Deep down the rabbit hole of my life...

When Michelle told me that I was dying because I hadn't recommitted to this life after the passing of my life partner, my mind was blown.  You see, the alternative to dying is to fully commit to the incarnation.

Of course when it comes to commitment, I feel I've mainly been committing to a spiritual life, or at the very least in that general trajectory throughout my life.  And that, to me, is what's most important.  Yes, it's unfortunate I ended both my marriages, but that oxymoronically wasn't about commitment...

Taking over full accountability for everything that happens ANYWHERE in my life has its own Pandora's Box of goodies to test and torture. It is simultaneously lonely and empowering.  Lonely in the sense that as full accountability is approached, there's that stretch of emotional landscape where co-dependencies are made obvious as well as the necessity to jettison those dependencies. That is a particular kind of loneliness.

So, this brings us back to my little bungalow in South Park, San Diego.  This is where I have had to readjust to the death of my best friend and lover, restructure nearly completely my social circles, and acclimate to a life without Portland, Oregon, where I spent 25 years.

Perhaps it is all the above that has me navigating this rabbit hole of a life like Jada Pinkett Smith's ship pilot in the Matrix Revolutions as she whizzed through narrow tunnels and pipes at full speed, escaping from the robot sentries programmed to eradicate all human life that was out of the Matrix..

Weird physical symptoms began shortly after returning from Burning Man in 2012 (I don't believe there's a connection there, other than having my creative impulses overwhelmed by sheer, towering artistic talents on display in Black Rock City). Symptoms progressed along until about a month later, I could barely get up out of bed to go pee at night, my arms and legs were hurting so much. 

It was as if I had taken a full-on weight lifting class, or something--every single muscle in my shoulders, arms, hands, legs, knees, and feet hurt.  The less I did, the better the symptoms were. But, at its height, before I finally started taking aspirin, I was pretty much at a 7 or 8 on the 10-point pain scale (8 is when you make a sound in response to the pain) all the time.

As I was still in the mindset of external solutions, I stayed on the assumption that something in my environment, or body was causing the pain.  Thousands of dollars of supplements, therapies, retreats, meditations, etc. have to this day gotten me to a fair degree of pain management.  Most days I never approach 8, hanging around a 5 or 6, occasionally going down to 2 or 3, with even rare times when there is no pain for a couple of hours. 

And... the pain is still the thing that has been running my life.  Since Michelle's session, I came to realize that, as the great poet Rumi, said, "The cure for the pain is in the pain".  This gave me a way in.  I also realized that I was the only one who could do this.  No medicines, treatments, or supplements were going to take the pain away for me.  This is all my deal.

I started to see that of all the substances I could bring into the body, pure light energy is the highest quality nourishment.  Not only that, but to follow the light where it goes in the body, and use the very real amplifier of the imagination to increase the light seems to help a lot, too.  I've fully embraced the scientific fact that human bodies are self-repairing--it's just that most Matrix-driven subjugants don't have the patience or the faith to accept this biological fact. 

This approach had immediate effects on the muscles in my arms and legs, bringing the pain down from 7 or 8, to 5 or 6.  Eureka!  I have continued like this for the past 2-3 weeks, and the body seems to be processing very deeply.  My sleep has improved and instead of symptoms being the worst in the morning, they no longer are.  Both shoulders are still frozen, and my knees still make it clumsy and difficult to sit down and get up from a toilet, or get in and out of a car.  But nothing usually rises to an 8 or 9.

So here is a shambles of a life, though, when I take stock from this Accountability view.  I'm spending 11-12 hours in bed daily, sleeping, reading, surfing, napping.  I'm into a habit now of what I call keeping "musicians' hours":  Get up at noon (or later), and go to bed at 3 AM. 

During the day, I do the absolute minimum to keep my little online health products company going--doing shipping and accounting, and occasional promotion.  By the time 8 PM comes around I'm looking at my TV Guide app, to see what's on the HD 39" boob tube.  I've got at least one show a day I want to watch, but some nights it's solid TV viewing from 7 PM  (NPR news, of course) to 2:30 AM.  As a result of too much sedentariness (I assume), the body has packed on 20 lbs. and lost muscle mass.

