I Want to Write,

and yet I feel like I have nothing specific to say today, which is problematic for me. My process has been to grab the thought when it starts by typing away and letting it flow from there. Due to decades of writer’s block, other than Facebook posts and the like, I have a pretty good stockpile of thoughts inspiring me to write. Today, however, things are different. There is not one singular thing, just a mashup of many bits and pieces, like what’s always in my head at all times.

Sitting down to write without feeling inspired by a clear thought or topic or without a due date but just feeling inspired instead by the desire to write is a new moment for me. So I sit here and write, unsure of where we are about to go. I have another piece finished, but I am not yet ready to share it. My “editor”, Jon, has yet to look it over for me and correct any spelling and grammatical errors. He is also excellent with the content and letting me know what he feels is missing or what feels like too much. So, I will wait for him to wake from his nap after getting up early to take the dogs out before the heat of the day set in.

I have no discipline, okay, this seems like an exaggeration. I have little discipline when it comes to many aspects of life. Freedom has always been one of the things I have most valued, especially when it comes to my time and my use of it. I sometimes will think to myself, “I’d like to get a massage today (or something of the like, that has an actual measured time),” and then immediately feel my resistance rise as I experience the thing I’d like to do as “time lost”. That hour will be gone from my day, and then the inevitable inertia sets in and I sit, doing nothing much with the stretch of time I believe I have created by denying myself the very thing I truly wanted to do.

When I was young, maybe 10 or so (maybe younger), Saturdays were relegated to cleaning the house. First, before any fun could be had, the house must be cleaned. My sister and I split the chores, one of us on bathroom duty and the other on dusting and vacuuming the rest of the house, and we switched off weekly. Oh sure, we could wake up and watch some cartoons on tv and eat some breakfast first, but before any real activity could happen, anything outside of the house, or having friends over, or sitting down and curling up with a good book, the chores must get done, on that day.

We hated this, of course, my sister and I. She would yell at our mother, “I am not your slave!” I was less bold than she, putting my head down and getting it done, always afraid of my mother’s anger, anger at times that distorted itself into rage.

Waking up to the sound of dishes being smashed in the sink at 2:00am by my drunk mother who had just come home. I was 16 at the time. I had left one plate and one glass in the sink before bed.

We never spoke about it.

She would inspect our work before we were free to go, always finding a little bit more for us to do, always finding a bit of fault with our work. We were never good enough at house cleaning. This ritual continued through high school. Although as my sister and I got busier and busier with activities related to school that often took us out of the home early on Saturdays, the schedule of chores would shift to accommodate these things.

My mother yelling at 15-year-old me for not cleaning the bathroom well enough, pointing out to me that I’d missed this and this and this. Me mouthing, “Fuck You” to her behind her back. She’d completely abandoned me to the abuse of my stepfather by then. She seeing it in the reflection of the mirror and turning and hitting me in the face.

Rage, she had a real problem with it. She still does.

Chores, discipline, shoulds, and must-dos, I have a real problem with them to this day, procrastinating to the point where I often create more trouble for myself and more loss of time.

For a couple of weeks, “You should back up your computer to your external drive” was the gentle nudge/thought/guidance I had been ignoring. I would think, “Yes, I should back up my drive,” and then procrastinate and forget about it for a few days until the next time the voice returned.

Tuesday night of this week, I turned my computer on and the thingy under the Windows logo on my screen just kept spinning. I waited a good long while, sometimes waiting is all that’s needed, but nothing changed so I manually shut it down. When I restarted it I got the blue screen of death. You know the one, the one you look at and just say, “FUCK!” when you see it.

“I’m heading into my room,” Jon said as he walked by the open door of my office from coming inside with the dogs. We sit out with them every night, but I missed out due to the technological shenanigans I had created for myself.

”Nope! Wait! Help!’ I hollered.

I had already tried a few fixes. Each time Windows replied with, “nope” or “critical process died”. I was already in command prompt, typing in letters and words and spaces and //////s, using my tablet and my phone to run internet searches for fixes on something I already knew in my gut was unfixable.

“Have you tried (fill in the blank with all of the things I had already done)?” asked Jon

“Yep,” in a surprisingly calm voice. At this point, not too long ago, I would have been crying and picking as many fights as I could with him, and he would have been obliging me. When one of us goes down, often the other one goes right along with them, our symbiotic connection which most often serves us, does not when it comes to conflict. For some reason when any technology is involved, things tend to fall off the cliff much more quickly. I’ll tell the story of “The Great Remote Control Battle of 2001” some other time.

