The symbolism of anything that makes me take notice is never lost on me. My phone conversation had a few disruptions so between calls I went to the web on my iPhone for the symbolic nature of rabbits. What I found was interesting enough to note here.

First, coincidental to this blog, the rabbit is #4 in Chinese Astrology. It is also, coincidental to this blog, the animal most closely associated with the moon. Yesterday’s New Moon is in Cancer – my mother’s sun sign and the sign of my Ascendant/Rising Sign.

Yesterday was also a Solar Eclipse. The Sun is in my 2nd house which means the Self-focus and new beginnings brought on by the eclipse are related to my finance. With a big check in the mail and a budget for a new condo in place, both line up pretty precisely.

In addition, the rabbit is a symbol of abundance and fertility. Evidently rabbit meat is believed to be a cure for female sterility in some cultures and considered eating your grandmother in others. I even read that eating rabbit for 9 days was believed to make you more attractive.

I read it is also symbolic of waiting patiently. I saw this with my rabbit in the yard. We sat still together for what seemed an eternity. Only when I gathered up my things as it started to rain did the rabbit decide to move on.

I’ve also been doing some work on living from the inside out and luminosity, or inner light. I read something about the rabbit in Jungian dream theorty that resonated:

Symbolically, Rabbit in the Underworld is therefore representative of using one’s intuition: knowing how to get around “in the dark” and being comfortable traveling in “unmarked territory.” By default, it can also denote having or developing trust in the “Inner Light.” Rabbit does not need an outside source to illuminate his way. His connection to the Collective Energy maintains his pathway.

My relationship with the rabbit is forever changed. I will have an entirely different perspective on the Easter Bunny next time he comes around. It seems it is even widely accepted that word Easter is even from Germanic goddess Eostre for which the rabbit was a messenger and symbol.

This is the 8th moon of the year and lasts precisely until my birthday. This morning I woke up with an awareness that this moon month is to be carefully tended to. The encounter with my new rabbit friend simply solidified that awareness.

And no one else is in any hurry to do anything with this house so it doesn’t matter except for my own sanity.  My brother’s next baby is due in August and yet another construction project is in the works at his house with a pool installation possibly to follow after that. It will be the Fall or later before anybody cares what I have or haven’t done here. Meanwhile the back yard has become a jungle again and I’ve finally recovered from the poison ivy rash I got on my workday with Mom to make the front yard presentable, AGAIN.

To motivate myself, I’ve been looking at hi-rise condos in the city…where no yard work is required. I found one not much bigger than a hotel suite that inspired me to want to get rid of everything but that isn’t very realistic. I think I’d just be setting myself up for failure so now I’m on the hunt for a two bedroom which would allow for a renter and expansion of my own family WHEN that time comes.

I have to get my finances in order (or find a rich beau) before I can show up as a serious buyer. Business is finally picking up after an almost two year lull. I know Winter is necessary in the cycle of things but I won’t be sad to see it go and for things to start blooming in my professional world again.

Realistically, it will be 3 months or more before I can purchase assuming things continue booming like they are. I have to make sure I have get debts paid down and put enough in savings not to get in trouble should the economy hiccup again.  But I attended a first-time home buyers seminar on Sunday and I’m a woman on a mission, or at least in the final stages of preparing to be on one.

I just finished reading The Healing Code (Loyd & Johnson).  There is a quote about what makes a healthy home that caught my attention and inspires me as I take these next steps forward:

A healthy home is not determined simply by the absence of garbage, dirt, or clutter. It is defined by the life that is inside. The joy that permeates. The peace that makes it truly a resting place. The kindness that makes everyone that comes through feel cared about and at home. In other words, a loving place that transforms the hearts of those who live there or visit. (p 246)

That’s my goal for this house over the next few months as I prepare to receive my next home in whatever form it takes. I see evidence that my consciousness is shifting by the new people and places I am attracting. I can literally feel the shift in me and this house as the Saturn Conjunct Moon makes its third pass and things reorganize.

The other part that is shifting for me is in telling myself the truth about myself…with love and acceptance. I am my mother’s daughter whether I like it or not. The more gentle I can be with myself about my tendencies to hoard and live in filth and clutter, the more gentle I can be with her. It is what it is. I can choose to change it but I can’t change it if I deny it.

