On the Threshold of 70

Some of my online peeps are speaking of -- or modeling -- going through a death process (metaphorically, not literally). Just as our old paradigm institutions are crumbling and can't move forward into a higher, love-based manifestation, we personally won't be able to move forward without letting old parts of ourselves die. Well, as ever, I don't really need classes or rituals for such things. That is my life, with all the changes I have regularly made. Most recently, there is nothing like weeding through a lifetime's worth of old photographs to mirror the expression, "having your life flash before your eyes." Even the pictures from before I was born -- my grandmother in a slim long skirt and broad hat in 1915, my mother standing near Arthur's Market in Schenectady's Stockade area before her marriage, my parents on their honeymoon in Quebec --  are part of my story. I'm holding onto most of these historic snapshots, plus ten or twelve from each phase of this lifetime. 

And yet, this lifetime feels over. Absolutely done and dusted, as they say over the pond. I don't say this from despair at the collapse of our larger paradigm. Quite the contrary. For someone like me, the American experience was never fertile soil. A female mystic and English church musician? As someone I once knew used to say, I felt as welcome as a hair in a biscuit. The pressure to try to be anyone else, with any other core identity and passion, was so strong it nearly erased me over and over and over again. I see these snapshots -- the bemused looking "working girl" at Time Magazine, the overwhelming view out my window of Lake Superior making me feel miniscule, a heavier version of me caretaking my dying mom and later trying to stave off bankruptcy by selling my artwork. I hold my baby nieces, terrified that I will drop them, represent a small-town art association in a fourth of July parade, smile with friends at their Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts. I used to laugh at the fact that I had several "para" jobs -- paralegal, paraprofessional. But my whole life was trying to be "like" a normal American, and yet I operated literally alongside everyone, not genuinely fitting into any of these pictures. So It feels good to pare this collection way back, just to the number that I could show a future friend "who I was from 1-70".

Two major things have changed over the last few weeks. If you have been reading this blog, you know that I not-so-secretly and passionately love England and its cathedral choral music tradition. Over the years, it has been like a love affair, only unrequited, waves of love energy going out constantly, seemingly into the void. Part of my shame was the fact that with a few important exceptions, I felt no reciprocation. It became part of my knee-jerk reaction to assume that I never would.

But the other week, these incredible words came to me: "What you love, loves you in return." This may not always be true of people or institutions, but in my case, I suddenly felt that yes, there is an entire landscape, an entire soul of place, that loves me. For the first time ever, I have started to be able to watch videos and movies about the UK, and feel almost 100% warm, delighted, engaged and included. I'm no longer staring across an abyss -- I am in the picture. And in tandem, another related step forward. Yesterday I was on my own, and I turned on Parry's "I Was Glad" and Harris's "Faire is the Heaven" at full volume. I sang with total, loud, joyful abandon. No shame, no longing, no bittersweetness, no crying, no expectations. Just sheer joy, harmony, and unity. My landscape and my music love me back, and it is super powerful. 

If this isn't a rebirth on the threshold of 70, I don't know what is.

Goddess Words 56: Warmth

It seems appropriate on a frigid day like today to speak of warmth, both the physical sensation of being not-cold, and the personal quality of friendliness. I am one of the fortunate Americans who is under a warm roof this morning, many thousands in the south still being without power. Upstate New York (like my previous temporary homes in the northern tier of states) is used to cold winters, although Winter '25-'26 has been particularly brutal. But it will be unforgettable for generations to come in many normally-warmer states.

I think that when I added this to my list of Goddess words, I was referring to the human emotion of warmth, although it is possible that in a more Goddess-centered world, the earth might not experience its current extremes of cold and hot temperature. That's something we cannot know right now. But human warmth is something we have a bit more control over, or at least some of us do! I think the most shocking aspect of recent events has been to watch the deliberate cruelty towards other people, the complete and utter absence of warmth, empathy, or kindness. In the past, when I read about historical events characterized by this same brutality, I think even I lulled myself into thinking that humanity is slowly improving...that such vile treatment of other people surely must be going the way of the dinosaur. Now it is becoming clear that is not the case.

