Stomach thing: intermittently awful
Lilly caring for me: totally wonderful
    I hate being sick when the lilacs are blooming and the pheasant in the tree farm is cawing -    
    everything feels alive except me, plagued by an itchy restless yet blah feeling

I spent time surfing blogs between naps which I never do and found these words by Burning Woman  Sonya Lea which have me burning – thank you Sonya, wish we could meet for tea! She writes about "deciphering what it means to live by
one’s instinctive nature" something I find myself yearning for, especially as I read and give comments on my friend Marcie’s novel Moss, a brilliant story about a woman leaving her life and her tendency to give herself away to the men and clients in her life, to live alone in a cabin in the woods for a Colorado winter.

Lea writes, "One cannot preserve the wild soul on piecemeal terms. I have tried. I
have tried taking a karate class, and redecorating the living room and
cleansing my liver and buying the cutest freakin boots to ever walk
down Pike Street. Beautiful alterations that lasted a few moments, and
still never delivered the intended, lasting joie de vivre.

"What
sustains my wild soul is living less out of perceived obligation,
finding the place where desire and responsibility have merged into one
soulful union." 

I would / might add "living not at all out of perceived obligation" but that feels both impossible and perhaps impossible.

I also read this post by Keri Smith and it inspired a similar feeling in me — a spiraling inward and exploding outward all at the same time– not a search for anything new (searching is strangely over for me, hence Freedom from Self-Improvement Day) rather a falling away of everything no longer needed and a sinking of deeper roots than ever before.

Keri writes:
"Without knowing it, I have been giving lectures based on a
"do-nothing" approach to illustration and design, employing terms like
"don’t promote", "ignore your audience", "fuck the money."  A recent
interview I did goes into this a little more, (it’s not out yet). This
is not to say I "do nothing" to promote my work, you do have to put
things out in the world so that others can see and respond to them. But
I do feel strongly that all of the techiniques, calculating, obsessing,
entering contests, trying to get awards (annuals), wanting to be a
rockstar in your field, trying to land "the" great job, trying to be
like someone else who is successful, trying to target your portfolio,
trying to be cool, and schmoozing, don’t actually help to move your
career forward. If i look back over the course of my career so far, it
is only when I stopped trying to do all of those things and focused on
the work that the good stuff started to happen. only when I
relinquished control to some extent and focused on the things that moved me
did I start to attract some kind of success. And this method of "doing
the opposite" of what I was taught required much less effort in the
long run. (i think i wrote in the how article that instead of sending
out hundreds of mailers, as the tell you to do in art school, i sent
out a few here and there to places I really responded to.)

so i guess the questions that i learned to ask myself where, "what
the hell makes me want to stay up all night so I can work on it,
forgetting entirely about the fact that sleep exists as a possiblity?"
"what makes you get up in the middle of the night to scribble something
down?" "what is in my nature?" (NOT "what should go in my portfolio?",
"how do I target an audience?", "how do i get more work?") none of the
artist’s whose work i respond try to ‘target an audience’.

What if we were to contemplate the opposite? What if we let the
seeds grow on their own? Water them a bit if needed. leave the pruning
shears behind."

Another piece of guidance when Molly asked me "What kind of structure and support does God want you to receive?"

Themes I see as I write this:

• Comfort is my life’s theme
• Knowing one’s instinctive nature is HUGE aspect of comfort and my instinctive nature wants attention, which is how I will become clearer about the things that move me. In the past, I have sometimes bought the story that "nothing moves me thus I must be defective" when it might just be my instinctive nature hasn’t been given enough time to recharge or to speak clearly. I listen but I move too soon… or I have in the past.  
• It’s also important to suss out for me what it means to live in this new odd sometimes very uncomfortable place of not searching or reaching or wanting anything– more aware of Ever Present awareness than ever before – yet not collapse that awareness into "it doesn’t mater what I with my creative energy" because it does– and it doesn’t. (Living in paradox can be living via loca!)
• I yearn to find the place where my desires and responsibilities merge (which may well be spirit living through ego instead of ego living through ego). Another way to approach this year’s intention (or maybe my life’s intention) "

                May what I do flow from my like a river,
                    no forcing and no holding back,
                    the way it is with children." 
                            From The Book of Hours by Rilke

I so love to hear your thoughts on all this – what you see in these thoughts, what these words bring up for you!