You know you’ve hit on something when you throw up an update on FaceBook and immediately hear back from folks you literally haven’t heard from in almost a year! (Hi Lizzie!).

At first I thought it was re-entry blues – you know:  awesome vacation, eat out a lot (and nothing but great food out West, folks.  Good food and more good food!  And we don’t even eat meat!), someone comes in an makes your bed and cleans your bathroom, and generally there is no clock, and new things just keep appearing on the horizon, and then you come home.  Well, actually these days it usually starts with:  then you have to deal with the airport and flying and then you come home.

Symptoms can include starting out the window, inability to focus and resistance to your normal routine (whatever that is, and in my case it’s getting up on my own time clock.  You’d think I’d be fine). Usually lasts a few days and then gratitude for all that lovely open time, and the lessons you learned about what’s really really important in life come crowding in and you hum back through your days energized for having gone and returned.

I must admit that since arrival it seems to have been going downhill attitude wise.  To the point the snarky head voice (this one isn’t the hamster, the hamster is just repetitive.  This one is nasty.  And would have me be hopeless) has started commenting on “all those perky quotes and affirmations” (the voice, not the real me) with a resounding “Right” (dip that in sarcasm and let it drip its acid a while – you get the picture).

So I there I am wanting to do something and with more than enough “somethings” to do if I could just get myself in gear.  All kinds of ideas for clay, a big jewelry show coming up (and a smaller market and a private show before that…alert! alert!  all this is starting tomorrow!), new beads, a torso class this weekend  – plenty plenty to do.  So what am I doing (do I dare admit this?)?  Playing Bedazzled on-line.  Not even playing on Facebook which I can make networking excuses for.

I had already heard Mecury is retrograde usually calling up the trickster aspects of life and “distortion of perspectives.”  So I posted “phbllt to Mercury” and learned that we also have a full moon tonight and 5 other planets are in retrograde (Rob Tillett says: Mercury’s retro phase tends to bring unforeseen changes and blockages, but the

aggravation and frustration that many of us experience during these periods is often due to our own inability to roll with the punches.) Okay – I’m not a fanatical follower of astrology, but you know what?  I DO know the full moon and how it swings me sometimes either wildy joyful or terribly depressed.  If it ells you anything, Husband didn’t believe any of this stuff until he lived with me for a while, and now he watches the moon cycles if nothing else.  Anyways, just knowing the full moon was coming opened up a wide, spacious:  “Oh! that’s what’s going on.” And I found myself relaxing into all this and stopped fighting it.

The key:  stop fighting it.  Don’t give in to it, just sit with it.  So I went and cleaned up my studio for the workshop, spent a bit of time playing in clay – not as much as I would have once, but enough and it felt really good.  Then I trundled into the jewelry studio and started getting things really organized.  And I felt good at the end of the day.

This is all by way of letting you know that we all have our day(s0 or week(s) or even month(s) and year(s).  And it’s okay.  It’s okay not to be on your game every last second of every day.  In fact, the dark side of all this “affirm it and it will come” is that if you aren’t affirming and doing and generally getting bigger and bigger every day you can now feel guilty because if it isn’t working, Baby, it’s all your own fault.  Notice the wording there “fault.”  Not:  it isn’t time, rest in your present joy; not: stuff happens and it’s okay to feel sad, mad or boxed up; not: breathe in and out and go stand outdoors and refresh yourself.  None of that.  Nope, it’s your “fault” and so you “deserve all that is happening” because “you are obviously [okay – I’m going to let you fill in the blank here because I know you can]. 

Tell me how this is any different than nose to the grindstone industrial time management thinking.  And tell me how this is going to advance either you or society as a whole.

So if the planets or the Moon or Mercury or your kids or your husband or your job are making you crazy, stop.  Breathe.  Moderate those head voices.  Find yourself the support you need (even if it is a chorus of “oh, me too”s on FaceBook so that you know you aren’t alone), and, just for this one minute, rest in all is at it should be (because it is, after all – and all we have is what is right at this moment).  Finding one small thing to be grateful for doesn’t hurt either. 

In fact, if I’m honest, all of my greatest and best life changing growth has come from moments of discomfort (some bigger than others, some even life threatening).  So if nothing else, you can be grateful because you know you’re in the midst of some life lesson and that means you are Alive!

Here’s a great post on the balancing act we all go through by my friend Ruth David:  Funk or Fire (don’t you just love that phrase?!)

Wylde Women’s Wisdom

There are some things your learn best in calm, some in storm.  Willa Cather

Life will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.  You have to love.  You have to feel.  It is the reason you are here on earth.  You are here to risk your heart, you are here to be swallowed up.  And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.  Tell yourself that you tasted as many as your could. Louise Erdrich

(two qutoes today because sometimes we need a boost!  What are you doing to make sure you have a support system in place?!)