Looking at the religious tradition that I grew up in, I realize that there wasn't much in the way of warmth. Majesty, yes, drama, yes, a beautiful prayer book and musical tradition, and fine words about love and caring for others. (In the church context, I never felt held, embraced, cared for, or noticed in a motherly way, and in turn, in some areas of my own life, I have kept a rather cool interpersonal energy, I am sorry to say.) Even exhortations to care for the sick and feed the hungry came across as kind of "arm's length" -- in my church experience, after the Gospel reading was finished, I don't think we were literally expected to look struggling people in the eye, and to walk with them and hear their stories. And, of course, because of the underlying duality of the paradigm (good vs. evil), the energy I felt so often around the theology I was exposed to was militaristic and combative. I once did a collage using clippings from an old hymnal -- all of them about marching off to war, and victory over evil, etc. It was horrifying, the high percentage of hymns containing such expressions!

One of the things I keep reminding myself is that, even before these current horrors, our entire system was far from "warm". There may be nothing "colder" than a financial construct whose only consideration is how much profit you make. Forcing people to "earn a living" is cold. Competitive systems in health care, education, housing, and so many other areas of our world are cold. Many of us who couldn't navigate such coldness were encouraged even by the most well-meaning people to at least try to function -- "it is the only system we have, Liz." But there's the problem, we adapted and adapted and adapted to this chronic coldness, and can only see its deficiencies clearly as it reaches its final, crumbling stages. 

I don't believe that a person can be warm and compassionate and still own or use weapons, but urging people to change may not work. We have entered the Age of Aquarius (and the return of the Goddess), and from this point forward, conflict will gradually, "simply", stop working. Human coldness -- as much as it seems to be spreading right now -- is on its last legs. This is a monumental shift, and it is happening as we speak. From now on, if we have the choice, acting from a place of compassion and warmth will always work better than pushback and fighting. Warmth toward others is a core value in the emerging paradigm. It will be there in the future, but the coldness won't be. We need to keep holding on to that truth if we can, like a warm cup of tea.

Old Photographs

On this extremely cold and snowy day (at least for this part of the world), I have been doing two things -- shoveling snow, and going through and weeding out old photographs. No, it is not lost on me that over the last week, our nation seems to have gone over a cliff. Perhaps it is because of this that I feel so strongly called to address my blue box of snapshots, and reduce all my remaining belongings as far as possible

I think I have had this box for at least 30 years. Some of the pictures in it were in scrapbooks "back in the day", but I came to realize that the books were too heavy to keep moving around, so -- ta da! -- the pics (and hundreds of subsequent ones) were piled into this box in no particular order, although I did manage to keep them stored vertically. There are a few from junior high school and high school, family events, summers on Lake Champlain, some more from Smith, my year at Royal Holloway, my almost-decade in New York City (I took a photography course at Parsons, so some of these are in moody black-and-white), Pendle Hill, Duluth (my first incarnation there), the Champlain Valley years, and many dozens of my nieces. I don't have many from the last 15 years or so, through the digital age, since I took fewer pictures and they didn't often get printed out.

But if any of you have gone through this process, you know it is an emotional one. As with some of my memorabilia, I've held onto photographs not only to remind myself of the places and people in my varied and unusual journey, but as proof to show others, or as talking points. I've held onto this notion that a granddaughter figure might befriend me before I die, and I could sit with her and go through my pictures, telling her about people, places and situations. As I near 70, the notion that I will have such a person -- or that we will have the leisure to pore over memorabilia -- seems to fade. And these events and people seem almost literally like they are from another lifetime.

(I almost forgot to mention an important thing when I first published a few hours ago. Each picture that I have decided to release to the "no" pile, I have touched, and thanked that person or place for their role in my life. I hated throwing them out on a symbolic level, but when these photos are piled together, they are just too heavy to keep!)

One other comment -- it's been a bit unnerving seeing dozens of photos of my dad, smiling in nearly all of them, looking like the sweetest guy in the world and not quite as I have described him. For the millionth time, I've questioned my own experience, and yet deep down, I trust myself. It's a reminder that things can be -- uh -- complicated.

