Paradoxically...

Well, this continues to be a rich time, a liminal time. Traveling around the area the last few days has forced me to feel ever more nuanced impressions of the rough edges between me and my environment. Returning to "home territory" at about 70 was no accident...I see things from my child eyes, my adult eyes, and, arguably, the eyes of my higher self. Every day I am clearer and clearer about what layers of perspective were in place from the beginning, which ones were added like coats of paint over decades, and which ones may be emerging from a much higher perspective as I strip off the old paint. 

A question has amused me -- what if, when my great aunt gave me The Social Register, I had set about on a concerted effort to marry into that class? (Although she didn't quite say so, I suspect that was what she had hoped I would do.) It might have been possible, because I certainly have the ability to operate in that world, including doing polite chit-chat at cocktail parties. I might have lived a very, very privileged life, with a beautiful permanent home (UK or US), a workable marriage (if my husband had had some genuine interests -- other than money -- that overlapped with mine!), and perhaps successful children and beautiful grandchildren. I might even have had a more traditional career of my own, and/or volunteer work bringing me accolades. I might have stopped caring about whether or not I sang the music I love. I might never have focused on women's spirituality, or seen our current global moment through any eyes other than, "How can we keep this apple cart righted for the sake of my own family?" I might have been in a position to donate huge sums of money to my alma maters, and to other arts or social causes. I might have been genuinely respected, at least by a certain group of people. "What if?"

The hard part about my recent posts has been publicly acknowledging this "shadow" version of me, the self that I've been sweeping further and further under the rug every time I've lived in a contrasting situation, or traveled on public transportation, or shopped in a big box store. (Leave it to me to have a shadow self who is rich, privileged, and successful!!!) When that little voice within said, "This isn't my true place" or "These aren't my true people", I thought I was hearing the voice of a snobby little mini Dowager Countess of Grantham. The duality within me took on decidedly old paradigm form, a form I am actually as uncomfortable with as the me in thrift store clothes.

So now, it is dawning on me that the rough edges I've felt every day of my life stem from a much, much bigger perspective. Let's face it, I would eventually have felt like a fish out of water in a world of elites! It was never about where I fit on our world's current scale from deep poverty to "the top 1%". Or exactly which square foot of soil I happen to be standing on. It was never about which outward milieu would have felt most like home. Instead, it is about being true to my inner spiritual leadership. It is about who I have been for dozens of lifetimes, a specific facet of the Goddess. And until recently reaching the point of fully embracing that core heart identity, I have been rather stuck.

I know what I need to try to do over the next few weeks. I need to look at every moment, wherever I am, as a potential portal to serving the Goddess. This applies not only to my personal life, but also to the horrifying things in the news. (Some of these things are surely happening so that humanity will dig down into the rich soil of truth under the surface, and embrace new ways of being.) Expansiveness comes not from moving from one side of the "versus" screen to the other, but from embracing more and feeling life energy blooming out into all dimensions and unexpected directions. 

Paradoxically...looking more squarely and honestly at when and how "I don't feel at home" has helped me feel more at home within, and to sense that comfort expanding outward. I am thankful. I just saw my first dragonflies of the season: transformation, breaking down illusions, adaptation, inner magic. Blessings, all.

Thursday Thoughts

Back when I was a teenager attending private school in Albany, I used to take a school bus along part of what starts out as State Street in Schenectady and becomes Central Avenue in Albany. Even 55 years ago, this was for the most part a woebegone stretch of retail establishments, and my young, hypersensitive self found it a profoundly ugly urban/suburban stretch of road. Who knows, perhaps that is part of why I became fixated on getting to the English countryside. 

Yesterday, I took a city bus along the same route, and honestly, the impression that it leaves hasn't changed a bit in over half a century. Actually, it is shocking that some buildings are still there, if somewhat changed for the worse, including 1930's-era Roosevelt School that I attended from first through third grade. Putting aside how worn out/worn down a lot of the structures are, and how not visually beautiful, my obsession yesterday was imagining all the plastic being sold along the route (eventually to be discarded)...in big box stores, small convenience stores and gas stations, pharmacies, fast food restaurants, etc. OMG.

