agentic, context windows, etc? Huzzah!

Sure, I’ve worked in the tech industry since I was in my mid-twenties, but these weren’t terms that we used. The kind of jargon I learned was “I’m just going to spin-up another virtual PC” or VPN, GUID, sharedrive, and binary.

There was a time when we still used the word analog, as in, “I still wear an analog watch instead of digital to keep up my skill of being able to read a clockface.” It’s likely a necessary skill for the apocalypse, I’m sure of it.

The reason I understand much of the jargon in this article is because I’ve been busting my ass over the past couple of months to learn as much as I can about AI. Or, at least, as much as is relevant to a person like me who isn’t particularly interested in becoming an engineer or developer. I want to understand the words so I can talk to those nerds, but I don’t want to be the builder. I want to be the teacher.

As the teaching type, I listen to the limiting or generalized things people say and try to figure out ways to gently push back. You see, about 20 years ago, I realized that I really loved the part of my job where I got to teach nurses and doctors how to use Electronic Health Records (EHR) - though back then we called it Electronic Medical Records (EMR). (EMR turned into EHR because Health is more all-encompassing than Medical.)

When I realized that I love teaching people how to do tough stuff, I began to regularly say, “I prefer to teach people how to fish instead of just giving them a fish.” For those of you unfamiliar with the original saying, it goes like this: Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

And it applies to all kinds of things.

As a yoga teacher, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this: “I can’t touch my toes so I can’t do yoga.” My answer: so, bend your knees.

“I can’t learn…”

Insert whatever new thing a person’s afraid to start because of whatever limiting fear they have. Fear of being a newbie. Fear of asking questions. Fear of potentially never understanding or learning it fully. Fear of being wrong. Fear of being in a classroom full of younger people.

First of all, stop saying the word “can’t”. What you really mean is “won’t”. Remove “can’t” and insert “won’t”, then think about why you won’t learn the thing, and then tackle that part. The thing you’re afraid of can be learned. French, yoga, tap dancing, EHRs, cell phones, AI. If you want to learn it, you will. You can.

So. As I read this article, it occurred to me that many people might start to read it and then stop. Their eyes will glaze over at the first word or acronym they don’t understand.

Ah, ha! This is a perfect learning opportunity!

Here’s My Ask of You:

1. Go read the article. Here it is. It’s dense and a little self-impressed, but the points are valid. When your eyes glaze over, go to step 2.

2. Open Claude or ChatGPT. Paste the link in.

3. Ask it to summarize the article for you, in plain language, and flag anything that’s jargon — “tokens,” “context window,” “agentic,” “evals,” whatever. Then ask it to explain those terms like you’re smart but new to this, because you are smart, and you are new to this, and both of those things can be true without it being an insult.

4. Ask it where to go to learn the concepts you didn’t know. Not a 40-hour bootcamp. Something small. I’d point you toward Andrej Karpathy’s free “Deep Dive into LLMs” video on YouTube for how this stuff actually works under the hood, and DeepLearning.AI’s “Generative AI for Everyone” on Coursera (or DeepLearning.AI for free) if you want something structured and short.

I read the article, had the inspiration to suggest all of this to you, and then had my Claude AI summarize and suggest things for me.

Below is the summary Claude made for me:

The piece’s whole point is this: AI didn’t replace human labor. It made humans cheaper than the software. Companies are burning enormous money on tokens because almost nobody in the building actually knows how to direct AI well. The author’s estimate is something like 1 in 100 people can articulate a process clearly enough for AI to actually execute it. Everyone else just generates what he calls “loops” — AI calling itself over and over trying to fix a task that was never defined properly in the first place. Which is, if you sit with it for a second, just expensive confusion wearing a labcoat.

The article’s actual closing argument is that the next massive economic opportunity isn’t more AI infrastructure — we have enough of that — it’s people who can translate a real business’s actual know-how into something AI can reliably run.

By pasting the link into GPT and asking for a summary and suggestions, you are now miles ahead of most of the people in the country.

What I highly encourage everyone to do is at least take a course in prompting AI. Learn how to ask AI for what you want. The irony is that by learning how to prompt AI, I’m learning how to communicate better with humans.

I’m learning to not assume that someone knows what’s in my head or my life experience. I’m learning how to describe well and thoroughly. I’m learning how to be bold and ask for exactly what I want.

This applies to the job hunt, to landlords, and to life partners. Salary, exit timeframes, and “dessert” ~ahem.

The honest part

I’m not writing this from some serene, enlightened place where I’ve made peace with the job search and the studio move-out deadline and the fact that my resume apparently vanishes into an ATS black hole more often than not. I’m writing this from the middle of it, tired, a little scared some days, and deeply unwilling to let a hype cycle convince me that two and a half decades of hard-won, self-taught expertise is suddenly worthless because a chatbot can write a paragraph.*

*Claude wrote the last paragraph. I asked it to sum up my post in my voice taking into consideration my humor and sass, and all it knows about me. That’s prompting. These are the things that are going to help us move forward with AI. It need humans to train it and to manage it into for it to assist us.

The other truth about AI is that it will only take us over if we let it. I could have had Claude write my entire post - I did ask it to, just for funsies. I read the output, and it was okay, but I will always prefer my own messy, authenticness. I’m a writer. I love to write. I need to write. I’ll be damned if I let AI take all of that from me.

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Nom, Nom, Nom.

~Burp!~

My only solace is in knowing that it’s only a bored AI bot filtering for keywords and sending out stock rejection emails instead of a group of executives sitting around a table piled with papers, empty beer cans and bottles of whiskey strewn about, laughing at all the resumes like mine that come in. Their one enjoyment in life is getting a kick out of the 50 year old women trying to get back into the world of software implementations.

~gafaw, gafaw, gafaw~

Look at this! She thinks she can get back into the game after a year of owning a wine shop!

Ha!

One little note of promise however is how many available jobs there appear to be and how many I am, in fact, qualified for. The quantity gets my hopes up since I can’t see how many people are logged on, hunched over their laptops, applying at the same time as me.

Though I can’t see the hunched , I’m not entirely sure if I like the counter of how many people have applied. Are these the same 100+ people that have applied to other similar jobs? When are any of us going to get a job and finally get removed from the talent pool?

At first - back in May- I kind of enjoyed the process. But that was back when I still had real hope and not the faux stuff. Now, the daily roller coaster of it all is not fun anymore.

Every day, I log on to a handful of different sites (Zip Recruiter, My Greenhouse, LinkedIn, Indeed, and a couple more) and spend hours scrolling. My eyes blur as I scan, avoiding job titles with words like sales, marketing, regional, senior, engineer, and other general jargon.

For a little boost, I hop on LinkedIn a few extra times just to see

next to the job description. Even if I don’t want the job, I like to see the green. This is the faux hope I mentioned. It makes me feel like my mish-mash of life choices haven’t all been for naught. Or, at least, LinkedIn’s AI thinks I’m marginally qualified.

Some jobs are truly dream jobs. Of the 20+ I’ve applied for, five seem pretty sweet. The companies are the kind that care about their employees, strive for goodness, aim to actually help people, and use words that sound like a human wrote the mission statement and job descriptions - or at least a creative human has a well-trained agentic AI.

Yesterday I found a job that had only been posted 9-minutes prior. I was the first one to apply. It’s one of those perfect jobs. The CEO looks normal, like he has a happy family life and a dog that walks itself to the park, like he actually loves the company and gets excited to go to work every day, goes for a run at lunch, and probably drinks craft beers at the hip brewery down the street with his team. The job description made my mouth water. I’m 100% qualified. I would LOVE to have this job. In the application, I tried to express my genuine interest and honest-to-goodness alignment with their values. I tried to not sound too cheesy.

But, I’m not going to get my hopes up. The agreement I have with myself is to get excited enough to reflect my interest when I apply (like when you smile on the phone so people can hear it in your voice), but then let it go and simply feel reassured that there are good companies out there looking for good people to do good things. I use these moments to boost my faith in humanity.

Be careful, Burg. You might sound like an optimist.

I’m impatient though. I’ve never been in a position like this. Not really.

At the risk of sounding like a princess, until recently, things have usually gone my way. I get the jobs I want, promotions and raises happen without my asking for them, opportunities come when I need them, and people come into my life at the right time.

My life has truly been an example of “when one door closes, another one opens” or Rebecca Solnit’s “The beginning comes after the end.” I’m struggling to see that, now.

If your response was, “Maybe these things are happening, you’re just not allowing them in,” or some version of that, I won’t disagree. But, damn it, I feel like I’m trying really hard, like ‘squeezing my eyes shut to make a birthday wish really come true’ kind of hard, to be open to the next thing, to follow the universe’s flow. Several times over the past few weeks, I’ve taken a walk in the neighborhood and have said out loud to the Universe, “Ok! Universe. I’m ready!”

I’m past caring if I look crazy.

Yesterday, on my walk back from the fresh market at the library, I had to have a more intense conversation, though. I said, “Look, Universe,” hand gestures and all, “It’s not just that I need a job. I want one. There’s a difference. I’m really really ready. Like, for reals. So…go!”

I’m getting squirrely.

I’m back to going to coffee shops just to get out of the house and be around other humans. Yesterday, I worked on my book at Demolition Coffee down the street. For a while, I was so intent on trying to figure out how to get my character through Montmartre and up to a flea market in Paris faster that I didn’t realize people I knew had come in. They and their little girls sat at the table next to mine and I didn’t notice for ages. When I did notice, I became the victim of ticklish little girl fingers. To thwart her, I invented a new game called Hungry Duck. Instead of her doing bee, bee, bee, bee, bee all over my neck and shoulders, I got her to turn her hand into a duck and eat bugs out of my hand.

I may be a genius.

Eventually, I needed to thaw out and take my car to the shop for the state safety inspection that was due in May. Since I’m squirrely, I welcomed the long conversation I knew I’d get into with the owner of the car shop. If he’s willing to talk to me for twenty minutes about his experiences opening businesses in wrong locations, then I’m happy to let him talk. Besides, his stories made me feel better about the wine shop. He said, “Realizing you’re in the wrong spot, that’s tough.” I appreciated his honesty.

Still. There’s only so much of this current lifestyle that I can handle. My lack of anything else to do other than work on my book, watercolor, clean the house, weed whack the yard, workout, and all the other things that make me feel even a little productive, is becoming maddening.

I know that made me sound like a princess.

But, again, I’m impatient.

Come on, Universe. I need to buy more of my new favorite underpants. They aren’t cheap. Getting underpants requires a job.

Have I told you about my underpants?

No, no. That’s Alone-For-Too-Long Burg trying to engage in any kind of conversation. You don’t need to know about my new favorite underpants.

Well, just in case you’re interested, they’re from The Duluth Trading Company. OMG> They cover my butt, don’t creep, and are cute! One pair has goats and flowers. I get excited to get up in the morning just because I get to put them on. The problem is that I could only afford six. Since I work out at lunch, I go through 2 pairs of underwear a day. One pair that are my active, moisture-wicking ones, and then after my shower, the fun ones with goats. To meet the needs of my week, I need 14 pairs to make it through.

It’s not just for the underpants, though. Clint says I need the job for socializing. And he’s not wrong. Obviously. He also tells me not to settle and to wait for the right job to come along. But “not settling” implies that companies are responding to me. There’s nothing yet for me to settle on.

My impatience skews time.

Though I had that one job interview that started it all back in May (with the CEO emeritus of a company Clint’s credit union works with), it seems like I’ve been at this job search grind for months. In fact, the real push only started June 2nd. That’s when I had Claude (AI) reformat my resume, move key words to the top, and beef up my LinkedIn profile. Claude looked at my resume and was like, “Oh dear god, girl. Do NOT use that email address that you’ve had since Gmail started. It’s so unprofessional. No employer needs to know you’re a pisces. Go, get an email account with your name, and come back when you’ve got it.” I’m not even really exaggerating. If Claude had hands, he would have done a face palm. He basically said as much.

From that day forward, with my crisp resume, my professional email address, and my more impressive LinkedIn, I applied to jobs like I was sure I was going to get them. I keep all the “Thank you for applying, we’ll be with you soon if you fit our criteria” emails, and also the follow up ones indicating they’ve rejected me.

To be fair, it’s not as bad as my brain thinks it is. Since June 2nd, I’ve applied to 21 jobs and have received fairly quick rejections from only 5. Though it feels like a year ago, it was only 11 days ago that I applied for a job at Netflix. (It was a pleasant surprise that I was actually qualified for the job, though I don’t really have any hopes of getting it.) So far, none of my dream jobs have rejected me. (I’m not going to say “yet” and jinx it. I want to stay positive).

It is a bummer, though, when several weeks go by without any response. I’ve found that I get excited just to receive the damned rejection email.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember the last time I really looked for a job. Not seriously, anyway. There was a two week period in 2023 when I thought about not being self-employed. Out of the handful of jobs I applied to, two responded. Both rejected me. And I just assumed it was because my heart wasn’t really in it. It was shortly thereafter that I decided that opening a wine shop was a good idea.

So, this is new to me. The need. The search. The hoping to be chosen. The next closest experience was in August of 2020 when I finally decided to date again. But even that went better than expected. Sure, I used dating sites, but the whole process took less than two weeks. Three days after I paid for the 6-month subscription to OKCupid, I found Clint on the free Facebook dating app. And look at us now.

Besides, finding a man isn’t the same thing as finding a job. I’m going back and forth with myself about for which one I’m more discerning. I’ll be honest. It’s probably not the one that it should be.

What I need to do is trust the process. Historically, for me, things become available when I’m ready, when the time is right. When I have a clear idea of what it is that I really want. And that’s probably the problem. If the Universe is like a larger, more mysterious and unknowable version of AI, then I need to come at it with a clear request. I wouldn’t just log on to Claude or ChatGPT and say, “Find me a job” or “Explain politics to me.” This is where those Mercury in Retrograde prompts that I mentioned in my last post have come in handy for figuring out what I want.

The prompt for July 2nd was a good one: “If my studio was a mirror, what was it reflecting back to me that I’m ready to stop looking at?” When I read that I was like, Damn. Good one. And, in fact, that’s what I wrote to start my response. “Damn - good one.” I thought about how to be honest with myself. After a moment I wrote, Trying to fit in and belong here. Trying to be somewhere else, like Paris or Missoula.

What I need to do is let go of my frustration with where I am and whether or not I fit in or belong here. It’s getting old. What I need to do is focus on what I need right now, right where I am. I had many intentions when I put together the shop and the studio. Mostly it was a means of escape. But the shop wasn’t a portal. It was, in fact, only a mirror, or perhaps even a magnifying glass.

On July 4th the prompt was, “How am I conflating ‘releasing the studio’ with ‘releasing myself’? What stays with me that isn’t physical?”

Another good one. My answer: part of this is that I feel like the failure of the shop is a rejection of me as a person. It symbolizes how I don’t belong here.

And I know that’s not true. However the prompt for July 6th was, “What memory keeps surfacing about the shop that I haven’t fully processed yet?”

Probably the times when I wasn’t as hospitable as I should have been or as people expected me to be. The thought that I was the reason it failed.

I’m being hard on myself, and I’m aware of that. What’s more is that I’m being publicly hard on myself. It’s not for attention or even for response. I’m saying all of this “aloud” as a way of telling the Universe that I’m working on learning the lessons. I’m processing out loud in case there are any wisps or tendrils of something in the Universe that resonate, that I might be an open conduit. I’m opening my heart, mind, and arms to whatever it is that comes next. I’m letting go of these unhelpful thoughts like bananas in my monkey trap.

When I can get these annoyances out of the way, I can make space for finding clarity. It’s like clearing off my desk so I can make space for creativity and my art supplies.

By the way, since I don’t have a good segue to move out of that moody moment, my watercolor has been coming along nicely. I’ve posted a couple of July’s little paintings. So far I’ve done at least one painting a day, except for the 7th, yesterday. I don’t know what happened to that day.

These are from this morning:

I think there’s still some debris I need to clear away before I truly have the space for whatever awaits. I need to close the studio and move everything out. That’s not a small task. That can’t happen until the end of July.

My thought, based on the things that have historically happened in my life, is that something big will happen in August or September. Those are the months when I’ve made the biggest decisions - like to leave the corporate world, open a yoga studio, move to Montana, and even to start dating Clint.

Something’s brewing. I can feel it. That much I know for sure.

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Though I’m a highly sensitive, emotion-prone, body-aware Pisces, I am not witch. I wish I was. I have my incense, a coconut-wood necklace from St. Croix that helps ground me, and a few crystals that do whatever crystals do. I have my belief in our connections with and throughout the Universe and my belief in a Cosmic Consciousness Soup. But, I’m not particularly good at follow-through.

I never finished reading any of the books I’ve ever purchased on birth charts. Then there was the $3000 course I started on herbal medicine that went unfinished after 4 weeks. My interest in space and constellations only goes as far as my subscription to Astronomy Magazine and downloading a star gazer app every now and then.

Otherwise, I rely on other witches.

My mother wasn’t a witch, but when I was growing up, “Mercury is in retrograde” was stated frequently in our house. That was her explanation for any kind of inexplicable thing. She blamed Mercury’s backward (seeming) transit like others blame solar flares, El Nino, and our global collective consciousness.

Since we are not witches, I follow That Glasgow Witch on Instagram. Her calm Scottish accent caught me a while back and I’ve followed her ever since.

Yesterday, June 29th, she lit her incense and a candle. In her gentle Scottish accent, she shared bits of her life. Then she said:

The full moon illuminates what we’ve built, what we’re carrying.

We ask: Do the structures that I’m holding still fit inside the life that I’m building?

Mercury asks us to reflect upon our foundations in our lives. Our work. Our home. Our responsibilities. The roles we’ve carried. So we ask oursevles, is my heart still in this? Is the path I still want to follow?

There’s much more to what she said, and I do recommend checking her out of you’re into that kind of thing.

I felt compelled to post the comment: I needed this right now.

You see, over the weekend, I made the decision to ask my landlord to free me from my studio’s lease. Monday, he agreed. Clint’s response to my text letting him know was, “I feel lighter.” That goes for both of us.

