Ready, Fire, Aim! And other well-intentioned approximations…
Many months have passed. The long, cold winter nights are slowly growing shorter and in the wings the heralds of Spring buff and shine their golden bugles.
Change has come. In so many ways and so many forms, we are not the same as those who crept, step by step into the freezing darkness.
I’ve abstained long from writing here for so many reasons: avoiding discussing my terror of marriage, feeling that my life is nothing special to share and changes in my relationship with myself being the foremost. I apologise to anyone who was waiting on tenterhooks for the next instalment; well done, you’ve survived! J
Deja and I left the cabin in mid-December, passed a merry, bucolic Christmas with my parents and then left for Croatia. Deja’s father has been kind enough to allow us to pass winter in one of his vacant villas whilst our cabin is buried in snow and ice. We’ve spent the last two and a half months in luxury accommodation in Istria, just outside of Pula and about 20km from the coast.
It has been something of a culture shock to have running hot and cold water 24/7, electricity, lighting, internet and a fully equipped kitchen! Living in the cabin created a very strong sense of purpose and direction through necessity: we knew we needed to get out of bed to chop wood or carry water or work on plastering the walls. After the merriment of Christmas some inspiration was required to make good use of the time and space available and not just slouch in front of a vast plasma screen watching re-runs of American sitcoms!
January was accompanied by a bit of a shock, namely the realisation that some of my primary ‘firing’ needed some major adjustment to its ‘aiming’. I’ve been relentlessly plunging myself into all the challenging emotions that I feel for some time now in the understanding that the only way to expunge them is to feel them completely. After a conversation with Deja I realised that actually focusing on these emotions maintained and even recreated them in the present moment. If I really desire that my life include more love and happiness I need to create them for myself now, accepting pain or sadness or fear that arises but focusing instead on what I want my reality to be.
This realisation was a major ‘down-tools’! My life has been centred on ideas of liberation from these emotions and for a moment I was quite lost as to how to proceed. Then I got to work.
The most obvious way in which I was not creating love in the present moment was in how I spent my time: moping about how I was abandoned once or how sad I was feeling. I decided that one way to love myself was to support and nurture my talents. I appreciate that what we love to do or are good at is not always clear but life has streamlined my activities very thoroughly in the last few years and it was clear to me that I was not giving my writing or my music the attention they deserved.
I’ve spent the last two months playing flute and writing every day. I’ve also been exploring fasting, doing circuit training to keep fit, perfecting the art of baking 100% wholemeal sourdough, meditating, doing yoga, busking in Pula and generally trying to make use of the time I have here. Strangely enough letting go of my desire to directly heal my pain brought much more healing than directly trying to work with it had. Before my healing was at the centre of my life and now I feel like it is my creative endeavours that motivate me to get out of bed and play.
I have decided that I would like to write fiction, starting with short-stories. I’ve been writing stream-of-consciousness stories everyday but also studying the craft of story writing as the more I write, the less I realise I know about writing. I’ve never before appreciated how the text we encounter on the page is the tip of the iceberg of what the author has explored about his/her story. I’m having fun and I hope to be able to combine my love of growth and transformation in my chosen medium. Sadly many of the competitions that I am keen to enter stipulate that the entries must not have appeared anywhere in print, even on my blog. I’m trying to find a way around it but this is why my blog has remained so silent.
So to Now! Things have changed again, seemingly in an avalanche the last few days. I read a book which dropped a few more pieces of the puzzle into place and suddenly I’m welcoming all my discomforts with open arms and a smile on my face. I feel a bit like hitting myself on the head and saying ‘doh!’ A lot of my old ideas about life and its mechanisms are falling apart and the realm of possibility that I glimpse through the wreckage is quite frankly wonderful. Fortunately Deja is right by my side in this metamorphosis, if not already flying around in the air alongside me nagging me to stop pupating and enjoy the sunshine J
And the future? Well, it’s widely said that the future doesn’t exist so my ideas are of the loosest persuasion possible. I will return to my mountain cabin in a month. I want to stay there for the next 9 months and I have many projects in mind! I intend to install running hot (solar heated) and cold water, build a shower, build a water filter, insulate the roof, buy a larger solar set up and lighting, buy a laptop and mobile internet connection, build a cob-hot tub, start a garden…
Ultimately we want to have our own land, build our own eco-home and plant up a forest garden but for now we are happy to indulge in play and explore the world around us. Deja has also leapt into her talents in the last few months and has started painting every day. She has already sold a few of her paintings and she hopes to sell more in the market towns where I busk.
