Two vases. China, Qing Dynasty.
L) smoky quartz R) rose quartz.
(I’m writing this with an ocular migraine and no real pass through for editing so I make no claims about its quality or content…)
I think it was July or August before I got on board with the broader, pervasive feeling that: “2016 is a total tire fire.” I remember the day I gave in–a hot, summer day when we had to fire one of my favorite employees for a sudden flagrant display of sexism and misogyny, I found out the future of our business was looking supremely dire, and our new space didn’t pass inspection. It was just a compounding of a lot, after months of metaphorically spinning increasingly more plates.
Before that, 2016 on a broader level was a series of significant celebrities dying, rising national tensions with the spotlight on our terminal cultural racism and xenophobia, and the painful but loving and necessary redefinition of my most significant personal relationship. I was able to reason it all as a time of necessary change, but surely for a greater good, a greater outcome… The old ways and themes painfully passing, but making way for the new, and for better. Right?
I’ve been thinking about coping mechanisms and how I’ve made it through this year; what is useful to me now, what was useful to me in the past. Despite having personally experienced an extreme past decade with regard to work, grad school, and then having a child, by and large nothing has felt completely beyond my management abilities, with the exception of the weeks and months post-partum. I generally know when I’m past my own edges and need to retreat and recover. But this year there hasn’t really been room for that. I’ve had to eek out slim pockets to breathe and try to cultivate stillness.
Useful for coping this year were some of the ususal suspects, and some new tools: listening to music / car singing, yoga / pilates, writing, walking, a few dear friends, loving my child, meditating, researching astrology, and mineral and rock meanings and use. Those last ones are really new. I sort of have no idea where they came from but they took over as a thing to learn and dig into. I guess in the past 15 years I’ve been so occupied learning very specific things–wine, bees, business, writing, baby(ies), and now I get to try to learn something I’ve purely always been curious about. And being post-partum has pushed open a long row of doors to the other, unseen, the divine, and regularly receiving information from a greater source.
These more metaphysical aspects of life feel like an aspect of truth and deeper faceting to my already crystallized (if very feral), faith. And while I almost never speak of these things in daily life, I think they might be a significant part of the next phase for myself, and are really just the intersection of all of the greater themes of me as a person–who I terminally am and what I’m inherently preoccupied with: Truth, the unknowing, and the organic and instinctive as they relate to creation. Unfolding, evidence, cycles and systems, and non-verbal langauges.
Once when I was meditating a few weeks back, I was shown a white-ish house in the middle of the woods–a huge cube, with significant windows. There was no landscaping around to signify a domicile, just a building in the middle of the woods. It wasn’t a huge footprint, but inside was a kitchen with a fire and large hearth, a corner that functioned as a library and study, and above a loft with a low bed and a wool blanket spread neatly over, next to a window. In many ways it represented exactly my needs–places to work, learn, and create–the places that keep me sound. I also knew my son was there and could feel him, but not see him.
Then I walked outside of teh house and a few trodden paths spread forth. I walked down the main one into the sunny, autumn woods and several paths split off. At the far, far end of that main path, I could see a bright light. I knew the side paths to be the major themes of life–health, partnership, work, family, etc. I tried to walk on and see what else was there, but somehow I knew I was supposed to walk down the path of health first; that none of the others could exist or perpetuate without attention to and invstment there. That image and feeling has stuck with me these last weeks, especially post election.
This new moon (occuring Monday) feels very significant. I don’t know enough about astrology yet to be able to understand all of the significations, but it personally feels like a culmination of all of the things for the past year.
Surprisingly, last May I received a letter from a very long ago friend. It was an apology note, in many ways decades overdue. Receiving it was a shock to me. I have carried it in my bag since, not knowing how to respond or what to say. It just sits in there, a loose end needing addressing at some point. Everytime I think to respond, I can’t imagine what to say.
I want to say much, to explain so much, but also not. Because I don’t know if the apology was for himself–to feel better, or actually for me? Probably both. One of the biggest regrets of my life (and I’m someone who doesn’t generally believe in regret, only in learning and timing), is that he and I met each other then, when I was nothing but open and active wound sites and the sum of my ancestry and childhood. And I don’t think anything I could say would ever be enough to explain. So I’m worried it would be speaking into a void. ..but I guess that’s why the apology was sent, to acknowledge that past habit. And then, I dreamed about him last night– this very old, very significant friend. He was trying to explain to me, and show me some of his own circumstances.
I gather it’s finally time to respond. And it’s time for responding overall, to all of these new ways and structures that have taken shape, and the redefining of so much of my way of being. Trying to will ways and solutions into being hasn’t worked, and sitting back witnessing the changes and trying to comprehend their impacts in the short and long term is only so useful… It’s very hard for me when it isn’t a time for thinking, but for just being. And I think that’s what I need to learn next–how to simply be. I have no idea how to do that.
Links about the new moon:
(For the astrologically bent, I have a stellium {Sun, Mars, Neptune, Mercury}, my north node, and Vesta in Sagittarius, hence this last year.)
1481hyperion 