Well, I still feel awesome. Definitely refreshed that cushy buffer of goodwill that makes it easier to weather stress. No headache at all so far. I went into this hoping for relief from depression (a perfectly logical condition given the state of the world) and to shake up my metaphorical snowglobe. Sometimes you just need to shake the fuck out of your snowglobe, all there is to it. I tried to keep my expectations low because not everything works for everybody, but dang, I do feel genuinely better. There's a lot of hype about certain experiences and spirituality - there's a lot of money to be made selling a certain "profound" "theraputic" experience. There's places in the US right now where you can go and pay in the high hundreds for a 6 hour guided session. Entheogenic churches. Or if you don't live in 3 specific states, you can buy everything you need LEGALLY for like $50 and blow your own mind DIY style, easy peasy. I guess it depends on your financials and what you are looking to get out of it and how "safe" you need to feel. Maybe the entheogenic church route would be more attractive if I had a career and I just wanted to touch up some stuff on the edges but preserve the stability of my existing life. Like, let's only jostle the snowglobe a little bit. Safely.

There's a quote that has stuck with me for years and years - I can't remember where I got it or if I even made it up myself, but I assume I read it somewhere. "Every choice implies loss." Even choices made happily carry the burden of closed opportunities elsewhere. You marry one person, now you (theoretically) lose the opportunity to experience falling in love with others. You choose the stability of the salaried 9-5 job, but now you can't pick up and go on spontaneous adventures because you have to give your boss 4 weeks notice for vacation approval. You buy a house and now you have to mow the lawn and pay for the busted water heater and deal with your obnoxious neighbors. You live off grid in the boonies and now you don't see your friends because they like flush toilets.

Sometimes even when you get your ideal choice you feel sad, because you are mourning the other opportunities you had to sacrifice.

My friend died of cancer 13 years ago and I have never been the same. I had a respectable office job and ambitions of getting an engineering degree. I had friend groups and activities. I had health insurance and a 401k. And she died, and everything got stripped away until the only thing I hadn't lost was my job. I ended the long term relationship I'd been in, then bumbled into a bad relationship and ended that and I was single for 3 years until I got the chance to date spouse. Friends moved away, friends abandoned me because they did not get the grieving version of me, and I lost whole activity groups. No family around. I kept my job but I realized I had no passion for it. I could get the engineering degree but I realized I only wanted it so people would be impressed and think I was smart. If I had to work as an engineer I would def be on some psych meds, probably in therapy for the rest of my life. I tried therapy and it was a waste of money. I took a meditation class, I read a bunch of books, I got into astrology. Eventually I realized the only way to keep myself sane was to shake my life up. Quit my job, move away, start over. Give up on the engineering path I didn't truly want anyway. Accept that I am an artist, and I wasn't meant for the nice paved road. I just had to get away from the gussied up rat cage I thought was a good, enviable life. Once I made that decision, things got better.

Good things and hard things have happened since, but I never really healed from losing my friend. I don't know how to explain. Something got cut out of me and every day I feel the hole. It's like I've been drowning but I'm getting just enough oxygen from the water to keep from dying. I can't articulate why she was so important. I think it was because she wanted so badly to live, she deserved to live, she went through pure medical torture, and I've been suicidal for most of my life and I couldn't swap with her and give her the life I didn't value. If life were fair, I should have been the one to get the cancer. She never got the chance to be a mother like she wanted. There was nothing I, or anyone else, could do. She suffered and she passed. I had no energy to be angry about it, I just wanted to make the unfairness have some kind of meaning and worth. It changes what you value. What seems important and what isn't. You think you know stuff and you don't. You think you can process loss and you can't. If you absorb the impact, if you feel it to your core, you will never be able to go back to the person you were. You put yourself back together but the cracks are still there. If you're lucky you figure out your own wabi-sabi treatment, but that takes time, and this world doesn't have much patience for true healing (unless you have money, and then Eat, Pray, Love as you please).

When I was in the last P3 it was like a dialogue with myself. It was gently pointed out to me that everything I have ever truly desired has been given to me (true - spouse is a miracle by himself). "You needed a rest, and it was given to you." Meaning the past two years. The Calamity did give me the opportunity to be a hermit, and I took it. I could have forced myself to go back to work and I chose not to. Safeguarding spouse's health is a very good excuse, but still an excuse. (If I'd gone back, mentor would have been out of his mind with stress and I would have been the target of convenience, plus the risk of covid exposure. I just couldn't see how that would end well.) But I was tired. Not just from the stress of dealing with mentor, or the pandemic, or the state of the world, but it's the same tiredness I've had in my bones since my friend died, the cracks I was repairing with the mental equivalent of chewing gum because I couldn't stop to address them better. I needed the opportunity for a real rest, and my world stopped to give to me. And I took it.

