Somewhere in "The Move" (re: novel-in-progress, or extended meditation, or whatever)- blurring the edges between fiction and life.....
On the edge of calamity, there seemed only a choice between returning to a house where she had unwittingly become a target for projections of her landlord's shadow sides, and had been physically threatened, or a woman's shelter. Unable to find suitable, if temporary, housing, she let go.
She let go of the struggle to find housing. She decided to play a game and find her way, not by the map you carry in your mind, what you've understood about life and your place in it, the route you've traveled, its familiarities, but by intuition. By not thinking you know what lies around the corner; but navigating, instead, by trusting your instincts.
The letting go expanded her vision. Streets took on a luminous glow. The early morning world became welcoming in ways she'd forgotten. As she closed her notebook filled with ads scribbled from papers and online sites, she switched her approach from worry bordering on panic to an open calmness. She had only 9 or 10 hours to find something and move out of the crazy woman's house completely. She began moving through massive tree-lined streets as if she was walking through a wonderland of magic.
She felt an inclination to go down that street, she went. Sometimes there are signs in windows. She had a cell phone. But saw nothing. It was a wealthy area. Perhaps someone had a basement that they would happily rent for the amount of money she had because it would help pay for a ski trip, or an Armani suit. She laughed quietly to herself. Since she was walking through an area of the city she didn't know, it was like an adventure. She didn't worry if her thoughts were rational or not. Anything could happen if she was open. The strangest things occur when you least expect it. Wasn't that the way it always was?
Her feet seemed to fly across the streets, down here, up there, over to a main street, back down. She didn't feel crazed or desperate, only that she was flowing past magnificent houses and a regal path of trees on an adventure. She meandered by homes filled brim-full with furniture and brick-a-brack, imagining lives unlike her own.
After awhile, she began to think that she was wasting time. That following intuition, while delightful, was not enough. She was enjoying a walk on a beautiful morning without a destination and was not focused on the task at hand: to find accommodation by nightfall.
As she headed south and crossed a busy road and was about to walk down another residential side road, she saw a small library. Its entrance was tucked away from the street and could easily be missed. She looked at her watch. It was 9:01 a.m. Surprising for a government-run building, which usually open late, she pushed the door and it opened. Inside she explained her need for housing to a librarian, was given a temporary card and pin number, and she began browsing ads in papers online. She made three calls before she saw it: a one-bedroom basement apartment in the area she wanted for exactly the amount she could afford.
She phoned. It was probably a dismal, bug-infested hole in the wall. The landlord answered. She knocked on his door half an hour later, and found the apartment spacious, clean, with 2 small southern facing windows; it was more than suitable for her present needs. She paid him in cash, signed the rental agreement, which didn't tie her to a lease but to an indeterminate time that only required a 30 day notice to vacate. That evening, with the help of a friend, who hadn't answered calls all afternoon, but arrived just in time with his car, she moved in.
What luck that she was the first caller and the first to see it. It was perfect. And, importantly, she was safe. There would no longer be stress over the paranoid accusations of the owner of the house where she had been staying if she gingerly ventured into the kitchen to make tea. While the apartment did not have a private entrance, she was in a self-contained space with its own bathroom and hot plate, fridge and microwave. Even sleeping on an air mattress seemed heavenly in comparison to where she had just come from.
Pondering on intuition as she pulled a soft, down sleeping bag over her exhausted body, vast new possibilities about how to navigate life opened up. Unless you can free yourself of your preconceptions, your ideas of how things should be, you cannot be open to whatever possibilities are available. Possibilities that meet your needs, and are answers to your wishes.
Letting go to that extent may be only something you did in extreme circumstances. She didn't know if you could live your daily life that way. Could intuition, where life is perhaps lived as an adventure, and which seems to receive perceptions and signals from sources beyond rational reach, be a guide to creating your own reality?
Finding accessing the internet through the library very limiting, and ultimately frustrating, both for posting my writing and art, and especially for the close reading I like to give posts, and the comments I often leave after a day of carrying words with me, I finally got on the phone and called around about internet options. The house in which I am living doesn't have internet or cable. I use a cell phone. And I need to keep my costs way down. So installing a land line was out. It turns out that the cable provider for this area, Rogers, has an "ultra lite" internet service, which they claim is 5 times faster than dial-up, for $20./month, flat rate, no installation fee, no modem rental fee. It took the guy an hour and a half to install it here. And I am ecstatically on-line again. In the intimacy of my living space. Accessing you all in the library was strange, not just because of the time limit, but because reading in a public space over a public computer lacked the intimacy that I have come to enjoy about the way we receive each other's writing on our screens at home. Where it feels like we are talking directly to each other, whispering our thoughts, reflections, expressing our lives...
