When you’re an air type like me (Moon conjunct Mercury in Libra, 2 Clubs and King Clubs in Destiny Cards, 29/11 in numerology, etc.), inspiration comes out of the woodwork. The downside is a tendency to over-think everything. My spiritual work continues to be about balance; my lofty idealistic nature must bow to the humbler aspects of life such as eating three meals a day, putting a paycheck in the bank, remembering to hug those I love. Or as my favorite business coach was fond of saying, “Carrie, you’ve got to land the plane!”

Nowhere does this pas de deux express itself better than in the dance of love. Ah, love. Certainly I’m not the first air-head to fall in love. Search on the words “love poetry” to get scores of verses from every century in which humans have had the written word. And before that I’ll bet they were singing about it. So what does an air-type do when she has fallen head over heals and those heals desperately need to touch ground? (You know, so she can make breakfast, hug her kid before he goes to school and sit her butt at the desk!)

First, I have cats. My cats, especially my girl, Havana, keep me on task. They wake me at 6:30 for their breakfast. It doesn’t matter if I have spent the entire night writing love poetry or searching my beloved’s and my astrological charts for auspicious aspects to analyze. Breakfast must happen, otherwise Havana begins shredding the couch to bits. This knowledge tends to get me to bed by 10:30 p.m. Lovers need their beauty rest.

My kitties also help me to keep the house clean. Loki likes to “dip” his kibble in the water bowl. He drops one in, fishes it out, tosses it onto the floor and then eats it. Meals might entertain him, but Havana finds the whole thing disgusting. When the eating place gets too messy she stages loud hunger strikes. If that doesn’t work she goes to the couch or shreds loose papers lying around. She especially enjoys homework, un-cashed checks and receipts for merchandise that must be returned. I change the water and sweep up the kibble bits at least three times a day. This keeps the cats happy and the household in order and the focus prevents me from rocketing into the stratosphere thinking about my sweetheart.

My second strategy, parenting, grounds my ego, more than my body lately. I must say I do complete mundane household tasks such as grocery shopping, simple food preparation and laundry regularly when my teen son is home. Okay, well maybe I don’t do food preparation. But every day at 5:00 p.m. Asher asks, “Mom, where are we going for dinner tonight?” That at least gets me on my feet and into the car. I spend most of my parenting time driving him around while learning about major league baseball statistics and the rest of the time scrubbing out grass stains. I highly recommend the scrubbing.

My third grounding strategy is to engage you, dear reader.  Blogging does it for me. Blogging allows me to spin my ideas out into the world wide web. It doesn’t get any more ethereal than that. I can write to my heart’s content, try out new ideas, keep you all abreast of the connections that threaten to clog my brain. Blogging forces me to use my rational organ until it is thoroughly exhausted. Considering that I only publish about one out of every five posts that I compose, you can see just how over-active it is.

I have a whole filing cabinet full of other grounding ideas — there’s yoga and exercise, swimming, walking, playing frisbee with Asher. There are reflexology balls on the floor beneath my desk. I have a small patio container garden and a basket full of unfinished knitting projects (Yeah, right!). And dancing is an option that I have chosen in the past. For now, I think I’ll put all those things on the back burner and look forward to being with my sweetheart. To quote Leonard Cohen, “There ain’t no cure, there ain’t no cure, there ain’t no cure for love.”