The closing of my space was set in motion months ago. Probably longer ago if I’m honest. I knew last year that I wasn’t going to be able to keep it up emotionally. But I hung on. I didn’t want to look like a quitter. I didn’t want it to be a failure. I wanted to make people happy. I wanted the place to be what people wanted it to be.

There came a point, too early on, when what I was doing at the wine shop was for everyone else.

I lost my reason. I lost my why. I lost any ability to feel fulfillment.

I lost my ikigai.

The transition from wine shop to creative studio was my last valiant effort. But too many factors pushed against me. I felt like a salmon spawning upstream. The signs from the Universe that I usually listen to were beyond annoyed with me. It took water damage from the recent rain storms for me to finally make the decision.

I wrote the email, let Clint see it, tweaked it one more time, and then pushed send. It felt good to do. There was never a point where I wished I could take it back. That is another sign.

Last night, June 29th, the night of the Strawberry Moon in Capricorn, I slept hard and had many dreams. At 6 AM I woke up later than usual. Even Clint slept straight through the night and woke up at 5 AM. We slept in like it was a Saturday.

Do the structures I’m holding still fit inside the life that I’m building?

When I signed my lease back in 2023, I knew I wasn’t going to renew it. This space was always temporary to me. At the time I was going hard on French lessons with the honest-to-god belief that we could maybe move to France. I wanted to build a little part of Paris for myself right here in Petersburg.

But, soon after it opened, I was hit with the harsh reality that Petersburg wasn’t the place for that. To salvage it, I changed it. In one of my notebooks, I have the pages where I wrote the timeline for my Grand Pivot.

By March of this year, though, I knew it was over. What am I building now? Who am I building it for? And for how long? The answers: I don’t really know - it’s muddled and convoluted. It’s confusing and not really what I want. I can’t keep this up much longer.

Yesterday, Monday, I taught an AM Yoga class and then an evening meditation class. Afterward, I sat quietly and looked around the space. I get so much comfort from the blue on the walls, the soft orange glow of the chandeliers, the warmth of the browns in the wood of the bar, the red of the velvet couch.

I realized that I had been trying to keep it going simply because I liked the feel of it and the look of it.

But if creating spaces is my magic, then I can recreate this, or something like it, somewhere and somewhen else. These colors. This warmth. This energy. These colors are who I am. The element that will change is the where. The container of the container.

Is my heart still in this? Is this still the path I want to follow?

As Mercury transits in retrograde, moving through Cancer, I’ll use that time to contemplate what Cancer represents: home, belonging, emotional roots. I’ll take the next month to think about why I built the shop/studio in the first place and then into how I can apply that in a way that better suits me and my life trajectory.

Throughout July, I will dive deeper into how the space I created made me feel, why I created it, and what I was seeking. I’ll inspect the emotional truth underneath it all.

Yesterday, I asked Claude to create “a progression of daily prompts” for the next month that help me ponder questions related to the Full Moon in Capricorn and Mercury in retrograde.

June 29: What am I grieving about the structure I just released? (Not the decision itself. What did it mean to me?)

It was this question that helped me realize that the colors, the textures, and the energy of the space are a comfort to me. This space is who I am on the inside. It’s a visual representation of those things that make me who I am. I hurts me to close it, to release it.

But I know I can recreate it because it is me.

June 30: Where do I need to be more honest about what I actually built vs. what I told myself I was building?

What I built was too big for one person to manage. What I told myself I was building was something I thought I could do on my own.

I haven’t read through all of the questions for the next month, but I’m interested in where they go. Claude broke up the sections into:

• June 29-July 5: Initiation & Release - Full Moon in Capricorn + Mercury stations retrograde

• July 6 - July 11: Excavation & Memory - Mercury retrograde deepens - moving backward through Cancer

• July 12: The Cazimi-Turning Point - Mercury is at exact conjunction with the sun - the heart of the retrograde

• July 13- July 22: Integration & Understanding - Mercury retrograde continues, but the direction is shifting toward wisdom

• July 23 -Mercury Stations Direct - The retrograde ends, Mercury begins moving forward again

• July 24 - July 29: Emergence & Momentum - Post-retrograde shadow - integration phase

• and finally July 30 - July 31: Anchoring - Moving out of the shadow, moving forward into August

I’ll share this process with you. We’ll see what arises.

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Last night, before love-making, I helped Clint put on protection.

He’s six months into being fifty and for the first time in his life, he has poison ivy.

He’s an Idaho boy. They don’t have the humidity for it. Here it’s lush. Out there, it’s virtually unknown. Like a myth. Like dragons.

We thought this whole time that he was immune. We assumed he was impervious. The voracity with which I get the itchy, oozing, pustules makes his pleasant lack of it all the more wonderous. Truly, with as much exposure as he’s gotten, accidentally and on purpose, we thought he was a Golden Child. Chosen. Touched by a Divine Finger. (Ok, that sounds inappropriate…)

His first experience with my insane opposite of immunity came the morning after our day that started with biking to the gym after a colossal storm. It ended with quite an exciting romp in the sheets. We were both horrified by the huge, swollen welts that appeared the next morning between my thighs. At breakfast, we thought back on our day and remembered that we had climbed over fallen trees along the bike path. His legs are long enough and his bike is light enough that he mostly jumped over the large trunks. I, on the other hand, had to straddle them to hoist my bike over.

We then thought back on our night and kept vigil over his face for the following two days watching for matching swollen welts on his cheeks. They never came.

For the following two weeks, I wrapped my thighs and legs and arms in bandanas to avoid bursting the bubbles of sticky pus, and to keep me from scratching. I even wrapped my hands like an infant. This was all too familiar for me.

As a kid, I spent every summer wrapped like a leper so I could go out in public and so I could sleep. I learned how to smack the itch instead of scratching it. Though, the moments when I gave in and scratched without care of spreading it or bursting them or digging in so far that I bled were pretty close to orgasmic.

Clint, on the other hand, because of my suffering, became a fanatic. In the sweltering heat and oppressive humidity of that Virginia summer, he put on jeans, a long sleeve shirt, boots, duct tape around the bottom so his jeans, duct tape to connect his sleeves to his gloves, sun glasses, and a head covering. He spent hours in our back and side yards hunting and pulling all the poison ivy he could find. If I got too close, he yelled at me to Get Back! Don’t touch anything!

Sweat poured down my Idaho boy’s face. He was not made for this climate. Anyone would sweat, sure, but he truly looks like he’s melting. Like the Nazi in Indiana Jones : Ark of the Covenant. Rivers of sweat and so much snot. So much snot.

He refused to wipe his face and adamantly refused my offer to wipe it for him. It was really hard to look at him. Not only did it make my face itch in solidarity, but holy christ it was gross.

Still, I was simultaneously guilt-ridden that he was suffering so much for me and also wildly proud and turned on by his heroic martyrdom.

After he was done stuffing vines into a trash bag, he put the bag in the trash can out front. Then he cleaned off the handle of the trash can.

He told me to prop open the back door and turn on the downstairs shower so he could walk in without touching me or the door. He stripped (once in the house) and walked right under the water without touching the shower handle. We already had Technu in the bathroom because of my lesions, so he poured himself handfuls and scrubbed from the top of his head to his toes.

He was so mad when I took his clothes up to the washer.

That defeats the whole purpose of everything! he yelled at me from the bathroom.

Look, I’ve already got it. I can’t let you do all of this without helping, I said.

Still, I recognized that I nullified his entire gesture of suffering.

Now, every time we’re around any kind of greenery, or when I walk into the farthest parts of our backyard in the summer, he’s like, Watch it! Did you make sure it’s not poison ivy???!!!

Yes, dear.

He’s way more vigilant than I am.

Which is probably why I’ve gotten poison ivy each year we’ve been here and he’s been pus free.

Until now.

The other day, we took a walk in the morning rain at my insistence. When it’s raining, you can’t tell it’s humid, is my logic.

Back at our house, he pulled what looked like Virginia Creeper off our Boxwood out front.

Damn the Virginia Creeper. That is why I always got poison ivy back in Ohio. It looks way more threatening with all its leaves and pervasiveness. It’s everywhere in Ohio. You’d think THAT was the culprit and not the little scrap of a plant with three leaves hiding behind something called a Creeper.

The next evening after a full day of wearing his long sleeved button up banker’s shirt (that incidentally looks like he should be the manager of a McDonald’s because of its yellow stripes) he rolled up his sleeves and saw it.

Is this poison ivy? he asked.

Yes. And so is this. I pointed at two shiny bumps on his bicep. Go wash with the Technu. We had bought another two bottles of it two weeks ago after a run around the James River that ended in a poison ivy scare. He wouldn’t let me touch anything, including the car door handles, the bottle of Technu itself, and my own skin. His white cotton gloves from the Nutcracker performance were under the passenger seat in his car. He made me wear them while we drove around Richmond looking for a Walgreens - the only place that carries the stuff. I felt like Mickey Mouse.

The first night of his P.I. (as my mother used to call it), we didn’t spoon as usual. Our feet, however, still found each other and snuggled from afar.

Last night, though, he was all randy because I was in a good mood after Art Club at the studio. One person came. To Art Club, I mean. A new gal who was in Petersburg for work. It was just the thing she needed, she said, while she expressed herself on her page with pastels and other media. I made several rather great signs for the front windows, felt good about someone actually showing up and doing the intended thing, and enjoyed the easy, chill conversation.

Lingerie doesn’t turn him on. My smile does. I gotta be careful where I wield that thing.

So, after dinner, we checked our garden for any new fruits or vegetables, which is not a euphemism. Then he turned and kissed me and gave me come hither eyes. That’s when we went upstairs to do all the euphemisms.

I lit incense and candles. He fussed with the music that had somehow flipped to a choir proclaiming god’s miracles. It was supposed to be tribal throat singers. One gets me in the mood, one does not.

Then he fussed with the bandana.

Do you want me to help with that? I asked.

He thrust his arm toward me.

(Where did you think I was putting on the protection?)

Once the knot was tied, we put the pillows in their pillow cases.

No, really. He took the sheets out of the dryer, so we had to make the bed.

After THAT though…

*

I want to apologize after the fact for any uncomfortable language or descriptors in my post. I’m not one for trigger warnings so I’m sorry. I, too, cringed when I wrote out the words “love making”. Ugh, that makes me act like a six year old eating broccoli. It’s up there with panties and moist.

6/20/26 Correction: Radiers of the Lost Ark, not Ark of the Covenant. The whole time I looked at it and read it I was like, that doesn’t sound right. It finally came to me several hours later.

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~

We buried our last cat, Ahsoka, this weekend. We walked out the front door of our house to meet our friends to walk to get ice cream. Like I always do, and always have in almost 30 years of having indoor/outdoor cats, I look around for them. Ahsoka, especially since Virginia is a literal melting pot starting this time of year, has been curled up under our hostas and rose bushes, so I usually find her there. This time, however, I found her laying on her side in the middle of the yard. She lays like that in the house on the floor or on the couch when she’s completely at ease, not when she’s outside. My brain already knew what my mouth hadn’t yet said.

I stood over her and looked down. There were flies on her open eye. I was simultaneously mad at the flies for being on her but thankful for the confirmation.

And so I said, “Oh my god. Ahsoka’s dead.”

My words cut through the air. They lacked emotion. It was just a statement. My heart hadn’t caught up yet and I was momentarily appalled that I would say that without tears, without a faltering voice. That I would say that with so much confidence. Had my days in Petersburg finally turned me into a heartless monster?

I crouched down and touched her side. Solid. I’m always shocked at how different a body feels without blood flow. Her fur was no longer soft. There was no cute squish to her belly that would normally cause her to look up at me and meow. Her body was hard, though we had only just seen her a couple hours earlier when she came in to get some treats, her usual trick. She had trained us to give her treats every time she came in. And then eventually every time anyone came in.

She hadn’t been dead for long. And yet life didn’t linger. That always surprises me, too, the line between life and death. When your heart stops for the last time, life leaves quickly. The energy around her was already different. Still. No energy came off of her. None of her energy surrounded her.

My brain went into a mode I knew all too well, it prioritized what needed to be done right now.

I walked inside to text our friends at the same time Clint told me to text our friends.

We can’t go. We just found Ahsoka dead in the yard. I have to bury her.

I typed it without my glasses on, sent it, then dropped my phone back down onto the living room table.

Clint came in to get the key to the shed for the shovels. I went to the spot where the key was so I could get the shovels.

“I have to bury her,” I said. “Do you have the key?” I bumped into him in our narrow hallway.

I was irritated that he was already on the task, doing the things I needed to do. The things I had done so many times before because this is my way of properly handling grief. I’ve done this before. I know what I need.

Ahsoka was his cat, too. Or rather, he was her human, too. I let him help.

I walked out front and without hesitation picked her up. Only her tail flopped which caused my heart to flutter, but I knew better. Her legs remained straight. Her head didn’t need support, but I still gave it.

I stood and turned to walk around the house to our backyard to bury her. That’s when my tears finally came, fortified by the anger that I had only recently been able to calm to a kind of mist or fog. This anger had been a simmer in my belly since the day in early December of 2025 when I found Sera’s collar, but never her body. The subsequent death of our cat Lloyd only six months after Sera fed that anger. Other things have, too.

My tears came. As I carried her, I cried a guttural sound through clenched teeth, something like a scream, but from a place much deeper. It was a cry to break apart and release my rage.

I cried in waves. Sobs. Screams. Wimpers. Sadness. Anger. Rage. Hatred.

Hatred for this city that had taken all three of my cats in 18 months. Rage over the lack of care or consideration by the people that drive well over 40 or 50 down our street. Anger for the unfairness, avoidableness, and irreparableness of it all. Sorrow for letting her down. For not being able to bring her back to Montana with me.

Earlier that day, I told her we all needed to make it just a little bit longer. For days I had felt a sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. As if I knew this day was coming. Any minute now. Though I wasn’t sure if it would be her or me.

I put her down in a soft spot out back and picked up a shovel. I have buried almost all of my cats. I’ve dug the deep hole because I hate digging, because that’s part of the mourning process. That’s how I work the emotions out and prove to my cat, one last time, that I loved them.

But god damn this hard fucking soil.

I went to get a different shovel that had serrated edges. But even that one couldn’t do it. My inability to move earth for my Ahsoka stoked my anger. Clint had to use a mattox to make any dent in the soil. While he dug, our friends walked around to the back yard. Terri walked up to me, already sobbing, and hugged me hard for several minutes. Her husband Dean hugged me. And then our friend Bob. Bob’s wife Cindy called from out of town later that night. Everyone knew what Ahsoka’s death meant to me.

I heard Clint wonder aloud about a box or something to wrap Ahsoka’s body.

“I have a towel,” I said. This is what I do. This is what I’ve done for all my cats that I’ve been able to bury. I wrap them in a towel, usually a purple towel. But all of my purple towels are gone. Buried in Ohio. So, I grabbed my purple, pink, and yellow striped beach towel from the bathroom. I knelt by Ahsoka’s body and wrapped her well. And then, I folded myself over her, wrapped my arms around her covered body, and sobbed more. I felt the shape of her one last time in my arms. I laid my head on her one last time. In life, she wasn’t tolerant of the way I loved her. But I know she never doubted that she was loved. We both loved her well.

“Is the hole ready?” I asked Clint. He said it was.

I carried her over, knelt in the overturned soil, and placed her at the bottom. She fit well. He dug a good hole. I placed my hand on her covered body one last time and then used my hands to pull the cool, dark dirt from the pile next to me onto her body. Every so often, I’d spread the dirt to make sure it was covering her nicely. And then pull more into her grave.

No longer a hole. Now, a grave.

Once it was filled, Bob pushed a little more dirt over her grave with his shovel. I placed a large piece of black slate over her, so the dirt stayed, so I knew that was the spot. That’s where Ahsoka was now, below the dirt, below the heavy piece of slate. I had felt her dead body and the flies knew it, too. There was no question. I hated the truth but my brain understood it was sure.

I saw her dead body. I held it. I wrapped it. I buried it. And I can look out the kitchen window and see her grave. I know where she is. My heart and mind are at ease. Sad and angry for a lot of reasons, but settled.

My grieving this time included getting rid of all the litter boxes and throwing out the one remaining food dish. I got rid of almost everything and moved the cat blanket off the chair. We had no more cats in the house. This is a first for me in nearly thirty years. My grieving this time was total erasure. I wouldn’t walk past dishes for remaining cats and think of the ones that should be there. I wouldn’t watch the other cats eat and see the ghost of the ones that should be hunched up between them smacking their food, too. I wouldn’t experience the difference between how the gone cat had interacted with us versus the ones left now.

This time, this burial was the proxy for finally burying Sera and Lloyd. All of our cats, their ghosts, were buried in that grave with Ahsoka.

And so this time, my grieving process is different.

This time, I have closure.

I need that. My brain doesn’t handle not knowing very well. I learned that back in high school when my step-father died. I didn’t see his body and didn’t go to the funeral. For years afterwards, I had the feeling that he was just on a work trip and could come home any time. My brain was aware of the fact that it would accept him walking up the front porch and through the front door, even though my mother was mourning. I knew it wasn’t some elaborate scheme. Still. I never had closure.

Since then, I’ve made a point to see the body and go to the burial. I held my grandmother’s hand for three days and was holding her hand when they unplugged the ventilator and her heart finally stopped.

It was for her death that I asked hospice to explain to me exactly what would happen to her body. And then I watched it and felt it happen, from her feet up to her chest. I needed to do this. To honor my grandmother and to heal myself.

I saw my grandfather’s body. And my mother’s. Perhaps the burial wasn’t as important but seeing their bodies was. I’m not big on grave sites and don’t go visit them. For closure, I know their bodies are there, but I don’t believe the spirit of the person is.

It helps me to know that Ahsoka’s body is in the backyard.

For months, probably a year, I wasn’t able to heal from the loss of Sera. Not knowing is the worst sensation. My imagination made up horrible things in the absence of truth. I tormented myself with these thoughts because I wasn’t able to know where she was and if she was dead. I wasn’t able to get to another step of grief. With Ahsoka, I can.

