"Be Bold"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is She?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This new lane

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

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

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

The Return

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I'm giving up for Lent

OK. So clearly someone "post-Christian" doesn't observe Lent strictly religiously, as a preparation for Easter. But the imprint of the Church year remains strong, part of the rhythm of my life. And for the first time in years, I feel a clear leading to give something up.

I was the only "creative" person in my family. In fact, my mother had rejected her mother's painting, designing, knitting and rug-hooking, and was, I fear, extremely uncomfortable with my creativity and musicality. Dad had no creative or hobby interests. By and large, my brothers were into the out-of-doors (hiking, skiing, bicycling and sailing), although Andrew would become quite a fine photographer. But overall, in my family and among friends, I was "the creative one." Many of you know the feeling, always being asked to make cards or write silly poems or draw diagrams or maps because, "You're the one who can do all these things."

Oddly (given my parents' overall lack of interest in the arts), I think I equated my creativity with "worth," and thought somehow if they (and by extension, the world) could see my beautiful creations, they would find me worthy to be on the planet. And yet, decades of organ recitals, embroidered or painted gifts, and music and art degrees went by with barely a, "That's nice dear." How much I was doing anything for its own sake, and how much in a frenzied attempt to prove my worth, I don't know.

And in this last decade, there has been something of the same quality to my (decidedly creative!) efforts to get back to England and the world of English church music. I don't have to prove to myself that this is the core of my being. But maybe if I got into such-and-such a choir, or sang at such-and-such a cathedral, or began to be recognized as a Howells scholar, I would finally be seen, respected, embraced. I would be "worthy." Yet I'm still in America, still living on nearly nothing, still feeling invisible all around. While I don't doubt the value of my skills and their results, I am questioning whether my 60 years of creativity have been done from the right inner place, how much my various efforts have helped anyone else, and whether this sort of creativity has been, in fact, the highest skill set I was meant to use in this lifetime.

These last six weeks or so, I've done a lot of writing and some desultory art and design. Creativity is still my instinctive default as I travel my path. But there is something so stale about my creative energy right now. Perfunctory, unenthusiastic.

So on Ash Wednesday, two days from now, I will put aside all creative materials, even pen and paper. I will release the need to write, journal, blog, paint, collage, sing, or even creatively problem solve. I do have reservations about putting my book on hold. Eight months of hard work has brought me within shouting distance of the end of it, but my gut tells me my Lenten creativity "fast" will teach me something important that I need to know before finishing the project.

Will I twiddle my thumbs? Will I watch too much TV? Will I take up bird watching? Where will my creative energy get channeled? I don't know. All I know is that if an impulse feels "creative" in the traditional sense of the word, I will politely thank it and ask it to wait "forty days and forty nights."

And sometime the week after Easter, I will let you know what has happened. In a strange way, creativity has been a heavy mantle. I feel lighter already.

Protagonist

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending a workshop on telling your life story, led by Diane M. Millis, PhD, a writer and spiritual director. She is the author of Re-Creating a Life: Learning How to Tell our most Life-Giving Story, and I am working my way through the book/exercises as a way of improving the memoir I am currently writing, and just simply to turn the corner on seeing my life in a new way.

The other day, I noticed that the next chapter was called, "Who is the Protagonist in your story?" Before I even had a chance to read the chapter, my brain responded, "My Father."

Uh-oh. 

Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh.

Let's put aside for a moment that a therapist would have a field day with this. Let's put aside for a moment the fact that my dad was such a passive black hole, and that even now it is hard to nail down anything active that he "did to me." Indeed, he did so little in so many respects that the fact that I see him as a protagonist is extremely surprising. All of this is for another day.

But the headline is that, on some very essential level, I have not seen myself as the main character in my own life story. This is horrifying given the fact that I have been single all these years and operating on my own in the world. And yet I can't help but wonder to what extent that this is the experience of many other women; even in 2020, we are in a culture that can treat us as support staff, no matter what our actual role is.

Something has snapped into place since journaling about this surprising response.  Feisty little Lizzie has come to life. "I don't think so! I don't want anyone else, male or female, to be the main character in my story! This is my story!" She's two years old, and her feet are stomping on the ground!

Clearly, some work to do. I am thankful for the time to do it, and for the wonderful tool of this book.

For one moment

Last week has to have been one of the most trying/traumatizing ever, at least from the standpoint of looking outward. The spread of fear, hatred, disease...I had both got the "news" of it through the medium of TV, and sought relief there as well, unsuccessfully. Scanning the cable channels, I rarely found anything that was not a thriller, a crime show, or a movie about war or a future apocalypse. (Gosh, what is it that people don't get about the law of attraction?!) Even my old fallback, The Great British Baking Show, is competitive at its core, only more gently so.

My whole life, it seems, I have been emotionally at arm's length from a family I didn't understand, an ocean away from the music and place I love, a gender away from being able to sing that music, and looking through plate glass at institutions and conflicts that make no sense. I am sure I have been derided for not doing a better job of engaging, and considered ill, myself, because I don't function well in "reality." I guess I have said it before -- I have felt so apart, and frankly, so lonely.

This morning, I saw a reference (with photos) to the battlefields of World War One. I felt my usual, dizzy sense of otherness, not understanding on any level why wars are fought, or the desire to kill people in battle or otherwise. I feel chronically distanced from every manifestation of separation and conflict, whether political, social, economic, health, or religious. When I try to live a life referencing these world "realities," I feel untethered, as if I am tumbling through space. Talk about homeless.

Then inexplicably, for a short "aha" moment, the "otherness" of the world didn't matter. For one moment, all that mattered was my "is"-ness. My truth, my vision, my artistry and musicianship, my honest efforts to stand up every day in a sea of what feels like insanity. This feeling of groundedness keeps trying to slip away, but I'm holding on.

I believe that one or two hundred years from now, the only human life that will still exist on this planet will be that which is primarily "about" love/compassion/support/beauty/harmony/truth/passion/vitality/joy. Resistance to these things will just fall away. No grand battle. Enough people will simply grow tired of conflict and not engage in it, in any form. Hatred of other people and the earth will dissipate into the mist, as people stop even hearing "calls to arms" and "fighting words." Our energy ripples will be too high to even hear those sounds.

We artists and musicians have always "gotten it." Yellow isn't put on the canvas to fight blue. Altos are not in the choir to fight basses. Sometimes there is dissonance, but it's resolved, not killed off.

Oh to hold onto this for one more moment.