Sacrosanct

I knew in January that I would be leaving the walled safety of my work life, the life that I had begun to throw up as a barrier to anything beyond family, beyond my littles.  By then, Miss Jones was already being prepped for her transfer to the Saluki Witness Protection Program, one less body to snuggle with but one less thing to avoid actually living my life in the present.  When your work is often based in preserving history for the future, it becomes quite easy to forget you live in this moment, this reality, especially when the moment is so...painfully uncertain, when your heart keeps expanding for the breakage. 

I stumbled into this quote on the commuter train from Rome to Naples: 'As my old man used to say, frequently, regarding my expectations: the triumph of hope over experience.'  Maybe because growing up was so peripatetic, because my foundations had to be moveable. And I was a child, even if my father insisted even as he was crossing over that I came out of the womb forty-two. 

On thinking about foundations - metaphorical and otherwise, I realise most of mine have been built to easily dismantle because my life had to be easy to dismantle, to shift. Now that I've been in my current perch for 7 years, I wonder at how that time has gone. And when I look at the last 2 years, I am even more flummoxed.

The difference between a 'post' and a 'base' in US military parlance is that a 'post' or 'fort' is temporary, whereas the 'base' has more permanence.  I grew up in the shadow of camps and forts, at the whim of US cold far foreign policy and whimsy of the Department of the Army. By 1993 (in addition to the non-military moves) we'd shifted life to: 

Mckee Barracks, Crailsheim, Germany

Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas

Camp Shelby, Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Gulfport, MS (where we would move 4 times in as many years).

Fort Hood, Coopers Cove, Texas (via Dayton, Ohio)

Storck Barracks, Illesheim, Germany (via Dayton, Ohio) 

Rose Barracks, Vilsekh, German (though we were geographically closer to Grafenwoehr and I preferred it) 

Fort Knox, Kentucky (via Dayton, Ohio),

before returning - yet again - to them bosom of maternal family in Dayton (again).  

So, now I have allowed myself the time to stop and ponder what has come before, how things have ended, and how I leave. Stealthily, slipping the latch. Furiously, in a wave of telanova worthy flair. Forgetfully.  Projects, friendships, romances, the one-off moment I fell in love with the Welshman in a snowy carpark after daddy's heart attack.  The notice periods, the wrap-ups, the hand overs, the incompletes.  I've never really tied off anything well, with the exception of childbirth and death. Even then, with the latter, I wonder. Paperwork gets you every time.

Somewhere my hustle and swagger get waylaid after yesterday's events. I feel a loneliness that seeps into my bones (partly hormonal, sure. Estrogen shifts, a decrease in dopamine)  and I have to wonder that I wasn't better off when I was closed off from the world, content to live inside my head. Of course, I wouldn't, I know that, know the toll living too much inside one's self can take, but when my energy levels dip like this, when I all I want to do is lie on the bed, staring at the ceiling, out the window, watching the light shift, I wonder why allowing myself the comfort of human contact and interaction is so difficult for me. It's not that I don't care; if anything, I probably care too much, too quickly.  I have traditionally fallen too fast into love, into friendships and the like. 

So I made the decision to take a sabbatical and thus far, I've kept my word. I haven't taken on any additional work, I haven't bitten off more than I can chew. My one commitment has been an intensive course in Hermetics and Esoterica, delving into - among other things - astrology and human design.  I'm trying not live so much within my intellectual self, within in my masculine energy. I want to be able to ask and receive as well as give, to share and to trust that it will all work out as it is intended to work out. There is much more to know, to understand to experience, if only I will allow myself to be open to possibility.