Heeding The Call.....

The past few months have been a strange time for me.

I have been feeling the "call" to do some things that I would not normally do. Years ago I felt the "call" from the Goddess, and followed her willingly. Over the many years since then, I know I have been guided by her wisdom in a lot of life situations.

However, over the last few months these "callings" are becoming more and more frequent, louder, and more odd, from my point of view.

One of the setbacks for my entire life is I am (was, as I am getting out of it finally through some fierce determination ) a horrible procrastinator. If it could be done later, you can bet I would not do it until I HAD to. It is not until the past couple of years that I have really started to address this issue, and make steps to better that part of my life. I always did what needed to be done, but the lesser things I would put off until I had no choice but to do it.

Now, while I am not always bursting with energy to do it, I am much more diligent about getting things done and out of the way so I can do more enjoyable things. I also find that if I DON'T do these things in a timely manner, it starts to really bother me, and I find I can not think about anything else or relax until I get it done.

I have wanted to be a writer from a very young age. Because of the choices I made as a teen, which shaped my life forever, I felt like I missed the chance for that dream to ever come true. It was hard to pull out of the whirlpool...the downward spiral...that my life choices had sucked me in to. I have Jack and Alex to thank for that, because without them, I probably would have let the spiral take me. I was tired of fighting, tired of swimming against the current. Lucky for me, Jack got one of HIS callings at that time in his life, and that calling led him to me. For better or for worse, and believe you me, we have been through both....

But I digress...

I thought my chance to be a writer were over. Then I was fortunate enough to receive the physical embodiment of my muse in the form of my now best friend, Maia. She is the one who rekindled my love of writing. She is the one who encouraged me to start a Live Journal, which was the doorway to here, and then she was the one who kept kicking me in the ass to start my blog, because she knew I would keep agonizing over it, and fiddle fart around and keep putting it off. I could very easily turn this into a post about how wonderful she has been in my life, but that is another entry worthy of its own focus lol.

 Last year about this time I had written some poems and the start of my Memoirs of a Crazy Witch series, which I amazingly had published by Authspot.com. I posted there for a few months but it was not exactly what I was looking for. I went back to my LiveJournal for a while but it is private, and only a couple people could see it, and I talked to those people all the time so it seemed rather pointless. So I stopped writing at all for a while. Maia then started kicking me in the ass again, and in addition to her, I was talking about it with another friend, who was just as encouraging as she was, and finally I bit the bullet, swallowed my fear and here I am today, with a slew of posts and 51 followers I never thought I would have. Pretty awesome stuff.

That was Calling Number One.

I have been a smoker for the better part of 16 years. With the exception of when I was pregnant and then breastfeeding, I smoked. My parents smoked ( back then anyway, my mom quit about 6 years ago and dad quit a few months ago ) all my parents friends smoked, most of my friends were older than me, and several of them smoked. ( I know I am just adding fuel to the "Children are more prone to smoke when then have parents who smoke" campaign but for what it is worth, they had nothing to do with why I started smoking, and I think it is a personal choice. My parents did not shove a cig in my mouth, and most other parents do not either. In fact I was still hiding the fact I smoked from my dad when I was 19 years old!! )

Anyway, smoking was just part of my life. I did not want to quit. I enjoyed it. But starting around my birthday this year, which was in May, I started enjoying it less and less. I saw that I was starting to smoke because I was bored, and it was something to do with my hands. I did not feel the need to smoke anymore, but did out of habit. Then I saw the only time I smoked was when I was sitting here at the computer, and waiting for my archaic dial up to load pages, which at times takes forever. I never smoked anywhere else in the house, and would flip out of a cig was taken into either of  the bedrooms. We have 4 big time air purifiers, but she smell was still bothering me. So I started smoking less and less. Other people smoking ( Mainly Jack ) started to really irritate me, and I hauled a fan out to sit here and blow smoke right back at him, away from me. (Which I still do lol ) Finally, July 1st, 2009 I smoked my last cig. I then came down with the friggen swine flu for the next almost 3 weeks, so smoking was not much of an option anyway since I was doing my best not to cough my lungs out of my body. That was brutal. I have never been so sick in my life. ( For those interested, I did NOT take conventional Big Pharm Meds, I did NOT get vaccinated or get a flu shot, and I never will...*kicks soap box back under the table*)

I have been tempted a couple of times, usually when I was extremely agitated, but I have not caved. I am fast approaching my 4 month mark and I can tell you I don't miss it anymore. Jack still smokes, and it irritates the hell out of me, but he is an adult and it is his choice, not mine. But he has smoked less around me which is nice. It was a hell of a lot easier than I expected, and I have tried to quit before...unsuccessfully...