Tomorrow's chore is to go through the "keep" pile one more time, both to put the pictures in some sort of order, and to further weed out duplicates and others. This isn't serving to put the unconscionable cruelty of this moment out of mind, but it does ready me to be agile enough to serve the Goddess and the spirit of Love, moving forward.

Tornados of Fire

This is an essay I wrote just before I started this blog, in June of 2015. I just found the handwritten draft among my things, and although I think I have told you about this dream before, and this piece looks back more critically and perhaps negatively than I would today, I still feel that it is worth sharing, slightly edited:

Very few dreams have stayed with me through the years, but one vividly symbolic one is never far from my mind.

I was about four when I had this dream. In it, I was taking a walk up our road, a country-suburban "lane" near Schenectady. I looked to my right, and realized with horror that an enormous tornado of fire was burning its way through the field adjacent to our property and heading straight for our little white house. I turned around and, as fast as my little legs would carry me, I raced to the house to warn my family. I ran up the steps, opened the door, and wanted to shout out a warning, only nothing came out. I was so afraid that my voice had stopped working. So I ran all over the house looking for my mom, dad, and two brothers, but no one was there. It was only when I returned to the dining room -- the center of the house -- that I realized that all the furniture had been removed, and I had been abandoned. I stood frozen in place, waiting for the tornado to hit, when I awoke.

I was never actually abandoned as a child, of course. In their own way, my parents did a courageous job of trying to "do" the 50's American suburban model, given the highly dysfunctional Depression-era families they had come from themselves. My World War II veteran father worked for General Electric, and came home each night to sip a succession of cocktails. My uncomfortable-in-the-domestic-skin mother chain-smoked and sipped coffee at 5 AM each morning to carve out some time to herself. The tiny white kitchen was classic 50's, books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring lined the living room bookshelf, and a shoebox-sized and shaped black-and-white television (with probably an 8x8 inch screen) was our window to everything from the local "Freddy Freihofer" show to the nightly news. Our house was surrounded by fields and had a blue wading pool and swing set in the yard. 

Yet clearly that dream reflected the emotional landscape I felt I was living in. For whatever reason, I felt utterly alone in the world, left, yes, to face even the most dire threats on my own. When I looked at my parents, I evidently did not see love, concern, or recognition mirrored back to me.

So it's interesting that it must be around this time that I was first taken with Mom and Dad to church, one of the services at our historic Episcopal church that featured its then-thriving men and boys' choir. The minute I heard the sound of this choir, I was enthralled. Utterly enthralled. The clear boys' voices and the men's voice combined to create magic. I wanted to sing in the choir. Period. This music was me. At the age of four, I knew this, and I was ready to start singing. However, my mother returned a few days later from a chat with the choirmaster with the news that I would have to wait a full two years before I could join the choir. Two years! I couldn't bear to wait, and nearly counted the days!

So it was, that sometime after my sixth birthday in 1962, my mother drove me down to my first choir rehearsal. I was almost beside myself in eager anticipation. Yet when we arrived at the choir room and walked in, I went into shock. This was the wrong choir! Around me, several young girls, several teenage girls, and some older women were collecting music and hymnals, and preparing for the rehearsal. I was introduced around, and I dutifully sat down and joined in the warm-up and rehearsal. No one could see that, for all intents and purposes, I had just died. 

It wasn't a case of gender confusion. I didn't want to be a boy. It's just that I had fallen in love with a sound, and a repertoire of music, that I would never experience in the St. Cecilia Choir ("the girls' choir"). If I didn't know by that first rehearsal, I would soon learn the full extent of the inequalities between our choir and the men and boys'. First and foremost is the fact that the men and boys' choir was respected. Almost every Sunday, the rector would find a way (in his hearty, faux-English accent) to praise the other choir. If we received the odd mention, it was with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. The men and boys' choir members were paid and considered professional. They worked hard, there is no doubt about it, and so did the mothers. My mom eventually ferried my brothers back and forth to three rehearsals a week, in addition to a Sunday service. My brothers came home once a month with a small pay envelope, and early on learned about the link between effort and financial reward. We girls knew without having to be told that we were inferior, that we were not worth training more comprehensively, and that females were simply not part of this grand, glorious English men and boys' choir tradition. And like virtually all women in the church in that era, we were volunteers to boot.

