From Oversensitivity to Ultrasensitivity

I've been thinking about the gifts and challenges of being "too sensitive". Most of the men, and some of the women, I have crossed paths with over the years have found my sensitivity exasperating. To the extent to which it often manifested in being sensitive to personal slights, or responding poorly to comments that people said were jokes (but didn't sound like jokes to me) -- or whatever -- I agree that sensitivity had its downside, for me and for relating to the people around me. On the plus side, it made it possible for me to sing on key, to sightread challenging choral music, to harmonize with music I had never heard before, to paint realistic paintings of fruit and do color mixing in oils. It has made it possible for me to express myself in words in ways that many people cannot. So at 66, on balance, I would never want to be less sensitive, or medicated "against" this aspect of my makeup.

Still, it is becoming clear to me that in this 2022 rebirth time, my sensitivity to assaults on the divine feminine has increased significantly. Yesterday was a good illustration of this.

Sometimes I take the city bus "up to the mall" area. (It is literally an uphill battle here!) When you don't own a car, every week or two you have to take the bus out to one of the more outlying areas just to get a change of scenery. You need to escape the limiting confines of downtown. However, I don't like malls and retail strips; ultimately, I just don't find them beautiful. 

I went into one of the enormous supermarkets, just for a few things, and almost swooned. (By definition, that Victorian-sounding condition can be brought on by positive or negative situations, but for me it almost always occurs when I am negatively overwhelmed.) It hit as I walked through the bakery aisle. There must have been many hundreds of loaves of bread (commercial, not store-baked) on the shelf. It was just too much to think about. I mean, is all this bread being sold and eaten? Is the remainder getting to the local food shelf? Does it seriously only cost around $4.00 to make, package, and ship each of these loaves? Where do all the plastic container bags end up? From the moment these thoughts hit me, I was completely freaked out. Each aisle was stuffed to the gills with thousands of bottles of soda, hundreds upon hundreds of cake mixes and cans of tuna and bottles of condiments. The amount of plastic waste generated by this one store, alone, is almost unthinkable, even if some waste is eventually recycled. Add to that the amount of food that must have to be discarded, other packaging, and artificial sweeteners, scents, and flavorings...I could barely breathe once I left the store. Nothing in the place seemed to reflect Nature, the Goddess. Her truly natural ingredients have been twisted into so many knots, I doubt She can recognize them.

Next door, an old big box store has closed and a new one has taken its place. The redecoration is quite swank, and I have no doubt that the home furnishings within are of good quality. But I will never go in there, simply because when you have no home, you don't have a place to furnish. Even if I turned on a dime tomorrow and started to believe in our paradigm, and got full-time work in some modestly lucrative milieu, the fact is that at this late date, I still could never afford a house in this lifetime. It is painful simply to look at some of these places, much less to go in them, they are so far out of reach.

Lastly, a small stretch of the strip, which I swear has been for sale since back in the 1990's when I first lived here, seems finally to have been sold. Half a dozen bulldozers, graders, and other huge pieces of equipment were completely changing the 2 or 3 acres of landscape. I literally let out a little cry; I could feel the pain of the earth being dug into and altered without Nature's permission. It felt like an attack on my own body. 

It's like, the numbness of over six decades of living in this consumerist culture has finally worn off. I feel the pain, the inequity, the inherent conflict of it all, and as hard as it is, I don't want to return to numbness. For me, it's not about fighting these trends or self-medicating. It's about walking through and understanding my ultrasensitivity in this area, writing honestly, and aligning ever more with the divine feminine. I will never again call it "oversensitivity", because that's a negative judgment. "Ultrasensitivity" simply means, I have sensitivity in abundance for some good reason. It is one of my divine gifts, not a curse. 

"It's Mine"

As I listened to the news on the radio this morning, I couldn't help but think about how many of the items were related to man's tendency to claim things as "mine". Individual men, men in leadership positions, governments, corporations, countries. Our entire economic system is based on personal ownership, which can lead to almost constant conflict. I'm reaching the point where I can dimly hear, under the surface of a news report, a childish spat in the schoolyard: "It's mine." "No, it's not, it's mine." "No, it's mine"...

