Find Your Boundaries

Today, my mind is full and scattered, wandering and looking for a path, chaos surrounded by chaos.

At the end of a fairly stressful Monday filled with more nuisances, annoyances, and breakages than a whole month should have, my altar candle burned itself out.  It was a 2-week pillar candle, which usually lasts at least a week in the too-large glass pillar I have it in, and I had just lit it that morning.  For some reason, it flared up, melting so deep and fast that it completely buried itself.  I couldn’t even dig out the wick.  This morning, I tried lighting it anyway, but all I succeeded in doing was melting more wax and burying it deeper, until eventually the tip of the long match fell off, still burning, lodging itself in the red pool of melted wax.  That tip is still there hours later, still burning, like a substitute wick, a little off center, but functioning just like the real wick would, melting the rest of the wax to create a flat surface to start over from.

Part of me is a little afraid that something huge is going to happen to shake my life up further, to completely divorce me from my old patterns and set me on a new course.  I know a new course is coming.  I keep trying to force it, to seek it out, but I think it’s just going to land on me.  I’m a little scared.

Yesterday, as I pondered the catastrophe that was Monday, I received a new prompting:  Find Your Boundaries.  I’ve been claimed by a boundary crosser as my patron god.  Now it’s time to further delve into His place in my life.  Is this a preparatory step toward finding a Great Work?  It could be.  Time will tell.

The other night, I had a bizarre dream that my High Priestess just suddenly stopped coming to rituals and refused to talk to me.  Very bizarre, since she is one of my best friends, not just my priestess.  Last night, I had one of those long, convoluted dreams that included: a roller coaster that swirled around the roof of a building and was used as an escape route to keep away from some kind of boogey-man; living in a skyscraper with businesses and an underground shopping complex, like Crystal City, and setting myself up as a temp with a law firm in the building; an impromptu make-out session with another mom in the abandoned hallway of a school; driving a bus; and making cinnamon rolls for the needy.  Um…brain?  What the heck?

Boundaries…What are my contradictions in life?  What points me out?  I am a genius who has chosen to be a stay-at-home mom rather than pursue a hotshot career in something money-making.  I am a thick woman who is healthy (apart from constant pain) and strong, and willing to fight anybody who thinks my size or anybody else’s size is a problem.  I am a happily married woman approaching my 20th wedding anniversary with my high-school sweetheart, but I am neither heterosexual nor monogamous.  I was raised southern Baptist, and I am now a Wiccan priestess.  I am a pagan with many children.  I am a homeschooler, but I am not Christian.  I am a crunchy mom who smokes and drinks.  I am an attachment parenting free-range mom.

A story I told my daughter this morning…When I was a kid, whenever we would go out to eat for breakfast, to Denny’s or IHOP or someplace similar, I would always get something off the lunch or dinner menu.  Because I could.  That was the only reason.  Everybody else was getting breakfast, but there was another option, and so I took it.  I followed the path less traveled.  And got constant complaints about how the smell of my food was ruining the taste of everybody else’s.

Published by solinox

I am a Wiccan priestess, a libertarian mother of triplets plus three, a wife and homeschooling mom to blind and autistic children, a fiber artist, and a Jane of All Trades, always learning and seeking to help.

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4 Comments

  1. Defining the boundaries as well as walking right past them as necessary or wanted. Doesn’t sound like Him at all. *grin*

    I find myself doing the ‘er?’ cat head thing at the dreams but still reminds me of a lot of boundary-crossing images. Things that you aren’t or may have been, or may be yet. Or do. You push boundaries, and dear Gods do we need more boundary-pushers! I have no idea if it is your Great Work, but from the conversations we’ve had and the looks of it that is one of your life’s works.

  2. I don’t know if it helps you to know this, but thanks to a post from Angi, I was reminded last night that we’re currently in the thick of a Mercury retrograde in Cancer, which explains so much of what’s going on in my and the Reverend’s life just now, I almost hurt myself with the force of my facepalm.

    Mercury retrogrades are about the “four r’s”: Review, Reflect, Resolve, Re-integrate. Until 20 July, this energy is pushing on the sign of homebody Cancer, the sign of home and family life. Nurturing, healing Water, with an emphasis on action and changing the external to reflect the internal.

    ” I know a new course is coming. I keep trying to force it, to seek it out, but I think it’s just going to land on me. I’m a little scared.”

    It may just land on you, but there are still things you can do to prepare yourself for it. Something that struck me in what you’ve written here, particularly along with your post, “Distraction” is this:

    I think your lesson is in the candle.

    I know a lot of folks insist that you need to find quiet, that you need to take time away, that you need quiet and space and so on so you can ground, center, and meditate. Wouldn’t it be lovely if life were like that? If we all had hours that we could carve away in time and space for quiet contemplation, meditation, and reflection in spa-like rooms of feng shui-ed Zen welcoming perfection? Life doesn’t work like that. Life is not orderly, and peaceful, and feng shui-ed from here to Tuesday. Life, by its very nature, is chaos.

    When I felt called to Hermes, I resisted, because I didn’t think I needed more of /that sort of thing/ in my life. Eventually, though, I welcomed Him into my life. Because He could teach me how to stop being a victim of my own nature… how to work /with/ my nature. A kite can’t fly on a still day.

    “A fractal is a object in space that has an ever larger number of ever smaller pieces. It is self-similar, meaning that the smaller pieces are reduced copies of the larger pieces. For some fractals, the smaller pieces are exact copies of the larger pieces. For most fractals in nature, the smaller pieces are kind-of-like the larger pieces. A tree is such a fractal. It has an ever larger number of ever smaller branches. A fractal can also be a process in time. There can be an ever larger number of fluctuations of ever smaller amplitude.

    “The word chaos was chosen to describe another type of nonlinear system. It used to be thought that complicated results must be produced by very complicated systems. Chaos means that some nonlinear, but quite simple systems, can produce very complicated results. These systems have the surprising property that we can completely predict the values of the system over brief times, but we are unable to predict their values over long times.”

    The tree /is/ chaos. And yet, the tree is at peace.

    1. Oh, and my candle: after several days of using matchsticks and toothpicks as substitute wicks that burned extremely low, fell over, and gradually dug a hole well off to the side, today I was able to get the real wick lit, and it is still burning this evening!

  3. Oh yes, I saw the retrograde coming, so I was a teeny bit unsurprised at how Monday unfolded!

    I’ve done a lot of exploring this week, a lot of contemplation. More thought will be needed, but I have some small changes lined up for the next couple of weeks, way to accept and integrate instead of fighting and redirecting.

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