Turning point

Namaste. I'm back at home after a tumultuous week, and the stressful completion of another edition of the newspaper, one more closer to The End;
I'm sitting in my favourite chair, the ugly one, in the morning winter sun by the window, about to write my pages;
I feel yesterday was the beginning of the turning point - and a heading towards, and embracing of, and living in a new 'sanity' - of the life storm / drastic soul shaking that I'm currently being flogged with-and-through;
So what have I learnt this week (a learning that feels to have almost saved my life)?
I have learnt to no longer derive my identity, my sense of who I am, from the incessant stream of thinking that in the "old consciousness" (Eckhart Tolle) I took to be myself;
"What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought - or the emotion or sense perception - happens." (Tolle again.) I have grasped with firstly accepting, and going into the place with awareness.

Another photo of an aloe flower? Yes, the lion khaki of the tinderbox-dry winter environment is magnificently alive and colorful with these sense-saving flora. Every year I give thanks for these passionate red-and-orange-and-yellow missiles that brightly dot my landscape.

Exactly five years ago last night I moved into this home and began a drastically different life journey; one that has tested, and rewarded me, to way beyond anything I could have ever imagined;
I am grateful, I am thankful, I offer up a yielded and pliable spirit for the next chapter of the journey, one which has already begun in earnest....