Pressing the RESET button

(by: By Bruno Furnari CC license for non-commercial use)

Going home is like pressing a reset button in my head. It's a reminder that I don't have to win or lose, pass or fail to be alright and everything is in order. My family supports me and knows I'm brave and tough, they know I'm scared shitless a lot of the time but still go out and do my best.

This is today's theme it seems, and while it's super late I'm wondering what is the reset for others. Is it a vacation or going to someplace you learned great things? Is it a day of rest and sleeping it off or maybe just making enough time in a day to do something you love, like I love to paint or just go out and shoot random photos.

It doesn't take a lot to get me out of a creative and energetic funk. It does sometimes take me a lot more to get out of a creative funk. In the news business it's sometimes easy to get into a call/visit, notes, write reports, repeat -- cycle. And I hate that because I want to write poetry in the newspaper and apply it to common things so that people will include a bit more poetry in their lives. Maybe it's just a romantic notion to believe others are interested in reading a finely tuned piece of news better than taking the bitter as it is, but you'll have to come up with a pretty good argument to prove I shouldn't keep on believing it.

I wear myself out. I literally go and go, hope and hope, drive myself and drive myself crazy with details, names, facts, dates, late history, early history, who's what doing, did, said had a dream. And I love it. I love the pace because it's an addiction and I crave it like one, too. But at least it's productive, even when it's not healthy. The adrenaline rush was why I loved hard, breaking news and chasing the cops around like a mad woman for a year. Instead, now I just chase anything in sight and refuse to narrow things down.

Then there's my friend's business and how I hope to help it grow and make it more because I want to see him succeed after being an underdog. And if I didn't see the potential for success, I'd probably still help him because I love him. And love is always a good enough reason to do anything.

I've set myself up to move to the next phase of a woman's typical life, skipping children perhaps, and going out for a graduate degree and my own business. I'm thinking my life will always be empty if I do neither, so I'm going to do one. It's not the success I care about but that people stop whatever they're doing and notice I was here, take something profound away from my expression (in whatever form it takes) and live a more fulfilled life for it. And I don't care about how big my audience is. If you're reading this and moved by it -- well then, maybe I've done it all.

In the meantime, I want to travel, which has a fee attached to it. I want to create art, which has a fee attached to it. I want to help others in drastic ways, which (usually) has a fee attached to it. I want to be free from the system, which has so damn many fees attached to it that the idea of trying probably cost something.

And then there is spirit.

I've stood at the crossroads enough times to know that down one path lies the status quo, the home and family, a career with success, fame or money. And down the other path lies the revelations for today's world that I can reach through spiritual transformation and a smattering of enlightenment. The trick to being enlightened is to practice it all the time, so it's obvious that you can't stay enlightened all the time unless you are wholly supported by others. Walking with one foot on either side of the spirit-line is knowing you're mad while experiencing the madness and embracing this. Our world was not built for such folk, but I've seen that it is wild and hungry for what such mad folk bring back.

Shamanism would be the closest thing I have to a religion, but I cannot truly serve the people as a shaman while participating in the social drama. Thus, the crossroads. And while that is the role I feel I should take, I wonder at myself for not seeking a shaman to heal and help me grow into that role. How like the vision-quests is my seeking for knowledge of the human animal in these days? How unlike animals we are.

I'm far from the crossroads this time. I've developed a fairly healthy network of contacts and have a wonderful relationship with an understanding, supportive, tenderhearted man. I'm learning all the obstacles to communicating alternative ideas to the people and about their trepidation for the evolution needed to bring about a common and peaceful future. Spirit healing is not just a thing that happens to an individual.

And so, writing this blog is also like a reset button, a channel to put out all my feelings so they can begin building again. Building new atop the same old, same doesn't necessarily mean the foundation was good when you started. When things start out askew, then there might not be enough room for roots.

There doesn't have to be a malfunction or error to press reset. Sometimes that just means finding north when charting a course or east. Sometimes you have to push the reset button over and over, over and over, over and over - - before the beginning point will have its right time or place, or that things will finally be out of danger from prevention by external forces.

I have a wellspring of hope that rises with the rains that come from the muse. It leads me to feel immortal in ideas and formidable against the status quo's chief naysayers. And I will live the life of a visionary, whether I have to just give it a little go at a time or push reset again, and again.

Terri