My Path to the Goddess II

Two days of heat and smoky skies later, I am ready to continue!

It was around the time of my extra-ordinary card reading in 2015 that I first started this blog. I don't know that there is a connection, except that perhaps the energy of the Goddess was urging me on. The next few years are a bit of a blur in my mind...several different nesting spots but no real home. Sometime in 2017, I received my own set of Tarot cards, evidently in the way that is considered optimum -- someone gave me a set of cards that they had received as a gift but never opened, plus a book to help interpret them. Slowly at first, then with more enthusiasm, I started to get to know the Rider deck, to appreciate their wonderful symbolic imagery, and to trust my interpretation of what I was seeing. 

In a completely unrelated (?) development that summer, I did get to England again, to sing with old Royal Holloway friends at Canterbury Cathedral -- a week of choral evensongs and just plain fun. We rehearsed about five hours a day offsite, then rehearsed briefly in the cathedral before the hourlong service, so it was hard work, but afterwards, the dinner and/or pub camaraderie with people who love this world was completely and utterly without compare. It is so hard to fully articulate what this lifetime has been like, knowing who your "work colleagues" are -- your kindred spirits in terms of your main passion -- and yet virtually never seeing them in person or singing with them or socializing with them; people who know decani and cantoris  and how to sing Anglican chant and the evensong repertoire, and can easily discuss the composers/conductors/organists in the field. It's still impossible for me to imagine what my life would have been like if I had ever figured out how to get myself permanently into the center of things. I had arrived in Canterbury vowing to use this opportunity to say "goodbye" to England permanently, and of course that wasn't going to happen. The "either/or" instinct was still very much in place. The urge to erase my most vibrant passion continued to plague me but didn't win out.

In the winter of 2017-2018, I was in a U.S. setting and situation where I found it easier than ever to start exploring what a more Goddess-centered life (and vocabulary) might be like. Perhaps because of the political climate of the time, I was becoming almost allergic to the notion of conflict, and tried to honor those feelings and imagine what a more unified, fighting-free world would be like. On my 62nd birthday, I celebrated with a few women friends and tried, in what might have been quite an awkward way, to blend some music of Herbert Howells with dedicating myself to the divine feminine. It was somewhere around this time that a wise woman said to me, don't try so hard to fight your passions for these two things! If you are the only person in the world where they overlap, then that is enough. You are the overlap.

In May of that year, my Dad died. I guess all I will say right now is that this liberated me to try harder to find a way to be me. In the short term, I knew I couldn't remain on the east coast, where so many places were infused with family memories. Thus the return to Duluth and the glorious lake where it all started. Of course, life and the passage of time being what they are, nothing was quite the same. The lake didn't hold the same mystery for me as before, perhaps because Park Point had become far more upscale and beyond my reach, except for temporary housesitting, etc. Being in my 60's and not my 40's, the beaches of the Point and sifting sands were harder to navigate, and so literally to get into the water and feel "Her" healing waves took a lot more effort. And what was originally going to be a reasonably brief Christmas trip to England to hear choral music was extended out when I broke my wrist en route to Gloucester Cathedral on Christmas Eve. At the time, I was so philosophical about this development, but still, it was symbolic of the frustratingly broken, fractured whole that was my life.

When I returned to Duluth in the spring of 2019, I did find a temporary living situation on the Point, and made the decision to write a memoir about my life. My wrist was healing and needed the exercise, and I didn't have a computer, so this was done handwritten on large index cards. While superficially this decision had little to do with the Goddess (I didn't invoke her every time I sat down to write or anything!), I had managed to get beyond my lifelong embarrassment and shame that I had "succeeded at nothing". I was ready to celebrate my unique journey. And living where I could see the rowers going by and hear the lapping waters of the bay certainly helped! Every day, I wrote five or ten cards, and while I tried to transfer some of this material to a thumb drive at the library, my energy for that endeavor quickly faded. When I "won the lottery" (or whatever!) I would buy a computer and create a usable document from what quickly became a 200-page book, covering the period from 1956 to the year 2010.

