First things first. I’m doing it. Here I sit at Farmer and the Cook, a blueberry rooibos tea with some oat milk and honey next to me and my laptop in front of me. Writing. Well, writing and socializing due to knowing half of the people here right now. This is an actualization of a long-held dream and I have such mixed emotions.
Why, why now, five days before we drive away from this valley, instead of at any point over the last fifteen years?
When I know, six months or so in the future, well, I’ll fill you all in.
Huh, I just noticed that my caps lock is set to on, and yet I am not typing in all caps. I’m chalking this up to Mercury going direct, and I am not going to even think about it until I get back home.
Home.
I am not sure where that is right now.
Sometimes I sit on the sidelines and observe the suffering occurring in our world, and other times I find myself thrust into the middle of it. There seems to be no rhyme or reason only the truth that bad shit happens and sometimes the shit finds me and sometimes it doesn’t.
This shit, though, the housing crisis, the widening of the wealth gap……………………
I just had to get up and move to another room after hearing someone at a table near me loudly talking about how she was being victimized and then say, “But The Universe is always taking care of me.”
The inability of many in the new age/wellness community and every other community to accept being a victim and instead bypass it with language like, “God has a plan for me” or “I must have created this for some lesson,” lets the perpetrators off the hook and prolongs the healing process.
Where was I? Oh yes, the shit. This moment of ever-increasing inequity is not sustainable and is affecting us all. I wonder how much more the collective can take before we put an end to this needless suffering.
“Why do you keep telling people we’re being evicted?” Jon asked me after a wonderful community potluck the other night.
“Because I am trying to draw attention to what’s happening in the bigger picture,” I said. “Plus, it’s just true. We are being evicted.”
“Evicted!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Steve Sprinkel said that same night with a sad and disgusted look on his face. He already knew, but hearing me say it drove it home.
I knew when Mercury went direct that our moving plan was likely to change. I had hoped this would mean something might open up here for us in Ojai. It turns out it was the firing of our local mover, the canceling of our relo cubes, and the hiring of a full-service long-distance mover after our local mover blew us off on Sunday when he was supposed to come by and collect all items that had not sold during our driveway sale and then after one text the next day began ghosting me.
I’ve been demanding the $57.50 deposit back which I was stupid enough to send him a few weeks ago when I booked him. See, here I go, blaming myself for being victimized. This also all happened on the Scorpio Full Moon, the moon that had me yelling at Jon at 1am due to his need to hold onto too many physical items thus triggering my anxiety and money concerns. The full-service mover will cost us more, and in my opinion, we have too much stuff.
“You just hate me,” he said.
“No, I don’t hate you, just the hoarding,” I replied, trying to avert a full-on disaster. I handed him a CBD gummy infused with melatonin, took one myself, and we both calmed down.
I looked at him and said, “The hoarder moon,” which cracked him up, and he said, “I guess I am taking one for the team.”
Speaking of taking one for the team, we were on the patio of the Farmer the other night, eating a deliciously hot meal. Lately, the food has not been as hot as it could be, but on this night it was perfect. As I stuck a forkful of my cauliflower tostada into my mouth, savoring the incredible mix of flavors, a server came by and dropped off the bowl of soup that Jon had ordered. I started smelling something burning and looked at him with the giant patio heater behind him making sure he was not on fire.
Many years ago a patio heater got too close to the windows there and shattered them. With this memory rising to the surface I was concerned this may be another patio heater disaster. It was not, and Jon was not on fire.
The burning smell was coming from the soup. This caused much hilarity between us, the servers, and a friend who happened to be there about how to get piping hot food at the Farmer something needed to be burnt. We got free treats due to the soup taking one for the team, as Jon and I both are right now. And yet, when things get tough, we are always more united despite our need to argue (and we do, need to argue, it’s just something we both have accepted).
Weird, the front window of the Farmer is once again shattered as it had been years ago, right behind the spot where Jon, the burnt soup, and I sat the other night. Apparently, this just happened last night.
Disclaimer: I have never had a single burnt thing at the Farmer before. This was all some wacky magic just for us and I in no way wish for this to reflect badly on The F & C which I love dearly along with the people who own it and work there. We eat much healthier now than we used to.
Don’t fuck us up, Chicago!
Whoa, more weirdness, my Caps Lock just repaired itself.
Fin.
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I'm definitely one of those who knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Universe holds me in its hands, even when things go wrong. It doesn't mean things don't go wrong, of course. Sometimes the things that go wrong did indeed need to happen to clear the way for something better, sometimes it means that shit happens and things are going to be okay anyway.
I think here of the article I wrote for the Beatles website I used to write for, the one I poured my heart and soul into, the one I thought would kill me before it was finished. The one that laid bare the inner contours of my heart. And the way the editor told me not only that he wouldn't publish it, but that he wouldn't publish it because he thought it would put bad energies into the world. I think about how much I cried over that (and never told him). And I think now about how grateful I am that it wasn't published, because he was right -- it would have put bad things into the world, although not the ones he was thinking of. That's just one of many examples. I felt victimized and misunderstood, and I suppose I was -- but ultimately, I'm so grateful for the rejection.
It's not always like that, of course. Sometimes bad things just happen and they're not fair, that's true. But more and more, I've seen that if I dance in good faith with the world, if I do my best -- and that's my contract with the Universe, that I will not rely on its grace to save me, but will always do my best to save myself -- things work out exactly as they should, even if it takes awhile for me to understand why. Even if I never understand why.
All of this, I should add, only started to happen once I surrendered to passion and let go of all the other bullshit.
Anyway, I wish this for you as well, of course. And I can relate to that experience of sitting writing in a lovely cafe in a community where you are known. That's a fantasy of mine, too, that has yet to come true. I'm glad you had it for awhile, anyway, and I suspect you'll have it again, because of course, we take our dreams and ourselves with us wherever we go. <3
I am impressed to be reading your writing so close to your move!
I empathise with you both - with the expense and effort of moving one’s belongings a long distance (having just moved 4000km across Australia), and also the emotional release required to let go of a lot of belongings… it can feel very emptying especially when you don’t know where home is! Sending energy to you both for the energetic/emotional/ physical upheaval you are navigating. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just create some fairy portals to move our belongings through and skip the moving companies all together? lol
Love to you
💚 🧚 💚