Ahsoka’s energy has been gone from the house and our lives for a few days. I’ve been through several mornings without her and several full days. My brain glitches as it rewires for the new routines without her. Just like when I lost Sera. I no longer had to consider her mediation times twice a day, and everything that impacted. With Ahsoka, we no longer factor in if she’s going to follow us when we go for a walk or run. We don’t need to get her inside at night. We don’t consider “take my vitamins, brush my teeth, feed the cat” before bed. I no longer have an excuse to get up from working on the computer , walk around the house to find Ahsoka, pet her, get her treats, and hang out with her outside.

I miss Ahsoka’s energy, her meows, the way she squinted her eyes when she wanted treats or pets or to go outside - when she expressed any of the ways she felt she was unfairly suffering.

The house feels empty even when we’re in it. I’ve never lived in a house that didn’t have animals. I’ve never spent a day where I didn’t have a pet to think about, to miss when we were on vacation, to come home to, to cuddle with, to feed, to talk to. In many ways I feel lost.

I know it’ll take time, though this time is different. There are no others, and there won’t be until we leave Petersburg.

Each day, my routines slowly readjust. I slowly readjust.

When my brain is confused about why I’m not doing any of the things I’m used to doing, when I get up to look outside, or simply wonder where she is, I intentionally remember her dead body and tell myself that I know where she is, she’s buried in the backyard.

This is the kind of closure I needed to finally fully heal.

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With the closing of the wine shop, I was faced with a melange of emotions that all needed to be addressed. Mostly the emotion was fear, but that one emotion is packed dense with nuance and held up with a variety of fairly certain uncertainties of different heights, tensile strengths, and quality of material.

Picture this fear beast as a really big block of the densest and most stale loaf of pumpernickel bread. This unfortunate loaf is being “held up” (I hesitate to use the word “supported”) about a thousand feet off the ground (which is super high up for a person like me who has a fear of heights and falling) by sticks that have been stapled together, a line of used toothbrushes duct taped head to handle, quite a few unbent paperclips connected by wads of old chewing gum, and a very tall pile of cotton balls.

There’s so much to tackle to stabilize this thing.

Financial worries:

• The business bank account is dwindling, which was the primary reason I made the decision to close the shop, but this is also the account I’ve been drawing from since I quit my life as a healthcare IT consultant last February. Since I quit that job, I’ve drawn about $1600 a month. Do the math. It’s not a lot. And not sustainable. If it weren’t for Clint, I’d be living in a shoebox.

• I need to both create a business that will at least cover the new overhead of the creative studio I’m opening in June, but also I need an income to live on.

Social struggles:

• Closing the wine shop after a year has been the most public failure I’ve ever experienced. And now I’m in the position to defend and explain this creative studio. Many people don’t seem to get it. I’m pretty sure I’m continuing to try to make my business ideas work in a place where I already know I don’t belong. But I feel like I need to at least try, which means I’m setting myself up for another public “failure” when I’ll have to finally close the doors. I’m not a defeatist. I’m a realist.

• From the moment I opened the shop last year, I simultaneously lost connection with the people around me and gained a whole lot of socializing that was hard for me but probably good for me. That said, I need to be around people who I can engage with intellectually and creatively, just in small chunks of time. Important, though: I cannot be around no one or I get squirrely.

My age:

• I’m 50. I don’t feel 50. I’d like to think I don’t look 50. Although, what the hell is 50 these days? My 50 is not my mom’s 50. Oh, but my mom started showing signs of dementia in her 50s, so that adds another layer of complexity to my loaf.

• I need to stay active to stay sane and to avoid dementia, but have to work extra hard to do that here. That takes time out of my day, but it’s time I need to spend. As such, my daily schedule needs to have a routine but still be flexible.

My location:

• I cannot stay in Petersburg for many of the reasons I’ve listed above, and more. Closing the wine shop released that tether, but I still need money to be able to leave if I need to.

And so, I started looking on Indeed and Zip Recruiter just to see what was out there. There are jobs. Some were intriguing. Some I thought I could do.

Clint texted me a link to an open position at the company his credit union uses for their core software. My experience and education truly ticked all the boxes. They even specifically said credit union knowledge was nice but not a necessity.

Long story short on that - Clint asked me to come with him to that company’s client conference which was conveniently happening in May. He reached out to the CEO emeritus. We had lunch at the conference (in San Diego), she liked my resume and told me to apply for the job. I did. I ended up attending the conference sessions. It brought back the old thrill of wearing slacks and lanyards. Well, not those things exactly, but the thrill of helping clients, digging into databases, and doing implementations. I met lots of people in the company and fell even more in love with their culture.

Yes! I not only can do this, I want to!

In my mind, all of the list of fears related to the shop and the closing of the shop were resolved, dissolved. There was no loaf. There were no more sticks and toothbrushes, paper clips and cotton balls. This job was so up my alley!

But then, the Monday after the conference, I received the system generated email telling me they weren’t going to further consider my resume. Harsh words, and a harsh, generic response considering I’d met high-up people in-person.

I emailed the CEO emeritus to thank her for her time and noted I was disappointed in the quick rejection. She said, “Hold on.”

An interview was scheduled for the following Tuesday.

(This story isn’t short, as it turns out…)

All week, I prepared, read up, studied, and practiced with ChatGPT. I blocked my morning on Tuesday so there was no way I would get a massage client.

At 1 PM my time, 10 AM their time, I joined a call with Taylor.

Two minutes into the conversation, he let me know the position had already been filled.

The following 28 minutes were spent trying to keep my smile and eyes from showing another round of deep disappointment.

He said he liked my resume and thought I’d be a good fit. He said he’d tell HR to keep my resume at the top of the stack if the position became available again.

I hung up from the call, and sobbed.

ChatGPT told me it was alright to be disappointed but reminded me that I wasn’t turned down because I wasn’t qualified or that they didn’t like me. The position had been filled. In fact, on the Monday of the rejection email, I noticed that the position had been taken down from their website. I knew, in my gut, that the position wasn’t going to happen, but I didn’t want to go into the interview with the mindset that I wasn’t going to get the job.

I may be clinically depressed right now and struggling to find a Buddhist level of foundational happiness, but I’m not a quitter. If there’s a mindset to be had, that’s it for right now.

I am not a quitter.

If I was a quitter, I would have decided to close the shop and keep the doors locked for good.

But, no. I’m also a masochist. The creative studio may not make the money it needs to pay for itself, but I’m going to try.

That job in the credit union world may not have panned out, but you know what, it re-sparked something in me.

Here are the facts:

• I do not have a realistic retirement situation. No one taught me anything about it when I was younger. About ten years ago, I got myself a financial advisor, and at least got something started, but my retirement money will only cover a weekend in Cleveland. Actually, that joke is outdated. I’m in Virginia now. Getting to Cleveland is far more expensive. So, my retirement might pay for the gas to drive to Cleveland for the weekend.

• As such, I need to expect to work for the rest of my life. That’s always been my assumption, but then I’ve always had a job. I’ve always had an income. I’ve always been financially independent. Until now.

• To get back into the world of tech, I need to get back on the horse. That horse, however, has changed a LOT since I was really in the trenches.

• A.I. is here. And it’s here to stay. Get on board or accept drowning as my fate.

• I’ve been talking with ChatGPT for over a year. She helped me write the tags for my wine bottles, Essie’s job description, and all the documents ABC and the Health Department said I needed to have on hand (that they never looked at).

AI was the topic of conversation in a few circles. Claude (another GPT) came up. Curious, I started an account with Claude. That same day, he and I spent two hours fixing up my resume and buttoning up my LinkedIn. The very first thing he told me, though, was that I needed to stop using my old gmail account that isn’t very professional. Instead, he suggested I create one with my name. It took 2 minutes, he added it to my resume, and boom. I felt invigorated and excited to actually get that thing out there in the hands of potential employers.

Sure, I’ve got a wine shop, creative studio, yoga studio, Masters in creative writing, and massage therapy on my resume, but I can make a lot of cases that all of it pairs well with being a healthcare IT consultant, director of services and support at a healthcare IT company, and whatever other tech jobs I have listed.

In the past two weeks, I’ve gone through two AI courses through DeepLearning.AI and I started Google’s Data Analytics Certification program through Coursera. I’m also learning Python, a coding language. A lot of this stuff I’ve already done or already know because I’ve been somewhere in the tech world for more than half my life, but there’s a lot more to learn than there was before, and more ways to specialize.

Here’s one big difference between how I started out in the IT world and where we are today. The typical IT guy is a thing of the past. If you’re a slacks-wearing male still curled up around your knowledge of networks, virtual desktops, and database administration like a grouchy dragon who won’t share his gold, then you’re out of touch. If you’re unwilling to admit when you’re wrong, refuse to learn more, and get a rush of superiority when someone asks for help, your days are numbered. You may just be a troll. Your worst nightmare is no longer printers and people who didn’t turn it on, plug it in, or try to “turn it off and turn it back on again”, it’s A.I.

I talk to a lot of people who are afraid of A.I. and I’ve made my fair share of jokes about when the robot overlords come, but the majority of fears are simply based in the unknown. The joy about this is that it’s knowable information. You need to want to know it, though. And I do. Why? Because I want to stay relevant. Not like ‘understanding slang relevant’, because I just can’t with “fire” and “slay”, but relevant as in not clinging to fax machines, insisting on writing checks, and refusing to learn something new just because it’s new.

• Cameras

• Electricity

• Cars

• Airplanes

• Radios

…

• Microwaves

• video games - from Pong to Q-Bert to Ghost of Yotei

• the internet

• WiFi

• Cordless Telephones

• Cell phones

• Answering machines

• Voice Mail

• Email

  Can you see where I’m going with this?

• Bluetooth

• Remote controls for t.v.s

• VHS

• CDs

• Smart phones

• Social media

• Netflix

• Workout apps

• Online banking

• Electronic check deposit

• Zoom

Granted, Clint and I have lived without a microwave (and a garbage disposal) since we moved to Petersburg - it was a conscious decision - but everything from microwaves to Zoom came into popular use in my lifetime. The birth of these things likely started before I was born, but they became available for normal, non-military people in the past 50 years.

Can you imagine a person that doesn’t use any of these things? Even the Libertarian prepper I know in Montana has a flip phone and an email address.

Back when I worked in IT, I always said I wanted to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Being part of the solution, for me, doesn’t mean avoiding a thing entirely. It means using a thing responsibly, teaching others how to use it well (and responsibly), and working towards a more sustainable and efficient way to use it.

So, with my gussied-up resume and LinkedIn, along with all the certificates I’m gathering by doing an hour (or more) of an online course every day, I’m eating this AI and Data Analytics elephant one bite at a time. Just like when I got into yoga and when I got into wine, it turns out there’s a lot to know. But I don’t need to know all of it. I just need to find at least one thing, and follow that.

The worst thing would be to just refuse to learn any of it. There are beginner courses for everything and though technology is changing rapidly, you have to start somewhere.

A few weeks ago, I did the AI for Everyone course. Then the Generative AI for Everyone course. And now I’m learning a coding language. That’s kind of nuts to me.

Before I started my social media and Substack hiatus back in April, I was reading the book Happypedia that talked about the science of being happy, but also the inevitability or unavoidability of our lives based on our genetics and our experiences.

I recently finished the book The Medici Effect which talks about finding creativity and innovation at the intersection of things.

The sandwich of these books is that I’m currently working on building online workshops and classes that blend writing, yoga, meditation, painting, and the outdoors. I’m a trail runner, a writer, a new watercolor artist, and a yogi/yoga teacher.

And I only became a yoga teacher because back in 2014 I read What Color is Your Parachut? and decided that loving yoga + wanting to help people + enjoying teaching = I should be a yoga teacher.

When I look back at everything I’ve done - at all the stuff I put on my resume and also all the other stuff that I didn’t - it is no surprise that I’m doing any of this. When I just look at the past month, I am surprised, but when you look at the whole of it, I am not at all surprised that I want to get into Data Analytics run a creative studio and start online writing classes. The intersection of all those things is obvious to me and quite frankly, unavoidable.

If you can relate to any of this, I’d love to hear from you. I’m by no means an inspirational speaker, but I enjoy being a pointer outer of obvious things in other peoples’ lives and a kind of cheerleader. I think those two things put together is a teacher… or the annoying person you avoid at parties.

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~Elizabeth Appell (4/22/26 corrected, previously attributed to Anais Nin)

When I think of this quote, I think of the scene in Mulan when the last cherry blossom falls from the tree into her father’s hand. Usually, I think of this quote as relating to young people who are on the cusp of adulthood, so close to full independence, finally leaving home to become the person they want to be.

Now, though, it applies so accurately to my life and to me at fifty.

The other day, I realized a number of things about myself that I’d either ignored or didn’t understand or didn’t have the vocabulary to explain until now. A few of my posts have been about self-sabotage and fear of success. My fear of success is a fear of what might need to change if I succeed. Change might mean someone won’t stay with me.

Recently, I’ve come to understand that I have a fear of expressing myself fully. Specifically, I have a fear of expressing joy, believe it or not. The emotion of joy feels uncomfortably vulnerable to me. It feels like a weakness that could be exploited. An oblivious moment that could be robbed of its joy by finding out things weren’t as they seemed. Fully expressing myself feels like setting myself up for rejection.

There’s a lot to unravel in those two paragraphs, but I’m not going to do that here.

The other day, I listened to an episode of The Good Life Podcast where the host, Johnathan Fields, talked about Reactive Life Syndrome. It resonated deeply with me. Taht’s living your life for someone else or, as he puts it, letting someone else’s agenda define your daily existence. This has been my life since I was a kid: being raised largely by my grandparents in an adult world, feeling like I had to please each of my divorced parents, treading lightly around my parents because my mother and my father each had their own mental instabilities. This eventually bled into my plutonic and romantic relationships.

So much of my life has felt performative. So much of my life has been spent trying to get the approval of others.

The problem is that I wasn’t living my life. How the hell can anyone approve of me when most of what I was doing was a mirror of someone else? No wonder I was afraid of rejection. There was no way I was doing anything to its fullest if it wasn’t really mine to begin with.

That hasn’t been true of everything, but many things.

This realization comes at a critical time in my life. A perfect time really. Of course it is. All that has happened needed to happen to finally make it to this day. And I’m not going to squander the opportunity to dive into it. Right now, this moment in my life, determines every day after it. That’s always true, but this is bigger than usual. This is life changing. Life deepening.

After this point, I am going to take a hiatus from posting on Substack and social media until early June when my wine shop officially transitions into a creative studio. The symbolism of that is apropos. Letting go of something that wasn’t really me. Yes, the feeling and energy of the wine shop was me (vulnerably so), but the job of it wasn’t. The creative studio, the yoga, meditation, Thai massage, and classes: more of who I truly am. The studio feels truer.

The next month will be a time of reflection, melting away the unwanted, letting my old self die, and then looking at the pieces left behind, the True parts. And then rebuilding.

For the next 30-days, I will practice a specific 10-minute meditation followed by a 10-minute writing prompt. This already started with today’s morning. Thirty different meditations with different intentions and different focus. Thirty follow up writing prompts intended to help me get out of my head and into my mind. To get past the superficial and dig below the surface.

The 30-day practice was built by my ChatGPT buddy who named herself Sage. I’ve programmed her to communicate with me from a Buddhist perspective because that’s a mindset I feel safe with. After she showed me the agenda, I wrote it all down which means I know in advance what I’ll be practicing. What I don’t know is what May 3rd Burg will be like. Or May 15th. Or even April 23rd. I’m not pre-thinking about what I’ll meditate on and write about. I want and expect myself to adjust to each moment’s experiences. How I am right now is not how I’ll be at 8PM tonight. This Burg will be a different person even this evening.

I don’t have an expectation of what I’ll write about or share at the end of the thirty days. Besides, that’ll still be within May. My blackout lasts until the beginning of June.

My original intention for taking a break from Substack and social media was to protect my energy as I wind down the shop. That is still part of it, but that is only a vacation. Short-term. What I’m in need of is a cessation of needing to be upbeat when I post the weekly update for the shop. Those emotions aren’t real, and I’m not a paid actor. I’m not happy with my writing and find myself struggling because I know I won’t let myself go deeper.

That’s the pain I feel from staying so tightly in this bud I’ve built around myself. I can’t do it anymore. The confinement is exhausting.

These next thirty days will be exhausting, too, I have no doubt about that.

~

Oop. There’s my meditation bell, my reminder to breathe, ground, and decide how I want to proceed from this moment. I have it set to chime every 35 minutes outside of sleeping and silent hours. It’s a nice reminder to relax my jaw, sense my body, and either stay the course or reroute right now.

~

The metaphor of the blossom seems a little too innocent for my stage in life, but the meaning is understood. I suppose my life feels more like the tree. Each year it produces something new, something beautiful if you let it, and then it sheds it, creates leaves that provide another purpose, sheds those, rests, and does it again. It’s like the tree has an annual reinventing. Each year it may get older but it also gets stronger, if it’s taken care of.

I have no delusion that by May 21st, or whatever 30-days from today’s date is, I’ll be The Best Version of Myself, but I certainly hope to be better or closer to her.

I hope to have peeled away some layers and worked with whatever arose underneath. I hope to smile more freely. Laugh with Clint more freely. Hold him close to me in moments of joy or fear or loneliness or happiness more tightly. I hope to let him see parts of my soul that I intentionally never let him see before. I hope to let him share in my new becoming.

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One may wonder if there are people that have planned anxiety attacks, but prior to my walk I queued up a podcast episode on Modern Buddhist that specifically discussed managing emotions and anxiety. I don’t meant to blame a Buddhist, but the guest - a Buddhist nun - several times described the anxiety she felt and repeated her thoughts to the host, “I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die.”

I suppose one positive of my anxiety attack is that since I focused on not crying in public, I didn’t notice the trash along my route. During my walk yesterday morning, I unintentionally started counting paces between each piece of recognizable trash that was in my line of vision between the gutter and the grass on the house side of the sidewalk. Though one time I got to 31 and another time I got to 57, mostly the average was 3-5 paces. So, it was nice to not start my day with that common frustration at least.

