My plan for this week had originally been to talk more about the coronation and/or the debt ceiling cliffhanger. But my highest priority continues to be to try to document and describe my path (as it turns out) toward the Goddess, and beyond all our current constructs. I've just had an important step on that path, a smallish decision but, I think a necessary and important one. So let's talk about it in real time.
OK, for over a decade, I have had a handful of boxes in storage out east. Since packing them up and leaving them, I have moved so many times, too many times. I had pared my belongings way back, almost eradicating myself in the process, but I never felt I was in a place of enough permanence to send for what remained. And, truth be told, I'm still not.
But this feels like the moment to start getting them out here to Duluth.
Why? A lot of considerations are converging.
When I placed these things in storage, I believed three major things that I no longer believe. The first was that there would finally be a happy ending, that (hopefully in England) I would, despite all the odds, find my "forever home". If it was with a Prince Charming, so much the better, but if I was on my own, at least I would grow older in an apartment much like my Schenectady grandmother's: Victorian, high-ceilinged, art on the walls, and comfy. Mostly comfy! I didn't understand yet that my path had taken me so very far from overlap with the economic and social constructs that might make such a fairy tale ending possible. Right now, this minute, I am comfy -- I am grateful, and need to take advantage of that fact to consolidate some boxes. But strictly speaking, I only have income for the most low level public housing, and if that moment should arrive, it may be just too hard to have my few beautiful things (paintings etc.) with me or on the wall. The contrast will be too painful.
The second thing I believed was that someone would eventually wish to write a biography of me! (Yes, so much for trying hard not to be narcissistic!) That I would become famous either because of my efforts to get into English church music, or as a scholar of Herbert Howells, or, finally, as a woman scouting out the path into a more Goddess-based future. Some young scholar would want to see my childhood memorabilia, scrapbooks, MMus research, artwork, you name it. As of now, I would still give anything for my voice to be heard, and for someone to think I am important enough to catalogue in this way. But I no longer assume that this will ever happen.
Lastly, a decade ago, I still took seriously my role of family genealogist, and took a personal interest in the materials I have. I thought in my "old age" I would love to do more of this research. But right this minute, even this level of "patriarchal" research is profoundly unattractive to me. When that box wends its way west to me, I'll have a lot of decisions to make.
I guess it's like this. After all these years, the things that were important to me and to my sense of self simply are not any more. I truly have been reborn, gone through a portal, or whatever metaphor you prefer. Which is more a 2023 portrait of me, my last five or ten blog posts or my little silver picture frame? My hard, uncertain journey all over the map, or college teaching notes from the early 2000s? My day-to-day city bus reality going through the end of COVID time, embracing the Goddess, and trying to adequately write about my present, or the research my great-aunt did to prove our aristocratic English heritage (and my eligibility to join the Daughters of the American revolution, paradoxically!)? I guess the time has come to pick up this last layer of belongings, prayerfully and intentionally align them with what the Goddess may want for me moving forward, and either make a place for them here in Duluth, or honor them and get them to a better home.
Just laughing at the difference between belongings (the things you own and keep with you) and belonging (a feeling of fitting in). That, I guess, will have to wait for another day!
