Yes, this is my least favorite day of the year — the day when we move the clocks ahead one hour and everything inside me becomes discombobulated!

(And if you use google translate to read this blog, good luck with that word!)

Discombobulated: adjective – confused and disconcerted.

For some reason, it usually takes me several days to get used to losing that hour. And even though I usually only sleep 5 or 6 hours a night and can easily sleep a little longer and catch an extra hour of sleep, I really resent doing that because I am so possessive about Time –when I’m awake, that is.

My “wide awake, me-time” is really precious to me and I resent having to surrender even one hour of it just so that the country can get a little more time to have barbecues or something all summer.

Anyway!

So here I am.

Well, today I completed yet another one of those little Inner Being Dialogue journal thingies. I have filled 4 of those little journals in 9 months. I’m serious when I say it has changed my life. It really has. It has changed how I focus my mind. And if you have any interest at all in getting a better grasp on how reality works, beneath the surface of what we generally consider “physical reality,” and to perhaps get more efficient about scripting your own life,  then I really, really recommend keeping one of these journals — or doing something similar to it.

It is simply your Inner Being talking to you. Like tuning a radio dial to a specific frequency and then the voices come. For me, writing it down resonates best for me.

Back when I first started keeping the journal, I was listening to a podcast about the Inner Being while doing yoga. And a guy said that when he first began meditating to specifically tune in to his Inner Being, his Inner Being said: “We are here.”

And this totally stopped me in my yoga tracks, gang, because that was exactly what happened to me when I first started my Inner Being journal. They said: “We are here.” Plural.

When I was a little girl, I was always very aware that there were these “people” watching me. I couldn’t point to them or anything; I could only feel them. They weren’t frightening to me at all. I didn’t think of them as angels or anything. Just people– plural — making sure I was doing okay.

One time, when I was 7, I was playing with a couple of my girlfriends after school and I mentioned, in passing, something about the people watching us. And they both said, “What are you talking about?”

ME (seven years old and quite cavalierly believing I was sane): “You know, those people who watch us. They make sure we’re okay.”

And neither of them had any clue what I was talking  about and so I never, ever mentioned it again to anyone, ever. (It was around that same time that I also mentioned that “thing” that happens between your legs that feels so incredible, and none of my girlfriends had a clue what I was talking about then, either. There was a lot of stuff I started to just stop talking about.)

But the “people” were there. And I started to think that maybe my birth mom had sent them to look out for me and that, because of that, none of my non-adopted friends had any need to have people watching them. Whatever.

By the time I was 12 (just a really incredible year for me, apparently), I first started having a dissociated state of mind. An alternate world I was creating so that I could get away from my adoptive mother. It seems — as I’m trying to remember it now — that that was when I started to lose that connection to a sense of “people watching me.” At that point, I was starting to really sink into mental illness. By the time I was 14, I’d become really adept at splitting myself off mentally from my mother’s presence and going to that alternate world.

I had a different house there, an entirely different family. And that’s where I went as soon as my adoptive mother came into my field of vision every day. I can’t stress enough how terrifying that woman was to me. But the dissociated state  wasn’t just a survival mechanism; it was the only place in my waking world where I could find love. It eventually got to the point that if I wasn’t hanging out with my friends, then I was in that dissociated state — living in another house, with a different family.

I remember one afternoon, when I was in my mid-twenties and living in the tenement on E. 12th Street in NYC, it suddenly occurred to me that the other world was completely gone. And I couldn’t remember when it left me. It was just totally gone. I remember telling my friend Jeffrey about it, and how startling it felt to realize it. And then directly on the heels of that realization, I found my birth mom, and then a couple years into that relationship with her and all my half-siblings, my birth dad came into my life.

So it’s interesting. Charting that gradual shift over the course of 25 years: benevolent energies watching over me; my mind splitting off to find a place of love; my birth family coming into my life and filling it with so much actual love.

And then, of course, it was also really interesting to begin those Inner Being dialogues, sort of out of the blue, and find a plurality of voices there. (I don’t “hear” the voices; I feel them. The words come.)

So I will begin journal #5 tomorrow morning.

On sort of a related note — people who know me well know that, throughout my life, my psychic abilities have been really pronounced. (I believe that we’re all psychic, but I also believe that if you don’t believe you are, you won’t recognize it in yourself. I think that our psychic perceptions are actually the larger part of what our minds receive, but because of our physical senses filtering most of that out, we have come to believe that what’s physically in front of us is information that’s more reliable than what we psychically perceive. But I believe it’s the other way around. )

And even though I cannot draw my way out of a paper bag — I have no artistic talent in that area at all — when I was living in that same apartment on E. 12th Street, the night before my birth dad contacted me, I was in a really inexplicable, heightened mental state. Just agitated beyond belief. Pacing the small apartment like crazy. My mind was on high alert about something but I couldn’t figure out what.

(After a lifetime of trying to find out who my birth father was, he suddenly called me from Nevada one evening, while I was watching a rerun of “The Andy Griffith Show” on television)

However, the night before the call came…

I had a set of colored pencils and I suddenly sat down at my kitchen table and began to draw — I was in a sort of hypnotic state. Just really intensely drawing. And this is what I drew:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then, the following day,  a phone call that I had been waiting for my entire life finally happened. And my birth father introduced himself to me. (And changed my life forever.) And in that very first phone conversation, he told me that he had been in the Navy during Vietnam and that his back had been severely injured on a flamethrower during a skirmish on the Mekong Delta.

And then he said, “I have no idea why I just told you that. I never talk about that.”

Isn’t that interesting? Plus, I had been making that drawing while he was on a phone call with the people in a little town in Ohio who were telling him that I existed — and he was freaking out. He didn’t know, until the moment that they told him, that he had a daughter anywhere at all. (I was already 28 when he found out about me.)

So there you go! Just a slice of the wonderment that we call Marilyn’s Mind.

All righty. I’m gonna scoot and get started around here. It’s cold out there today, but really sunny. Outside my window right now, I can see a little boy riding his bicycle! Like maybe Spring is right around the corner…

Thanks for visiting, gang. I leave you with my intensely appropriate breakfast-listening music from today! “The Boy in the Bubble,” from Paul Simon’s Graceland, 1986. Another incredible album. If you’ve never heard this song, listen to it! It’s so cool. And catchy. And hypnotic and very upbeat. Okay. I love you guys. So much. Have a great Sunday. See ya.

“The Boy In The Bubble”

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

It’s a turn-around jump shot
It’s everybody jump start
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

c – 1986 Paul Simon