I came close to dying that year, psychically at least. As the months progressed the rest of that school year -- first grade -- I responded to the shock by developing nearsightedness and a habit of pulling out my hair that alarmed my teachers and parents. I went from being a vivacious, pink-cheeked, blonde-haired Shirley Temple to a serious, dark-haired, glasses-wearing little girl, almost overnight. Once I managed to accept the choir status quo, I determined to become the best girl chorister of the bunch, and started to rack up gold bars on my red "Royal School of Church Music" medallion ribbon with almost savage pride. I began to collect recordings of the great English choirs (King's College, Cambridge; St. John's College, Cambridge; Westminster Abbey...) and taught myself to sing Anglican chant and many classics of the English cathedral repertoire, not at choir rehearsal, but holed up in my room listening to my record player. By the time I was 12 or 13, I determined that my life's goal was to be the first woman conductor of the choir of King's College, Cambridge. To say that this set me apart from my contemporaries is an understatement! None of my friends, classmates, or teachers had a clue what I was talking about. By the time I got to college, however, this dream had devolved into wanting to move to England, get married and have boys who would sing at King's. I would live vicariously through men.

There were apparently a few other American women on a similar path. Honor Moore's memoir, The Bishop's Daughter, speaks of trying to train herself to sing with the pure sound of a boy soprano, as I did. Yet for almost fifty years I felt alone, and carried with me the toxic weight of rage and blame. What was wrong with my family that I should be so invisible in their midst? What was wrong with men, the church, even God, that they should exclude women, rendering them invisible? Inaudible? Voiceless? I had (and continue to have) a feminist fire in my belly, an almost insatiable desire to burst out of this involuntary "solitary confinement" and sing with the choir, be out there, singing and speaking and being respected for my skills. They had ripped my heart out in the early '60's, and I wouldn't rest until I could find it again and place it back in my chest.

It is only since the singular events of the last few years that I have finally come to fully accept an important truth. I think the Goddess and I sat down before this incarnation, and She said, "I have a great assignment for you. How would you like to be one of the first women to try to break into the English men and boys' choir tradition?" (In that context, it makes perfect sense that I chose my parents, and the girls' choir at a high church "Church of England-style" American place of worship. It also makes sense that my dad's mother had been a pioneering Canadian woman lawyer, giving me that feisty piece.) In this scenario, I was perhaps less likely to accept the rejection than young British girls of the period.

And with the early disappointment came a singularly strong "rocket of desire", to use a term coined by Abraham Hicks. This passion has stayed with me through thick and thin -- mostly thin. And what I for so long interpreted as my "lost years" were basically me biding my time until other girls and women began to enter the field, and there was a critical mass.

In this light, I can find an intriguing new interpretation of the dream. What if the tornado of fire represents not terror, but passion? What if, alone in my family and musical tradition, I was the only one with the courage to stand up and face -- even embrace -- my passion in life? That tornado of fire has, at times, sent me and my life flying through the air, and yet from my current vantage point, I am proud to have weathered the storm.

There are many interesting things about this essay, but for the most part I'll leave it alone, except to say that, of course, I did have about nine months of singing daily services at Royal Holloway College in 1980-81, and the same time period singing weekly services at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine fifteen years ago. I'm not sure why I didn't mention this when I wrote this, but I do so now. Even now, when I watch choral evensong services streamed online, I do so with kind of a bittersweetness that hasn't completely gone away. If my tornado of fire could take me today to the perfect situation, it would be as an "anchoress of the Goddess", home near an English cathedral or college choir, where the services would be available for me to attend every day.