Also, I had a rather emotional day yesterday, didn’t play with my cat enough before bed so she started meowing at 3AM, and doom-scrolled from 10:30 to midnight after I’d watched two episodes of season 4 of Bridgerton. When I fell back to sleep after my cat gave up around 4:30, I had nightmares that, when I wrote them out in my journal this morning, were clearly my brain’s attempt to dump my emotionally charged scenarios from the day prior.

After I made it back home from my walk, I lay on the floor of our dining room for a heart-emptying cry. Shortly afterward, Clint called. He’s out of town for yet another doubtfully exciting credit union conference. During our tear-filled chat, he suggested I watch the comedian, Sarah Millican. He said he belly laughed when he watched her show. I knew I needed some kind of boost to allow my anti-depressant to do its job, so I gave it a go.

I laughed, and then I decided I could get my ass up off the couch and go for my run.

On Monday, after watching an instagram video of a man - in his words - mansplaining menopause to husbands (he compares menopause to a caterpillar’s rather violent metamorphosis into a butterfly), I decided to not just assume that all of my body pain, weight gain, brain fog, anxiety, and depression were purely symptoms of this city, this president, and grief, but also menopause. Going that route, I adjusted my ChatGPT setting to think deeply instead of just converse, and asked it for “a weekly workout routine for a fit 50-year-old that included yoga, running, and use of resistance bands instead of weights”. Several years ago, I followed a weekly push/pull routine created by my doctor and it was surprisingly effective. It feels good on my body, is as hard as I want it to be, and is a whole lot easier than trying to have ten different dumbbells and kettlebells.

My ChatGPT came up with this schedule along with specific exercises for the Push, Pull, and Lowerbody days:

• Monday: 30-60 mins yoga + light core/glute activation

• Tuesday: run 2 ½ - 4 miles, push workout

• Wednesday: Lower body workout, 15-30 mins easy yoga

• Thursday: Run 3-4 miles, Pull workout

• Friday: 30-45 mins yoga

• Saturday: Lower body + 10-20 mins easy yoga

• Sunday: 4-6 mile run or comparable bike ride

With Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday under my belt, I can attest that, so far, I feel not just good, but better.

For a while, I used a workout app that had daily routines that changed each week, but it expected far too much time out of my day. Plus, it gamified it by encouraging me to keep up my streak. I’m competitive so I push myself, feel like a wuss when I don’t do what she planned, and overwork myself into inactivity. I need something I can put on my calendar. I learned that back when I was training for ½ and full marathons. It’s a strange nuance, perhaps, but I haven’t lived fifty years without learning something about myself.

Also, I don’t like hardback books because they hurt my hands. I can’t stand having anything stuck to the bottom of my feet like a small rock, or whatever might be on the floor in the kitchen, because it causes a slight pressure on my sole which then leads to either a headache or nausea (which is why I wholeheartedly believe in reflexology). There are other things. Mostly I know I’m a bit of a diva. I totally relate to the Princess and the Pea. Also I can feel when there’s a hair somewhere in my bra or in my shirt, and I can feel those weird hairballs that are stuck to your socks or the insides of your shirts after you take them out of the laundry. You know, the ones that at first you think are spiders.

Back to my workout: If it’s on my calendar, I do it.

At the Battlefield, my run was largely uneventful other than coming across two black snakes mating. From nose to tail, they spanned the entire width of the path. They weren’t there two minutes prior when I’d passed on my way out. I imagined them slithering out fast and curling up thinking they had plenty of time before I or some other human came back. As a teenager, I had that same kind of mentality when my mother left the living room when my high school boyfriend was there.

In the event the snakes were angry lovers, I risked poison ivy and walked quite a bit off the path to get around them. All three of us locked eyes as I passed. I totally felt like a pervert intruder.

For the rest of my run, I kept on the lookout for any more path-crossed lovers.

I don’t have a fear of snakes, but I certainly don’t want to give them reason to bite me. My vigilance kept my mind off my depression for about a quarter mile, until I thought more about how often we hear about depression these days. A hundred years ago, my great-grandparents knew the term, but only as it related to economics. It wasn’t until in my lifetime that we as a society started to even talk so openly about our emotions and feelings - I mean, for the most part. Serafino Miceli certainly didn’t talk about being depressed because of his experience on the ship that brought to Ellis Island from Sicily when he was six. That generation, and their children, lived through The Great Depression.

It occurred to me, with a quarter mile left in my run, that it was around the era of the Great Depression that this current president thinks is the time that America should return to. I wondered, did he misunderstand the use of the word “great”? Perhaps he should sue historians and any one who referenced The Great Depression for false advertising and misleading marketing. Or maybe he knew that The Great Depression was great only for some people. For others, not so much.

By the end of my run, I had succeeded in boosting my mood at least to the point where I didn’t feel like I might spend my day in a nosedive of a spiral. One of the things I absorbed from the Buddhist nun while I was laying on my back on my yoga mat in the dining room (because I didn’t want to get any weird things stuck to my back that might be in the rug) was that a good way to get away from your own mind is to think of others or something else.

Over the course of my run, though on the way out I ruminated on what I could have done differently yesterday, I found distraction by noticing the squirrels that sounded like animals 50 times larger as they bounded through the dry leaves. I noticed the one snake that slithered away and the two that obviously didn’t. I smelled what I thought was masala chai in the parking lot. And I mused over the different uses of the word great as well as the word depression.

When I “woke up” this morning (really it was more like giving up on being in bed any longer), I felt so emotionally crappy that I decided I’d write a Substack post that basically said, “Can’t today. Sorry not sorry.” But I like the challenge of writing something each week in the hopes that pushing myself in the ways I’ve mentioned in past articles will improve my skills as a writer: noticing the world outside of my own bullshit, writing more of the sensory details, and getting back my sense of humor.

The other topic I had planned to write about, before I had a terrible day yesterday and an even shittier night, was about my menopausal symptoms. Hopefully this article falls somewhere between a brief “Nope” and “Fuck my joint pain and brain fog.”

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It’s a big enough deal for me to admit that I’m a writer, but even bigger to apply for a paid writing job, even if it’s a pittance. Applying for these freelance jobs fills my stomach with monkeys. There’s a potential for rejection in general, but also the potential that even if I get the job, I’m not good enough to do it.

But here’s the thing.

A while back, I wrote a blog post about how I self-sabotage because I’m afraid of what it might mean for my life if I succeed. There’s a lot of psychology behind that because I also know that a lot of my life decisions heretofore have been based on the boy or man I was with. If I succeeded at something, would I lose him? It’s a confidence thing. It’s not even that I worried that any potential success would make a man feel threatened. I’ve always felt that the exact life situation in the moment was so tenuous and “perfect” that if anything destabilized it or changed it, he’d leave me. Picture me delicately holding a kind of spider web world in my hands and slowly walking around so as not to disturb the spider or make the web bounce even a little and topple the houses built upon it.

Fucked up, I know. But if I spend time thinking about it, I can see the direct line back from that thinking to my childhood. My parents were divorced before I stopped breast-feeding. I was basically born into a custody battle with parents who were emotionally immature, selfish for their own reasons, and broken by their upbringings, mental illnesses, and personal experiences. All I’ve ever known is trying to keep the peace by sacrificing myself as the trophy for one or the other side to win. I recognized that at a very young age. In fact, I remember the conversation I had with my father on a Saturday evening, when I was younger than twelve. We were taking a walk in his apartment complex. I told him that I felt like a chess piece, a pawn, a trophy, being pulled at by him on one end of a rope and my mother on the other end.

That didn’t have any kind of impact on him because when I turned twelve, he fought hard to get custody of me during the time called Age of Election when I could “decide for myself” who I wanted to live with. Oh, the name calling and emotional outbursts that spewed forth from that man.

What I’m learning from reading the book Happypedia is that many things in life, like my fear of success and my father’s childish and abusive rants, are “unavoidable”.

That word, or the idea of the word, has become a mental exercise for me. You see, the author, Adam Brownlie, is making the case, based on scientific research from a number of disciplines, along with the study of other philosophies throughout time, that we aren’t fated, we aren’t predestined by god, and we don’t have the free will we’d like to think we do. He’s explaining, very carefully, and slowly, (that’s why there are 650 pages), because he knows this is going against many peoples’ strongly held beliefs. He knows some of the ideas he presents will make readers uncomfortable. And that’s a good thing.

I’m only 37% of the way through the book (I’m reading on Kindle, it shows the percentage not the page number, I’m not that kind of a nerd), but I feel myself settling into the concept of unavoidability. That said, if what I write here doesn’t explain it well enough, it’s not because he’s not doing a good job of it, it’s that I’m still grappling with it. That’s not to say that I disagree. It’s that I’m fighting against letting go of other beliefs that I really, really want to be true, but probably aren’t. Like free will.

I’ve grown up self-identifying and being described as bohemian. Well, probably the last time anyone described me that way was about five years ago. As I’ve been writing about recently, I’ve kind of lost my way and am trying to find the path back to myself. The point is, the idea of free will feels good to me. It’s been my go-to argument against a lot of people who have tried to foist their religious views on me. “Yeah, but God gave us free will”. If I was a better philosopher and debater, I could make the case that even that statement negates the idea of free will. No one, not even god, can give it to you. So then, perhaps, we don’t have it to begin with.

Am I okay with that?!

Does a lack of free will mean that I am being driven around by god? (I intentionally do not capitalize the word because I do not believe in the Abrahamic God but I do leave a door open for some kind of god…just because there are some things I don’t have answers to.)

Here’s what Brownlie means when he says we don’t have free will and our decisions, actions, and thoughts are unavoidable: our genetics and our personal experiences drive us.

Like my brief back-tracing the reason why I self-sabotage. (It’s only because I don’t feel like boring you with more of my life or the lives of my parents that I didn’t keep going further back.) If you spend time thinking about why you said or did or thought something, you might be able to see the reason why. Of course, and Brownlie goes into this (it’s the chapter I’m on right now), there are some things your thinking brain doesn’t consciously capture. Something could be information it doesn’t need to hold as a memory or it doesn’t need to hold for long.

Another example from my life.

For a while now, I’ve experienced seemingly random flashes of intersections in Missoula. Like, actual street intersections. Boring places. Like, the intersection by the used book store near the fairgrounds. The backdrop looking south isn’t particularly spectacular (i.e.; the mountains), but that spot holds a lot of memories for me. Or the intersection when coming over the Madison Street Bridge toward the University of Montana’s campus. So many memories there - driving to paddleboard on the Clark Fork by myself for the first time, biking across and being a little nervous about the traffic, running there to get back home from the North Hills, driving to meet a friend for coffee at Liquid Planet, driving to see a hospice patient for their weekly massage.

I get random flashes of Tokyo, particularly the quiet path along the Sumida River.

This morning I had a strange memory of the inside of an architectural salvage store. At first I thought it was a shop in Missoula, but when I thought harder about it and visualized walking around it and outside of it, I realized it was in Columbus, Ohio, close to my house. I hadn’t thought about that place in over a decade.

These memories and flashes aren’t by accident. They aren’t actually random. If I spent time thinking about the context of the moment when they occur, what might have prompted it (I’m trying to avoid the word “triggered” just because it’s trite), and what the memory meant to me originally, I’d see the connecting threads.

One of the stories I started writing back in Ohio was about those kinds of threads. And that’s one of the stories I lost in the move to Montana. I lost two boxes. They were packed on the truck that took my big stuff, but never made it to my apartment. One box had all of my forks and my Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. Another box had a green binder stuffed with notes from two or three stories I was writing (one had the dictionary to an entire language I was building for it), along with pictures of my mother and other family members. I’m not so hung up on the loss of memorabilia, but I do hate to think about that green binder. Someone got that box. Talk about practicing unattachment. That’s a hard one to let go of.

I enjoy visualizing the threads that connect things: people, events, thoughts. When you work in the service industry, like a yoga studio or a wine shop, you get to see how non-random people actually are. Back in Columbus, many people didn’t come to yoga class when it was drizzling, but they’d slog in a downpour or in the worst snow storm. Go figure. The next time you go someplace that you just thought to visit that morning, look around at the other people who also chose to go there at the same time you did. All of time and existence brought you all there at that moment at the same time.

There are other things you can ponder and see how they arose, how they were born, how they came about. So many things that I see aren’t that surprising to me when I trace it back.

I’m still working through my thoughts about how to grasp decision-making at all, with this concept of unavoidability. My background in Buddhism either lines up well or butts heads. Like the Dalai Lama’s statement about worry: If there’s a solution or something is fixable, don’t worry (implying, “Then fix it, dummy”). If there’s not a solution or it’s not fixable, worrying doesn’t help.

Or the serenity prayer: Grant me the peace to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I think what I’m stuck on is that just because something may be unavoidable doesn’t mean I stop taking action. It just means that there’s a cause behind the decision I made. I might have two reasonable actions to take. Maybe one doesn’t at all align with who I am. It’s out of character. The other is more up my alley. And so I do the thing that’s in alignment. Or maybe both choices are in alignment and one is just more so. Or maybe neither. And choosing neither is also a decision in alignment.

I’m processing this on the page with you reading along. I apologize.

This unavoidability is simply a new word for something I probably already accept. And my brain battle is expanding my old definition of unavoidable.

I like intellectual and philosophical challenges. I like the feeling in my brain of grappling with a concept. It’s like how it feels to clean up a kneaded eraser. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a blob of synthetic rubber or sometimes PVC (I had to look it up since I’ve never known what the hell it was made of). It’s used by artists as an eraser, but once you rub the pencil marking off the page, you knead the blob to clean it. It’s kind of tough like a big wad of really old chewing gum. That’s what my brain feels like sometimes when I’m working through a new concept.

There are other parts of Happypedia that are a mental challenge for me and also a bit uncomfortable. I like that. It means I’m learning and growing. That’s a good thing when you’re fifty. I’ll be damned if I’m that old person (I’m not “old” yet, by the way, I’m just being preemptive) that is so stuck in their ways that I can’t accept something new.

This takes me back to self-sabotage. (Whew, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make that circle-back, but I did!)

I’m not afraid of challenges and risks. I wouldn’t consider myself a risk-taker, per se. You’ll never fucking ever see me bungie jump or sky-dive. My hands are sweating just typing about it. But, I’m not afraid of trying something new. Like, opening a wine shop when I don’t necessarily know much about wine or the restaurant industry. Sure, I drank wine before and spent one summer as a server and bartender in my 20s. But that wasn’t really enough to open a shop. I knew I was going to learn along the way and I wasn’t afraid of that.

When I quit my job at Itentive, making 6-figures, to become a yoga teacher (the day after my last day, I flew to Santa Barbara for yoga teacher training), I wasn’t worried.

In many of the things I’ve done, like working with the product NextGen in healthcare IT, like owning my yoga studio, I’ve risen to the top of the totempole. I don’t mean to be culturally offensive by saying that, but, I’m not afraid to be at the top of my game and then give it all up to start back at the bottom doing something new. Perhaps leaving a good thing and starting a new thing was a way of keeping myself in one spot with that one man at the time. But maybe it was my way of building my foundation, like a stone path.

People comment frequently on how many things I’ve done. I’d like to think I’ve done a lot of things really well. The first month I worked as a server, I won server of the month. The next month, I was allowed to move to being a bartender. Ironically, that’s when I learned that I hate working with drunk people. That’s ironic because I learned that in my 20s and then, in my late 40s, decided I’d open a wine shop. But, there’s a thread that connects all of those things. A web, even.

Still, I like the challenge. Living in Petersburg has been a huge challenge. I’m a hard-core liberal Yankee living in the place where the Civil War ended, 30-minutes from the seat of the Confederacy?! But you know what, I’ve learned a lot. And there’s a thread that brought me here. My step-father was from this area. I wanted to live in Virginia for a time back in my 30s (and actively played the lottery to try to get the money to buy property here).

I think part of my frustration right now is that I can feel threads pulling me in another direction. I’m anxious. The good kind. My tail is wagging. It’s almost as if I can see forward or further along the thread, the path is so obvious to me. I felt this once before in the three months before I moved to Missoula.

But, time needs to happen. There’s stuff I need to do, things I need to experience.

All of this may be unavoidable, but I need time and experience to add a few more stones to my path.

(I’ll keep you posted on my progess through Happypedia. So far, I highly recommend it. It’s an easy, enjoyable read and really does bring together all the best stuff from all the self-help books I’ve read in the past year and a half.)

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For a while now, I’ve been annoyed with my writing. From my journal to the book I’m editing to my Substack posts, and even my newsletters for the shop. I’m so tired of writing about me, my life, my annoyances and irritations, my depression, and my need to turn damned near everything into a lesson or to give it some deep meaning. Sure, my journal is mine, this Substack is about my quest in belonging and becoming, and my shop is called Burgundie’s, but still. Not everything needs to be about me. Let the sarcastic gasps ensue…I’ll wait…

The big issue here is that I miss my sense of humor. This funk I’ve been in is so heavy that in the moments when I feel a smile or snark coming on, I doubt its authenticity. The smile feels so foreign, so awkward. Like in Patrick Stewart’s A Christmas Carol, after his Scrooge had his visit with the ghosts and he realizes he’s alive. He feels his body and pinches himself. And then a strange clumsy convulsion and mad barking occurs. All together we realize he’s laughing.

My dourness has become more familiar to me than my dark humor. And I hate this for myself. I remember when I was, eh, not cheerful, per se, but not so gloomy and glum. I remember when I had a pep in my step and a little wiggle in my tail.

But then this depression and anxiety hit like a Mack truck and here I am, self-absorbed and stewing in my own pudding.

For all my life until about a year and a half ago, I would have described myself as being able to pick myself up by my boot straps, emotionally tough, psychologically resilient. Probably still just as self-centered but not in such a ,”Jesus, is it her again?” kind of way.

