What Shall I Slough

What shall I slough? What useless old skin shall I squeeze out of and toss away?

 

Impatience- that one might be good. Or how about self-doubt? That’s a nasty one. But it is very deep in the layers of myself, and won’t come loose readily. I’ll have to work on that one.

 

Hmmm, sloughing. I need to learn to take the time to finish my work properly. That includes my knitting and embroidery. A big box full of completed projects that I never bothered to mat and frame, bags with pieces for a child’s sweater never blocked and sewn together, stories and poems written and tucked away without smoothing and editing, or rushed out to put on my blog before I read it that one last time, so I have to go back and edit it when I see an error later- all cured by a little more patience.

 

I’m not impatient with the process of creating, just with the polishing and finishing, the going back over things. Perhaps this is what I shall slough, and make an effort to polish the bits and bobs I create so that they are not hidden away in a box somewhere, or put out with incompletions and  errors for all the world to see.

 

Procrastination, perhaps. That’s another one I could slough. There has been some discussion about that, and avoidance and distractions. I suppose it goes hand in hand with its brother impatience above, leaving those same boxfuls of completed work shoved away in a closet. Hmmm…

 

Choices for the moldy old skin I shall rid myself of – this is hard. I know some of the things that should go, but which one?

Finally, I think I have chosen; I’ll try the impatience today, I think, and the sloughing begins. I pull and scrape. It feels good, this letting go of things, but a little bit scary. I feel a bit naked. What if I need this later?

 

No, no, it has to go. It peels off in a cloudy bits, making a small heap on the floor. Finally, I finish and sweep it up, putting it in a pile with all the other sloughed pieces people have left here.

 

The Keeper of the Mine smiles warmly at me, and then says, “Good job. I know this isn’t easy. And it may try to grow back; in fact it almost certainly will, but you know now to be on guard for it, to slough it away each time you feel it growing back and accumulating again. Now, you are ready. Come with me, and put your hand in the handprint on the door.”

 Posted by She Wolf