The Spiral

The process of going through my boxes yet again has been painful but absolutely necessary. Whether I go forward with eight or nine boxes of belongings or three or four isn't really the issue. The issue, in these extraordinary times, is my intention to carry forward only the materials that support my life on behalf of the Goddess. Even now, I'm stunned to find a handful of negative things I held onto to prove what kinds of roadblocks I experienced in my life...such as a few pages of medical records from when I fell and fractured my elbow, and the hospital wouldn't operate because they insisted I had broken it previously (I had not. I assume this was because I had no insurance. My elbow eventually healed, but I'm sorry to say that I think I have held onto an inner desire to shame the people involved.) On the other side of the coin, I have saved (and still will for the moment) mementos of higher moments (a piece of my personalized Time Magazine stationery, flyers from organ recitals and art shows). Yeah, my inner historian/biographer is slowly exiting stage left. I'm sure she wanted documented proof of a life almost too strange to have been true, but as of the last few months, I feel less and less inclined to go back over old ground in that way. We're leaving that paradigm. If I end up being anyone's heroine, I hope it won't be because I survived the old paradigm, but because I take a welcoming and teaching role in the new one.

Even one slip of unnecessary paper has become "too much", too weighty. Here's an example. I've held onto a few things from the Smith College Chamber Singers tour of Spain in 1976, one of which I had assumed was a small itinerary. Upon actually opening it up, it turned out to be a menu from a meal we ate there. Fascinating, something to celebrate as part of a rich and unique life, but not worth taking forward from here. More recycling!

However, one thing stopped me dead in my tracks yesterday, and it initially brought up some of the feelings of shame, fury, hate, and helplessness that I spoke of last time, leading me to realize that I still have active healing work to do! It is a notebook that I bought in 2015, on the short trip I took to the UK to audition for the choir of Gloucester Cathedral, and then extended for a few months. I had happened upon a workshop about connecting with your true calling, and took it (and found kindred spirits there) and kept a journal of the class.

What made me tearful was a drawing (2-page spread) which I guess you could say was both illustrative of my inner landscape, plus where I literally was at that moment, plus the dream I have essentially had since childhood. In the foreground, I pictured myself on top of a rocky hill, overlooking the English countryside. There's a house in the middle distance, and a cathedral city in the background, and scattered around me are the tools of two of my creative gifts -- a journal and pen, and an easel and paints. In the center, a simple spiral. Overhead, an eagle soars in the sunny sky.

At that exact moment in the English west country, I initially felt hopeful that finally, I would physically live this dream. The spiral was like a grounding point, and it is a drawing full of light. Yet only a few pages later, I faced the hard truth that I couldn't believe my dream would ever permanently come true. I didn't feel I had the power within me. My entries in this notebook vacillated up and down for a few more weeks, before petering out as I got ready to return "home".

I'm thankful that I held onto this booklet through several purges -- how easy it would have been to deep-six it in frustration. How many sleepless nights over the intervening years have I questioned God and the Goddess over not being able to "figure out" getting back to England? Yes, I've returned for a few visits, but I haven't yet alchemized living a permanent calling there. I finally understand that the effort to figure out/find action steps etc. was the whole problem...since I am, at my core, a right-brained, creative Goddess. Perhaps I have felt stuck for a decade or more, but it took more years to spiral further up the dream, to spiral up into loving my own genuine self, to spiral up into self-acceptance, to spiral up in welcoming my life's strange paradoxes, and to spiral up in increasing love and compassion.

Today, I'm going to spend a long time gazing at this picture, because it is like a series of oracle cards. When I drew it, I probably resonated the most with the cathedral spires, perhaps the homey structure, but now it is the eagle. At my age, I have spiraled up through countless gusty air currents, metaphorically. Being the soaring eagle and looking down from above, as I spread out my wings like an embrace, I realize that the whole image is me, and has been for this whole lifetime, from the moment I first heard the men-and-boys' choir at our church, to the year of singing and studying at Royal Holloway College, and through all my various incarnations here in the States. My higher, floating self knows why things had to be the way they have been, and has kept the vision, and still does. There is no cause for sadness here.

