Are you feeling a shift of being more grounded and present in reality?

Here’s what’s happening for me:

In the last several weeks/months the recurring dream I’ve had for years increased dramatically in frequency. In the dream I’m in the apartment I’m living in but all of a sudden there are new rooms in it I’ve never noticed before. Sometimes they’re already beautifully appointed and sometimes they’re dirty and cluttered like a garage, or sometimes they’re just more storage space in rooms that exist already, but either way I’m always excited about being able to fix them up and start using them, even if at the same time I’m mad that I’ve been paying rent on them the whole time without knowing they were there.

Last weekend I drove by myself to San Bernardino to pick sage and wildflowers to hang outside and make smudge sticks from, and I thought to myself, how amazing that this place has always been here, just an hour away, and that I can harvest from the earth things I can fashion into something valuable. There was a restaurant whose views overlooked down the side of a mountain, and the whole experience felt magical.

I replanted the balcony garden that I’d let die when building maintenance destroyed it. I painted a birdhouse to hang and put some birdseed in glass decanters. And I started actually spending time on my balcony again. Like, oh, this was here the whole time, and I’d forgotten about it.

Last night some friends came to visit me and we decided to go swimming in my building’s pool – which I had never used in my three years of living here. There’s a barbecue there that I guess anyone in the building can use, a hot tub, and a game room I never knew was there.

And yesterday since I was home with nothing to do I decided to offer discounted email tarot readings, which, even though they were virtual, were an amazing way for me to connect with my friends/followers at virtually any price point they were comfortable with. (Astonishingly, more than half who responded chose the upper half of the scale!) Like oh right, I can offer the work I love NOW – even before the new website is up or I feel like I’m official.

All of a sudden I’m looking around at the planet I live on and being like, oh, I’m here, I live here.

And I’m not the only one. My mom discovered that her health insurance covers a gym membership and she’s started going in the mornings, and she even convinced my stepdad to get a personal trainer. I see people taking time off Facebook to reconnect with the physical world. There’s a shift happening, and I can’t quite find words to describe it yet, but it’s about seeing the parts of the world we normally put off or block out out of convenience, shedding the ease of falling into the habit and routine of the familiar.

So if you’re not on that train already, I invite you to start looking at the roads around you that you don’t take, the places you’ve never been, the restaurants you’ve never ordered from, the recipes you’ve never tried, the towns within driving distance you haven’t visited yet, the options that are available to you that you might not be aware of.

Or if you ARE on that train, share a new thing you’ve done lately and how it made you feel, or what you think about the shift that’s going on.