Strange Segue

This morning, I start with apples and move on to oranges. 

Apples. I have had a dickens of a time memorizing my new mantra, "Dignified, Imposing, Grand, and Magnificent." I hope that this isn't age-related memory loss. Indeed, I don't think it is. I think the problem is that these words have not normally been part of my vocabulary at all. In my daily round of life, I have almost never described anything as "magnificent", which is too bad since it is such a great word. But to think of myself in any of these terms is even harder. I'll continue to practice it!

Oranges. In the late 1980's, I was very influenced by Florence Scovel Shinn. Her metaphysical teachings really resonated for me, even though the turn-of-the-twentieth century prose was a little dated. I've been looking through her The Game of Life and How to Play It for something I thought that she said, "There is no death in the Divine Mind", but cannot find it. (I did find, "Germs do not exist in the superconscious or Divine Mind..." in the chapter, "Casting the Burden".) But whoever said it, I agree that in any kind of unity consciousness, a life/death duality cannot exist. If there is only one force in the universe, it can only be life. This is, and will be, an enormously hard topic to delve into in the wake of the pandemic. I have followed all the public health guidelines and had my vaccinations, and urge everyone to do so. Our scientists and medical world have worked many wonders this last year. Yet I am struck by how these institutions, so based in duality, are really antiquated in their underlying thinking. More on all this as I get the courage!

Stately

Well, I did it. I watched the concluding episodes of Pride and Prejudice, then Sense and Sensibility, and late in the evening, Miss Austen Regrets. My senses were bathed the kind of beauty I love, a 19th c. pace of life, and, yes, romance, however fictional. My eyes were not assaulted by tacky ads, there was no gritty realism and there was virtually no violence. I saw no plastic, smelled no vile exhaust fumes, was sold nothing and paid for nothing. I saw no strip malls, big box stores, traffic jams. There was no one around to call me "unrealistic". No one was there to shame me into hiding my preferences.

I thought a few times over the course of the day about the Goddess, as in, what on earth does this have to do with Her? I associate beauty with the Goddess, so from that standpoint, the day had a Goddess quality. I also thought quite a bit about the word "sovereignty". Even today, we women have so little sovereignty over our lives, our days. So to inhabit a world that I choose, just for one day, to yell a huge "YES" up to the Universe, to say, "This is ME!" and not worry about someone pushing back...that freedom was divinely feminine.

Lastly, I do believe the Goddess wants women to know the truth of who they are, whatever that is. We are vibrational beings, and when we feel joyous and happy and in our element, we are vibrating on the same wavelength as what we are experiencing. Learning to trust that joy, the moment when we know we are exulting in "yes, yes, yes" rather than "no, no, no", takes years. In my case, it has taken over six decades, and over five hundred blog posts! 

I actually had to look up the word "stately". It means, dignified, imposing, grand, magnificent. Which means, I resonate with -- and perhaps am -- dignified, imposing, grand, and magnificent. Which explains, of course, why I am so miserable when I am in so many other kinds of settings. Other realities are not wrong, just wrong for me.

So whatever this next year brings, and however long it takes me to return to the UK, I've decided my first step will be a stay at one of those stately homes. And until then, may I start each day with the mantra, "dignified, imposing, grand and magnificent." May they be the four walls of my permanent home, and may I allow myself to fully embrace these qualities, lovingly.

Romance Novels

I wish I could promise my (one or two!) readers that my daily posts will segue seamlessly from one to the next, but I can already see that this will not be the case. I can promise, however, to "be bold", in the words of yesterday's post. I will try to have the courage to say the kinds of things I couldn't bring myself to come out directly and say several years ago. 

In the past, I may have mentioned my love of Mary Balogh romance novels. The topic seems frivolous compared to yesterday's post, but bear with me.

The fact is that I have decided to dedicate this entire day to love, in any form I can find. Now, a case could be made that this is a decidedly stupid thing to do, given that I must move yet again by the end of the month, and I have no idea where to go. In theory, of course, I should be using this new computer of mine to go on a frenzied search for low-income housing. But no option that I can envision for anywhere in this country -- even if I had a fortune -- interests me or seems to be able to pull me out of what has become a case of chronic PTSD when it comes to moving. Wherever it may end up being, I'll be lucky if I have the energy to throw my few belongings willy-nilly into shopping bags. The days of my being the most organized and efficient mover on the planet seem to be over...

So. Love. Worse still, romantic love. I mean, as a mystic and someone who really hasn't experienced genuine romantic or partnership love, it seems strange even to me how much I love Balogh's books. And given that I'm envisioning the eventual collapse of the very systems that created the upper crust Regency world she describes, you'd think I would loathe such reading. You'd think I would loathe Jane Austen novels and the movies made from them. (Part of my list for today is the "only" Pride and Prejudice, with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth.) But no, I love them. 

