I’ve been fighting with a painting for several months.  I started it at my old house, and for some reason, I couldn’t do anything with it. 

Today I talked it over with my dog, and decided to attack it.  Paintings are usually not this much work!  We’re still not seeing eye to eye, but it has changed a lot today. 

I eventually took it off the easel and started a new one. I’ll return to it later. 

I can’t force paintings.

Sometimes I struggle for a long time, then one day out of the blue, I revisit it and find the solution to be simple. 

I’m in no hurry. 

It can be hard, and I can wrestle with it. I was given a permission slip today.

I just emerged from my sauna.  I love the low light, the heat, the hiss of water on the stones.  

Without trying, my mind wanders in an inward spiral. It’s not overthinking, which my mind does in other rooms. It’s the opposite of that. It’s stillness that magnifies what is in the depths, rather than the waves of events and errands that conceal things with foam and reflections. 

I retired at the beginning of this month, which is a dream come true. At the same time, it’s an adjustment that takes time. Even new shoes need to be broken in. 

I’ve often felt that there was something wrong with me.  I mean seriously wrong that disables me from doing the things I once did. Things that defined me. The words of a friend came back to me in that calm. She said that there is nothing wrong with me, it’s just that that contract has been fulfilled. 

When I paid off my car, I didn’t continue sending the monthly payments.

My first ever post was “Dream Fragments”, in February of 2006. I’m still doing them all these years later.

Unelman palasia

I’m amazed at how quickly the past three hundred days have gone by. 

I took the first couple of months off to get settled, and to heal. Yes, heal. I was broken. I could hardly walk. In the 30 years prior, I owned two homes, neither of which had a second story. Now that I was in a home where not only my bedroom, but also my kitchen was upstairs, I was having trouble getting up and down the staircase. 

I’d made plans about the things I would do in my new town, and I started doing a few of them. It was winter, so I couldn’t do everything right away. Some stuff had to wait until spring. I didn’t even know what my yard looked like yet!  That didn’t keep me from rolling in the snow mid-sauna.

I joined the Senior Citizens Center, Friends of the Greenhouse (FROG), Dream Machines Car Club and the bike trail association.  I was even hired by the city to serve on the Human Rights Commission. In April, I began full time healthcare work, and then six months later, was approved for my social security benefits. November first, I will be done working full time, and will drop down to casual as long as that works for me. 

I got back into my old hobby of owning, enjoying and showing classic cars. I no longer own the two vehicles I brought with me, and I finally have an AWD daily driver, which is pretty much a necessity in the northland. 

In late summer, I adopted a dog. My cats and I have known her since she was a puppy, so the transition was an easy one. 

I think the gallery has sold out of all my paintings, so I’ve been working on new ones, and look forward to having more time to work on them, and get new work up for sale. 

Raymond is 21, and is doing great in his new place. This month marks one year since he got out from under my wing. He has a job that he enjoys, and has made new friends where he lives, about an hour’s drive from my house. 

I’ve enjoyed visits from various friends and family members in my quirky, cozy house. 

To be in this house as long as I was in the last one, I’d pretty much have to live to be 100.  Goals. 

The church I grew up in had very strong ideas about things like playing cards, dice, movies, video games, smoking cigarettes and many other things that were never mentioned in the Bible.  They just made up new rules about what constituted a sin.  This set my bullshit meter off.  We were allowed to play poker on church campouts if we used Rook cards rather than playing cards.  Swearing, drinking and dancing were outlawed.  I didn’t do these things, so they came up with something else as my vice.  It was listening to contemporary Christian music.  I went to a concert at another Christian college, only to get a dorm confinement upon my return because my school didn’t “condone that type of music.”  This is a band that played what is considered to be Praise Music now, and some of their songs appear in hymnals.  I think they just like power and finding fault.  This is the problem with dogma.  It is unkind, arrogant and alienating.  Many other abuses occurred there that have left me wondering what the fuck.  Most of us (hopefully) can look at the Salem witch trials in horror, wondering how such a thing could happen.  I don’t wonder.  It’s an extreme example of the kind of thinking and teaching that chipped away at my self esteem and my faith.  Over the centuries, Christianity has made up a lot of rules and have convinced people that they came from the Bible.  It’s really just church tradition.  Does the Bible say you have to pray and ask Jesus into your heart in order for him to become your lord and savior?  I must have missed that one.  I remember reading you only have to believe.  But I was never sure I’d prayed correctly, so I did it multiple times over many years to make sure.  I was at a camp bonfire, and the pastor had everyone bow their head.  He led the campers in just such a prayer, assuring them that everyone’s eyes were closed, and they should raise their hand if they prayed to ask Jesus into their heart.  It was private, just between him and them.  Then he asked them to come down in front of everyone.  He lied, and manipulated the kids.  I confronted him afterwards, asking him what a person needed to do to be saved.  He quoted Acts 16:31, and admitted he had never thought of it like that before.  I think about these things.  I always had doubts, and asked people in the church for advice.  I was instructed to act like I believed them, and that one day I would actually believe it.  No thank you.  It reminds me of the time I told my mom that “because I said so” was no longer good enough for me.

I’m not an atheist.  I don’t believe anything that strongly.  I just think we’ve collectively gotten god all wrong.  I used to attend Al Anon, and was a bit shocked the first time I heard “take what you like and leave the rest.”  A friend once told me she’s a “cafeteria Catholic”, meaning the same thing.  It sounded like heresy, just because we didn’t get the option of leaving anything.  We were encouraged in Al Anon, to believe in a higher power, and in a way I accept that.  In a way, no.  I see the universe as my higher power.  The laws of physics and all that.  The problem in it being a higher power, is that I’m part of that.  I didn’t come into the universe.  I came out of it, the way a wave comes out of the ocean.  So I guess I’m an agnostic.  But I don’t really like wearing labels.