metamorphosis

“Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.”
Alejandro Jodorowsky

You can’t rush a butterfly. It seems that is exactly what I have been trying to do. And there’s more, but first I have to say something about yesterday’s post and the response to it.

I am so deeply, immensely grateful to all of you who wrote to me after the post. I am so incredibly touched, and what everyone had to say, well, I took it all in, I copied and saved many of the comments. I read, and reread them, and made notes. I learned a lot, I began to see and understand much that I hadn’t been able to rightly understand and take in. How do I thank you all for all of this? Mere words are not enough, but they will have to suffice. Thank you dear friends, thank you.

And something surprising happened, and in all my years of blogging, back to 1998, with this current blog running for over 10 1/2 years, this has never happened. That blog post was shared almost 100 times! I think I hit a nerve. It is unlikely that I will ever know or understand why it moved people enough to have them share it 100 times but I think it says something. I think people deeply long to do the work of their heart and can’t figure out how to do it and make an income. And I learned, in reading all the comments and giving it a lot of thought, that my problem was that I was going about it all the wrong way. Let me talk about that a little bit…

I think it might be my age. Younger people seem to have been able to grasp what the whole business of making an income online is about. I have seen it completely differently and I have been wrong. Here’s what someone said to me in a group I was in and it was a real wake up call. She said…

“When I hear the word ‘blog’, I think of someone posting content that interests them, that they are putting out there in case anyone else wants to read it (or listen to it, in the case of YouTube videos). Not to make money but as a hobby. I would not expect to pay to read someone’s blog or watch a YouTube video, in the same way that like I would not expect to pay to look at someone’s art in a museum or on a website. But if it was an artist I liked, I would like to buy some of their works to have in my house. Similarly with someone who offers helpful content that I could learn from – if I wanted to engage with that content or saw it as a form of teaching, then I would be happy to pay but I would then expect to get the content in a different form: a series of emails, maybe, or an online course, or an online subscription magazine. Something a bit more curated, on a theme, or a series of lessons or essays or thinking points, in a carefully thought-out order, to lead me through a process. Maybe with an online community to foster discussion or for support.”

BING! A light bulb went on.

You see, I realized that the way I was approaching it, in my heart, was as though what I was doing here on the blog was a kind of “busking” like street performers who play music and put their hat out and passersby who enjoy their music drop a few coins in the hat. I thought if I shared deeply from the heart with the real intent to reach out and help others through my work, and put a donation button after the posts, that people, if they enjoyed the post, if they were helped in some way, if they were able, might make a donation to help me do my work. Well, I was naive, and, as I said, wrong-headed, and it was all my fault. As the woman above wrote this just isn’t the way blogs work. I have seen donation buttons on a lot of blogs and I just thought this was something people did. It isn’t. I now feel embarrassed that I thought that would happen, and I never expected anyone to make a donation who couldn’t, I wanted people to enjoy the posts and I hoped that I could be helpful, and to be honest I didn’t even realize how deeply I felt, or thought, that this would happen. And I have really beat myself up over this, “If what I have to say doesn’t matter why am I doing this?” Well, why I’m doing this has to be for me, as one friend pointed out, and if, in the process, I help others, that is wonderful, but I cannot expect people to financially support me for doing a blog. It just isn’t how it works. And that’s okay, I’ve learned something. I’m going to leave the donation button there just in case someone really does want to make a donation. From time to time people have and it is deeply appreciated. But it is not something that I can expect, just something delightful and affirming when it does happen.

And perhaps the thing is, drawing on what the woman said above, if people do like the blog, what I have to say, they might be interested in an eCourse, or eBook, or other things that I could create. I have believed that the blog itself was enough but now, realizing that that simply isn’t the way it works, I understand that concrete products and services, other kinds of offerings, are the answer to what needs to be done. And as in the analogy of the caterpillar and the butterfly at the top of this post, these things are something that I cannot rush. As was pointed out to me yesterday by a number of people I started this current 365 day experiment here on the blog feeling that it was a journey, that I would learn things along the way, and that is exactly right, but I have gotten over-anxious, too eager to make something happen when I wasn’t even half way there. You can’t rush metamorphosis and I can’t rush the blossoming of my work, that will be the outcome of whatever this journey will have meant.