That was Calling Number Two...

Next in line is Yoga. I am still working on this one. I am a fluffy chick, with body pain issues, so I am still in the research phase of this one, other than doing a few stretching poses. I do not have the money for a dvd or anything, much less a class, so I am using the internet to learn. But it is a calling because all of the sudden it was in my face every where I turned. The blogs I follow, the stuff I saw on TV, and things that would catch my attention on the Net..all yoga yoga yoga....so I am working on that one..

That was Calling Number Three....

The most recent one came in the form of another passion of mine, Herbalism.  Always drawn to it, it is a self study thing. No formal training, just a passion for the knowledge and putting it all into practice when I could to see the results for myself. I had let is slide a bit ( okay a lot ) in the past year, because I went through one of those " Dark Nights of the Soul", only mine lasted for most of a year. I turned away from most aspects of the Craft, ( not in favor of any other path, I was just at a standstill, and refused to walk down ANY path ) and my herbalism studies were caught in the crossfire. The last couple of months have really started me back down my path in general, and my herbs have jumped back out into the front over the last couple of weeks. I did not get to grow any this year, my seedlings drown twice in the freak monsoons we had this summer, and I don't have a good place to start them indoors, so after I lost the second batch I was so discouraged I did not try again. I think it is to late in the season to start anything, but I am gearing up for next year which is a good thing.

I guess I could lump all these into one "calling", which is to make myself healthier and to rekindle my passions in life, but I am a very analytical person, and I have looked at these things above from many different angles. I have never felt more open and receptive than I have as of late, and it seems that the Universe is seriously downloading some major info into my brain, and I love it.

It gets a little dark from here...and some will not like it, but you should all know by now I am a blunt person...

On the downside of things..although not for me, for them...it has also made me look at the people in my life, and I have gone through a weeding process. I had a talk with a friend a while back about Psychic Vampires, and how I felt surrounded by them at times. Not the evil ones who do it on purpose. I am talking about the needy, whiny, clingy and perpetually dramafied people that like to attach to me. Other people I have talked to about it, who know more on it than I do, say it is because I am a strong person, and it is a known fact that weaker people are drawn to stronger ones..( their words, not mine ) I agree with that to a degree. Not that I am saying I am better than anyone, quite the opposite, since I have a lot of demons of my own, but as cold and logical as I am, I still try to be nice to everyone, and be helpful when I can, but there comes a point when you just can't handle these Psi Vamps anymore. I was exhausted, no energy, all I seemed to see or read about from these people is how horrible it is and how their life has no meaning, no one understands them, woe is me crap. However, these people have several people trying to reach out to them, but they can't stop moaning about how horrible things are to see it, so those people eventually stop trying. I am a dark person, and these emotions do not usually bother me a bit, so when I talk to you and you depress ME, something is wrong, and I can't deal with that all the time, especially when I am being hit with SEVERAL of these someones at the same time. It was just to damn stressful. Helping a friend through a hard time, or being an ear to just listen is one thing. When this goes on for over an ENTIRE YEAR, I just have to say sorry and distance myself. In those cases, these people need more help than I can give, and it was dragging me down mentally, physically and spiritually to continue to try. In some of the cases, I stopped speaking to them entirely, and removed them from my life, got rid of them on the social networks if they were on there, and basically fell off the face of the earth to them. Some of the reasons for this was they started creating drama in MY life, and I am in a really good place right now, and refuse to let anyone fuck it up like I have done in the past. Others, whom I still care about, but need to have barriers of sorts right now while I work on myself, I have just distanced myself, talk less, things like that.  Still others I have reached out to, only to have it ignored or flung back in my face, and I said to hell with it, you can sit there and be miserable and lash out but I don't have to put myself out there to get stepped on anymore. There is no reason for ME to suffer just because your bf/gf/hubby/wife/ex/best friend/boss/mom/dad/etc is a total and complete jerk. I am sympathetic until you start treating me like crap because of it. So for any of you who still read my blog, yet I have unfriended or drawn away from...sorry, I really am, but your just to much of a drain on me, and my family and myself come first now, instead of everyone else's problems first, and ours last.

Well now that everyone thinks I am a bitch...( oh I know there were one or two of you who still thought I was sweet an innocent, admit it! LOL...) I am going to close. I prolly should have put that last part into a separate post, but it was because of my callings that I did what I did, so I felt I should put it here instead.

Thanks for reading!

*Music of the Moment: Hair of the Dog by Guns N Rosesr*