The same goes for unforgiving and ugly feelings in the cluttered and dark corners of my heart. Last weekend I had to face how angry I am about a lot of things. Just telling myself the truth about that and allowing it to be has opened up channels for healing in ways that are nothing but miraculous.

I’m still processing through it but I suspect there will be more to write about it in the months ahead.

A week ago yesterday I got a call I’ve expected for years. The woman who babysat me as an infant was in the hospital and her future was uncertain. She’s 90 and had a stroke on the Monday before. Her daughter thought I’d want to know.

I’ve been making regular trips to the hospital ever since. Yesterday was the first day she was awake for me. She can’t speak and her stare is a bit blank but there seems to be recognition in her reach for my hand.

I struggled at first with some guilt. I had visited her at Christmas. During that visit I mentioned that I hadn’t been able to find many pictures from my early childhood in this cleanup and had asked her daughter if they would be sure to save the ones they have for me at her passing. Her daughter called me a couple of days later to tell me Mama C had gone through all of her photos and wanted me to come get mine.

I hadn’t made it back yet. I kept thinking about it but not doing it. I knew when I had seen her last that her time was short and yet I hesitated.

A minister friend has encouraged me to let go of the guilt. He described it like a vine wrapped around my leg that is keeping me from being present to her spirits experience in this moment. He told me that I have a gift for being present with people and that if I  allow myself to be there with her and her children without the guilt I will be offering back what I received from them as an infant in a sort of magical way.

I think I managed to do that fairly well yesterday. I tried to see her like she’d seen me at 6 weeks when I first arrived. I imagined myself as an infant in a new environment that was confusing as people stood over me watching my ever move. As her hand reached for mine, I thought of the way a new baby curls her hand around your finger. I just tried to fill the room with the love I knew she had invested in me so many years ago.

Even if she recovers from this stroke, her time is short. In this life, she won’t attend my wedding or ever hold my baby like I always hoped she would. But we’ve shared our lives as they are well beyond the 3 years she was paid to care for me while my mother worked. For that I am grateful. It is enough. It has to be. And truthfully, it isn’t just enough, it is abundant in ways most people never experience.

Hoarding or not, there is something to be said for lifelong relationships and the learning that comes from allowing status change when something keeps you connected. Every relationship isn’t lifelong and it’s hard to say which ones should and shouldn’t be hoarded but I imagine that if I ran our birth charts I would find that Mama C and I have one of those karmic connections that needed it to be so.

Ironically, one of my astro.com horoscopes for this week reads:

Saddness stopped the writing. Depression literally set in. I wanted so much to be finished by the end of the year and those ambitions proved too high.

I made definite progress but I didnt’ finish. Mom fought the last dumpster and my brother shifted his focus again. The announcement of a new baby led straightaway into basement renovations at his house.

I spent time being angry, then surrendering. The apartment I was hoping to move into got rented to someone else. Then I started traveling, realizing that I don’t really need to be paying for an apartment. I was gone 18 days in January.

I spent most of the holidays hyperfocused on the clean-out. Dad came and we purged like crazy. If I remember correctly, there were 14 bags of clothes and linens and 10 boxes of knick-knacks that went to the Salvation Army and two small truckloads of recycling. Without the dumpster, two garbage days netted bags and boxes stacked around the curbie that likely overwhelmed our sanitation workers.

We sorted papers for shredding and found pictures long feared lost. Mom is letting go a little better now that we know my brother didn’t really throw her 25th Wedding Anniversary photo album away in the first cleanup fifteen years ago. It was in the bottom of the last closet to be sorted, packed safely in a box where I had put it before moving away for grad school.

Scanning pictures is on my to-do list. I think we’ve just about recovered them all. Mom is chomping at the bit to take them to her new house but I’ve convinced her to leave them with me until they get scanned. I know that if I don’t, they’ll end up tucked away and scattered in junk boxes all over again. It’s been maddening to see how poorly the most precious of them have been cared for by someone who is so obsessive about keeping them close.

But then again, this whole things is maddening…when I let it get to me. Today isn’t one of those days.