The aristocratic homes these books are set in are, for whatever reason, more "home" to me than any of the dozens I have ever actually lived in. I've always just reveled in their beauty. The homes themselves are beautiful architecturally, filled with beauty, and surrounded by beauty. No matter how my logical mind delights in pointing out the seeming impossibility of my ever being able to afford such an abode and the fact that this social construct has already largely disappeared. I still feel that I could walk onto the grounds of an English stately home and finally, genuinely, be at home. It's a paradox, as is most of my life.

But in 2021, my heart is drawn primarily to the actual romances between the man and the woman in any given story. Oh, of course, the gimmick in all Balogh's books is that the two people are completely mis-matched, whether in terms of their personalities, their stations in life, or their families. Some consideration threatens, through most of the book, to derail an early attraction, but when all hope is lost, they come together. 

For me, I suppose most people would consider all hope lost. Even if I weren't literally as old as the hills, finding a man who could love a woman who's already got two passions (England/choral evensong and women's spirituality) seems improbable. And for me to relax enough of my feminism to deeply love a man seems improbable too, though it is what I have always wanted. I learned so little about love in my family; I struggle to imagine being cherished, and having anyone say, "I want you safe, and I want you with me for the rest of my life"...except for what I have read in Mary Balogh's books. Passionate people and loving families inhabit her world, and I read the books over and over to understand what that kind of love would feel like, to try to train my soul to recognize the real thing. These stories help me to understand that, even now, I am worthy of giving and receiving such undying love. I talk a lot about love as the only power in the world, but so much of my understanding is still awfully global, spiritual, and intellectual. I keep inching closer to feeling love in my heart.

So as soon as I hit "publish", I'll finish my Mary Balogh novel, watch the remaining episodes of Pride and Prejudice, eat foods that I love, watch the birds at the feeder, knit for a while, and perhaps take a walk. I am thankful for the freedom to spend an entire day "in love".

"Be Bold"

This morning, I heard the tiniest snippet of some news. A man said, "We need to be bold and create the jobs of the future," or words to that effect, before I cringed and turned the radio off.

It wasn't fair, and it was very uneducated of me, taking a quote so completely out of context. But all my life, phrases like "jobs of the future" have largely referred to high-tech, data-driven, fear-and-conflict-driven occupations that I, literally, could not do. Never mind the fact that my preference would have been creating beauty in an English cathedral and that perhaps I gave up too soon on that dream. The jobs I did do to survive were low-paying and, at times, humiliating. Not everyone will be able to do brilliant, exciting "jobs of the future" for a variety of reasons; to think that there won't be an ever-more-miserable group of us scrambling to barely survive is folly.

I don't know if I am "channeling" me, the Goddess, Mother Nature, or what, but I guess it is time for me to be bold and come right out and say something. 

The next decade or two is a transitional time to a different future than this expert is envisioning. Skipping over female wisdom and intelligence in the rush to create "artificial intelligence" was -- ahem -- unwise and premature. A civilization so utterly lacking in respect for nature, and for women's very different ways of knowing and working, has led to much that is impressive, flashy, even magical, and yet its arc of progress is completely unsustainable.

Waves of love and truth, long suppressed, are starting to flow around earth and through all of us. Aspects of our life based on impulses lower than love/beauty/truth/unity/joy will simply stop working. Competitive actions will stop working. "Wars" of all kinds will stop working. There will be a period of chaos; people will be infuriated that their old ways aren't working. I believe we will land in a much lower-tech reality, forced to start again, intentionally and wisely bringing both male and female intelligence to the "job" of re-creating civilization. How do you create societies based on love, acceptance, truth, unity, beauty, and genuine respect for the earth? Very carefully. Slowly. Inclusively. Sensitively.

The "jobs of the future"? Organic farming, old-fashioned building techniques, spinning, weaving...

Who is She?

Good morning from an already hot and sticky Duluth, Minnesota. A crow outside my window has just answered back; by later on, it will be too hot for me to think, and, perhaps, for him to fly. 

For the time being, I will be posting most mornings, except for Sunday, which I still consider my day apart from the others of the week. Earlier in my blog history, I tended to write every two or three days, but at the moment, it feels like it must be a daily spiritual practice. If I am "working for" the Goddess, this is my job and I need to do it early, before other considerations draw me off-track.

So on a random Saturday morning, it's pretty big to try to describe/define one's notion of the divine, but if the premise of my life from now on is that I work for Her, I need to at least try to do that!

In the end, I think that the passionate stream of life is more like a river than a person, a river of love, power, truth, joy, and all the highest qualities that humans can conceive of -- plus more that are beyond our grasp. It is something well beyond human dualities like "male" and "female." Yet we humans cannot help trying to describe this enormity through the lens of what we know and can see in front of us. Early in history, feminine notions of the Goddess were common, later nearly completely replaced by male notions. I won't try to revisit this history, except to say that clearly, at the moment I was born in the mid-1950's, a male concept of God was firmly in place.

