Simple magic of a soft wand

These words keep echoing in my head. When I was first told these words, they seemed wrong, but I knew they were absolutely perfect.

I have recently been introduced to Harry Potter movies and after seeing them all, wands don't seem so soft to me at all. However, after studying quantum physics a bit I can only see them as soft. Wands to me are just the energy used to create my universe. Energy is malleable, flexible and sometimes not seen with the physical eyes at all. How can it not be soft?

Here's how it's been explained to me. We are all energy. Everything is energy. We create interference patterns in our energy fields when what we're offering meets up with what's echoing. Offer waves meet echo waves and create interference patterns that are dense enough for us to see and feel, smell and touch. Our waves are intensified by our feelings. The stronger we feel about something or someone, the stronger the offer wave becomes. However, every time we second guess ourselves or throw in a modicum of doubt, it throws the offer wave a bit and there goes the echo wave we wanted to match with.

Energy. Vibration. Feelings.

I'm 53 years old and I'm learning a new way to live. None of this was taught to me in school. The past I choose to focus on right now is one where I was a Catholic school girl with three brothers growing up in the 60s and 70s. So, to say this "new" way of creating is a bit different for me is an understatement, and yet it's the clearest, the easiest, and the most comfortable I've been in this lifetime. It's home to me. It's as if I'm finally recognizing who I really am and what my true potential really is.

I am scrapping all, and I do mean all, that I've ever been taught, bribed, and coerced into doing and believing. I am like a snake shedding its skin. I am being transformed yet again, entering a new phase of being. I'm learning what doesn't work for me and surrendering to all that shows up in my life, knowing and trusting that it is exactly as it needs to be.

The judgments that I've so honed into in the past, all the dos and don'ts of my upbringing and of a stifling marriage are being discarded. They are sloughing off with ease, and I'm just standing here cleaner and fresher than I was before the shedding process.

Am I done with the transformation? Absolutely not. I'm transforming at the moment, getting ready for the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one. I know that the more I know the less I know. I know that the more I question, the more questions there are and the fewer answers that exist.

So, my simple magic of a soft wand is being still, is feeling the feelings of what makes me feel good, and seeing the life that makes me feel good, and then knowing, knowing beyond any doubt, that what I so desire is making its way to me. It's been waiting for me to be ready for it, and whatever it looks like is absolutely perfect.

It's that simple.

What I know for sure

Things are never as they seem. This has been the story of my life. What I've concluded is that I know nothing. There is nothing in black and white; it's forever gray, but that too will change. Who I am right now is only this for the moment. Within seconds I'm different. I see things differently. I want different things and I want differently.

I'm discovering the world anew every second. I think of myself like the little kitty at my daughter's apartment who twists her head looking at a shoelace longer than I've seen anyone stare at anything. She's entranced with everything. The wind that blows up her nose is a new experience when she goes outside. She touches the brick on the wall gingerly as if it will disappear if she presses any harder.

The world is not what it seems. It never has been, but I've bought into it for most of my life: pay my taxes, balance my checkbook, go to college, get a degree, get a good job, build a retirement plan... These were constants in my life. These were things I could count on. I followed these rules and life was supposed to be good.

But it never was. I struggled over being off pennies in our business accounts. I stashed away funds like there was no tomorrow in all five of our retirement accounts. I paid bills. I went to church. I paid taxes -- payroll taxes, state income taxes, unemployment taxes, federal income taxes, and on and on and on.

I have nothing to show for all of that diligence. There is no retirement. All five of those accounts got used up before the ink was dry on the divorce papers. The college degree has not gotten me any jobs. There is no security in anything I was told was going to be my security. Having a husband didn't do it. Buying insurance policies -- health, life, term, car, homeowners, renters, malpractice -- didn't keep me safe either.

It has been a hoax. The whole thing. None of it is real. None of it has been worth losing all those nights of sleep when I tossed and turned over every little detail. Did I pay the vendors? Did I return the state's phone call? Did I put enough in retirement for federal income tax?

