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"!
