May 09

Whither

I find myself in the backwoods of Monroe on a Sunday before band rehearsal, overlooking a basin of standing water with no obvious outlet to the myriad running streams that run down Webb Mountain to Lake Zoar and the Housatonic River. A day after my Chiron return, it seems an appropriate place to be.

I have to imagine there’s a better name for this pond formation I’m studying, on whose shores I’m meditating. A river that finds a newer, more efficient path to the sea and leaves behind a pond such as this would be said to have left an ox bow lake behind. This isn’t an ox bow; at least, I can’t see any stream feeding it. It might be the water table I’m observing; it might only be evidence of a recent rainfall, except that we really haven’t had much of that in the past weeks. Water table it is, then, until I know better.

I just discovered a tiny inchworm on me. As innocuous and potentially benevolent as he might be, I’m really not much in a mood for hitchhikers, so I carefully pluck her off my shirt and set her down on a nearby boulder in arm’s reach of the boulder on which I’m catching my breath from the strenuous hike up here. As I finish this paragraph she’s disappeared off the stone and into the underground of the decayed leaves and twigs trampled by others who’ve been here before me, slowly returning to the earth.

Chiron came out of his retrograde zone on 29 February, when he passed 5 Pisces 29. Since then, he has been traveling through degrees of the zodiac he hasn’t visited in fifty years. Saturday night, at 1827h EDT, he came back to the position he happened to occupy when I was shot out of my mother. Between now and February he’ll visit that degree twice more.

Several astrologers through the ages assigned meanings to each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac: some rather literal in interpretation, some more metaphorical (if not hyperbolic). Most of these lists of degree symbols have been aggregated at an amazing lexicon of matters arcane, Aux Mailles Godefroy, from which I’ve culled the following interpretations.

Most recently of the astrologers who’ve published such lists, Adriano Carelli says this about the 10th degree of Pisces:

Stubborn pursuit of the laws hidden behind nature’s appearances.. Hard and efficient work; an uncommonly sharp and analytical mind; practical sense, perhaps marred by a certain routinism; a gift for exact sciences, especially physics and chemistry (or alchemy).

In front of strangers the native’s behavior will be cautious and reserved. People’s behavior toward him will be typical: he will be looked upon with that kind of uneasiness or mistrust that earthworms harbor in front of a really superior being, in whom they feel they might find their master. His teachings will be ignored rather than fairly discussed and openly fought. As to himself, he is so engrossed in his researches as to overlook such trifles; the deeper he delves into Nature’s bosom, the more he loves her with a fervor which could be termed religious—even if he started to be a godless materialist. Willing to forego present glory, he works for those future generations who will in fact recognize him as a trailblazer. Barring harmful influences, his ought to be a long life, marked by a great magnetic force.

I find this to have been true of my life so far. Mind you, I’d stop short of regarding myself a “really superior being”, and I’m not convinced others look at me like that (“in whom they feel they might find their master”? Srsly?), but I do feel as though people have never fully trusted me, that that magnetic force has largely been repellent; that the vast portion of humanity don’t take me seriously enough to even comment on any advice I might have to give. And I also know that because I’ve always sussed that I have bigger fish to fry, whether they did or not has been pretty far down on my list of considerations.

Kozminsky’s symbol is less literal-minded, and gives me some pause.

A man sweeping together quicksilver which has fallen from a dish and has scattered in all directions.

As much as I’ve been trying to wrap up various personal projects such as the Luminous City remaster and the first Arc album, along with the two CAPE tracks that me and my two teams have been working on since February (La Volasfera reads the degree: “On a table of plain surface lie a number of chemical instruments, a retort, a pestle and mortar, a bent tube, and a crucible being the chief”), it has seemed as though other things have been slipping through my fingers. When one item on the list is about to get checked off, two more appear at the tail end to take its place: it’s like fighting a hydra, and it literally took Herculean effort to destroy the one in the myth.

Esther Leinbach’s examination of this degree produced this interpretation:

Natives of this degree are sure to be tested. The material world holds little promise for success. May obtain a reputation as a man of character. Often these natives purse one of the arts, drama, music or poetry often with some melancholy. An adventurous life is indicated here. He may arrive at a measure of distinction and success. The extent of his character is usually indicated the extent of the ordeals he must go through and the way he meets these tests. The greatest satisfaction in life is to be able to cope successfully with challenging problems. When they are handled successfully and in a clever manner he often feels it was no threat at all, and rather enjoys challenge he successfully met. It is not wise to feel too sorry for these natives. For the most part, the trials they face are welcomed and are a measure of their greatness. It is sad however when a weak and immature individual crumbles under the load of a situation he is unable to meet with success. Even here there is something to be learned and understood more clearly.

I am grateful that there are at least a few people in my life who recognize how important it is for me to walk the walk as well as talk the talk—although I’ve never been much at holding words more sacred than actions, my own or others’. I’m not so inclined to talk about the walk as I am to walk it—and that’s going to need to change as I become a Reiki Teacher.

Then there’s Ellias Lonsdale’s Chandra symbol, which Aux Mailles doesn’t seem to know about yet:

An old witch on a windy promontory. She is calling to the sea.

He continues, “Wildly tuned in. Staggeringly aware of the overall situation and its call, you respond deeply and with earnest, plaintive engagement with all that is happening. You are profoundly emotional, physical, and personal in order to ground and focus a vaster attunement, urgently and critically mobilized at hot spots. Assigned to tune in to everything and make sure all the cosmic bases are covered–inner-planes activity predominates. You live within vast worlds, and are psychically charged with all that is being taken in, but your central focus is to respond, to report, to send the inner messages, to keep the lines open. Emergency and crisis sensibility inside of things, searching for signs, and knowing how to be there on the spot to turn things around by inward force of the magical will.” Kind of difficult to do when hardly anyone takes my words seriously—but then, it comes back to the back-asswards nature of words over deeds, doesn’t it?

The best-known group of degree symbols would be the Sabians. 9-10 Pisces is equally telling.

As a tiny fleck of dust in the sky, the aviator sails across the horizon in absolute mastery of these higher realms.

And an old Colin Hay song flits through my head: “All alone you’re born and die the same.. in between can take a while.” (If Carelli has anything to say about it, it may well.) What leaps out at me is that the aviator is alone in the cockpit, just as in the end, he is alone on his path. Friends walk, or fly, their path nearby, close but not close enough to touch.

I’ve been in this crucible for a while now, and I’ve felt as though it’s burning off the parts of me that need to rise and fall out of me like vapor or excreta, in order for me to eventually arrive at that essential purity of which the version of me signing off on these words is just a shadow. I just don’t want it to burn off the rest of me too; I worry that I go too far and still can’t seem to trust the universe in what it’s telling me, even as it’s telling me that it trusts me. Charubel tells of the kind of heat being used:

A fixed star. A transcendental Sun. It sheds a halo of supernal glory on the ascendant.

Alchemists referred to these stepwise processes as calcination (reduction, usually by fire, of the base element to an substance no longer affected by fire), dissolution (further reduction by a liquid, say, water or acid), separation (discernment of what needs to be kept and what needs to be discarded after dissolution), and conjunction (bringing the raw material kept after separation into a new form). They weren’t just physical processes: they were spiritual as well.

Viewed in those terms, I’ve been tested, and parts of me accepted, and parts rejected. I’ve reached, and am apparently still in the process of, putrefaction. It’s part of the process of fermentation, the fifth alchemical step, in which the purified result of conjunction is allowed to wither and rot, allowing natural forces to produce a new essence emerging from the debris of the old.

The dull roar of stagnation is building, and will deafen me if I do nothing to make something happen soon: there are plans to hatch and not a lot of money to hatch them with. Maybe it needs to deafen me.

Still, here I sit next to the water table, doing nothing but thinking about it, trying like hell to think about nothing and Just Be, the words to the chorus of that Colin Hay song ricocheting among the maples and the pines: “Hold me if you’re lonely…”, wondering about the identity of that personality inviting me to hold her.. or him.

But the degree interpretation of Jeanne Duzéa gives me reason to hope that that halo is coming in my lifetime:

A horse jumps the fence of his enclosure.

May 02

In search of a mountain

At the crossroads.

 

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you. — Lev Tolstoy

 

Now that I’m about to receive the Master level attunement, I wonder if I’m already seeing things more clearly than I did even two months ago.

I’ve been beset. My parents, Great Spirit continue to bless them, are every bit as mentally sharp as they ever were, but I can see their physical presences deteriorating right before my eyes. It isn’t even like the kind of difference you notice in someone when you’ve been away for a while and you mark how they’ve changed since you saw them last—it almost feels now as though I’m seeing a difference from month to month, sometimes week to week, even (less often) day to day.

