new year

Misshapen pottery filled with smudge sticks filled with mugwort for dreams and shamanic journeying, and cedar for prayers and sage for cleansing and palo santo for stinking up the place. There is a turkey feather in it, and my friend calls it Southern Eagle. My husband and I make a board with pictures and words and a check we wrote to ourselves for the amount we want to save with a photo-shopped print-out of our credit card balances at $0.00. I made a magical wand this year our of rosewood and kunzite and crystal points. I wrapped sari silks with blessings around the wood, then tied knots. I held the prayers tightly over my chest, then blew like a whale, sending it off for crow to take for answering.

There was spittle mixed in there, and a little man whose boat I must have swallowed.

The palpability of this new year makes me want to bite a calendar, suck on its pulp, juice the awesomeness out of it. And I want it all now. I see a year of magic, healing, learning, release, visioning, goals set and goals accomplished. It feels different, already. I feel different. I bid 2012 farewell with a prayer for healing. On Winter Solstice I burnt all the things I wanted to release now--anything not serving my highest good, and then the specifics that screamed, "BURN ME IN A FIRE! LET ME GO!" I believe in the power or ritual and prayer and intentions and magical thinking.

2012 was about all the shit falling around me and me not losing my shit. I didn't drink or take hostages--emotional or otherwise. I joined circles, more than one, of women, and those women help me soar and love and be better. I checked my Android at the dinner table and cussed at drivers who don't use their turn signals. I judged things and people and gossiped more than I'd care to admit. My emails were still too long and wordy and I cannot stop run-on sentencing. This year, I aim for five sentence emails.

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January 1, 2013, 10:30am. We go for a walk in the woods. The trees thin in January, like everyone except me. Their bones stick out in all directions, and I catch my sweater and knit hats on them. The thin ones are restless and irritable and eat nothing but cabinet crumbs. But not me. I eat small ships and calendars and new years for breakfast. Burp up harvested retreat days and fires and tarot cards left out for further meditation and explanation. Death. The Tower. And Five of Cups. Right in a row. It is the new year reading that shocks me again-- some change, transformation, catastrophe and grief for 2013. Metaphorically, I hope.


I thought about it as we walked through the sparse wood near our home. The houses hide behind the green and the lake in the summer. Now the trees look cadaverous, the cheap plastic toys in primary colors behind their meager branches like the gunshot that took them out, the stain on the rural identity they were cultivating on the internet. There is nothing to gather for supper but dried up gas grills and Christmas lights. The trees empty and solitary and sadly suburban. Spray paint arrows pointing to HELL and the smashed beer bottles I beg my children to watch themselves near. I kick a baggie that must have held some weed. There is an urban duck, head bare, like a vulture, honking and skittish around the dog. He flew too near the sun, he eats the carrion emptiness of the Starved Forest of the Strip Mallsley Land. 

It is New Year's Day, and the illusion is gone. We need to get out of here. This place was beautiful five months ago, and we pretended it made up for all the other suburban bullshit we deal with, like traffic and high taxes. This place is the illusion of woods and solitude. I want no part of the lies anymore. My daughter finds a lean-to and asks me who lives there.

Homeless people and gnomes and a raccoon with rabies.

I look up into the sky. It is gray. I beg it to rain. On me. Purgation and blessings and baptism. And let all this attachment to space run off of me, or I will have to burn it in a fire next December.

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On our visioning board we cut out a huge headline that says, WHERE TO LIVE NOW, and another that begs for the "Freedom to Roam." Besides the hefty check I keep worrying will be stolen out of our home, there are pictures of mountains, of soil, Buddhas, rivers and hiking trails. There are words and phrases like nourishment and healing, {uncluttered}, gathering, creativity, find your balance, wisdom, peace, awe, mindfulness, loving speech and deep listening. In my 2013 INCREDIBLE YEAR! workbook, I write a list of 100 things I'd like to do this year. They are super-positive! Happy! Really awesome! BUBBLES! UNICORNS!

21. Climb a mountain!
28. Be SUPER frugal!
33. Eat super healthy (AND LOVE IT!)

They get less enthusiastic.

61. Dance to Hare Krishna music after dinner, instead of watch Real Housewives of Anywhere and eat icing off of cupcakes.
67. Ask less advice.
75. Make a backyard sweat lodge so I can be alone.
80. Cry when I need to, instead of stuffing it.