By late January of 2020, all of us had started to hear about COVID-19, although it still seemed unreal and unlikely to affect us in Northern Minnesota. Even when Lent started in late February, and I decided to "give up" writing my book and blog for those six weeks, I did it to give myself a break, not in reference to the growing pandemic. But by St. Patrick's Day, the library was closed, bus service had become severely restricted, and soon I would move off the Point and up the hill for the duration.

I guess my next post will be "My Path to the Goddess III"!

My Path to the Goddess

As promised last time, let me try to be a little more deliberate in describing parts of my winding path toward a more deliberate focus on the divine feminine in myself and the world.

The first time I remember considering the word "goddess" with any seriousness was back in the late 1990's, when I lived on Duluth's Park Point and literally looked out the window over a sand dune to Lake Superior. This vast lake, so ferocious at times, simply "felt" feminine. It was as if all the mystery of life was contained in "her"; I can't explain why it seemed like a female entity, not a male or neutral one. It was thrilling to feel her presence and energy every day. I grappled for the first time with the term "goddess", but in a thoroughly left-brain, logical way convinced myself that seeing the divine in this way was as unfair to men as a male God construct has arguably been to many women over the generations. I concluded that all of us needed to get beyond these gendered concepts of something so much bigger than ourselves. And I felt no need to "worship" a Goddess figure. In the end, I tried to find other ways of making sense of the spiritually powerful image in front of my eyes every day. I tried to create a "horizon" theory about that place where sky and water (and other dualities) meet. I painted a few powerful paintings of my view. And within a rather short time, life (and my mother's serious illness) took me back east.

Many years passed. About six years ago, a friend and Tarot reader offered to do a major reading for me, one of those ones I can't do yet involving maybe a dozen cards. After I had blindly picked my cards and placed them where she wanted me to put them, we turned them over. "Huh," my friend said. "That's interesting." What was interesting was that there were two Empress cards in the spread. I was clueless. What was so strange about that? She said that there was only one Empress card in the deck! I suggested that perhaps she had mixed two decks together, and one look at her and then at her fancy scarf-covered box convinced me that this was her one special deck of cards and that was not the explanation. So she told me she had heard of this happening before, although she had never seen it. A card may morph into a different card if the Universe is really trying to get a message across to someone. To my friend, Empress represents (of course) female leadership, nurturing, wisdom, nature, power, but also divinity -- the Goddess. She thought that in this situation, the Goddess was trying to speak to me, and she asked me, "What is your relationship to the Goddess?" I told her that was still finding it hard to even use the term, or make any commitment to my own divine feminine. Instead, for several years I had been trying hard to find a way to return to the world of English cathedral music, and being associated with alternative spiritualities wasn't going to help. I knew this card reading was important, but I sloughed it off like an irritating mosquito. I couldn't deal with the paradox of having choral evensong and the Goddess under one "roof", especially as at that moment, as is so often the case, I didn't have a roof of my own anyway. The Goddess, if she was trying to get my attention, would have to wait.

Oh dear. So will the rest of this account. A storm just ended, and the cooler air has moved off with it. It's getting too hot to think and write. I'll return to this narrative next time.

The Best Gift

Yesterday, I received the best gift of all. 

Someone actually asked me to tell them more about what I mean about the Goddess, and about my journey to a Goddess perspective on things.

It's so ironic, really. For years, I've wanted to be asked just such deep questions, to be taken seriously. I've wanted people to want to hear my speaking voice, my singing voice. I've wanted deep communication with people that went beyond the surface and shared the most profound inner truths and experiences. So you might think I would have prepared for just such a moment. You might think I would have prepared that succinct, enthusiastic "elevator speech".

But no.