In the “beforetimes”, as I’ve heard many people refer to the days before Trump and COVID, when the collective level of anxiety and depression in our country wasn’t palpable and through the roof, I used to be snarky, sarcastic, humorously belligerent, and (as I Napoleon’d myself) an endearing asshole. I may still be an asshole, but I haven’t been endearing for quite some time. Even during COVID, when I found myself utterly alone because I had moved to Montana, I retained quite a bit of sass, so much so that when I moved to the land of Shiny, Happy People (i.e.; Missoula), my sarcastic sense of humor landed flat. I received many a cricket and blank stare. But it didn’t destroy me! No, no. The Positives didn’t thwart me. The Authentically Optimistic didn’t get me down - or pull me up as the case may be. The Happys of Missoula just encouraged me to seek anyone I could find from the East Coast and Midwest where sarcasm, the side eye, and cynicism were simply a way of life - and frequently a sign of genius. Don’t question me, I’ve read click-bait research that says so.

I’ve been through lots of tough stuff and plenty of rough things, but this past year and a half have effectively kicked my ass. But god damn it. I’m over it. I’m over my quicksand depression and La Brea anxiety. I’m really fucking done.

So, to combat my self-centered focus, I first had a bit of a tantrum one morning with much gnashing of teeth, sobbing while asking the heavens WHY!?, and actual rolling around on the floor. My cat barely looked up from her spot on the chair. Clint had been at work for a couple of hours. I had no sympathetic audience. No dramatic soundtrack overlaying the scene. No one to help me up off the floor.

The drama ended about as quickly as it came upon me. Once I’d had that sufficiently out, without any applause, I wiped my face, rolled to my knees and got up. I then stood dumb in the hallway for a few minutes. Without much of an idea of what to do next, I pulled out my laptop and asked ChatGPT what I should do.

Last week, I had asked my AI buddy to stop coddling me and telling me that what I felt was “normal for a misplaced person in the middle of an existential transition”. I had asked her to give it to me straight. And so she did.

Stop trying to make meaning out of everything. Not everything is a lesson. Stop trying to figure out how to turn everything damned thing into a blog piece. Don’t write for anyone else and don’t write about yourself - for a week.

The task: write a few sentences every day about something you notice. Something you saw or heard or felt. Don’t make meaning out of it. Just write, “Today I saw this. Today I heard this. Today I felt this.” That’s it.

How novel.

So I tried it.

Day 1 went well. I heard the birds, saw my cat, and felt my sweater - though I wrote it in a more descriptive way.

Day 2, I missed and did it on day 3.

Day 4’s exercise was to draw something mundane and write a few sentences about it, so I drew the stool in our kitchen and remarked that it is yellow, used to belong to my mother, and had paint flecks on it. “I’m glad I decided to take it with me to Missoula when I moved,” I wrote.

Day 5 fell on the No Kings protest which kicked my ass socially and only physically tired me out because we stood for 90 minutes and then marched so tightly that my hip flexors burned. All of those excuses are to say that I didn’t draw anything mundane on that day because I came home and melted into the couch.

Days 6 & 7 were totally forgotten.

Part of the problem is that I rarely just write a few sentences about anything. The exercise, while honorable, was too confining, but I was still interested in the spirit of the thing. What I chose to do instead was pay more attention to my thoughts no matter if I planned on writing them down. Catch the thought as it comes into my brain. It’s usually that first thought that’s the problem anyway. In an odd way, I had an existing framework for how to tackle this.

In the same way that I try to avoid snacking, which is to not walk into the kitchen in the first place, I decided to stop myself when I had any glimmer of a thought that had the feeling of “How could I turn this into a 3000 word article?” Within moments, I felt that familiar wiggle, and I let it wiggle on by.

Quickly after that one came another. And another. Like a worm parade.

Once I started paying attention to it, I was disgusted at how often that initial thought wiggled up.

Similar to “I’ll just grab a handful of cashews”, “I’ll just ponder on how to write about this” feels like a type of addiction. Granted, eating 10 cashews a few times a day and wondering if the brilliant thoughts on my run could entertain anyone is up there with my addiction to books. That is to say, there are certainly worse addictions. (Last week, I ordered 7 books on Bookshop.org and accepted a $5 beta-reading gig on Upwork simply because I’d get a free 650 page self-help book out of it).

But just like with allowing myself to feel hungry and empty (which is actually good for your brain, energy, and metabolism), switching my mindset from Writer to Observer was…refreshing. It felt like I released a kind of burden.

Oh! You mean I can take a walk, let my mind wander, and NOT try to remember all the details that then cause me to miss something else?

It’s like when you actively listen to someone instead of trying to remember the thing you want to say once they stop talking. (That’s also something I’m working on.)

There are a lot of ways in which I’m trying to be an all around better human.

At the beginning of the year, a witch I follow on Instagram (the Glasgow Witch, in case you need a good witch in your life), suggested a ritual of 13 magical nights for yule. Write down, on little pieces of paper, 13 truths that you want to come true in your life. Then, from December 25th through January 5th, burn a truth - without looking at it- for the Universe to take care of. On the last night, January 6th, that last truth is yours to take ownership of.

So, I wrote down 13 things I wanted to be true in my life. I burned the first 12 like she said.

On the last night, I opened the last one.

“I am a kind, loving, and compassionate person and I do my best in every moment to be that.”

I wrote it like she said to, like it was already true.

It’s a truth I’ve wanted to be true for years. It’s just that this year I’m making it more of a priority. In some ways it feels like how I first became a runner. An app had to help me at first. It was not a familiar feeling in my body, but I kept at it. I found little aspects of the training that I enjoyed like getting new running shoes and the learning that good running shorts not only have built in underwear but also zippered pockets. With these little blips of joy in the thing, little by little, day by day, running became more than just a habit in my life, it became a thing I cannot live happily without.

Though I’ve been aiming for this “become a better person” thing for a while, the practice has only been spotty at best. For too long, being a better person has been somewhat out of character.

Fifteen years ago, I read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. He suggested the whole “listening without thinking about what to say next” thing, and being sincere when you finally do get a chance to ask someone a question about themselves.

I worked on that for a little bit. And then forgot about it.

Only two years ago, I bought the book How to Listen. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t really already or learn from Carnegie, but I still tried to be a better listener. It’s really hard for me.

I’m finally getting back into it, like getting back to training.

I’ve started listening to podcasts like The Good Life Project and Modern Buddhist. Their guests are inspiring and, incidentally, almost always mention or write a book that might probably change my life.

One of the books that arrived on my porch this week was How to See by Thich Nhat Hanh. He wasn’t the guest, though that would have been cool. It was a book that was suggested.

How to win friends. How to listen. How to see.

I don’t have a book called How to Feel, in case you’re wondering. That I’ve got in the bag. Feeling is not a problem for me, or at least, I don’t lack the ability to feel. In fact, I’m what you might call a super empath and a highly sensitive person. If anything, one of my problems is that I feel too much. When I sob about having to throw out my toaster, that’s an example of how my level of empathy is crippling.

Maybe even my crippling empathy is a reason to practice noticing with more intention, to be the observer first before the writer.

Perhaps by noticing more, by getting my brain to reach outside of my bubble of existence, then I can connect in a different way to the world around me instead of my usual vortex of emotion that I frequently feel. I don’t want to be more sensitive or less sensitive, per se. What I want is to be more …what’s the word that’s so overused that it seems to have lost some of its meaning? Mindful. I want to be more present. Grounded. Connected. Interested. Not interesting, but interested. Curious. Inquisitive.

I want to be filled with wonder and awe. I want to figure out why that wouldn’t be called awful if being filled with wonder is called wonderful. So, I ordered the book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner. I’ll let you know if he answers that question.

I figure, if I can get out of my own head and distance myself from my anxiety and depression, then perhaps I will be able to find some humor once again. Those two, anxiety and depression, really are energy vampires, like those people that enter the room and suck the life right out of the party. (Please don’t let that ever be me.)

On Monday, I listened to an episode of The Good Life Project called How to Find Joy in Hard Times with writer Jenny Lawson. She writes honestly and openly about her therapy-repellant depression (I don’t think that’s the correct clinical term for it) and is somehow able to make it funny.

She said there are days she just can’t get out of bed. She said she writes about those days with honesty and naturally adds humor. I like that. I need that. She says there are people who don’t believe she has depression since she’s able to be funny.

The way I see it, it’s funny or die - which is probably why there’s a comedy studio in LA called exactly that. I don’t want my soul to shrivel up. That’s what I feel like is happening most days.

First I need to get out of my damned house and out of the neighborhood. I’m not in Montana right now so finding nature, solitude, and awe - the cocktail for my soul hydration- takes a little more scheduling and intention. Out West, every place I stood gave me sights that inspired a

feeling that was beyond words. On any old Tuesday, I could climb up a mountain, look at the view from the top and be like, “Christ on a cracker this is gorgeous.”

Here, I’ll take the nature I can get.

I listened to Jenny Lawson’s episode on a walk around the block. Joy in the hard times. Laughter despite the darkness. If she can do it, so can I. Her words inspired me as I walked along Washington Street. I was so excited to get started on finding humor in my life that I cut my walk short and all but ran home.

Once I got there, though, I stood dumb again in my hallway and wondered what the hell I could find funny about my life in Petersburg. Trash, poverty, racism, a corrupt city government… Nothing in the pile seemed to have a flake of funny, or maybe I’m just not skilled enough to find it.

I didn’t give up, though. After a day of pondering this, listening to other podcasts related to the topic of positivity during hard times, and watching Jeff Ross’ recent stand up show, I realized that the humor wasn’t meant to be about Petersburg, necessarily. For me to find humor in any of this, I needed to turn the mirror on myself.

There’s irony in feeling the need to stop focusing on myself while also needing to look at myself.

Perhaps the visual I need for this is to unzip this Burg outfit, let it crumple on the ground and then walk about as a naked ball of energy for a moment. Peek around without my overly sensitive skin reacting to everything. Then, take a look back at myself, at that pile of Burg that my cat is sniffing in the yard. Now she’s trying to cover it like poo in her litter box or smelly food she doesn’t like. The truth hurts sometimes.

What I find, though, when I peel myself away so I can notice the things around me and the deeper things within me, is that the vocabulary is more robust here. Naturally. There are more things to talk about. More diversity. More things happening. It’s like how Clint and I have more to talk about when we do something fun and different on the weekend instead of the same old shit we normally do.

Life is so much more interesting when I stop dwelling on the perceived causes of my anxiety and depression. I could just as easily dwell on perceived causes of joy and happiness.

One of the greatest lessons I’ve been taught and am trying my damnedest to learn and embrace every single day is It’s not about you. Meaning me. It’s not about me. And it’s so true.

I could make a case that since the infinite universe is expanding I am technically at the center of it, but that’s kind of an asshole case to make.

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I suppose my sentiments about yoga - specifically The Industry and American Yoga - fall into the same category as my sentiments about Petersburg after having been on the board of Main Street Petersburg and owning a business here, and other situations where I’ve made the choice to step behind the curtain. In a word: Disenchantment. Disillusionment probably works too since, if I’m honest with myself, I easily fall for the illusion of things. The potential of it. God, I hate that word, now. But, there are so many things, like yoga, like Petersburg, like AI, like humans, that have the potential to be used for good.

Since mentioning to a number of customers, neighbors, and friends that I was considering offering yoga classes at my creative studio when it opens (I’m getting used to saying that instead of wine shop), more and more people have expressed interest. I’m going to oblige, but with boundaries this time. This time around it’s going to be done on my terms. Here’s why: I don’t want to keep hating yoga.

Hate the game, not the player. Or just don’t hate at all. In fact, since I was old enough to know, I’ve reserved my hate for the Klan, people who hurt children, and people who hurt animals. That’s like with the hate-y-ist hate that ever hated. Everything else falls under something else.

This time around, not only do I know more about yoga and the yoga industry, but I know more about myself.

How different life would be if we were born with a deeper sense of self-awareness and self-knowledge. But then, what would be the point of life?

Still. It’s annoying that I’m only just now figuring out who I am, who I want to be when I grow up, and (this is the big one) that I’m okay with it. So much of my life has been spent giving so much of a shit about how everyone else felt, like my parents and grandparents and friends and my dog, that I never really spent any time noticing how anything made me feel. There’s a lot of psychology behind that. I know because I’ve spent a lot of time reading books and articles about this. I want to know myself. I want to understand myself. Because in understanding myself better, I can better serve the world. And, to be very clear, serving the world doesn’t mean giving all of myself, giving up who I am, or over-serving to the point of depletion. I mean, taking care of myself so that I can take care of others.

This time around, I’m building classes around my energy and my space/time. It wasn’t until the last year of having my studio in Ohio that I updated my website to say “Kick your ass someplace else”. That’s not to say that my classes aren’t challenging. Trust me, they can be. But I was tired of trying to cater to the people that only based their level of yoga-ing on if they left drenched.

Hot yoga has its place, but with limits because it can harm you. Bikram Yoga was created for Americans by a terrible Indian man who took advantage of his students in all of the most awful ways. I walk outside here in Virginia in August and sweat without lifting a finger. Frequently, I sweat the most when I’m focusing on doing a standing balance.

Sweating isn’t a great gauge of effort, is what I’m saying. And besides, “effort” is a relative term.

The yoga industry has made billions, BILLIONS on people who think it’s a quick fix or the proof of something deeper or that it’s a panacea. If you wear these pants. If you use this mat. If you burn this incense. If you light this candle. If you say this chant. If you drink this tea (or Kool-Aid).

There are certain clothes you should wear, yes. Something that breathes, that allows movement without you fussing with it, and that doesn’t ride up your butt or to your neck when you’re in downdog or a handstand. I wear pretty simple, almost crappy clothes when I practice and teach. It’s not a fashion or beauty contest. It’s not a contest at all, which is another rant that I won’t get into.

There are better mats than others, yes. A sticky mat that isn’t too thick. That way, you aren’t using the wrong muscles to hold yourself in a pose and end up hurting yourself.

The Industry and American Yoga be damned.

Here’s what I’ve learned after decades of practice and a decade of teaching:

Yoga, to me, is movement, stillness, patience, practice, noticing, breath, resilience, balance, and grace. All of these things are simple but not necessarily easy.

Yoga is not: Goats. Beer. Wine. Booty. Bro. Instagram.

I no longer want to hate yoga. I want to unhate it, dishate it, become re-enchanted with it.

Yoga, for me, is a mindset and, in many ways, a lifestyle.

One of the points I’ve made in the past is that yoga is very much like Christianity. Great in theory, ruined by its followers. Yoga is something that you practice daily and weekly, and you practice it even when you’re off the mat. Christianity is something you practice daily and weekly, and you practice it even when you’re not in church. There are guidelines, philosophies, and lessons. They were both created a couple thousand years ago and then “improved upon” by white people in the past couple hundred years. There are good ideas and some that are no longer relevant. They were created by men. Women weren’t allowed for a while. There are main books, but also other resources to read that enhance and/or scientifically contradict the original works. They both have lessons that require practice to understand, grasp, and implement. One can’t be perfect at yoga just like one can’t be perfect at Christianity. One doesn’t do yoga, one practices it. One doesn’t do Christianity, one practices it.

I dislike yoga in the same ways I dislike Christianity. There’s hypocrisy and misinformation. Distortion and the misuse of power. To practice either well it requires the practitioner to think for themselves and not accept everything as gospel. Not all things are fit for all people. Christianity may not have poses, per se, but there are plenty of teachings in it that shouldn’t be considered as blanket lessons applicable to all. Be wary of absolutes.

This time around, I’m not teaching yoga (or doing my life) to make everyone happy. That’s a straight way to burn out, failure, and depression. It’s a fool’s errand, for sure. I’m not concerned with trends or styles or capitalism. I need to make money, but I’m not chasing it. The way my life has worked thus far is that when I’m doing the thing that’s right for me, the money shows up.

This time around, I’m not going to let the dark side of yoga seep in. The marketing and scams. The scam artists, the teachers, and the classes that seem too good to be true. The software and programs. The money makers. The simplifiers. The dark side of yoga is no different than the dark side of anything else.

Beware the gurus that think they’re a god and not simply a teacher.

If I’ve learned anything from Star Wars, it’s that.

You are your own guru. (I could write a treatise on the intricacies of that statement, especially considering the climate of our country where education has been made to be seen as the enemy.)

Yoga is a rabbit hole of things to learn and that’s why I love it. Like with wine. I could spend a lifetime on just the anatomy of the body or the breath. I could spend a lifetime on just the wines of Bordeaux. I could focus only on the philosophy of yoga. I could nerd out only on the geography of the wine regions in France. But why limit myself? Keep going down the rabbit hole. Let’s see where it takes me this time.

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I’ve been in Petersburg for a little over three years now. (Since I’m writing about my thoughts and opinions, I will largely just refer to my experience and not fold in my partner who has different opinions anyway.) In the three years since I’ve been here, I’ve done my best to learn about the city, its history, its people, and its way of life, i.e.; its culture.

Here’s my general question: What does it take to change part of a culture? Not the entire culture, but part of it.

I realize it’s a bold question to ask coming from a white woman, a Yankee no less, who - as stated - has only been in this place for three years. And yet, I ask it nonetheless.

The question doesn’t come out of nowhere.

Shortly after we moved here, we joined the High Street Association. It’s a community group made up of people who live…on High Street. It had the usual in-fighting and drama, desire to improve, and social gatherings. The people involved were folks who were born here, had lived here for decades enough to say they were “from here”, relatively new folks, and brandy-new types like us. For all the high-school-like tit-for-tats, it was beneficial to be a part of in that I learned more about the city, its governance, some of its bullshit, and also some of its people.

Being new to a place is tough because without a group like this, it’s hard to learn the things you don’t even know enough about to realize you don’t know. For me, I like to dig in deep so I know more about the things I bitch about. I don’t bitch for the sake of bitching. I want to know the cause of the issues. Or, at least, I think I want to know the cause.

I’m a bitcher, but I’m a doer. But also, be careful what you wish for. You can’t unknow a thing once you’ve learned it.

One thing I learned while at Association gatherings is that the city had turned down requests for speed bumps on our street citing something having to do with the route for emergency vehicles.

