The Environment

I'm sharing a few sentences which I wrote in my hand-written journal yesterday, essentially as written:

The Goddess's love for earth's environment is greater (and more powerful) than our lack of love for the environment. So what She needs to do to sustain earth's viability is what will happen. Period. Full stop. 

I'm going to leave it at that, even though I'm wondering about changing "sustain" to "maintain", and a few other edits. But for the moment, I feel it's important and timely to communicate what came to me. 

Five of Cups

You'd be forgiven for thinking that this is morphing into an oracle card journal, and heck, maybe it is. I'm open to however the spirit moves from this point forward! Anyway, I did metaphorically spend meditative time this weekend, between hours watching the runners in the rain and taking in (the next day) the sunny expanse of Lake Superior. It's amazing how overfull the city is on the day of the marathon, then it almost completely empties out within 24 hours.

Before pulling a card this morning, I stated my intention, which is to "decide" within the week what my next step will be. I am already living in a small state of chaos, with books in boxes to be given or thrown away (the latter, the ones that are simply too heavily annotated by me for anyone else to read through!) Will the "step" take me across town or across the country or the world? I was surprised to find, yesterday, how dispassionate I felt at the view of this lake which I love. It's not that I don't still fully embrace Her magnificence. I guess it's more that I'm ready to stand on my own two feet in representing the Goddess, and may not need great lakes (Superior or Champlain) as a crutch. As my mother used to say, "We shall see."

I used the traditional Rider deck, and didn't get the kind of card I might have expected: Five of Cups. This depicts a black-robed figure facing away from view, with three spilt cups at her feet, and two upright cups behind. There is a river flowing in front of her (or me!) and a bridge a small distance away, leading to what is typically referred to as a house, but its tower looks to me like an English church or cathedral. Most books refer to dealing with grief, and with the hopeful possibilities represented by the two remaining full cups and the bridge.

My initial interpretation is that I need to acknowledge my sadness and frustration of having had a life so far from where I would have wanted to be. It's like, I have spent a lifetime looking "across the pond" to England watching my life energy spill out, feeling helpless to get there permanently, despite so many attempts. And yet, there are two full cups behind me and the bridge is near.

If I had stayed in the UK in 1981 after studying for my MMus, my life would have focused on the male paradigms in church music, history, traditions, etc. Although I cannot know this for sure, I would probably have made far less headway toward focusing on the divine feminine. Because of having been cut adrift from my home of many lifetimes, I had to blindly start making my way to my new spiritual home, to understand myself and the feminine principle from the inside out, without the old trappings. 

Today, may I not assume that the distant building is a cathedral, and that I literally need to pick up the last two cups, cross the bridge, and go back. Going "back" is not an option, at least in the same way. Yes, there is some grieving that I still need to do, but may I also start to appreciate that I had the journey I most needed. As I pick up the last two cups (and what remains of my energy!), may my question be, not "Where do I wish to be?", but "Where can I be of the most use to the Goddess, and what does she want me to do there?" 

Under a Full Moon

Everything has become so heated, from the environment to personal and societal interactions, to international ones. I sometimes wish I had studied astrology, and could understand everything that is happening from that vantage point. But I never did, and just have to trust what I am feeling in my own body, plus the clarity of the full moon.

While this part of the world remains somewhat cool, we have been experiencing another form of climate chaos -- torrential rains. There is a great deal of flooding north of here, with roads and train tracks damaged, water systems out, and towns partially underwater. Duluth's steep avenues became raging rivers Tuesday night. We are expecting more heavy rain today and tomorrow, just in time for the annual marathon and its huge influx of visitors. Interesting. The point is, nowhere on earth will be "safe" from such weather events...in a world that tries so hard to compartmentalize and isolate and blame, how hard it is to quietly recognize our oneness, our essential and unbreakable oneness, and just sit with it.

I am keeping an oracle card journal -- picking one card from one of my half dozen decks each morning in response to a question or intention. This morning, I said I wanted to stay inwardly calm in the midst of the world's chaos and upcoming personal changes, and picked a perfect card from the Motherpeace deck -- four of swords, with a woman sitting crosslegged in meditation in a pyramid-shaped tent. I try to imagine what our world would be like if, for lo these many centuries, times of stasis and quiet had punctuated mankind's hardscrabble forward momentum, if there had been an ebb-and-flow rhythm to history, not a constant surge forward. What if sharp instruments had never been used as weapons, only to hold tent corners in place? Perhaps we would not be in all the messes we are in...

Well, regret and speculation aren't helpful, or meditative. This weekend, may I pitch my metaphorical tent directly on Mother Earth, and be a small space of complete calm, under a full moon. 

