The Portal | Day 5

In relationship with yourself.

I was scrolling social media this morning while waiting for my espresso machine to heat up. This is not part of the ritual, not something I should be doing. Somehow I got distracted by something and the next thing you know I was scrolling — even though my deal with myself is to not do that within the first hour of waking up. Because I don’t need to be reminded that I need a better face sans wrinkles or a better body or better everything before 6:30am. But mostly I don’t need a dopamine spike.

Regardless I did see something interesting — and in these days we get messages from anywhere that may actually stick, may be meant for us, even in the morning gimme more dopamine scroll.

The thing is that the scroll had my mind scrambled, this is what it does to me — I begin to get scattered thoughts and I can’t parse them out — and so I opted to take this practice on of showing up here AFTER I took an hour walk in the misty gray of outside. Where I could get in the rhythm with my dogs and the sound of the ice cracking and bombing out on the river, where I could be surprised at how loud the train is heading south to the city, and where I can walk with 2 hawk companions who kept flying and landing, flying and landing, curious about the two massive dogs I was walking. I could walk to the waterfront and just stare at the way the water still flows when it’s almost all ice. This cleared my head enough to come home and begin. I had to be in relationship with myself before I could create outside myself. And that was actually the message from the scroll.

Someone on IG wrote something (forgive me for paraphrasing because I didn’t save or screenshot, I just let it imprint the essence in me) along the lines of: we are not our creative projects. And then the poster asked “how do you want to be in relationship with yourself”.

The whole point of showing up every day here, to write, is to be in relationship with myself and also with god, with the divine, with the spirits of the words and wisdom that flitter around me, within me. This is like my own mini mystery school using writing as a channel for mystery to be worded, languaged, and shared. But it’s not all about what I write or post. It’s not about if I “hit the mark” on receiving an “epiphany” or if there is even the tiniest bit of oracle within these. The whole point is that is brings me closer to me, the god of me, the way I treat myself. Remember the first post here? It was all about my health and that came from writing, but now I can say this:

It’s not about the writing it’s about the relationship I want with me.

What kind of relationship do you want with yourself?