Whatcha been up to?

My postings here have begun to get farther and farther apart. I would say that I am sorry, but that would be a lie. Just been up to my usual no good, just more of it. I, like so many of you out there in bloggyland, just love fall and have in recent years simply let the season escape my grasp with the business of life. I decided this year to stop and smell the green chile, as it were. Create my own enjoyment without the worry of pleasing a soul but me.

So I have taken my own field trips to savor the season. Gone to places that herald the season of nesting and gathering. In doing so, something had to be put on the back burner so to speak.....and that was the blogging. But I am back and looking forward to all the upcoming fun activities of fall equinox, autumal frivolity and of course the celebration of spooky ooky and things that go bump in the night. Followed by dumb dinner, Samhain and Dia de Los Muertos.

There has not been one frantic day in the past 10. Just rainy, cloudy mornings filled with a crispness in the air and some bright golden afternoons warm but not hot. The kind of days that heretofore have made me want to embrace them.....but the worker ant in me always reined in the grasshopper with a fiddle and I restrained my wandering spirit, until this year.

I've gotten the cuckoos off to their destinations each morning and then let the spirit guide me on my day. It has been grand. Nothing particularly noteworthy but mine alone. Quiet, calm, peace filled moments or hours during which I did as "I" pleased. With the exception of one obligation that was scheduled during my "me" time, I've "had no strings on me", as the Disney song from Pinocchio goes.

The roasting of green chiles, the grilling of corn in the cob I bought at a roadside stand, mid week back country walk along a winding spring where I was greeted by 3 deer, some rabbits, a wild mare and her foal and a very angry pinon jay with a bone to pick with me. Sitting near a well traveled path in the nearby foothills, I met and had conversation with a lovely woman who was visiting New Mexico from France. During our conversation I asked if she knew of the castle Wildenstein (my husbands surname) between France and Germany and we were both tickeld to find out that she lives less than 100 miles from the castle, has been there on several occassions and told me much about the surrounding countryside. We also had so many other things, places and life views in common. It was like meeting an old friend for the first time in a long time for both of us.

Small world indeed. Chance meeting? Or is it? If my new friend had made her trip last year as she originally planned, I wouldn't have been out treating me to small pleasures and reconnecting with the universe and we might never have meet. So now I'm left to ponder. Do I believe things happen for a reason, or do I believe that our chance meeting was just that, a serendipitious meeting of two like minded people from different parts of the world. Or did the Goddess' design for my new authentic self lend proof of itself in these last few days of autumnal bliss?

I would have been afraid to venture out alone into the "nowherelandness" until my recent cleansing by compassionate depossession of the old fears. Having all of those dark thoughts holding me back from living and the accompanying heavy feelings removed from me has allowed so many more possibilities into my heart and mind. I am in control of me.  That may sound odd to some of you because you have never been occupied by a controlling force, not your own. I am living autenthically for the first time in my memory. But that is the past (literally) and all I have now is the now. I have always been a version of me. But this reintegrated, whole me is enjoying the dickens out of being in control of myself and embracing life.

This new me isn't half bad. The authentic me is a bit less frantic, a lot more calm, much more self assured, and far more able to embrace "what is". Throwing caution to the wind probably doesn't fit into my chronological age bracket but it sure is a happier way to greet the day and grace my heart.