And it's not completely and exclusively men. We women try to claim ownership of everything from material possessions to our own bodies, only to this day, it's not a given that we will be successful. We only have a short history in a limited number of countries of having rights to any kind of ownership or independent action or thought, much less successful careers, respect, and opportunities for leadership. My personal inability to function in an ownership construct is pretty spectacular, but I suppose you could say my priority was always to "own" myself. If it took 66 years and resulted in owning precious little else, I'm strangely OK with that.

The schoolyard spats seem even more surreal when placed in the context of classic photographs of earth from outer space, where all our artificial lines and boundaries are nonexistent. These lines are completely imaginary, when you come right down to it. And in the end, even Mother Earth's "ownership" of this planet (and all through the galaxy and beyond) isn't what we humans consider ownership. It is simply never-ending love energy filling up every spot it can. It is ownership not ultimately "about" owning or possession but about loving with no boundaries. It is not about pulling things in and holding onto them, as much as beautiful energy moving out from inside us, to the world. Theoretically, at some point in the future, no one will own anything -- so everyone will own everything. It sounds chaotic, but when genuine love is the catalyst, it won't be.

Supported

Today's post piggybacks on Wednesday's, in a way I couldn't have envisioned that day, or Monday, when I made a passing reference to the possibility that I have no "tribe".

Over the last few weeks, to the extent to which I "pray" to the Goddess, it has been one prayer: Please, let me find my tribe. Those people who are on a spiritual, intellectual, creative and visionary wavelength with me. People who I can plug into, and the electricity flows. People who understand my unique mix of interests, and welcome me. Wherever they are. Please, please. In these last few weeks as rebirth was clearly happening, and a little more authentic energy was flowing, it has been clear that writing this blog and getting out for errands (or even potentially a volunteer or paid job) will never be enough. And it's also become clear that most of my dearest friends aren't necessarily part of my tribe. That doesn't lessen the love I feel for them, but it does mean that we may not speak the same specific language, and I need to speak the same language as someone!

Forgive me for speaking in generalities for the moment, but I have just made arrangements to listen to a few lectures this weekend and next that really excite me, and are sponsored by people who have been on my radar screen for a few years. Unfortunately, between COVID, not having my own computer at times, and several other factors, I never really connected with them. But on Tuesday I followed a search thread rather quickly and rediscovered them. I don't know for sure if this is my tribe, but there is at least the possibility, which feels wonderful. No matter how much of a hermit or contemplative you become, you need a community. In fact, it may be all the more important when you are a hermit or contemplative!

There is no question in my mind that this leading is the energy of the Goddess propelling me in a direction where I can more effectively use the totality of my gifts. It is support. A building block of my expanded self. Even if only one new door opens from several hours of lectures, it will be a step forward, and it came because I asked, and finally loved myself enough to care whether I find my tribe and fulfill my potential.

Goddess Words 12: Support

I am happy to report that since I wrote on Monday, I have discovered that the deadline I thought was in place for leaving my current residence is much more flexible than I thought. At least for the moment, I can focus on being where I am in the present, rather than how to move forward from here. Thank the Goddess! That doesn't mean that my life is any less about transition, just that a tiny edge of the fear has been shaved off for now.  I have sometimes thought I was fearless, but that isn't completely true, especially when I leap across chasms (!) And COVID-time brought some deep fears to the surface.

That brings me to a good word to look at today: Support. Again, both a verb and a noun. And, again, a word that's impossible to fully address in one short essay.

Why might I have included this in my list of Goddess words, words which I associate with the powers and energy of the divine feminine? Clearly, even a decade or so ago, I had begun to associate Goddess energy with being "supported" by the Universe. I now see safety nets as the Goddess, and, in fact, when I let go and let Her figure things out, life purrs. It's when I get caught up in knots trying to operate within the male paradigm -- to make lists, try to find solutions, try to find the money, create artificial deadlines, to prove to others that I am worthy, etc. -- that is when the safety net completely disappears and I crash or become despairing. 

