My goal has been to post on this blog twice a month, but for the last few months, this hasn’t been going so well. In May and June I only posted once, and not until the next to the last day of each month. And now, in July, I find myself in the same dilemma.

In part this happens when personal challenges — physical, emotional, mental/spiritual — come up with certain intensity, the consequences (and potential gifts, I tell myself) on a path of self-discovery. They inevitably lead to deeper insight and healing, but it can be a mess along the way, much beating of pillows, many heart-clearing tears.

Yet the deeper issue is that my intent for this blog is to present a glimpse of my authentic life, which means my authentic self, the highs and the lows, to write solely and soully from that truth.

So, what’s been going on with me lately? Everything. It feels like all my challenges have come up in my face, and body, this month.

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately, although I’ve pretty much made peace with the fact of it, and that it may not at all be what we’ve been taught it is. Part of this for me comes from the profound wisdom I’ve received over many decades in conversations with non-physical beings, some of whom I’ve affectionately called “The Dead Guys,” teachers, guides, angelics, even extraterrestrials “channeled” through several “soul sisters” who have had that gift.

At this point I’m more afraid of living, of really living, than of dying. Since resurrecting my life and my writing back in February after a three year Dark Night of the Soul (see Being Happy For No Reason), I continue on my journey to discover who I am now, and what I want from here forward. It’s not been easy, especially at this  stage of my being, and it can be very tiring.

Moving through time, what I call aging, has also been on my mind lately. Time itself is whizzing by so fast that something new and unexpected and challenging seems to manifest inside and outside of my body almost daily. I’m not kidding. It has been very unsettling as well as frightening. I’m doing my best to accept whatever is happening, to love all of me, brown spots, red dots, old bones and all, but I haven’t been doing so well with that either. I remind myself that 76 isn’t even really that old these days, and that I’d never want to go back to being younger in terms of the wisdom I’ve gleaned. But part of me isn’t listening.

And one of my major projects has been sorting through and cleaning out old clutter in order to make room for the new, organizing closets, drawers, hard copy files, and computer files, including my writing documents over the decades. This month, I’ve started sorting through poems, unfinished novels, endless story revisions, saved emails, and other forgotten mental meanderings, all of which have instigated many emotional re-memberings.

One of the first things I came across in my doc files was a novel I’d called Ariel and Ethan barely begun in 2008, about the dissolution of my last intimate relationship in 2003. I’d totally forgotten about it, the writing not the relationship…well, maybe both. The story is narrated from the larger perspective, by what might be thought of as Ariel’s Soul Self or maybe Guardian Angel. The novel begins at the end of the story.

As I re-read these first few paragraphs, I totally lost it. Tears came in a torrent of feelings. How, in my deepest heart, I had been more distraught about the way the relationship ended, than that it had ended — abruptly, through an email, right before plans to be together through the summer, with the only explanation being a feeling of fear that he said needed to be paid attention to. In many ways, I did feel that the relationship was “meant to be,” although I hadn’t been sure it was meant to be forever. It wouldn’t have been so devastating if it had ended differently, although we were eventually able to talk and heal and even visit a few times.

Anyway, reading the few chapters I had written, which included some of the amazing emails between us (he was a man of words), and all the notes I’d made at the end about things to include, tugged at my heart. He was my last physical partner for this lifetime, although I had a later six-year inter-dimensional relationship, which I wrote about in my memoir Rare Atmosphere: An Extraordinary Inter-dimensional Affair of the Heart. Since that resolved itself in 2012, my choice has been to continue on my own. Intimate relationships in this life, both physical and non-physical, often spanned dimensions and have been emotionally complicated.

For many reasons I won’t go into here, it was time for me to go on alone, to live what I believe my Soul Self originally intended for this lifetime — to find out who I am separate from old patterns of self-destructive liaisons. And I relish living alone, not having to share my time, my small space, my Talenti Coffee Chocolate Chip Gelato, or my bed with anyone. I understand why I’ve chosen this more solitary, and for me comfortable life, and yet I have moments of deep loneliness.

For eleven years I had my beautiful Ragdoll cat Michou, who I had to re-home after I moved into my current place in August of 2019. I begged my landlord to let me keep him in my new no pets allowed home. I had to promise that if Michou passed, I would not get another kitty.