I was first stunned, then thankful for the unexpected gift of probing questions, but I proceeded to blather. I rambled. I stumbled into inevitable stereotypes. Speaking off-the-cuff, I didn't feel articulate, self-assured, or the least bit knowledgeable. For the granddaughter of a pioneering woman lawyer, I made an absolutely abysmal case for the need for the divine feminine in our world, much less in my own life.

Except...

Like a little girl on her first bicycle ride, amidst all the wobbling and zig-zagging, I stayed upright. I didn't burst into tears, which can happen when I feel insecure. My own ears heard a few little snippets of wisdom in what I said. I knew that somewhere within me, I was on solid ground, and that the gift of being asked was actually an exploration and acknowledgement of my God-/Goddess-given gifts, gifts I have always wanted to share more fully, but was afraid to. Even I have been afraid of their power. I have been afraid of being ridiculed even more than ever.

Now that one person has asked good questions, it's possible that someone else will too, so I need to get back up on the bicycle and practice. And perhaps the best place to do that will be here in my blog. I owe it to my friend to share the gift forward. I owe it to my readers to become ever-clearer about the topics closest to my heart, and ever more courageous. 

 

Cities

I'm sure many of you have also noticed the changes to cities right now. I won't call it "post-pandemic", given that we are clearly still in the midst of it, whatever state or country we are in. But perhaps, "post-2020 and -early 2021" or "post-pandemic onslaught."

Yesterday, I returned to Duluth for the day, since I am really only in the midst of a discernment process for a new living situation and I needed to go "home" to do some important things. How strange it was, almost as unsettling as the museum outing. I don't completely remember pre-COVID Duluth downtown reality, because, hey, when things are ticking along normally you don't really notice all the details, do you? Then for 15 months, I was in retreat/hermitage/self-quarantine mode due to living with friends who are at high-risk. With the exception of twice-monthly early morning visits to the post office and grocery store, I was an auto passenger through the city center only a few times, and never took the bus. Everything seemed closed, but I am sure that wasn't completely the case.

Now, there is a semblance of a return to normal, yet when you scratch the surface, it isn't back to "normal" at all. How could it be? Restaurants that used to open every day from 11 o'clock on may only open at 4 or for part of the week, due to being short-staffed. Many storefronts are shuttered completely. Clearly tourism is out in full force after a dark year, and Canal Park seemed to be booming on a hot July day. Hospitals are expanding. Car traffic seemed fairly heavy. But downtown foot traffic was lighter than ever.

The bigger cities I have seen in the last few months seem equally hollowed out. People must be working from home, and/or a certain economic Darwinism has allowed only the fittest smaller businesses to survive. Are residential and business skyscraper plans still going forward? The notion of hopping into an elevator to the 70th floor (as I used to do when I worked in Manhattan's Citicorp building) seems unimaginable now. Looking with COVID-opened eyes to many public spaces and businesses/former businesses is sobering, even, I assume, for people not weighed down with my sort of assumptions about the future. We need time to assess what has changed, but many planners may not have that luxury. Spot yes-no decisions about what to go forward with must be common.

A certain coffee chain provided me with welcome "normalcy" while I waited for my bus. Even I found it comforting to walk in and say, "Good, this, at least, looks familiar."  Still, once I settled down, I felt the tide of surreality rising. There were two guys straight from 1990's Hollywood central casting ("geeky" and on their computers, not talking). There were several large family groups, with small shorts-and-tee-shirts-clad children loudly demanding fancy (and presumably expensive) fruit drinks. I remember the rare occasions when my grandmother would take me to bustling downtown Schenectady in the early 1960's. I had to be dressed in, yes, a dress, and be extremely well-behaved. If a meal was in the cards, it was at the cafeteria of one of the three downtown department stores (this is pre-mall, of course!) I would probably have a hot dog or a tuna salad sandwich and a milk or ginger ale. The most surreal thing that happened on these excursions was that Grandma's white glove-wearing friend would surreptitiously dump all the sugar and salt/pepper packages into her purse at the end of the meal. I somehow knew intuitively that this was one of many occasions when I was to be seen and not heard. (As in, "Why on earth is your friend doing that, Grandma?")

