Threescore Years and Ten

For days, I've been trying to articulate what it means to reach 70, what it feels like to reach 70, and other related thoughts. The drafting process has been much harder than I expected. On the one hand, if the span of a life was "threescore years and ten" back in biblical days (Psalm 90), then reaching this milestone in our era should theoretically be "easy-peasy". If 70 is the new 50 (or 40, or whatever), then this should only be a minor blip. And yet...and yet...so many people never make it this far, for a host of reasons, both natural and unnatural. One of my own brothers only lived to 55. Having lived such an uncertain, change-dotted, and unconventional life, I am still amazed that I am here.

It is strange...the last few weeks I have been fearful that something would happen to prevent me from reaching this watershed. This negativity is very unlike me...but I became fixated on the thought that I didn't wish to die in my sixties. So a wave of relief has washed over me this morning. Somehow, despite a whole lot of odds, I have made it this far. It is an immense privilege. I even feel little peeks (and peaks) of joy.

Twenty years ago this summer, I hosted a large 50th birthday party event -- for myself. Having never married or had children, it was the equivalent of a wedding, baby shower, and big birthday bash rolled into one. I lived in a small town, so there were dozens of local people, plus some dear friends from further afield. My dad even came across country for it. It was a Big Deal, and I am proud of having had the nerve to go through with it! And yet my recent review of old photos makes me aware of having been quite a different person back then. I was still uneasy with my true passions (although a friend did make a Goddess-themed cake!), and it was a moment when I still hoped to "make it", somehow, in a more conventional sense. It was fun being the center of attention, but did anyone really understand who I was at my core, even me?!

The energy of today is really, really different. The image I am getting is of a low bar, like a limbo game at a party. I just want to sneak under the bar and get to the other side in one piece, with maybe a low-key lunch out with friends or a big piece of chocolate cake with chocolate icing. No singing, no presents, no big deal. 

In an unrelated aside, I need to say this. I truly, truly do not understand the cruelty we are all seeing right now. I mean, completely do not understand or resonate with it at all. It is horrifying and sickening. Even the slightest iota of pain to any living thing is hard to bear. Yesterday, when I took a shower, I suddenly realized that a large daddy longlegs was struggling near the drain. I am so nearsighted, by the time I tried to "help" him, my efforts basically sealed the deal. He (and some of my hair) had to go into the trash. I was nearly in tears...to inadvertently kill anything so close to my birthday almost did me in. 

I try to remind myself that, ultimately, "there is no death in the divine mind" -- for me, for you, for your pets, for any being. Life is eternal. Before "birth" and after "death" we are eternally part of the great stream of life and love passion surging through the universe. As I move through a quiet anniversary, here is my intention for upcoming weeks and months: "This is the chapter of the story where I soar on love's winds -- and love's wings! May this quiet portal bring me to my most powerful 'place', where I am more help to people, the earth, and the Goddess than I have ever been." 

More thoughts on forgiveness

I last wrote about forgiveness about two years ago, but this is a somewhat different approach.

This weekend, in the lull after yet another round of paring back on belongings, several ways that I continue to hold onto some negative inner baggage popped to the surface, perhaps not surprisingly. During the course of this latest process, I was pretty fastidious about blessing the photographs that I chose to throw out, thanking  people for the roles they had played in my life. I wasn't as generous-hearted about paperwork. Lets face it, many of the old papers represented institutions and business entities, and I have never felt any alignment with that world. A few weeks ago, it was simply a basic feeling of, "Wow, I'll feel lighter when I recycle this old stuff." But of course, the bad feelings weren't necessarily situated in those brown storage boxes or on the sheets of paper themselves. They were still lingering deep inside of me, my heart, my body, my psyche. Fortunately, the revolving door moves so quickly these days that it didn't take long to realize that I needed to do a little serious healing work, at least around a handful of memories. I'll say a little more about my process below.

