Becoming conscious...

This blog is about my experience of being slightly different in the many groups I have belonged to. It is a story of both blending in, stepping out and bridging back in.

I guess I was born being a little different from those around me. I am the only girl in a family of four. I am the youngest in my family by 5 years. I spent much of my academic life and professional life being in the minority sex (the female). It came natural for me to work with men because that is what I grew up with in my home. Yes, they were different from me, acted a bit different, were annoying at times, but they were good people. As time went on, I become a mother to two boys (of course). I have no sisters and no daughters. Again, this naturally created many ways to explore being the only female in different groups. At work, it was a big lesson to learn to speak up. I had a few excellent male bosses who encouraged me to speak up, gave me pay raises when I deserved them and even supported me to pursue my second degree. I've learned to fit in being the only woman in a group of men, and in general, I've learned to fit in being the only x in a group of y. The only single mom, the person with the least wealth, the person with the most wealth, the only female computer scientist, the person with the car that back-fired when I changed gears because I couldn't afford to fix the muffler, the first woman I ever heard of that owned a Tesla, being President of an organization, being ostracized from groups, etc. All those transitions were relatively easy. I oscillated between blending in, stepping out and bridging back in to groups. And then, there was the fateful trip to Peru...everything changed. In the few days before and the few days after I visited Machu Picchu for the first time the real challenge began. I started to question EVERYTHING. Was I really living the life I came here to live? Was "consensus reality" a fact? How is it possible that a "normal" person like me could have so many mystical unexplained experiences and so few around me were having the same experience? So.. I took the leap and quit my 27 year professional career, sold my house and took what turned out to be a 2.5 year sabbatical researching reality - I was especially interested in white collar corruption and the history of world religions. I discovered a new word that seemed to apply to EVERYTHING... The word was consciousness and while it isn't commonly understood (or even defined consistently) with most of the people I meet, it is the common bond with my new global tribe. We don't agree on everything in this new tribe (far from it), but we agree that consciousness is the path we need to take in order for the human species to survive. Through all this I have discovered my purpose for being on the planet at this time. It is "clean money". This is a life long journey which started in my bedroom when I was six years old. Most of the girls in the neighbourhood had doll houses but not me, I had a cash register. I had price tags on every item in my room and used to add up different purchases and add sales tax in my head just for fun! And now as a grown woman, my ongoing task is to clean up my own money - how I make it, who I bank with, the products I buy, the companies I support, the companies I boycott and the thousands of micro-lessons that entails as my money becomes "cleaner" every year. As I start living a purposeful life with my partner and we start on our path of being in service to the positive evolution of humanity, our first step was to build our own dream. This common dream started in thought form in December 1989. We had never met but at that time we both decided our dream was to be in Costa Rica. His dream was to have a house in Costa Rica. My dream was to live my life so that I had enough money, hootzpah and health to back-pack around South America in my 50s. Yesterday, I found myself carrying only a backpack for a two day trip to Panama. I was boarding a local bus when I realized I was actually living the dream I started dreaming about 30 years ago. I was taken aback at the profoundness of it. We are now ending Phase I of our project to build our dream. Our co-working space on the ocean in Costa Rica is built. We have had our first guest. So much still to do, so many right hand turns and left hand turns to take. So many more groups to join and be "just a little different" than the others, so many new groups to join where blending in is effortless, so much work to bridge groups together.. Soo many lessons to learn along the way..

The mantra for today and pretty much any day for us is "Do what you can with what you have. Start now.. doesn't have to be perfect, just begin"