Life does go on. Sometimes changed, and sometimes not. That's the deepest I can get on this very hot and smoky day.

More Lifetimes

This, it turns out, is something of an update to a blog I posted back on October 24, 2018 ("Lifetimes"). There are mornings when I know I am semi-repeating myself, but either I cannot find the earlier blog or just feel led to write on, regardless. Anyway, you might want to check it out.

I think we all have multiple lifetimes. It has never made sense to me, the idea of having one lifetime and then, bang, that's the end of it (unless you go to heaven or hell). The lovely thing about visualizing life as a single stream of positive energy is that as beings, we are fully part of it eternally, and we can leap onto the earth plane or, for that matter, other planes, and out again, and still be part of "Source". Talk about "getting into the stream"!

I said in the 2018 post that I knew I had to have had many previous lifetimes; I'm fairly sure at this point that most of them took place in England. It's the only thing that explains the intensity of my connection to that culture, history, music, art and landscape. What is new in this time of COVID and this month of a more spiritually-structured life is that I am ready to fully accept and articulate (as mind-blowing as it sounds) that I have had lifetimes in the future as well. In this current lifetime, I've simply been a deer in the headlights. Our culture seemed so outrageously brutal, so "of" an earlier era, that it was simply unnavigable. When my peeps saw me at a standstill, they said, "Come on, Liz, just accept this reality. It's the only one". I simply didn't have the heart or courage to say, "No it's not the only one. I've known others." But the time has come now to say it: I lived (and possibly helped to create) a future Goddess-centered world, and even further down the line, the era when human men and women live and work together in true partnership (Riane Eisler's books are helpful here). That high level of collegiality will only happen once we have been reminded (for maybe a few hundred years!) of the power and value of women's innate strengths, intuition, intelligence and New Paradigm leadership ability. That leap in human consciousness is on our doorstep, and yes, as a result, the next few decades will be extremely challenging.  Then, in a few hundred years, a subsequent leap upward into true male-female creative collaboration will be more challenging still.

All of us knew, at least in outline, what this time period would have in store for us, and we joyfully jumped into the stream anyway. If, like me, you sometimes feel you have a "memory" of a time when life was fairer, less brutal, more loving and collaborative, and more beautiful, perhaps some of your "past" and "future" lifetimes are coming into focus now too! Hang in there. Try not to despair about what is in the news now. If you "remember" these better times, then you are already paving the way for their return. You are re-membering. It is extremely important work. 

Into the Stream

During COVID time, there were two things I missed more than anything. One place (and form of music) I don't need to identify yet again...regular readers must pretty much have "had it up to here" with my off-the-scale anglophilia! The other thing I craved was the opportunity to visit a major art museum, almost any major art museum. I just simply wanted to stand and look in person at something beautiful created by an inspired human being. 

Now that I am at least temporarily in a big city, I had my opportunity yesterday. A good friend picked me up, and we drove into the stream of highway traffic and emerged out the other side at the museum. This was a museum of modern art, roughly 1950 to the present, and I was left with a jumble of impressions. Most of the work felt quite dated, and there was the inevitable realization that pieces from before the eighties or nineties are quite dated. They reflect concerns and experiments that were cutting edge at the time, but seem passe or even silly right now. Is it because my own artistic impulses never ran to the abstract or conceptual, or because everything in life just seems strange in the wake of COVID? I'm not sure. I was pleased at the percentage of women artists represented in the gallery, and two or three pieces stood out and have stayed with me. All in all, though, it felt like a walk through the distant past. I think I resonate more with artwork of the "real" distant past, and will search that out next time. I am exhausted today. Fifteen months in hermitage mode has made jumping into the stream of modern American life hard. A little goes a long way.

