Lately the synchronicity stream has me awash in one-offs. I jolt awake at 4:43 and 3:44 and 4:45. My timestamps are 3:33:34 and 4:44:43. My electric toothbrush stops inexplicably at 2:21 minutes while I am still trying to brush. People inadvertently send me emails at exactly 1:10. The best was the QA test I received at work after I finished telling a friend I am always one off lately – the auto-generated title was “Sanity Test 11:10:10.”

I feel off. The perennial contradiction between my job and what I see as my true work in the world has me spiraling down. I hate that I spend most of my time and energy working for The Man. I hate the idea generally, and it only makes it worse that my job is absurd on every level.

It hurts my head to do my job. I don’t know how else to describe it. Work is an energetic river – I guess all activity is – and dipping into this particular river does violence to my mind and spirit.

It’s not that my job entails activities are in themselves difficult – far from it. But they are crude and inane – and far beyond one person in volume.

Ultimately, though, the work is fundamentally non-aligned. You could say that I work for the defenders of those who would put a spigot on air and force us to pay to breathe.

It’s painful to turn to that frequency.

To those of you in the same boat as me, I ask can we agree to stop this? Spending our days working for the wrong team in grossly mismanaged situations, banging our heads into walls, trying to accomplish nonsensical tasks given to us by bosses without a respective clue, doing the work of whole departments because they keep laying people off, driving long, harrowing commutes back to heavily mortgaged homes . . . By the time we’re home, we’re mentally and physically exhausted, but then there many household tasks that every good suburbanite must do. We’re just starting to feel human again when it’s time to go to sleep. Next thing we know, the alarm is ringing and we have to go back.

I don’t want to go back.

There is something else I long to do that I think would be a much more worthwhile contribution, but it doesn’t often pay a living. I’ve been trying to figure out a way, but the health care/health insurance issue is a stumper.

I may not have figured out an alternate route yet, but I do know we are all better than this. Our time, our will, our creative power should not be wasted and misused in this way. This is NOT who we are.

I really liked Charles Eisenstein’s post “Money: A New Beginning” on Reality Sandwich a while back. He captured the absurdity of the artificial scarcity that we are living in. He writes:

For indeed, we live in a world of fundamental abundance, a world where vast quantities of food, energy, and materials go to waste. Half the world starves while the other half wastes enough to feed the first half. In the Third World and our own ghettos, people lack food, shelter, and other basic necessities, but cannot afford to buy them. Other people would love to supply these necessities and do other meaningful work, but cannot because there is no money in it.

When paying work is meaningless at best and destructive at worst and when meaningful work doesn’t pay enough to sustain the worker, the system is obviously unsustainable.

“Contribution” image by my husband, used courtesy of a marriage license.

We bought a new water fountain for our cat. It must have the scent of someone else’s pet on it because our cat is acting as if a strange and terrifying animal has taken over the house. So he has banished himself to the basement. He is crying down there. He longs to come up. Everything is waiting for him: food, water, comfort, companionship. But he can’t overcome his fear. We have to get rid of the fountain, but until we do, he is living in self-imposed limitation. All because of a fear-based illusion – no strange animal has taken over the house.

Am I like my cat? Am I living in the basement, full of angst over where I am and pining away for my Right Place, when all I need to do is step across the line of my self-imposed limitation?

In Creating the Work You Love: Courage, Commitment, and Career, Rick Jarow talks about how finding our place in the world literally can also mean finding our place figuratively:

A person can become empowered by a place. For many people, the matter of creating artful life work may not be so much a question of finding the right job as it is of finding the right place. If you feel connected to a place and many people report moving into the area on the intuitive strength of knowing that this is where they belong, honor that place. Find a way to develop a relationship with it. The place itself will then produce the work that is needed to keep you there. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. It is quite mysterious how a place calls a person, and there are stories upon stories of peoples’ fortunes changing when they change location. This does not mean that you must pick up and move somewhere because things are not going well; that would be giving into the scarcity principle in another form. On the other hand, honoring the energies and feelings that a place communicates to us factors into our personal management work. . . .