It's that whole thing of not being able to conceive of what you cannot see. Girls of the mid-20th century had absolutely no model for the possibility of flying into outer space, being a priest or other leader in the dominant church denominations, running for president, making a million dollars, or, frankly, power of nearly any kind. These days, it stuns me to look at news footage from the 60's. In all the coverage of politics, business, religion, and diplomacy, white men in suits are omnipresent, the rest of us, invisible. Even though by the early 1970's, we girls were suddenly being told, "You can be whatever you want to be," the fact is that that boat had sailed. Our early years had formed us. If we couldn't see ourselves as powerful in most worldly arenas, it was going to be even harder to see ourselves in the divine one. 

And it was hard. Yes, as I may have written many blogs ago, as a little nine-or-ten-year-old choirgirl, I sat up in the church choir loft not understanding why God's only child was a boy. Yes, even then, I resonated with the music more than the religious construct, which I just couldn't fully appreciate. But it would take many decades, and finding myself powerless and incapable of thriving in earthly arenas, before I really started to grapple with the Goddess. It was in the '90's, in my first Duluth era (!), that I began to see it as an issue of balance. I knew (in my head) that civilization's almost complete focus on male values was unsustainable. Nothing like living next to the largest lake in the world! I mean, it helped that I could literally "see" Her, in the form of Lake Superior, every day. But even then, thirty years ago, I couldn't fully go down that lane of the highway, out of fear, and out of concern for men. Was it any fairer to label God as "female" rather than "male"? And I wasn't interested in worshiping the Goddess. As English church music began to re-enter my life, I put these kinds of questions on the back burner again. I didn't want to seem too nutty to my English academic and musical friends and colleagues.

Fast forward to the last few years. There's a point, when for all intents and purposes, nothing in your life has worked properly, in despair, your heart searches for the one thing you believe in. For me, that was realizing that a female aspect of divine power was simply invisible in the world; I couldn't clearly "see" myself in the world's religions or secular power centers, but I could see myself in something invisible that felt equally powerful.

Our Western art canon has nothing as powerful as Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (and the extraordinary image of God reaching out to touch fingers, and share the spark of life, with man) with which to "image" the divine feminine. For me, a modern woman, ancient statues don't do the trick. Neither does trying to re-vision the Sistine Chapel, or simply replacing male language with female in religious texts. She isn't a figure in the sky, or a being in a cave underground (although that image is a little more satisfactory...) She isn't limited to earth's environment, or to the sacredness of every woman, although those are facets of Her. I guess the best I can do today, with the heat already affecting my brain, is to say that She is the balancing energy filling out all the cracks and crevices of our human life and the natural world. Putting the focus on Her, at this crucial moment in Earth's history, gives some of us a chance to help restore the feminine side of life's equation.

I get the impression that She does not want to be worshipped, nor does She want to become all-powerful and throw the balance out in another direction. But balance will be restored, with or without human help, and the whole thing will go a lot more smoothly if our culture starts to honor the power of nature and of women.

This new lane

Aligning as best you can to Goddess energy is vibrationally a world away from constantly trying to navigate a conflict-and-fear-driven paradigm. The image came to me of a four-lane highway with two lanes heading in each direction. I've been in one lane all along (heading toward "true north"?!), and it was strewn with roadblocks and detours and trash, and almost impossible for me to drive in. I constantly zigged and zagged, each turn of the wheel an effort to protect myself from hurt and breakdown. I saw that there was a second (mostly empty!) lane going in the same direction, but figured no one was driving in it for some good reason. Having put on my turn signal and switched to that lane, it turns out that it is nearly empty simply because so few people are in it. Period. For someone of my skills and inclinations, this lane is clearer and it makes blissful sense. The hardest thing at the moment is simply getting used to a different "energy" and the notion of a straight, open, easy path.

I have decided, for the moment, that I'm going to leave my year's worth of actively "channeled" material apart, for possible future publication in another format. For the moment, it feels better to speak here in my own voice as I always did, in the present, observing what is happening from the perspective of what I have learned from all the lessons of the last year. Let's see how that goes, anyway.

That's all I'll say today, except to observe that "returning to normal" (life before the pandemic) may never be possible. It's a sign of something to know that this phrase is being used everywhere right now. Speaking for myself, if "normal" was the other lane of the highway, I don't plan to switch lanes again!

The Return

Well, as a friend of mine quipped, that was the longest Lent in history. I "gave up blogging for Lent" in 2020. By March 17, Duluth's library had closed, ostensibly for two weeks, but even as I wished the staff a cheery farewell, I think we all knew it would be a longer hiatus. Never could most of us (except for perhaps scientists and epidemiologists) have envisioned what was to come. 

