Well, as a friend of mine quipped, that was the longest Lent in history. I "gave up blogging for Lent" in 2020. By March 17, Duluth's library had closed, ostensibly for two weeks, but even as I wished the staff a cheery farewell, I think we all knew it would be a longer hiatus. Never could most of us (except for perhaps scientists and epidemiologists) have envisioned what was to come.
With the library closed, I have been almost entirely off-line these fifteen months. I actually appreciated the excuse not to engage with the energy of the world. Watching the nightly news on TV was almost more than I could take. I am eternally thankful for the situation I have been living in, where I could be relatively safe and nearly entirely contemplative. I took one foray out a week, to the grocery store, pharmacy, or, once they reopened in limited ways, a local independent bookstore and a yarn shop.
Because I was spending relatively little money, even for me (!), I actually could have afforded a new computer by late last year. One of my very own. Friends said, "Gosh, Liz, what a terrible time to be without a computer!" My senior, retired acquaintances were on their phones and computers much of the day, checking social media, making video calls to family, grandkids and friends, or taking classes. And I nearly faint when I think about the millions of people worldwide whose jobs suddenly went virtual, the students working from home, and the increased use of computers everywhere. Maybe it was for that reason that -- as a mystic -- I just didn't feel led to join the fray. The only way I could stay calm, hopefully healthy, and learn this era's clearly important lessons was, for a stretch of time, to avoid electronic media. When I wrote, it was handwritten, Liz-from-the-70's snail mail letters, journals and channeling.
Yes, you read that right. Channeling. For a year I have been keeping an "alternative" journal on the side that came to me -- and still does -- from some deep source.
For decades, you could say that I had already been doing some channeling in my personal handwritten journals. It started, interestingly enough, when I first moved to Duluth in 1990. I had at that point given up on women ever entering the field of English cathedral music. I was determined to forget about England and its music, and find somewhere American to settle. When I first arrived, you could say that my resume was as out of place as I was. Needing employment, I quickly got Christmas season retail jobs and in quick succession frostbit my feet. Trying to make sense of this unusual series of events, I opened up to a new voice in my journal, a loving, calm, motherly voice. "She" dialogued with me, and "spoke" reassuringly with me when I was most down or confused.
Good Smith College graduate that I am (with second helpings from the University of London and Parsons School of Design), I have always been quite uncomfortable with the notion of channeling, even though some of the spiritual messages I've read over the years seem sound. Other people spoke with odd voices or claimed that they were Biblical or historical figures. Whatever it was that I was doing in my journal was something else entirely, just for my eyes. It was cheaper than therapy (important when you are suddenly making minimum wage!) and no one else need ever see it. It was "creative journaling." My surprise move to the upper Midwest had already started to make me an embarrassment to my social, intellectual, musical and spiritual roots, and in the thirty years since then I have tried hard to hide this apparent connection to higher spiritual planes, so as not to make matters even worse.
But it seems that my recent return to Duluth and the shock of COVID have conspired to push this channeling to another level. The kindly, embracing, motherly voice, reassuring to me personally, seems to have expanded to addressing the larger population, and She makes observations that are honest, surprising, visionary (although not precise or predictive), basically along the lines of, "This is what is going on in these times and why." Whether she is simply my higher self, or The Goddess/Mother Nature/The Feminine Face of the Divine, I may never quite know. But in recent months, I have come to understand that the only thing I truly believe in now is a loving female creator. If nothing else, the "voice" that writes through me is my interpretation of what she would say to us if she could.
In the fall, a good friend asked me if I had asked -- in my journaling or channeling -- "who" was speaking to me. No answer came. I walked over to the door and looked out, and there was a single, heart-shaped golden-yellow leaf hanging for dear life onto the tree closest to the door. In that, perhaps, I had my answer. I am expressing my heart's connection with the heart of the universe. (I actually think all creative and spiritual people do the same whenever they create or communicate.)
I finally broke down and bought a computer. The library still hasn't re-opened to pre-pandemic normalcy, and I realize I can wait no longer to share at least some of this material with you. I haven't yet figured out exactly how to proceed with this, especially as recently the alternative journal posts seem to be less in the form of a "dialogue" and more my own prose. Perhaps that makes sense. I am beginning to see that my whole life has been tuned to Her music, and perhaps my voice was always aligned with Hers. My lifelong yearning to sing choral evensong, starting well before I was ten, was at least in part about the impulse, as a female, to access the divine and fully express my gifts. I suspect all my life choices have made far more sense in the context of a Goddess paradigm than a God one.
So the major change of this COVID time is formally embracing that the remainder of my life is dedicated to the Divine Feminine in creation and the world, coming out, if you will, as working for Her. Like many people who feel a spiritual calling, I would dearly prefer to hide under a pillow, or disappear into oblivion. I have come so close to the latter many times so it wouldn't be hard! But I have been putting this off for too long. Every other aspect of my life seems to be at a dead end yet again, and the only door creaking open is this one. Goddess help me, literally!
