Shifting Winds

"What a difference a day makes." Early this week saw heavy rains in Minnesota. Yesterday, however, cleared up entirely and was one of the most gloriously beautiful days I have ever seen anywhere. Clear blue skies, light west winds, and brilliant green lawns, trees and shrubs finally coming out. Our lilacs are close to popping, and other flowers have started. The only disadvantage of winds from the prairies is that in my older age, I seem to have developed allergies. Lovely to feel the warmth, less so to feel the congestion.

Then last night, in the middle of the night, the wind shifted again, this time around from the east, and, at about 40 mph, sent doors and exhaust fans banging, and cold lake air in the windows. It's almost like not needing to hop a plane in order to travel from the midwest to the tundra. 

In terms of interior "weather", I have found it almost impossible to cry, despite having been trying to wrap my head around the omnipresent violence of our world, and its presence in my system recently catching up to me. Odd little snippets of memories...most of my life, I have not been able to watch movies about war or conflict, Westerns, thrillers, etc. At the very least, I've had to avert my eyes during the bloodiest content. On more than one occasion, people have condescendingly made fun of me -- "C'mon, Liz, it's just a movie. This is just acting, it's not real. Stop being a baby." Well, it feels "real" to me, to my sensitivities. My heart and body experience it as real, as a shot to my own heart, and I believe the pain gets trapped within me. Other shaming came from not being able to operate well in our "kill or be killed" economic system: I can still hear being told to "put my big girl pants on". And at the time, I certainly felt ashamed, although I now realize that my issue wasn't not wanting to grow up or be decisive, powerful, or successful. It was ethical problems with the larger system, and finding it too conflict-driven. At the time, I curled up into a little ball within, trying to find a place safe from attack. Some of my tears appear to still be in there, and I need to be patient with myself, and let them emerge when they will, not on demand.

But the wind has shifted enough that I'm feeling increasingly confident in the path away from these harsh realities. We've all been inured to a high level of violence, yet I can easily envision a world where conflict would be an obscene exception, where fighting (in effect) for money and a living would be considered bizarre. In fact, I think this is happening as we speak. In any event, that new world is the world I want to live in, and always have. I used to use a lot of sailing lingo in this blog, and so in these shifting winds and choppy waters, I'm "tacking" to head towards where I want to be, with nary a backward glance. 

Checking In

It's been an emotional week.

I'm grateful to have hit some layers of anger toward my father, and toward our larger paradigm, and to finally really feel it. Oddly, my dad wasn't overtly violent, and yet what I've become totally overwhelmed by in the last week is the violence everywhere in our culture, not just the obvious spots. I'm almost at the point of discontinuing my television watching altogether. It's not the handful of relatively harmless competitions that until recently I could still stand ("The Voice", "Antiques Road Trip", "Project Runway"). What has become unwatchable and unbearable are the accompanying advertisements, promoting fear in a host of forms, other, more violent shows and movies (even for children!), conflict in the form of sports, and unsustainable products. It's like we are voluntarily creating war zones, outside of actual war zones. Why do we do it? My anger floods through me, but then segues to grief and sadness when I think of how many people are harmed, and how much of this toxicity I have "consumed" in 68 years (in addition to the actual struggles of my own life). In my own body, I can feel the toxicity and pain multiplied by 8 billion people, plus the planet at my feet. It is almost overwhelmingly heavy.

Yet the hummingbird feeder is attracting bird after bird after bird, and hummingbirds represent "joy". Just plain joy. My job for the coming days? Try to be like a hummingbird, if only for a few minutes a day -- to try to restore a little balance. And to remember that joy, beauty and love are the hallmarks of the era we are entering.

Feeling more Feelings

Today's post started yesterday, when I wanted to explore another of the Goddess words from the list I wrote by hand many years ago. The problem is, none of the words was right for how I was feeling. As I dug down, yup, it turns out I was and am angry again, this time, not at my dad, but at our world's conflict-based patriarchal paradigm. It's like, allowing myself to "go there" on the family level must have unlocked the next door.

All these decades, it was so much easier to play the fool, to look like this ditsy artist and spiritual seeker who just couldn't "do" reality. I felt like a fool, so it wasn't a big stretch! It has been safer to say, "I don't get" capitalism (or property ownership, or violence, or wanting to use weapons, or "us vs. them", or fear-based businesses like insurance, or whatever) than it was to tell the truth. It has been easier to say, "I feel overwhelmed" when I see bulldozers tearing into Mother Earth, or when I feel literally swamped by plastic in the grocery or department store aisle, than to tell the truth.