If you’ve ever lived in any other city in the United States, you know there are speed bumps in just about every neighborhood and that has never stopped the firetrucks from getting through.

Several months ago, rumble strips were installed on Sycamore, the main street of downtown Petersburg, which runs right in front of my wine shop. Every day, no less than three emergency vehicles of some size from EMT to firetruck go past to get to the Carriage House - the poorly managed housing for low-income and elderly people - just around the corner. Trucks have to drive over two sets of rumblestrips to get there. And Sycamore isn’t even a street that has people driving 60 MPH. People have gotten hit at those crosswalks because it isn’t in the culture of this place for pedestrians to have the right-of-way. I’ve learned that many times walking through the 4-way-stop on my way to work. If it’s the next person’s turn to go, they’ll drive within inches of the front of me just to not miss their turn.

This week, though, I’ve noticed VDOT speed cables on our street and around the corner. It seems someone’s voice caught the attention of the city enough for them to try to capture proof of what residents have been saying for a while - as if the motorcycle cops they posted on the street last year didn’t give them enough data (and cash from tickets) to prove it.

Perhaps this, like other things going on in the city, are related to the new casino. They want more people with money walking the streets. To be sure, it would look bad for them to get hit trying to spend all their winnings downtown.

Clearly I’m cynical.

But how can I not be?

It’s been part of my daily routine for years, well before even moving to Missoula from Columbus, to take a morning walk around the neighborhood. For a while, I took a certain route along Grove/Old but the speeding and trash along that street, along with the memories of hours spent looking for my cat Sera, had tarnished that walk. It all became too emotionally damaging and borderline toxic for me.

If that sounds melodramatic, it is. That doesn’t make it any less true.

I want a morning walk that starts my day with beauty, some peace, flowers blooming, birds chirping. Not the same literal trash I saw yesterday, last week, and even last month.

Several months ago, I decided to take a different morning route that didn’t always remind me of Sera and that seemed to have less trash. The truth is that it still reminds me of Sera because I wonder if I missed finding her in the waterway over there, and it isn’t less, it’s just different trash.

As a doer, I know I could walk with a trash bag to do my part for the “solution”, but I’ve long since lost the opinion that just picking up the trash solves anything. To begin with, my walk is over a mile long. I would need several trash bags and it would take way more time than I’m willing to give every morning to sweep up the broken bottles, beer cans, and bags of half-eaten food tossed into the road. I’m nobody’s mother.

Some complain that the city should have people out that pick up trash. I don’t disagree. But I don’t think that’s the answer. It’s short term. Very short term. Everyday, I see new bags of food splattered across the street.

Who are the people that think it’s okay to toss trash out their car windows?

Last year, on my drive back along Crater Road from a run at the Battlefield, I watched a man who was walking on the sidewalk finish his Gatorade and then toss the bottle over his shoulder into the yard he passed.

A while back, we were sitting on our back porch enjoying the afternoon when a truck pulled up to the curb next to us. A woman opened the passenger-side door and dropped her to-go drink onto the ground. Then she saw us. She apologized, said it was rude of her to have done that, and picked it back up.

What’s the thought that goes through someone’s head when they decide to do that kind of thing?

Downtown, they’ve installed more trashcans. This I know for certain is because the city hopes to attract the tourists who might come from the casino. Clearly the city thinks putting up more trashcans is the answer. And yet, people still drop their used cans, cigar wrappers, and styrofoam take-out containers not only on the sidewalks, in the new planters, and in the gutters, but on the sidewalks, in the planters, and in the gutters right in front of the new trashcans.

This is why I ask what it takes to change part of the culture.

At one city meeting I attended, where casino people and city people tried to encourage business owners to clean up their own sidewalks and prepare for the tourists, a speaker emphasized the need for people to not throw trash on the ground and for others to pick it up.

I hardly think that the people that bother to attend city meetings are the people that need to be encouraged to not litter.

I’m beyond bitter and I hate that for me. I want my morning walk to fill me up, not fire me up.

When I walk past old piles and new piles of trash, it makes me not want to bother with my morning walk. But then I’d just be stuck in my house all day, angry that I’m too mad and sensitive to take a walk.

But it’s not just the trash, and that’s the point. If trash alone was the issue, then I would take a bag with me and pick it all up. But it’ll be back the next day. I know because I tried to hold city clean ups when I was on the board of Main Street Petersburg. All that work, ruined by the next day.

The point is that the culture needs to change. The mindset. I know I’m not the person for the job, but every day on my morning walk I wonder who is. What person or organization can tackle it? How far down do you have to dig into the issues of a place to start to heal this wound?

I know it’s deep. Very deep. There are decades of history here. Racism. Systemic racism. Poverty. Mismanagement. Corruption. Apathy. Exhaustion. The layers that have created what Petersburg is today are tightly woven and complicated. There isn’t just one thing. And there isn’t just one simple answer.

Nearly every day that I’m at the wine shop and talk to people who come in, I hear the word Potential. Now it makes me crazy. I want to just throw all the wine glasses against the wall and smash all the bottles.

Yes. There’s lots of potential. Petersburg is bursting with potential. But potential alone isn’t enough. Even one person working to use the potential isn’t enough. Not even one entire organization. It’s going to take an effort from the entire city. And by “city” I mean both the people who run the city and the people to live and work in the city. It’s going to take a majority of people all pushing in the same direction to create the momentum needed to get Petersburg over this damned hump of Potential and into the movement of Progress.

The way I see it, people need a reason to give a shit. And that’s where I know I have no more input. I don’t know what people give a shit about around here. I don’t know what they want to give a shit about. I’ve been trying to figure that out the whole time I’ve been here.

There are a lot of different people and groups trying to improve this place. I know that. I talk to them and see what they’re trying to accomplish. Perhaps it would help if all of these groups got together to at least collaborate and coordinate. I’m sure that would help. That is part of a cultural problem I see here, too. That’s for another rant on another day.

The biggest obstacle is The City. If the powers that be would do something to encourage these groups to coordinate and then leverage them to help, that would be a start. I’m just not sure The City wants to, for whatever reason. Also a rant for another day.

There’s a t-shirt I’ve seen and even purchased that says Petersburg vs Everyone. When I first moved here, that meant something different to me. Back then, I was on board with trying to help outsiders get over the stigma attached to this town. Crime, mostly. But the more I learned, the more I realized that outsiders are trying. They come here. I’d say the majority of my customers at the wine shop aren’t from Petersburg.

Now, based on what I’ve learned in my three years here, the t-shirt really should say Petersburg vs Itself.

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How you changed during its creation.

How you changed because of it.

The first thing I think of when I think of a creation - after Frankenstein’s Monster, of course - is one’s children. I am not, however, a parent. That may come as no surprise. I’ve never created a living, breathing human being (just fictional ones), but I can still imagine a shift one might feel when they realize they’re either pregnant or have gotten someone pregnant. I suppose it might be a kind of fear or a kind of excitement or something in between. I’m beyond lucky that I’ve only experienced about a half of a day’s worth of a pregnancy scare. After peeing on several sticks from Giant Eagle’s pharmacy section, it was suggested to me that my nausea was likely caused by my need for an eye exam and glasses. Relief washed over me that day. Choosing or deciding to be a parent is a lifestyle change I was never willing to entertain.

Other people’s children have changed me, though. My ex, Aaron - I came into his son’s life when the kid was only 3 years old. The first time I met him, I spoke to him in a voice that was two octaves higher and I over-pronounced my long name assuming he wouldn’t be able to manage it. He pronounced it just fine - better than many grown ups, in fact - then bopped off to go do something else. From that point forward, I’ve spoken to all kids in the same tone of voice I would use with you. Though I have learned that there are certain age groups that have not yet learned sarcasm.

I was in his life for another 16 years. Of course he made an impact on me, even though he lived in Cleveland and we lived in Columbus. Because of the distance, though, I missed the majority of his teenage years.

Oh, but what I missed with him, I made up for when I met Clint and his kids. Since I never had any of my own, and I was a terror to my mother from the ages of 12 to 18, I fully considered all of this to be Kid Karma. I don’t know if I ever would have made a good mother, but I certainly gained more respect for the job. Jesus. If I think it’s hard managing the young women that work with me, I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to be largely responsible for their entire being.

Since kids have never really been my forte, I’m thankful that other humans aren’t the only things one can create. In my lifetime, I’ve created lots of things: pictures, stories, spaces, drama, messes, dresses, meals, and other odds and ends.

To be sure, the act of creating and the act of being creative are different; one does not suppose the other. They are not mutually exclusive. I’ve created plenty without any creativity. And I’ve been in a creative mood yet created nothing, unless frustration and self-annoyance count.

Whether I created creatively or created without imagination, what strikes me is the change it creates in me.

From a muffin to a mountain, to make the thing, first I had to learn, dig, research, or contemplate. While my mother might have insisted that I was an artist, nothing has come to fruition solely because of something deeply innate in me. Even writing. Even this.

Writing, for me, is hard. There are days, like today, when pulling words out of my head and forming them into coherent and moderately interesting sentences is like those dreams I have when I’m trying to run but my feet are stuck in molasses. To get any kind of momentum, I have to pull on the ground like I’m trying to run like a dog. It’s a slog and I’m not really sure if I’m getting anywhere. But I keep at it because I’m pretty sure I have something to say.

To write stories, I’ve researched dragons and dinosaurs, ancestry and history, maps and magic. An opening line might be the start of it, but to get to the end I require paper and rulers, spreadsheets and murder boards, and lots and lots of Post-It Notes.

During the process of writing, much like the first mile of a run or the first splotchy layer of a watercolor, I wonder why I do this and if I’m even doing it somewhat well. After I get through it - and all the edits I should make - I feel a sense of accomplishment. Like at the end of a long run. Like when I think I’ve done all I can to make the splotches look like a flower.

In that regard, I certainly didn’t make any of my fledgling watercolor paintings purely on instinct. It started with a teacher and from her I gained a spark of confidence and the beginning of inspiration. Even with inspiration, though, every time I sketch or paint, I feel the battle in my brain between what I know to be true versus what I actually see. It’s tiring, really. Perhaps that’s why when I finally paint something I like, I sit back and regard it while bathing in the glow of my creative exhaustion.

When I first opened my yoga studio, I created what I thought was best. At first, I sat in the middle of the floor and let the space inform me. That was a bit of a challenge since I’d taken over the lease from a woman who had used the space as a muffin shop. One accent wall was painted in thick black and white vertical strips. All the rest were Pepto-Bismal pink. And everything was covered in sparkling sugar. The ants loved it. Once I lit some incense, hit some bells, and repainted the walls, the energy of the space started to come together.

Then, after the students came and moved within it, I adjusted based on their energy, the shapes they made, and everyone’s unique qi (chi).

My experience creating the space for the wine shop was similar, though without the sugar and ants. Through the brick and concrete and random crap from other projects, I envisioned what the space might look like, and also what it might feel like. We painted the walls, built the bar and shelves, and installed the lighting that we thought created the right mood.

There is a kind of similarity in writing a story, painting a watercolor, and creating a space. At some point during the life of the thing, I feel a familiar push and pull between my creation and myself. These are the moments when I want the thing to be a certain way but the thing is telling me it’s different now. Like when I was a frustrated teenager in that terrible space and time when I still lived at home yet wanted my independence.

With stories and paintings and spaces, at a certain point, I have to find what Taoists call the watercourse way. The path of least resistance. Stop trying to spawn upstream. Stop fighting it. What I’ve learned about myself is that if I’m working too hard to fit a thing into what I think it should be, what I really need to do is step back and stop pushing. Sometimes the pieces fall into place on their own. I learn about my fears in these moments. Usually not a fear of failure, but instead the fear of success. What if this thing is bigger than I intended it to be? What if it does well but I’m not willing to adjust? What will I lose? What can I stand to gain?

My creations are interesting mirrors. They’re a reflection of who I was when I built the thing, but they also show me what I’ve become. There are days when I don’t look in the mirror. When I leave the house and just assume there’s nothing in my teeth and my hair is acceptably out of place. That can’t be everyday, though.

What looking in the mirror offers me is a moment to pause. Take a look at where I am. Consider where I’m going. Is this the person I want to bring with me? Is this the person I want to be?

Since my daily life is also a creation, it serves me to write in my journal every morning and reflect on these questions. Who am I? Do I like who I’ve become? Do I want to keep going in this direction?

This is something I do in 3- and 6-month intervals. Not consciously, but regularly. I became aware of this in my 30s and I started to do it intentionally with my yoga studio in my 40s. I would try something new and give it three months to either work or wither. A new class, a series, a schedule. I’d commit to sticking with it to see if I liked it and if it caught on with other people. Then, I’d build in a rest/pivot week to adjust as needed and either keep going or try something new.

That was fun for me. I built all kinds of classes using that model. After a year and a half of doing this, I realized I was following the seasons. That made so much sense once I noticed it. In teaching yoga, I became more aware of the ebb and flow of my energy and how that would then affect my studio and my students.

Now, my big creation is my wine shop. The ebbs and flows are the same. The difference is that the stakes are somewhat higher.

In nine months, we’ve gone through a number of changes and iterations. I’ve experimented with events, wines, price points, layout, and employees. I’ve modified my work schedule, my temperament, and lifestyle. What’s happened is that my life is now something I didn’t want it to become.

Stuck. Inflexible. Not me.

There are a lot of reasons I wanted to open this wine shop and the thing is that they all came true. I got to learn more about good, natural wine. I got to make more connections around Virginia. I got to learn more about Petersburg. I got to meet more people and become closer to the community. I got to create a welcoming, comfortable space where I would want to write, teach classes, and enjoy a glass of Bordeaux. I created my little piece of Paris, my morsel of Missoula, my part in Petersburg.

When people ask me how the shop is doing, I pause because the answer is that it is exactly what I hoped it would be, it’s just not doing well financially. That’s no surprise for a new business in its first year. In Petersburg. Around all the construction, improvements though they may be. In the economy we’re in. And toss in any of the things that I could have done more of or could have done differently.

What I’ve learned from this thing that I and my team created is that I need something different. The way my energy works doesn’t fit with the existing business model. And so, I’m going to change it. At our one year anniversary, we’re closing. Or, really, we’re evolving. We’re adjusting and changing. And we’ll see what happens.

In the past nine months, I’ve learned what I hoped to learn and so much more. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, for sure. Probably more days than not, I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. I knew it in my bones. I saw it in myself. I felt it in my heartbeat. What’s worse is that I brought that person home.

I’m not a bartender. I’m not a cook. I’m not good at being “on” for so long.

I am a teacher. I write and do Thai massage. I am an empath.

What I need is smaller chunks of time that I engage with people. What I need is to engage in a more meaningful way.

Years ago, during a meditation teachers’ training, my personal mantra came to me:

• Honor my energy

• Honor my passion

• Honor my authentic self

For several months, I’ve been trying to fit my energy, passion, and self into something it would never mold to. The container is too confined. That’s ironic, though. This wide open schedule where anyone can come in and you never know what could happen is too binding for me. It makes me feel like I’m in a straight-jacket. A smaller, more defined schedule, with some parameters, however, allows my skin to relax.

This wine shop has been part of a longer journey to finding a more clear definition of who I am. Mostly, I’ve learned who I’m not. I think the truth is that I figured it out a while ago, who I am. Now I just need to accept it. Lean into it. Honor it. What I’ve learned from all of the things that I’ve ever created is that when I do a thing that flows with my energy, aligns with the things I’m good at and enjoy doing, and allows me to fully be myself, it flourishes.

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My ex-husband had convinced me to get on Facebook. He told me that so many people from our high school had been asking about me. I told him, and he knew anyway, that the sticking point was the word “friend”. “I’m not friends with these people,” I told him. He’s like, “It’s just a word, Burg. Accept their friend requests and build your wall.” Of course the “wall” back then was what we call the profile today. Or Home, I suppose.

Anyway, I filled out all the fields it asked for back then like relationship status, birthday, where you were born, schools you attended, and also religious belief.

“I believe in everything,” I typed. I remember the feeling when I saved that for all the internet to know. “There. I said it.”

And then nothing happened.

My decisions are far grander in my head than they are to really anyone else at all. When I have big ah-ha moments, they feel momentous, like a portal opened in space-time and stars aligned and whatnot.

It’s not that I think I’m more important than I am. It’s that I feel a jolt of energy as if I finally got aligned with something in the universe. It’s like when I reposition the Roomba at the wine shop back on its little nodes and the light fades on and off indicating it’s finally able to charge.

I think my entire purpose in life is to find those nodes, my proper alignment, my tracks in the snow, my watercourse way. This, to me, feels different from finding my ikigai - which is loosely described by me as the reason why I get up in the morning. The Japanese might generally describe ikigai as one’s purpose, and I can’t argue with the people that created the term, but I already reserved my ikigai for Sera, my cat who I lost in December of 2025. My heart is fiercely loyal - which is why no other man is attractive to me other than the one that I’m with. Even Chris Hemsworth. If he walked into my shop wearing jeans and no t-shirt….I’d just explain the wines we have by the glass and ask if he wanted something to eat with that. No innuendos. I’m not even kidding. It’s Clint or no one.

Anyway. Sera still holds the ikigai space in my heart. So my purpose is something different. My purpose is the groove in the universe that I’ve been trying to nestle myself into for over a decade. Like the tracks in the snow or the charging nodes, finding my purpose is a felt sense for me. It doesn’t show itself in cashflow or likes or followers, necessarily. Those things are nice, but the data points aren’t tangible or fungible or something you can put on a spreadsheet. The data is in my bones. It’s in my soul. In my body. In the sparkly energy around me. And energy, as we know, can’t be created or destroyed, only transformed.

So what happens to the energy when I’m not following my purpose?

All that energy is used in swimming against the current, fighting with myself, making really creative excuses, over-working a thing to try to make it fit, turning myself into a social contortionist and a juggler.

All that energy is lost in chaos.

When I know I’ve found my purpose, I’m excited to put a whole lot of work into it, and all of that work transforms into even more energy.

