What to Say?

I'm not sure I know what to say on this particular New Year's Eve. I think I know what not to say. "Happy New Year." Even when you believe you understand what's going on and why, it is still hard to access a "happy place" in the midst of pandemic illness and death, entire towns and cities razed by fire, tornados and flooding, and the dashing of people's hopes of an imminent return to "normal". Things are moving so fast, that I almost don't dare say "Happy New Year", in case friends' lives are in turmoil.

Right now, I feel "somber". I still seem to be able to access what I believe to be the truth and the longterm positivity of our current moment, but it is balanced out by feeling the pain of people racing out their doors to the car, fleeing for their lives before a wall of flames. Will any American want to watch movie thrillers ever again? They've become our life.

It just occurred to me that, in a sense, my choices over the last thirty years "inoculated" me to face this time, or at least prepared me. I learned to live without a real, permanent home, without adequate income or medical care, without partner or family, without any measure of worldly success or recognition, and without old paradigm spiritual comforts and constructs. I've lived largely without a modern safety net. 

So, what to say to people in this moment? 

Look every day for something you love. In the midst of chaos, uncertainty, doors slamming shut, and fear, be good to yourself and find one beautiful or lovable thing to care about or embrace. Notice the good. Notice the one thing that goes well. The one deer that runs down the street or the one star you can see through the clouds. Love and beauty may seem fragile or even pointless right now, but they are the only path through uncertainty and terror. What to say instead of "Happy New Year"? Perhaps, "May the New Year bring more love and truth to your life". Such a new year may not always be "happy", but it almost certainly will bring unexpected blessings. 

It's Liminal

If there was ever a time that could be called "liminal", this is it. I suppose in a way, I've been in it my whole life, in a space or time between worlds, on a threshold, in transition to a new reality. When you are mystically inclined, you hold the spiritual and physical realms in an uneasy balance all the time anyway, slipping easily from one side of the "line" to the other. And, of course, in a post-duality world, there is no line...

Anyway, over Christmas weekend, I think I moved farther from old realities than ever. I was alone, and with the COVID surge, not feeling really inclined to see people in person, tests or no tests...winter, the pandemic, the solstice -- all were calling me inward, and that is mostly where I stayed. Yet it was unnerving. "Lessons and Carols from King's" didn't elicit the usual responses from me (joy, appreciation of the beauty, homesickness). Even the dreaded first lesson (about women being to blame for everything) didn't send me into a fury. In the context of this pandemic and its ripple effects, the carol service lost its former meaning and attraction. And even music on the classical station seemed jarring. Except for food, I hadn't spent much money over the holiday, so TV ads were even more unpalatable than ever.

I'm not sure what I feel like reading or doing any more. Jobs, paid or volunteer, are all part of the dying paradigm, and I simply do not want to put my focus there. Sometimes I fall back on watching good and bad "crime" television, not because crime attracts me per se, of course, but because in the past it has engaged my problem-solving muscles. Yet over the last week, all these entertainments and activities fell flat as well. I sent Christmas cards to people who I may never see again if travel doesn't open up. I still have some belongings out East, and need to arrange to ship the boxes here, only everything in them is "history" -- family portraits, childhood scrapbooks and boxes of pictures, notes for my master's thesis, my mom's sewing box, little bits of family silver (picture frames, dining sets, etc.) All the WASP accoutrements for this low income senior citizen in Minnesota. Even if I get them sent out here, what do I do with them? I don't have a permanent home, and even if I did, somehow, I have moved on. The items don't reflect who I am now.

If the lives we have created are morphing into something new, what did it all mean? Where are we headed? This is hard stuff.

What keeps me going is the fact that I was already predicting a "Transition" decades ago, and now that it's finally here, it's not surprising me in the least. I am oddly relieved. Deep in my heart, I rejoice that many unsavory truths about how we have been operating in the world are finally being revealed. The conflict-based paradigm is more visible than ever but it is paradoxically less effective. We don't need to "fight" it, just notice when it no longer serves and shrug it off. The liminal space is awkward, uncomfortable, and unsettling because future ways of being are still far off on the horizon. We've taken off the old coat, and the new one hasn't been sewn together yet. It is tempting to keep holding on to the old just to have something, but this stream is going to keep moving. That's one thing we can be sure of.