Wookie the Clown Dog...

I do also take care of my little buddy, Wookie, a 9-year old Lahsa Apso doggie.  She is, I believe, completely pampered, with visits to the groomers every Friday, and fed with the most expensive pure food for her, not to mention all the treats.  She gets her walk every day, sometimes twice, and is utterly entertaining. I call her the Clown Dog.

I do manage to make my bed every  day, do my laundry about every 2 weeks, and keep up my personal hygiene. 

So, in my defense of the particular brand of "lazy" that has informed my life for the past couple of years, I am effectively handling just enough to keep me alive and active in the world without causing anyone concern, albeit along an uneventful and uncreative trajectory.

Now here is my current conundrum:  My overall strategy has been to "follow the light" with it expanded into the "follow what feels light" .  In so doing, when I consider cleaning the apartment, it seems very heavy to me, where going to Starbucks to get an Americano, then going to some fun place for lunch, feels very light to me.  So, I've been following that.  In fact, the description of my activities above is just about all that feels light. Oddly, I actually feel light about doing the dishes, and feel light about sweeping the kitchen floor every once in a while, so I guess I'm not a complete slob of lightness...

I've got backlogged filing, backlogged warehousing, backlogged accounting (how many extensions can you get from the IRS?). Then there's the MUSIC.  I have an idle Alesis M8 electronic drumkit beside my bed, a nice Roland keyboard, and a full acoustic drumkit in my garage.  I've got excellent production software on high powered computers, and several music/video applications and programs.  I've got mikes, stands and studio monitors. I've got a library of nearly 100,000 songs, and even bought a DJ mixer last year that is still lying unopened on top of the keyboards.

Nothing is happening.

I ended up getting my Google account hacked last week, which called for a complete survey of everything I've posted in various applications across the vast Google platform over about 9 years.   Rather than attempting to save anything, or even back it up, I just deleted the Google account, and set up a new one.  I did notice that the last personal blog entry was in May of  last year.  Yikes.  Plus, I stopped publishing the company newsletter--the last issue I believe was November of last year.  Double yikes.

Why?

No inspiration.  Nuttin'.  In fact, it seems very heavy to me to do the newsletter, or anything else semi-creative.  I did suddenly decide to set up a new blog with this as the first entry, so everyone can see what a certain type of spiritual transparency looks like... I guess.

Now I'm beginning to wonder if by following the direction of "doing what feels light", it will eventually get me doing what I think are my art forms.  Or, maybe that's just what I think are my art forms.  Maybe music isn't one of them (even though I've toured nationally and internationally with two bands, recorded on over a dozen albums, and played pretty much 5 nights a week for the 25 years I lived in Portland). Well, "not music" feels heavy.  Music IS one of my art forms...

By re-locating to sunny San Diego (who has a great music scene, BTW), I left  my 25 years of music momentum. The pain issues have taken away most of the joy of even considering hauling a drum kit around to gigs, to then use the painful arms and legs to perform with.  Doesn't seem like much fun; doesn't feel light.

It seems like my creative process has stalled out somehow, or perhaps all that energy I used to have for making music and good writing, has all been commandeered for pain management.  I really don't know about that.  I keep asking that question every day.

Bottom line:  If it doesn't absolutely, definitely HAVE to be done I don't seem to want to do it--or more accurately--it just doesn't feel light. 

So I guess my question is... well... maybe it's not so much a question as a statement of faith.  By following light and lightness, should this not in turn create more light and lightness, ultimately arriving at a full expression of my individual divinity at some point?  It would seem so, by any reckoning of metaphysical precepts. 

I guess I'm worried. Worried that the pain won't ever stop; worried that the music I feel and hear within me will never come out, worried that my business will continue loping along at its current feeble pace, and worried I'm going to run out of IRA money, with nothing to replace it now that I'm in my 60s.

But, aren't worries heavy in and of themselves?  Yes!  So, stop worrying, I reckon. Eh?