Law and disorder

There was a time in my life when my unhappiness was not at all about impulse.  Self was constructed of the cement of rules and role, and I didn't seem to have any Real Me in there at all, not even impulses.  NoWun. I was just what I had been told I should be. What satisfied my parents. What was permissible in their narrow thoughts. It's a small cage.  But it has a door that isn't locked.

It sort of amazes me how many lives I have had. That buttoned-up tight time was in my twenties. At that time, nice little house, no mess, because my husband wouldn't have liked mess, because my parents were fiends for neatness, my mother always picking up after all of us, always cleaning. Very little creativity in any of our lives. For a while mine found its out in sewing useful things.  I remember very fondly a pink terry-cloth bathrobe with a hood that I made for Cassie when she was still a toddler. She was so beautiful in it.  I used a pattern, never learned how to sew without one. Now I know people who make gorgeous fabric collages stitched with gold thread, who work with happenstance in their quilting. Back then all I ever saw was quilts according to patterns - even patchwork was done to a grid. Sometimes the question is about finding your impulses.

Reading Chogyam Trungpa this morning on Auspicious Coincidence.  He gets into questions about choice. And making choices is very much about being right in the center, right here, right with yourself and all of it, doing the central, sane thing.  He talks a bit about using divination when we feel stuck, and it made me think of my tarot cards. At another time in my life when I felt very browned-out and stuck, I learned to read tarot with the classic Rider deck.  And it was great for me, it helped move me along.  It is a way to put the Self and all its thoughts and rules aside and enter the situation wide open, put your energy into the cards as you shuffle and cut, so you are putting yourself out there a little.  Listen to the universe, be opened by the symbols on the cards, so that the answer becomes clear. Well, sometimes it doesn't.  But you approached the question.

Always looking for big answers. But I often think the question is, What are you going to do with the thing in your hand?  That's both tangible and a metaphor.