There is something deeply positive about that. It mollifies whatever guilt I felt from abstaining from the real world since the pandemic hit. Oh, I should have gone back and let mentor yell at me until I was stuffing down panic attacks and tried to shuffle around in a mad world dealing with the sort of high risk people who want to get tattooed in a pandemic and made what cash I could (not enough to be worth it). You know? Maybe I missed out on absolutely nothing. I stayed healthy. Spouse stayed healthy. I rested and observed and read and learned. The bills got paid. Spouse moved forward with his dream job. I figured out how to shake up my snowglobe and took the chance to do that.

Every choice implies loss. It's true, it's true. Even choosing the grey project has loss. Now I have this secret to keep from spouse, which I don't enjoy because I love getting his viewpoint. Now I don't really want to cooperate with "the machine" of malignant capitalism, so that's super fun. Now I have to invest time educating myself on these deeper spiritual aspects, and that ain't gonna make dealing with people easier. I have different priorities to consider, just like I did after my friend died. I think we are headed for a bad time with fascism, and I don't think I have the luxury of hunkering down and preserving what I've got and waiting for it to be over. In some ways I think I don't get to play it safe anymore. That is a challenge. Part of what the grey project has become is not what can it do for my benefit alone (selfishly), but how can I use it to benefit my community and humanity in general. How to I make myself useful and give back. I feel like there's a debt.

So I don't think I can casually recommend the grey project to anyone (if I could talk about it, which I can't). People approach it different ways as they please. Is it amazing? Yes. Can you do it "safely" in such a way that you are guaranteed to reap only positives and avoid all negatives? I don't think so. You can wrap yourself in control mechanisms and pay big bucks to let the pros guide you, sure. But a real experience means you will change. You will not be the same. It will cost. Every choice implies loss. If "safety" is important and you don't want to change too much, perhaps you aren't missing anything and it's valid to stay as you are.

But if you're depressed as all hell, I mean, maybe it's time to shake up your snowglobe? What has safety and following the rules done for you lately? All these news articles - they say there's something that could help with depression, well tolerated, good results, not addictive, you don't have to be on it for the rest of your life, and then they tell you it's illegal and you can't have it or SUPER BIG TROUBLE MISTER. What a bunch of dumb insane clown world bullshit. Make your own choice, asses your own risk. I made mine.

The next chance for "taking the sacrament" won't be until mid march, but I have doubts that I can make good arrangements by then. I may have to chill for a while and that's fine. Plenty to think about in the meantime.

I told spouse I "had a dream" where Cat could talk and he had an accent like Antonio Banderas and spouse just nodded and said "Cat is from El Paso, makes sense." I told him Cat said he's a "man's cat" and he liked spouse because spouse had balls and didn't listen to him. Spouse laughed and gave Cat extra cuddles. Cat was very happy. I have never seen a cat more attached to a particular human. It's close to dog-like, except you can tell Cat thinks HE is the benevolent master. It's not "a man and his dog", it's "a Cat and his person".

It was a really nice weekend with spouse. We didn't do anything fancy, but sometimes you get reminded that you just genuinely like being around someone and things are better with them. And then there's cuddles and you get to wake up with them in the morning and make them pancakes. It's the caviar & champagne of human relationships. I know what luxury is. It's waking up in a comfy warm bed with happy cats and a spouse who can't wait to tell you the dumbest jokes he can find.

I took the cats to the vet to get a rabies booster and their travel papers. With luck I will be flying out with them on Sunday. Supposedly they need temps to be above 45, so we are at the mercy of the weather gods to warm up a little. Looks iffy right now. Such a terrible time of year to move. If it's too cold to make this flight, we have a second chance when we move proper, but then we'll also have our bags of house goods and that will be more chaotic. So, fingers crossed we can get them to anchorage this try.

Nobody liked being in a crate. Other Cat freaked out and fear-peed within the first few minutes. Cat barfed on the car ride. Many noises of unhappiness. Many indignities. They got over the trauma and seem fine now. $400 for boosters and pet permission slips.

I've let the grey project keep rolling but I have to end it Friday. Everything needs to be packaged up and plausibly square. No trace. All the leftover organics are going to get buried in the park. It's possible it may only be good for fertilizer for the trees, but it tickles me to imagine leaving behind a little patch of naughty, waiting for the right weather. >:-)

The movers supposedly have to check all the boxes before they are sealed to make sure we aren't smuggling anything that breaks uncle sam's rules. We're not supposed to pack any liquids, aerosols or flammables. I'm not worried. It's simply not logistically feasible for them to search well enough to figure out what I've got is what I've got. There's no way they can open up everything sealed and test all my capsules, etc. So long as it looks square, pretty sure that's all they care about. I doubt they want to find anything because that makes their jobs harder.

I really should be a smuggler. I'd make a great smuggler.