It's kind of hard, in our culture, to think of "support" without thinking of money. We are constantly being asked to support the causes we believe in, by donating money. Within the context of the old paradigm, this makes sense, but I have lost friends and family in part because of their fear of my relationship with money, and of the possibility that they will be "stuck" supporting me. It is so painful. Yet my experience has been that the Goddess doesn't, primarily, use money as much as she uses relationships, love, connection and unity as supportive foundations. (For someone like me, money only appears in situations where there is love; doing jobs I don't like or buying a lottery ticket has never worked.) Decades from now, love, kindness and goodwill will be our only currency; maybe I was a little ahead of the game, but I'm happy to have at least tried to live in integrity to this vision. 

Yup, most of us cannot see the Goddess's supportive network with human eyes, looking at a human bank account. We cannot always access it by traditional means, like an ATM. But it is there for us if we can completely let go of our old assumptions. If all our belongings are swept out to sea, and if we are still alive and have the capacity to love, She will provide the one essential next step. She will provide more open-ended, warm, loving support than we can find in almost any current institution, but the form may not be what we expect. One small opportunity here, one small coincidence there, one unexpected synchronicity or discussion with a stranger...For those of us beginning to find a home in Her, pathways open up, old blockages loosen up, dead lines disappear. Throw in a little gratitude, and the process accelerates. We may even find ourselves being Her vehicle for supporting others, easily, lovingly, fearlessly. We start being part of Her support network, and often without once pulling out a checkbook.

Monday's Child

I am a Monday's child. That is the day of the week I was born on in 1956. According to the old nursery rhyme, I am "fair of face", which is interesting since (as mentioned recently) I never thought I was beautiful. I finally do, now. This Monday has dawned cold (below freezing) and extremely windy. I feel the need to check in, even though I have no idea what to say.

This was one of those weekends when I was super conscious not only of the onset of winter, but also of not being with my tribe (if I have one...) or in my preferred country, where life interests me so much more. In an effort to do something different, I decided to go to a church harvest fair in a relatively unfamiliar part of town. I couldn't think of any friends who might be interested in this, so I took the bus. The event was in a stuffy church basement, and the people running it had it pared down to the bare bones, perhaps because of lingering COVID concerns. The items on offer were: beef pasties, apple pies, doughnuts, preserves, cookies, and a select few knitted and sewn goods for winter. I bought a pasty, a small jar of jam, some cookies, and a dishrag. Then (it being Saturday), it was an uncomfortably chilly half hour wait for the next bus, but I'm still not doing a whole lot of random sitting around indoors with other people even for the sake of warmth.

A cold Saturday morning in October made clear one thing -- this looks like it will be a hard winter on Duluth's streets, and on the bus lines  There are already so many people "sleeping rough" as they say in England, and I know every day of my life that I am on the verge of being one of them. I'm finally at the point where I believe that this is not about anything that any of us have done "wrong", it is about a system that can't help but create massive inequality and need, and push aside people who are different in any way. I am grateful for a roof over my head this minute. I'm not as compassionate as I should be, I think out of my own fear. I don't think of myself as fearful, but when I see a woman carting all her belongings in a baby carriage, or a man lugging an impossibly heavy backpack, I shiver. Literally. 

On Sunday, I made a so-so stew. Next time, I am not going to add tomato paste or tomato sauce, as it turns the gravy too orange! I listened to a Q and A session with one of my favorite authors, but wished the questioner had also been female. And I watched three "Masterpiece" mysteries (so much for having set this form of entertainment "violence" totally aside! But I wanted to see if any of these new series were worth watching, and the third of the three looked most promising, in part because the woman detective is so engaging.)

So it was a weekend, not so much of distracting myself, but of treading water. There has to be a way for me to expand, beyond this blog, my expression of my gifts, thoughts, and passion for England/English church music and the Goddess, but, even reborn, I can't yet hear a specific call. For today, this Monday's child is just thankful to be alive, warm, and fed.

The Power of Choice

This is going to be very short.

What would our world be like if, many thousands of years ago, humanity had chosen to follow a more unified, love-based, Goddess-centered, earth-based spirituality? I cannot know for sure, but I suspect that most of the ills plaguing us right now would either not exist at all, or barely exist. Would we be as technologically advanced? Probably not. We would have moved ahead much more slowly and thoughtfully, with careful, loving attention to the needs of our neighbors and our earth home.