As I continue to spiral upward, I intend to hold onto this notebook and the pivotal sketch, at least for a little longer. I think it serves the Goddess to continue to have it in my possession, and to reference it. Talk about getting to a really intense moment in one's discernment process. Literally, piece of paper by piece of paper.

The Great Misunderstanding

This moment is excruciating. I don't have to tell you that. I've largely powered my way through the madness by focusing on my own spiritual and physical health, but of course that's only serving to heighten the contrast with the in-sanity without. This might be the right time to reference the physical ailment I dealt with late in the fall/early winter. Let's face it, in our outer world, things were in full swing by then, and perhaps it was inevitable that my body would eventually succumb to dis-ease. I had to seek medical attention, and I am glad I did. And yet even from the first moment of using the prescription meant to fight the condition, I knew that my inner "non-violence" would be an issue, as it has been for years. And sure enough, medicine got the healing process started, but didn't seem to finish it.

So I literally had to dig deep, and address everything within me that was at war with the outside world, every last iota of fury, fear, feminist cynicism, and resentment eating away at me. I had to address the ways that I have hated the world's violence and greed, hated myself, hated my body, hated the frustrations of my journey (and how I have constantly felt exiled), and hated feeling so alone and homeless. For a so-called peaceful person, I had an awful lot of hatred within me that I could no longer hide from. As I went through the process step-by-step, I knew perfectly well that this was all a well-timed metaphor, a final exam of sorts forcing me to do a complete detox heading into this all-important year of 2026. Until I completely healed myself of The Great Misunderstanding (a belief that unwanted conditions are caused by outer factors that can be "fought"), I would be powerless to operate effectively in the all-Love post-duality new paradigm that we have entered,

I think I have basically passed that exam, although this week's excessive congestion reminds me that being a physician and regularly healing myself will continue to be a daily necessity. Other processes may have worked a millennium ago, or a century ago, or a decade ago, or even a year ago, but not today. Full physical healing can only come from Love, not just medical intervention. Safety can only come from emanating inner Love into the outside world and being loved in return -- not from warfare, or scaring people, or amassing land, power, and wealth. Real nourishment can only come from loving the food we consume and the beautiful planet that provided it -- not from ever-more-complex processed food concoctions and addictions. And wisdom will only come from the journey within -- not from an outward accumulation of educational experiences, information, data, and facts.

The way forward is simple. Hard, but not complex. Do the inner work. Do the inner healing. Love yourself, your journey, and your body. Don't try to fix anyone or anything but yourself. This morning, it doesn't make our outward scenario any less painful, but I can finally be reasonably sure I am not adding to the world's suffering, even unwittingly. And I can step forward, at peace with "what is".

Trees

Well, this journey of mine keeps conforming to what I am hearing and reading about the astrological and energetic changes we are going through. This is what today feels like, unnervingly, as if I have taken one of those really fast elevators up about 50 floors, and have left everything I ever was down below. No, I'm not acting on the sensation, and dragging my remaining boxes to the dump, or buying a one-way ticket to "anywhere" (yet), but that's what it feels like. That's how different I feel today from the person I've been for nearly 70 years. It's as if the earlier person was the seed, and suddenly, lickety-split, the sun came out after a warm rain, and my seed has sprouted through the surface, and I don't recognize either my own spindly green body and its potential, or the landscape around me, but I'm glad to be alive.

In a related vein, I did a guided visualization yesterday. I've been fighting off a cold, and my head, neck and shoulders felt heavy and congested. In the visualization, my head became a tree. My hair was the branches and leaves, my skull and neck were the trunk, and my arteries and clavicles were the tree roots. (I almost tried to draw a picture of this to share with you, but decided it might limit you if you decided to envision the same thing.) The phrase that came to me in the course of the visualization was, "I've found the tree within." 

I have no real idea what all this means, except that it is interesting that these two sensations came within a day of each other. Something about breaking through the surface with sudden new growth, with powerful energy facing the sky and the warmth of the sun, yet still having powerful roots planted in Mother Earth. Being the vertical connection between all the layers of reality. Allowing oneself to truly break through the surface and sing.

Normally, I don't write in the afternoon and just "go for it", but today, here goes.