In my last blog, I spoke of how strange and unnerving it is to see (on videos) the changes churches and cathedrals in the UK had to institute to choral evensong, in order to follow COVID guidelines. It occurred to me later what I didn't mention; there is a choreography to the traditional service up in the choir stalls, a linear regularity to the processions and sitting/standing/facing forward for the creed. Choral evensong is a church service, not a concert, so I think what is most disconcerting is seeing it sung in modified concert layout. Still, with everything that has happened, it is quite amazing that music programs have been able to start up again in any form. 

I gather that the U.K. has jumped back into the stream with what I assume must be a pretty controversial removal of most pandemic restrictions. Today is literally a new day over there, even though cases of the disease are trending upwards. What this will mean for music and potential travel -- and for all aspects of life there and around the world -- remains to be seen. 

Weekend Miscellany

Hi all. "Hot town, summer in the city..."

It has been a good week. I know that might be harder to say if I had paid attention to world and international news recently, but I haven't. (What a confession to make for a former Time Magazine letters correspondent whose focus was replying to reader letters on world and international events!) The benefits of staying on top of the news are way outweighed by the benefits of holding as high an "energy" as possible. Energetically, if not specifically, I know what kinds of news is inevitable right now. It's going to happen; my role, when it is humanly possible, is not to "stop" the events or trends in the world. It is ever to scout out the more loving path, and to try to hear/see/sense/speak the kinds of things the Goddess would say to us, whenever such messages come to me directly or indirectly. It's the only way I seem to be able to create an all-love and -joy and -beauty model. 

During the fifteen-month COVID retreat (it really was that in many ways), not having a computer or access to the library meant virtually never playing any Choral Evensong music. I could have played some old CD's, or borrowed my friends' laptop, but I found I just simply couldn't do it. The fact that most of the English cathedrals closed completely for so many months, for the first time in history, was just so shocking. It didn't seem appropriate, somehow, to fill the void, and emotionally I was grieving what felt like a death.

So yesterday, I went online and did some searching, and realized that literally, the "landscape" of the service has changed, whether it turns out to be temporarily or permanently. In some cases, choirs are spread out somewhere in the nave, or arrayed on the steps before the choir screen. They are not singing up in the Choir, closely spaced in rows facing the center aisle, as is traditional for that service. More importantly for me, having in recent years almost always been a member of the congregation, this eliminates the option of sitting up in the seats directly behind and around the choir. That option may well return, but I found the re-placement jarring and its own kind of death. At times, I have told friends that my home is in an English cathedral's choir stalls, so this new layer of exile was painful. Still, it was a joy to hear the music again, and sing along to it. I've decided that most late afternoons, I will play some of this music, reinforcing the anchoress model I spoke of the other week. I will open the door of my heart and "attend" a service virtually. It's remarkable that this is possible, and I am thankful. I will try not to see it as a Plan B, but rather the best Plan A I can do right this minute.

Are you noticing the subtle daily changes to the light outside? I don't remember a year when I've been as aware of diminishing sunlight within weeks of the solstice. It must be something about the garden behind the house where I am staying, and the shade cast by the enormous tree in the corner. I'm also seeing fewer birds than I did in Duluth, but that's in large part because of no bird feeders. My own landscape has changed again, quite literally. And for the moment, it's OK. When a wandering mystic can feel even the slightest rootedness, it is a very good thing. 

Clear Panes

A small break in the action due to the need for some technical support. A young person who looked barely 12 or 14 (but was undoubtedly at least 20) helped me, and I am very thankful. There is no question that young people's brains are wired differently than those of us born in the '50s or '60s, and they take naturally to technology. There's a part of me still hoping that some of my odd skills (using a dial phone, reading a clock with hands, and, as a retail clerk, making change the old fashioned way) will continue to serve me and the world...perhaps only as brain exercise, or "what to do in a power outage". Yet we've gotten rid of so many of those lower-tech objects, that even in a power outage we'd be up a creek.

But I digress! As usual!

