So I’ve just come from having my last bath. This is the third and final bath. I am pleased to report, I feel a physical, palpable difference in my emotional, mental, spiritual state. I feel good. After I started to bathe, I was just singing and humming, and I’ve been in a singing kind of mood.
By comparison, this bath was a quick and neat affair. When I got down to the palais, I was an hour late, but there was only one other woman there, and after I got there, the only other guy scheduled got there, within another half hour.
In fifteen or twenty minutes tops, I was bathed and settled up, and smelling sweet and marvellous, feeling light and airy. I prayed very hard tonight, prayed right through the whole experience, concentrated on visualising my aims, and formed the words, whispering them over and over. Shooting my good wishes and good intentions into the act. Again, I prayed to learn how to love my enemies, even as I prayed for protection against them.
Today was a productive day, I really worked very hard, and I’m already ahead of the game for next week. I’m still worried about money, and yet, not worried. I am going to continue to pray and make my offerings, and from somewhere, some way, the money to do the things I need to do will come. This month, I put everything but the rent and the phone bill on pause, because I had to spend so much money paying for the baths, and seeing about getting this spiritual work done. Even without much money, I haven’t been starving.
Now, with this extra work the office wants me to do, I’m going to have to be even more organised, but more than that, there will be a little — and I do mean little — bit extra in my pay check. Between me and you, every little bit helps right now. Also, I’m going to have to see if there’s anything extra I can pick up along the way. At least I can sell my stuff, and get back the deposit on my apartment, so this means at the least, I can pay for my ticket and go up to England with at least enough money to survive, but I’ll need to get a job right away.
All this stuff to think about. I’m not scared. In fact, I’m eerily calm. That in itself is an interesting experience. The clawing desperation and frustration I felt before this sequence of baths I’ve undertaken, is gone. It’s completely gone. I am concerned for my plans. Trying not to make them too loosely, but those I am making are definitely feeling doable. Tonight I prayed that what I need to get where I need to go, comes to me, finds me.
Tonight I washed away the grit and gunk of the last several years and maybe, even the lingering heartbreaks from the decade as well, and it’s up to me to start building myself up now. Rebuilding my defenses, buttressing the confusion and the self doubt with a firm wall of confidence. I know what is going to happen. I know how to get it done, and I am not afraid. I am a foetus, cum goddess, cum spirit runner, wild child, water baby, cosmic traveller, true dreamer. Fear is the mindkiller, and I am no slave to the mindkiller.
All that struggle is bearing fruit. I am feeling so good about of everything right now. I feel so different and still so much the same. It’s like the part of this pain I’ve been internalising — someone else’s self hate and frustrations — and making them mine. I have left that behind me, and whatever suffering I go through now, it’s going to be the kind of stuff I can handle.
I been handling my shit. I’m going to go on handling my shit, come hard or come soft.
I tell you, I have a million clichés I could tell you right now that are apt, astute, and overdone. So the only more I feel like saying at the moment is: I am happy, I completed something. I finished the steps and broke a cycle. I did something to help myself, sought and received competent, confident help and I can feel the difference. My life’s course has changed, is changing.
I can sense that I have slipped past the demon, raging and seeking my blood on stones; yet the escape already in progress. I can feel it in the air all around me. By the time The Beast looks up, all that they will see is my dust. A smoke screen to hide my tracks.
——–
Here in my room, bleary eyed and satiated by some pasta and cheese — ready to sleep and holding on to watch the end of “The L Word” — I feel more like myself than I have in years.
My brother signed the lease on an apartment, and come the end of the month, he and his entourage are departing the realm. I know I bitch, but I’ll miss them. It’s certainly been the most activity my quiet, dark little cave has seen in many a month.
I also really feel the need for some sex. Also, some Grade A, quality, completely restful sleep.
Also, it’s been more than 24 hours and I haven’t had a cigarette.
Add comment