2020-07-02 — Deep Reflections

Hello, all you wonderful people, you. 😊

It’s 10:25 p.m., and it’s been a memorable day. As per my previous post, to give you a follow up on how I’m doing with my body having gone over the edge last night and my crossing my fingers to see if I could stave off a migraine, well, I was somewhat successful and somewhat not.

I woke up with a headache, and I had a sort of quasi migraine most of the day (my head hurt, and the thought of eating was just… no; but I never got to the point of the debilitating pain that I usually go to when I’m this far over the edge).

That was nice. 😊

What did happen was something quite different than what I’d expected for the day. I’d expected to sleep in a little bit today to recover a bit and then to take it relatively easy today, doing a few jobs, and calling it good.

Instead, I ended up taking the entire day off, barely working a handful of minutes out of the whole day, and pretty much ignoring my phone the entire day, despite perhaps 20+ phone calls coming in. 😮

Why?

Well, my mom texted me asking how I was doing this morning (with my migraine situation and whatnot) suggesting I call when I got the chance, and I did call her back, and we actually spent the next 12+ hours (not kidding or exaggerating even a tiny bit) talking about this whole letting go/holding on experience that I’ve been writing about for a few days now. She’s the only person in this entire world who knows everything about it. She’s been there fore me when I couldn’t even function without her on the other end of the line. She’s been there through my breaking into a million pieces. She’s been through my trying to put myself back together. She’s been through all of my hardest times and most painful struggles, and she was there again today–for 12+ hours… my angel mother.

I don’t remember exactly how it started. Oh wait, yes, I do. We were talking about my post from last night and about letting go, and about the hiccup I ran into with my intention to try to let go after I re-read some of the entries in my “sacred” journal.

What happened from there was that we ended up going over every single journal entry from my sacred journal from the beginning, from 1994, the first entry, to the last one, before I stopped trusting in god and stopped recording what I felt to be my sacred experiences. The last one I had recorded was in June of 2017, so that’s 23 years of entries (hence the reason it took 12 hours).

We didn’t start with that intention. At first, I shared with her a handful of the more recent entries/experiences that seemed to clearly direct me to keep trusting what I’d understood all along. And after spending a couple hours or so reading and talking about them, we agreed the right course was to keep holding on, despite what everything looked like on the outside.

But then, because I knew that there were other experiences that could potentially call those latter ones into question, and being more interested in truth than having things a certain way, I shared some of those other entries as well. After probably a couple hours of reading the first ones, and then those earlier ones, so we both decided that it would be best just to start at the beginning, with the very first of my “sacred” entries, and read through all of them.

So we did.

We read 23 years of entries, in chronological order, reading some of them for a second or third time, since we’d already read some of them before. Suffice it to say, it was not a short read.

I had hopes that by the time we’d gone through all of it that maybe, just maybe I might come to a resolution, a confident decision about the path forward. I’d read large chunks of my sacred writings before, but I don’t think I’d ever gone over every single one in one sitting. It was quite an interesting experience. There were times I flinched at some of the things I’d written in there–worrying what other people would think if they saw what I’d felt I’d experienced. There were many times where the experiences were super powerful, with me feeling that power again and again with the same feelings that in times past I would have said were 100% the spirit of god. Now, of course, I question everything.

By the time all of them were read, to my discouragement, I found that I was nearly where I’d begun. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t feel good about moving on anymore, not that I had ever felt good about it, I just didn’t know what else to do given the apparent realities of the day. But it was all called into question even more today as there were some very powerful things that seemed so absolutely clear in directing me to stay the course, even still. However, there were some other things, both in the writings and including the current circumstances that made it seem simply foolish to continue staying the course.

Basically, to make a 12-hour conversation short, the final verdict from both me and my mother was that neither of us knew what was right to do, and I personally realized, again, that I couldn’t feel right about either. In the end, my mother gave me a challenge, taking a play out of my own playbook, suggesting that I do what I had challenged others to do in similar situations where there’s something that, certainly is super important, but that at the moment has become more of a distraction or obsession, to the point that you can’t do the other things you need to do because you’re so caught up in it.

When people have come to me living life in such circumstances or conditions, I have very regularly suggested to them, “Don’t worry about it for now. Yes, it’s super important, but just put in on the shelf for now. You’ll come back to it at some point, but put it on the shelf right now. Let it go for the moment. Don’t worry about it. We’ll deal with it another time. For now, just focus on X, Y, and Z.”

So… there you have it. I’ve taken the challenge to put it all on the shelf for now and to focus simply on being good and doing good. Perhaps the rest will take care of itself. We’ll see. It’s certainly not going to be easy, whatever the outcome.

Anyway, it’s been a long day. My body is still not where it needs to be. I’m wiped out pretty good right now. It’s after midnight now, and I need to go to bed, as I’ve royally screwed up preparation for tomorrow, as I’ve done just about nothing today (workwise).

#1. I’m grateful for my angel mother, to spend her entire day with me, unplanned to try and help me through this experience that has been such a big deal for so many years.

#2. I’m grateful that I have kept a journal for so many years, to have all that to go back to. Today, it didn’t net me a solid direction, but I’m grateful to have all that to read through if I want to.

#3. I’m grateful that it stormed again today. I was caught up in the long conversation with my mother, so I didn’t see much of it, but it was certainly shaking the house violently, and I love those storms.

#4. I’m grateful to at least have a tentative decision, even if it doesn’t answer anything at all, to put that whole situation on the shelf for the time being and to let it just be there for the time being, deciding later what to do with it all.

#5. I’m grateful for this gratitude section in my journal. If nothing else gets written on a given journal entry, I will always include the gratitude. It’s the most important part.

Good night, my lovelies. I’m about to collapse. Sooooo tired.

Lift the World.

~ stephen