So here it is, the truth. It's not that I don't understand. It's that I do understand! And understanding the true underlying nature of our societal and economic structures makes me angry. At this moment in time, that is the emotion I feel, and I'm not used to it. This isn't anger at any individual, institution, or country...and it's not at all men. It's just that there is a worldwide wall that I've never been able to get through, get around, or fly over. I'm angry that my efforts to try to avoid operating in conflict-based systems left me twisting in the wind, ever-wandering. To state it positively, I was trying to find institutions that operate like me, and have been, so far, unsuccessful. My life has been a photo negative, not a positive image of a woman's creativity. The crazy thing is, I wasn't limited by so many of the things women are frequently limited by. I was (and still am) amazingly free. What bound me was being post-duality, and thus "from" either an ancient paradigm or a future one, not the one in place. What bound me was lack of belief in the values of most of the institutions in our world. The heartbreak was the constant rejection of these institutions, who (understandably) couldn't understand or believe in me.

I suspect that I'll go through roughly the same process I did a few weeks ago, because the "place" the earth is in right now is profoundly terrifying and sad. It will be important to get out of my head and feel from my heart, and grieve. Hopefully, the final phase will be empowering -- I will acknowledge that I simply operate on a completely different wavelength, and I will move forward with far less personal reference to the dying paradigm. I probably won't be able to look backwards even long enough to protest or criticize individual issues. The whole point is that what blocked me was the whole paradigm. It's both outrageously enormous and strangely simple.

This is all I can do this week. It leads to some interesting questions about the capacity of the Goddess to feel anger, but I have to focus within little human me for the moment. As ever. 

Ascension

In the Christian calendar, yesterday was Ascension Day, the day when Christ "...ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father..." according to the Nicene Creed in my old Book of Common Prayer.  Despite everything, the church year remains imprinted in me, both because it is in my spiritual DNA and because of the continuing metaphorical resonance.

Many years ago, I read something that implied that earth Herself would eventually go through an ascension process, as would many humans, and I cannot help but think that, whether or not that exact term was used, this is what is beginning to happen. Of course, the way I see it, it doesn't necessarily involve literal ascension -- leaving the earth plane in order to start a new life far from our physical reality. Earth will undoubtedly stay in Her body, as will many of us -- it's just that we will be stretched and changed. The reason I've been thinking about this recently is that I had been wondering if the last few years had actually been a process of ascension; I'm beginning to realize that it feels less like moving into "new"/higher territory and more like moving into a reality that was there all along, a reality I wasn't fully ready to embrace. Now that I see that my instinct tended to be to do things the "opposite" of how society does them, perhaps some wiser part of me was in place from the start, trying to get my attention. If anything, "ascending" spiritually while staying in place physically is extremely challenging. You feel it in your body, your soul, your emotions, and your relationship with the world around you. At times it is virtually unbearable, but if you can get through it, it may help the whole world in its ascension process.

So many painful things are happening, across the globe, across our cities, and in our own lives and the lives of our friends. Beliefs, foundations and assumptions that no longer work are being ripped from us, leaving gaping holes and raw emotions, confusion and emptiness. It's not funny, but sort of telling, that so many Americans' homes are literally being ripped (by tornados) from the earth and, for a period of minutes, into the sky. As ever, I cringe at all the promises to rebuild. In the long term, we are not going through this intensive spiritual class time in order to lay down the same old roots again. 

So it's about going "higher" spiritually without literally going higher. Living in paradox. Blessings, everyone, as we walk through this uncomfortable process.

New Moons

More and more, I am treating new moons in somewhat the same way some religious groups treat (or used to treat) the Sabbath -- not so much as a day of rest, per se, but more like a day where I engage less with "the world as it is" and more with "the world I think we are entering". If possible, I spend little money, do only errands I can walk to, do things I love (like writing!), or things that are creative in an old-fashioned way, like knitting or baking. Many people don't have that luxury, and I am conscious of my age, "retired" state, and privilege. And to some extent, this is the model for how I am trying to live every day. This use of my time simply makes me feel more aligned with the Goddess.