He wandered into his room and ordered me a new hard drive due to arrive the next day, Wednesday, which would solve the, “I need an operational computer for the online advanced level channeling class we were teaching on Thursday” problem and yet did not solve the, “I had not backed up the data on that drive recently” problem. One of the things not backed up was all of the work I had done towards our taxes, both last year’s and this year’s, as we are getting ready to file. Mostly everyone in CA got an extension this year due to the storm systems that rolled through taking out much of the infrastructure for periods of time all over the state. We took advantage of the extension as doing taxes feels to me like cleaning the house does, but worse.

Jon got up early on Wednesday to take the pack out. I was going to sleep in, but my computer problems coupled with the fact that my next-door neighbor was doing some loud yard work had me up at 7:30 am. I have a pretty standard morning routine which was now completely disrupted by my downed computer.

Instead of starting my morning in my office, I started in the dining room, doing the bare minimum that needed to get done on my little laptop/tablet thing that is way out of date. I still was calm, certain the hard drive would arrive and that I would be able to install Windows on it without issue. I had a fleeting thought that once I had done that, perhaps I would still be able to access all of the data on my other drive. Maybe it was just a booting issue? I tried not to be attached to that outcome while at the same time being open to that outcome. I did just have the underlying feeling that “everything will be okay”, largely because my life experience has shown me that this is, more often than not, the outcome, and I let myself enjoy the disruption of my regular morning routine.

I did a cursory search on Best Buy just to see if they had a sale happening on drives and they did. I decided that instead of waiting for the drive to be delivered, I would head down the hill, once Jon and the pack were home (we share a car), and buy myself another one. I like having two disk drives in my computer, a computer Jon built me 10 years ago, as I can use one as my main drive and the other for storage, making my main drive run much more quickly and efficiently. Plus, I wanted to look at laptops. I’ve always had this vision that if I just had the correct laptop this would somehow magically turn me into a writer. As usual, I always start the thing first before upgrading to the technology needed. So now that I am writing, I need a laptop to fulfill the vision I have always had of walking down the block to The Farmer and The Cook (or heading to Paris) and sitting there with a beverage on the outdoor patio while writing.

I told Jon my plan when he got home, the Best Buy plan not the Paris plan. Now, sometimes doing something like jumping in my car to try to solve a problem more quickly as opposed to waiting for the solution that is already on the way can be anxiety-driven behavior of mine. I checked in with myself, this plan to go to Best Buy was not the anxiety-driven variety. I even pulled a card on it, my support staff agreed. Jon jumped on their website and found a 1 TB disk drive on sale for $35. He’s still going on and on (and on) about what a great deal this was. “The greatest deal ever!”

I headed down to the store and the entrance to the parking lot was blocked due to repaving. I figured out where to park, laughing that it had been at least 4 years since I had last been there and that I would choose to return while the entire area looked like a construction zone with the smell of hot asphalt filling my lungs. The employee I spoke with told me that they did not even know this was happening on that day.

I got exactly what I wanted, looked at some laptops, and then headed home. The drive being delivered was still not there so we set to work at installing my new drive. I had said to Jon earlier in the day, “When my new drive comes, I am going to need you to stop whatever it is you are doing and help me so I can get ready for tomorrow’s class as soon as possible. So whatever you do, please don’t be a pain in the ass about this.”

He was gardening when I got home. Crap. It is something he loves to do so much, and had not been able to get out there like he had been wanting to due to the heat.

“I know you’re gardening, but remember the thing I said to you earlier about being cooperative with me? Could you just do it so we don’t start yelling at each other?”

He gave me a little scowl and said, “Give me 10 minutes”.

About 30 minutes later he had my new hardware installed, and then I set about installing the Windows operating system on my new drive. I aggravated him some more by making him observe me as I started, even though I have done it before, and released him once installation was underway.

The moment of truth had arrived, time to address the thing that had been gnawing and gnawing at me, even as I continued to access the thought/feeling that “everything would be okay”, would I be able to get all of my data off of my bad drive?

Windows was fully installed and my computer was operational once more. I downloaded and installed some necessary programs first, and then opened up file explorer to the “My PC” panel. And there it was, all of my data on my old disk drive was still there and accessible. I immediately began to copy it all over to my new drive.

It’s all there now and is also about to be copied to an external drive as well.

Phew!

The channeling class and all attendees blew me away on Thursday with their work as they did during the first session last Saturday. The love and energy and information being accessed and expressed by our participants has been incredibly healing and uplifting to everyone including Jon and myself.

I have been reminded that when the voice gently nudges me to do the thing I think I do not want to take the time to do, I always end up taking much more time sorting it out than I actually would have if I had just done the thing when first prompted to.

Our next Level I Channeling Class begins on Saturday, September 30th. This class is open to everyone, from total beginners to those of you who have already established contact and connections to those of you who are working in a more advanced way. The collaboration between attendees makes this class a rich and powerful experience.

More details and registration can be found here on my site