After last week's experience of recognizing some snobbishness on my part -- something that is still causing ripple effects -- I realize that I have changed a bit in six or seven days. Now, I feel a new measure of acceptance. I don't think I actively felt superior to my fellow bus riders or the landscape I was riding through. It was more a case of, I am where I am. All of it "is what it is". There were some hard moments (fights, etc.) but I did not find myself wishing I were elsewhere. I was a little bit better at centering myself and saying, "I am here. There is a reason I am here. Perhaps on some level I am a force for good."

Meanwhile, the kind of cool English summer I remember from writing up my master's thesis in July/August of 1981 is a thing of the past, and earth Herself is rumbling and feverish. Those of us in climes that are currently more temperate and bearable walk the tightrope between gratitude that we are "somewhere else" -- and the sure knowledge that at any moment, we could rumble or burn too. There's a certain calm that comes from simply letting Mother Earth do what she needs to do to regain balance. 

The Chains Holding Us Back

I work hard to edit out unnecessary words and phrases in these blog posts ("just", "a little bit", etc.) but today I'm going to start with one: "Needless to say".

Needless to say, the last two or three days have been pretty intense. I've had so many turning points over the years, that it may take time to gauge whether last week's moment on the city bus was my "road to Damascus" or just another ordinary step on the path. At the very least, I think I will look back and realize that facing perhaps my most embarrassing and shameful quality (snobbery) has released me from a painful, solitary prison. I may be one of the freest people I know, and yes, I am on a boat speeding down the lake, but there have been chains around my ankles holding me back.

On this Monday morning, am I totally transformed, in a state of bliss, feeling nothing but love? Um, no, not yet. But I have inched closer. I guess you could say that I am in a place of more complete acceptance -- that the world and the people in it are inevitably where they would have to be within the dualistic construct that has been in place for centuries. We haven't been able to help ending up at the top or the bottom, in a race to succeed, or in the constant fear of failure. We have all coped with this in different ways...but in this liminal moment, everything is changing. As we enter the Age of Aquarius, the energies of unity and love are becoming too strong to support stark duality anymore. 

I guess what was hitting me over the weekend is how very old paradigm my chains have been, these manacles keeping me tied to old traumas. I mean, remaining snobbish and condescending may have provided some slim thread of comfort at times, but it doesn't tie me one bit to things I want in my life now! Even if I could be magically transported to England to live in a stately home for the rest of my life -- near a cathedral, and perhaps to become the patron of its girls' choir -- would that be the happy ending of this Liz path? At the end of each day, would I sit in my drawing room, wearing a beautiful linen dress and pearls, sipping my gin and tonic, and say, "Finally, I'm playing the role I was meant to play"?

No! A hundred times no. Not only is it entirely too small of a role going forward, it is not a role that begins to reflect the world and values of the Goddess. As painful as it has been to be chronically outside the worlds I thought I wanted to be part of, clearly it was my unique way to prepare for the higher harmony era we are entering. It was the only way for me to become who I am meant to be now.

It is as if I've looked down at the chains and manacles around my ankles, only to realize that they are not locked shut. All I need to do is reach over, open them up, and step out of them. All the traumas, disappointments, limiting beliefs, even snobberies, can fall away, no longer to impede my freedom of movement. I may wish to continue to hold some qualities close to my chest (musicality, eagerness to learn more about the musical energies of the Universe, passion for the arts and beauty, a certain amount of dignity and strength), but the old historical details can fall away leaving me in a place of more love and acceptance. I feel slightly more at home with myself and the world than I did a few days ago, for which I am profoundly grateful. Life feels a little softer around the edges.