Just a quick update. So far, I haven't been satisfied with the outside options I might have turned to, to process the anger I recently referred to. It seemed like I might have to reach just too far backwards into the old paradigm to do it, especially as I was fairly successful on my own in transmuting old emotions into new alignment. However, I'm still open to forward-looking assistance, and I'll keep you posted.

I was reminded again of a related thought, listening to this morning's news: focusing on love (and trying to take actions only from that place) isn't just Pollyanna-ish silliness. I truly believe we have entered a time where the only steps that will move us forward (or "work") are ones taken from a place of love. And when we cannot genuinely love, perhaps the best transitional step is to nod a blessing to the people or situations, acknowledge that our contrasting energies are too far apart to productively engage with each other right now -- and move on.  

My Two Questions

I was too young to take part in the student protests of the late 1960's -- I was, what?, twelve or thirteen. Me being me, I doubt whether I would have taken part even if I had been older, just as I doubt I will do so now. As it has turned out, my whole life has been a "protest" of sorts, since I haven't been able to operate in a duality-driven way in even the most mundane areas of life. Of course, I'd like to think that it was less a "protest against" the way things are than "an effort to find a new way of operating". 

Having said that, after last week, I can hardly say I don't understand or experience anger. As you know, I uncovered a layer of it toward my dad that had been buried for a long time. Yet in the succeeding days, the process has moved rather quickly, first into almost unbearable grief: when you don't experience love or protection as a child, even the most superficial examples of parental (particularly a father's) love seem like something from another planet. What would it be like to be cared for? What would it be like to have your father protect you or unconditionally love or support you? What would it be like for him to take care of you before taking care of himself? What would it feel like to be seen, or deemed worthy of genuine (and appropriate) affection?

Then the process moved on rather quickly again, to the reminder that I've crossed over an invisible line into a world where there are only two questions. 

• Is this what the Goddess would want, or how She would operate?
• Is this Love?

My dad, bless him, was a "no" on both counts, and no amount of outside persuasion or protest or confrontation ever brought him into a different place. It was (and will undoubtedly be, perhaps for lifetimes to come) traumatizing, demoralizing, obliterating, and literally dis-heartening. And yet, in this new Goddess place I'm at, how he operated is also, arguably, completely irrelevant. I can choose to no longer have him as my primary reference point. He could not have changed, but I can (and apparently, have!)

In these times, everyone has their own set of questions and moral guidance. It's interesting that the earlier protests came when people were singing songs like "The Age of Aquarius", and these current protests can be said to be happening as we enter that Age. Hmm... 

I had to chuckle

Over the weekend, I had to chuckle. Of course a woman from a narcissistic background would eventually write a blog about herself! For nine years, no less! And it isn't lost on me that because I rarely refer to specific other people (which is the case because I feel so strongly about other people's privacy), it magnifies the focus on my own journey, putting it kind of in a vacuum. And while I do occasionally talk about world or national events, I figure that these topics are so over-analyzed elsewhere that for the most part, I don't wish to add to the maelstrom. The exception is when there is some spiritual facet to it all that I feel the need to draw attention to.

So why do I do keep writing? It is hard for me to talk about myself, seriously! My every instinct is to pull back into a closet or under a rug and disappear. Much as I deeply want to be heard when I open my mouth (or my computer!), I would never have kept at it this long if it was just about me, or I would have stuck to safer topics like the good spaghetti sauce I made last night or the forsythia blooms just coming out near where I live. 

And it isn't even that I think of the Goddess as kind of a reverse male god, who I have to prove my validity to in my words, to have something to show for myself. I think and hope I am being honest when I say that I keep writing because it is has been so very hard to reach a point where I could begin to define myself on my own terms and by my own standards, not those of society. I didn't have a road map for being the kind of woman I am, and I don't believe many women do! Our lives are valid divine endeavors, no matter what they look like, but we are rarely encouraged to think that they are. (Can you imagine public service announcements inspiring young girls to pursue careers in the arts or spirituality?!) So my "Liz path" is one word after another after another, one footstep after another after another -- this has been all I could do so far to help break that new ground. My "back"ground may have been an ideal training course, but from time to time, early trauma swamps me, and if there are tools to help out, I'll use them.

Anyway, on this cold (35 degrees), windy, miserable day, it's good to have a little laugh. I hope you find something to laugh about too!