change

Time for Change

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I have been all over the place about what day it is this week – I spent most of Tuesday thinking it was Wednesday, most of Wednesday thinking it was Tuesday, and today it feels like Wednesday again. Not sure what that’s about.

Anyway, I’ve been hinting for the last few weeks that big changes were afoot that I couldn’t yet talk about publicly. I’ve announced this to enough of the right people at this point that now I can safely blog about it – my husband and I are moving back to Minnesota! We move into our new place six weeks from today, actually, which is wild.

When we moved to Chicago in 2012, we knew it wasn’t going to be forever – our families are still in the Twin Cities and we knew we’d eventually want to move back to be closer to them. We figured that’d be 7-10 years away. The trouble was, we never changed that “7-10 years away” number in our heads as the years ticked by. Nine years later and we’re realizing it is, indeed, time.

There are so many people I’m going to miss in Chicago, but the weird mixed blessing of 2020 is that most of the places/things we’d have to say goodbye to we’ve…kind of already done that with, since we haven’t been able to do anything in person in over a year. (I’m thinking in particular of the Old Town School and the songwriting community we’re part of here…it’s all been online.)

I will, at least, still be back somewhat regularly for work, so I know I can continue to connect with friends here. I am also genuinely excited to return to the Twin Cities and the friends and family we still have there. We’re moving into a beautiful apartment with in-unit laundry (which has been a dream for forever), and a den where I can set up my office space (no more working out of my dining room). I’m overwhelmed by the process of the move itself, but I’m looking forward to being moved into the new space. I’m super grateful I have a job that I can continue to do remotely even when the rest of my team returns to the office in some capacity.

It’s weird to leave this apartment, though. We got married in this apartment. We’ve learned how to coexist in this one-bedroom space while being together 24/7 over the past year. There have been enough minor annoyances around maintenance that I’m not exactly sad to leave it behind, but it is weird.

So that’s the big news! In other news, next week there will likely not be a blog (or it will go up late) – we’re headed up to Minnesota for a visit over Memorial Day weekend (hopefully bringing up a load of fragile things to store at my parents’ place until the move, and doing a tour of the building we’re moving into, and just seeing family) and will be driving on Thursday at the time that I usually write this blog. If I’m super on top of things and get something written Wednesday night, we’ll all be pleasantly surprised.

Keep hanging in there and taking care of yourselves and each other. I believe in you.

Dreaming

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m in a weird, waiting space in a few big areas of my life right now. It’s not bad, necessarily, but it’s uncomfortable and I’m hoping I’m able to start moving again soon.

In the meantime, I’m dreaming, and I’m trying to figure out how to manifest some of these dreams. (I’m also thinking about how “manifesting your dreams” usually comes down to some combination of hard work and privilege.) What do I want my life to look like? What do I want to give more time and space to? Where is my focus shifting away from things that have taken up a lot of time and space historically?

I’m trying to stay on top of assignments for my songwriting class (which I’m super grateful for at the moment, because if I didn’t have those deadlines, I probably wouldn’t be writing much at all right now). There are dreams tied to that, too – when will I hit the point where I can save a little money to record an EP? Since 2012 I’ve written almost 175 songs; more than half of those have happened in the past two years. I’m sitting on a lot of material, and it would be nice to be able to put some of it out into the world in a way that feels more permanent than the (very) occasional live show.

I really, really hope I have some more concrete news to blog about soon. In the meantime, I am trying to learn to breathe through the discomfort of waiting. I don’t know that I believe that everything happens for a reason, but I am trying to see what I can learn from this liminal space. Patience is not always my strongest virtue, but I’m working on it.

Journeys Old and New

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I feel like the past week has been a bit of a roller coaster. From a lovely weekend of domesticity to the incredibly sad news of the passing of a kind knitting acquaintance to some family-related angst, all while wrestling with intermittent vertigo (a hanger-on from the cold that laid me out last week)…it feels like there are a lot of things I could talk about for this week’s blog, which is giving me a different sort of “what do I write about this week?” struggle than is usually the case.

Yesterday my newest tarot deck arrived in the mail. It’s the simplest and, in some ways, most abstract of the decks that I own. It’s called the Nømad Tarot, and is a lovely thing of deep, dark navy (nearly black) backgrounds with white edges and white line drawings. The cards have a gorgeous linen finish and are a joy to shuffle, and I’m super excited to start working with it.

The deck was a bit of an impulse purchase. I’d been looking at it off and on for many months, but I still felt a little apprehensive after placing the order – I had been wrestling with the impulse to order a new deck over the weekend, weighing the fact that I really like the collection I’ve got against this feeling like there was a certain element missing from that collection. I debated back and forth among three different options (all of which had been on my wish list for ages) before finally caving and going for the one that seemed like the best combination of characteristics that would make it fit what I was missing.

Now that it’s here, I’m happy with it. I’m glad I went ahead and did something to get me a little more excited about meditation again, because I fell out of the habit a month or so ago, and I’m realizing more and more that it’s a habit that I really need to get back into for the sake of my overall well-being.

The fact that it’s called the Nomad Tarot feels fitting for this place of movement that I’m finding myself in – movement in relationships, in identities, in beliefs.

For the creature of habit and ritual that I am at heart, the fact that my life has been sort of ruled by regular upheaval for the past several years can be kind of exhausting. At the same time, it’s an exciting journey that’s taken me to places and people I never would have dreamed were possible.

So here’s to movement, and change, and not getting stuck in a rut. There are lessons to be learned in the stuck places, for sure…but I’m ready to get back to forward motion.