A Moment in Time

At this moment in time, lyrics of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" keep coming to me -- "the world in solemn stillness lay". Solemn stillness. Florence Scovel Shinn said, "One's ships come in over a calm sea." Calm seas. Stillness and calm.

Tuesday, I listened to an online solstice event, and what was most moving was not so much the event itself (wonderful as it was) but rather the fact that we participants could send greetings and identify where on earth we were. We couldn't see these hundreds of people or hear their voices. Our greetings just scrolled by at the bottom, faster than you could read. It was clear that there were listeners from literally all four corners of the globe (where did that expression come from?! How can an orb have corners?) We didn't have to break the holy silence or physically cross the ocean. We were still, together (and still together). For all that computer technology is a mixed blessing, it certainly is helping us practice new fourth and fifth dimensional muscles. There are new ways of being present with people, new ways of feeling at one with others, that simply didn't exist a decade or two ago.

It will be a still, calm weekend in my little perch near Lake Superior. Unlike 30 years ago, I don't own a car, and won't listen to the service of "Lessons and Carols from King's" on the car radio at a pull-off near Two Harbors. The lake, whether calm or wavy and steaming, will be visible from the window where I live, so I can listen and remain still. Certain threads keep weaving their way back into this scarf that is my life, and nothing weaves the polarities together more efficiently than listening to English cathedral music in Duluth. The paradoxes that used to be almost unbearable are finally becoming more comfortable. May you, too, find your polarities easier to bear -- fear and love, illness and passion for life, uncertainty and inner peace. May this extraordinary moment in time be as blessing-filled as possible.

The Holy Week

In the Christian tradition, Holy Week precedes Easter in the spring. But for me this last decade or so, the holiest week of the year is the week surrounding winter solstice and Christmas.  Several of these years involved a whirl of cathedral services (when I sang at St. John the Divine in New York) or travel to England to audition for choirs or hear cathedral choral music. But most late Decembers have found me sinking easily into the stillness, the mystery, and the darkness.

I watch the frenzied activity (and have done for years) like a being from another planet. It is painful not to be in close contact with family, but because it is more painful for me to be in close contact with them, travel cross-country remains undone, presents un-bought. (The fact that my income is so limited is part of the story, but really, at this point, I would retreat into the silence even if I won the lottery.) Making homemade cookies or pies seems appropriate to the energy of the week, as does giving these goodies away when it can be done COVID-safely. I send out cards, read, listen to music, and overall try to stay in a mode that comes naturally, contemplation.

None of this is news to my handful of patient readers. I've said similar things frequently and recently. So why revisit these themes today? I guess it is that this morning I feel an almost overwhelming wave of compassion for those who are battling COVID, battling to help people with COVID, battling not to get COVID, battling lines to get tested and get on airplanes and buy last-minute presents, battling traffic jams and check-out queues. From the depths of stillness, the pain of all this frenzy and fighting is palpable. If I could morph into an angel with the capacity to be in several billion places at once, I would gently whisper in the ears of the people of the world, "It doesn't have to be like this. No matter what your spirituality or religion, this can be a holy, serene, and loving week, even this year. If a week is out of the question, try to find one moment of peace." 

Just to show that divine contemplation doesn't preclude bad jokes, this one came to me this morning. I am making chicken soup for dinner tonight (truly). Chicken soup, good for the sol-stice. (Ugh!)

Breaking Through

These last two or three days have been challenging in a way that I guess none of us expected when vaccines were rolled out. I feel like I'm on the observation deck of a tourist train, watching the lefthand track curve off to the left and the righthand track curve to the right, and the train itself about to derail completely. There's such a disconnect between the pandemic news/warnings and the millions of people shopping in stores, going to football games, and traveling in airplanes, trains, buses and cars. What is real? What is "safe"? 

There are so many questions out there, a cacophony of queries. And yet, in my mind, there is only one: what has humanity's relationship been with Nature/Gaia/Mother Earth/the Goddess? Human ingenuity is extraordinary, but our efforts are unsustainable if we keep Her out of the equation.