I’m now expecting to travel most of January. That creates the opportunity for the intrusive renovation work on the ceilings and floors to happen while I’m gone. I’ll decide after that how soon until I get my own place and where. I did some visioning around what that looks like at my retreat this weekend, but none of that matters until this clean-out is complete.

One of the things that really became clear to me this weekend is that I’ve got to get out of the habit of spending all of my energy cleaning up the past. The next 3 weeks will be a definite and intentional balance of looking forward while also completing this task. I won’t be afraid to ask for help and I won’ t let it drag on.

I had a massage on Monday and we talked about injured connective tissue around my intestines and how that was related to not letting things go. I’m meeting with a nutritionist tomorrow and decided I’ll have her oversee a cleanse during the next 21 days while I do this house and end of year work. As we move more fully into winter it feels like a good way to say good-bye to Autumn where intentions about elimination are held most in the foreground.

I’ve got 2 weeks until Anne can come again to help. The bulk of my purging work will happen starting on the 19th when my regular work slows down a little but I’m still going to set my sites on little victories along the way. I’m going to see about scheduling some kind of donation pickup for early next week.

I want to make Christmas presents for everyone from things I’ve found so I can’t wait until then to get started even if the next two weeks are going to be busy. I’m also working with an organizer to get year-end paperwork done so my 2009 taxes are out of the way and I’m on track for good record-keeping in 2010. I want the completion of this house project to represent a shift in how I handle my possessions and my money. I am committed to breaking this hoarding cycle…from now on!

As a reminder about progress made so far, the $100 check for the recycled refrigerators was in the mailbox when I got home last night. I’m asking Mom to use it to open up a joint savings account with me for the stuff we’ve got to start selling on e-bay and Craigslist.

That check could be the seed money for getting me started thinking about that project. My sense is that’s a post-January travel project. I don’t think it is the best use of time right now to learn those additional technology skills or fight the holiday lines at the post office. But soon! And maybe I’ll tie this blog into those efforts…hmmm? Maybe!

I stayed up late last night working on new blogs/websites for work stuff. Dad comes back over this morning and I have a little work to do before he gets here around 10 or so. He’s going to finish chopping up the trunk section of the big tree we hit Mom’s building with and then finish off some of the landscaping. He’s also promised to help me move some furniture and stuff around. I really want to get my bed set up and the other one moved into a room where he or Mom can sleep when they stay here. It might be a little ambitious but the day promises to be productive, right?

I’ve been licking my wounds since Saturday night as I worked through the disappointment of letting go of now old beau. Still sad,  I’m definitely feeling better today. Yesterday afternoon was a little rough with lots of what my acupuncturist calls “rumination” where my thoughts kept looping obsessively over what I could have done differently but my brother called to check on me and my mood lifted. I also had a few business-related things progress forward nicely and that helps too.

I dreamed of now old beau last night. He was helping me move. I guess in lots of ways he did help me move through a transition with various issues, including that he had given me information recently that proved useful in last night’s kick-start on productivity. Or maybe it was a predictive dream about a pending physical move. Only time will tell. But what remains with me is the spirit of help that hopefully lives on in the relationship somehow once we loop back around to a more casual way of being with each other.

I’m feeling more settled today. I’m ready to put my environment back in order and to get some new things going. K says I have until December 20th to start new projects before Mars begins a retrograde through my 2nd and 3rd houses and make things temporary for a while. After that, I’m into to 90-day trial mode for anything I start. Sounds familiar and…

Per astro.com:

The second house (Values and Possessions) and its occupants tell us about our material circumstances, our acquisitive urge and how we deal with possessions and material means. This includes the relationship with our body. The second house also covers our self-worth, as well as our values in general. The third house (Communication) tells us about our siblings, the manner in which we communicate on an everyday level and the relationships which determine our daily life. It shows how we react to our immediate environment and learn from it.

….sounds like things are right on schedule for how things are currently tracking!