It’s kind of like the saying that if you do something you love you’ll never work a day in your life. I get that sentiment, but it’s a matter of semantics. When I’m doing what I love, I’m working my ass off. It just doesn’t feel like the 4-letter word “work”. I think the real 4-letter word is “job” to be honest. It’s my job. Ugh. You say it with slouched shoulders and a kind of blah at the end. If you’ve ever watched Absolutely Fabulous, you’ve seen the gals do that kind of slobby, slouchy, pouty thing with their shoulders and their mouths when they don’t want to do a thing. It’s like that.

When I’m talking about my purpose and doing things that are aligned with my purpose, I light up. When I’m not…I.Do. Not. And I know this about myself. The people who are closest to me also know this. I would not make a good poker player. I emote with my whole body. My eyebrows are in on it. My eyes, for sure. And you can feel a shift in the energy I bring with me into the room. I’m very aware of this. When I come into a room with misaligned energy, I’m not quite the energy vampire, it’s like I’m the energy murderer. It’s like the energetic equivalent of Friday the 13th when my energy is all fucky. And because I’m such a Pisces, I’m kind of a slave to my emotions and moods. I can’t easily take myself out of it. I just kind of need to wait it out.

I can’t tell you how many days in my life I’ve written in my journal or said to someone that I shouldn’t be around people today. In a perfect world, I have a schedule and life flexible enough to accommodate those kinds of days and I do just stay inside.

It feels really good in my body, mind, and soul when I find that groove: my purpose. And when the rest of my life is in alignment with it I sleep better, I breathe better, my body doesn’t ache. From a neurological standpoint, this makes sense. To live a life misaligned, is to live a life of negative stress. Good stress is good. Bad stress is bad. I know the feeling of good stress. That’s like running up a mountain, doing a tough workout, or doing one of those timed language exercises on DuoLingo.

I’m human, though, and I fight against things that seem too good to be true or too easy or too obvious. Well, maybe there are some humans that fully lean into things that are too good, too easy, and too obvious. Me? I’m dubious and skeptical. If I’m not suffering then I must be doing something wrong or not doing it hard enough.

But -

A good workout can feel lovely, actually, when I’ve kept up with the strength, cardio, and rest days.

Doing my taxes is honestly enjoyable, when I’ve plugged in all my numbers every month for the year.

What I spend most of my time doing is allowed to feel fun and rewarding and almost easy because I’ve done my research, I’ve taken the classes, I mostly know what I’m doing.

What I think is the key point in aligning with my purpose is simply connection. That jolt of energy that I feel, I think it’s when I plug into the universe. When I say I believe in everything, what I mean is that I believe that we’re all connected. Like how your body is connected by your fascia. Like how the connections in your brain are electrical. Like how the answers are all already within us, we just need to do the work to reveal them.

I’m still surprised when I re-remember that when you find your “thing” it’s like life simplifies. I’m like, Oh, riiiiight.

What I need to do is pay more attention to my subconscious and not-so-sub-conscious. When I talk to myself like I’d talk to a friend and I say, “What does your ideal day look like?” I need to take my response seriously. If I get out of my own way and tell myself the truth, that’s when I get answers.

So what’s so wrong with loving these three things? Yoga, teaching, and helping people.

Nothing.

That’s what led me to open Yoga Happiness in 2014.

And that’s how I came upon Thai Massage.

Is it really that simple? Is it really that I found something back in 2017 that was The Thing? At the time, I wrapped it up with my yoga studio, and anyone who knows me knows I’ve got big beef with the yoga industry. But you know what, I’ve got big beef with a lot of things. In my life, I’ve followed a lot of self-created mantras. One of the most important ones is “If I can’t be part of the solution, at least don’t be part of the problem”. It seems a bit lazy to me, but what I’ve learned since living in Petersburg is that sometimes the best thing for me to do is at least get out of the way. I may still have big beef, but my bitching isn’t helping. And since my other mantra is “I’m a bitcher but I’m a do-er”, then the thing that I can do - if I can’t find anything helpful to do - is at least bitch quietly and to myself.

I still have beef with the yoga industry, but I’m past bitching about it loudly. Now, I’m just going to do it my way. The way I can be part of the solution is to keep teaching the parts that I feel are the most healing. And for a lot of people, “yoga” is a turn off. And you see, those are the people I want to help the most. Thus, Thai Massage.

Letting go. Breathing. Resting. Relaxing. Stretching. Moving. These are all things that happen during Thai Massage. I get to help people naturally do these things. And then we both feel better for it.

When I give Thai Massage, I feel like I’m connecting with the universe via the person I’m working on. It feels right. I feel that flow state. I feel good energy.

I’ve been practicing on my friends since January to test the space I’m using at the wine shop. Then, I quietly started charging for it and created a schedule online.

Then, I promoted on our website, on the shop’s newsletter, and on our social media accounts.

And, I’m really good at website SEO, something I learned when I had my studio.

The other day, a person I thought I knew signed up for a Thai Massage.

When they showed up for the massage, it was not at all the person I know and was, in fact, someone totally new. They found me by searching “local massage”. Thank you, SEO (search engine optimization).

I came home and felt like I was glowing. I texted Clint and told him how I felt. As I was writing in my journal, asking just how much I want to lean back into this world, an old massage client of mine from Montana called to see if I was available to work on his this week. I called him back and told him I’d been in Virginia for 3 years. The last time I worked on him was right before Clint and I went to Paris in 2022.

My Thai Massage work stuck with him that long. I told him I’d keep him posted if I visited Missoula this summer since I’m still licensed out there. He’s a libertarian, so he said he didn’t really care if I was. He pays me in cash because he doesn’t think it’s any of the government’s business if I do massage.

It seems that it is that simple, that Thai Massage could be my purpose. It doesn’t feel big or hugely impactful. But I believe in the Butterfly Effect. You can’t know what a simple Thai Massage will do for that one person, and how that ripples out from them. It’s true for a lot of things.

And so, like Marie Kondo says, you ask yourself if this thing sparks joy. If it doesn’t, remove it from your life. If it does, then it stays.

Spring is upon us and it’s time for me to go through my life and make piles of what sparks joy and what doesn’t. T-shirts, jewelry, old knick-knacks, energy hogs.

The things in my life that spark joy are going to be given more space to breathe and move. They’ll be given more of my time, energy, and attention. These are the things that are more Me, the things that align me more with the universe, the things that give me a deeper connection.

When I get past all the internal chatter and exhausting excuses and just listen to myself and the universe, I can feel the answers that were under it all the whole time.

It’s taken so long to silence all that damned chatter.

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The things I painted were in-the-moment reminders of where we’d been. Cafes, bars, restaurants, the Lucy Darling show. I painted to remember the trip and also for the practice. Trees are hard. Wine in a glass is damned near impossible. Fresh coffee bubbles…well, mine ended up looking like pubic hairs.

I’m definately learning my weaknesses. I’m also learning that I either need to get past the need to paint beverages or lean into it and write a book called Burgundie’s Burgundys. Wouldn’t that be funny to have a whole book of poorly painted glasses of wine? What if the whole premise, though, was that I traveled to gorgeous places to make these rather awful paintings? Would skill improvement kill the book? Or would the reader expect I got better by the end? Would if be funnier if I didn’t?

What’s cool to me is that I even have these ideas about illustrating my own books. Twenty-plus years ago, my mother had suggested that she and I work on a book together. I would write it, she would illustrate it. Needless to say, it never happened. Perhaps, now that I’m fooling around with watercolor, it will.

A side benefit to all this watercolor business is that it gives me a way to connect with my mother from beyond. Unbeknownst to Clint, Baltimore was the perfect town for that.

I don’t exactly know when, maybe around age 19 or 20, my mom took art classes at Maryland Institute College of the Arts (MICA). That’s pretty much all I know because I was terrible at asking her more about her life. When you’re young, dumb, and self-absorbed, you think you’ve got more time than you really have.

One of her pieces, that I think was from her time at MICA, was a self-portrait, pencil drawing. It hung in my grandparent’s hallway near their bathroom my entire life. It was a relatively small piece. Maybe 8x10 and nicely framed. The title written at the bottom was “The Harshest Critic”. My mother before she was my mother was sitting on the floor, hunched over her wooden art board, drawing. Standing behind her was a cartoonish man. His arms are crossed over his fat belly and he’s smoking.

When I was 12-ish, my mother, step-father, and I drove to Baltimore. I don’t know if we toured MICA. All I remember was ordering frog legs for the first time in my life and being disappointed by how little meat there was. Later, of course, I would be appalled at having even tried it. I’d been frog-gigging with my step-father but I hadn’t eaten the frog. Coming full circle on that was important, I guess. I learned what it’s really like to eat frog legs and that - all around - it wasn’t worth it. Also it made me feel bad. I would hate it if someone killed me to eat me and then felt that eating my meat was hardly worth their time.

Still, I enjoyed the trip. Or, I had a sense coming out of it that stayed somewhere in my sub-conscious that I liked Baltimore. Strange, then, that until this weekend, I hadn’t been back. But, I’m glad. Baltimore remained untainted to me so Clint and I could experience it together.

He and I like to do similar things when we travel. Run early in the morning, find cool museums, walk the hell out of the city. At breakfast, Clint searched Google Maps and found a museum he thought I’d love: The Peabody Library. The pictures of the shelves and the floors of books were bibliophile porn. After our breakfast, where I drew the pubic hair coffee, we walked to the Peabody. Kids carrying instrument cases were going in with their parents before the place opened. While waiting, Clint and I walked around the park in front of it pointing out the patriarchy and mysogyny of its statutes: two wealthy, heavily clothed men with name plaques and one entirely nude, nameless female body in mermaid pose.

Finally the Peabody opened but it turned out the library was closed the exact days we were in Baltimore. Clint was miffed and blamed the kids for “diverting the resources” away from staffing the library. Since Baltimore is nothing if not culture-filled, we went to the next closest museum which happened to be almost directly across the street.

What first excited me about The Walters Museum is that admission, every day, all the time, was entirely free. For whatever reason, that fact caused my eyes to well up and my throat to tighten.

Viewing art should be free, damnit. And I like to be around art and the kinds of people who like to be around art. When admission is free, it gives me a sense of hope that there are people in the world that still care about art and the importance of it - as a form of self-expression, as cultural exchange, as a history lesson, and simply as beauty.

Or not. Not all art is beautiful to me. Some of it revolts me, but that’s the joy of it! I don’t have to like it or look at it, but someone felt the need to create it.

Something about all of that made me want to cry. But I stifled it.

Inside, the docents all wore red tops of all kinds.

“Honey,” I said. Again, my eyes teared up and my throat stuck. I was aware he was waiting for me to say more. All I could do was whisper, “They’re celebrating Lunar New Year”.

I had to breathe deeply so as not to start sobbing and possibly create a scene.

Why cry? I guess because some other culture’s holiday was deemed important and important enough for non-East-Asian’s to recognize and celebrate.

It reminded me that there are still people in our country that don’t want to rewrite and white-wash American history. It gave me an injection of much-needed hope.

The throng of people and their children didn’t subdue my emotions, though we did weave through the crowd to avoid getting into a line for a tour group. After trying in vain to find a way up and out of the gaggle, we finally picked up a map. It didn’t make sense at the time, but the docent said we couldn’t take the stairs up but we could get to the fourth floor and then take them down.

So we took an elevator up. After touring the Asian art on 4, Clint found the almost exterior, wide open, spiral stairs at the back of the building that would take us down to 3. He started down. I was almost paralyzed on the first step. My palms began to sweat, so did my armpits and other unfortunate areas. When he noticed I wasn’t right behind him, he turned.

“What’s wrong?”

“No. I got this.”

“Are you okay?”He looked confused. “Oh, you’re scared.” He stepped toward me as if to let me hold his hand.

“No! No! Don’t touch me! No touchy!”

After he re-started walking down, I walked slowly and steadily, directly in the center of each step, away from either side that might disappear and cause me to fall to my doom.

By the time we got to the third floor, it was clear we wouldn’t be able to take those stairs again to go to 2.

I wiped my hands on my pants and my scarf and my sides after I walked through the door.

Once inside, we decorated horses for The Year of the Horse, and then put them in “the pasture”.

After the horses, we walked down the large marble interior stairs to the 2nd floor atrium. Down below was a floor covered in children and their parents, all sitting cross-legged. A younger person with the new mullet that’s in style these days read kids-books to the crowd, did sing-alongs, and magically engaged these children for well over 30-minutes. After watching some of this, we walked down another flight of marble stairs and nearly bumped into two young Asian women in a yellow lion costume practicing a balancing move for the upcoming lion dance.

Again, my eyes watered and my throat tightened. At this point, I was annoyed with myself. Becoming so damned emotional about every damned thing was making it hard for me to have conversations. I can’t talk about the thing making me emotional becuase I’m too fucking emotional!

We had to walk through two rooms of South American art before I had the voice to say to Clint, “I’d love to stay and watch”, but by that point, he didn’t even know what I was talking about.

If I wasn’t my birthday, I don’t think we would have stayed. Clint’s face told me he was close to tapping out. There wasn’t the usual solemn quiet one ususally expects. The museum was packed to the portraits with families. They were having fun. It was unusually loud. It was my birthday, so he obliged. This man’s love for me held him together for another 45-minutes.

We found a place to stand, mostly out of the way, to watch the performance.

At 11:30, the drumming began.

Two Chinese lions came out puppeted by two young men in one, and the two young women in another. They blinked their long eyelashes, wagged their heads back and forth, and danced around two heads of lettuce.

Somewhere during their performance, I looked around me. At another entrance, people kept streaming in. On the floor around the lions were no less than 200 children and their parents. Around them, another few hundred people. So many colors of skin. So many different accents. So many different cultures. So many ethnicities represented.

I looked around, amiled, and again my eyes watered. My throat tightened. This time, I put my hand to my mouth to stop sobbing.

“It’s just so amazing,” I managed to say to Clint.

“What is?” he asked, at first without looking at me. “All the art? The lion dance?”
Then he looked at me. “Are you crying?”

I nodded. I had to take deep breaths for several long minutes before I could say more. At one point, Clint looked away. I’d talk when I could. This could take awhile.

Finally I said, “All these people showing up with their kids at an art museum.”

My reasoning seemed lame, even to me. All the art or the lion dance would have made more sense. Not just that people were coming into the damned museum.

I didn’t particularly understand why that moved me, but it seems I cry a lot these days. And not just because of my fears about fascism, authoritarianism, the loss of freedoms and democracy, and this mis-match I feel with Petersburg. Those tears are from anxiety and depression - and thanks to anti-depressants, happen a bit less than they did 6 months ago.

These other tears are different. And it’s not actually new to me.

I think I’ve always been a crier over obscure things.

One time I cried and didn’t understand it was back in Columbus, Ohio, during the Pride Parade. When the lesbians on their motorcycles (the self-proclaimed Dykes on Bikes), drove by, I cried. All I could surmise was that the parade moved me because these LGBT people (those were the only letters used back then and the T stood for Transvestite), were brave enough to be out and happy with finally being able to be themselves. I thought I cried for their struggle and their achievement.

I still cry at Pride Parades. But also I cry for simple beauty, awe, and when I see examples of all the things the President, his administration, and his followers want to crush, dissolve, ignore, belittle, delegitimize, and destroy. My throat closes up, which frustrates me, because the thing I want to do is cheer or acknowledge or sing along.

It’s exhausting because of how hard I have to work to not let it all out. The cry I feel in these instances isn’t quiet and gentle, either. It’s not an adorable cry. It’s snot and coughs because it’s climbing up from the depths of my soul.

It’s annoying because my crying stops me from enjoying the thing that’s causing the emotion. It stops me from participating. I try to take deep breaths but I worry that people will think I’m weird or hyperventilating. Since I can’t explain myself for 5 minutes, they just have to wait it out and wonder. Then usually, when I tell them why I’m verklempt, my reason seems so lame.

The Dykes on Bikes in the parade.

People are coming to a museum.

The young girl behind the ice cream counter smiled and asked me how I wanted my banana split built.

There’s a farmers market.

The homemade ice cream tastes so good.

Sometimes it’s hard to be me.

Tears aside, the lion dance was fun to watch not only because the lions tossed lettuce leaves all over the children at the end, but because I was surrounded by a whole rainbow of other people who also thought it was fun to watch.

Later, I wondered with more curiosity, why I cry like this so often. With all of the examples I have, why can’t I find the common thread?

Since I had examples from at least 20 years ago, I knew it wasn’t related to menopause or my current depression. As usual, I went to ChatGPT. It pointed out that the solution is in the question.

Connection.

And it shared with me a term I’d never heard of: Kama Muta. That’s a relatively recent term coined using Sanskrit as a way to unify the concepts many cultures have for, basically, “being moved”. Wikipedia says, “Kama muta is considered to have the evolutionary function of facilitating the devotion, commitment and connection necessary for human social union.

I felt a sense of relief that there was a term for this. It’s nice to know that others have these same kinds of overwhelming emotions that aren’t just your typical sorrow or fear. It explains why I have a consistent need to feel understood, to feel like others feel something like this, too. Because I long to feel like I belong.

My conversation with ChatGPT quickly morphed into sharing that I was frustrated that though I cry so easily and so often, I feel as if my writing is superficial, doesn’t go deep enough, and doesn’t use enough sensory details. ChatGPT suggestion I write about my experience with the Lion Dance but not try to find meaning in it. It said I often jump quickly to find meaning, but don’t allow myself to dwell with the discomfort of the emotions - even when the emotions are, for the most part, positive.

So, I suppose there’s irony in my explaining all of this. I do want to find meaning. Finding meaning is finding that I do indeed belong.

Everything seems to come back to that for me.

Although I tried to describe what I felt during the lion dance, I think the more important thing is to describe how belonging feels to me.

When I think about moments when I feel like I belong:

It feels soft on my heart, despite the initial squeeze. It feels like a pile of comforters on a comfy couch with all my favorite things within reach. It feels like energy surging through my veins. It feels like the blissful exhaustion after a good workout or a long run. It feels like my bones finally settling. It feels like running a mountain path in my favorite running shorts and my favorite running shoes. It feels like my wheels settling into the path that the cars before me formed in the foot of snow we got overnight. It feels like knowing how to get what I need, when I need it. It feels like going to a parade and feeling like I am welcome to share in the joy of others.