What emerged from this was really facing my complicated feelings about nearly 30 years without health insurance (and, usually, health care within our current construct). Back then, I realized that I was going to be on a unique path, and would have to learn unprecedented self-reliance in terms of my physical health. I knew, increasingly, that I was readying myself to operate in the new paradigm. And yet, I also must have been "swallowing" a measure of resentment over the hoops people need to go through to "earn" basic medical attention. I scanned my body for signs of these negative emotions, and focused a lot of love on them, but also felt amazement and gratitude that I'm still here, as ever.

Inevitably, my thoughts took me beyond my own personal experiences. In the current tumultuous moment, what is the bigger picture? How are we who are mystics and healers to respond to widespread cruelty and inhumanity? For those of us not called to protest or push back -- if our role is to embody the new paradigm -- where (if at all) does forgiveness fit in?

In an older dictionary I still consult, the financial and legal roots of the word "forgiveness" are highlighted, but in our modern era, it's more about the psychological release that comes from the decision to no longer hate or resent someone who has harmed us. It's a complicated notion, no matter what perspective you look at it from, isn't it? I have been blocked all these years by the fact that the people and institutions that have caused me the most trauma have not had the capacity to ask for my forgiveness. In that situation, I find it impossible to think or say, "I forgive you." But if I get stuck in my own unforgiveness (duality again!), I cannot be an effective light worker.

So what is the new paradigm path in these situations? I can only speak for myself here, and present my path. 1) I acknowledge the reality of my memories and the hard emotions they bring up (or the reality of a current personal situation or event in the news). Really look at it and feel the pain. 2) (This step is "where I am coming from" and may not work for others.) I go back as far as I can, historically, often acknowledging that the core pain may come from really big, long-arc movements like patriarchy and duality. I cannot adequately explain the historical necessity for these trends in the human experience, but I remind myself that everything I have experienced in this lifetime was birthed in these old models that are now shifting. 3) Then, in that context, I try, if possible, to feel compassion for any person who represents the old paradigm. (Better still, if I can possibly feel genuine, positive gratitude for that person or situation -- for their role in helping me learn new truths -- that's great.) But if I cannot feel either gratitude or compassion -- if an institution or person has simply been too unrepentantly cruel -- then all I can do is say, "I do not speak this old, inhumane language and it is time to turn around and move forward to create a more love-centered world." "Forgiveness" is another concept that will not last long in the new paradigm, because it references not-love. As we move forward, fewer people will knowingly hurt other people, so forgiveness will gradually become unnecessary. 

With every passing day...

With every passing day, I become more convinced that the enormous missing piece in our world is "respect for the Divine Feminine"... that this is evident in virtually every event, conflict, and crisis in the news. At this pivotal moment, I can't see how any single change ("stopping" this, that, or the other thing) could possibly bring long term stability or peace. Only an enormous spiritual leap upwards, bringing with it an embrace of the Goddess and the power of Love, has that potential.

I'm reading an amazing book: The Serpent and the Goddess by Mary Condren. Like so many feminist classics that I discovered in recent years, it was published in the late 1980's. I have only finished the first chapter-and-a-half, but even if I returned the book to the library now, it has been grounding and vindicating, a reminder that there is a reason trying to self-actualize as a woman has been consistently challenging, nearly impossible sometimes. That I may finally have done it (at least within myself) feels miraculous, especially in the context of everything we are seeing right now. Of course, perhaps this painful (and sometimes absurd) "contrast" is helping to push some of us upward into the new paradigm. 

Overall, having largely embraced the whole scope of my journey, I now rarely feel "regret" per se, but a little of it rises up when I think to myself, what if I had discovered this (and perhaps a dozen other books) back in the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties? What if my journey had taken me on the path, say, of becoming a feminist scholar? Might I not potentially have had at least a more stable existence, and a "tribe"? It is certainly possible...intellectually, that route would have been far more satisfying than jobs in retail, restaurants, and lower-echelon teaching. But I'm not sure in those days I could have pivoted completely, given that I still secretly hoped someday to enter into the field of English church music. Recently, I've been able to "marry" the Goddess and choral evensong, but it was just too much of a stretch 35 years ago, when there wasn't one woman in the field. I didn't dare reveal my feminism...as if it wasn't evident already, huh???! And I might never have reached the same point of integration. 