When one parental unit takes the Cadillac out to go to the store or the library, I find myself worrying now about other drivers on the road and that parental unit’s  current state of reflex. When they’re both out, one as a passenger for the other, that’s double the worry. The best that can be said when both Mom and Dad have vacated the house is that I can actually record things down here in the Sanctum with a microphone; when they’re home, the clatter upstairs tends to preclude that activity, as do the incessant interruptions and the increasing amount of errands on which I find myself for their sake. So I have my choice: worry about when the records will be done once and for all, or worry about whether today is the day some idiot runs a red light and totals the Caddo (or if [heaven forfend] my parents manage to do it themselves).

The records, by the way, are probably not going to be finished by the May deadline. (The celebrated Douglas Adams quote comes to mind: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”) The sudden appearance on my system drive of a Trojan horse virus from an unknown source about a month ago pretty much saw to that. I’m still at least partially in recovery mode: the disk drives are working and the audio apps and plugins are functioning again, but so far no amount of reinstalling the printer driver will force the MacBook Pro and the Epson Stylus to recognize one another.

So, in an effort to make things just a little easier on myself, I’ve placed the Luminous City remaster on the back burner and will concentrate exclusively on the first Arc album for the time being, with the hope that it finally sees release in July.

If there’s money to release it. I’m investigating now whether I am to be one of the 7000 residents of this state to lose my unemployment benefits on the 12th of this month—it strikes me as ironic that the state legislature would cancel the extended benefit program because there’s merely less unemployment in the state. It’s as though they’re saying, we’ve got the unemployment level down to what we feel is a manageable level, now those who are still unemployed can go stuff themselves.

And it has dawned on me that if there were adequate skilled work here in Connecticut, I’d be doing it now. Yes, lately I’ve been concentrating on acquiring the skills needed to become a Reiki Master/Teacher, and I still intuit that a good chunk of my life’s work will be in the healing arts (with another good chunk of it in music, and still another a good man to a good woman).

Today, I considered a drive up to Washington to hike the tower trail at Mount Tom State Park, just for the view and for the cardio that I’d burn on the way up—then remembered that the tower was closed for repairs the last time I was up there a month ago. I considered hiking the tower trail at Sleeping Giant—I hadn’t been there in four years, the day before I met Jersey Girl for the first time in the flesh—but I told myself it wouldn’t have been enough of a challenge. The morning was rather moist, so the Blue Trail at the Giant was out of the question: lots of rocks and opportunities to slip and fall over a cliff.

So instead I drove through the exploding greens and intoxicating Russian olive blooming in Oxford’s back roads. I passed a signpost—and at that precise moment, my spirit guides reminded me that I had been neglecting a third skill set, which if it hadn’t sustained me through the beginning and end of my marriage, had at least kept the bread on the table.

Yes, I said, I could go back to IT, but you’ve already told me that’s not where my future lies. I turned the car around to head back to the T-junction.

It isn’t, the guides said, but then again, you’ve always known your future isn’t here in Connecticut. In order to have the future you’re going to have, you need to revisit that other set.

But there aren’t any jobs here, I protested.

That’s true. There aren’t.

So.. I have to.. go where the jobs are?

No verbal response, but a gentle rustle of the wind as I alit from the Explorer with cell phone in hand, readying the camera at the intersection, told me my guides were nodding in agreement.

But.. my parents? I asked. Leave them now, in their twilight years?

They need to do what they need to do, and you need to do what you need to do. If anything was going to happen, it would already have happened at some point in the last four and a half years of you being under their roof. Your life’s been on hold for quite a while now, and it will remain on hold as long as you’re living there. You’re not getting any younger, and pretty soon your sell-by date will pass just like you were afraid it would.

As I kept trying to reason my way around what my guides were telling me was necessary for the next step down the path, there came a voice I didn’t recognize at first, until the words formed sentences and recognition came: Ray Bradbury.

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

I snapped the picture and wished again for a nearby tower.

Mar 13

Thrills and spills with an inconvenient benefic

After days spent integrating new tracks into the songs for the first Arc CD (performed by others), I’ve been spending my nights doing a bit of astrological research. It appears now that neither this album nor the remixed, remastered Luminous City will be ready when I had intended them to be (next week), so I began to delve into the murky depths of electional astrology in order to determine an auspicious time to have the upload ready. I found one that I think will work, but am waiting on a second set of eyes (a volunteer at an astrology forum) to confirm that for me.

At the same time, it came to my attention that in about a month I will have completed my fiftieth trip around the sun here on Spaceship Earth, and a spirit guide prodded me to have a look at my Solar Return chart. As it does annually, the Sun will return (hence the name) to the degree of the zodiac that it occupied when I was born. Because of the movement of the solar system as a whole, it gets earlier and earlier, so that now my return occurs the day before my birthday.

Anyway, the Solar Return chart looks promising in a way that recent years have not been: tenth house highlighted, meaning that if I play my cards right (there is still such a thing as free will) I may be working again soon and off unemployment insurance. At least, something is likely to happen that will place my work before the public.

For laughs I also computed my Venus Return chart. I stopped laughing when I saw all the good omens for my social and romantic life for the upcoming year. As I write the return is to take place this evening. Venus’ planetary position, along with that of the other planets in the sky now and their placement in the houses, speak well at the time of the return; as does their interaction with my natal planets. In the astrologic natal chart, Venus is the lady of love (we’d refer to a male ruler of a house or an area of life as a lord), of course, but it also has a hand in financial matters, so I enter the next pass of the merry-go-round with a smile on my face and hope for my prospects on all fronts (and hopefully, very soon, as a Reiki Master).

But because I am turning 50 in less than a month, I was aware of a third return chart that I needed to have a look at.

Technically speaking, Chiron isn’t a planet; it may even be a comet, but it’s convenient for most astrologers to consider it an asteroid, one of the so-called Centaurs. Mythologically, that’s exactly who Chiron was: a centaur schooled by Athena and trained in the healing arts by Apollo, he inadvertently took a poisoned arrow in the thigh (shot by Heracles—friendly fire, apparently). Chiron’s immortality prevented him from dying, but as he was unable to heal himself, he suffered. Heracles brokered an end to Chiron’s misery by suggesting that Zeus exchange Chiron’s immortality for the life of Prometheus (chained to a rock and left to die for the crime of bringing fire to mankind). Zeus recognized Chiron’s nobility and service by making him a constellation, Centaurus—which we in the Northern Hemisphere can no longer see; it’s progressed too far south.

From this myth, Chiron the asteroid (discovered and named in 1977) acquired its astrological connotation as the “wounded healer” and the “inconvenient benefic”. Chiron’s placement in a natal chart by sign and house position, and the aspects it makes to the other planets in the chart—more and more astrologers include Chiron in their interpretations—represents that area of our psyches where we are wounded. Because its orbit is as eccentric as it is, at perihelion it can be closer to us on Earth than Saturn is, and almost as far away from us at aphelion as Uranus, so it’s also considered a bridge between the “personal” planets (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) and the “transpersonal” ones (Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto).

Chiron takes approximately 50 years to complete one orbit around the Sun. I’ve taken 50 spins on this rock, give or take. So I fired up AstrologerXP to research when mine was coming, and what I might expect to encounter when it did.

(Let me take a moment to recommend this piece of software, which runs on both OS X and iOS. If you know what you’re doing with plists, you can customize the hell out of it, adding as many asteroids as you like and as many different aspects as you can stand. I’ve already added aspects for the first 36 harmonics. More on that another time.)

The Chiron return is supposed to signify a time when that which has wounded us throughout our lives is brought to the fore, and represents an opportunity to deal with the issue once and for all. Shamanic astrologer Daniel Giamario phrases it like this:

The Chiron return process around age 50 radically exposes the interface, the ‘fracture’, between the psyche and the soul, between the personality and the essence of who we really are. It catalyzes a process that restarts the ‘spiritual path’ on an essential level by exposing the ‘sacred wound’, which is the core of our humanity.

When I was born, Chiron was at 9° 6′ 12″ in Pisces, in my 9th house. I’m in somewhat sketchy company: Warren Harding, Dick Nixon, and Ronald Reagan also had their Chiron in Pisces. (But then, so do George Clooney, Nicholas Cage, Brad Pitt, Jodie Foster, and other beautiful people like me; so did Kurt Cobain, Charles Dickens and Henry David Thoreau.) From the wiki at astrologynotes.org:

Chiron in Pisces relates to deep wounds stemming from the desire to merge with the whole (e.g. oneness with God, with the universe, or with others). There is nothing wrong with this desire; in fact it could be argued that it is our natural state. The Chiron in Pisces child is born with expanded consciousness; so much so that they can hardly tell where they end and another person begins. But their life may be riddled with painful experiences that result from their lack of boundaries. It is not uncommon for parental neglect, rape, or some form of childhood betrayal to be associated with Chiron in Pisces individuals. The nature of the wound will relate to betrayal of trust. Since a Chiron in Pisces person does not distinguish between self and others well, they do not know how to say no (or even that they should say no). Furthermore, when they do assert themselves as individuals, they encounter the pain of separation or even abuse.