The Recovering Snob

Well, having stuck a pin in a particular balloon yesterday, as the air has been slowly escaping (as it were), I have been inundated by memories of when I've been snobbish, and, perhaps, its origins in my life. This doesn't seem to be a moment for sitting on anything and letting it fester, especially if it might speak to anyone else's condition, as the Quakers say.

I guess it should come as no surprise that most of my snobbishness stems from my twin passions for English church music and England itself. I've told the story of my joining the girls' choir at church, and realizing with a shock that I wouldn't be singing with the men and boys. I wouldn't be singing the repertoire that I had already started to love. Despite the fact that I pivoted as quickly as possible into "I'll be the best girl chorister that I can be" mode, and began piano and organ lessons, the fact is that being so firmly excluded from a world I felt so strongly called to be a part of was traumatic and (as is evident from my writing in this blog) I've never gotten over it. As a teenager, I wore my Royal School of Church Music medallion over my choir robe with a lot of pride, perhaps a little too much. Ditto my pride at being in the choir of Royal Holloway in 1980 -- I soaked up the experience like a sponge, and yet never afterwards had a place to "put" all the expertise in singing choral evensong and that specific genre of music. In recent years, when I have attended services at English cathedrals, I felt actively superior to most of the tourists in the stalls or pews around me. I knew when to stand, when to sit, when to say the confession, and the words of the hymns and canticles by heart, and it probably showed. I mean, it is one thing to adore the music and the environs and the glorious acoustics. It's quite another to feel superior to the people around you. My only consolation is that perhaps being blocked from doing your true work, and being (myself) condescended to at times in that world, has this kind of effect. I had a "ton" of knowledge, skill, and musicality within me, of which only perhaps a few pounds has made its way out over the years. Some of it came out, uh, inappropriately. 

Of course the larger England thing comes to me genetically, although early on I didn't really understand that. But from when I was about eight to fifteen, my family lived what could only be described as an upper crust WASP lifestyle. We had the big house, the oriental carpets, the bits of sterling silver, the summer cabin away from the city. I attended a private school, and slowly, the layers of assumptions that came with that privilege started to pile up. A relative passed on some genealogical material with our almost exclusively English heritage (some of it aristocratic), which I became fascinated with. And the original "Upstairs, Downstairs" started airing on TV in 1971, when I was in tenth grade. (I resonated most with Upstairs...) 

Ironically, that was the very moment when our family's fortunes were in the process of taking an extreme turn, in part because there had been no "fortune" in the first place! Soon after my high school graduation in 1973, we moved out of the swank house and up to the North Country, where my parents would live year-round in our cabin for the next dozen years or so. I would come home from college or my early jobs to find no food in the fridge, no gas in the car, and my dad asking to "borrow" money. Again, shock seemed to be the catalyst for snobbery. I held onto my supposedly upper crust roots like a life preserver. On and off, washing dishes at my Smith College house's dining room, or being the downstairs nanny in the home of a prominent family, or living at the YWCA in Helena, I would pinch myself and try to remind myself of my real roots, my real persona. I held onto -- as I still do -- a few small silver bowls, spoons, and picture frames. Now, finding certain things beautiful, preferable, or enjoyable is fine. If I could have simply said, these things are important and beautiful to me, it would have been fine. But to the extent that I have at times tried to make myself feel better about my ongoing situation by thinking that I am actually superior to other people, as I do on many occasions such as on the bus the other day, that is decidedly not OK. 

My dad's aunts were the epitome of snobbishness...think Maggie Smith in "Downton Abbey", minus the sense of humor! I was rather scared of them, to be honest. When I was in my thirties, I went to see one of them for the first time since childhood. I rang the doorbell, and my great aunt answered the door, looked me over, and exclaimed in a most imperious voice, "I must say, Elizabeth, you don't look like a Wilson!" (She would laugh if she would see me at 70, the spitting image of my father.) She spent the first half of the weekend making these kinds of cutting remarks, before I finally started standing up to her and showing a little moxie. By the end of the visit, I think she began to like me, and gave me two gifts which were telling -- and useless...a mink stole and a copy of The Social Register. 

