I am super weird about cleaning.

Let me try to explain it, punctuated with images of current messes around my home, to help you understand.

As you know, authentista is big on Temet Nosce, know thyself. There are many great ways to do this: meditation, introspection, observation, relationships, mirrors (metaphysical and glass and metal ones), reading, asking, psychedelics, therapy. Autentista loves Meyer Briggs for Temet Nosce and you will find this place to be a great source for it until she finds something that works even better.

I scored very high on the Meyer Brigg’s for the fourth category as a ‘P’, (P)erceving. What this means is that

If you know anyone who is a very strong ‘P’, it is almost a guarantee that they not be a neat person. This is probably a person with a messy ass room, a jumbled ass car and a desk with papers haphazardly piling by the day. So I’ve got that.

Now don’t get me wrong- I actually enjoy housework. When I am on vacation, I actually miss cleaning my home. I sit and think of all of the nooks and crannies that I’ve overlooked lately and how good I’m going to make them gleam when I get back.

Socks. Just, you know, on the ground.

The funny thing is, I also score very  big on the ‘N’, I(N)tuitutive, so I am someone who sees everything in a big picture way. A VERY big picture way. People with high ‘N’ scores get easily overwhelmed. The best example of how someonee with these charactersitics can feel in the world sometimes, and also a perfect illustration about how I often react to my ‘P’ induced mess, is an anecdote about a certain ENFP that I know. His brother recounts how is room was always messy and one day their mom enforced his cleaning of it. He was eight, I think. A half hour later, they decided to check his progress and found him the center of the messy room crying with his head in his heads.

Such a charmingly cute story.

There are great benefits to having a strong  personality type, I very much take pride in it, but like all things that are polarized, there are big blind spots when balance is not sought!

The biggest part of this…hilarity.. is that a have a big mental cripple around housework with direct thanks to my mother. She used cleaning the house as a form of punishment. My mother was an epic ‘P’ as well, a single mother of myself and two younger children. A recipe  for what could basically be seen as a grubbiness grenade.

The message was:

Clean up this (huge, it was ALWAYS huge) mess because you have done something wrong.

Clean up this mess because I don’t want to do it and I am in control of your survival.

Clean up this mess or I will thunder emotional rain over you.

Clean up this mess, I don’t want to do it, and other people are coming over and will see how messy we are.

It was something that I felt emotionally manipulated, socially pressured, guilted and shamed and life-or-deathed (literally, when you are that age) into doing.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

I’d venture to say that it now applies to everyone’s life about everything. that. they. do.

Ever.

Generally, speaking. tehe.

This is, in a nutshell, why authentista doesn’t celebrate holidays. She finds them stressful, social pressure-y, retail happy events that keep people focused on the concept of linear time and the acquiring of things.

 

 

“Beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm: for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off- serenest azure is at hand”

Sedona Dream

I had never heard cicadas before.

I come from a place where winter rules for 8 of twelve months, the remaining four being fraught with mosquitoes and heavy rain. Now I had suddenly  found myself in a paradise. Unexpected but certainly no accident.

Lush woods welcomed me, their trees brimming with large, waxy leaves.  Blue skies and red rocks standing in solemn geographic cathedrals as far as my eye could see.

Hopefully, in February I’ll be back…..!!

real life hobbit quest

 

 

We crested a crumbling granite outcrop peppered with plumes of sage. The simple act of crossing from one side of the ridge to the next meant the difference between a sweat beaded brow and a sudden cold you could feel through every layer of clothing on your body.

Spent most of the day in sunny mixedwood stands, their canopies filtering lazily blowing snow. There were periods where I would be squinting through the sun in my eyes one second, then I’d turn and by the time I had lifted my saw to shoulder height and started running it, I could see my exertion in front of me; white clouds of breath in the air.

Camaraderie in the wildest nature where the threat of death is ever present, intermingled with feeling more alive than you have ever been in life.

 

 

Yeah I once got paid for that.