Chiron in the 9th house indicates my spiritual restlessness, which started at a very early age (much to the chagrin of the nuns). But its aspects—whether, and how, it communicates with the other planets—show where the wound lies.

It lies within a strong and easy sextile to Venus, two signs away in Taurus (somewhat beset with a square from Saturn in Aquarius in the 8th house, the house of sexuality). Ordinarily, that is, it would be considered easy; but as it’s played out in my life it’s reflected a lifelong battle between the side of me that wishes to be original (Pisces) and the side that wishes also to fit in (Taurus/11th house; the house of friends, committees, gregariousness). Up until I began this self-work I had deemed the two sides mutually exclusive.

It also lies within an even stronger and much more difficult opposition to Pluto in Virgo (in my 3rd house, the house of communications). Here’s a particularly poignant interpretation of what that might mean:

You have some very deep work to do around issues of loss, intimacy and personal power… Your journey involves deep, initiatory experiences that prompt you to claim your spirit power and heal yourself. In so doing you can become a powerful healer, shaman and spiritual midwife, but you must accept and own your power and face your “shadow”.

Other than a weak conjunction with Jupiter coming up behind it less than six degrees of arc away, it sits about 1.75 degrees of arc outside a square to my Vertex/Anti-Vertex (“Hand of Fate”) axis, one terminus of which sits neatly atop the midpoint between my Sun and Moon in Gemini (11th house). Dawn Bodrogi writes:

If planets square the Vertex angle, then the development of this planet is crucial to whether or not I become aware enough (and brave enough) to meet my fate.

Translation: working with Chiron energies opens the door to fated encounters. But it’s going to be bloody hard work. So it has been.

The chart elsewhere on astrologynotes.org details what happens to us as the transiting real-time version of Chiron aspects its natal position. It first sextiled (moved two signs away from its natal position) when it hit Taurus (and an almost exact conjunction to my natal Venus) two weeks after I turned 17. It was to have been my first opportunity to heal the wound—the desire to return to oneness with creation—and it might well have been a start on it. I was coming to the end of my first year in a public high school, where no one remembered me as the victim of numerous thrashings from playground fights as children. I was beginning to fit in, albeit that I still felt somewhat out of place and was nowhere near as popular as others in my age group.

But the wound surfaced in a major way when it came around again the next year. It came within about an arc-minute and a half of perfecting a second sextile to its natal position, and seeing all my friends pairing off with new lovers, that was when I began to feel too different to ever be loved. Ordinarily that first realization would have come with the first square, which didn’t occur until I was 23 and Chiron had moved three signs away to Gemini). But if anything, the square reinforced what I already knew to be true: busing tables at a hoity-toity Westport restaurant among some very beautiful people, and again feeling like the odd man out when it came to love. My first relationship was still a year away, and that lasted six months before I was kicked to the curb.

The trine, which came about when I was 27, saw me begin my relationship with the woman ten years my elder, whom I later put aside in favor of my future (now ex) wife. True to the chart, I did feel more like I could be myself during it, and after it was over.

If I recall the timing correctly, the first major fight I had with my future wife, during which she expressed a desire to break up and never see me again, coincided with the opposition, when Chiron had moved six signs away to Virgo. We managed to reconcile long-distance while I was in Montréal. The chart: “Learning to love, forgive and accept ourselves and others.” It was the first of many instances in which we decided that saving what we had required work, and that what we had was worth saving and therefore worth working toward. We learned.

The ex and I were solidly together when the second trine hit in November 1997 (Chiron was in Scorpio), and we had been married a year and three months as the second square hit in December 1999 (Chiron had moved to Sagittarius). By then I figured all the pain of the past was behind me; I wondered how I ever thought I would never be loved. Even as Chiron sailed through Capricorn and the second sextile came and went in 2002, and I wondered how I was going to provide for the household on unemployment insurance, I felt no need to examine the old wounds; time would heal them, I figured—it had healed everything else about this relationship. What self-work needed doing now?

A year later, Uranus moved opposite itself; two years later, Saturn opposed itself for the second time in my life. It was the beginning of the end. A short time after I moved out of our house in 2007, I joined Myspace and began a pen-pal relationship with a girl in New Jersey. By now you know my take on how that turned out.

Before I bring this walk down memory lane to a close, I need to go off on a short tangent. From our vantage point here on Terra, because some planets move faster than others and some slower, we observe that sometimes the other planets slow to a stop and then appear to be moving backward in the zodiac—what astrologers call retrograde motion. Eventually the planets slow to a stop again and begin moving forward in what astrologers call direct motion. As I write, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn are all moving retrograde.

Chiron does this too, in a pattern that appears to us to be three steps forward, two steps back.

In the sky now, Chiron is rolling through the early degrees of Pisces again for the first time in 50 years, and in the early evening of 5 May, Chiron will finally return to its natal position. Back to the chart:

Issues related to the wound resurface as a test of the individual’s level of awareness and growth. If we are able to respond with unconditional love, it will probably be a victorious experience, otherwise it could be very painful or even completely repressed and unnoticed. This is a major crossroad. We should experience confirmation of spiritual growth and healing at this point even if it means we have to work through more issues. If we do not, we are not likely to continue to work on ourselves past this point on the issues related to Chiron.

So here’s the kicker: not only will it return there, it will move forward a little bit, slow to a stop while it is still within an acceptable orb for conjunction, begin moving retrograde, hit my natal Chiron again in the late evening of 19 July, slow to a stop again while still within acceptable conjunction orb, begin moving direct again, and hit my natal Chiron a third time during the afternoon of 23 February 2013. This direct motion will bring it out of the conjunction orb early in May 2013..

.. for about a month. Then in mid-June, it will stop and begin moving retrograde again, back into conjunction orb.. and then (as it happens, on Jersey Girl’s birthday) it will stop about a minute of arc away from hitting my natal Chiron a fourth time.

Then it turns direct again and begins moving away. By late February 2014, it will be out of conjunction orb for good, and I’ll have to wait another 50 years to do this dance all over again.

If I weren’t already bald, I wonder if I might have torn the last of my hair out by the time March 2014 rolls around. But the rest of the description of Chiron in Pisces from Astrologynotes gives me hope that this battering isn’t in vain:

After a while, the Chiron in Pisces person gets tired of having their trust betrayed and starts fighting back. In the process, they acknowledge that they are an individual, that they want to remain an individual, and that they are willing to endure the pain of separation from others if they can be free to be themselves. Without this struggle, they would de-evolve back into group consciousness. The reward for their efforts is the ability to evolve into individuality without losing their connection to the whole. In fact, they discover that they have never left the whole, and they are connected to all beings regardless of their feelings of separation.

.. that, in other words, being myself and being an integral part of the cosmos are not, after all, mutually exclusive.

 

Feb 19

And he reads maps, too

A small correction to yesterday’s post.. all those planetary lines converging over Alaska converge over Kotzebue Sound, not Norton Sound. My sleep-encrusted eyes saw what my wakeful eyes didn’t.

Specifically, they all seem to meet over the village of Sheshalik, which according to Wikipedia doesn’t seem to be inhabited now. The lines fly about 15 miles west of the settlement of Kotzebue (I like its Iñupiaq name better: Qikiqtaġruk, “almost an island”), which has about 3000 residents.

If anyone has gone through life being almost an island, I feel like it’s me. This is a major reason for all my work with Reiki energies for the last few years: Having established a firm connection to myself at an early age, I have always wanted, but never quite felt (or only felt sporadically), that profound connection to others and to the universe at large.

Mind you, all of Western Alaska, including Norton Sound, will have strong planetary influences. I guess I got taken in by what I saw on Google Maps when I inadvertently zoomed in on the wrong section of the state.

Feb 18

Hither, and indeed, thither

Just now as I start this, I finally finished getting rid of all the spam that had infiltrated the comments section. Three thousand comments telling me who to use for lawncare in Delaware, who to go to for grey Uggs.. and a few telling me that I used to “write excellent” but that my last several posts have slipped in quality. (Yeah, pal, I’ll be sure to click on your link sometime soon, especially since you’re chastising me for my style but haven’t even got a clear grasp on basic English grammar.)