I feel strangely light and optimistic today, but it goes back to "when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose"... I'm so ready for the new paradigm, and I am beginning to feel the energies of it in daily life. Little moments of wonder and joy. Every day of this lifetime was undoubtedly the appropriate training for where I am headed, wherever that may be. With every passing day, I begin to understand the patterns and events that brought me here, and I bless this present moment in time as "perfectly as it must be", a threshold to something quite fresh. Using the same ingredients, but creating something bigger, more brilliant.

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 to 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.

A) and B)

We seem to have reached the point where two things are true -- A) The news is leaving me absolutely speechless and B) I have a feeling that in 1,076 posts, I've basically said just about everything, spiritually, that I can think of that is relevant right now, and I don't want to bore you. We have entered a new energetic and astrological age, post-duality and Love-oriented, and those who cannot handle this are wigging out. That's it in a nutshell. This year will be a very wild ride. The hardest thing for me continues to be holding as high an energy as I can when others are, understandably, reacting. You can seem like you don't care, when in fact you care more than anyone knows, only caring takes the form of trying to model the new paradigm, not fight to fix the old one. This becomes particularly hard when the state of Minnesota, site of so much that was positive and growth-filled for me, is under siege. The mother in me wishes I could wrap my arms around it and protect it.

What is my job for today? Assessing whether my own thoughts or actions are consistent with an all-Love future, and assessing situations outside myself by the same yardstick. This pretty much guarantees that I am in a completely different ballpark than the powers-that-be -- but hey, I finally understand that this was always the case. The game in that other stadium will increasingly lose fans. Really, it will.

Goddess Words 55: Energy

When everything is going pear-shaped, it is time for another Goddess word. Another brick in the foundation. 

I had to go back and check my list twice, like Santa Claus, because I couldn't believe I hadn't already examined this word over the last four years, but it appears that I haven't.

There are so many nuances of meaning to this word...in essence, a life force or catalyst for change.

So, looking back almost twenty years, how did I think this word related to the Goddess? I consider Her the indispensable creative force, that the Great Mother is literally the energy that birthed the Universe -- yes, in active partnership with the male God energy worshipped for generations, but, unlike him, largely forgotten. Out of Her energetic body came all of it, stars, planets, galaxies, life of all kind, including on earth. This energy or life force is constantly renewing, never fully ebbing or ending, just transforming and transitioning into new forms.

In day-to-day usage, energy can be about what one does (or does not) have it in them to do. Do I have the energy (at nearly 70) to go out and shovel snow? To take a long road trip? To take the city bus half an hour to do errands? To go through my boxes and make decisions -- again?

Then there's the "energy" we notice about other people or situations, almost an aura. If we are sensitive, we can walk into a room and immediately pick up whether a person is angry, or scared, or elated, or "shut down". We can sense uncomfortable energies between people, or their hatred for (or conversely, their attraction to) one another. There are people's energies individually, and then how those energies interact with other energies. (I hope it goes without saying that I am taking a really unscientific look at energy. I couldn't do otherwise if my life depended on it!)

Lastly (and this is something I think I can say as a layperson), "energy" is the word we use in the context of the materials we use to power modern life. Many of these materials ("natural resources") are substances extracted from the earth. The extraction and refining of these resources are expensive and complex -- but the actual resources have been free to mankind, whether they be trees, wind, water, sun, coal, natural gas, or oil. Gaia has literally gifted us these energy sources all through history. We have taken this "free" material and alchemized it into power and money -- huge amounts of it, for some. What I find fascinating is that I think we are entering a time when aligning to Goddess/Love energy will allow humans to travel, communicate, and create outside our current human limitations. We won't always need these old-fashioned physical resources which cause so much conflict. 

Our processes have sapped Gaia's life energy in so many ways. If we were to listen to Her, we would probably hear Her begging us to honor Her energy, Her power, Her creativity. She can survive without our honor -- indeed, Earth will go on and eventually prosper even if we humans destroy ourselves. The energy of the Goddess is indestructible. But I also believe it would be Her preference that our human energies align with Her. She would love to co-create a better future with us!

More Epiphanies

Interesting that the last post which I titled "Epiphanies" came on this day in 2020! The current crop of them is coming thick and fast, isn't it?

