Princess Diana, Rest In Peace

Wow.

That's the best word I can come up with to describe the last three weeks of my roller coaster life. Just Wow.

There have been many surprises, good moments and bad, and it all sent me hurtling forward on my soul's journey. I was catapulted into wisdom and personal growth I couldn't have imagined last month.

People I haven't spoken with in YEARS have come out of the woodwork and affected my life. People I am very close to sent shockwaves through my little world. New teachers have arrived with new lessons, and before I even noticed, new ideas were implanted in my spirit that have deeply affected the way I view my journey.

It would take days to write this all out of my head. The hardest part is how many people I am close to have seen a snippet or two and assumed it was all about them. Its actually kind of an amusing reminder of the human condition. We are wired with an ego mind that tells us everything that enters our consciousness must be directly related to our own journey. This is not so.

I was told a long time ago that if you say something and the other person has an unusually strong defensive reaction, it means that whatever you said hit an issue in their own life and has nothing to with you. I sure saw that happen more than once.

Ghosts from my past have come back to make peace once and for all. I wrote a little bit, trying to process through it, and a few people were hit with their own realities on a new level. Their instinctive reactions were to assume *I* was attacking *them* and they were all atwitter. This struck me as incredibly amusing. Then it infuriated me that these people were mad at ME. Lol

I am not responsible for your choices, and you are not responsible for mine. It is awfully self-centered for anyone to think my expressions in my personal writing involve someone else's life path.

This past week was an anniversary of a death of someone who, for better or worse, had a TREMENDOUS influence on my life. It also would have been a birthday for an earlier influence. Each year, when someone says "Wow, it's the anniversary of Princess Diana's death" I remember standing in Jewel looking at the Sunday paper and finding it appropriate that a particularly life changing week would forever be marked by an International event. An event that would be recognized and discussed in the world going forward, always there to remind me of what preceded it in my own life.

Fifteen years. That's the age of my youngest child. That summer was a whirlwind of change, and choices, and events that directly led me to where I am at this exact moment in time. I do not talk about it and I tend to think about it even less. It always there, of course, because it directly made me who I am today.

Only Bonnie and Donna went through it with me. Tom, too, of course. But while I was holding him up, they were holding me. Sometimes things happen that you do not understand. Sometimes you will never understand. Other times someone new walks in fifteen years later to remind you what you were supposed to glean from that experience. Something you always knew, but you had hidden so deep within you because the pain around it masked the lesson.

It seems that just like 15 years ago, the events of this summer were simply stacking up one by one, building to a crescendo that crashed loudly this week. The musical composition is reverberating within me, slowly settling into a place where I can process each note and make sense of the melody.

There will be much more to write, of course. For my life is just as confusing now as it was then. Like then, I am standing at the beginning of a new road. Events have come to pass that I never dreamed of a few weeks ago, but they can not be undone, thereby forcing me to start fresh in a new direction. I am now left standing here forced to decide what from my old path will accompany me in my new one.

Day by day, moment by moment, I will keep moving forward in the direction of my dreams. Sometimes, in the darkness, that is the only path to the light.

Don't forget to breathe ~