Way back on January 7 of 2020 (the day after Epiphany), before I had really heard of what would become the pandemic, I made a comment here in my blog that I had a hunch it would be the year when we would see a lot of things more clearly. Yes, this was a riff on "20-20" vision. But in addition to that, the year had been in the back of my mind since the early 2000's, when I happened to write an essay (never published) that took the form of my being interviewed in 2050 by a young person, asking how humanity had gotten through "The Transition" that started in around 2020. Even twenty years ago, I had an intuitive hunch that the 2020 decade would be, well, unusually important and life-changing. It certainly has been so far.

In my new living situation, we spent a few hours the other morning cleaning windows and screens. While it can be a challenging chore, especially if you have to get up and down ladders, there are few things more satisfying than looking out of a really clear, clean window. Literally, it is like looking at life in a new way, with 20-20 vision. And it changed the quality of light (I actually almost wrote "life"!) coming into the house, and lighting its interior. 

I learned one metaphorical and two practical lessons. One: I prefer household chores that involve cleaning with water, just as the only sports I really like involve water (sailing, rowing, kayaking, canoeing, swimming). Two: If you take screens out of the windows to hose down outside (it is hardly worth cleaning the windows if the screens remain dirty!), spray "into" the inside side of the screen so the water pushes out the milkweed and other wildflower fluff that has clogged up the outside of the screen. Spraying the outside of the screen first only pushes the fluff further into the screen. Also, don't leave screen B on the grass right next to where you are spraying screen A, because all the fluff from screen A just lands on screen B. 

And Three: at the end of the day, a squeeze of dish detergent and a capful of vinegar in a small bucket of warm water work just as well to clean glass as fancy cleaning products, especially if you use a really smooth lint-free cloth instead of paper toweling. 

There are many forms of seeing clearly, and I guess we need all of them right now.

A New Week

This new week begins with me very thankful to have taken the leap to try out this intentional living situation. For years, when I would tell people I was something of a nun at heart, they would remind me that there are Episcopal orders. But even decades ago, I knew I could "sing" Christianity, but not live it in the sense of the verbal prayers I would need to say, and beliefs I would need to have. That paradox again. 

My current situation involves only a few overtly spiritual factors (quiet mornings, 8:30 meditation five days a week, and dinner together about five days a week, preceded by a short reading). But the household is evolving under the assumption that members look at life through the lens of the spirit, and approach life in the house and in the world from that standpoint. To finally experience this in a living setting rather than only when I "go on retreat" is deeply satisfying. I'm kind of kicking myself. It's that old either/or thing, the assumption that because I am out there in the "post- traditional world religion" wilderness, there were no religious orders that would have me. Sure, strictly speaking, that is probably true. And this home and I are still in "discernment", so it is not entirely clear where this experience is headed. But the little seed that is me has finally distinctly felt what it is like to land in the kind of soil that encourages my growth. I can feel the seed covering cracking just slightly, and green impulses jostling to get out and root, and thrive.

It's good that a serious life like mine always provides you with comic relief, or at least a dose of non-spiritual weirdness. I had been told that for 65 and older, the city buses are a dollar. So the other morning, I confidently placed a dollar in the slot and asked the driver if I could please have a transfer. He looked at me and said, "Say, what kind of game are you trying to play with me, lady? There's no way you are 65." (Even though about 1/3 of my hair is white, the mirror tells me that my hair still looks brown, and I suppose I have fewer wrinkles than many women my age.) So I said, yes, I am. So he told me he needed to see some ID. Not having expected to access my wallet again, I struggled to get it out of my zippered pocketbook and open. Meanwhile, this poor kid behind me who had told me at the bus stop that he was late for work, deftly put a second dollar bill in the slot so that we could move along, and I thanked him profusely. The driver still grumbled about wanting to see proof, and next time he'd need to see my Medicare card. I sat down feeling quite ridiculous and inept. In the end, though, I felt sorrier for the driver (who probably encounters dozens of people each day who are trying to fake age or disability in order to pay less), and for the people who do make concerted efforts to scam the system, because it must ultimately turn around and hurt them. It was the kind of experience that you don't get when you are "on retreat" in some lovely rural setting, and I blessed being in a place with the reality of hard edges. I have no doubt that this new week will bring both inner and outer growth. Hope yours does too!

