plot developments ...

It was a long night. Just as evening descended, she found herself suddenly in the center of a hay fever storm. Pawing at burning eyes with one hand and applying endless stream of tissues to staunch nasal flooding, she lurched through the hours before bedtime. Then she snatched at the battered and probably out-dated box of grocery store brand allergy medicine, searching fogged memory to recall if it ever had been effective in the past.

"Your nose is really red," observed the astute Girl Child. Still, she soldiered on with bedtime reading interspersed with nose blowing and open-mouthed gulping of air. 

Lying her left side with hopes of freeing a clogged right nostril, she drifted to sleep only to wake up to a slow, steady trickle of cooled snot inching its way towards the pillow. The only thing worse than snot running down the face is rolling over and finding one's cheek resting in a freshly formed puddle.

There was a midnight panic to open the blister packaging surrounded ineffective pill which, when finally freed from its plastic cell, crumbled before she could get it into her mouth. Frantic but ever-hopeful, she swiped moistened finger across the bathroom counter and sucked the crumbs of medicine from her finger and stumbled back to bed and an anything-but-restful sleep.

Let's add hormones to this story ...

I seem to have a voice-over narration playing in my head, one which discusses me as a character in a developing novel. Overwhelmed by life, yet tenacious and determine, she is unable to tackle cleaning up her life so she documents it. 

Yes, I am contemplating a series: breakfast dishes/365.  

She then retreats to the shower where she huddles under the steamy spray waiting for a thaw to occur.

Today it was handfuls of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint soap repeatedly pour over my chest.  The label reads Magic Soap and magic seems to be the only option available to her right now.

The thing is, don't we all at some level perceive ourselves as characters in a story?  Donning roles, living out archetypes, feeling trapped by character descriptions? Am I playing the victim or heroine? Or underdog? Tragically flawed or comically inclined? Am I seeking meaning? Redemption? Or is this an Absurdist's play with all bets off? 

Yet if I am a character, then who is the author of this Donna Quixote story? It may be my saving grace - or my fatal flaw - but I do believe part of my business of this lifetime is to create meaning out of the raw materials handed to me. Which I suppose includes me as semi-raw material. Once in a workshop I was asked "Who are you?" To which I cheekily replied "Whoever I choose to be."  

And that is my work at the moment: deciding who I choose to be at this stage in my life. 

It's not easy.  A dear friend just wrote to me about how the tide seems to have turned in her life with clarity and flow appearing on her horizon.  That is not my current plot development.  I had a moment of dizzying darkness when that truth flashed upon me.  

I do not know where I am going, who I am becoming, or what I am called to do. Now is not a time for action or forward movement as much as I am wired and yearning for something to do.  Now is a time to sink deeper into the truth of living, which apparently means time for me to grapple with the truth that duality just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Life or death? Purpose or purposelessness? Meaning or Mystery?  I sense my place is to found in between or perhaps embracing it all. 

Every day I head outside to make my prayers, yet I admit I haven't a clue as to what I want to say. HA! I was about to write "suppose to"  ... and that is the issue.  Weeding out  "ought to"  and "suppose to" in order to find the driving truth within my life, my story.  So I pray to be able to discern the messages of my heart; to speak and act in harmony with love and flow with the spirit of the Universe, of Life. I pray to know my truth and to be brave enough to trust and follow it. I pray for ease within this darkness and I give thanks for the many bright lights that provide cheer and hope.  

Most of all, I pray to stay the course.  There is something I've been circling all my life and now is the time to go in deeper. I don't believe it is something to be understood but to be experienced, lived through. It feels like rite of passage, an initiation to be experienced and rather than me integrating it into myself, I am the one being woven into something larger, broader and more elemental. 

I don't know what to do because there is nothing to be done ...

sigh. and so the story continues to unfold ...

... and dishes continue to stack up as our dishwasher broke and the new one died after just two loads ...