I don't know about you, but I think a lot about where your attention goes, energy flows. It's all the witchy woo-woo stuff that I love (why not, seriously? what's the alternative? dreary stuff...if now isn't the time for magic and dream fulfillment and spreading love and joy, I don't know what is). Today Pam said (because I hang on to every word that Pam Gregory utters) "I definitely say that whatever you're focused on this solar eclipse will get bigger." Watch here at around 7.47. It's quite a thought. Whatever you are focused on will get bigger.
This is the very thought that derailed me on the 8.8 portal - the Lion's gate. Everything will be manifested and magnetized, they said. Me: In tears in the garden, feeling like a failure. Dude, it's a lot of pressure. Not only are you struggling to keep afloat, you're struggling to keep afloat with the knowledge that it's going to be more of the same. My only analogy is acid, to be honest. That awful thing of trying to keep the bad thoughts out of your mind, scary as it is, because it will only get worse.
I am teetering at the edge of the precipice, one foot in each world. My left foot on the parched earth, locked into my persona as a crack PR person, my myriad hands scrolling through endless emails, my brain filled with creative ways to unlock puzzles and crises. Snap your fingers and I know what to do. It's a business suit that no longer fits. The buttons are just a bit too tight. And my right foot dangling over the edge, remarkably calm and cool, feeling the soft, salty ocean breeze, ready to step off and float like a bird into a new world, a new existence. It's calm and uncluttered out there. I can see trees and deer and horses, and laughing grandchildren, and the vast blue sea stretching out ahead of me. It's filled with possibility, in every single moment.
They call it flow. It's the feeling you get when you are doing something you love and you can't stop because one thing magically turns into another. This happens to me when I start. Starting is hard, as those with neuro-spicy brains can attest to. And persecution is real. I remember when it started on Sunday morning. I woke feeling the weight had lifted, but with a thin residue of paranoia. An amount not assuaged by tea, but once I stepped out of bed and walked past an open window, the cool dawn air blew in, and I heard the wood pigeons cooing gently outside, and like a slap, it all changed. It threw me into moving tables and whipping up curry mayonnaise (lemon works to bring a bit of sour if you're doing this for non-dairy folk), and stripping roast chickens, and picking the dahlias I'd forgotten were there, because they were crisp and perky in the morning breeze, and pulling vases out of cupboards, and finding tablecloths, and choosing glasses and gently peeling the baking paper off the Claudia Roden inspired orange and almond cake which I'd made in a silly tin that wasn't nonstick. The night before I'd stuck cocktail sticks in it as it was cooling, and the hedgehog cake now magically stuck together, sponge clinging to sponge. I don't ever want to stop when I'm like this. Choosing each flower feels bursting with possibility. The satisfying way the table comes together. The way in which we inhabit the garden, all of us who live here; the birds, the trees, the flowers who are struggling through this heat. But this is morning and this is when the world is full of optimism. It's bursting with it. And the opportunity offers itself every single morning, no matter what the day before was like. No matter what. Wrap it up. Go to sleep. Start again. Start better. I knew I was in it and it was where I was meant to be when a black, orange and white butterfly, a Red Admiral, landed on the orange and white tablecloth I'd just put down, only a few inches from where I was standing, and did gentle jumping jacks with her wings, as if she were clapping.
We have no control. This idea of free will is false. I'll acknowledge that something like compatibilism exists. And exerting control as if we have it is worse. Holding on tight to the ideas that you formed years and years ago will not serve you. Let them go, I tell myself. Just let them go. Be the peaceful observer. Even if the worst pain you can imagine is happening to you it's not about you. And you can't fixing by engaging in it. Even if your child isn't speaking to you and you don't know why and you feel betrayed and bewildered and as if your heart is being pierced with daggers, the only way to survive this is by neutrality. By wishing good for them. By unhitching your cart from theirs. By letting them go. It's as trite as that saying on the Holly Hobby lunchbox you treasured as a thirteen year old, "If you love someone, let them go and if they come back to you..." I can't remember how it ends.
We're fighting a losing battle with this heat. Our gardens are slowly going brown. The grapes, the figs, the roses and the dahlias (the larger ones) are surviving. Other plants are withering. It's just too much drought. In Spain, it feels okay, natural, expected, but no-one is prepared here, not the birds, not the deer; I have seen at least five lone does in brown fields standing still, looking tired, disoriented. And yesterday a fledgling blackbird on the ground in the churchyard. I gave him water in the top of my water bottle. He didn't really want to move and didn't back away from me as I knelt down next to him. I checked this morning, and with the help of the internet I've ascertained that juvenile fledgling blackbirds may indeed spend a couple of days on the ground, within earshot of their parents. Empty nest and all that.
As I look out now, I swear that our false acacia tree has expanded its canopy to cover more of the house, more of the tiny plants, to protect us all from the sun. Thank you false acacia, or Chinese Pagoda Tree as you are called on Martha's Vineyard.
What does any of it mean, anyway? Love is all there is.
This struck me hard while in Spain for my nephew's wedding to a wonderful Spanish woman named Asunta. In this particular family, and perhaps in other Spanish families, it's customary to write and sing songs to the bride and groom the night before the wedding. We stood in an old house surrounded by trees, looking out over a pristine valley and distant hills under a sky shot with pale orange, as hundreds of cousins sang songs to the happy couple, who were perched on a veranda above us. Joyful songs about dreams and falling in love. Old men, young children, a dog even, all singing loudly and clapping along in time with the music. We Americans and British stood by, amused, transfixed, caught up in it all, wishing we too were Spanish, and able to sing out our joy so loudly. There is a charming politesse with the Spanish of this kind of gentility. They are doctors and architects, investors, and their great great grandparents found their fortunes in Argentina, not quite conquistadors, but brave young men who needed new maps, new horizons, new fortunes at the end of nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The world was lighter then. Tales of courage and the pioneering spirit existed. The choice was the church, the army, or exploring the world, with a slightly naive and delightfully brave can-do spirit, in breeches and excellent straw hats and the kind of boots made from Spanish artisans that could last a while exploring the barren land of Patagonia.
What I mean is, it's time to do the thing you've always dreamed of, and to dance as if no-one is watching. Why not?
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