The Eight-eyed Steam Girl is a Woman Now: My life as Myth

I was born an Eight-eyed Steam Girl. The fire of natural gas and oil shot through me from below; ancient waters poured down from above. The mixing was wild and chaotic. Fluid emotions and flaming passion combined to propel me down the tracks, rocking back and forth with my own rhythm. I could see where I was going even though I had no map in hand. A different sort of sight was required for my trip through life. And I had lots of sight—eight eyes.  Not just the two typical face eyes but eyes of my heart, hands, feet and one right in the middle of my forehead.

Other folks thought all that sight and steam was too much in one little girl. My “extra” eyeballs were lassoed and tucked out of sight. The “unsightly” steam was controlled by a careful wrapping of my entire body with a beautiful skein of yarn, stopping up all of the “unsightly” eruptions of steam.

Luckily, I was a smart girl. I learned how to navigate with two eyes and my rational, logical mind, all propelled by the limited amount of steam that escaped around my full body wrapping.

Until now.

It’s time for a change. My rhythm has long been strong and powerful, but limping. Not connected to the heart of myself. Trying hard to adapt to the demanding gallop of the culture around me. I wanted to find the real me once again.

I released my eyeballs from their hiding spot and laid the beautiful yarn unwrapped from around my body in a knitting basket. Part of me danced with delight. But my two, overused eyeballs and my brain, so long in charge, screamed and shouted in fear. “Don’t go. You are throwing away the best ways to navigate through life. You’ll never be able to keep everything straight, get anything done, be efficient again.”

Nonsense. But sometimes, too many sometimes, I still believe this fearful voice. Chaos is harder to navigate than tried and true to-do lists. What would happen in my life, I wondered, if too many things fell through the cracks?

For over fifty years I’d kept my inner lid tightly closed so I could adjust to the world. It was time now to quit pretending I was someone else.

In my wrapped up days, I’d over accommodated, tried to be the woman others needed me to be, nice and supportive-like. It was EXHAUSTING. I’d been trying to fuel my life with limited sight and truncated energy.

Now is the time. I was born an Eight-eyed Steam Girl, and now I’m older. Coming home to myself. Learning new songs and dances.

Wild, wise and a little crazy, I’ll find my own way to dance with steam, see every which way and sing with all parts of myself.

In the middle of writing Big Topics at Midnight, I played with telling my life story as a myth. Instantly, I had the image of an Eight-eyed Steam Girl in her Little Red Boat. I told her story from birth until high school. As I struggled to find a way to step into a more intuitive, Spirit-guided way of shepherding my book for this second year, I returned to the myth to see how my story would look right now, as I moved toward my 60^th birthday.

For a more extensive peek into my personal myth, see Big Topics at Midnight, pages 306-308.