2018 already?

Hey there. It’s been a while.

2017 was a pretty full year for me, with a lot of changes, some of which interfered with maintaining this blog (and a lot of other stuff).

I had gotten into my spiritual practices more in earnest in 2016, which I was able to do because I was unemployed for the first half of that year (despite my best efforts). I got deeper into meditation, journeying, and talking to my ancestors and the spirits, and trying to get to know the land in this area–and that was pretty productive. During Summer 2016 I experienced some really weird and interesting magic that is extremely hard to describe, but it involved revisiting (in mind/spirit) an old relationship that had been unresolved for, like, 18 years. It was also closely intertwined with music–and I discovered some awesome new music during H2 2016–and something that I can only call a kind of spiritual/emotional time-travel. Lots of synchronicities too. I learned how important creative (re-)writing of one’s own narrative can be. Besides the spiritual stuff, as I was living in an old farmhouse on old farmland (christened Firefly Farm), I was looking forward to doing some farming. Composting, growing vegetables, keeping chickens and bees, etc. I had also planned to continue with my herbal studies/remedy-making. Alas, I did compost, but didn’t do anything with it (it wasn’t ready when I planted my vegetables). The veggies were almost all eaten by the neighbor’s free ranging chickens. And as it turned out I never amassed enough initial capital to invest in chickens or bees. As for the herbal stuff, the spirits made it clear that I had “remedial work” to do that mostly didn’t involve the herbs–and so it proved.

So in 2017 I continued with the spiritual work. In the spring I started a soul retrieval process that lasted several months (spirits had told me in 2016 that it was going to be necessary). Meanwhile, things became increasingly tense between me and my friend with whom I shared the house, and in 2017 she was able to buy her own place, so we moved out and parted ways amicably.

I took the opportunity of homelessness to visit a city where I had lived a few years previously and where I still had stuff in storage that I wanted to retrieve. It was a lovely couple of weeks where I got to reconnect with friends I hadn’t seen in years, jettison a lot of baggage, and get my stuff. Many of my friends have left academia for one reason or another, one of them to pursue a musical career, and through hanging out with her again I was exposed to even more amazing new music and I realized that I really need to spend more time around artists. I decided to learn to play a musical instrument (still haven’t though because I am terrible at follow-through). When I was a kid I was constantly writing poems, songs, and stories and drawing and painting. I don’t know where all that creativity went, but getting it back was a main reason I undertook soul retrieval. But it hasn’t really reappeared yet.

For the most part the summer was a blur of temporary residences where I didn’t really have sufficient space, privacy, or time to do much. And that’s when things started to fall apart. My spiritual practices languished; I fell into depression and anxiety; the spirits stopped communicating with me very much; my journeying (when I could manage it) just didn’t feel like journeying. More like “active imagination,” though that is still useful, I suppose. I hit a wall. But the soul retrieval wrapped up, and had some really interesting consequences.

I actually feel like two souls were returned to me; I don’t know the details because for some reason the shaman I worked with chose not to communicate with me about it any more. But synchronicities resumed, many of them involving music, I finally finished the work I was doing to resolve the unresolved relationship from years back, and people started reacting to me differently. I started having dreams in which a ghostly, childlike version of myself began to try to communicate with me. But the work was just beginning, and a lot of it has been painful.

In the fall I found a permanent place to live (well, as permanent as any residence ever is for me) in the town where I work–the poorest town in Ohio. Objectively, I know it’s an ugly, depressing place, a dying coal town with a polluted watershed and a serious opiate problem–but I don’t feel depressed by it. In fact, I’m in love with it, and that mystifies me. I don’t know why I’m here or why I care about it so damn much, but I feel like it’s where I am meant to be, at least for now.

For three months I had a long-term substitute teaching position in a local high school, because the regular teacher was out on maternity leave and the man who normally subbed had died in a tragic accident shortly before. Since he usually made his own course materials, no one had prepared anything for me, so it was sink or swim time, teaching a subject I had never taught before.  I adored the kids and I love to teach…alas I don’t love our educational system. But I think I’ve ranted about that before, so enough about that. Although I taught university courses for nearly a decade, teaching high school was a whole new experience–much more difficult (because you have to do it all day, five days a week, and it’s like 75% babysitting). In some ways it was very disheartening, because with this being such a poor community, many of the kids have already given up on themselves by the time they’re 14. Too many adults have given up on them too. But most of them are wonderful, and the experience made me feel more committed to the community–although to some extent it remains an unrequited love. I’m the new girl in town, and this is the kind of place where I will still be the new girl if I live here 30 years from now. It takes a long, long time to be accepted.

Just before Halloween a local woman died of a drug overdose. I didn’t know her but was somewhat friendly with a guy she was seeing, and had encountered her a few times through my job. She was very young (21 or just barely 22), and even though she and I really didn’t connect with each other (or want to) while she was alive, after she died she haunted me for a week. Longest frickin’ week of my life. I don’t mean that her ghost was physically present (do ghosts have a physical presence?)–at least I don’t think so. But she was present in my mind, in an all-consuming way. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I got so depressed I didn’t eat or get out of bed for three days. I called off work. I experienced a crushing identity…crisis? I don’t know what to call it. Absence of identity was more like it. I literally stopped knowing who I was anymore, although I could rattle off a list of habitual behaviors and tendencies, but there seemed to be nothing to cohere them. Although I wasn’t suicidal, I didn’t see any point to being alive. Then, one week after I heard about her death, I decided to go for a drive to enjoy the fall foliage (which was awesome last year). Just as I was turning out of my side street and onto the main drag, I found myself blocked by a funeral cortege–and then I had no choice but to join it, as there is only the one street going through town. I don’t know if it was her funeral, though the timing was right; but driving along at 5 miles an hour, I had some time to think about her and say some more prayers for her and her family. And the haunting lifted. She moved on.

To some extent I am still experiencing the sense of non-self though.

As for winter, it has been either non-eventful or I have yet to really recognize the events. I got the cold that’s going around that lasts three weeks, and then I somehow injured my back, and financially I’ve never been poorer, so that had me being very non-participatory. This being the eastern US, it has been unusually cold, snowy, and icy, so like everyone I’m spending more time hunkered down indoors. The personal, inner work has continued though: The ghostly child self who appears in my dreams has brought a lot of childhood abuse and resulting issues around love and shame back into my awareness for re-hashing and it suuuuucks. It has been as excruciating as it has been slow. Very much winter work. Grounding meditation has proved to be essential.

So I’m entering 2018 feeling rather battered and storm-worn, though hopeful. Pluto is finally moving off my progressed Sun and out of my 10th house (though it’ll be back when it retrogrades), and Saturn just moved off my progressed Moon (they will cross paths again too), so it should be interesting to see how that plays out. By 2020 I’ll be free of those two a-holes, at least. As I think about it, it seems silly that we celebrate the beginning of a new year during the time when, seasonally, things are very much not beginning. This is a time for introverting and cocooning, not starting new projects and making ambitious resolutions. That’s springtime stuff.