Caution - Blogger Under Construction

There's a saying that what a caterpillar thinks of as the end of the world we call a butterfly.

A few weeks ago, a friend with a deck of tarot cards predicted that I would be facing a process of spiritual death and rebirth.

Both of these seem particularly appropriate at the moment. I've been dealing with some pretty weighty issues recently which, amongst other things, have caused me to sleep very badly for the past few days. Yesterday just felt like death. This morning has rather more of the tone of a difficult and painful birth. Some feeling that there may be a purpose to it all is beginning to crystallise out of the general turmoil, some sense of what needs to be done.

Ever since getting the boat, in May, I've been oscillating between needing to get somewhere in a hurry, to some deadline, and wanting to slow down and take things easy. Just a few days ago, I absolutely had to get to London as fast as I could, to meet somebody else's unspecified deadline. After two days I stopped and since then I've moved about 400 yards in three days.

I still need to get to London - I'll need to make an appointment to see my doctor at some point - but there no longer seems any great hurry, and I can always get the train if I need to pop down for the day.

To me, this has been one of the most obvious symptoms of a lack of a genuine sense of purpose to anything I've been doing recently.

One very major spur to me to do something about this was the two zines that Carrie gave me recently. (I'd post a link but I don't think they're available online). Part of her reason for giving me them was to convince me of why I should be a vegan, as opposed to to just being a vegetarian. What I got from them was much bigger than that - a stark picture of the horrors that can come about when people with principles don't do anything to act upon them. Next to all that, not buying cheese doesn't seem much of a sacrifice.