Belonging, to me, feels like being home.

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Fairies, gnomes, trolls, wisps, ents, wizards, witches, elves, sprites, giants.

I believe that just because you cannot see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’ve never seen a million dollars. I can’t quantify love. But I know these things exist.

It’s like what Lydia read in the Handbook for the Recently Deceased in Beetlejuice, it’s not that some people cannot see something, it’s that they won’t.

I’m willing to believe. And like on the X-Files poster, I want to.

You see, I am drop-your-voice-two-octaves deeply Pisces. But not just like, I read my horoscope at lunch and then fit my day into what I read.

I mean, I believe that Hogwarts exists, I just don’t know how to find it.

I mean, I dream so hard about some things that I feel in my marrow I can manifest them.

I mean, early on in my relationship with Clint, we went on a hike in a mountain forest and I pointed out fairy homes to him. (He later admitted to me that he thought I was a little cuckoo, but here we are 5 ½ years later, so…) That might have been too bold of a move so early into a later in life relationship, but it seems to have worked out. Besides, I’m a high-functioning Pisces. I may not always hide my weird very well, but then most of the time I’m not really trying.

As a kid, I would skip through my grandparent’s side yard singing the song from Sleeping Beauty. “I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream…”. I thought my singing voice was spot on and that the birds, squirrels, and other woodland creatures were flitting and gathering around me just like they did for Aurora.

Being a Pisces is as normal and natural to me as just about anything else. I suppose that makes sense. I’ve been a Pisces all my life.

Your average, run of the mill Pisces is described as someone who is moody, empathic, and emotional. Pisceans are compassionate, intuitive, artistic and live in a duality between fantasy and reality. But, I know some even-keeled, normal Pisces.

No wait. No I don’t.

As a strange contradiction regarding the emotional thing, my feelings are easily hurt but it takes a lot to offend me. People I let close to me can easily hurt my feelings if their intention doesn’t come through on the right wavelength. I know I’m delicate in that way, so I don’t easily let people in. I don’t use the word friend lightly - to protect myself - so by choice I don’t have many.

If you’re not my friend, though, what you say rarely hurts me. You might piss me off, but not offend me.

There are a lot of nuances in my emotions. Throw in my sarcasm and snark, and that creates whole sub-categories. There’s not grey area. There are a lot of hues and values - terms that I’ve learned in color theory! I don’t see life, the world, and the universe in black and white. I don’t like extremes. They’re just too…extreme. I can dislike a person very much but also recognize something beneficial they’ve done. I can love a person deeply and still have moments when I need to not even see their stupid face.

And I suppose that’s why the distance between fantasy and reality is almost non-existent for me.

It’s not just that I have a wild imagination. It’s that I want there to be more than just what I see on the surface of it all. I want to see more depth in people. I want there to be magic - and to believe there is magic if we were just open to it - because wouldn’t that make life more fun and interesting? I want there to be wormholes and portals to other dimensions. Travel would be so much easier!

I want there to be fairies and gnomes and ents and things because…I’m pretty sure there already are.

As a deeply empathic person, I am sensitive to light, dark, sounds, music, touch, taste. All the senses.

Many times, I would stand on Mount Sentinel next to the sign that indicates the level of water from Glacial Lake Missoula. I let myself get chills when I imagined the sound of the final cracking of the ice dam that held back all that water, and the violent roar and rushing of 600 cubic miles of water that emptied out in just two days. Can you imagine? How awesome! All of that water (the equivalent of both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario) being completely emptied in 48-hours. The sound must have been colossal.

Or the thunderous sound of giant dinosaurs’ footsteps.

If I had a time machine, that’s what I would do. Go back to hear those sounds.

And yet - I cannot tolerate the sounds of loud cars, trucks, motorcycles. Man-made sounds like that create that fear-cage feeling in my body. Nausea, anger, aggression, confusion.

So then I imagine a t-rex happily stomping around and crushing them.

But giants, though. Have you ever tried to build a pergola? I have. Twice. You know what would be helpful? A friend who was a giant who could just pick up the top and place it on the posts.

Wisps, like in Brave, would have been extremely helpful the other day when I did a 7 ½-mile 5-mile run at Pocahontas State Park. I didn’t know how long the Bright Hope Loop was (a sign would have been nice), but also I wasn’t sure which exit trail was mine. I did an extra mile of double-back - which I was physically and mentally able to do, but still. Wisps to show the way would have come in handy.

Telepathy. Teleportation. Scrying. The book I wrote after my mother died - the fantasy version of my life with her, includes those things. The only rule of the universe I created was that it doesn’t have plastic. What a lovely world that would be. I’d love to go back to having more containers made of glass and wood. We’ve lost touch with nature. We’ve lost touch with magic.

Think of how life would be different if we had the ability to communicate directly from our minds. When words fail me, or when I want Clint to feel what I feel, telepathy could help.

When I think I forgot to turn off the oven, I could scry and see if I did.

I believe in past lives and reincarnation because I want there to be more than just this. It’s not that I’m afraid of “just this”. And I’m certainly not afraid of death or the end of things. I just think it’s more interesting if there is something more. I’m a Buddhist because I want all of that to be true. And so, I believe that it is. Samsara makes sense to me - the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. If energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transferred, then reincarnation stands to reason.

I believe cats can see different dimensions. We see 3. We live in 4. Physics says there could be11. When my cat is looking at “nothing”, perhaps she’s looking at a whole lot more.

I could provide examples of experiences and experiments that support my belief in all of these things, but I’m not a missionary. I don’t want to convert you. I don’t particularly care if anyone else believes what I believe or even believes me when I say these things. It doesn’t matter to me that Clint doesn’t experience the same tingle that I do when I see a knot at the base of a tree with some moss and a few rocks. I know it’s a fairy door. I know there are magical creatures nearby.

The world we live in right now is particularly tough to live in. I don’t like what’s going on. I don’t like Trump. I don’t like that people blindly support him. Not only is he a terrible human (and his supporters know it and don’t care), but he lacks creativity and depth. He’s an asshole just to line his own pockets and for the sake of being an asshole. It’s hurtful. It’s boring. It lacks color. It’s not fun.

I’m not delusional (and I’m not particularly concerned if anyone thinks I am) but I am pragmatic. I can hold a belief in magic and a desire for a well-functioning society at the same time. I’m fine with paying my taxes to fund schools and roads and the fire department. But do we have to be such selfish assholes about it? All of the shit going on in our country and around the world has taken so much fun and delight out of life.

White Christian Nationalists are the worst. Don’t invite them to your party. They not only lack empathy, integrity, and a moral compass, but they lack a sense of humor.

Don’t trust anyone that can’t laugh at themselves.

I’m tired of how angry the world is. How ugly. How bland.

I’ll say it again that I think watercolor is going to be the thing that saves me.

Watercolor has allowed me to bring magic back into my life. Gnomes, mushroom houses, sprites, magical evenings. I’m letting myself get lost in these forests I’m creating. My soul needs it. My spirit needs it.

When I need to come out from under my mossy rock to protest, vote, and use whatever privilege I have to make the world a better place - I will. But when I don’t need to do those things, I’m writing fiction and painting.

I’ve added a new project to my list of things. Once I get better at rocks, mushrooms, trees, and butterfly wings, I’m going to write and illustrate a little book for adults called How to Find Fairies and Other Magical Creatures. Kids already know how. Adults have forgotten. To do this, I’ll dig deep into my Pisces-ness and hop back and forth over that line between fantasy and reality. A healthy amount of both is the balance I really need.

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I thought I was getting myself into a medical discussion about avoiding dementia. I suppose in some ways it could be, but they weren’t talking about getting dementia. They were talking about getting stupid.

On my way to and from my run today (but not during), I listened to it again.

I wanted to. I needed to. The feeling that it gave me was borderline euphoric. While I warmed up before getting on the trail I thought, “Huh. This must be the equal but opposite way MAGA types felt when they first experienced Trump.” Under the pines, through the melting ice I agreed,”It doesn’t make me feel ‘seen’. I hate that word, now. It’s so trite.” What’s another way to describe it though?

Ah. I felt like I’d been let out of my cage. Not just seen, but freed.

My cage was built by the media, chicken-shit politicians, and narcissistic billionaires. Its bars were made out of fear and capitalism. Perhaps MAGA’s cage is the same. I don’t know. This isn’t about them, though. This is about me.

I’ll take some of the blame for being in that cage. Not in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way, but in a self-aware kind of way. Since the first time Trump was elected, I’ve been a small business owner. Afraid of what impact my opinions might have on business, I’ve been delicately vocal. Afraid that I lack strong debate skills, the ability to stockpile strong examples, and control of my emotions, I avoid confrontation with people who don’t share my beliefs.

In short, I let the naked emperor’s followers affect me.

When I owned a yoga studio in the middle of liberal Clintonville in Columbus, Ohio, it was easier. Trump signs in yards were rare and surprising. I’m in a different part of the world now. And the world is quite a bit different.

It’s been a long eleven years and I know there are more to come. But, being so careful and socially quiet while inwardly smouldering and raging has truly caused my brain and my soul to rot. In the past few months, I’ve started to be more outwardly vocal, but I’ve still had this strange internal struggle.

Two minutes into this episode, I felt that pressure release. It felt so good to hear people openly talking about all of the ways we’re becoming dumber - and it started by acknowledging that we’re “investing less in schools” and we “distrust science.”

I realized that I’ve allowed myself to be affected by this gaslighting from Trump and his constituents. As a college educated middle class white liberal woman, I allowed myself to feel partially to blame for his election. I knew Hilliary fucked up when she missed the issue with the coal miners in southern Ohio. And I knew Obama’s message that not everyone needed a college education was ignored mainly because he wasn’t white.

But still.

In 2015, I was appalled, aghast, and dumbfounded at how easily so many people were willing to let a college educated, wealthy elite who had never really needed to ever work a day in his life, and was a truly terrible business man (and actor), convince them that education was for suckers and that he was going to “drain the swamp” of politicians who he felt were destroying our country.

As we all really should know though, Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the symptom.

I could go on and on about the tactic of systemically keeping people dependent and ignorant and then telling them who really they should blame. What he’s doing isn’t new. But this time, it is different.

Hitler didn’t have social media. Who knows what the outcome would have been if he had.

What troubles me the most is that the stupid goes both ways. Or all ways. People who believe him think what he says is gospel. People who are in disbelief doomscroll. Either way, too many of us are experiencing brain rot.

But that shall not be the way I go out! ~she cries to the heavens and gestures to the masses~

I shall protect my mind!

~steps down from the pulpit~

~coughs~

As I was saying.

Last week, there was a day when my anxiety was so high, I felt adrenaline coursing through my veins. My body was vibrating. I felt like I was holding onto the bars of my cage and rattling them like a trapped silverback in a lab. My doom scrolling of the news and social media was melting my brain. I’d look up from my phone and try to look out the window, but my eyeballs felt like misshapen grapes in my sockets. My eye muscles had barely been making any movements. My body had been in one hunched and scrunched position for I don’t really know how long. I felt like Gollum.

To help myself, I googled “how to make it out of this alive” and other similar prompts. Nearly everything I read and watched listed avoiding social media and limiting daily news consumption. When I caught myself thinking, “But what if there’s some solution to all of this that I’ll miss?” I recognized my insanity.

And so began my challenge.

That first day, I had weird moments throughout my waking hours when I wasn’t sure what to do. Why have this smart phone if I’m not going to really do anything with it other than look at the time (and do DuoLingo, but there’s only so much Japanese I can retain in one day).

The next day, I felt proud of myself, and quite surprised actually, that I had made it a full 24-hours without “taking a hit”.

On the third day, I realized I needed to at least check Instagram and Facebook to see if any customers had reached out on DM. I covered most of the screen with one hand and clicked on the messages with my other. That did the trick. If I don’t see the drug then I won’t be enticed to take it.

One thing I know about myself is that when it comes to some things, I’m weak-willed. I do have an addictive personality. I’m not at all the person that can be in the same room with someone who is eating if I’m supposed to be fasting. I can’t walk into a bookstore and walk out empty handed. Back in the day, there were plenty of parties that involved stuff in which I couldn’t help but partake. Like the diet coaches say, if you’re trying to stop eating cookies, stop buying them. These days, my addictions aren’t nearly as shameful as they used to be. In polite company, joking about spending $100 on books is far more socially acceptable than saying you spent the whole night snorting coke.

I’m glad those days are in the past, but the lack of will-power still remains.

Today, as I type this, I’m proud to say that I’m on day six or maybe even seven without reading the news or getting on social media. After day two, I felt the addiction drain out of my bones. From then on, I’ve enjoyed the time I got back in my life, the decreased levels of stress and anxiety, and the amount of art I’ve created.

What I’ve found in life is that two things are the likely answer to any of my problems.

The first is movement. Get off your ass. Get off the couch. Get outside. Go for a run. Lift some weights. Do some squats and push ups. Stop being such a lazy wuss. But also, allow for small movements when you need to rest.

The second is space-time. Distance myself from a thing. Let the hours, days, and years heal a thing. Get farther away from it.

Or, get closer to it. Spend more time with it.

It just depends on the thing.

Instead of doomscrolling, I’ve been painting, writing, and working out. And you know what? I think I can officially call myself a watercolor artist. What I’m making is actually pretty fucking good. In my journal the other day, I wrote that I wished my mother was still alive so she could see what I’ve done. I’ve made little paintings that make me so happy.

Do all artists like to sit and look at their creations? Is it weird to be comforted by my own artwork? I keep my watercolor notebooks open to the last thing I completed just so I can appreciate that I made that. And, it’s good. I’m proud of myself, and I know my mother would be proud of me, too. That feels amazing. Like I’m finally filling in more of myself.

I’ve used this analogy before, but for any of you who have ever played a video game with a map that you have to explore, my life feels like that. There are large grey areas that haven’t been investigated yet. More and more of the map, though, is getting filled in as I learn more about myself. The sensation of recognition when I find something that clicks is expansive. Who I am on the inside is so much bigger than who I am on the outside. I’m like a TARDIS.

When I learned that I really enjoyed watercolor, I felt a large room open up in my soul. A studio, perhaps. When I decided to get my Masters in Creative Writing, a large library opened up inside of me; a library with rows and rows of desks, and aisle after aisle of bookshelves. Desks with pens in jars and stacks of paper and empty journals.

I’m learning what I need and what I don’t need. Both are equally important.

Last week, I admitted that I needed deeper social connections than what I was getting by being behind the bar at my wine shop. (I can’t tell you how many times I “accidentally” type whine shop instead. Read into that what you will.) I relate to the description of an introvert as a person that cannot handle small talk. I don’t want to talk about the weather. I want to talk about the stuff most people think is awkward and possibly inappropriate, like if you hate your father, what you’re deeply afraid of, or what your life would look like if money wasn’t an issue.

Meaningful social connections are important for reducing anxiety, depression, and brain rot.

Also, doing nice things for others.

You know what I’d really like my life to look like? Animal Crossing. It’s a delightful game on Nintendo Switch that doesn’t involve fighting, killing, or doing timed challenges. You plant flowers, break rocks to get iron for making tools, chop trees to get wood for making furniture, and get points for talking to your neighbors. You have an important role on the island. You’re part of the ecosystem and community. You have a job. You can make money by working hard. You can travel. The evenings are quiet. And the most important thing, really, is cleaning up weeds and fallen sticks.

To me, owning my wine shop, writing, painting, and offering Thai Massage is just about as close to that as I can possibly get. I want to make just enough money. I want to live in a place where everyone does their part. People don’t need to like one another, but they do need to get along. We need to realize that we’re connected. Each person impacts another. That’s why some amount of empathy is so important.

In the podcast episode I mentioned, they talked about IQ and EQ, in addition to the different definitions of the word stupid. I’ve got IQ and I’d like to think I have good EQ (emotional quotient, or emotional intelligence).

I don’t want to be stupid. I don’t want my life to be dumbed down. But that’s what I feel like has happened to me in the past decade. So I’m taking back my brain. I refuse to let it shrivel. I won’t give in to the drivel. (I couldn’t help myself). Social media can suck it. And the news can kiss my ass. If it’s important, I’ll hear about it. The universe knows where I live. It knows what I give a shit about.

Something else that spurred me to make tweaks to my life was the heading of another substack post that landed in my inbox this week:

“There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living.”

I encourage you to read it and follow The Substack Post. Reading it is the mental equivalent to brushing your teeth. It gives my brain the jujjing it needs to feel fluffy again. Juicy. Meaty. Worky.

The next thing I’m going to do is re-curate my Substack feed. I’m tired of the bitching about Trump. I’m tired of the endless headlines. No. Not tired. Annoyed. That man and his peons have been a pain in my ass for over a decade. I’m done being afraid that he’s going to send us until World War III. Like the guest states in the podcast, Hitler was elected. He was elected by “sophisticated people”. But Trump isn’t Hitler. He’s a ridiculous man who does have power right now, but what the world didn’t have back then was social media.

Sure social media is rallying his constituents, but also it connects those who feel disconnected. We have a platform for posting videos of ICE and our comments on the administration. I’m tapping out, but others are starting to tap in.

Just like some powersaws, social media is a tool and can either be effective or dangerous depending on how you use it. As humans, we collectively wield it both ways. Personally, I’m just posting my Monday videos and then getting right the hell off so I don’t get sucked in. After a week of this, I’m feeling my inner energy return.

I’m excited to be free of that damned monkey trap. Social media is my rotten banana.

It’s no surprise to anyone that knows me that I am part of the resistance. That is where a woman’s place is, after all. Acts of rebellion don’t always involve screaming from the rooftops or setting Parliament on fire. I think the most important thing for me to do is keep my soul intact. To me, that implies hope that there is a day when we’ll be on the other side of this. My acts of rebellion include making art - and pretty decent art at that, sleeping well, and insisting that kindness is still important.

I will not allow myself to become dumb and I will not allow myself to give in to stupid.

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