More and more, I see life as a single powerful river of love. Think of the biggest, most roiling river you know of, and imagine that water being the loving, enthusiastic, all-powerful life force. When we don't actively work with nature, perhaps it is the equivalent of building a dam, a blockage of what is naturally trying to happen. Eventually, water breaks through dams. It isn't angry, it isn't getting back on the people who built the dam, it is just stronger than anything we humans have the capacity to build. Right now, nature is breaking through our carefully-constructed world. Somehow, the culture at large didn't expect it. 

One of the hardest things to remember, even for me, is that there is no such thing as death. Humans often make dramatic departures from our physical planet to other realms, but that isn't "death". It's the continuation of life in another form. In coming years as earth rocks and rolls and tries to regain a sustainable energy flow, the key will be moving with the river of love as much as we can, and not fearing death so much. Nature is breaking through our world in large part so that we can experience positive, upward-trending breakthroughs too.

In on the Action

Back in 1990, when I first set foot in Duluth and decided to spend the winter here, I called my parents to tell them, and there was a stunned silence. "Can you get the New York Times there?", my mother asked with a tremor in her voice. And of course, back then, the answer was, "no." It was the very fact that the city was so far from all that seemed "civilized" -- New York City, the U.K., the northeast, the world of private schools and high-powered careers -- that attracted me. I didn't become a wild nature woman, a fact that drives a few people crazy. "How can you be aligned with the Goddess and not love gardening or trekking in the woods?" But there are different ways of losing your worldly veneer; being perched on the edge of earth's largest lake started a radical shift in perspective that continues to this day. Last week, I did a visualization where I saw my heart strings tied around Lake Superior, like a bow. These days, the word "civilized" is highly problematic in so many ways, and rightly so; whatever it did or does still mean, I'm proud to have become less so. 

There's a paradox in play right now, however. Where northern Minnesota used to feel like the back of beyond, in this strange new era, we're almost on the cutting edge. Definitely "in on the action". Last night, there was a completely strange storm, with thunder and lightning, rain and sleet, and wailing winds. A front has come through and now it's snowing hard. But the southern part of the state seems to have had a tornado, the first ever in December. I saw a map of the country the other day with various shades of red indicating warming temperatures across the U.S. The one swath of extremely dark red/burgundy spanned, you betcha, northwestern Wisconsin and across Duluth, into the Iron Range. Summers are much hotter here (gone are the days of wearing your winter coat in July!) and winters are brutal, but not anywhere near as much so as in the 1990's.

And Minnesota was the second state to discover the Omicron variant. We aren't in some far-off eden, we "are" New York and London and LA. We are in on the action. It's not a kind of action any of us wanted, but I actually embrace how this new era is leveling the proverbial playing field. The impulse to cut and run, to find a safe haven, will be sorely challenged as we move forward. Same with the impulse to fight and destroy. The only option, wherever we are on earth, will be to face those gale force winds lovingly, fearlessly, openly, and with curiosity. History is being made. All of us  chose an amazing time to live...we are all in on the action. 

Tornados

I had planned to write on Saturday, but when I woke up to the news of the extraordinarily devastating tornados that flattened entire towns in the American midwest, I knew I had to hold off.  Over the weekend, bird's eye/satellite/drone views of the destruction have been truly astonishing, overwhelming. This is not a case of people in one small neighborhood losing homes and having to temporarily camp out with friends a few miles away. This is entire towns and parts of states being completely wiped off the map. Six weeks ago (Natural Disasters, October 27), I wrote about the word "disaster" in this context, and I wouldn't change a word. However, for the people who have lost absolutely everything -- homes, important papers, family memorabilia, furnishings, appliances, jobs, cars, and in some cases, lives -- this word is the only one that begins to apply. It may take years for people and communities to recover their equilibrium, if they ever do. And judging from the warm December temperatures across the country, there may be many more unseasonal tornados touching down before the end of the year. There is a paradox inherent in calls to rebuild, clean up the mess and return to normal. It is ever-more-universally agreed that this very "normal" is actively causing more potent storms. When towns and cities are clean, and running relatively smoothly, it's hard to see the human-created dangers under the surface. Things look nice, prosperous, permanent. A tornado, hurricane, or fire pulls away the veil. Mile after mile of plastic waste, chemicals, oil, twisted metal, broken pavement and electrical wire...they are all exposed, out of context. No longer useful, much of this waste is dangerous and toxic, to us and to earth. 

