After some sunny days, Portland is plunged into streaky grey rain again. It is April 5th, a New Moon day, and I am trying to come back from an expectation hangover.

You remember what that is, right?

I’m reeling from lots of realizations, and trying to get my feet underneath me firmly enough to attempt the next jump–focusing on finishing my fifth novel and making all the marketing decisions that will accompany its readiness.

What realizations? Well.

I flung myself into the coaching arena with the gusto of an amateur, only to realize that a startup organization is not the best draw for an audience or clients. If I wanted to find clients, I would have to seek them out, piece them together one by one, just as I have been doing for my reading audiences for the past SIX YEARS, with little geometric result.

So, yet another thing that I would love to share with people but have no desire to start all over in terms of manufacturing visibility. Why is it so hard to find that thing that sings in me, that also makes other people appreciate it enough to pay?

It could be related to the plethora of examples in the US today where value seems to be indirectly related to price, e.g. teaching, child care, nursing, versus banking, athletes, middle management, ‘consultants’ in many contexts. The jobs that take heart and soul get peanuts, while cold calculation, image, and patriarchy seem to get all the props.

I tried a new exercise yesterday: writing clouds of all the activities I like doing. Today, I noted how often I do each, and then, influenced by Melia and Gill’s latest Semi-Together podcast, I meditated on how much each contributes to how good I feel as a person (similar to their ‘does this bring me close to the life I want?’ question). I came up with 18 activities:

• Four got ’10’
• Two got ‘9’
• Four got ‘8’

…..And only one of the above was an income-generating activity.

So, as it is the New Moon, a time to form intentions to grow along with that big Reminder in the Sky, what should I be flinging myself into next? It has been several long weeks since I realized that the last venture was not the integrative panacea I thought it might be, and those weeks have been filled with the urge to declutter, destress, hide, meditate, purify. None of that intuition is helping me find an anchor to get along in this bill-paying, income-measuring, oh-yeah-and-I-love-to-support-local-businesses world.

Advice?

Meanwhile, I’ll keep singing, dancing, walking, reading, …