The roller coaster continues. After a hard day or two, two days ago, I managed to pull myself up into a place of curiosity, which was indeed a step up. But by Friday, I woke up almost incapable of functioning. What seemed to have triggered it, amidst uncertainty on the horizon, was the notion of safety. I don't think I ever felt safe in my childhood home, but I learned to so thoroughly internalize fear, that subsequent ways that my path (and the world outside it) has felt unsafe have been similarly swept under the rug. Suddenly, whether I end up in a stately home or on the street, I felt overwhelmed by fears for my safety. The fact that I have done everything "wrong" by old paradigm standards doesn't help. It feels as if this is the moment when I could pay the price, and be swallowed up in a black hole of material neediness, never to be seen again.
I sometimes talk about having cried, but last night, I really, really cried. Pathetic, gurgling, childish cries. I have no memories of ever being held by my mother (although she must have held me when I was a "babe in arms"), but that's what I wanted -- a mother's arms to hold me and tell me it is all going to be all right. The resident kitty cat came in and looked at me with concern and tenderness, and truly, that was a lifesaver.
In the midst of all this emotion, and a certain amount of numbness, my brain, as ever, kept working. I thought about the fact that this transition will be different from all the others of the last two or three decades for one simple reason. Other moves were ways of pulling together the learning experiences I needed to become more aligned with the Goddess. I was still the student, running from school to school to gain knowledge. Now, though, the energy has shifted. I guess I've "graduated" (!) and am ready to become, myself, the teacher. I'm so thankful for all my temporary homes of these last thirty years, and the dear friends and acquaintances who provided them. (My last post may not have been entirely clear on that point!) But I understand that there is some level on which I've become too powerful to simply look for housing. While I may not yet draw to me all the help I've been talking about, at least I need to be very honest with people about the journey I've been on, and where it has brought me. I'm bigger than I ever was. I take up more space. I have more that I want to say.
So, this morning, still shaky as heck, I set this intention: to start to feel the passion that will propel me forward in the right direction. On this new floor of the building, the old passions (choral evensong, music of Howells, etc., per se) just aren't vibrating quite the same way, and I haven't been feeling much passion of any kind. When I picked a card from the Motherpeace deck, it was: "Strength". I laughed a little ironically, feeling anything but strong. But this deck's image of a priestess surrounded by animal helpers, under a full moon, started to bring me back into alignment. Vicki Noble speaks in the book about this card representing "matriarchal consciousness", and concludes saying that the Goddess is embracing us. This little girl from Schenectady who barely knows what it is to be held, or (having not had children) to hold, needs to somehow trust that I am being "held" on the spirit plane, that the full moon will bring light to a path that still seems invisible, and that helpers of all kinds will smooth the way forward towards my new teaching role.