Dedication

What's the expression? "In for a dime, in for a dollar"? If I am going to interpret oracle cards once, perhaps having broken the ice, I can do it again. In this case, I think it's an important illustration of a moment in a person's spiritual process.

This morning, I woke up remembering snippets of two dreams. Over the last year or two, this virtually never happened. So I sat up and quickly wrote them down in my journal, and mulled over whether living in a more spiritually-intentional space was helping in this regard, or whether my having broken some new ground in yesterday's  blog had made me more receptive to dream messages. 

Either way, I like feeling gradually more and more tuned in to my own inner promptings, and the visual and natural symbols that are increasingly coming to me, so I said a little prayer dedicating myself to paying ever more attention to them, and communicating what I learn (through writing, art, music, etc.)

A few minutes later, I shuffled my decks of cards (referenced yesterday) and chose:

• The Moon (Rider)
• Nine of Arrows/Dedication (Wildwood)

Now, the Moon card is often interpreted negatively, the "dark night of the soul" kind of thing. Indeed, the booklet accompanying the Rider deck speaks of "hidden enemies, danger, darkness, terror..." And yet to me, nothing in the image on the card begins to suggest those interpretations, and knowing that the moon is so often viewed as representing the feminine, it's almost laughable that an image of the moon would create such a fear-filled response.

My interpretation is that the Moon card represents the landscape of the divine feminine, her milieu, as it were. Yes, the light is reflected, and is not as direct as the sun, but it creates a striking illuminating clarity -- in Smith's illustration, none of the objects cast a shadow, for instance. It is a portal card, in that there is a golden path right through the center, following from the nearby water (yes, representing the deep unconscious) to a mountain far in the distance. On each side is a baying dog or wolf, and a standing stone, and in the center, a lobster (of all things) crawling out of the unconscious, about to make the slow journey to a higher plane. This card is certainly suggestive of dream imagery, and celebrates awareness of all kinds of subtle symbols on the spiritual and physical plane.

Can you imagine? I dedicate myself to noticing and communicating these kinds of phenomena, only to blindly pick a card minutes later called "dedication"! By now, I should no longer be astonished by such serendipities, but they still fill me with awe. The artwork shows a young woman playing her bow and arrow as if it were a violin, dedicating herself, you might say, to her spiritual "music", which truly seems to come from within. 

There are times when these cards feel like they are in dialogue with you, and this morning, what I heard was a big cosmic "yes". 

 

It's All in the Cards

I realized this morning that this would have been my dad's ninety-somethingth birthday. He read my very first blog nearly six years ago, and announced that he didn't understand it, and I don't think he read any more. Dad was purported to have a genius IQ, so I think the issue was more that he was deeply uncomfortable with introspection and spirituality. At the time, it was a journey in itself to continue to write in the face of patriarchal disapproval or discomfort. 

Each new post has pushed me further and further past that barrier, and today's may take the cake. Almost every day, I hear an inner Greek chorus singing, "So-and-so won't like you saying that", and nearly every time I still print "publish" anyway. The chorus has started singing already, and I have barely started!

At least once over the years, I've referred to using Tarot and other oracle cards. I'm sure I hoped that no one would really notice. But this time, I hope you do. For the last few years, part of my morning ritual has been to draw one or two cards, and meditate on what they mean to me, then, often, to write in my physical journal about what I learn. I had been given the Rider-Waite-Smith cards years ago and, like many people, found them initially rather strange or scary, but quickly fell in love with the symbolism and the visual storytelling. Recently, I purchased The Wildwood Tarot (published by Sterling Ethos, New York). The traditional cards have medieval-inspired imagery, and the latter are more Celtic-British woodland-inspired. Recent mornings, after shuffling, I have blindly picked one from each deck.