Hold onto what is good, even it is a handful of earth. I read it off my visioning board and I nod.

"You are right, wise Pueblo proverb. That is why I put you on there, to inspire me to be better." Yeah. I used to be a cynical bitch, jaded even. It creeps out here and there. It's all so hokey. Magical thinking and work books for my goals and visioning boards, but I need hokey right now. I need simple. I need to declutter. I've decided I'm checking email once a day, not carrying my cell from room to room. I'm not going on Facebook fifteen thousand times a day to read posts in my forums. I want to live in awe of spirit and nature and then figure out where to live now, and what to do now and how to do it now.

And maybe I will be here more because of it, or maybe less. What is your new year all about? Do you have goals, aspirations? Are you hopeful? Or not so much? Tell me about your process. Or just say hi.

ouroboros

I used to think of myself as a series of uncategorized items. Undefined, out of color and alphabetical order. Bourbon and cigarettes, and unwashed lucky socks. Second hand combat coots, and mixed tapes with  names like Heartbreak. I suppose I used to think of myself as a junk drawer. I am none of those things anymore. I have none of those things anymore.

I have this shell that feels nothing like me. It hasn't in four years. It is like I walk through the earth in a machine, bumbling and inoperable, left moving me right. My body turns against itself, and the pain that plagues me feels finally like the manifestation of years of anguish. And that is what my body did to me, or rather I did to my body.

In the past few months, I have felt sick. Arthritis, depression, weight gain, exhaustion, lethargy. I can't remember to return calls or emails or thank you letters. Perhaps, after Lucia's death, I just couldn't muster too much sympathy for me. I grieved and felt sorry for myself, yes, but I also acted out, and retreated and pushed. Those two Angies, the one of good and the other of evil, I hadn't reconciled. It makes me sick. One swallows the other, like the Ouroboros devouring its tail. I am one, not two. I draw it, like an enso, in a few strokes a circle, and a snake eating itself. Then I sage it, say a prayer, meditate on the image. It is not an image of destruction and self-sabotage. It is about rebirth and recreation and primordial unity--that which was, is, and will be. 

I no longer want to feed myself the storyline of her death and of my responsibility. I don't want to feed it to my ailments and my dis-ease. I don't want to give it strength anymore. I wonder if I caused my sickness to find a cause of her death, then I shoo it away as overthinking. I don't want to speak its name anymore. Even when I think grief is over, it comes back, like a mobius strip, the beginning is the end, and the two are a moot point anyway. But the grief and the action of blame are too different things. I release the blame, release the hatred, release the guilt that I didn't even know was there anymore.

I open, open, unfold the turns and twists of me. I, maybe folded into a swan, am still just a piece of paper. The words, melodramatic and wordy, run around me like the rings of a tree. Each description a year, telling the story of me. The song I call out into the night, my song, as I journey into a world where time lays easily on top of itself, and the dead live again. I pocket the paper away, fold it into an elaborate fortune teller game.

Eenie, Meenie. Miney. Moe. Catch a Tiger by the toe...And then it reminds me:

"2008, you were the happiest you ever felt, most contented. Your daughter died."

"2009, You wept for a year. You walked through the underworld. You mourned. You alienated. You survived."

This upcoming year, the one ahead, I envision something magical, important. The path before me has changed in 2012, a hair pin turn back to a spiritual center I had before the marriage and babies and jobby jobs. It was covered over the decaying leaves of grief and alcohol and self-loathing. I sweep them away as I find my footing again.

Remembering.

Remembering.

Remembering this way of beauty and strength and surrender and unconditional love of everything including myself. There is moss on the northern facing parts of me, the shadow parts. I must turn toward the sun now, open to the air, water, fire, and earth. I emerge from the machine that has trapped the storyline of Lucia's death. I emerge from the sickness that I imagined killed Lucia and Michael into the strong body that brought me to this place right here. I emerge from self-loathing into a place of unconditional love and acceptance.

I have been meditating on a word to encapsulate my year. 2009, Grieve. 2010, Create. 2011, Recover. 2012, Open. 2013...what word can you be? I create another fortune teller. This one with words that encapsulate what I hope for--love, blessings, miracle, opening and counting until we reach the fortune for next year. I write on the inside all the words that I hope the next year will be: Balance. Self-acceptance. Open. Clarity. Growth. Trust. Heal. Spirit. But I know the word as I write it.

Emerge.

What is your word for 2013? What does it mean for you?