The New Week

Many years ago, when my life began the process of rebuilding my sense of identity. I did something I have since called "The Embracement." About a week or so at a time I looked at what I could remember of my life. I have one memory before there were words, so I'm thinking less than a year old. Just sensation and images, all comfort and beauty of the world of night and snow, light and moving into a warm room. And I remembered the ceramic heater, couch-on-legs, and crawling across a specific linoleum tile. Years later my dad confirmed it was the living room of a house we moved out of when I was 18 months old. So - two memories from the first two years. Retrieved by ending the self-medication that allowed me to survive, and the beginning of the process. 

I journaled and specifically mediated to see what ages brought to me. I was only 35 so it wasn't that huge. It was sometimes traumatic, sometimes magic, and year and year built up to get me to where I lived at the moment. The Now. I discovered I didn't really want to be a Hollywood writer, so I left Hollywood. I failed. I came back to Los Angeles, whipped, my tail between my legs, and I hid out. That was where the novel CLIMBING THE SPIRAL MOUNTAIN began. I was young and foolish then. I believed I would get the answer of "who I was" and I would be done. 

But I have learned that who I am is constantly in flux, constantly changing, and every time I thought I knew I was, I changed and wasn't quite then. Who I was"" became unimportant compared to who I was becoming. Constantly.

And none of the ages of me went away. They are still there. I remember. I can be triggered into an episode of recall that will take me away, deepen my experience both now and was. 

I remember a horrific storm - possibly from the dregs of a hurricane - and my cousin and I playing in the wash of the gutters, using our bodies to dam up the flow and the warm water flowing over me in a continual baptism.

My basic worldview because people
did the same for me.

I remember honey from a hive, with a comb, put in a Bell jar and coming home with me. I remember opening the jar while riding in the back seat and enjoying that pure taste, and the unique flavor from the pollen of the area where a relative maintained his apiary.

I remember swimming in the Elk River, and spending months with nothing but a pair of shorts, my diving maks and some flipper. By 9AM in the morning I was wrinkled as a prune and was ordered to stay out of the water for a tortuous two hours. I remember schools, and teachers, and the joy of learning. 

I remember terror and abuse. The smell of breath tainted with alcohol and cigarettes, sweat and pain.

I remember people, related and not, old and young and in varying stages of drunkenness. 

I remember a babysitter who wore a nurse's uniform but stayed drunk the whole time I was at her tiny apartment over a store, and sitting in the open window - no screen - looking down at people and cars. She was passed out and I could have fallen. But I didn't. 

I remember tragedies and the grieving I thought would never end.

The journals were lost, along with many things I had created - paintings, journals, manuscripts, and reels of tape with shows I had done with friends who had become closer to me than blood. Gone because I could not pay the price of the storage rental. 

There are three lost storage spaces in my history. Pictures, gifts (I have a pathological appreciation of Gifts of almost any kind)... all gone.

I play my memories like entertainment.

But I carry my Embracement with me, and in quiet times memories rise. They do not frighten me anymore. They are mine to ride for lessons that still are being taught from my inner self.

And sometimes I get to create things that share part of that process to people who are terrified to face their own Embracement. 

A friend in North Carolina says "I have no problems. I have facts I do not like, but they are not problems. They are facts. My job is to live with that, accept it and move on." 

My dreams are not connections to some ethereal diety, they are my mind organizing the input from my daily realities, and continuing to focus. My mind boils, even in my sleep. It is why meditation has become so important to me - the little spaces of time where I consciously remove the process of thinking, judgment, feeling, avoiding - I stop. And in that stop, without dread, without the burden of the traumas from my past, with the peace given by the Embracement, I can stop. Rest. Recharge. And receive the result of my subconscious process - with full involvement of all the mes that have ever been.

Seven-year-old Joe with Jo Ann Jeffers Adams, the woman
who stepped in to do the job after my mother died.
(He had input on the new week design, too.)

That happened last week. I've been trying to find a structure for my Patreon project, to try to survive this next phase of my life. A few days ago, the dream woke me up to make notes immediately. And I did. I have a new week that does not require me to deny any of the areas I feel are important enough to spend the rest of my life doing. And being.

I have found a model on which I will base the next phase of my lie. A weekly schedule of juggling specific areas of my life - Six days a week with Media, Recovery, Fiction, Non-fiction, Promotion, and RPGs - and even a seventh day of rest. A "Joe" Day. 

And after three days of being unable to use my computer system (Apple upgrades strike again), I am still satisfied with this new model will work, provide meaningful, satisfying work, and could benefit other people. From light entertainment through fiction and RPGs, or deeper and more meaningful projects like living without the dependence on drugs and alcohol, finding spiritual focus and satisfaction for a deeper peace.

Maybe.

I think it is worth the rest of my life to try.

More details and I hope the announce will be on Wednesday - Day Promotion.