I had a conversation with a friend the other day about the four stages of conscious growth. I'm not sure where these stages come from (psychology? mysticism? religion?), but we enjoyed talking about them. The four stage are: 

1. Revolution
Of course, I love this word. I find myself rebelling against something constantly, but revolution is a different thing all together. Revolution is a serious rebellion against the "tribe". It's the decision for a planned overthrow, not just wishful thinking.

2. Involution
This is the stage where one journeys inward in order to gain strength and momentum. It's the planning, the building up - it's where you screw your courage to the sticking post.

3. Narcissism
Probably not what you think. This is the hard work of self improvement where you actually make the changes you want to see. This is working out 5 days a week, eating the egg flower soup instead of the egg roll, making your own coffee instead of stopping at Starbucks. We focus on ourselves -- because we have to if we want to make change.

4. Evolution
The change manifest. You've made it. You no longer walk on 4 legs or have a uni-brow. You have evolved.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be many different things: an astronaut, a paleontologist, a belly dancer. I also wanted to be a nun.

Now, I had no idea what a nun was - I was not Catholic and in fact, had never seen a nun. Well, I did see the Flying Nun on tv, and she was pretty cool, but that wasn't the type of nun I was thinking about. The type of nun in my 7 year old imagination was more like a cross between the image of the tarot figure The Hermit (which I'd seen on my sister's Led Zepplin album cover) and something out of the movie The Sound of Music. 

There were three lifestyle characteristics that I thought a nun would have:

1. Quiet, meditative solitude. Then, it meant I had more time interacting with my imaginary friends: Casper the Friendly Ghost and Buck Rogers (both were conveniently pocket-sized so I could carry them with me). 

2. Communion with nature. I grew up in a pretty rural area, rich in Native American lore, and my spiritual leanings always had something to do with this bucolic setting. I talked to trees and plants, became "blood brothers" with them, and of course, thought my animal friends bestowed on me a special power. It was all a bit pagan before I knew what pagan was. But that's a different story....

3. Long black dresses. I loved black. Or more specifically, crayon black. It just colored - better. However, I remember getting in trouble one day when, in one of my coloring books, I colored the sky black. (Apparently the scenes in coloring books only happen in the daylight. Regardless, black was fabulous and I loved dressing up in it. My mom would take me to second hand stores and back in those days, there were some great finds. Black shoes, black hats, black gloves and purses: I begged my mom for them. I loved the weight and swishing sound of those old heavy clothes and wearing black made me feel like I had on some kind of protective cape of power. Today, those dress up clothes actually fit me, and I can't escape the idea that I've finally grown into the person, at least physically, that I hoped I would when I was a girl. In any event, I imagined the garb of a traditional nun would feel equally powerful and significant. 

Eventually, as I got older, I realized that most nuns had "modernized" - they no longer lived in forested nunneries secluded from the real world (the first time I saw a nun in the grocery store was the abrupt end to the last bit of my fantasy). Anyway, my own tendency to buck authority, would have made me a really bad nun.

Yet, I realized today, that my childhood version of this ideal, yet unrealistic, state is still very real to me. I still crave meditation, solitude, and nature. Every year when I take my MIS (multiple intelligence survey) with my students, I score high as a "Naturalist". This does explain my years as a 6th grade camp counselor, the Kamp Snoopy employment at Knott's Berry Farm, and the brief consideration to become a Forest Ranger in college...

Perhaps we are born with our purpose already encoded  in our bodies and imaginations, and our journey in life is only a round-about distraction until we decide to finally go back home. Or in my case, a return to the nunnery.

Two days post-Christmas.  

Two days free from pubic places, polite chit-chat, social obligations, sensory overload of all kinds, and holiday music taking over my favorite Sirius Radio stations. Let the joyous detox begin!

I always think of the time before Christmas and New Years as dive into the Underworld. It's a place for introspection (and hibernation), for emptying spaces (both physical and mental), for putting to rest the ghosts of the previous year (the last of the graded papers), and for a spiritual fasting of sorts -- a tilling of the earth before planting the hopes and dreams for the new year.

It's a time when these lines from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland seem so relevant:

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

The long days of postponing joy, surviving on scraps of "little life", are over -- for now. So much living to be done before Spring Semester, and no time to lose in brushing off the funk of the Fall, but it's not easy to switch gears so quickly. In fact, I'm surprised that inspiration for this site showed up so soon. Or that it showed up at all. 

See, I've been stuck. Stuck in the routines of work and life that require an intense expenditure of energy - wearing that social mask that gets more and more difficult to wear as the batteries run low and my patience wears out. I procrastinate, avoid. I get grumpy and impatient. I get resentful of living in "survival mode".

Yesterday, I ran across several articles discussing personality types, specifically on the subject of introversion. Mildly interested, having been and introvert during the first half of my life (you grow out of it, right?), I read this: "Many introverts feel there’s something wrong with them, and try to pass as extroverts. But whenever you try to pass as something you’re not, you lose a part of yourself along the way." That hit a nerve. No wonder I have felt depleted and resentful; I haven't been living my true self. Instead, I've been passing. Hmm.

So, two days after the holiday, I'm still underground embracing the stillness, but I'm not apologizing or feeling guilty for it. I'm planting new seeds that might stretch my boundaries in new directions and in a way, I feel like I'm waking from a zombie apocalypse. This site, Reluctant Crow, is a first step.

 It takes effort, but as fearless Dear Sugar herself has said, "This is how you get unstuck. You reach."