The Secret Garden

Careful what you wish for

There are various magical axioms that all state - more or less - that once you fix something in your mind that you have the power to make it a reality. They say it more succinctly of course. What they don't tell you in their erudition is that this works for whatever you might be thinking. Just like Ray and his Stay Puft marshmallow man, the universe is very literal minded.

This poses a problem for me. In fact, I am beginning to wonder whether it might be the lesson that I am next to learn. Because I don't know what I want. In a triumph of experience over hope, I have become something of a zen master (in the loosest sense of the word) and have striven to remove desire from my life. That's not to say that I don't want things, just that I don't set my heart on something specific and then focus myself like a laser beam on its achievement. That way madness lies.

This approach has served me... well? I don't know. Who can say what my life would have been like if I had done things another way. It has saved me from redundancy, at least. But now I find myself in a peculiar situation. I am being presented with a succession of potential housemates, and each one more closely matches what I think I am looking for on any given day. First was a spinner, followed by a wealthy professional man, then came a wild-at-heart chef, and finally my current housemate's doppelganger, this time complete with cat.

Each person has reflected my changing desires. Bookish, then "normal", then exciting, then familiar (albeit with a mouse-eating machine in tow). So I was hardly surprised when the next potential called and was a smooth-talking man with a cat. One up on the doppelganger. But she pipped him to the post. Now despite my best efforts not to think this way, I couldn't help but wonder about the man with the cat. The grass was definitely greener over there.

In stepped the Universe, and an email arrived from the girl. Matters beyond her control (redundancy) mean that she can no longer take the house. Now, you have to ask yourself, what is the reason for this sudden change in fortune? Last week she was in Panama at the company's expense. I don't truly credit my indecision with being the driving force behind her sudden unemployment, but it has given me pause to think. If only I could get my thoughts in order, who knows what I could achieve?

The Test

I'm back, but I'm starting to wish that I wasn't. It seems that everything has changed while I have been away.

Travel is always a liminal sort of time. There is the true liminality of being in transit - neither in one place nor the next - and also the liminality of your life on hiatus. While you are away you live the bubble of your life at one remove from its normal sphere.

Normally, this is why I love travel. I enjoy the feeling of being between. My favourite way to see the world is from a truck - constantly moving from one place to the next. An extended liminality that can go on for days, weeks or months, with no need to allow the instrusion of my other life to burst my bubble. Indeed, on this trip I found myself not wanting the journey to end, and I needlessly replenished my supplies on autopilot, steering myself only at the last minute away from the ticket desk, the way a sailor only reluctantly tears himself away from the lure of deep water and drowning.

I had the sense (as I often do) that if I were to give in and go that I might never come back.

It is a siren song, the call of the open road, but that is not the Test I have to face. The Test is coming back.

A month is a long time to be away at some times in one's life. As a student a month was nothing, and I have regularly gone for several months at a time without seeing friends from those days, still slipping comfortably back into conversations almost as if I never left. I took it for granted, even found it stifling at times, but now I wonder at what it was.

Because this time I have come back and everything has changed. In the space of a working day I have discovered that my working and homelife are both about to change (we'll discuss the changes to my spiritual life by proxy another time). My closest colleague is leaving at the end of the year, and my housemate has given her notice on the house (unbeknownst to me) and so in four weeks' time she will be gone, and I have to start the process of finding somewhere or someone new.

So what does the Universe make of all of this? It's pithy comment: The 8 of swords. The Test. It seems I have walked into the shitstorm promised to me by my Tarot teacher in the summer. And I forgot my umbrella. So as the shit hits the proverbial fan, I find myself once more in need of the life laundry. Delicates cycle this time, with softener please.