No Words

It is rare for me to go for a whole week without writing. There were a few different factors this last week, including trying to race around and do things/see people before the cold weather and snow, which started last Friday. But the main thing was simply finding no words with which to respond to the war in the Middle East, among other heartbreaking events. It is with absolutely no irony whatsoever that I say, I can't understand why people are drawn to horror movies, many TV shows and ads, "spooky" Halloween events like haunted houses, and dressing up for that holiday, when our day-to-day world has become so horrifying and violent.

I guess when there are no words, it is best not to spend long paragraphs analyzing everything! So I am just going to return to a few of the messages I seem to have "channelled" (if you will) from the Goddess. The first: that we are entering a period of much higher spiritual energies (throughout the world and the Universe), and anything conflict-, hatred-, fear-, profit-, or power over-driven will simply stop working as effectively, no matter who is involved. More than ever in history, only love, joy, beauty (and their related qualities!) will "work". She told me She will never ask me to fight for anyone or anything, or against anyone or anything. Energetically, fighting is not aligned with the Goddess, and adding even the slightest iota of anger or pushback energy to our toxic mix will not lead to peace. Lastly, focusing on the condition that is sick or violent will only attract more sickness and violence. Yes, I, too, have been "perseverating" on the world's two most prominent wars, but as soon as my mind can stand such agitated thinking no longer, I seem to be able to let go. The only response must be to create some small bit of beauty, express some small bit of joy, or embrace someone or something in love. 

Last night, public radio played the entire Faure Requiem. It has probably been over 40 years since I sang this exquisite choral piece, and yet I remember every single word in Latin, and just about every note of the four choral parts, the solos, and the instrumental accompaniment. I closed my eyes and sang the whole darned thing from memory, all 35 or 40 minutes. Love, joy, and beauty twined into a rare braided ribbon of ecstasy. Finally, there were words.

Threads of joy

I had basically "planned" to spend the weekend meditating on joy. I knew I had stumbled on something important last week; that joy is hard to uncover when you place decades of external (often male) expectations and preferences on top of it.

While I don't for a moment think joy is insubstantial or fragile, there are moments when trying to find its threads -- to follow the path to the well of joy within -- is challenging. On Friday, I had scheduled my COVID booster, and wow, did this one ever do me in! I was all but "out for the count" from midday Friday through Saturday, even into Sunday. Perseverating on the Middle East didn't help.

Back on January 5 of this year, I wrote about Joy as one of my Goddess words. And interestingly enough, I note that I have used the word quite frequently in this blog. So it's there, it's in me. The best I can do today is consider what brings me joy right now, and it is the belief that we are (despite appearances) heading into a world beyond war, and that the feminine face of the divine is re-emerging from behind the clouds. Embodying and expressing Her, as best as I can on this paradoxically dark, rainy day, is my only "job". Holding onto joy's thread inward is my only job. (Interesting that "job" and "joy" are only one letter different, eh?!) May this week bring you peeks of joy. Even peaks!

Defining questions

The last few months, I have been building up to an epiphany. Those of you who read these posts have seen the uphill steps; I'd be tempted to apologize, only I try never (these days!) to apologize for my life. Let's just say that when you are a mystic, awareness of your process is your daily bread. However, I do hope that I don't repeat too much...or at least that today I am speaking from a different vantage point.

The other night on "The Voice", one of the coaches told a contestant that they were using their God-given talents to bring joy to the world, or words to that effect. No doubt I have heard those very words on previous episodes of the show, not to mention in dozens of self-help and spirituality books. For the first time, the words really resonated. But when I asked myself, "With which of my talents am I bringing joy to the world?", I experienced a horrible, deafening silence. I haven't sung at all in five years, or painted seriously in at least ten or twelve. The purpose of this blog has been to record the steps of an intense spiritual journey, and I hope that a little joy has peeked through here and there, but spreading joy wasn't consciously my main goal. For a few hours, I found it hard to breathe. In my interpretation, the core values of the Goddess are love, joy, and beauty. If I wish to represent Her (no matter how imperfectly), these three qualities must emanate from me somehow. If it has been hard to allow them to emanate, and if I haven't always thought of how I was helping the world experience love, joy and beauty, clearly I have been seriously blocked.

