See You in September . . .
I am reminded more than ever that time marches on even if COVID would have us think otherwise. There are days when I feel like it should still be mid-March . . .
As I have mentioned many times over the years, I remain stuck comfortable in the old "school year" calendar. September has always felt more like the New Year to me than January does, and so I have been feeling a strong sense of renewal these past few days. I think part of this feeling is that - after 16 years - I was finally able to go through my mom's funeral box.
I tried to do this about six years ago and couldn't - I had to put it back on the shelf. But for the past week I have been feeling that it was time. It came into my consciousness over and over again - so this past Friday, when I was downstairs in the basement on another matter (a beeping battery back-up on the main sump pump), there the box was, still covered in construction dust from the work done in my house five and half years ago . . . I took it over to the potting bench and wiped it off, and then brought it upstairs to the kitchen table where I immediately sat down and started. I went until I was finished.
I read every card and letter. Some of them were really hard to read, but I was struck by how faithful my mom's friends had been. Throughout the eight weeks of her illness, many of her friends wrote a card pretty much weekly. I remember taking them all to the hospital and reading them to her. And then, after she had passed, they all wrote to me. Many of those people are gone now, as well.
I read those cards and letters, thanked them, blessed them, and let them go. I believe that things hold energy, and this box had been sitting in my basement holding energy for 16 years, whether I was consciously aware of it or not. I walked away from the box. It sat there on the kitchen table for a few days, and then on Monday evening, August 31st, I did a little ceremony for myself, picked up the box, thanked it again, and walked it out to the recycle bin in the garage. As I turned to return to the house, all the energy that had been tied up in that box was released and has already begun to return to me to be able to use in better, more productive ways.
That evening, in preparation for the "new year" on September 1st, and also to honor this passage - for it was a passage, or transition if you like - I sat down to read the runes for myself. And what a reading! If you are not familiar with them, runes are not a fortune-telling device; rather, they are an oracle of the self, directing you inward for guidance. I have found them to be a tremendous tool on the path to myself.
They are read from right left - and symbolize (1) the situation as it is; (2) the challenge; (3) the situation that can evolve is the challenge is met. These three are, R-L:
Perth (reversed) - The rune of initiation/something hidden/ a secret matter. Reversed it's about calling in scattered energies and focusing on one's own life
Thurisaz (reversed) - The rune of gateway/place of non-action; the Norse god Thor. Reversed it's about growth and development, with a focus on contemplation and clarity of intent.
Mannaz - The rune of the self. The self is the starting point for everything else. This rune also requests clarity of intent, but more importantly a willingness to change - to live the ordinary life in an extraordinary way.
This reading is about returning to myself in a new and beneficial way and it was completely affirming of the place where I currently find myself. I am reminded of T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding, where he uses the words that St. Julian of Norwich ascribes to Jesus in her Revelations of Divine Love, ". . . all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well" and then in the fifth stanza where he says:
This is how I feel about so many areas of life and love. I have been an explorer and seeker my entire life. I have not written lately about what I call the "path to myself," and yet, here I am, on it again - releasing side-trips and what author Joan Anderson calls counterfeit journeys. Moving forward to discover what has already been here inside me from the beginning . . .
I have some card decks that I also use when I read the runes to see what angels and guides might travel with me on the journey and they all lined right up - affirming the stones and pointing the way to the initial path. It's been my experience that the stones know - they know what one needs to hear. I can't explain this, they just do and they bring the ability to focus one's mind on the situation at hand. As I said before -they are a tremendous tool that I have used for many, many years. And finally, that night I did the meditation on cutting energetic cords that I have mentioned here before. It's one I find really helpful.
In the Celtic calendar, September is mid-harvest. The days and nights are relatively equal in length, making it a good time to recapture balance. Something I think we all seek . . . So - Onward - to arrive where I started and to - hopefully - know it for the first time.
In other travels and explorations, yesterday's walk yielded a pear sighting (no partridge),
And a muskrat (couldn't get close enough to tell if it was Susie or Sam ;-) ).
I've discovered that the new Blogger interface does not play nice with my preferred Foxfire browser, but it works with Chrome - at least for now - so I'm hopeful that I will be able to post more here. It has been really tough to post at all for the past couple of months and every post that I did manage to complete took hours to craft due to Foxfire continually running scripts and slowing down the site tremendously.
This post actually started out to be political, and so I will end with that. Last week I watched the Republican National Convention (RNC). I felt it was necessary to hear for myself what would be said.
There's part of me that just does not even know what to say about it . . . The amount of exaggerations, revisionist history, divisive rhetoric, and insulting and preposterous lies is more than I can actually comprehend. The current administration doubled down on the lies. The fact-checking had to be exhausting for those doing it. Daniel Dale is one such person. He is the main fact-checker for CNN. If you watched 45's speech on the closing night of the RNC, you should probably watch this video.
I've done the best I can do to get the facts out on social media, but - quite frankly - those people who need to hear them unfriended me or unfollowed me long ago because I wouldn't keep my mouth shut in 2016. Nothing has changed on the mouth not keeping shut . . . ;-)
Kamala Harris gave a prebuttal speech last Friday. If you didn't see it, you might want to watch it now.
And I know this was May song, but I love it - and we've somehow made it to September . . .
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