There is little point in too much "what-iffing". Humanity developed as it did, and we are where we are. But it is time for taking more personal responsibility for all our choices, and trying not to blame other people, the government, companies, or other institutions. I chose to buy this item made of plastic or wrapped in plastic, I chose anger at someone who thinks differently than I do, I chose to benefit from our economic construct (or not!), I chose a retirement portfolio that may include companies that do things I don't believe in...etc. We may feel like we have very little power in the face of all that is happening, but we have more power of choice than we think we do. We can individually choose different options throughout the day, as hard or inconvenient as that might be. 

The Face in the Mirror

As a follow-up to my last post, I found a place to give away my father's tie clip miscellany. I rather hope that the items will make their way to a young man attending his high school prom, or getting married, or acting as best man. Anything is better than another thirty years in a small box.

The process of going through my few bags and boxes of possessions continues to be emotional. I'm not sure, but I wonder if it has to do with the fact that most of what I am dealing with is paper -- letters, years worth of journals, notebooks full of handwritten essays (from before this blog), memorabilia of trips to England, research about Herbert Howells, even family photos (see below). It's been decades since I have "owned" furniture, small appliances, etc., and those are less likely to have a major emotional charge. Paper can be a more bittersweet mirror about your life, your choices, your friends and family, the phases you have gone through. I am throwing a little bit of it out, but I had already pretty much reached the plateau of "the next stop on this train is tossing everything but a roller bag-full", which I hope is not where I'm headed unless it is for a joyful, positive reason. As hard as it is, I'm awfully fortunate. The folks in Florida had these sorting choices taken out of their hands. Many of them may feel like they literally don't know who they are without the things they used to carry. Some of them no longer even have a roller bag-full of precious belongings. It's all part of our communal leap upwards, spiritually, but that doesn't make it any less painful.

This is going to seem like a complete non-sequitur, but bear with me. I have tended not to look at myself in the mirror very often. I mean, really looked. For one thing, I haven't felt I was particularly attractive. I've almost never worn make-up, so I didn't pay that kind of daily attention to my face. Having gained weight about 20 years ago that I never lost again, I felt I didn't really want to focus on this "me" that I didn't fully recognize. My first few video conferences online were unnerving, because I wasn't satisfied at all with how I looked, and there I was for everyone to see.

But in the last year, my hair has grown long, as I think I have mentioned. It is now well down my back. And oddly enough, it has become a deep chestnut-red color, with some white mixed in. My hair, at least, is beautiful...and that has been the catalyst to looking with a little more self-acceptance at my face in the mirror. Except...

One morning, I realized with near horror that the face looking out at me is my father's! I am the spitting image of him; if in his sixties, he had worn a wig with long brownish-red hair, he would have been the twin of me, now. In the context of what I have finally learned and accepted about him as a person, it was very, very hard. If I look so much like him, am I more like him than I think?

Then, in going through my papers, I found a small stash of photos that I had forgotten about. Amongst them is a family photograph from the summer of 1961, which is unnerving in its beauty. The five of us look happy, relaxed, and "normal" -- whatever that means! Six-year-old "me" is looking directly at the photographer. I started wearing glasses later that year, so it's amazing to see how clear and almost piercing my eyes are. Another, more formal, studio photograph must date from 1931 or 32, and it shows my dad in the center, with his younger brother to his right and his older brother is to his left. Dad (who would have been about six at the time) is looking directly at the photographer, and he looks exactly like me in 1961. Exactly. I guess you can choose to give away or lighten the load of other fatherly gifts, the old cufflinks and tie clips, maybe even institutions and expectations, but you can't escape your genes! (He, in turn, looked exactly like his Scottish grandmother, which means I do too.) As unnerving as this has been, there is a little bit of healing in it. Maybe, just maybe, I took the same genes and the same physical traits and managed (mostly!) to represent very different qualities and values. Yesterday, just for a moment, I actually thought I looked beautiful in the mirror...for about one second, but still, that's a step forward.

