Long time no see…

Well, I’ve basically been offline for over three years now.

It’s been a rough few years. When I thought things couldn’t get any worse as I was updating you guys about shipping and paypal issues and such, well, they did get worse. They got even worse than my anxiety and worry had needled me about. A bunch of my nightmares came true.

For a while, I lived in a small tent in the woods. My partner’s family donated materials so we could build ourselves a one-room cabin, which we did and proceeded to live in well into the winter, which pretty much sucked.

And by the time I had a roof again and got my stuff out of storage and inspected the insect and weather damage and found entire boxes of stuff that had shipping labels on it but it never got dropped off at the post office…  by the time I realized how badly I had screwed up with so many customers and clients, I couldn’t see any way to fix it short of paying them back, and until then, I decided, I couldn’t show my face (so to speak). I would lay low, keep my nose to the grindstone, and work work work until I could appear with reparations.

Well, I worked worked worked alright, but I sure never came close to being able to afford to throw enough money at these issues, and the more time passed, the worse it all felt, and the more final. How to fix my business without being open for business… couldn’t see a way. Over the last couple of months, though, a few things happened.

I had a falling out with a family member that reminded me very keenly about something I know intellectually but lose sight of when things get painful — that we only get out of life what we put into it, tend, and stick around to harvest, and we have to do that ourselves. We can’t sit still and just hope things will change any more than we can sit home and hope somebody else suddenly remembers we love them and they haven’t spoken to us in six months. Can’t control their emotions, can’t control all kinds of things, and can’t read minds, and if we wait on them to remember we exist or for life to somehow get easier *before* we put our shoulders back to the wheel… well, we’ll rot. We have to get going with our own lives even when we’re sad about the way it turned out.

Around the same time, a friend gently suggested that my perspective on it all might be a little skewed and I could be turning this into an all-or-nothing scenario when in fact there were more than just two binary options. She also reminded me that I’m a writer and that I get a lot of my sense of meaning out of that. She was right – so in leaving academia and then deciding I’d screwed up this business and all my client/customer trust and relationships royally and fatally and forever and had to go live under a rock, I suddenly didn’t have either of the vocations that I’d put everything into over the last 10-15 years, and I also didn’t have anything to write, anywhere to put it, anything to say, or anybody to say it to. There are really only a couple of things I know enough about to bother articulating opinions and ideas on, and I had no room or outlet to do so re. either one.

Just about everything in my life that contributed significantly to my sense of identity or vocation or meaning was upended, exploded, turned inside out, or at the very least shaken to within an inch of its life over the past few years – my sense of self as a mother, as a rootworker, as an academic, as a teacher, as a daughter/sister/niece/cousin, as a problem-solver and thinker and writer…

And who in the hell would want anything to do with spiritual commentary, advice, or services from somebody who couldn’t even fix their own shit when it broke? (went the mental narrative) Why should I even bother trying to unsnarl the incredibly messy tangle I’d have to dig shoulder-deep into to even start getting a clear picture of where things are? (went the mental narrative) I had nothing of any special value to contribute anywhere anyway. (went the mental narrative)

And then coronavirus happened. I have allergic asthma and it’s been very poorly controlled  over the last three years since we moved out to the middle of nowhere and then into a old house full of 20 years of cat dander, mold, mildew, dust, God know what else (definitely a goat used to sleep in the living room when it was cold out). So I’m in that category of folks who could realistically end up deader than hell if I get sick. And we live so far away from an emergency room that I might not make it even for a regular old asthma attack.

Well, damn, I thought. Never thought I’d be one to go out with a whimper.

Then I thought, wait a second. Screw *that.* For better or worse, the good Lord gave you a loud damned mouth and that seems to be the only asset you have left, so maybe you should be using it. At the very least, you can put your apology out there instead of just cringing your way into the grave looking all hangdog. Your sitting there feeling like shit for a few more years, or until you die of pneumonia in a couple of months , isn’t gonna do anybody any good.

So maybe a few people see you around and show up to hurl rocks and epithets. Well, you earned a little grief, so suck it up and take the best chance you’ve got to fix it in the foreseeable future. But it’s pretty unlikely that anybody except you has been obsessing over this several times a week for a few years, so they probably aren’t going to be emotional about it. (went the new mental narrative)

…All of which seemed fairly reasonable and plausible, actually.

So here I am going through the rubble, seeing what can be salvaged, seeing what I do and don’t recognize of the world now, and trying to suck it up and start fixing things.

It is pretty slow going. I have some real messes on my hands and a few things have changed since I last had to fool with them. But if you want to keep up with what’s going on, the plan is to regularly update the new site, Seraphin Station, with that sort of thing. I posted a note there the other day for people who were Karma Zain customers/clients between 2002-2015 explaining some of this, but it’s gonna take me probably months still to track down and catch up on everything and everybody, so there’s bound to be some repetition and some rubble along the way.

I haven’t even been able to access all my old social media yet, and I figure I must have about 8,000+ messages and comments to sort through (sigh) but I’ll be keeping up with new messages here at this blog and the Seraphin Station one. I suspect I’ll keep both and let this one be the more “advanced” material/discussions for people who don’t need a generic intro to spiritual work and are already familiar with conjure specifically. I guess… we’ll see?

But if you *don’t* hate me and would like to see me kicking around on the web making a nuisance of myself again, please leave a comment and let me know how you’ve been, or drop me an email (you can use the contact form at Seraphin Station or the gmail address), or wave or click the like box or subscribe or *something* so that I can tell my imagination to get stuffed and to stop with the sky is falling stuff

Hope everybody is healthy and hanging in there and your homes are all peaceful and patient and loving and nobody has cabin fever!