Today's cards were powerful: 5 of Pentacles (Rider--the image of two poor, sick people walking barefoot through the snow next to a brightly lit cathedral or church), and The Guardian (Wildwood--image of a bear skeleton guarding the entrance to a dark cave, this deck's equivalent of The Devil). I was mulling over what this combination might mean, when I wrote the date in my journal and realized it was my dad's birthday, and immediately it became clear. I'm going to quote partially from my journal entry:

In terms of the devil, "the books talk about addictions, our darkest side, etc. But for someone with [a father with little to no ability to love, help others, or empathize], it's more (or less) than that. A complete black hole.The Void. The constant reminder that you came from nothing, and that you are nothing, and that no matter how hard you try, you will never be 'anything' -- that the 'church' is all lit up and people are going about their business, but you will always be the poor crippled child walking by on the snowy street, seeing no door into the action of life."

Phew. Of course, it may be just an odd coincidence that the Church figured so heavily in my life, and being the wrong gender and on the wrong continent to fully share my musical gifts. But every time I choose 5 of Pentacles, I resonate so very strongly with the poor, shoeless travelers. And the church here isn't just the Church, it is all of the institutions in our current paradigm, all the potential jobs out there in the world. Very early, I managed to slip in the door of corporate America, and served it well. But the minute I left, became clearer about who I really was and what my values were, and started to knock on the doors and windows again, they stopped opening and, indeed, disappeared entirely. There has been a wall between me and thriving, me and the brightly lit inner circle of people doing well.

And the image of The Guardian, the bear skeleton at the door of the dark cave/black hole, looks so comically like my dad in his easy chair that I have to laugh. If I had seen this picture thirty years ago or more, perhaps it would have taken me far less time to understand what was sapping my strength.

I believe we choose our parents, and other factors in the place and time of our birth, so on this July 7, I celebrate that my father (ahem!) "facilitated" such a thorough and difficult life journey. For reasons that are still hard to fathom, I must have had to be the  outsider, the "nothing", in this mostly male construct. People may wonder, why all this Goddess stuff? Simply, She represents a construct that is life-giving, and where I am warmly embraced at Her core, no matter what. I am "something" to Her.

As a postscript, it is interesting to realize that in a divine feminine model, quite a few of these cards would literally not be necessary! No one would be out in the snow. And fearful figures wouldn't resonate with most of us anymore.

Fireworks

I knew I had changed realities when, on the Fourth of July, I discovered myself in a neighborhood of fireworks enthusiasts. I mean, I'm not talking about the odd crash and boom a few blocks away. I'm talking, every home in the neighborhood (except mine) setting off loud fireworks and explosions nonstop from about 8:30 to 12:30 on the Fourth itself, and also for a few hours on the 2nd, 3rd and 5th. I had vowed to stay outside and enjoy the colors and excitement, but I'm afraid I lasted a mere few minutes. It felt to me like being in a war zone. And while going inside and cowering under the blankets didn't make me feel "safe", not when the weather has been so dry, at least I felt safer.

One of those paradoxes of life, isn't it?, to have come to a living situation that is about a certain monastic intentionality and contemplation, only to be literally engulfed in, not "sound", but violent noise! My life always being paradoxical, it didn't surprise me.

But I did find myself thinking about how odd it is that we celebrate this holiday by  symbolically recreating war. Yes, the "rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air" may symbolize that "our flag [is] still there" -- but as with everything, it all seems so old paradigm, so much a part of a conflict way of life. What would celebrations in a new paradigm consist of? Perhaps meals, singing, music, dancing, and lanterns to light the dark. But no traumatizing explosions. Please, no traumatizing explosions.

The morning of the 5th, thanks to insights from Sharon Blackie's book The Enchanted Life, I went out to the garden and acknowledged to the plants and trees that it had been a hard night, and I hoped they were OK. I guess I needed the nature around me to know that I was with them.