Hi all, Willow here. I haven't been around for a long time. (Hilary, I'll get to the part of trying to find and merge my old account here later.) Whomever sees this and remembers me, please wave - though I've been away a long time, bits and essences of many of you have traveled with me through the years.

So, my mom died. She was 90, and had a wonderful life. I'm left inheriting her house, and, with my two brothers and our various families, to doing right by the place and many things she's left behind, which we will now distribute and share, and some of her tasks we will continue. For the first three or so months after her passing, we sat with the questions and the problems regarding the house, but took care of other matters first, culminating with a wonderful celebration of her life. Now, over the past few weeks, we've been having a lot of discussions. I've come to have a wild contradictory plethora of thoughts about what I want to do next, and the meshing and failing to mesh, understanding and failing to understand, between myself and my brothers and others has been interesting and challenging.

The other thing you should know about me, or be reminded of, is that I'm not very organized. Actually, I can be exceptionally organized, but my natural preference is to intuitively drift, held by the loosest possible level of organization and structure, just tethered enough to keep the basic processes and systems that support me functioning. I'll tell you my favorite Bible verse, which also happened to be in the reading that my mother always requested (there were four) for the Christmas Eve service at her church: "And Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart." (Luke 2:19) It's an odd thing. Fundamentally, I think of myself as an artist and creative being, but I've been fortunate in never having had to support myself as an artist, and also in never having been at a loss for meaningful creative challenges in my paying work or ordinary personal life. But as a result, the sort of organizational or "business" systems and disciplines a professionally working creative person would have developed by this time in life and could rely on, are for me instead neglected and atrophied. They are now necessary. What to do.

So here are the notes preparing for the reading (thanks Hilary for the sticky post reminder that verbatim is best):

The Question:
Recognize after yesterday's meeting and x,y,z conversations, that nothing in the possibilities can stay just an idea now. It all has to be tangible to each necessary participant. So the long awaited, long imagined, long put off, comprehensive life/art/business management approach necessarily starts today. On this significant occasion, I ask for a reading: Gods, I ask for your blessing and guidance and support as I take this step. Ashe. Becoming the functional administrative, business and planning manager for all my work and life, holistically conceived and born.

The Reading:
57 unchanging (marbles method (real ones))

My response:
Oh! LiSe... seals... of course.

(went and read current version of her page:
https://www.yijing.nl/hex/hex_57.html
especially
https://www.yijing.nl/hex-stories/57.html
> The blueprint or the seal that one carries, decides all what one is or does. It penetrates every action like wind or roots can enter anything. It has no name, often its existence is not even known, but it is always there and directs everything one does or thinks. It decides the way one listens or looks to the world.
> The emperor bestowed a seal to those who were able to carry out his ideas, and whom he trusted. The seals one carries inside come from Gods or devils, from parents or heredity, from muses or experiences with nature. Some seals can destroy a life, other seals can influence the world.
> Following winds: seal-assignment. The noble one conveys mandates and accomplishes affairs.
> Wind is not a one-moment thing, it blows from far away and blows on to other places. Your decisions now will not be for (or from) one moment either. Wind has to blow in a steady direction in order to accomplish anything apart from dust devils and the like. Who has a solid inner core, can influence others in many ways.
> Wind itself is invisible, which makes it difficult to ward off influences. It can be as if a spell has been cast.

At that point, I just stopped, realized that at least on the surface the answer was perfectly clear, and that one of the first things I wanted to do to live into it was come back here, where I could show up as both my past and present self, and where I could create a topic both for input and where a special kind of accountability would be possible. Duration.

So here I am; that's what's happening; time to stop with gratitude and anticipation...

And I'm back on day two. Writing all that out, and taking the step of posting here, helped me quite a bit. I think I can state my question and situation pretty simply now.

I've never before, or at least not for a very long time, had to fully combine being creative and being organized/managerial. I've always been able to safely inhabit others' structures and still get my needs met. Losing my second parent is profoundly changing me. In a way, for the first time, I'm waking up to the public responsibility of being alive as a unique and desirous individual. It calls for a level of holistic integrity I've imagined but not needed to work toward. It calls for a personal commitment to my own passions that I've long subsumed under my abilities and inclinations and preferences to support those of others - even to hide within those of others.

Way back when I was in high school, I wrote an essay about the metaphor of the cocoon, the chrysalis, that wowed my friends. "You are enlightened!" one of them said. I thought back to that the other day and considered that perhaps I've had a brilliant life as a cocoon. And now, the weather has changed, the time is right and -- uh-oh? drat! wow!? -- I find it's time to be a butterfly.

Something someone else did related to all this yesterday made me furious. Rather, it was something that I jumped to the conclusion they had done, while my rising anger stopped me from seeing what they really did and why. Rather than react, I stepped away. I wanted to blow gently and steadily in one consistent direction, not just kick up a dust devil. Day three...

Day seven. Wind following wind. My weekend insight is that where my administrative ability falls down is in followup. I am too much the fickle breeze that leaves before the work is done. No matter, maybe I don't change that part, but I bring on the "second wind" to return to the meeting notes or the commitment or the message or the half finished project and take the next step.