Onions. Earth. Skin. Trees. Sediment. Emotions. Rocks. Humans. Atmosphere. Cake. Glaciers. And did I say cake?
No, not a random list. These things are all related. They are intimately related by their physicality as well as my conceptual understanding and exploration of their deeper meaning. It’s not a one to one relativity, they exist in parallel, different, but the same.
These things all have one key element in common… layers. I’ve been musing about layers recently. It started with the onion.
When I on-board new subscribers to my software we start with the high touch, overarching, big juicy, easy to conceptualize workflows. The outer layers. I liken the learning curve to that of peeling an onion. Like an onion, this initial learning of the larger work flow concepts is a big outer layer, easy to access and really juicy. But there’s more, a shit load more once you’ve peeled away that first layer. You have to keep going to get to the center of the onion and you have to keep learning to get to the core of my software.
That’s a pretty basic analogy and not all that interesting, but it led me deeper down the path of my intellect and got me thinking about my life in the daily routine sense and the grander forty-six-years-on-this-planet-and-counting sense. I have layers and they are revealing themselves to me more clearly every month. Identifying a specific layer and its relationship to where I am right now in my journey opened the trap door in my psyche for other layers to appear.
Let the over intellectualizing begin! I’m an Aquarius, it’s my nature. (insert knowing third eye roll)
The first thing that struck me, and not for the first time in the last ten years, is that I don’t write much anymore. I write in my journal but even that has become a hit and miss practice. For decades journaling was the golden thread to sanity and the portal to my inner wisdom. I also stopped writing fiction and I stopped blogging; common practices in my life that kept me in the flow of my creativity and in balance with the dark side voices of Dumb Bitch in my head. Layer one.
Next came the lack of thriving houseplants and constant gardening. I still did some cursory gardening to stay connected to the fraying edges of my sanity but my gardening was topical. Sadly, I killed many undeserving houseplants. I attribute their unfortunate deaths to a lack of available oxygen. Not oxygen available to them, but to me. My narrow, survivalist bandwidth did not have enough juice to keep them and me alive. Someone had to go, better them than me. Layer two.
Layer three, deeper, scarier, and more difficult to admit… My spirituality fell victim to my shallow living… it dried, shriveled and fell off the vine.
My sense of self, my confidence, appreciation of my sensual body and my sexuality withered from lack of self love and inattention. That’s only layer four and now I’m exhaustipated by my self yet I persist.
One by one the various layers of me began to appear in specific relief. As I parsed them out from my whole I began to see myself with less binary eyes. I was not a whole broken person. I was the culmination of all these layers of mine. Some big juicy outer layers, some smaller, thinner inner layers. Seeing myself incrementally like this was a stunning revelation. Must continue peeling.
Overall, totally fucking overwhelming and immobilizing. One layer at a time, however, these things are not so insurmountable. One layer at a time I can see through the forest of overwhelm and scarcity. One layer at a time this is not so scary.
Seeing myself as this exquisite cornucopia of complicated strata instead of just one ginormoriphic shit show of I-need-to-be-fixed-all-at-once, I started to see that when I break me down, one perfectly imperfect layer at a time, I’m totally repairable. Yeah, I can do this.
Shit happens. Life happens. Healing happens. And once healing happens… growth, alignment, and thriving the-fuck-out-of-life are what’s next.
One exquisite layer at a time.
November, 2019
I love writing I mean I LOVE WRITING. It’s helped me regain agency over my dark stories and celebrate my growth and joy stories. Writing helps me self-heal and has given me a place to explore my creativity and keep my sanity! Working for Our Story and Starfish Connection gives me an opportunity to do what I love and give others a place to do the same in a supported community that we built for storytellers like me.