So since this seems to be the day for it, with transiting Mercury conjunct my natal Chiron and working in a spirit of self-healing, I can turn my attention to loftier things. I’ve got several on my mind at the moment, so they’re all going to get some play in this post.

 

I attended a spirituality meetup on Monday, wherein (with guidance) we practiced mediumship. If you’ve been an avid reader of these ramblings it’s likely you’re also aware of Crossing Over, a syndicated series wherein medium John Edwards comes in contact with people/spirits/entities who’ve crossed over from this plane to the next, and relays messages from these entities to specific people in a studio audience who need to hear them. The few times I sat down long enough to watch, I kept an open mind about what I was seeing, and figured it was a special gift that Edwards has with which the rest of us weren’t blessed.

After Monday night, I’ve had to revise my thinking. As is customary at these meetups, we worked on the specific area of concern with a partner. On some level I guess I was tuned in to her vibration, although I wasn’t aware of it as I concentrated—it wasn’t even that I went into a trance, just that I opened myself up to any spirit that might have had a message for anyone in the room. Most of the others at the meetup didn’t get messages specifically for their partner—I was one of the few who did, and may even have been the only one other than our facilitator.

I got a vision of a seaside restaurant, then of a middle-aged woman in a blue dress with small white polka dots, wearing a piece of cheap costume jewelry: a pin, pewter-structured, with colored glass representing a small cornucopia of fruit. My partner identified this person as her late mother-in-law, who used to take her and her husband out to dinner at a restaurant on the water in Montauk. The message she wished to relay to my partner was that she was happy with the way my partner and her husband were taking care of one another, and that that was what she had always wanted for her son.

But earlier, our facilitator had been showing us the basic principles of mediumship by way of demonstrating how she does it, which turned out to be in a manner not dissimilar to John Edwards. She sensed the presence of an older woman of particular spiritual radiance, short, wearing glasses, heavy Eastern European accent. I sensed that this person was trying to communicate with me: the description fit my late maternal grandmother.

My grandmother is no stranger to me some twenty-odd years after her passing: more than once I’ve awakened in the middle of the night to sense her spirit at the foot of my bed, keeping watch. If there was conversation, I wasn’t aware of it in my half-awakened state. I never sensed that she was trying to tell me anything; she was just letting me know she was still there, and I was always grateful every time she showed up. For me, that was enough.

The message I got at the meetup from my grandmother was twofold: first, that life is to be savored. It’s something I don’t always remember to do in the midst of working on three albums’ worth of music by myself down here in the Sanctum by day, and running out to gigs by night. But when I’m actually at the gigs, I can savor that experience and the support and cameraderie of the people who’ve showed up (even if I can’t always accept their compliments freely; see previous post).

The other part of the message was that I’m not going to be single for very much longer: I’m not meant to be alone, and the lover who has been speaking to me in spirit for a year and a half, urging me to keep looking, is coming soon.

 

On the drive home from the meetup, one of my other spirit guides got my attention. “You have a knife in your back.”

I had been feeling this ever since the end of my last relationship. Now, I call it a relationship, and I can point to certain experiences we shared along the way in order to prove my case; but to hear her tell it now you might well think she had never, ever given it any kind of credence, even while we were lovers; or accorded it the weight that would justify it being called a relationship. On my end, I know better than that; on hers, it’s probably something she never even thinks about now, and it’s probably just as well that she doesn’t, as she has other things in her life that require her attention.

The betrayal I experienced at her hands, which I’ve documented in earlier posts, had never really left me. I know that she’s moved on now: she has a new lover, who is also the father of her child. What has bothered me, to the extent that her presence in my spiritual orbit still bothers me, is that since she gave birth, her attitude seems to have mellowed towards quite a few of the other people she’s hurt in the past: she’s reached out to them, or found them reaching out to her, and met them halfway.. and that was something she’d rarely if ever felt inclined to do with me. The chain between us remains broken.

And I’m ambivalent about fixing it, and she appears to be equally ambivalent. The disconnect I experienced between her past actions and her words, and the fact that she’d come to a point where it seemed that I was only her friend if she wanted something from me, and a non-factor in her life the rest of the time, produced serious trust issues. It raised questions with which I’ve found myself wrestling ever since: can you truly love what you can’t trust? To what extent is trust a part of, or prerequisite for, love? When one person feels like a kitchen utensil, taken out of the drawer only to be used, and then put back in the drawer again with no more thought given to it after its purpose has been accomplished, does that constitute friendship? Given that I’d forgiven but not forgotten the slight, was that OK in the universe’s book, and did that contribute to my walk or hinder it?

I broke radio silence between us after about nine months only to acknowledge the birth of her child (for some reason I still can’t fathom, my phone number remains in her cell phone, and she MMS’d me a picture of the newborn). I went right back to silence when she tried to engage me in conversation. At no point since we stopped being lovers did I ever feel that she was ever curious as to how I might be faring; the sole topic of conversation after a while, after we stopped being lovers and were ostensibly friends, was herself and whatever might be troubling her at the moment.

Then, a few months ago, while I was still on Google+, a notification appeared in my Gmail inbox that she had added me to one of her circles. She was reaching out to me. I allowed it without adding her to any of my own circles, and as a courtesy I sent her a friend request on Facebook: a move I’ve second-guessed every day since I did it.

She accepted my request; however, I restricted access such that while my status updates and shared items may well appear on her FB wall—I can’t tell whether they actually do—none of hers appear on mine. The second-guessing, and the restricted access, come from that ambivalence about fixing things. There are days when I feel that our lives have spun in entirely different directions, and that there is no overlap now, and that she and her attitude toward me had changed enough that I don’t really need to know what’s going on in her current life. But I perceive that she doesn’t see that anything needs fixing, even after I told her explicitly that I felt betrayed, even after I told her explicitly that I no longer trust her, even after I told her explicitly that I no longer considered us friends, that in light of the attitude she’d taken towards me our roles in one another’s lives were effectively at an end, and that I could see no further reason for us ever to speak again.

While it’s true that we all have a system of chakras scattered about our bodies—a whole range of very minor ones that seem to me at first glance to correspond to acupressure points, about 21 minor chakras, and 7 major ones—certain healing arts practitioners, among them Barbara Ann Brennan, have identified that the major chakras aren’t just energy centers protruding from the front of our bodies, but also from behind.

The spirit guide who pointed out the knife in my back gave me something else to think about. “You can’t reach it. You’ll need help getting it out.”

Step into a shower and try to fully wash your back without aid of a scrubbing brush. There’s an area around your shoulder blades that you won’t be able to get to. It corresponds to the back area of your heart chakra. That’s where the knife in my back was located.

The night after the spirituality meetup, I attended a Reiki share with Jane, my teacher. I told her what my guide had told me and asked her to have a look at my back around the area of the heart chakra. As she worked there, she felt something give.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly over the course of the last several days since the share, I’m feeling as though something is releasing in me. I don’t know what this will mean for my current relationships—or my past ones.

 

Today, just before I sat down to write this, I hiked a mile off a back road and down to a local reservoir. The area was quiet except for the wind blowing leaves along the ground and through the bare branches, the water slapping at the shore, and distant traffic from State 58 across the water. The air was cool but not overly cold; the sun showed signs of strengthening. I was pleased at the mildness of the winter so far just north of Long Island Sound.

I found a hospitable pine tree to set myself under, and my body became a pendulum. Yes, my grandmother was correct: she is coming. Yes, she is coming soon. No, I don’t know her yet; she’s not in my life now. But she’s coming. I didn’t ask any other questions, and a guide told me to enjoy the show.

The only show in front of me was the play of sunlight on the water and the caress of a slow wind across my face in the shade. It was enough.

 

Apropos of nothing I’ve had to say so far, but this has been on my mind too, lately. Back when I was a sophomore at a parochial high school, it dawned on me that the girls in my class who remembered me from my younger days of getting tormented on the playground were probably not going to be very charitable toward me as we all passed through pubescence and began looking for partners with whom to pair up. Other than a select few who appeared to be content with friendship, I didn’t see that anyone was at all as interested in the prospect of dating me as I was in them.

I decided that I needed a fresh start, prevailing on my parents to send me to the local public high school instead of to the Catholic one. It was one of those moments in my life that represented a true crossroads, when looking back from the safe distance of almost thirty-five years you wonder how things would have gone had you chosen differently, how your life would be so very different now.

Now, I can’t change where I was born, but I can change where I go from here. And the question has been rearing up in my head of late: if I needed a new reboot from the circumstances that surround me here in the 203, where should that take place? And do I in fact need one?