It got me wondering, what were the "old" questions that propelled me forward in the past? What questions helped me define myself and my goals? Here are just a few: what do I need to do to get my Dad to like or even tolerate me? If I am perfect enough, will I get noticed or loved by my family? What do I need to do to enter the musical world of the men and boys' choirs? If I take piano and organ lessons, major in music at Smith, and get a master's degree in England, will it be enough? In my 20's, the questions became more "practical": what job do I need to get to earn enough to pay off my student loans? Then, once that goal was accomplished, where and with what skills can I forget about England, church music, and the career I will never have, and make enough money to live on? As my situation not surprisingly began to go downhill, it was, like, what belongings can I sell? Can I paint enough little paintings or do enough menial jobs to stave off starvation? Can I live without most of the things other people have? Eventually, my focus returned to, how can I get back into church music? How can I get back to England? What do I need to do to be recognized in that field? Most recently, having allowed those questions to lapse yet again, it has been more about, can I simply come to peace with invisibility and non-"success"? I think I said last time that it has been a heartbreaking journey, and it has been, and, with some exceptions, a largely joy-free one too. I've hung in there, and survived, but my well of actual "joy" sometimes seems pretty empty. 

But now I get it! In the end, these defining questions primarily referenced our male-dominated culture and its preferences -- not who I really am. I had long since taken the focus off my inner joy and passion, in favor of looking outward for acceptance and a paycheck. I was trying, trying, and trying some more to find a home in a paradigm where I could never have been at home...and I mean this metaphorically as well as literally. 

This week, it is particularly hard to imagine feeling joyful. Images of yet another war horrify and traumatize, almost off-the-scale. The black hole beckons, and tries to grab our full attention. But this does not invalidate the impulse to embody -- and spread -- joy, love and beauty. For a number of weeks, I have been feeling uncharacteristically depressed and wobbly, but I think I am experiencing a death, the death of my lifelong focus outside myself. My new question is, how will I, Liz, manifest my Goddess-given joy, love, and capacity to express beauty? How can I make those qualities my only work each day? Can I start to define myself by looking only at me? So very hard to do when you were brought up in narcissism's family net, and yet absolutely necessary when you are nearly 68 and single. Losing sight of oneself is a kind of death, and that will come soon enough as it is. I have no time to waste.

It is Heartbreaking

This morning, we are having an early "gale of November" in Duluth. Lake Superior is churning, 30-, 40-plus mph winds from the northeast are wailing. Trees are bent over, losing their remaining summer leaves. Some rain is falling, and in the "place" I am at this morning, the drops of water are the tears of the Goddess.

If She is crying, why? Because it is heartbreaking. (All the many "its".) It is heartbreaking that humanity has still not learned that war is never a solution. It is heartbreaking that humans still hate each other and willingly cause violence to one another, to animals, and to the earth. It is heartbreaking that we haven't learned to see the same warlike violence in our common institutions, our entertainment, our assumptions -- in order to make different daily choices. It is heartbreaking that we still hope that our modern models will want to fix the problems they have caused. If She is crying, if She is heartbroken, it may be because She had hoped we would have gained more wisdom by now.

As for me, heartbreak has been my constant companion this entire lifetime, even when my pain was not superficially evident to people around me. However, in recent months the tidal wave of trauma has started to ebb as I have finally more fully let go of the structures-that-are, and begun to "inhabit" a structure-that-will-be. (Is that why my right arm has been hurting?! I've been holding on for grim dear life, and have finally had to relax my grip and let go.) The rooms of this brand new house are basically empty; the structure only consists of a foundation-cum-scaffolded walls and roof. Only the bare bones are in place for a house, and for the values which some people will see as "home". It's a little early, perhaps, to take refuge here, but it may be the first time in 68 years that I have felt sheltered as the storms rage.

 

Ageing

My computer isn't happy with my use of this spelling of "ageing", but that's life.

There is no way I'm going to try to address the entire topic of "getting older" today, so just a little aspect of it. For a few weeks I have had an issue with my upper right arm, which in true "me" style, I tried to essentially ignore/allow to heal itself. Well, over this past weekend, I was in more pain, so I finally went and had an initial look at it, which will be followed soon by another appointment. That's as far as I will go with this today.