There are so many barriers to loving oneself, and to loving a world that seems bent on chaos and destruction. I guess one 60-something woman continuing to make baby steps towards inner healing doesn't look like much, but it feels really big today.

Goddess Words 11: Wonder

There are a variety of definitions for the word "wonder" in both its noun and verb form, and I'm sure we have all used it both ways. When I originally wrote this list of Goddess words, I probably had the noun in mind, but today I think both are useful. Wonder is closely related to "Awe", which I wrote about six weeks ago, but it is usually seen as a slightly warmer or less off-putting emotion.

Having said that, I look with wonder at the photographs of southwest Florida. Wonder and awe. The truth is that Nature is completely awe-some, and worthy of respectful wonder. I feel the heartbreak of the many thousands of people who have lost everything, perhaps even family or friends, and more than many people I can empathize with that feeling, "I have nothing. What on earth do I do now?" And I respect the courage of those who declare that they will start over from scratch, and rebuild. But it's that rebuilding that stops me short...these storms are largely Nature's effort to restore balance to a system we have set off-kilter. Rebuilding will be a catalyst for more powerful storms, just as more air-conditioning units are a catalyst to higher temperatures. What we humans are doing to "fix" the messes we have created is only making the situation worse.

The artist in me finds a visual beauty in the aerial photos of the destruction. The subtle patterns of the "after" pictures have a different appeal than the "before" ones. But more than anything, what is so compelling is the evidence of Nature's power. She is simply more powerful than any of our human efforts or creations, and until we "get" that as a society and start to have the humility to include Her in our planning, no amount of rebuilding will have permanency.

As a verb, the word "wonder" may be really helpful right now. Rather than panic, simply wonder. I wonder what Mother Nature would want us to do right now? I wonder what steps I can take to live even more lightly on the earth? I wonder how the next few decades will unfold? I wonder if I can be more loving, even in the midst of tragedy? I wonder if I can do more to embrace of Goddess values and the power of Mother Nature? 

Dad's Detritus

Back in 2018, after my father died, I received my "inheritance" -- around $725. Then a few months later, my brother sent me a small jewelry box of miscellaneous tie clips, tuxedo studs, and cufflinks, thinking I might want them as a memento. I didn't, particularly. However, I've held onto the box and its contents, with what I suppose you could call an ironic motive. I was pretty sure they weren't valuable, but if all heck broke loose, perhaps I could trade them for a loaf of bread. 

When I came across the box a few days ago, I opened it again and looked carefully at the contents. The only significant item appeared to be a tiny gold ring, which I can see from the interior inscription was my great-grandmother's wedding ring from 1888. It barely fits on my pinkie, and even it has, I am sure, little real value, but as it is a token of one of my female forebears, I put it in my own little box of special things. On Saturday, I took the remaining nine items to a local jeweler, to see if any of it has value. The short answer is no. Worthless. And, of course, in this day and age, away from major metropolitan centers, I don't think many men wear cufflinks, tuxedo studs and tie clips, although they are for sale online.

So I walked away, still in possession of this gosh darned box of stuff (from Schenectady's best jeweler back in the day), now wanting to get rid of it but not quite prepared to toss it in the trash. I'll let you know what I eventually do. However, I couldn't resist the metaphoric meaning of this story. What is in the box of "stuff" that our fathers pass on to us, both individually and collectively? Does it look shiny and valuable and turn out to be valuable, or is it the leavings, the detritus of a life or of a bigger paradigm? It's worth going through the box carefully. There can be beauty and value in amongst the worthless things, things that should be kept. But the entire collection may simply be too heavy, psychologically or physically, to keep carrying.

One footnote about my great-grandmother. She and her husband (and later, their children and grandchildren) were on the outer rings of New York City high society. I am not sure when it happened, but probably in the nineteen-teens or twenties, they separated or divorced, which was uncommon in that era. Although I have no evidence of why it happened, my gut tells me that Jean was more willing to face an uncertain future alone than with her husband. She was evidently a formidable woman; perhaps her husband was not. In any event, the little ring speaks more to me of her eventual independence than the limitations of her married state, and I hope I can continue to keep it safe.