One of the cool things K said to me the other night was to think of astrology like weather patterns we have to navigate. They affect how we go through an experience and what accessories we choose to get through them but don’t predict or determine outcomes. She also explained that our soul chose its path astrologically based on the lessons we wanted to focus on just like we choose a major in college. The chart then forms only the same kind of framework that classes and homework offer in helping us learn what we came to this life to learn. What we get from the experience is ours to make of it.

Resonating nicely with that, I feel a little less victimized by the relat ionship flame-out. I’m also proud of myself for letting myself go through the range of emotions so that they moved through me. The pain in my left jaw has finally subsided so that tells me I’m on my way to the other side of this.

And that pain alone confirms for me that I moved through something significant in this relationship as it hasn’t shown up in years. I learned from cleansing that when the body heals it will often pass back through old illnesses as it releases them. TMJ plagued me in my teens and early 20s when I was gritting my teeth through dad issues and a date rape. I’m more than happy to let ALL of that go such that its power over me is lost forever…and trust I just have!

We have to formulate what we want and be so concentrated on it and so focused on it and have so much of our awareness on it that we lose track of ourselves. We lose track of time. We lose track of our identity.

And the moment we become so involved in that experience that we lose ourselves, we lose track of time, that picture is the only picutre that’s real. And everybody has that experience when they’ve made up their mind that they’ve wanted something. That’s quantum physics in action. That’s manifesting reality. That’s the observer in full effect.

Your consciousness influences others around you. It influences material properties. It influences your future. You are co-creating your future.

My best scene on stage so far was this magic moment at iO in Week 3 of Summer Intensive 2008 playing an angel…the soul of a dead mistress who committed suicide because she was pregnant returning to her lover who was grieving himself to death out of guilt. My angel wanted her boyfriend not to feel responsible for the decision she made. She talked about wrong choices and who she never meant to be, but mostly about grace and forgiveness. She carried in her arms the baby soul she took with her when she took her own life.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the room and I got a standing ovation from my class. It was a moment I tapped into real emotions and got totally present in a way that made time stop. The scene played me rather than me playing the scene in the way they say Del Close wanted everyone to experience improv. I became so involved in the experience that I lost track of everything.

It’s an energy I wish I knew how to bottle. It’s what I think about when I read that quote. It’s also what my new beau is doing about this business life. I can’t fault him for it. Our wants are just very different.

Success for me right now is about finding true love and making a baby with someone who understands and lives in abundance. My work and all my other interests are important but not in opposition. I can also hold space for people and things that are important to me with similar energy and concentration, giving and taking as needed. They are not exclusive of one another.

If the Universe is listening, my biggest desire and want is a partner in love who has either already reached the top of his ladder and relaxed into his success or someone who can hold the two wants at once without believing they have to be in opposition. I trust both are out there. I prepare my heart and my life to receive it. I co-create it as I develop my gifts of intentionality.

I met someone on the flight coming home who leads a community that I’ve been interested in but not made time for because my old new beau wasn’t into church stuff. Tonight I step into that new community for the first time as an act of faith. Whether I meet someone new there or not, I know that this is my next right step on the way to getting what I want.

My latest beau was an interesting mirror for me about where I’ve come from. K warned that our composite chart suggested that he would show up as the manifestation of who I used to be rather than who I am and continue to become. In these wee waking hours after barely sleeping, the dominant thought that keeps running through my mind is how much he has been a mirror reflecting back to my Old Self in that way that “What the Bleep” talks about at the very end when it asks, “Have you ever seen yourself through the eyes of someone else you have become?”

Up until now, I’ve believed that relationships would allude me. From now on, I trust that I am ready to give and receive love in profound ways. I liked who I was in that relationship. I wasn’t perfect but I was open and present in ways that were very new for me. I wasn’t running, hiding, or pretending. I found a new truth about 90 days that isn’t about fears, patterns, or self-protection, but rather about commitment, pacing, and momentum.

Up until now, I’ve believed I had to choose between success and love in a way that made prosperity in both areas elusive. From now on, I trust that the person meant for me is secure enough in himself to have time and energy to support me and that together we will desire and build abundance all around us. I know that I am worthy of that and that I can never be “too much” where abundance lives. And when an attitude of lack is showing up, all I can do is ask for more. The other person gets to decide if he wants a relationship with me enough to be present with me in abundant thinking, and from now on, if he is meant for me, he will.