The question that must be asked along with “What do I want to do?” is “Where should I do it? Where can I integrate into a community of like-minded people who are likely to support the creative expression of my work?” [188]

So maybe we don’t have to have it all worked out before we can go. Maybe going there will enable us to work it out. That feels right to me. Still, there are certain basic considerations we need to have accounted for before we can leave: jobs, health care, medical insurance. And these are the considerations that keep us cycling around looking for a doorway.

But I like Jarow’s notion of “honoring the energies and feelings that a place communicates.” Maybe that is the doorway. Honor those energies in your life wherever you are, and they will expand. And in expanding, they will lead somewhere.

Meanwhile, a friend emailed me today with the very wise and deeply appreciated comment that Maine is actually my place of Love and Freedom and that even if I never get to live there, I am already holding it inside, just let it be . . .

The February 20 Lunar Eclipse fell in my 6th house – work and health. Storm clouds are gathering there for me now, as they have been gathering for so many of us, with outsourcing, offshoring and inadequate health care coverage being the order of the day.

The morning after the eclipse greeted people at my workplace with a slew of corporate communications announcing the most profitable year in a decade and across-the-board reorganization, meaning – yes, they said it – job cuts.

Thing is, they said the second part as if it is something new. As if we haven’t already had successive rounds of reorganization and layoffs over the last few years. As if we weren’t already cut to the bone — deep into the bone in some areas. In fact, there have been so many layoffs now, they stopped acknowledging it when people go. People are disappearing in ones and twos each week, and you don’t realize it until you happen to go looking for them and find out that they were laid off a month ago.

Then on Friday there was a brief meeting with my boss that brought the storm clouds to me personally. No, I was not laid off. Let’s just say that for more than a year, I’ve been dealing with a bad situation at work. They have been stringing me along with promises to “make things right.” This week the time came for them to show good faith toward doing so, and they reneged. In fact, they acted as if they had never made the promises to begin with, which tells me they may have other plans for my position there – plans I won’t like if they involve me at all.

So I am angry right now, but not overwhelmingly so. In the past, I would have been carried off by my anger. I would have let it drag me down into the drama of the illusion. This time I feel the anger, to be sure, but I am only wading in it. My head is clear.

I have been unhappy in my job for a while. What my company has given me now is a gift because it clarifies where I stand in relation to my job. It keeps me from allowing myself to once again be sucked into their agenda – so that my soul purpose is lost while I scramble to fulfill my company’s goals for me and once again my job takes me out of alignment and crowds me out of my life.

So thank you, bosses. I will not be revisiting that road of gross misalignment. I will not confuse myself into thinking that my employment in your organization has anything to do with my true career, my professional mission, my contribution to the world. I am reminded: my job with you is merely a paycheck, and it may be eliminated at any time on short notice. I will treat it accordingly. I will not be giving it a second thought when the clock returns my time and creative power to me.

Well, duh – right? But I have a long history of being compulsive about work. I want my work in the world to be my mission, my life center, my raison d’etre. My natural desire is to plug into it and pour my creative essence in. Because of the exploitive nature of work under capitalism and the toxicity of the American economy, I inevitably end up doubly abused.

During the eclipse the moon was occulted in my sixth house, signifying upheaval and possibly loss in the work and/or health spheres of my life. My philosophy is not to hold on and wait for the waves of change to slam into you. Instead, I try to review what needs to be changed and then embrace the waves offering up the change as a sacrifice.

So throughout the eclipse, I meditated on surrendering my negative attachments to my job. And yes, surrendering my job itself. I received a vision of a waterfall in a lush forest. I went down to the base of the waterfall and found a tails-up penny in the sandy riverbed there. Then a tiny white crystal emerged and nestled itself between my eyes. Time will tell what role this crystal play in my life, but if it is anything like Falcon and Bear — who came to me during last year’s lunar eclipse – it will be an ally. I am ready for whatever the bosses throw at me.

My one-pointed focus remains and continues to sharpen. Unrecognized, unrewarded and unvalued in the world of late-stage American capitalism, it nevertheless is all that is.