Unasked Questions & Unexpected Answers: When is the time to bite off a paw?

Sometimes it seems to me that I am going through some kind of a quest and I do not always understand which one: for there are no instructions, rules, or tips, only some kind of beckoning sound from afar. Something inside constantly pushes me to follow this sound’s trail. The impulse is so strong that it cannot be suppressed. I held it back as long as I could, clinging to the stability of the cyclicality. But, in the end, the bomb exploded, and I completely zeroed out: I left my family, changed my place of living (trying to become a citizen of the world not in thoughts, but on paper), abandoned all old projects and created completely new ones on a completely different scale, switched to vegetables and raw fish, renewed values and standards, ended dozens of soulless relationships with soulless people, and this is just the beginning of the list.

Sometimes getting out of the loop means chewing off a trapped paw. The old has grown deep, and the initially soft, nourishing roots have turned into a dead iron vice which means it's time to remove them. A dead object in the psyche pushes it towards self-destruction. We, one the other hand, are trying to live some more.

At first, you are very afraid, and getting ready for such an operation takes you a long time. But after a while, you understand that the soul of an iguana lives inside each wolf, and the paw will grow again.

For many months I lived as a hermit, biting off old paws and growing new ones. Sometimes it was endlessly painful. Sometimes after this painful process, instead of a new paw, an old one grew back. This is insanely annoying. Whether this happened out of habit, or in order to test and strengthen the intention to chew it off - is unknown. Or maybe this was just the paw that was needed most of all at the time, and you should not have underestimated it. It’s difficult to understand. More tests are needed.

New paws must first be imagined, then created, then tested in practice, and only then one can understand whether they are suitable or not. It’s a painful but entertaining process. Only tests, tests. Everything is known only of the past, of the repeatable. The new requires alchemy.