Flu, Fatigue & Flights

So the whole month of January has sucked me into a vortex - it's been absolute disruption, chaos but most importantly, life-changing. Only from experiencing chaos can we finally understand how we can begin to create order again.

I was attacked by a very nasty flu that weighed me down and kept me pale and shaky for two weeks. Perhaps my punishment for a rather indulgent New Years but it gave me some very well needed time to rest my bones and gain a sense of my present. It allowed me to think about my surroundings and how I was feeling beyond my common flu symptoms. The fog in my head was thick and I was feeling that some sort of change was coming, like right before a thunderstorm. I also knew that these changes depended on my own choices...

...in between trying to heal and catching up on ridiculous amounts of work, there were thunderstorms brewing again and one day the lightening finally struck. Through the dense clouds of tiredness I took my imagination to a place I had taken it before and worked through a 'mind movie' but this time I stuck around to take note of the credits, observe the lighting, reflect on the plot, get a feel for the tone and setting and I watched it to the end. My life can be like this, I thought to myself, smiling for the first time in weeks. I worked this plan out for a while, talked it out and slowly I could see it unfolding as if events were slotting into place because of this realisation. And it still continues to do so.

I have always wanted to meet and spend time with Native Americans (a back story that requires a blog of its own), I have always wanted to do something stimulating and rewarding with my life; something that gives me the opportunity to help and care for those who need it. I have always wanted to stand amongst history and feel the energy prints of the past in beautiful countries; observing ancient worlds in my modern one. I have always wanted to have my breath taken away by megaliths and mountains and lagoons and temples and forests and all sorts of wonder. I have always wanted to connect with myself 100%. I have always wanted my spirit to be free...

...and so when that lightening bolt flashed, I saw myself travelling for a few months.

I set about looking things up and to my delight, all these things are in fact very accessible and financially possible. I found a volunteer programme to spend time in a Navajo community, to learn their culture and to help them with construction, educational support and community projects. I booked onto a TEFL course that grants me the ability to teach English in other country; Japan is first on the list. This, I believe is my golden ticket to anywhere in the world where I can have my breath taken away...my eyes have been dazzled by photos of Bali and Peru.

I've spun out from all these ideas, plans, research and most of all healing. Yet this is the most focussed I've been for quite some time. The clouds have bowed out now and the lightening has moved on to strike someone else. I see up ahead and the only thing in the world that will actually take me places, is me.

In the Midnight Hour

Boots, scuffed and muddy. Cold-air whips to the face.
I covered ground in a city that was not my own, but one I had frequented before...events unfolded swiftly throughout the night; all impossible to predict.

I let myself flow, wearing a bit of 2010 and a Stephanie I recall meeting before. She had been gone for a long while; remaining young and dwarfed in times of the past but coaxed out to greet her future self again for one night, given a chance to help her reset the clock.

Dancing within, like a priestess in a ceremony; heartbeat so tribal; writhing like a cobra to a flute. I lost the mechanics of my physical being and existed like water.

The universe seemed to sweep all fragments of me from all crevices and corners and put them together in the center; collected right where I stood.

And in the midnight hour, I didn't seem to recognise this existence but liked what it had to offer me once again. While paper lanterns carried wishes across a fresh sky, I bumped into my past there in the present, and wondered: had my future been there too?

And in the newborn days of January, my boots were still scuffed and muddy, cold-air whips still lashed at my face.

I stepped back into the city that had always been my own, washed the sticky remnants of 2010 away and stepped forward a little more polished, into 2011.