Once upon a time I rang in the new year in a bubble under the Space Needle, fireworks shooting overhead and onto my lips, warmed inside — despite the cold — by the promise of All That Could Be. It was absolutely lovely and absolutely perfect for the start of what I believe will be a wonderful year on so many levels. I am still in that magical place and hope to remain there a good long time. The end.
Juxtapositioning
moving things around in my headI frequently work with a portion of the Tarot deck to seek clarity or perspective on situations. For years I rather pointedly ignored Tarot, thinking that using it was 1) weird and woo woo (yes I see the irony in that, thanks), and 2) too complicated for my wee brain to comprehend, because after all it would require Memorization and Effort, and maybe I was feeling a wee bit sorry for myself and also lazy. But whatever. A friend turned me onto the lazy-ass method of Tarot, which involves the Major Arcana, 22 cards instead of an entire deck. Oh, and also intuition. Which I can totally get behind. So.
Tonight I decided to draw a card and then blog about it. Whatever it turned out to be. Disaster? Who knows. I asked only to be shown something about the present-moment state of a situation that has emerged in my life. When I asked about it in the past I drew fun happy cards like The World, The Sun, and The Lovers, all cards that show promise and auspiciousness, at least in my reality. I hadn’t drawn a card on this in, oh, weeks, trusting instead in the richness of my internal indicators (and there are many). How are things looking now? (as if my internal experience was null and blank on this, which it most certainly is not and in fact is filled with exquisite wonderfulness.)
The Tower.
Oh god.
This is the card I dread drawing in any circumstance. Look at it! Mine depicts a bleak grey stone tower beset by lightning. The top of the tower is engulfed in flames and people are jumping to their deaths on the rocks and roiling waves below. It’s a medieval 9/11. Not a happy sight. Pit-of-my-stomach uh-oh’s.
But wait! The Tower can mean a lot of things. Let’s look at this.
Epiphanies, transcendental states of consciousness, and Kundalini experiences Sounds like my kind of stuff. Not bad. Go on…
The Tower further symbolizes that moment in trance in which the mind actually changes the direction of the force of attention from alpha condition (pointed mindward) to theta condition (pointed imaginal stageward). A Theta condition (especially in waking versions of theta states) is that moment when information coming into the ego-mind overwhelms external or sensory stimuli, resulting in what might otherwise be called a “vision” or “hallucination.” Well then. I have those all the time. No problem.
But what does it MEEAAAAN? I thought things were pretty awesome. Is there something coming up? Not that I base life decisions on cards or anything, but it’s nice to have a heads-up if there is one available.
I decided to draw three more cards that would give clarity on The Tower’s meaning in this instance.
Justice.
I also haven’t liked this card much. Bah, judging. Right? But let’s investigate.
Justice, in many Tarot representations, is Athena. I like Athena. Warrior Princess. Gets shit done. Sexy beeyotch. Maat was a goddess of justice in Egypt. Okay, cool. When Justice appears in a throw, it usually signals that some injustice needs righting, that something in the world is dangerously out of balance. It is important, however, to be aware that most things in the exterior world that you perceive are in fact an externalization of some interior process or conflict. Hmm, okay, the wheels are turning here. How does this apply to me, exactly?
Temperance.
Judging? Temperance is all ABOUT judging. Related also to Maat, like Justice. Hmm. Temperance represents the unconscious, which can guide us to a deeper understanding of ourselves. It represents the unification of the external and internal, conscious and unconscious, realms. Under these approaches, when Temperance appears, it is a warning or invitation to be prepared for a confrontation with the deepest questions of who we are, who we think we are, and who we will become. I’ve been saying for a few days that the energy of this week is all about determining who and how to be. Coincidence? I think not! At any rate, after feeling into this card I had relaxed considerably. We’re showing movement here. Movement is good. It’s internal, yeah, but that’s okay. That’s how life works a good part of the time.
The Empress.
For awhile I related highly to this card, thinking of it as a representation of myself. Not as the Mother but as a creator. Lately, not as much, but it’s a powerful card nonetheless. She can represent the creation of life, of romance, of art or business. The Empress is often associated with Venus, goddess of beautiful things as well as love. The Empress may also represent the Object of Desire; most obviously, the love of the beloved. Nice. Okay.
I think I’m getting the picture here. The Tower is change, structures turning from false to real and tumbling down. Justice says this has to do with a perceived injustice, one that has arisen as a construct of an internal process. Temperance says the process will help create a deeper self understanding, and The Empress says it will all be okay, that it’s part of the creation process, and that yeah, it has to do with love. So yay.
