This is the year of the Firehouse and what a galloping year of fire and chaos it is proving to be. On the larger world stage it seems that madness abounds, leaders do not lead…some cower, some ride in crazy mad emperor style over the whole world. Billionaire’s continue to grow greedily and ordinary folk are left managing as best they can, watching in horror and bewilderment as life grows ever more expensive, constrained , scary and bizarre. But, spring is coming, the birds are singing and new life springs and zings from Mother Earth.
I have not written a blog in a long while; my own life has mirrored some of this dysfunction and lately I have needed to curl dream like into my quiet space in the woods and root myself in my slowly developing garden and to meditate by the wee burn and be at one with the bird song. I need to, I am burnt out. Although it is spring, I am in a kind of chrysalis , breathing, listening and allowing, knowing that the becoming will happen when I am ready to breathe out.
These last two years have been something of a pressure cooker. An enforced and difficult move due to eviction, my mothers illness, running my own music teaching business whilst doing a full time counselling training. I had the notion of ” saving ” my husband, and step up to a new profession so he can retire …at 71 he deserves to! However, once on counselling placement- which was one strand too many to add to the above balls to juggle- I crashed and fell apart.
I felt like I was absorbing clients energy, I struggled with the placement and the manager and spiralled into a panic attack. It was awful and also ethically not a place to counsel people from. So, I stopped; pressed pause on it all.
I needed to sleep and allow and listen within. The guilt, the shame and the smallness that came from feeling I was letting my darling husband down , was immense and added to my burden. He kindly said ” You can only be you.”
Indeed, I can only be me and where I am at right now. Not one real piece of me has surfaced for many months….no song writing, no creativity, no intuition . I felt like a grey computer churning out Scottish Authority Guideline essays.
I have realised that this counselling journey is not for me. It is scary to admit but also a relief. I gave it a jolly good try. My heart sings and I shine when I teach music, knowing I help people grow and that this is my forte, nurturing through music. Unfortunately it is hard to make enough money and I work around the margins of things. The value of music teaching is not recognised or applauded . But, this is my metier so I will see how I can bravely make this grow. Sometimes we just have to be very real and very honest and we can only be the beings we are.
So this time of hibernation is about self acceptance, listening, surrendering and I feel like the universe is giving me a great big lesson in trust . I have ideas to make my music teaching grow but they are full of uncertainty, nebulous, dependant on many factors I have no control over.
The year of the firehouse seems to be about burning down the old, the things that are not authentic . So, I start with honesty and authenticity and will slowly build from there. I am unlikely to ” save ” my husband, but we can work at doing our best, living simply, humbly, streamlining our lives to create a rich and wholesome simplicity that is peaceful and nurturing. A life that turns gently with the seasons, developing our wasteland into a productive garden, touched by doing what we can for others and trusting, trusting, trusting that life will bring enough. We will start a vegetable garden this spring and we are slowly constructing a hen compound so some feathered friends can join us later in the year. The garden is a slow jigsaw: it is land reclamation from scrubby trees and hillocky wasteland, but one spade at a time we are getting there. It is another exercise in slow realness.
And as for songwriting….I look back at what I have done a few years back with something akin to amazement- was it really me(?) and I am so grateful I had folk to work with, that I could shine in a small way for a quiet hour. I can just hold close to heart the whisper of a wish that somehow the universe will allow me to revisit this one day and find souls who would enjoy that creative journey with me .
Meanwhile the birds are singing in the great cathedral of woodland behind our house, the earth is zinging with fresh life and my dreamtime of hibernation is dropping small pearls of possibility into my consciousness…..
Abi's World of Music 