seven year itch

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there's a reason that seven is a lucky number and that people discuss seven year cycles and multiples of seven and that your body takes something like seven years to replace all your cells except the ones in your brain. [i may have that last one wrong]

seven is a long time and a short time depending on what you're measuring.

when i did my first hillside festival it was the summer of nineteen ninety-nine and i was in the ski patrol and there to do first aid and i was in the middle of a divorce. needless to say the festival blew my mind.

in fact? i went home and quit my job.

i think i was supposed to find that place, i think it was instrumental to my development as a human being and to saving me after my car accident. those people showed me that the way was there.

they showed me that i could be a better person simply by choosing to act organically and to consider the ripples before i threw pebbles.

they taught me that i was calm.

*wanders off to look at this gallery*

they helped me redefine mellow

and cranky.

they helped me learn to let other people's misery roll off me and sink into the planet for filtering.

they showed me that even i wasn't opposed to casual nudity.

i learned there that you get what you expect nearly always.

they helped me to free the dancer inside me. the one i had never met but had always suspected was there. and every year they free her a little more.

they demonstrated that communication beats shouting every time and they taught me to be better at it.

they raised my standards for myself.

in other words, over the seven years that i've known this festival i've changed all my cells, and because i changed the person making the cells i'm a new person now. and this was my eighth hillside festival and last thursday was seven full years since i met hillside.

and before i would go there and see this possible me for three days or so and then i would come home and try to find her in my daily life and she wasn't really there. well it turns out that she was coming.

i know this because this year i went to hillside and i was still just me, i didn't turn into someone else or better me or whatever. i didn't have to get myself to vibrate on a higher level just to fit with these enlightened souls.

so i guess i've graduated in some way and thus this year was an evolution year.

and it was kind of bittersweet.

instead of taking it away for the weekend and showing me perfect possible life/me the festival this year gave me a miniature of my life in three days. right down to a passable imitation of the most recent guy i was intrigued by at the climbing gym and a hyperspeed sample of the evolution of our relationship.

seriously there's no more to tell don't get excited.

i am fortunate that he wasn't into me back that guy at the gym.

anyway, i just saw my life from the outside in some sort of inexplicable way. lights got shined into dust covered corners. and it's interesting that lately i've been cleaning my home and that i'm planning a fast.

it's further interesting that someone did a tarot reading on me (one of the only people i know i would take even remotely seriously at such a thing) and basically said that i have to live in the moment and that it's evolving time. i need to figure out what's holding me back and just step through the wide open doorway that i can't see because i'm standing in it.

and somehow that's what hillside told me too.

go sass! go forth and...

and...

um.

shit

yeah that's the problem, i don't know what i'm supposed to go forth and do. i don't know because i've healed my body and then i healed my mind but i haven't healed my soul.

i still have these wounds that are sitting there and festering a little because i haven't released them.

i have beliefs and expectations that are coloring my realities because i haven't let them go.

i have bullshit clogging my filters and i haven't gotten all the scum out yet.

basically it's time to heal the spirit and i'm sort of afraid to start because it's going to be so much more work than anything else was. the body healed and that got the mind healing but the spirit.

yeah.

i walked around this weekend like a wraith and it got harder and harder to talk until by today i couldn't articulate words without sounding like a bitch. i wasn't trying to, it's just that it was so hard to speak that i had to make this great big effort just to get my voice to come out and thus it came out sounding wrong.

it's such a strange head space to be in. i was there. it was wonderful and i am fully blissed out. but i've talked about that already, go read last year's posts if you want to hear about that part of it because all of that is still there.

but my head is, if anything, less clear than it was when i left.

now since you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs it's probably good that my mental closet is a mess because now i can see what's behind and under all the neat piles but. yeah.

eggs are messy and hard to clean up and it's nice being on this even keel thing i have going.

ahhh hillside, fuck you for giving me what i need instead of what i want. and for teasing me with the latter just to reinforce the lesson.

you know i can only talk like that about you because i love you right?

right?

cause hillside baby, you and i are in this for the long haul.