As part of my studies into astrology, I came across the fields of relocation astrology and astrocartography. Wikipedia doesn’t go into very much detail on the subject, but its description suffices here. Typical astrocartography maps

…show all locations on the earth where planets were “angular” (rising, setting, on the zenith or nadir) at the moment of an event like a person’s birth. An “angular” planet is one that is conjunct one of these four angles (Ascendant, Descendant, MC or IC). These locations are displayed in the form of lines on the Astro*Carto*Graphy world map.

On an astrocartography map, the lines can be sine wave-shaped curves denoting where on Earth a planet was conjunct the Ascendant or the Descendant (the zodiacal areas where the Eastern and Western horizons were; astrologically these are where the first and seventh houses begin), or straight lines denoting where a planet was conjunct the Midheaven and the Nadir (the noon point and the midnight point; astrologically, the tenth and fourth houses).

The map I generated out at Astrodienst shows that the Moon-Ascendant sine wave passed just to the west of Bridgeport at the moment of my birth. Not surprising; when I was born, the moon had just risen above the horizon and was approaching first quarter. If the astrocartographic theories are to be believed, the entire area will hold a very, very powerful resonance toward the parts of my personality governed by the Moon, which as it happens was in Cancer at the time of my birth. Moreover, Cancer was rising on the horizon at that moment, making the Moon my chart ruler. It would likely have been powerful anyway, but its appearance just above the horizon would give my presence in this place a very lunar quality to it.

And I’ve come to feel that it’s done that over the course of my nearly fifty years here on this rock—to the virtual exclusion of those parts of my personality that haven’t been nearly as developed. I’m an Aries: that’s where my Sun was located at just about the highest point in the sky (Mercury is actually closer to the noon point, but Mercury is never very far away from the Sun). At my birth, the Sun rose over western Alaska and set over Volgograd and Lesotho. The sun was at its highest just east of Labrador, and at its lowest just west of the Korean Peninsula and some hundreds of miles east of Perth. Had I been born in any of those places, the Sun would have probably held more of an influence over what I’ve become.

Beside the Sun and Moon, the other planets cut similar paths across the face of the Earth. Astrologers have documented stories of people who were born in one place, relocated to a place just under or closer to one of these lines, and found themselves. As astrologer Robert Couteau tells it, Charlie Chaplin achieved a certain amount of success in his native England, but it wasn’t till he relocated to Hollywood—directly under the line where his natal Sun was at its highest point in the sky, the Midheaven—that he achieved his fame.

Now, I’m not looking for that kind of fame or notoriety (although if it comes, I will find a way to deal with it). But if there are aspects to my personality that need to be refined, it’s probably not going to happen in Connecticut.

Couteau’s concept of the Least Aspected Planet in my natal chart identifies Uranus as the planet most responsible for who I am at my core: the essence of my soul. My long-held individuality, creativity, and revolutionary tendencies are Uranian.

The line on my astrocartography map where Uranus was at the Nadir runs through or very near Saskatoon, Casper, Denver, Colorado Springs, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Mazatlán. I can expect Uranian energy to be very present there along that longitude. Similarly, the line where the Nodal Axis was conjunct the Nadir runs through Los Angeles, which actually was my home for a few months back in the watershed year of 1967. The Nodal Axis is commonly thought to denote fated occurrences.. and I am thinking very strongly again about California these days, contemplating a trip there in late June or early July, when the transiting Nodal Axis will be on the Descendant and transiting Jupiter will be on the Ascendant, and wondering whether to even bother coming back to Connecticut.

But the region I find most interesting is a little further north.

 

I can see Russia from here!

 

The area in and around Norton Sound is very, very highly charged on my birth chart. Uranian energy is present here too, on the curve where it was at the Nadir. But also floating through the area was where Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter were rising (conjunct the Ascendant) and Saturn and Neptune setting (conjunct the Descendant). To the west at the mouth of the Sound, the Sun and Venus were just about to rise.

Those of you who know how much I detest winter will believe me when I tell you I never thought I’d be saying this, but insofar as I have a bucket list of places to visit, Norton Sound has just gotten on it.

Feb 03

Bloodletting, part deux, euh, trois, quatre…

After the gig last night, our lead vocalist sat at the bar, sipped at her glass of red wine, turned to me seated on the stool to her right, and said, “You really need to get laid.”

The guitarist, sitting at her left flank, nodded. I, pulling at my Guinness in the process of drinking myself straight, hadn’t thought that anything of the sort showed in my demeanor. “Just a night of meaningless sex,” she continued.

It wasn’t a come-hither. She knows, and I know, that we have a professional relationship and that I’m not about to get in the way of her LTR with the band’s drummer. But over the course of playing with this band for a few months now, without my having had to pay much attention to the fact, we’ve all become comfortable enough with one another that we can say things like that.

I mumbled something along the lines that I’d had a bellyful of meaningless sex and wasn’t really in the market for more. I thought I heard someone say that it could lead to more if I’d just get back in the game, but I was still lit up and wasn’t sure whether that came from either the singer or the guitarist, or from someone in the ether. But as I’ve mentioned in the past, the cost of entry back into the game is something I just haven’t felt I’ve had for the last several years of other-imposed, and now self-imposed, celibacy.

Both the vocalist and the guitarist noticed me flirting before, during, and after the show with a doe-eyed single mother of three in the audience, laying Reiki hands on an ailing shoulder, placing my quartz dagger on her crown (it felt blocked) without bothering to remove it from my neck. She kept telling me how good it felt. If she was flirting with me, it escaped my notice—not because she’s not good at it, in all likelihood she is, but because I’ve never been able to tell when I’m being flirted with unless it’s been a truly overt gesture and I’ve been beaten over the head with it. Either way, she had work the next day and kids to pack off to school, and was off home by the time I motivated myself to begin packing my rig up.

Now, in a display of cameraderie and quite possibly alcohol lubrication, the guitarist asked, “Hey, who’s got your back?”

“You guys do.” I smiled.

Calling the vocalist by name, he asked, “What do we want for this guy?”

Her response was immediate. “A woman—someone we don’t have to pay…”

I came close to a spit take all over the freshly-sanitized bar, and along with the others, choked with laughter. After a moment it was hard to catch my breath from laughing and hacking.

The giving-up-cigarettes thing has not been going well for me. For every day I feel like I’m making progress, I have days like yesterday when I lapse back to what has become for me a normal level of nicotine intake. With every drag now, I feel like the demons are winning, and I can feel my will power and my ego shrink just a little more. That flashed through my mind as I caught my breath.

Later, the regular folk and the rest of the band had gone home, and it was just me and the guitarist sitting at the bar with our drinks—I may have been nursing the same pint from earlier, but I can’t be sure—while the bartender, a long-standing friend of the guitarist’s, scrubbed the place down and reconciled the registers. I remember (vaguely) responding to the guitarist complimenting my musicality and my keyboard work by extending my hands and showing my lack of reach, moaning all the while that Brubeck and Peterson could walk tenths with their left hand while I was lucky to be able to walk an octave on a good night. My keyboard technique is the result of working around physical limitations that most other pianists didn’t have to work around. Yes, Art Tatum, George Shearing, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Mats Öberg—all blind. But all have, or had, longer reaches than I do. It hasn’t prevented me from speaking my truth at the keyboard—but it has made it more difficult to get the phrases out.

Something similar happened to me while I was trying to bond with a comely young waitresses at the coffeehouse I’d played the week before. While the Old Men had played there numerous times in the past, she hadn’t seen the band previously, and was raving to me about how good and how energetic we were, and I felt a psychic wall going up around me as I mumbled some form of thanks. She wound up attaching herself to the bassist later that evening, and I guess I had expected that that would happen.

Remembering our vocalist’s pronouncement from earlier that I was in dire need of a good, meaningless fuck, we talked a little about the doe-eyed woman bopping to the music. He’d seen me giving Reiki, had seen her peacefully relaxing and enjoying it, had heard her say on her way out she needed a man to do that for her on a daily basis, had heard me blurt out that I was available, hadn’t noticed whether she’d reacted to that or even heard me say so.

I mentioned that I could sure use someone to work on me for my neck and shoulders. In the course of a Reiki share, which I enjoy weekly, some people will lay hands on you and some won’t, but it isn’t like massage therapy wherein muscles actually get manipulated. I recalled, but didn’t verbalize, someone from my past who was always quick to ask for a deep body massage, and was quick to get one from me, but whose efforts when I asked her to return the favor were perfunctory at best or else nonexistent: “Maybe later when I feel like it.”

He put his hand on my shoulder in that way a guy might do for his wingman, and gave it a squeeze—and found significant resistance. He called to the bartender. She looked up from her work quizzically as he motioned her over. “I need you over on this side for a sec.”