Taking these kinds of weather events into perspective as well as the newly-worsening COVID situation, I think we are being asked to pause in 2022. Take a deep breath, and try, if possible, to rise above our limited human perspective and see if we can hear what Earth/Gaia/Divine Love is trying to tell us. I don't think it matters how you see the creative force underpinning life -- male, female, or "just" love. That force is awesomely powerful. Numerologically, 2022 is a 6. I'm not a student of numbers (as anyone who knows me will tell you!) but six relates to healing, wholeness, peace, and other good things. Can we stop and listen to the guidance inherent in these events? Just long enough to consider what is working and what is not working as we interact with this precious earth home. Can these events teach us how to really heal, and bring peace, harmony, and stability?

A last comment, an almost complete non sequitur. Time Magazine's Person of the Year was just announced. Back when I worked in the magazine's Letters Department (most of the 1980's), I was often tasked with responding to complaints about what was then called the "Man of the Year" issue. And almost every year, we received complaints about that title. Personally, I completely agreed so I had to suppress my own opinion and tweak a form letter that the department had used for many years. The magazine did not change over to "Person of the Year" until 1999, nine years after I left the company. It is hard for me to feel enthusiasm about this year's choice because it seems to reflect the traditional 19th and 20th century male perspective on what constitutes newsworthiness, and worth in general. I guess it's reasonably easy to change the superficialities, much harder to shift entrenched belief systems. Until, perhaps, the tornados come.

 

Goodness Me

You can tell I am a million years old, because my "expressions of mild surprise" are the ones my crossword puzzle clues call "archaic" or "old-fashioned" -- "goodness me", "my heavens", "egad", etc. In a nutshell, I sound like my grandmother. 

Well, such is life. I wish grandma was here right now, although I don't think there is any way on earth she would have made sense of a COVID/artificial intelligence/online world. She died almost forty years ago. It was another era altogether. She painted oil paintings, hooked rugs and did needlepoint. 

It is frigid in northern Minnesota, for the moment anyway. Honest to goodness, -25 degrees F windchills kind of thing. I'll get out later today when it's slightly warmer to deliver some homemade cookies to a community organization. That, for the moment, is my "grandma" activity, grounding and sweet.

What can I say? Everything I see on the news, in advertising, in the world, seems literally insane. Unbearably so. I'm starting to understand why contemplatives and anchorites and hermits are what they are, why I am what I am. It's not to avoid evil, or "the things of this world". It's more to be able to align with oneness, to be in the one place where you can live with what you know to be the truth. The duality-/conflict-driven world makes no sense whatsoever. The pain of watching suffering is excruciating, but for Aquarian me, what is even worse is not being able to make spiritual sense of it. My brain tries so hard to understand, and when things don't make sense, it is hard to connect to the world. There's such a chasm between duality thinking and harmony/unity thinking.

So...heavens to Betsy. What a time we are in. I'm not making light of it...indeed, I think it is a major turning point. But all I seem to be able to do about it today is channel my inner grandmother. My tools are things I can feel, like baking ingredients and wooden spoons and wool and old-fashioned paper Christmas cards -- once I get off the computer!

The Movie

Well, the pandemic isn't in the least funny, but I guess you have to find the odd humorous aspect. Last night, I watched TV around news time (I confess to having reverted to this habit just to hear the headlines and know the basics of what is going on) and on the screen in big letters were the words "The Omicron Variant". All I could think of was, it sounds like the title of a Hollywood thriller or a dystopian novel, and yet it is not fiction. It is our reality.

Every time I hear words like, "We are fighting this virus and will win," I cringe. I know I'm probably one of only a handful of people in the world who see a direct correlation between this escalating fight and the pandemic seeming to get worse, so I say these words with a sense of resignation, not in an attempt to persuade. I know all involved are doing their very best with what they were taught. And "fighting", ingrained in our psyches and belief systems, is happening all across the spectrum of responses to these interlocking events. It's almost like we are reading from a movie script, one side fighting for more masks and more protections, the other side fighting for freedom from masks and regulations. The energy of the whole event is agitated, angry, fearful, distrustful, and combative. It's not the kind of movie I have ever chosen to watch, that's for sure.

So in the middle of it all is little old me, wearing a mask, getting my shots, doing only the errands I absolutely must do, and saying, please, oh please, can we release the need to fight? Can't we just train ourselves to heal and love?