For years this life and these questions filled the space between my ears. It was a small, draining, and exhausting life. Running, running, running to keep up with what I thought was necessary to keep up with. Never going to bed satisfied with my accomplishments, and always feeling so empty.

Going to bed with someone whose presence made me feel worse about myself was no way to enter into my dream state either. I stayed until I couldn't stay any longer. I stayed until I couldn't take being the miniscule person I was showing up to be.

Four years without that life has turned me upside down and inside out. I've seen reality for what it really is -- fake. I've delved into the quantum realm and found home. I choose living in the world of energy and seeing it as such, knowing that what I do, what I say, who I'm with are all just reflections of me. How do I choose to show up in this flexible, malleable world? It's a continuous process of changing and rearranging what I do with my moments. It's seeing the world of all possibilities and reveling in it. It's feeling the joy in the air around me and embracing it, inviting it to stay.

I wake up now to watch West Wing with a dog on my lap. I drink my coffee and eat my English muffin while listening to dialog that intrigues me. Once dressed and in my studio I arrive at a feeling of intense joy, loving passion. I sit at my desk or at my sewing machine, and I revel at the happiness I feel being surrounded by fabrics, threads, and beads that I've been so attracted to all my life. Once awakened, there's nothing stopping me to delve into what could come from my imagination at that moment. What garment, what piece of art, what writing, what illustrations, what next? It's all one moment of discovery after another. It's pure bliss. It's abundance at its finest. It is heaven as only I can know it.

Staring at the piles of fabrics, the threads heaped, and the boxes of flowers I've fashioned with scraps and beads, I feel blessed. Looking at the aprons I've designed for a wholesale customer makes me feel like a genius. What degree? What job? What anything? Because looking around this room at every art book, every basket of paints, all the clear containers of spools of thread, and rainbows of fabrics, I know what wealth feels like. I know what joy looks like. It is me in this very room surrounded with all that jazzes me. There is no greater wealth, no finer empire than where I sit right now typing on this keypad surrounded by my yards and yards of fabric. And this I know for sure.

brain vacation

My brain has decided to take a vacation and not invite me.

I'm in my studio for the second day this year because I've been residing in bed since New Year's. My brain started hurting last week when I was working on a new design in my studio. On New Year's Eve after seeing It's Complicated and laughing my ass off, I went flying with a friend over McKinney until it became the new year. I'm not sure if my brain landed with me.

It was a full moon and a blue moon. It was also John Denver's birthday. We took off around 11:48 at night. I was in the back seat clicking pictures of the lights and the moon, when the pilot told me to take over. There went my picture taking, at least the shots that weren't blurry.

I love to fly. I love to take off. It's one of my greatest highs. It's the landings I'm not so excited about. I'm not thrilled about taxiing slowly down the runway turning towards the hangars. I don't enjoy undoing my seat belt and taking off my headset.

Takeoffs are exceptionally orgasmic for me. There's not a cell in my body that's not turned on and tuned in. There's something so amazingly seductive about being above it all, seeing the ground below, the ant-sized people until they are nothing but dots and then nothing at all.

This is freedom. This is unadulterated freedom. This is mind-blowing, breath-taking, and well, for lack of anything better to say, just far out! Thank you, John, for that.

The point I want to make though is that I don't think my brain came back down with me. I've been floating and unable to comprehend the simplest of tasks since. Is it because it's been so long since my last flight in a single-engine? Is it because it's been even longer since I had my hands on a stick? (And I mean that in oh so many ways...)

I am meant to live above it all, above the pettiness and drama that resides here. They are not my friends or my people. My people are lax and loose and free. My people see no boundaries or reason to blame. Situations and people in their lives are clear mirrors to their own thoughts about themselves. They are grateful instead of blaming. They are in joy instead of in sadness. You ought to feel their excitement when I'm up in the stars. When I'm steadying my camera lens at the blue moon outside the cockpit.

It's the stars and the clouds and the sky and the moon and the sun that's home to me. Coming back down, feeling the tires land on the runway, and the propeller slow down makes my brain take a vacation without me.

Next time I'm going with it.