Triage Time

Well, it is that time again. Triage time. It looks pretty certain that I will be moving by the end of the summer, and until this weekend, I just could not face the process of going through my things and sorting them into piles (Keep, Give Away, Throw Away, etc.) Unlike many of my contemporaries, I have done this often -- too often. It was blissful these last few years to have the time just to sink into one small room filled with my things. My first instinct was that when the moment came, I would simply hire someone to help me box up books, papers, clothes, and small memorabilia, and basically take it all with me. Goddess willing, I won't have to carry it all on my back, and it is OK at 68 to get help.

However, Sunday morning (I suppose after having written what I did on Saturday), I looked at my shelf of books and realized that I don't need many of them anymore. It's so funny, my books have been my prized possessions. I think that no matter whether they've been packed up in storage or on a shelf where I live, they have "been" me (or a reflection of me that I've needed) amidst all the changes I have made. The book titles were a mirror, a validation perhaps or a reminder -- "Oh yes, that's who I am!"  Women, Art and Society, The Alphabet vs. the Goddess, Beyond God the Father, The History of the Church in England, The Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems...this strange old mix that is me created a unified whole on the shelf. The books didn't fight each other, or judge each other's value. They just sat comfortably, cheek by jowl.

But I saw in a flash which books I had actively consulted over the last decade or more, and which I haven't -- and which ones I am unlikely to consult in future. Oddly enough, the category which I realize I am most done with are the ones about the Goddess...and not because I am throwing that part of me aside. Lordy, I worked too hard to find Her! And I am so thankful to these wise and beautiful authors. But from this point forward, I simply have to "be" Her from the inside out. If I become an effective teacher, it will be by using who I am and what I have personally learned, not, by and large, referencing history or the past.

My piles will sit on the floor for at least a few days as I sit with my decisions or possibly move more volumes to the floor or back onto the shelf. I am grateful for the time and thought that I can put into this process, in an era where all too many people's "decisions" about what to move forward with are out of their hands. I'm not big on praying, but in recent weeks I just simply have not been able to get much of the world out of my mind...the millions of people at home and abroad whose belongings have had to be completely abandoned due to war and weather disasters. And this is just the beginning. Perhaps it was a blessing to learn triage skills so many years ago. Yet it still remains a walk on the cutting edge -- keeping enough physical treasures to stay tethered to this earth, and releasing enough to live lightly and occasionally soar.

The Real Deal

OK. So, I don't particularly like this slang term, I suppose given the fact that it has sort of a retail/business edge to it, and I (ahem) don't seem to function well in that world.

But there is a moment where you realize that you are the real deal. You may not be a good "real deal" -- a good Goddess-centered Mystic and Visionary -- but, come what may, this is what and who you are. Period. Full stop. Everything in your life has led up to this. It doesn't matter how many friends or family you may lose, or whether being "Her" ever brings you a permanent home or a measure of security, or even whether one other person on the planet understands you. I suppose it is roughly the equivalent of realizing that you are gay or transgender, or that you need to go to medical school to become a doctor, or that your true calling is to be a working artist or musician. You start to see the world only through one lens. There is only one answer to every question, one path leading out of the dark forest, one tune floating into your consciousness in the wind. In my case, it is the voice of the divine feminine wishing to be expressed, here in this blog, when I speak to friends, or in my actions and decisions. 

It's such a focused power, a new kind of power to get used to. When you are trained to be openminded and consider the widest range of possible options, in studying or teaching or in the world of journalism or art, getting to this point at 68 -- literally a "point", a pinprick-sized gateway forward -- is nothing short of stunning. It goes against everything I was taught. But of course, that is the whole point! I was "taught" nothing about the Goddess, really. It was learning that started within, slowly honed and defined through life experience. I honor the handful of brilliant authors whose work in the 1970's and 80's I am only now finding and fully appreciating. How completely ahead of their time were they? They were the real deal too, my foremothers. But I wasn't ready to hear what they had to say 45 or 50 years ago. My personal work started eight years ago when I started writing this blog, and I have been slowly but surely paring away the excess, everything extraneous, ever since. 

In this week of fancy shoes, unusually powerful storms, and a road trip to an outdoor sculpture garden, my mind has only been on one question: how best to serve the Goddess today. There is freedom in having no other considerations. 

Shoes

Many women adore shoes and cannot own enough of them. I am not one of those women. At any given time, I probably own between four and six pairs of footwear: one or two pairs of summer sandals, one or two pairs of fall/winter shoes, and one or two pairs of boots. All very clunky and geared to comfort.

Part of this is, of course, due to low income. I've tended to buy better shoes so they fit better and last longer, but this limits big time how many pairs you can afford to buy.