I am thankful for having several online resources that keep me sane by reflecting back to me the reality I believe -- that earth, having entered the Age of Aquarius/Love/the Goddess, is seeing the dying throes of the energies that cannot tolerate Love.

In the midst of it all, what keeps surfacing is the nudging that I am called to a form of leadership. Yes, perhaps quiet leadership, leadership that hurts no one and acquires little, but leadership nonetheless. If nothing else, I can say, "I, too, never had a real home, never owned property, wasn't protected by family or health care or cronies. I've been out there trying to barely survive, just as you have -- perhaps in different ways and for different reasons, but with the same essential result." There are so many of us who can no sooner imagine "owning" a quarter acre of land, much less an entire foreign country!

I think of the Magnificat, with the humble and meek being exalted. Maybe one reason I have always loved that canticle is that I sensed this time coming, the complete flip-flop. I love that these words are recorded as being spoken by a woman, the mother of Jesus. What seems particularly apt today is the reference to the scattering of the proud "in the imagination of their hearts". But for years, in my heart, the text had a different emphasis, with the Goddess (or the inevitability of Nature's need to restore balance) as the catalyst for change, not an all-powerful bearded God in the sky.

Epiphany. The Magnificat. After all these years, and despite the gaping abyss between me and the religion of my heritage, Church of England rituals, holy days, texts and music remain my spiritual frame of reference. This truth just doesn't go away. Interesting.

This is a time where personal truths (and many others) must ultimately be accepted and embraced, no matter how strange, or painful, or paradoxical. I don't think the Goddess wants us fighting anything anymore, particularly our inner truths. Certainly not on Epiphany, when things are so clear.

A footnote: I'm feeling the need to prepare for this time by once again, going through my (ever fewer) boxes. Diplomas, scrapbooks, my grandmother's needIework -- all are strewn around me. I did such a good job last year, that I am truly down to the most important and meaningful belongings, the ones that it will literally break my heart to throw out. But if the moment comes, and I need to proceed to my work for the Goddess with next to nothing, they'll have to go. Not today, however. Keep breathing, Liz...

The Beginning

I wrote this post yesterday and am putting it out there today. I have heard the latest news, just so you know, but I'm leaving this "as is":

Kind of hard to say an unqualified "Happy New Year" today, although ultimately I think much about this year will lead to a happier world...eventually.

It may seem like a strange thing for me to do, but I can't help but look back. Many years ago, I started to sense that the 2020's would signify crucial changes for the world. I had no professional basis for this -- I am not an astrologer, or (more than an amateur) historian, or a serious oracle card reader, or a serious futurist. I just had the intuition that the Divine Feminine was already on the ascent, and that this energy would be a poor fit for most of our institutions and contemporary expectations. When the year 2020 itself rolled around (even before the pandemic), I knew that if nothing else, it would be a decade of clarity -- as in, 20/20 vision. And has it ever been!

Now we are over halfway through the decade, and I think this year the clarity will become starker than ever. We will see the difference between Love and not-Love so very clearly, there will no longer be any lingering indecision (no more of that wobbly, "Maybe this is a figment of my imagination!") Those of us capable of Love will more consistently trust our gut feelings, and see things for what they are. Aligning with Love will gradually become easier, because we see more and more people doing it, and because we are beginning to see and sense more Love around us, under the roiling surface of Love's opposite. 

What is this "the beginning" of? More clarity, more Love, more compassion, more beauty, more joy, more genuine health, thriving, connectedness with Mother Earth and the whole cosmos. Probably a considerable amount of upheaval as we start to really walk this new path and the old path falls away. Probably a considerable number of miracles as the new energy expands and things "happen" in a new way. Probably (for some) dreams coming true that just couldn't come true in the old paradigm. 

Clearly, as so many are saying, we must focus on these seeds of a new world, not the detritus of the old. Keep breathing through the tumult, tap your heart many times a day, step out into Nature, talk or sing to the birds, any practice that helps you connect with Nature, the Goddess, and genuine Love, in whatever way you conceive of it. Focus on the fact that this is a Beginning. The Beginning.