It Begins With a Call (Part 31) - Mind the Gap!

I’m gathering up my courage and going to Deena Metzger's  Writers’ Intensive this year.  Although I have always been (and seen myself as) a writer, it’s the Healers’ Intensive I’ve felt called to three of the last four years.  Until now.  I don’t know why the original call or why the change, but I’m trusting my instincts.  In my experience, things start gearing up well before we get there.  Now, a little over a week before it starts, Deena sent a friend with some health issues the following:

“What might spirit want? Why did this potential condition in particular come to you in particular in this particular time in your life and history? What are you dreaming? Might the dreams be speaking to you?  Why this kick in the ass? What might you be called to? What path emerges for you to walk and if you step on it, you can tell Spirit you got the message and the potential illness is unnecessary. “

Such good questions.  I myself have cycled back into some familiar unpleasant symptoms and find this most timely for me as well.  This entire piece, It Begins with a Call, has been me addressing these questions. 

I know Deena would say that what is happening in our bodies is what is happening to the earth. 

Topanga Canyon

Two nights ago I dreamed a lot.  I do not remember any whole dreams, but I remember five very distinct images:

1.    Facing two others, I assume their posture of arms upraised, bent at the elbows, palms out.

2.    Bringing a pomegranate tree in a tub out of a dark storage place.

3.    Bringing cups of tea from a corner shop to my daughter-in-law and her mother.

4.    Arriving on a residential street at night with others and exclaiming, “Oh, we’re mapping the inner landscape!”

5.    Cards with symbols or images on them being placed down in a square form.

These feel significant, and I think they are connected to the intensive, but I’m not clear how.  Fragments.  But gem-like and potent.  What does spirit want? 

I see: the posture of a priestess; Persephone and bringing the pivotal image of the story out into the light; service; laying out the divinatory images.  But what does it mean to map the inner landscape?  How do you do that?

There are gaps in my understanding of what to do, what is needed.  There is this:

Mind the Gap II

Life is full of gaps and holes,

Like a worn-out rag.

There are gaps in my thinking,

gaps in the floor in a recent dream,

gaps in this old house

where the rats squeeze through,

gaps in my understanding.

There are gaps between what I say

And what you hear,

Gaps in my calendar,

Gaps our hands and feelings

Cannot seem to bridge.

There are gaps in the heart,

holes made by departed loved ones.

There are gaps in atoms,

Spaces we cannot see but know are there.

Gaps are not always bad.

They may reveal doorways, openings

To the way out.

Gaps can be minded,

Carefully considered,

Filled, expanded, crossed

Or simply acknowledged

It Begins With a Call (Part 18): Endings, Beginnings, and Reframing the Story

Some reflections on how I got to where I am now…

I retired at age 61, several years before I thought I would.  One day, I simply had had enough.  I had accepted a position that I had once thought I’d never accept, as a manager.  I’d been a children’s librarian for many years, and loved the front-lines work, the story times and class visits, the connecting a child to the right book.  I never wanted to be a manager, and passed up a clear opportunity to go that way several years earlier.  But now I was a few years away from retirement, and I had the chance to boost my income to get a better pension.  Plus, I didn’t want to train some young newcomer how to do the job (with the possibility that I’d have to endure a bad boss in close quarters).  I knew plenty about what bad management looked like.  So, I took the job.

What I hadn’t really bargained on was having managers above me who were far from ideal.  My immediate supervisor did or could not mentor me; I had the sense she herself was way in over her head.  Her supervisor, the big boss, had few people skills. The writing should have been on the wall when I got the job.  They not only made me jump through hoops to get it when it should have been an easy stroll in the park.  Then, the big boss offered me the position minutes before an all-staff meeting so she could announce it, without really giving me the particulars of salary, etc.  Oy vey.  

I actually wound up mostly liking being a manager, as long as I was in my own little children’s library and away from the bureaucracy.  But that was not to be, and one day, after feeling ill-treated at another all-staff meeting, I had had enough.  In addition, the city was threatening to come after our health benefits.  I decided to get out while the getting was good.

Why does this come into the picture?  Well, I had no idea how burned out I actually was.  For four months after I retired, I still couldn’t do much of anything.  I had attempted to ritualize the transition, having been warned by my friend and elder Leona that it was extremely  important to do so. Regardless, I started getting symptoms, problems in my digestive tract, from one end to the other, and which no one, neither allopathic doctors nor many, many alternative practitioners, could truly diagnose or heal.  This was another beginning to my story of healing, or maybe of aging.  Or both.  Almost eight years passed before my SIBO diagnosis came in.  And now, in a 69-year-old body, of course aging is front and center.  I am turned towards my mortality, even as I still have trouble truly believing it.  How can I be old?  How did that happen?  And as hard as it is to comprehend, the fear of it is omnipresent.

About a year after my retirement, we began to consider moving from the peninsula, where we had lived for over 30 years, to the east bay, to be closer to our children and our new granddaughter.  Only friends really held us there; Barry particularly hated what the area had become – a fast-paced, shallow, Silicon Valley-dominated rat race.  We put our house on the market after getting it into better structural and cosmetic shape.  It didn’t sell.  We continued to make changes, swapping the old wood paneling for clean white walls. semi-staging the bedrooms.  In the middle of all this, I broke my foot.

One night, home alone, I got up from the couch and somehow tripped.  I went down hard, my right foot turning under.  It hurt a lot, so I drove myself to urgent care, and sure enough I’d broken it.  They put a boot on me (Which I had to remove to drive home), but at the next day’s doctor’s appointment they told me I couldn’t walk on it.  I rented a knee scooter, an annoying contraption, but preferable to crutches.  People would come to look at the house, and I had to scoot around the block to Starbucks because I couldn’t drive.  On our weekly visits to see Ruby, I had to go up and down their stairs on my butt while Barry carried the scooter up.  The only bright side to this was that Ruby thought the scooter was a blast.  She’d perch in front of my knee and we’d scoot around the house.

Most of the time, though, I felt housebound.  It was stressful.  We had to keep the house perfectly clean for potential buyers, of which there were not many.  I knew I could fall into a depression given the circumstances, so I came up with the idea of regarding this time as a writing retreat.  I started this blog, which I named Hanging Out with Hecate, because it felt like we were stuck at a crossroads, unable to move on.  Hecate is the goddess of the crossroads and plays a small but pivotal role in my beloved Persephone story.  Hence the title.

This idea of reframing is significant.  I chose to make lemonade out of the lemons, as the saying goes.  Of course, it wasn’t a panacea, and there were still plenty of times of depression and fear.  But it helped.

The house eventually sold.  My foot healed.  First, I got to dump the knee scooter and walk on the boot.  Then, I got to gleefully throw the boot in the trash.  Everything changes.  A good thing to keep reminding myself.  It sounds prosaic, but much of the time my mantra these days is:  This will pass.