With the library closed, I have been almost entirely off-line these fifteen months. I actually appreciated the excuse not to engage with the energy of the world. Watching the nightly news on TV was almost more than I could take. I am eternally thankful for the situation I have been living in, where I could be relatively safe and nearly entirely contemplative. I took one foray out a week, to the grocery store, pharmacy, or, once they reopened in limited ways, a local independent bookstore and a yarn shop.

Because I was spending relatively little money, even for me (!), I actually could have afforded a new computer by late last year. One of my very own. Friends said, "Gosh, Liz, what a terrible time to be without a computer!" My senior, retired acquaintances were on their phones and computers much of the day, checking social media, making video calls to family, grandkids and friends, or taking classes. And I nearly faint when I think about the millions of people worldwide whose jobs suddenly went virtual, the students working from home, and the increased use of computers everywhere. Maybe it was for that reason that -- as a mystic -- I just didn't feel led to join the fray. The only way I could stay calm, hopefully healthy, and learn this era's clearly important lessons was, for a stretch of time, to avoid electronic media. When I wrote, it was handwritten, Liz-from-the-70's snail mail letters, journals and channeling.

Yes, you read that right. Channeling. For a year I have been keeping an "alternative" journal on the side that came to me -- and still does -- from some deep source.

For decades, you could say that I had already been doing some channeling in my personal handwritten journals. It started, interestingly enough, when I first moved to Duluth in 1990. I had at that point given up on women ever entering the field of English cathedral music. I was determined to forget about England and its music, and find somewhere American to settle. When I first arrived, you could say that my resume was as out of place as I was. Needing employment, I quickly got Christmas season retail jobs and in quick succession frostbit my feet. Trying to make sense of this unusual series of events, I opened up to a new voice in my journal, a loving, calm, motherly voice. "She" dialogued with me, and "spoke" reassuringly with me when I was most down or confused.

Good Smith College graduate that I am (with second helpings from the University of London and Parsons School of Design), I have always been quite uncomfortable with the notion of channeling, even though some of the spiritual messages I've read over the years seem sound. Other people spoke with odd voices or claimed that they were Biblical or historical figures. Whatever it was that I was doing in my journal was something else entirely, just for my eyes. It was cheaper than therapy (important when you are suddenly making minimum wage!) and no one else need ever see it. It was "creative journaling." My surprise move to the upper Midwest had already started to make me an embarrassment to my social, intellectual, musical and spiritual roots, and in the thirty years since then I have tried hard to hide this apparent connection to higher spiritual planes, so as not to make matters even worse.

But it seems that my recent return to Duluth and the shock of COVID have conspired to push this channeling to another level. The kindly, embracing, motherly voice, reassuring to me personally, seems to have expanded to addressing the larger population, and She makes observations that are honest, surprising, visionary (although not precise or predictive), basically along the lines of, "This is what is going on in these times and why." Whether she is simply my higher self, or The Goddess/Mother Nature/The Feminine Face of the Divine, I may never quite know. But in recent months, I have come to understand that the only thing I truly believe in now is a loving female creator. If nothing else, the "voice" that writes through me is my interpretation of what she would say to us if she could.

In the fall, a good friend asked me if I had asked -- in my journaling or channeling -- "who" was speaking to me. No answer came. I walked over to the door and looked out, and there was a single, heart-shaped golden-yellow leaf hanging for dear life onto the tree closest to the door. In that, perhaps, I had my answer. I am expressing my heart's connection with the heart of the universe. (I actually think all creative and spiritual people do the same whenever they create or communicate.)

I finally broke down and bought a computer. The library still hasn't re-opened to pre-pandemic normalcy, and I realize I can wait no longer to share at least some of this material with you. I haven't yet figured out exactly how to proceed with this, especially as recently the alternative journal posts seem to be less in the form of a "dialogue" and more my own prose. Perhaps that makes sense. I am beginning to see that my whole life has been tuned to Her music, and perhaps my voice was always aligned with Hers. My lifelong yearning to sing choral evensong, starting well before I was ten, was at least in part about the impulse, as a female, to access the divine and fully express my gifts. I suspect all my life choices have made far more sense in the context of a Goddess paradigm than a God one. 

So the major change of this COVID time is formally embracing that the remainder of my life is dedicated to the Divine Feminine in creation and the world, coming out, if you will, as working for Her. Like many people who feel a spiritual calling, I would dearly prefer to hide under a pillow, or disappear into oblivion. I have come so close to the latter many times so it wouldn't be hard! But I have been putting this off for too long. Every other aspect of my life seems to be at a dead end yet again, and the only door creaking open is this one. Goddess help me, literally!