Mellaenn said:
...GryffinSong, that is amazing that you essentially started all over again. Was that freeing to be get rid of so many material things? I think it would be distressing in some ways, but very freeing in others.
Yes, it was awesome!!! I didn't get rid of everything ... kept some things with my brother for my return. It was funny ... I expected to be gone for six months to a year.
Here's what happened. I'd been working in the computer industry for fifteen years. Was living with a sweet, funny man. Having "female troubles". This, by the way, is when my little broken-jawed magic Merlin came into my life. I adopted him two weeks before a hysterectomy to solve my "female troubles", and he snuggled with me all through my recovery. Anyway. Shortly after returning to work from my surgery I was laid off. I was really upset for a part of a day. Then I realized what an incredible opportunity it was. I bounced into my manager's office and thanked her. You know what she said? "Karen, you're creativity and enthusiasm are wasted here." And she was right. I had a lot of savings, and they paid me 39 weeks severance. I stayed in my house another year trying out a variety of plans in my head, and breaking up with my man. Then I sold my house, my cars, most of my furniture, and much more. I bought my truck and travel trailer. And I hit the road with my dogs. It was AWESOME!!!
For three years I traveled. I did a lot of photography. I explored a career in the arts, doing some shows and taking classes in how to market one's artwork. I saw this beautiful country of ours. I'd been to Fiji, but I hadn't seen the Grand Canyon.
Three years into things I started wanting to find a place where I felt I belonged. I thought for sure it was going to be Arizona, but I simply wasn't meeting people who felt like forever friends. I did a show in Washington state and immediately started meeting special people, one of whom offered to let me camp on her land and use part of her barn as a studio. I stayed at her place for a few months then moved to a mountain where folks were into native spirituality and had formed a really lovely community. If any of you have heard of Sun Bear, it's his mountain. He's gone now, but I've been in his old house, and lived with people who knew him. Then I met some people from a medieval recreation group and moved onto the middle of a twenty acre parcel of land. Only two other people lived there, and they were at the other end of it. It was AWESOME!!! It was while I was there that I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and those two dear, sweet men, and the people from the mountain, helped me get through it.
By the end of the cancer journey, as you might imagine, my savings were long gone. All that travel, small art earnings, and even though I had insurance, huge medical bills. My mom had been sending me money to help out. Mom and I occasionally speculated aloud that it might be cool to buy a house together, but we thought it was just a pipe dream. And one day she called me up and said she'd found us a house.
So, here I am. A brand new life. One I never expected. And I'm still adjusting. I love life with mom. I'm struggling to make friends. I miss the folks on the mountain and on those twenty acres. I'm working on my art career and much more successful than I was out west. And I still have a long way to go to completely recover from the hard times.
It was quite a journey.
I do have some plastic things in the mix (I started collecting as soon as I decided to be in this group), but if there is anything I send you that you don't click with, please feel free to send it on to someone else in the next swap. Mine will definitely be an eclectic mix!