Up until now, I’ve been afraid of physical strength in others. From now on, I know that I the 18 year-old girl who couldn’t protect herself has evolved. I have resources and life experience she simply didn’t have. I am strong – strong enough to stand confidently firm in the strength of my other. I desire strength and I trust it to show up in ways that are good for me. I trust myself such that I can also trust others. I am safe in all situations!

I have transcended my old desires and behaviors. From now on, I trust and expect that I am worthy of everything imaginably good. I focus my thoughts, feelings, and actions only on leaping forward. I spend no energy on the past, trusting that it will heal itself with each new choice. There is nothing about me or others to fix or improve in order to be happy. I simply am and I allow others to be as they are. Everything is right. Trusting and believing that to be so, my job is simply to do the next right thing.

I am whole. I am loved and desirable. I am prosperous. I am graceful, intimate, courageous, and worthy. I am the creator of my own destiny. From now on, I am, abundantly!

I stayed up late last night stoking a slow burning fire down to ash. For some reason, likely a Day 3 lack of energy and enthusiasm for it, yesterday’s fire just didn’t want to get going. Its lessons were not lost on me.

I went inside for a bit and dozed while watching “What the Bleep” all over again. When I went back out it was dark and the pile had barely burned. Against the county fire ordinance, I stoked and burned the fire in the dark. In tending it attentively, it finally burned up before bedtime but it took some focus and commitment. I contemplated my struggling relationship as I stoked.

I made a new friend in the process. Poking around, I noticed a ball of something on the ground. Without thinking, I almost poked it with the pitchfork but then I saw its left eye. It was a slow moving, rotund mouse completely unafraid of me and my pitchfork and mesmerized by the fire.

I was contemplating a splash of kerosene to get the fire going when my new friend disappeared into the edges where the fire pile extended beyond the immediate burn. Once I had finally burned enough in the middle to move all the extraneous brush into the fire, my new little friend reappeared and found a cozy spot a few feet away in the grass where he/she turned backside to the fire and took a nap. Suddenly, I felt like I was stoking this bonfire on his/her behalf.

My pact with my new friend was a tolerance for sharing space in the yard and the promise that a visit indoors with me would not be so hospitable. Critters in my ceiling or living spaces make my skin crawl. Slow moving or not, I’m not looking for a mouse pet. At some point we parted company and I’m glad for the encounter but OK to let it be as temporary as it needed to be.

The experience was much like my “talk” with new beau tonight. It’s over. After a week of being shut out, I returned his garage opener and we put closure on what I had hoped had much more promise. The reasons aren’t important. Hell, they barely make sense to me and I was there, so explaining them seems near impossible. The conversation was just sadly melancholy and nothing like the heat that characterized the rest of the relationship.

But as I left, I had the sense of walking away from the smoldering remnants of a bonfire that had turned to ash all of the the final pieces of old hurts and fears I no longer need.  Without being particularly painful in its own right, our time together had brought things briefly to the surface that I now know have simply lost their charge. As K predicted it would, this relationship transformed me in a fundamental, paradigm-shifting way. I’m extremely sad to say goodbye and I wish with all of my heart that this outcome could be different but all I can do now is move forward in trust that if it is truly over then it served its purpose and prepares the way for someone else.

What I know is that, in spite of my sadness, I feel lighter and less encumbered by ghosts from my past. The break tonight was clean and I am pretty sure I carry no baggage or patterns forward from this one. There is a tingling in my solar plexus that tells me something healed all the way to the core of my being today. More so than any before it, this bonfire was totally worth it.

I made arrangements to go to Cincinnati for the weekend after Thanksgiving. This trip represents the end of a 7-year cycle of healing. This circle feels complete. I’m ready for what is next and will spend the next couple of weeks contemplating and visioning what I want for my new life in preparation for my trip.

I’m hopeful I can sleep now!

Whether the hot/cold of a brush start or the slow going of the log start, a fire requires focused tending before it rages and consumes. And how you get burned is a little different but either can burn you just as badly.

Today, embers popped and left holes in a favorite shirt and tiny marks on exposed skin.

Posted from my iPhone