I am greeted this week by a view of diffuse brown and green mountains tapering off into a distant haze, clouds melting up into white gummy skies. From up high, everything looks soft and peaceful. There is no hint of the constant frenetic undercurrent of movement that is so apparent when you drive down the mountain into Northern California freeway traffic. Things change when you look at them from a different vantage point.
I spent Sunday night not sleeping. I knew I was “processing,” a catchall term that really means “going over and over in your mind all the stupid things you have ever done/said since the day you were born and thinking about the grand meaning to them while trying not to kick yourself too hard for having done/said them.”
[See: compassion for self]
I decided to use the time as a doorway. When I awoke in the morning, I decided, I would have stepped through this magical doorway back from the Land of Who I Was Once and into the Land of Who I Am and Wish To Be, Dammit. I noticed the potential irony of that decision at about 3 am, when I still hadn’t slept, knowing I had an alarm set for 5:10 so that I could catch a plane the next morning and realizing the very real possibility by that point that I would fail to sleep at all and therefore fail to step through the magic doorway.
Ha, ha, Self. Who has the last laugh?
But I dropped off into oblivion at about 4, missing entirely a text message that came in at 4:44 (auspicious sign)(I know people who are awake very early) but becoming instantly awake at 5:10 with the sense that I made it through the doorway after all.
I’m not the only one this past week, or in my case two weeks since I can pinpoint with deadly accuracy exactly when the shift back into Revisiting My Awkward Past began (not to mention the embarrassing nadir on Christmas Eve, replete with family — not my own, but does that matter? — and an sudden overabundance of wine), who has been revisiting old patterns and becoming immersed in the sense of inevitability and disempowerment that comes along with such an often unwelcome visitation. I’m glad I had the presence of mind to remind myself that I have a choice in how I experience things. The steamroller approach didn’t work well, but coaxing things along did, apparently. And now I’ve shifted back into The Good Place after taking my personal Black Swan moment as a jumping-off point with which to enact internal transformation.
Yay me.
What this all means in a tangible way is that I can now see that, for instance, I had a completely different experience of childhood than my brother did, and that neither perspective is probably the entire one that was available to us. Meaning, I can now try to flow into the entirety of what was really happening and change my Now as a result of allowing myself to experience the possibilities contained within a different Then. It really is that simple if you can become disconnected from attachment to things having been a certain way. The crappy childhood I had existed mainly in my perception of it. Yay!
It might help that I am perhaps just a little unhinged (loose grasp on reality). I mean that in a good way.
I’m haunted this week by Colorado. It keeps coming to me in different forms and from different places, SMACK a flash of memory. A mind’s-eye snapshot of brilliant white light filling rooms from every window. Bike paths winding through chirping prairie dog villages. The brilliant sky in tones of gold and vermillion, a different view in every direction. The purple crystal heart that hangs from my rear view mirror. Freedom. Loss.
He was ten that year. The cello was a natural instrument, but they weren’t friends at first. Not long before Christmas, something clicked into place. He sat taller, straighter. The instrument became part of him, an extension of him. Notes flowed from his fingertips into the warm golden-brown wood, and the house sang. A room at the front of the house became the music room, and every night we were bathed in golden brown.
I always liked Pachelbel’s Canon in D from the first time I heard it while driving to ballet class one Pittsburgh Christmas season. How had I missed this? I wondered, and turned the radio up louder. Now Pachelbel sang in the music room, the deep bass notes and the dulcet golden middle tones combining in joyful abandon. He taught me the bass line, and I felt a little body recognition in the way I held the cello, fingers curling around on the left, a taut bent arm bowing on the right. It felt familiar. No wonder he had become a natural. One day he’d play professionally, maybe.
Six months later, the sunsets dwindled in the rear view mirror and my bright dreams turned to ash. Colorado became a bitter memory of loss and defeat. The worlds I was creating, of cello players and horse girls, fell away into dust. The cello went back to the music store, forever a part of that one sun-washed year.
I heard my Christmas gift over the phone this year. It’s five years later and he’s bringing music back into his life. He picked out the notes of all the parts of Pachelbel on a keyboard nearly as old as he is, and played a hip hop version for me while I wept silently on the other end of the phone, remembering the tall boy who sat taller when he held his cello, regally coaxing notes from the golden brown wood and sending them off into the ethers, a blessing to the universe.
