Hypersensitivity

I started the five Tibetan rites. They are supposed to increase my metabolism and keep me young. I am only up to four reps, but I already have more energy. There are a million web sites on them, I will let you pick your own, if you are interested.

I finished another painting, which now I don't like. I wanted to do another one of Glenn's Ferry for Mom for her birthday, since she wanted an Idaho landscape, but I really don't like how it came out, so I will pick her out something else. In the last painting I did of Glenn's Ferry I did not like how I lost the yellow flowers in the foreground, so I picked another angle that shows off the flowers better, but it looks like two paintings in one, too much foreground, too much background, no subject. This one was bigger, 7 1/2 by 10 1/2, but now I am going back to studies, maybe of baby geese.

The weekend is flying by. Having a job is interfering with my work.

It is really hot here for a few days and then storm clouds roll in for a day and it rains and cools off, and then it is really hot again. Clouds rolled in late yesterday afternoon and last night the loudest thunder I ever heard woke me up. I sounded like a boom over my house and I thought the world was coming to an end. It was hot and clear all day and now the clouds have rolled in again. I really like it. Thursday morning I got to work and a girl I work with was standing outside just to look at the clouds, which were covering the sky and puffy. Sorry, I don't know my cloud types or I would name the type, I did not like science class.

Floating season started last Friday. Whoever is in charge of the Boise River water levels was finally able to lower the level enough so that people can float down the river, which I guess is a big pastime here. I'm not trying it, the last time I floated down a river in an inner tube I got the worst sunburn of my life and could barely walk or wear clothes for days.

Not that I have been here almost a year and have a job I am thinking, or actually feeling, how I am different.

I am hyper-sensitive and my friend once told me that sensitivity can be a character defect. Sensitivity is not really the defect, the defect is an inability to deal with your sensitivity, which can make you react inappropriately, or make you shut down trying to keep what you sense out. Imagine being hypersensitive and walking around LA assaulted by a barrage of negative energy from everyone you encounter, or working at a job where most people hate you and each other. A sensitive person has to find a way to either block it out or deal with it. I once sat at a job with my office next to the President of the company and for three months I knew he was going to fire me and I waited for the ax every payday. It was excruciating. Turns out there were three months of conversations in his office about firing me until he finally did.

If you learned how to use your sensitivity as a kid to defend yourself, then sensitivity also gets a scary angle to it, sensing something, or intuiting something, must mean potential harm. I think that may be a big reason I cut myself off from my art, my artist cannot exist without my hypersensitivity, but I could not at all handle being hypersensitive. Then I started to paint again and had to learn.

People talk about wanting a sign, don't ask for one of those without also asking for the ability to handle it if you get it. Some are so simple that you might miss them and some hit you like a hammer. It has been more than three years since a sign that hit me like a hammer and I am now finally feeling able to sit down and ask for a follow up.

If I was truly enlightened, I could be hypersensitive anywhere, but I'm not. Here in Idaho I feel more and more intuitive and it feels safe. I don't feel the same need to protect myself, which usually comes out as me looking unapproachable. Maybe it is the natural beauty, maybe it is less people, maybe it is more people who are sensitive like me, maybe it that I can feel the presence of God here and I could not feel it in So Cal.

I sit at work and I can tell what people are worrying about and what they will do about it without feeling like I need to do anything about it, like an observer. (Except knowing to ignore the talker, she will suck me down with her.) Then I have dinner with my friends here and think, without the events over the last few years I would not be here, at this moment, with these good people.

I feel serenity and there must be a link between feeling serenity and seeing more clearly and intuition. Even so, I'm still wondering what that sign was all about and what I am doing here in Idaho. Another problem with big signs is that they make you feel like you are part of something important, or maybe that is what is left of my ego talking.