Another dear friend said that I need to take time to brainstorm, to make a list of all of my gifts and talents and things that I might be able to do. Just take time to look at it and see what’s there. Yes, this will be part of it too. And this same friend said something else that really struck me, and I thought about it until I went to sleep last night, and I have thought about it all day long. She has known me a long time and seen this pattern many times. I will not quote her here but I will share what I have understood about what she said. I think I’ve got this right.

She pointed out that over and over again through the years I have wanted so much to “be of service,” to reach out and help others, and I have pushed so hard trying to do just that, without first taking care of my own needs, putting them as a priority, that I became exhausted and unwell. A current example of this would be that I have pushed so hard to make videos, really wanting, truly, to help other people, but I have spent so much time and energy trying to do it that I ended up yesterday, after having spent most of the day doing a video, in tears and taking it down, and feeling overwhelmed, overwrought, and broken. I did that to myself. Nobody expected it of me. I did that. I have now taken the link to YouTube off of this site and I will not, for the time being, make any videos, unless or until it may be part of work that I am offering. That would be a different thing entirely.

And then something deeper surfaced for me that absolutely startled me. It was disturbing but as soon as I wrote it in response to what this friend had written me I knew it was true. I needn’t go into all of this here, really it is just too painful to go into, but it has to do with patterns that started when I was very young and trying to survive. It led to me not feeling it was okay for me to make money from my offerings, for example I will put out these blog posts, or content on Patreon, etc, and if others wanted to support me by way of donations that was okay but to actually say, “Here, this is what I have to offer, here is what it costs, I’d love to be able to work with you,” I have cringed at being this blunt. People will not, or rarely, randomly make donations because they liked a blog post, but if they liked that blog post, if the content resonated with them, perhaps an eBook on the subject might be something they would enjoy. I see, I’m beginning to see. I’m not sure how it will all pan out but I think I’m seeing more clearly what I will need to do, eventually, when the time is right. This 365 day blog journey can help me uncover/discover just exactly what my material is. I will make notes along the way.

Emerson said, “Do the thing and you will have the power.” I have kind of been hemming and hawing about, laying my little offerings (blog posts) down in the clearing and then running and hiding in the forest and hoping someone would come along, pick it up, and leave me something in return. Whatever was I thinking? It doesn’t even work like that in the wild. You put out an offering/food, it is received/eaten, and off the wildling goes. I do not expect my birds and squirrels at the feeders outside to thank me because I put food out for them. I chose to put it out there and I take delight in seeing them consume it. That is all.

And finally, I think this has all been getting to me because I am about to have a birthday. I will be 64 next month. It has been 4 years since the fire when I lost all of my financial security. I have felt afraid ever since. And nothing in me thought, in my life, that I would be turning 64 without having a kind of security that I could count on. I know others don’t either but we live in a world where, for the most part, people work all their lives and retire and have their retirement or nest egg or whatever it is so that they can relax and enjoy their golden years. Next month I will be 64 without the concomitant financial security I thought I would have and some days it scares me so much that I can’t breathe. I cannot work outside the home, I have limitations even inside the home, so I have to figure out what I can do and that takes time. How does one relax, past a certain age, under these circumstances? That is another piece of the puzzle, something else I have to learn, but it won’t happen coming from a place of “magical thinking.” It will happen from concrete action, one step at a time. That is the work before me, to figure out just what this all means, what I can do, and find a way to do it.

I think I have not said any of this well at all. I am kind of talking to myself here trying to sort things out, but I would love to hear more from all of you about how you handle these kinds of things in your own life, and if there is something I could create in the way of products or services, something, based on what you read here on the blog, that you might be interested in as an extension of what I share here, I would love to know that. I am not going to go bounding into the creation of such a thing but it will help me clarify what this work of mine might be.

I want to thank you all, so much, for being here with me, for sharing with me, writing to me, supporting me, telling me the truth, and helping me wake up. I needed to hear it all, I appreciate it all, and I will hold it all close to my heart as I move through the days.

And, based on the fact that yesterday’s post was shared nearly 100 times, I am assuming some of you have similar struggles to what I expressed. Feel free to share your thoughts, feelings, fears and more in the comments. I will answer you as best I can and perhaps others will answer you too. We will figure this out one way or another, and in doing so perhaps we can help others along the way. That would be grand.