Wearing bones to ward off terror

My thoughts are all in a muddle today, so I might start in four or five places and hope they kinda converge somewhere.  Oh yeah, another thing: Caution, hippie stuff!

1.)  The crystal book I bought on Amazon finally arrived.  Two months!  Two months it took to ship it from Arizona in the US.  How does your post work, American people?  Does it involve camel trains?  Australia is almost the same size and I can ship a parcel almost anywhere in the country in three working days!  Overseas might take a week.  I was planning to give the seller a terrible rating, then I saw the parcel was postmarked the day after I ordered the book.  So it’s not his fault, it’s the postal service’s. 

2.)  I’ve been terrified I would lose my pension.  Yes, terrified all over again.  I got a call from Centrelink telling me I had to come to some appointment to assess my ability to work.  I thought it meant they didn’t believe my doctor when he wrote that I can’t.  What would I do if I lost my pension?  Can’t work, no other income… if I sponged off my parents they’d be financially ruined.  So I spent the weekend angsting over the conclusion that suicide would be the only ethical option, and yet I haven’t the conviction to actually do it.  And how was your weekend? 

Turned out the appointment was actually a chance for me to have my say about how my illness debilitates me.  And what I say is supposed to be considered in addition to what my doctor said.  This is a good thing, no?  The girl was quite pleasant and I relaxed a bit.  Not that the fate of my pension is decided yet, but at least the appointment didn’t appear to be an attempt to discredit my claims or my doctor’s. 

3.)  So naturally I looked up all the minerals and things for anxiety.  The book also lists some non-mineral things.  So now I have leopard-skin jasper (for fear of leopards, no?) petrified wood (for petrified people) and bone.  I thought bone was beautifully poetic.  There was a paragraph in the book about how anxiety usually involves a feeling that one’s survival is threatened… that unbearable things will happen.  So how resonant to wear bones when staring at death.  It does work, too. 

4.)  I’m in pain from all the anxiety, even though I did try awfully hard to keep it under control.  Eventually it got the better of me.  So now comes the analysis, the "what went wrong?" meeting in my head.  Though I did wonder, this time, whether there really is a philosophical or psychological reason for my anxiety, or whether it’s simply an unavoidable, brutally physical, biological fact of life. 

5.)  My credulous side is worrying that I might have somehow invited all this angst into my life.  Last thing I said to myself before bed on Thursday night was, "I’m ready for the next step in my personal growth.  Show me what it is!"  I thought I might get a thought-provoking dream.  Instead I’m woken up the next morning by that call from Centrelink.  Scary, huh?  No, I’m not at my most eloquent today. 

The book suggested you can bring karmic entanglements, growth-promoting challenges, and other dramatically intense experiences into your life.  No guarantees on whether they’ll be nice or nasty.  If this is all something I’m supposed to learn from, I guess the next question would be, and what am I supposed to learn?  Am I getting any educational benefit from all this drama, or is the enlightening wisdom going straight over my head?  Whatever the case, if there’s great enlightenment to be had from the experience of losing one’s only means of survival, I’m really not ready to find it yet.