As she rounded the bar, he said, “You take that side, I’ll take this one—” and I found myself getting sandwiched between them as they worked on my shoulders and neck. I felt myself trying like hell to relax at the guitarist’s behest, and I remember my head bouncing softly off the bar once or twice as they worked for a few minutes.

As the two of them finished up and went back to their drinks and the registers, I fell quiet. As they took time away from that to horse around with one another as friends will, I sat and watched and didn’t join them; in fact once or twice headed to the washroom in part because I needed to relieve myself and in part because I just didn’t want to be around right then. And I had no idea why.

The bartender noticed before I did. “Are you OK? You seem a little lost,” she said as I was about to leave for the night (around 3 AM), and reached around to cradle me for a moment.

I told her I felt fine—I thought I did, anyway—and privately attributed my state to the alcohol working its way through and out of my body. Alcohol is another of the things keeping my vibration down, and I had intended not to drink quite as much as I did. As I said, I’m not addicted—I don’t go out every night looking for a drink—and I do like to be social, or what passes for social for me: small groups only, one-on-one better.

A couple of recent articles shed some light on my own self-understanding in the last week. One was a Time magazine article about what it’s like to be an introvert. It pretty much described me to a tee, and helped me understand why I wasn’t comfortable at a crowded nightclub the night after the Old Men played: flashing lights, plenty of hot women dancing, and me in a corner safe in the knowledge that if I didn’t ask one to dance, I couldn’t be rejected. I was overstimulated and out of my comfort zone just in being there. So there I was in the corner, waiting on a friend to show up from another nightclub, so that at least I’d be comfortable having someone to talk to. Eventually I got up onstage and sang a couple of numbers with the band, and that seemed to set me a little straighter, although on climbing down from the stage I went right back to my trusted friends.

The dichotomy here is that much of what I do involves playing for large groups of people. I guess I take some advantage of that wall Roger Waters wrote an album about, the one between the band and its audience.

But on the drive home from the bar, I realized that despite what I’d told the bartender, I wasn’t OK. For all the healing I bring to people, there is a part of me nestled securely in my core that doesn’t feel deserving of receiving healing in return, such as that which she and our guitarist were bringing me.

It’s strange that every week I take part in a Reiki share, wherein at some point during the proceedings I’m the one in the chair receiving the attention and the healing from the others. Some nights I’m tuned in and have visions; some nights I feel and see nothing.

It’s just weird and I can’t make sense of it. I ask for something, the universe brings it to me, and I slam the door in its face and tell it that it must have brought the gift to the wrong address. In response to this latest rebuke, this song has been in my head all day long as not so much a punishment as a koan to ponder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2h-IEFe724

And it doesn’t help me that lurking on the fringes of my spiritual orbit are people whom I excised from my physical presence, or I from theirs, a long time ago, whom I feel would agree with my sometime self-assessment: that I’m not deserving. I intuit that these people would love to see me fail once and for all, would love to see me without a friend strong enough to penetrate these walls showing up, or showing up and giving up on me as many have done in the past; would love to see me at rock bottom with no way up; would jump at the chance to remind me how well they had used me and to remind me that that is the only purpose I serve: to be used and then discarded. Their hold on my psyche is something I cannot explain except for the reinforcement they bring to my darker moments. I called them into my life to begin with, and now I can’t seem to get them out again. Lady Macbeth had a hard time with the blood on her hands, too.

And I wonder if part of the reason I don’t recognize it when I’m being flirted with, apart from the notion that I don’t think people flirt with me all that often, might be that I’m telling myself “She cannot possibly be flirting. How desperate, how broken must she be if she’s stooping to the likes of me? Do I necessarily want another broken woman in my life?” I had thought that it wasn’t something I wanted any more, but it’s all I’ve gotten so far, at least until they were fixed and could safely return me to the wasteland where they found me.

Some of my friends worry that the cost of entry I spoke of might well be a figment of my own imagination. My spirit guides and animal totems constantly, constantly admonish me that I only tend to call upon them to assist me in the midst of a Reiki session in the service of someone else’s greater good, but that I tend never to ask them along to work for my own. And I keep meaning to, and the notion just as quickly falls by the wayside as life goes on.

This is something I’m going to have to address before I can even consider telling my Reiki Teacher that I’m ready for the Master attunement. I’m just going to have to add it to the list of demons to conquer, along with the nicotine and the alcohol.

Jan 25

Next stop: Mastery

I guess the big news on this thide of sings is that yesterday evening I laid out a 50% down payment on the cost to become a Reiki Master/Teacher. As agreed upon by me and Jane, my teacher, at some point in the very near future, I’ll receive the final Master-level attunement but not the certification. That comes when I pay the balance.

So it won’t be long now before I become a Master myself, able to give attunements and to make a real living out of being a healing arts practitioner.

It was a leap of faith in the truest sense of the word, doing that. I had only intended to give her a fraction of what I did, but I saw that with the money I’ve been saving—

Maybe I ought to back up a bit here. On a recent Wednesday evening, around 10 PM at night, I was out at a bar for karaoke night, among friends, when I received a phone call from my teacher. As I stepped out onto the patio to more properly have a conversation—Jane wouldn’t call me this late unless she felt it was important— she told me she’d been thinking about me and my situation (well documented in this blog), and wondering what she could do to help.

She told me heard a voice behind her mind’s ear: “He’s got addictions he needs to master.”

Jane, an intuitive, didn’t question where the voice came from, but fell into silent conversation. “Addictions?”

“Tobacco,” Jane told me as I lit a cigarette. Then, as I stood in shock and took a healthy pull from the pint of Guinness I’d brought along, “She told me alcohol, when you take it, isn’t helping either; they’re both keeping your vibration at this level and that it’s not going to rise until you quit.”

I’m not addicted to alcohol; I’ve seen what that’s like and I’m nowhere near that level of involvement with that drug. But cigarettes are a different story. This current fling with tobacco is the third time in my life I’ve fallen into this addiction.

It was hard quitting the first time, but I had incentive: my second girlfriend, who wasn’t a fan of smokers. It was easy quitting the second time: I’d just met the woman I would eventually marry, and my soul knew both that and the fact that she was, and is, allergic to cigarette smoke.

In my current period of forced and then voluntary celibacy, I simply had no incentive to quit once I started again in earnest during a bout of depression after my divorce. I pulled on my cigarette again as Jane continued.

“I asked who was talking to me, and she responded that she was Archangel Gabrielle.” Jane had never heard of Gabrielle before, and afterward found her here.

I recognized immediately that a message from an archangel would be sufficient incentive for most people to do something about their situation. So I’m about to quit cigarettes for the third and hopefully final time.

Now, I haven’t quit yet. I’m still smoking, but with the help of tabacum tablets I have managed to about halve my intake from baseline, that is, before I got Gabrielle’s message through Jane. And when I’m on gigs, I don’t find myself bellying up to the bar as much in between sets—but then again, when I’m in a club to begin with, it means I’m playing, and under quite a few circumstances and provided no one overdoes it, the band drinks for free, so it isn’t as though I’m paying for my Guinness.

And my body has been noticing it, and reacting with increasing volume, concern, and downright indignance over the falling nicotine levels. It hasn’t helped that because of my body changes, my immune system has been working overtime and wasn’t able to entirely prevent a URI I recently found somewhere, picked up, and took home as a pet.

In an effort to tone down the constant hacking as my body and the Reiki already present try to excise the infection and the aftereffects of smoking a pack and a half a day on average for the last two or three years, I bought a bottle of Bronchial Soothe Ivy Leaf Syrup in a local health foods store just after I found the tabacum pellets. (Yes, its active ingredient is an extract from English ivy.) In addition to quieting the wheezing in my lungs, it seems to be giving me energy that I haven’t felt in a while as it assists in rebuilding my immune system and pushes the toxins out of my body. I found that my singing voice hadn’t been this strong in months—and this is coming at exactly the right time, too, as I settle in to record final vocals for the Arc albums.

So, the upshot. I’ve been buying less cigarettes recently, and when I went to the ATM to extract money with which to start paying Jane for the upcoming Master attunement, I saw that I had quite a bit more in there than I thought I had. And the voices started up in my head: pay her a little more instead? Pay her a lot more?

Pay her half? Then, the voices said, you can at least receive the attunement even if you don’t get the certificate immediately.

If not now, then when?

So it was a leap of faith leaving myself as short as I did in my checking account, but I figured I could afford it with paying gigs coming up tonight and Friday; those could go into my gas tank to get me to two more non-paying gigs tomorrow night and Saturday. It would tide me over until I could file for my next unemployment check on Sunday.