And (this is way TMI!) the underlying issue is that since I was about 12 years old, I have had bunions, where the bone near your big toe sticks out, making some shoes and sandals impossible to wear. When I was in my 30's, I asked a foot doctor why I had them, and he said it was because I had worn too many high heeled shoes when I was younger, which was hogwash, since I've never, ever worn high heels. Throughout junior and senior high, at private school, I had to wear brown leather sensible strapped shoes with my uniform, and for many years after that, the only shoes I wore (sometimes even to work) were light brown suede "Wallabees", which didn't hurt my feet. Those having become harder to find about thirty years ago (I don't buy shoes online), I've had several other go-to sensible shoes, although as the problem worsens and my toes are crossing over one another, the shoe "issue" becomes ever more challenging. At this point, most of my shoes are men's, since there is more room in front. I have my mother's (and her mother's) feet. This has been all about genetics -- and possibly heading in the wrong directions -- not high heels.

So, I've basically never looked twice at beautiful women's shoes -- until last night.

It's a long story, but a pair of shoes came to me completely unexpectedly, and they almost took my breath away. They are multicolor, with a black strap, on a black wedge heel. Even though they don't look one bit like Dorothy's ruby slippers, that is what they looked like to me -- magic slippers. I was sure they wouldn't fit, but they do...at least, I could get my feet into them and walk several steps. Several steps may always be the limit, but I am going to keep them, if only for the smile factor. They make me smile.

If nothing else is proof positive that I have entered a new reality, this is!

Reaching that Point

I can't find it, so if I have told this story before, please forgive the repetition. Back in about 1995 (almost 30 years ago!), I attended a New Age-y workshop...I have since forgotten the specific topic of discussion and just about everything else about the event, except for one thing: a young man raised his hand, and told the group that he had seen something online about a chart someone had made illustrating the rise of human inventiveness. Essentially, it showed how slow the pace of human invention was in early history, and then how it gradually rose to a fairly steep pitch during the industrial revolution, then steeper and steeper still in the 20th century. By the 1990s, the pace of new technologies and inventions was changing so fast that it was predicted soon to become a completely vertical line which would collapse back on itself when there were simply too many new inventions for society to absorb. The ensuing discussion must have been about when that would happen and what would be the result; all that has stayed with me is the mental image of the graph's line circling back on itself.

I was reminded of this when I heard the news about the continued rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, despite efforts worldwide to "fight climate change". Rightly or wrongly, I see these two topics as completely related, completely intertwined.

If we are reaching one, or two, or many crucial points, it seems to me that there has been such a long arc of a specific kind of growth and acceleration that we cannot expect small bandages to cover the wound. And while our focus is on protecting the way of life we have created rather than protecting the planet that Nature created, our solutions are not likely to work in the longterm anyway. It would be very easy to fall into despair, even for me, except for one thing -- I feel joy that the energy of the divine feminine is surging into our world. The tipping point will not be about death (which of course doesn't exist anyway), but about new, more sustainable forms of life and love. Those of us who can will have to completely release our attachment to how our human world has looked and operated up until now, and who will or will not "survive". That will be challenging. (How's that for an understatement?)

Learning, continued

In my last post, I speculated about what learning (or "education") I'm ready to do now. Over the weekend, I realized that in the penultimate paragraph, I circled around the core lessons that are ahead of me, but missed the center.

The coming days, weeks, months, and years will be, for me, only about love. Learning to love, learning to accept and embrace love, learning to feel worthy of being in places that I love and with people who love the same things I love. If love is the  direction in which our whole world is heading (which I am more convinced of than ever), then learning to model that reality as fully as possible, and be that reality as fully as possible, is the only education that matters moving forward.

This summer looks like it will be another personal portal, and I'm beginning to get why deep down, portals have been terrifying for me. The overarching reality of my life until now was learning about "not love" -- I learned it from day one, from the inside out. I learned how to stay afloat (as gracefully as possible) in the face of rejection, lack of success, and lack of means. I've had wonderful, beautiful friends, and many beautiful and loving individual experiences, but the larger context of my life got me used to what is seen in our society as failure. So stepping up to a portal or moment of change has always been terrifying deep down, to be honest with myself. Failure and shame were lurking under the surface, ready to trip me up.

There's a whole different energy to it now. What if I could literally assume that by the end of the year, my life will be more about love and joy and beauty and productivity than it has ever been? What if there were literally no other options? What's neat is, it is not a case of thinking that this particular degree course is being foisted upon me from without. It's not that I think the Universe has decided it's what I have to learn. It's bubbling up from within me: genuine love is all I want to learn about moving forward! Let the lessons begin.