Moving back to Santa Fe
I’m getting ready to relocate back to Santa Fe, and I was wondering what that would do to blogging, since the actual logistics of moving are preoccupying me. Besides, I told myself, maybe no one is even looking at the damned blog. But someone sent me an e-mail about reading the Shift Diaries (Hi Bob!), which renewed my interest in this direction. So, I’ll be blogging about this move, I’m sure.
Before I start this entry, I’ll put this request into the ethers: I’m looking for a house-sitting or caretaking position in Santa Fe, a place to land until I can find more permanent quarters there. Or if anyone knows of a nice place to rent, let me know. I have excellent local references!It was only on Monday that I decided to move back to Santa Fe, and, despite apparent obstacles and challenges, I was feeling highly energized and dauntless. Over the next couple of days, logistical realities and potential problems began to preoccupy my attention (do I hear anyone saying, “Stay in the present”?) By Thurdsay, I had worked myself into a froth of anxiety about this move. Night fell and I began to notice a sort of dull paralysis. I wanted to sleep, but it only 10 PM, way too early for that. I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to disappear and not think about anything. I felt an urge to go to the computer and finish transcribing a couple of Elias sessions. One session was Anne K.’s and it had some soothing advice for me.
Part of my anxiety about moving develops as I contemplate the physical details of packing and getting all my STUFF to another state (get it?). I wish developing a matter transporter was a higher priority for modern science. We can put a man on the moon, but in order to move to another state, I still have pack everything up, load up a truck, and schlep my whole life bodily across the miles. Thinking about all the associated logistics and the sheer labor required gets me feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and tense. However, Elias addressed this directly with advice about how to avoid feeling overwhelmed by any task (Anne is complaining of a feeling of being blocked — “this wall”, and notices that it comes up when she tries to write) [emphasis mine]:
ELIAS: But you are not present in the now with your attention, for what becomes overwhelming is the anticipation of the finished product, and that becomes distracting, and the attention moves to that, which is a projection to the future. And in that projection, the task, or the activity, becomes a chore, for you’re not actually doing it, you are merely thinking about it. Therefore, as you continue to think about it, and you continue to project in anticipation of the finished product, you’re not actually present and participating in the process.
Which, this is what you are experiencing in relation to your movement in this information, and the movement within yourself in trusting yourself and generating this acceptance and applying these concepts in practical application within your focus. For you’re projecting your attention in anticipation of what you assess to be the final product, which is the reason that I express to you to remember that this is an ongoing process; there is no finish line. And in this, yes, you shall move into more and more of an expression of acceptance and understanding and ease and allowance of yourself in relation to your preferences and your freedom, but what you are experiencing in this feeling of this wall, the wall is the lack of actual action and participation of doing now and being present with yourself now. The wall is the evidence to yourself to pull your attention back into the now and to be present in your participation of your process.
Since making this decision to move back to a more familiar area, I’ve been wondering (complicating by questioning myself) if “moving back to the familiar” is a good idea. It feels good to me, but as I dissected this choice on a symbolic level, I wondered about it. Was I going backwards? Was I taking a step in the ”wrong” direction. Aren’t we supposed to be forging ahead into the unfamiliar? Elias also addressed that very topic in Anne’s session from 2003:
ANNE: I had a dream of cars, of driving—again it’s probably the same theme—driving a beautiful silver car that I really did like very much, but had very much difficulty in controlling it and maneuvering it. So, in the end, I decided to give it back, and instead I took the more familiar car. And when I went to go visit the more familiar car in the garage, it was all brand new, shiny, even though it was an older version. And I felt more comfortable and relaxed, and knew that I could do it, but at the same time slightly disappointed that I couldn’t control the new car. Was the symbol of that new car the new sort of direction, shall we say?
ELIAS: Yes, and the unfamiliarity of new movement. But it also is associated with timing and appreciation, for what you have offered to yourself in imagery in this dream is a recognition that there is some uncomfortableness associated with the unfamiliar, but there is also a desire to be incorporating that unfamiliar. But within timing, and in the recognition of the timing, you move back to the familiar, but the familiar is changed also. And there is a new appreciation of the familiar, for your perception is different. And, therefore, it is imagery of appreciating what you are generating now, and also knowing that in this time framework that is enough, and as you continue, the unfamiliar shall become more familiar and it shall not be as overwhelming.
In 2003, I moved to Santa Fe from Tucson. I was utterly miserable about the state of my life, and although my relocation had some aspects of moving into the unfamiliar, Santa Fe represented much that was familiar to me. I had one friend there. I think of the Southwest as my home, having grown up in Arizona. The food was familiar, the landscape was familiar, the Mexican/Spanish influence was familiar, the architecture was familiar. I was only 9 hours drive from where I used to live — too close, oddly enough. And, most familiar of all, I was feeling stuck in my familiar automatic responses of discounting myself, judging myself harshly, and generally putting a lot of sticks in my wheels. As a result, being in Santa Fe didn’t suit me at that time because it seemed too familiar. I wanted to be finished with the familiar, although I was fearful of the unfamiliar. So, there I was in Santa Fe, neither here nor there, living in Limbo.
After a year in Santa Fe, I chose to move away from the familiarity represented by the Southwest. I relocated to the truly unfamiliar, moving to an out-of-the-way, off the beaten track area out on the Olympic Peninsula in Western Washington (a place that actually passes laws to keep the familiar out of town), where I continued to struggle with familiar patterns that kept me mostly miserable and conflicted and confused for about another year and a half.
Eventually I became more comfortable with living in the unfamiliar ways Elias explains to us so patiently, to the point that now I feel fairly familiar with the formerly unfamiliar — both this geographic area and the psychic space. But living here (geographic location? psychic space?) doesn’t seem to be working for me, so I’m headed back to Santa Fe, the familiar, where I now expect I’ll experience what Elias talks to Anne about.
I do have a greater appreciation for the familiar now, or I wouldn’t want to move back to it. And I expect to see it with new eyes, because my perception has changed in so many ways. While being back in the familiar will provide a sense of comfort and stability and “control,” it will now also seem new, making it an unfamiliar familiar, transformed in my perception as a result of my experiences — my familiar and enlightening struggles — that came from trying to live in the unfamiliar.