It’s no secret that I admire passion. I have lived many years between the swings of the pendulum, hurtling myself over cliffs and out of airplanes because that’s just the way things are done. In my world, anyway.
Living with wild abandon hasn’t always had good results. Oh, it’s ripe with possibility for learning and growth, there’s no doubt of that. And I am all about growth. But other people don’t always understand my no-holds-barred approach. I have been hurt in the past upon discovering that what I thought was a melding of the minds (and hearts) was in reality rather disconnected. In retrospect, I could have asked questions and received answers. I didn’t. I could have furnished a lengthy list of my experiences and asked if those things were shared. I didn’t. Instead I made assumptions, and we all know what happens when you do that. And for that I suffered.
But I’m an idealist. I love my ability to see into what I think is the future and tap into juicy possibility. I believe I have the power to help make things real with this ability, and creating the world is one of the passions I possess. Because I’m an idealist (like Anne Frank), I insist on continuing to see the good in people’s hearts. I believe that throwing myself into what I feel to be true will yield positive results in the end, growth notwithstanding. And I believe that the suffering I experienced in the past helped me become the me I am today, and I am truly happy to be that person. I don’t regret any of it, not really. Not much.
There is a situation now that keeps calling to me to apply wild abandon. Every internal indicator tells me that doing so would be totally amazing. Wonderful. Magical. Immersing myself, hurtling off the cliff, would be — I believe — the height of ecstasy. My internal indicators (and there are many) assure me this is so.
Yet. Things are unfolding, petal by petal. It’s not hurtling, but blossoming. I am not sure what to make of this except to go with it, because I believe the end result will be magical. Wonderful. Amazing. Is.
It is. I am.
P.S. I debated whether to hit “Publish” on this post for two days. Ironic? Losing my abandon?
I have been telling stories lately, the stories that add, thread by thread, to the complex weaving that comprises the fabric of my thus-far life experiences and that shape who I am. Layer by layer these stories build upon each other, some painful, some humorous, some poignant. If I could find one concise word that sums up the me-ness of who I am I would use that to say, “This is me. Here I am. Love me,” but we humans communicate in stories.
We all carry stories.
While telling mine, I often become lost in the emotions contained within them. I fall down deep dark holes leading far underneath the surface of the telling and begin gasping for air, my lungs filling with choking earth and the dust of old wounds. That’s when I stray from compassion. In the telling, the wounds reopen and I am left with gaping, bleeding holes. I fill the holes with unshed tears but they just become larger. Deeper. Darker. The wounds become about the pain inflicted. I forget why I fell down the hole. I forget why I bleed. I only remember the pain of the wounds. The telling becomes about the old stories, and the telling makes the wounds more real. I forget that there are two sides. Others involved. Stories that aren’t mine to tell. I forget to tell my stories with compassion.
Afterward I retell the stories within me, replaying for my own ears the tapes of the telling, and remember. No longer lost in the deep holes of emotion, I see what I have done. I see my errors. And I feel shame. I am ashamed that I fail to remain mindful and aware. I am ashamed of who I seem to become in the retelling. I am ashamed of my mistakes. I am ashamed that I can’t seem to let go of some of the wounds I carry. I am ashamed of my imperfection. Ashamed, perhaps, of my humanity.
My friend Rebecca is a storyteller. Tonight she told a story for my community, and she began by talking about kapwa, Self in Other. She said that when you see the dark, twisted things in others, it’s because you have those things within you as well. I shudder sometimes to think of this when I become lost in my telling. It’s too easy to paint myself as the light and others as the dark when I am mired in my emotional cave. Only when I resurface again do I see my error and feel the shame cover me, the shame of my pointed finger, righteous brow, and victim’s cloak. I see the beautiful, light-filled compassionate people around me and feel pain in my inadequacy and my inability to remain mindful and balanced when telling my stories. I resolve to become more like those I admire. I resolve to always see the beauty in others. I resolve to walk always in light.
Rebecca said more, though. She said that when you see good things in others, it’s because you have those qualities in yourself. I heard that and knew the truth of it already because it’s what I teach others every day, but I wept. When feeling shame for my imbalance and lack of compassion, my eyes are covered and I can’t see the light within. I see only what looks like my dark shriveled heart. I see my wounds. I feel them begin to bleed again. I feel the pain of remembering.
It is easier to have compassion for others than for oneself.
In September I walked through a doorway of my creation. I wanted to see what would happen to my Now if I changed my Then. The door opened to a new world, one just as bright and beautiful as I knew it would be, but sometimes I forget to leave behind the parts of the old world that follow me when I crack the door open again through telling stories of the Then. I haven’t yet found the key to telling the stories from my new place of Now.