Well, I guess that is all I can manage for today. Snobbery seems like a relatively minor thing by comparison with what we are seeing in the world today, but still, it isn't love. It's like the curving upper slope of something that can turn downhill fast, into rejection, outright discrimination, and hatred. And there are snobberies in a lot of areas of life...I am sure I haven't covered all of mine in this "confession", but it is a start. 

Another Big Aha

Well, they are coming thick and fast right now. Today may not be the right day for this, but I must do my best to bear regular witness to my experience of this path...

I was on a city bus yesterday to go to a smaller local city. A man got on, with seemingly everything he owned bagged up in a baby carriage. This kind of thing happens almost every time I take the bus, and sometimes it doesn't faze me. But sometimes it takes me to a very dark place indeed. It's like my own private "event horizon". For ten years or more, I've been circling the edge of a strong eddy, trying desperately to avoid being sucked in and disappearing completely. It's on the bus that I sometimes swirl closest to the void, which was what was happening in real time.

I'm at a place in my spiritual development where I literally cannot stand negative feelings for very long, so I gave myself a good inner talking-to. What was going on here? The very first layer to emerge was old-fashioned, unpleasant snobbery. My upbringing and education should have sent me in a different direction. What was I doing with "these people"? (Goddess, forgive me.) I felt, what?, distaste. Superiority. (Not hatred, I don't think.) Ugh...complex, old, extremely yucky emotions. It was painful to realize that despite this long personal spiritual journey, it wasn't yet natural to feel immediate compassion, solidarity, or love towards this fellow human being.

Suddenly, in a literal "aha", I remembered that in this duality construct, there are only two things, love and fear. And so no matter how this event manifested initially, deep down what I was feeling was fear, pure and simple. Not anger that no one should be forced to live that way, but the narcissistic fear that this man's plight might represent my future. 

Over the course of the bus ride, every possible related issue surfaced. Riding through a suburban/exurban wasteland, and looking out, I realized I was still feeling distaste. Nothing about the endless rollout of car dealerships, fast food places, hair salons, doughnut shops, and dying farms-about-to-be-razed appeared beautiful in my eyes, nor the small green lawns and parked RV's and boats. Middle class America is as psychically hard for me as the world of extreme poverty. And yet at my destination, I encountered any number of very well-off and "successful" people and was reminded that I don't belong with them either. I don't find their world particularly beautiful. I fear them, yet perhaps in a very different way than some of the folks on the bus. 

It was overwhelming to realize that, if I love so few aspects of this variegated manmade scene, then I must fear it. What is that all about? After all this enlightenment work, I am still torn with duality -- loving a small sliver of beautiful, mystical, and natural experiences and people, and profoundly uncomfortable with all the rest. How can I consider myself even remotely spiritual?

So it was a freaky day and, as it turned out, a violent one. For over an hour, there was a torrential rainstorm with extremely strong winds. Running around on errands, feeling quite dazed, I couldn't help but get soaking wet, despite sheltering for a while at the library. I was grateful to know that at least I would have a place to really dry off later in the day.

Shortly after getting on the return bus, it stopped at a corner, and who got on but the same man from the morning?! Still with his overflowing carriage. His situation hadn't changed in four or five hours. Had mine? The pendulum hadn't swung from fear to love that quickly. I didn't yet feel warmth or compassion. But I found myself in a softer place of "appreciation" -- he has found a way to just barely survive a system whose currency is money, not love. Ditto the people who build tacky one-story coffee shops, and potential customers for swank apartment buildings starting to be put up. We are all trying to survive. 

I haven't lost my personal fear of slipping over the event horizon. But by the end of the day, I was able to see the whole thing from a larger perspective. We are entering a new age where money will no longer dictate our station in life, where we will all love one another. We will outgrow the duality hell of judging each other's success or failure -- much less (on this Juneteenth) anything else about who we are. We will understand that we are all, literally, one. (Today, I feel quite ashamed of the snobbery that has beset me on and off over the years, but I think yesterday's "aha" served as a pin in the balloon, a bucket of water on the wicked witch.) Aha.

