Saturday, September 11, 2010



Very often what is happening in my life physically, externally, mechanically and in the tangible realm is a mirror reflection of what is going on internally, spiritually, in the realm of the intangible. Currently, for example, I have been working on moving my workshop to a property that has been a rental house. On the surface, this is a simple enough endeavor. I need a workshop, My renter left with out notice and trashed the house (as is par for the course), so the concept of using that house as a workshop was not so far fetched. Aside from the rationalized need to do this, the time, effort, planning, and dreaming stuff up were productive distractions from the inner workings of my spirit-emotive-dynamics. Any distraction from that is apparently necessary these days, based on the amount of distracting I am inventing for myself. But the thing is that the real issues of being alive are the internal things. So efforts to distract myself inevitable end up being about what is going on inside. Once I get ready to look at this, I am often (not always) able to see some connection between the projects I involve myself in and the work at hand internally. I can ask myself, if I happen to be somewhat clueless about what the internal work at hand is, how what I am doing externally might relate. In the case of the rental house, what I am doing, essentially, is re-purposing that space. This requires some consideration. Some creative problem solving, some free associative allowing of possibility. After all, a rental house and a workshop are somewhat different uses of space. I had to figure out how to utilize living space for workshop space. How to make that work. This requires a rethinking of both the concept of living space and the concept of workshop space. I actually enjoy these sorts of challenges. And low and behold, guess what I am primarily doing with myself internally, in my own internal space? Why re-purposing, of course. I am trying to some how transform my self from a married man and father to a single, (divorced) man and father. I am doing some major reconfiguring of what I actually am and what my relationship to reality is. This too requires some level of creative consideration and free associated openness to possible differences. My inner space is being reconfigured to allow for a different kind of use than what I had set myself up for and utilized for the past 20 years. Just as in the reconfiguring of the rental house, this process has been an invention of necessity. One that calls for a letting go of set concepts of purpose, and a willingness to start over with the whole notion of what a space is. Or how a space can be utilized. In both cases the process is creative, which is good for an old guy like me, but in in both cases, it all requires work,and getting dirty, and time to make happen. You don't just snap your fingers and see changes like these. They take time to develop, and the development is a flexible situation where changes and new ideas are occurring as the work developes. My workshop is begun. I made the major move of stuff, cut out sections of walls in the house to change the floor plans, put tools and work stations in place where I think they make sense, secured the house, and have used it to do a couple shop projects already. But it has a long way to go before It starts to resemble what I am visualizing for it. The same sort of process is going on inside me. I have made the big gross changes that have to start the reconfigurations from married dad to divorced dad. I have some visualizations and notions in mind of what my new condition might end up being like. But it is very much a work in progress. It is going to take a while before the self I hope to manifest in this new condition stands alone and functions effectively. I am functioning, things are in place to do what I have to do right now. But there are still unpacked boxes of emotional and spiritual stuff laying around the are not opened and sorted out. There are major question marks around things like religion and social life and meeting other people that are still very much undeveloped and un-delt with issues. I would like to snap my fingers and have all that settled and in place. I like a tidy life. But these things will take time. If I can, I hope to remain able to avail myself to the yet un-thought of possibilities. To remain creative and energetic and able to keep moving the work along.

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