Perhaps a word on getting married? Gods, I don’t know? These things happen and you just say ‘yes’? There was a lovely Oscar Wilde quote on Facebook the other day that love has nothing to do with appearance, it’s because the other sings a song that only you can hear. Deja and I just seem to fit. We both are passionate about growing in self-love and openly committed to our own happiness before that of the other. This might sound very selfish but in fact it works really well. We understand that we are responsible for our own happiness and so there is no recrimination when the other does not satisfy us. We also feel a great freedom because we do not feel we have to be or do anything to please anyone else. We have a very loving and open dialogue that makes working through even the thorniest of issues much easier. We go through a lot of ‘stuff’, I think the more intimate a relationship is the more ‘stuff’ comes out. We are all mirrors for each other’s unseen inner worlds and the closer you are to someone the more honest the reflection you see in the mirror. This isn’t always pleasant but it’s not something to be feared or avoided. It is a gift that allows us to see what we are blind to and so allows us to be liberated from our deepest, most shameful fears and doubts. We also feel united in our dreams: both of us want to live in a sustainable fashion in nature, learn how to grow our own food and create from a place of connection with the mother that surrounds us all.
If we could both live together in France without getting married would we? Quite possibly, certainly the idea of getting married has caused great turbulence in and of itself. As Croatia is not in the EU we can only spend three months at a time in each other’s respective countries unless we are married. In truth Deja and I are already completely committed to ourselves and to love itself, we are agreed that if we are no longer growing together then being together is not something set in stone. Obviously this goes against the somewhat rigid tones of a hard-line Christian marriage but what being can honestly make promises on behalf of another? We are not our future selves and we do not seek to restrict their freedoms, just as we do not seek to restrict our own. For me, if a relationship is not something that we give ourselves to freely in each and every moment then it is just another kind of slavery. I am done with slavery, to an exploitative ‘system’, to fear, to any limited idea of myself or this universe. I want nothing but love in all her manifestations and I will continue to open myself to her and see what more adventures she has in store for me.
I could let this rest and rewrite it but I am impatient and impulsive, this is from the heart and you can love it or leave it.
I will be honest with you. I do not think I will be writing here as I once did. Some great part of my yearning to commune with the world across cyberspace has been met by the woman who walks by my side and for this I am grateful. I will keep it open and post irregularly so that the question ‘I wonder what Dom is up to?’ should never go unanswered. Sometimes I may even upload some of my stories or poetry, we will see. I could try and write about my life here ‘off-grid’ or ‘moneyless’ or whatever you like but I feel that others are already doing this better and with more energy than I care to.
Perhaps I will say just this: I haven’t worked a ‘real’ job in almost 20 months. I spend the vast majority of my time as I choose. I ‘work’ (as in directly for money) somewhere between 3-7 hours a week. I actually save more money than I did when I was living in Bristol and working 25 hours a week. Now this might appear lazy or dead-end but I believe if you find and nourish what you enjoy the most then it will ultimately be accompanied by all the material abundance that you personally desire. I am motivated, I use my time well. To wean myself into a new lifestyle in the last two months I used spreadsheets to timetable my days. I ‘work’ an average of 5 hours a day, minimum 3, maximum 7.5 and I rest on the weekends. My ‘work’ consists of those things I shared earlier: writing, playing flute, meditating, researching, studying, and exercising. I have huge chunks of time to myself and I still feel like there is so much I can’t fit in, so much there is no time or space for. I cannot imagine how I ever survived when I was working for 25 or even 40 hours a week.
To put it simply, my life is my own, far more so than when I lived in Bristol. I’m not interested in spending the best years of my life doing something I don’t really want to so that I might, might (!) have enough money to be free when I’m old and infirm. I believe that I deserve to be free now! I deserve the time and space to meet myself and this glorious planet that is our home. I deserve the time to nurture and nourish my gifts such that I and all those who I live with may share in them and enjoy their bounty!
You might say “Well, your girlfriend’s Dad let you stay there rent-free and someone leant you the cabin, I don’t have all those things, I couldn’t do all that”.
I didn’t have these things when I left Bristol, I had no idea that they would appear. I just knew that spending my life desperately awaiting the weekend and dreading the arrival of Monday didn’t feel like the infinitely abundant and generous universe that I believed in my heart to be real.
If you are in any state of doubt as to whether to cast off and leap into the unknown, please give yourself the gift of your own life. If you spend most of your time doing something you don’t like but feel you have to then you are complicit in its continuation. If you don’t say, “No!” to what you do not want then you are saying “Yes!” to it and the belief that you deserve it. Life needs space to move and if you do not throw out what you do not want or need then there is no room for the new to appear. It doesn’t matter how familiar it is or how long you’ve had it, if you don’t like it then let go of it!
The abundance that I have experienced in my life since I left Bristol is beyond telling. I may not live in a comfortable town house but I have my own life! I am my own master and my time is my own to enjoy, make use of or waste as I see fit..
..and that, was worth the worry 🙂
Lotsa love beautiful people, please do message me if you have any questions on this or any other aspects of this life that to me has come to seem normal 🙂
As ever, your Dom 🙂
xx
furryfurrygoatlegs 