Quite a Day

From what I understand, this is quite a day, astrologically, for the energies of the divine feminine. To honor this, I am basically doing things that come naturally to me -- writing, laundry, clean-up chores, cooking...yesterday I transplanted some plants into bigger pots, and they literally doubled in size overnight! I get the feeling of being squeezed out when you don't have enough room...I couldn't stand to look at their constrained state one more minute. It's a joyous feeling to see them so immediately leaving "surviving" mode and heading into "thriving" mode.

In an interesting addendum to my last post, where I mentioned feeling so much love for animals, birds and trees (but not yet to insects!), yesterday I swear I saw at least five insects that I have never seen before in my life, or at least have no memory of seeing before. I mean, it is almost as if they sought me out, wandered into my orbit, either on foot or through the air. It was a little hard to say, "hi sweetheart" to them, but in the end, not impossible...at the very least, I was more aware of their essential beingness than I generally have been with bugs of any kind. It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds.

I've started a magic list for today, just to note anything absolutely wonderful or magical that I experience. I started with, "I am still alive", and added, "my plants doubled in size." I figure if nothing else happens, that about covers it all!

More Love

On this new moon week, and after days of definite wobbling (emotionally and energetically), I am committed to focusing on love, joy, and magic. By magic, I don't necessarily mean wave-a-wand magic (as fun as that might be!), but more, seeing and appreciating the extraordinary in nature and in life. There was a sunset about three nights ago that was about a twelve on a scale of 1-to-10...absolutely as if from another world. Magic.

I've touched on this once or twice before, but something became very clear to me this past weekend. I have started to think of birds and animals as my beloveds. When one crosses my path (on land or in the air) I often cannot help speaking aloud to it, calling it my "sweetheart". Some of them stick around for a few seconds afterwards, and some skitter or fly off as fast as can be. I knew I was capable of slightly more-than-ordinary depth of communication with people's pets and horses, but feeling almost the same about multiple wild chipmunks, squirrels, robins, wrens and raptors is a leap into what these days people seem to be calling "another timeline". And I'm feeling almost the same about trees. So far, not quite there with flowers, vegetables, weeds, grass, or insects such as mosquitos (the latter would be quite extraordinary, right?!) But for solitary old me, it is a new experience to feel waves of love going outward and, at least in some cases, being received and reciprocated. I can almost hear the word "sweetheart" coming back in my direction, on the wind.

There are only a handful of TV shows that I'm watching at the moment, one of which is "Astrid" on PBS. I am not entirely sure why the main character touches me so much, but she does. (My particular sensitivity is very different, but I resonate with her.) And I'll leave to others debates about its presentation of neurodivergence...but in a recent episode, there was an act of love that almost literally blew me away. A young man, knowing that Astrid loves the music of Bach but cannot tolerate attending crowded concert halls, arranges for the two of them to listen (alone) to a top violinist rehearse. Astrid has never heard music played live, and it is monumental for her. Putting aside the context of a budding romance, what was almost inconceivable to me was imagining someone, anyone, loving someone so much that they would find such a perfect, pierce-you-to-the-core, life-changing gift. It is astonishing that a person could see their beloved so clearly, and leap over so many hurdles, to make the perfect gift happen. Yes, it caused a big wobble, a big moment of feeling sorry for myself that I haven't experienced such love, a brief trip into the Void. But once I righted myself, I realized, this is my new bar. Finding the place inside where I can imagine not only being given a gift of this personal importance and magnitude, but also imagining giving such a gift in return -- not something I need or want, but what they need or want. 

Around the time of the new moon last night, we had a doozy of a thunderstorm, and today has dawned blissfully cool and almost fall-like. After a week of intense heat, it is -- yup -- almost magical...