(On that front, I have my resume in for retooling with a friend who has done this sort of thing before for friends, all of whom found work after she got done with her editing. She knows people at her place of employment under whose noses she can wave my CV. Our fingers, hers and mine, are crossed.)

Beyond that, I find myself wondering what kind of upheaval I’m in store for once I receive the Master attunement. The first attunement produced mild glimpses of unaddressed issues from my recent past; the second, a violent roiling of deeper issues from my adolescence. Working with the Merkaba exacerbated what had taken place at the second attunement, at least at first.

Now.. I’m in a place where I’m ready to enter the final stage of mastery, and I honestly don’t know what to expect: whether I’ve gotten past the issues I needed to resolve, or whether more  arising from a deeper level than adolescence are due to burst into my consciousness.

I suppose, as I said once before, I should expect nothing.. and I should expect everything. But it took a leap of faith to get here, and it will take another to get me through it.

Jan 19

Thirty-six bucks I probably don’t have

… in order to purchase a year’s license of that wonderful spam blocker, Akismet.

Imagine my surprise when I got into my dashboard and discovered well over 2500 comments waiting in my queue to be moderated.. all of them spam. Although I suppose I could rock a Louis Vuitton handbag if it were the right style, and maybe I really do have low T, I don’t think you need to see that, and with all the work here in the Sanctum I just don’t have the time to spend dealing with the increased volume of bullshit comments in pidgin English about how great my site is (even though, well, it actually is great.. isn’t it?).

I don’t know what you can see out there in the audio radiance, but if any of these comments are visible to your virgin eyes, rest assured they’ll be gone within the next several days, and needless to say you shouldn’t click on any of them. Why humor these people?

If you can’t see them after all, well, it’s just one less thing for us both to have to worry about.

As you were, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, etc.

EDIT (the next day): I think I’ve managed to turn off commenting for the time being. I checked from a separate workstation, and sure enough, each of my posts, no matter how trivial, had about 30 or 40 comments along the lines of “This site are good writing thanks for the information ! ! !” and advising me where I could see lesbian porn.

So far Akismet has stopped pretty much everything it’s seen. But so far in order to delete 40 pages of this shit I’ve given up about an hour of otherwise productive time. I guess that’ll learn me, huh?

Dec 31

Working from memory

For a little over half the year I had a couple of collages perched precariously on the mantle over the fireplace down here in the Sanctum, prominently, where I could see and reflect on them. They represented the things that I openly stated that I wished to make manifest in 2011, about which more in a bit. I made the vision boards in January, the first at a manifesting workshop I attended at my Reiki teacher’s place, the second here at home after scouring Google Images to find pictures closer to what I had in mind than those I was able to find in the assorted magazines at my teacher’s.

The week before, I had written a letter to Spirit, asking for these things, putting them into words, speaking them to myself and Spirit, and placed it in a sealed envelope where my teacher had safeguarded it for the year until today.

By August, both collages had gone through the shredder in a fit of deep depression. I have the letter in my possession again.

Now, in between bouts with the Luminous City remaster and assorted work on the first Describing An Arc album, I find myself reflecting back on the year past in light of those destroyed collages and that letter.

As I entered 2011, the main thing I understood that I needed was a job. At a separate prophesying workshop, I estimated that something would turn up by August, and presumed I would be working again. I had hoped to manifest a full-time, non-contractual, 40-hour-a-week gig as an IT support person at a medium-to-large company, and applied for anything that looked as though it might be close to that in scope. I was told I could be as specific as I liked, and at the time a friend in New Hampshire was trying to get me into his company, and the possibility existed that the job could move to Long Island—close enough that I could still be within reach of my parents, and well-paying enough that I could have my own flat down there. So that was the specific situation I wrote down in the letter.

At the beginning of the year, I actually went on a few interviews, none of which recommended me for a second. The company in New Hampshire never even bothered to interview me. By May, I had been on my last one for the year, although I had no way of knowing that at the time.

In March, a recruitment company granted me access to their online databank of training materials, which I visited daily in hopes of keeping my skill set current. But whenever I had questions of them, most notably whether any contracts were in the pipeline, no one ever bothered to get back to me, not even to say “No, there’s nothing yet, but we’ll keep you posted.” By August I was thoroughly disillusioned at the lack of prospects and the lack of any urgency on the part of the recruiters, and I stopped visiting, and soon after gave up on even scouring the newspaper want ads and Craigslist.

The job would have facilitated other things that I sought to manifest. My own flat, for starters, close enough to my parents that I could still get to them easily, but far enough away that they wouldn’t necessarily be tempted to visit at the drop of a hat. And coming with that, the chance to prove to myself and others that I am capable of living independently. I’m an Aries; being here has chafed from day one and it’s worn me down to the nub.

Seed money for the day when I could say goodbye to IT and settle into my healing arts practice. Expansion of the Sanctum’s physical plant, and more opportunities to gig. The new albums finally released, available at the major online stores, and receiving airplay on assorted internet radio stations catering to my style of music. A trip to Los Angeles to visit with friends there. Another to Florida to visit with friends there. A third to North Carolina.

Most importantly, a lover: as I phrased it in the letter, one “who isn’t broken and is helping me to fix what’s broken in me.” But as my friends kept telling me, as though I needed reminding, ain’t no romance without finance. They also engaged in a bit of conjecture, and I now believe them, that the roller coaster, feast-or-famine existence of an IT contractor played a large part in both the collapse of my marriage and that of what turned out to be the rebound relationship with my former friend in New Jersey.

The money thing was reinforced when I threw Rahdue’s Wheel again on the Winter Solstice. I saw things for which to hope, things to guard against, and, in answer to a specific question I asked about my current level of understanding with regard to the fairer sex, the 4 of Coins. The Transformational Tarot says this about what the card signifies when it isn’t reversed, and describes the collage imagery the artist, Arnell Ando, used. (I’d reproduce the text here, but then I’d have to include all sorts of legalese and copyright notices; better that you see it there, I think.)

So, yeah. The ability to make a profit. While still unemployed and netting $250 a week on unemployment insurance from the State of Connecticut, with future insurance very much in peril at the hands of a Republican Congress inclined to let anyone making under $100K a year fend for themselves. Any job for which I’d qualify now is paying mininum wage, would not offer health benefits, and would require me to keep appointments on my own dime (i.e., no company car, not even a mileage reimbursement for using my own ride to and from). The shift from white collar to blue collar is pretty much complete now; all the white collar jobs are overseas, and the few openings I’m seeing are being taken by overqualified former systems analysts whose old jobs were also offshored. That market is glutted.

At first glance it seems that without the job, none of the rest of it came to pass either. But in the last several days spent wool-gathering over this last blog post of 2011, I got to thinking whether that was necessarily true.

On a purely material level, I have managed to improve the Sanctum. These improvements came about as gifts rather than through very much intensive labor on my part. But still, they happened, the Sanctum is in better shape to produce the music I hear in my head and that I want others to hear too; so that goes in the plus column.

Elsewhere, it’s true that I’m still in my parents’ basement, far longer than I anticipated I would be, unaware (as I made my calculations in 2007) that the job market was going to take the dive that it did and not accounting for a predominantly Republican Congress taking pains to ensure that the current unemployment situation would remain exactly as it’s been for the last few years, ostensibly at the behest of the corporate big shots who funded their election campaigns—the so-called one percent. It still rankles that Herman Cain would suggest that somehow being unemployed is my fault for not seeing the signs, and that he’s definitely not alone among his Republican cronies; but who among us did, or could?

And when I consider that there are people sleeping under bridges tonight, I’m damn lucky I have a roof over my head and food to eat at dinner time, and pets to care for.

I never made it to Los Angeles, Florida, or the Carolinas; about as far as I got was the odd trip to Woodstock, and those were few and far between. The healing arts practice has yet to reach anything close to critical mass, thanks in part to the economic doldrums we face as a country and the lack of discretionary income in these parts.

At some point along the way it began to appear to me that my road ahead has nothing to do with Information Technology. A friend’s words to me (in August) came back at just the right time while I was at the latest emotional nadir:

i think thats a bit of society’s brainwash upon us. you HAVE a job sir…you were given a purpose…Art and music!!!! that’s your job.

And the clouds parted a little bit, and helped to lift me out of the depression that caused me to destroy the manifesting collages. I inquired with my Reiki teacher as to how best to begin the work towards Master level, and the process has begun. Progress has been made on the three albums currently on the desk or near enough to it. Two of them are slated for release in March, money permitting. And it may: as a result of expanding my circle of musician friends I’m now part of a wedding band project which is sure to be somewhat profitable.