However, no matter how you slice it, this event has reminded me (as if I needed it) that the 67-year-old body is not as strong or resilient as the 47-year-old one, or the 27-year-old one. Overall, I have been outrageously fortunate. I'm beginning to realize that I am the one needing to do more "thanksgiving"! But, with no car, I carry heavy loads...I remember a day back in August when I carried two too-heavily laden grocery bags too far. It just simply wasn't smart. And whether that event triggered this injury or not, it's the ageing reality -- you keep having to pare back a little bit here, a little bit there. When your spirit is still strong and you still have work to do in the world, it goes against the grain to say "no" to life. But it becomes a survival skill of its own, I guess!

Goddess grant me the wisdom to know where to move forward and where to release and relax. Help me to navigate vulnerability and even, at times, the shame of looking older to the outside world. Help me to become ever-clearer about those things I absolutely must do to fulfill my destiny, and once I become clear, help me to act --safely. Thank you.

Just Wondering

There's something I have been wondering about for a long time, so I guess this rainy day in October is as good a time as any to get up the courage to ask.

What if, over many generations, humans had had to pay Nature for her resources...the resources themselves (not for the labor to extract them, cut them down, whatever)? I mean, these things have effectively been free gifts from Nature (or items freely taken by humans, depending on your perspective). Would it be possible to have our modern profit-based economies -- or any kind of money economy at all -- if we had been charged for these valuable assets? 

I don't know the answer to this, and perhaps it would be impossible to calculate. But as every day brings news of efforts to address climate change -- taxes, new technologies, laws, suggested personal choices -- I can't help but sense ever more acutely the need to fill in the most gaping hole. At the very least, for starters, can we (individually and collectively) just thank Nature? I can't see how any of these other actions will work if we cannot respect Her, express gratitude to Her, and listen to what She has been trying to tell us. It isn't too late to gratefully acknowledge the immense value of what She has given us for free over the centuries, and to do this unconditionally. 

Life Can be Like a Board Game

Over the last two weeks or so, my life has had the quality of a board game, perhaps even the old one literally called, "Life". Or in this case, "One Musician's Life".

I referred last time to having had to leave a concert because the loud rock music was  deafening, to me anyway. If I had been playing a board game, I can picture the space on the board: "Attend loud concert, leaving you inexplicably traumatized. Go back two spaces." (I spent almost a week feeling even more "pushed back" than usual, as it turned out.) Then, this past weekend, I heard a local choral group do a lovely job singing Herbert Howells; it was almost as if the Universe had decided to even up the scales, and the afterglow from hearing this music sent me way ahead, maybe five spaces on this imaginary game board. Still glowing, I tuned in early Sunday morning, as I usually do, to "Pipedreams", the public radio organ music show. Michael Barone was presenting some highlights of the first forty years of that program, and lo and behold, more Howells: the Coll Reg Te Deum, sung many years ago in St. Paul, Minnesota by the St. Paul's Cathedral, London, choir. This is not only "more Howells", it is perhaps my touchstone piece, one of the first that I taught myself to sing from a late 1960's record by King's College, Cambridge. I was interested to see whether I would start to cry at the end, the composer's dramatic and heartrending setting of, "O Lord, in Thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded." And I did, although perhaps not quite as hopelessly as I did many times over the years. (Heck, being confounded has been my almost daily experience in this lifetime. I'm rather used to it.) Yet my overall experience of hearing this music clip was surprisingly positive, minus a good deal of the homesickness and heartsickness that has often washed over me ("I wish I could be in that choir/in England"). More than anything, I felt a curious synchronicity and encouragement. I'm still alive to thrill to the music of Howells. And his music came to find me, twice in one weekend! My imaginary space on the board might say, "you are so filled with love, appreciation and beauty, move ahead five spaces."

And it turned out, that wasn't the end: from my new spot on the board, I watched "The Voice" on Monday night. Yes, the silly banter among the judges makes me laugh, but I watch because I appreciate their musicality, and that of many of the contestants making their way onto the world stage for the first time. A new contestant came out, but this time I let out a shriek. According to the information on the screen, she was from Essex, NY. Essex, NY, the town where I spent almost every summer of my young life, where my parents lived for 12 or 13 years in the 70's and 80's, and where I lived much of the early 2000's. OMG. I don't know her -- and as it turned out, she didn't get any chair turns and won't continue on the show -- but the chances of someone from a town of only 700 or so, a town which I know every nook and cranny of, being on this show would seem to be almost nil. 

The square here might say, "unusual synchronicities coming your way, and because you are noticing them, go ahead two more spaces"! I don't know what it all means, but I want to remember this metaphor. You can move ahead in life, even when you don't realize you are doing so.