Perhaps, then, there can be a new doorway, one that stands in the light of compassion but contains all that the darkness holds. Tomorrow night’s Solstice Full Moon Eclipse feels like a time of many doorways, and I will be stepping through some of my creation to my What Comes Next.
Time has slowed way down. I feel it stretching into ever-thinner spools of gossamer, strung this way and that across the myriad doorways of possibility that fill each second and every breath. Those breaths become entire new worlds, ripe with green juicy wonder and dripping with the clear cold freshness of the breath that comes after, and after that.
Nineteen. I count backwards, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, until I reach the touchstone that began my realization that I have become a Time Sorceress. And with every moment hanging in stillness, if I choose for it to be so, I have infinite time to use the power of deep desire to create my every What Comes Next. There are no limits, and there is no end, for every new breath brings a new limitless world to populate from that same deep place, if I should so choose.
Worlds are created from my lips. From my heart. From the scent of my skin. They spin off into the light beyond and shatter into millions of gleaming shards, each tiny bright light an entire new world of its own.
I drove off an island ferry tonight onto an oft-traveled road that led to my home and bed. In the darkness, or in the silly-putty stretchness of time bending, I felt like I had driven onto a new planet, an only partly familiar world that stretched into foreverness at the end of my headlights. I sped past mountains and lakes. I breathed and counted backwards again. I created one more world from the scent of home, a world that grants me limitless new worlds ever-spinning from each breath, ever moving into shards of light, ever asking for more, more, more.
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
~Leo Tolstoy
My good friend describes his life as what exists between the swings of the pendulum. Moving from one extreme to the other. I can relate; years ago I described my life to someone as a sine wave moving along a graph. He was pretty horrified by the thought and said he preferred to live life in the middle, escaping the extremes. The thought of having no high-highs and low-lows horrified me. I love the extremes. I live within the swings of the pendulum. My life is contrast.
Once I thought that living that way meant I had to allow myself to become immersed in the low-lows when they moved in and covered me with inky blackness, taking me to the depths of my inescapable inner cave. Now I’ve figured out how to ride the wave, moving from high-high to less-high and then back up again. The cave is filled with light, and when I want to explore the dark recesses still there, I know I have the choice to move outward into the light again.
I still feel the shift in contrast, though, but no longer does it take me to the depths. I don’t feel a lack when the high-highs move away, only a change. This past week has been filled with contrast, and I’ve been riding an undulating wave of movement from one crest to another. The intensity of some of those moments has been exquisite, almost-but-not-quite painfully so, multiple bright orange-red explosions of juicy in-the-moment sensation, the rightness and perfection of the moment becoming crystal clear. In the flow. The universe has lined up.
It’s the contrast from these moments of near-perfection to the ordinariness of all the other moments that brings it all into sharp focus. Today I made coffee. Danced. Read my email. Looked out the window at the wind’s effects on the tree across the street. Texted some friends to check in with their day. Breathed in and out.
Not long ago I was driving through the gorgeous mountain pass just south of my home, on my way past tall lake-fed evergreens toward a bright beckoning newness that at the time remained indistinct. Suddenly my windshield view filled with wings, feathers, talons but before my foot could lift to slam on the brakes to avoid collision, the bird swooped upward and out of view.
Brown and white. Red-tailed hawk.
I knew at the time that I had received a visitation, but didn’t yet know the character of this new energy being given to me. I still only have an inkling. Kundalini. Noble vision. Perspective. Power.
Hawk has been speaking to me. I hear her cries in the wind, telling me to watch and wait, threading forth through clouds to where the ancestors await. Hawk carries me higher, deeper, lifting me beyond the bounds of my current vision and into the wilds beyond. I’ve been feeling into what this might look like and am left with a pond, a glassy mirror that simply reflects my own heart.
Yesterday was the New Moon, and within her silvery embrace I set in motion a practice and connections that are forming a new foundation for everything that comes after. Hawk whispers into my cells, setting afire the trueness within them that blazes into pure gold light. Today I walked that path, every step becoming more corporeal and more magical, concentric gleaming circles that lift me high into Hawk’s realm. Tomorrow bears fruit of that path and that practice, and all the tomorrows to come.
Tonight as I fall toward dreamtime I will wing into the vision of What Comes Next that sleeps now in my heart, breathing higher, dreaming faster, going deeper.