Without the burden of finding work for which I am no longer spiritually suited, I have largely felt lighter in my soul as the year wound down.

It still hasn’t brought me any closer to a steady income, or to a steady lover. A friend said, “You’re looking for someone who isn’t broken, but we’re all broken at one level or another.” I don’t know about that. The level of vibration I hope to attain would seem to suggest a singular lack of brokenness. I’m not counting on becoming Jesus or Buddha in this lifetime, but I’m aware that my light shines brighter than it did at this time last year. One of the things I asked for in my letter was to walk closer with Spirit, and I feel as though I do now; I got as much of an opportunity to do that as I wanted thanks to the many public forest areas within striking distance of the Sanctum. And though I’m not taking anyone steady to bed with me, my circle of friends has expanded and I think we’re all better for that happening.

The album work has led me to believe that the people I’ve attracted into my life as lovers were attracted because they were broken, because they saw in me a road to healing—and not much else. Last night at a show (I wasn’t onstage), two lovers spent the entire time entwined around one another, barely registering their surroundings, only really registering one another. I ached a little bit for not having that, nor anyone in my life who might be that in potential, and I realize it’s possible that however much I may want it, I’m not supposed to have that kind of relationship with anyone this time around. It’s equally possible that if the universe wants me to meet her as the ball drops tonight, I’ll meet her.

And I realize I’m not really invested in a particular outcome, either: I don’t need to be in a relationship, and when the time is right, I will be, and so will she.

What I asked for this time last year, and what the universe gave me, seem at first glance to be rather dissimilar. I got the things the universe felt I needed for me to eventually fulfill my destiny, and didn’t get the things for which it felt I wasn’t ready. But I got things I hadn’t intended to get.

The very last thing I asked for in my letter was this: “The understanding that I’m not being greedy, that abundance is the birthright of everyone you’ve put here, me included. Ask and it is given.”

I think the main thing I am taking from 2011 is that I don’t get to define what constitutes abundance: that it’s totally the call of the universe as to what that means, and I don’t have the power to consciously manifest specific things or circumstances for myself. On throwing Rahdue’s Wheel, the second-to-last card I turned up in response to a specific question I asked (“What do I need to know about my current capability for healing myself?”) was the Ace of Swords reversed. One possible interpretation of the reversal is a feeling of powerlessness, and as I head into 2012 I feel very much as though I’m at the mercy of the universe and anything or anyone it might care to blow into my path. (But it also warns that I need to be careful of any conclusions I may draw from available data.)

And thinking about that as I write, maybe that’s how it should be: the hammer doesn’t complain when I use it to drive a nail into the pieces of wood that keep a house together, and maybe I shouldn’t complain about asking Spirit to use me as a tool—a fulcrum—to move us all closer together.

This is what I asked for.

And after I finished writing this year’s letter (with my manifesting goals much more vague this time out and with a lower bar set on what I wished to bring into existence), my teacher pulled a card out of a deck of messages from the angels (I think one of those Doreen Virtue decks). The card she pulled depicted a unicorn in full charge, and the message: “Keep charging ahead, and don’t take no for an answer. Expect miraculous solutions to appear.”

The walls that need to be broken down in my understanding.. is it that much of a difference to attack them with a unicorn’s horn or a ram’s?

Dec 07

Two plains

It looked more or less like this.

And suddenly I was under a dome. I couldn’t see where the half-sphere met the ground—too far, and too many beings in the way. It may even have been sky, but the light refracted into my eyes as an every-colored flower of life. I could see the circles within the circles, each circle distinct as a circle but each petal a slightly different color like stained glass: red gradually into orange, into yellow, green, blue, violet, and back again to red as I let my eyes roam slowly over the ceiling.

On the ground it was dark and featureless; figures moved about the smooth plain in all directions through a subtle haze the shade of burnt umber. I recognized some as human—even recognized some that I know. Mantises and Greys were there, and they were not at each other’s throats; they were cooperating. Other shapes seemed to me to occupy a state somewhere between the physical and the spiritual. And there were some who were purely spirit, points of light that didn’t have a recognizable shape but who distinguished themselves with just presence.

While they skittered about semi-randomly, from where I stood I did notice a general progression towards something I couldn’t see. It was as though the organism we made together were executing a random walk within the organism that wasn’t actually random, that the thing as a whole had a destination, had a purpose, and moved toward it incrementally.

Once I could glean a sense of that direction, I started to walk that way, but soon found myself skirting around others just standing and taking it all in, and then larger clusters of figures, some alike to themselves, some composed of various races, some standing in small cohort, some walking together. After I’d passed enough of them, instead of walking with intent in the direction I’d sensed us traveling, I found myself moving semi-randomly with all the rest of them.

You’ve been here before. The words didn’t reach my consciousness through my ears. A shape, the speaker, fell in beside me to my right. I realized that for all the conversation I’d been hearing as I walked, I saw no one’s mouth actually moving, no one’s hands crying to be understood.

I found that I didn’t have to speak either. I’ve never been here before, I don’t think.. but I know this place, I know what it’s for. I felt comfortable in a way I usually don’t when talking to strangers. Whoever this personality was walking with me, he (she? some other gender?) wasn’t human.. more than human, I guessed.

Of course, my companion said. That’s why you’re here: because you know what it’s for. And I have seen you here before.

Another shape of a different vibration fell in to my left, and said only two words to me before falling silent as we walked. Welcome home.

Something about the way he said it was worth a thousand embraces from a thousand friends after the greatest triumph I could imagine. And I felt not only my own heart swelling with the thought, but his too, and my other companion’s, and everyone immediately around me, and realized the whole room was feeling it too and had been similarly welcomed.

And as we approached the gathering place (it may well have been the center but could just as easily have been some other sacred point—the dome was that large) our shapes fell away from us, and we were all light, and we were all equal. The flower of life, and the trees of life that formed within it, lost none of its colors but gained in intensity as we moved.

I wish strongly that I could remember the words spoken when we got there. The voice soothed as none I’d ever heard before, and filled us with contentment if not a sense of purpose. I recall dimly that the voice noted that our paths had brought us all to this place, and that we were to show others how to get there too through our example.

Looking down momentarily, I noticed that another point of light was anointing what had been my heels with an inscrutable oil: it didn’t seem to have any particular aroma that I could discern, and I felt no extremes of temperature or pain: just that it was there. As I looked left and right I saw that I was part of a long line of people being similarly anointed: I couldn’t see the end of the line in either direction, just that it faded into the brown dusk and merged with the receding geometry in the ceiling, or the sky.

 

Before I had the opportunity to anoint anyone, I heard the voice of my Reiki teacher telling me, “It is done.. take your time.” As usually happens when I’m receiving Reiki at a share, I came to almost immediately, and sat straight up in the anti-gravity lawn chair we use in lieu of a massage table for want of space.

I didn’t notice until later that I wasn’t sorry to have left the dome, to have been pulled back into this existence. Thinking about it later, I paused long enough to wonder why in order to understand. The understanding comes from the deepest place in me, from the core of the core: I can get back there whenever I need to, now.

 

The share tonight consisted of four people: me (a second degree practitioner), a first degree, and two Master/Teachers. The first degree noticed that working in my energy field felt to her like a day at the beach, playing in the sand, warm water lapping at her.

The other Master told me that after a while it felt like he was performing a ritual. In my experience, Reiki practitioners never practice the same way twice, even on the same person at different sessions: their intuition will guide them to do certain things differently from session to session. They do what needs doing, and what needs doing can vary.

My teacher agreed that it felt like something sacred was going on, and told me that while she worked, she had a vision of a battlefield, full of fire and carnage, and of me walking purposefully and slowly through the scorched and burning earth, eyes fixed on the horizon, allowing nothing to get in my way, fearless of anything or anyone that might cut me down in the heat of war. Nothing could touch me, and nothing could stop me.

I told them what I’d just experienced: the dome, the figures, the lights, the sacred geometry in the sky, the anointing.

 

I don’t think it’s all sunk in yet. But I’m pretty sure I’m a different man now from the one writing this past Saturday night.

A friend wrote of being unsure of “astral meanings and consequences” after reading that post. Her words, and her kindness in replying with good reinforcing advice, make it impossible for me not to smile with gratitude.

And with her reply coming when it did, I realize I’m attracting the people I need into my orbit after all—and I am being attracted into others’ orbits for reasons not fully known to me but perhaps out of some reason only Spirit knows. But Spirit has good reasons for placing certain people in our paths, and for placing us in theirs. Opportunities to learn and to teach.. or just to be good to one another because we can.

I met a lot of fellow travelers tonight under that dome. So I think that for a while at least, it may be a little more difficult to feel as solitary as I’ve been feeling.

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