Greetings,
It’s the holiday weekend, and I have been either sleeping or lying on my bed in a state of semi-consciousness for much of it. Yesterday, I was up at 4 AM because I had a big story on my mind, and after it sorted itself out in my sleep, it woke me up to let me know it was organized and now I needed to get it reported and out the door. And I did.
Today, I shot out of bed, ready to caffeinate, walk the dog, and dress for church, before sitting down to quickly check emails where I saw the gentle notification that tomorrow is Easter. Somehow, I lost a day.
But now Saturday is back in my body, and so I am once again slow. I think my lethargy is due to the seasons changing. And I mean that more than literally so. The season of my life is changing hands with another.
It’s in retrospect that I realize how in synch I have been with these cycles, too. For example, I realized a month ago that I needed to cut back on the sugar I was fueling myself with. It was only today I realized that decision coincided with Lent, the first “season” within a season, given that it is what is going on, for Christians anyway, at the Spring Equinox. A season within a season. And I’ve had a sense that I have both sought and fought my way through to a workable sense of the unseen that I am comfortable with and renewed and inspired by, which seems to dovetail nicely with Holy Week and Easter.
My exact second Saturn return is next Wednesday. That seems right, too. It is joined with how, on the day of the eclipse a month ago, I once again was taken out of time and made to understand that I will not be leaving the US to move to return to Scotland, which had always been my dream. Not because I have given up the dream, but because I understood it wasn’t what is meant for me. After that, I suddenly felt that where I am is where I belong and I am home.
When things shift, I slow down. It is hard for me to embrace what’s novel.
I am aware that Kentucky is the butt of all your jokes, and since moving back, having left my native state when I was merely 3 years old, I am definitely aware of my East Coast sensibilities, which means my pace is far quicker than anyone around me. I am adjusting. I have a role to play here since starting a newspaper. I feel connected and I serve a purpose. It’s the first time in my life I can say that and mean it.
Despite being settled, I do think of my past lives from time to time. When I lived in Washington (technically Chevy Chase, Md., but on the city line), each morning I would head to the roof deck to be alone with my “pet” crow who would come sit with me while I drank my coffee and watch the sunrise (I had a way of beating the auto-locked doors). Each evening, I would head up to the roof for a glass of wine or a cocktail with friends to watch the sunset. Sometimes we would take our dinners up to the roof, too. I had a butler trolley that I could stack with plates, food, and a wine bucket and just glide it into the elevator. It was all so glamorous, and sometimes I wonder how I pulled that off without the pedigree all around me had, nor much real experience that should have afforded me what I was able to achieve by just showing up and trying, and then suddenly I was reporting from Capitol Hill.
My neighbors and happy hour companions were embassy staff, sports agents, well-known journalists, a few actual ambassadors or foreign service higher ups. There were many academics, lawyers, and retirees from the CIA, the military, or other only-in-DC sorts of jobs. It was a village of about 1,500 and I knew just about every one of us. I routinely spoke French, Spanish, and occasionally German with my neighbors, languages I had learned while attending my language-focused high school in New England, a school chosen for me so I could learn how to make lots of money. Oh, well.
In my current life, if I know my neighbors, it’s through church. I never went to church in DC, as I saw no need. I had people all around me and was never lonely. But when I arrived here, broken, grieving, unsure what the hell to do with my life and myself, I understood the most important act of self-preservation I could do was to surround myself with people who would keep an eye out for me, people who would be compelled to welcome strangers. So, I joined the most progressive church I could find, and luckily, this is the town with the most progressive church in Kentucky.
I am still puzzling over the cult-like, tacky Christianity that clings to the living in the South, even here in the northernmost part of the South. Why here and nowhere else is it this palpable? Did the Civil War break open so many souls that demons slipped in, twining themselves around the strands of seven generations? Because so much of the Christianity I witness between the coasts is bedeviled. It’s not all churches, but the bedeviled kind spreads itself like kudzu, choking out common sense. Still, as I have noted before, the people here are kind, generous, helpful and industrious at Kentucky’s Appalachian edge.
As the journalist in town who produces podcasts and covers local culture when I’m not covering local government, I get a lot of requests to do Appalachian things. Soon, I will be interviewing the author of a book about living and growing up in Eastern Kentucky, which is the place in our state legend for so many reasons, most of them hard. His book about forming his own code to living came to me in the mail today. So did a book about prayer, and a handwritten letter from a neighbor I wasn’t aware I had, politely exhorting me to read Revelations, and to consider coming to the Jehovah’s Witness church down the road. Strange they all arrived at once, given their similarities. If I read anything into that, it that this is not Washington.
And how are my friends doing in DC, anyway? They are closest to the toxic heat.
These are times in our world that make me think of the Rilke poem, Moving Forward. That is because I find the poem’s last phrase, “…I climb into the windy heaven, out of the oak, in the ponds broken off from the sky my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes,” to be unsettling. I believe the whole poem is an expression of Rilke’s madness, while at the same time meant to declare a sense of belonging to the natural world, and extending oneself into it, but to stand on fishes is to place your feet on cold, scaly, muddy bodies that are, as the title suggests, moving forward, unstable, gross. The water is dark, and I cannot see the source of motion carrying me. Isn’t that just what it feels like to consider world events currently?
But there are seasons within seasons. The season of the world now is bitter and murky. Our leaders are fishy. But we do not have to gyrate with those whose hearts whip-snake through the mud. If they intend to blow up the world, we cannot stop them. So, why worry about it? More likely, they won’t blow up the world, but will make such a mess we will go hungry, sit at night in the dark, and have to walk everywhere.
So, what is the season of my life that is within the season of their self-importance? Responding to the weather there, I reckon I will be ready for the days without light or food. I will not like it, but I will not have precipitated it even if I did anticipate it, and will have no control over it. That kind of madness is on the outer ring of cycles, and spins unattached from the rings inside.
The story I needed to write was of a victory. One I had foreseen, and was alone in doing so. Even the side that won was surprised when they did. But I had faith. I had started my online paper 18 months ago to welcome the news. It was so fundamentally wrong that a utility was planning to rip through one of the most beautiful landscapes in all of the Commonwealth without asking first, that I could see it would go down in flames. I reported all the way through until it did, this week, by the hands of a judge who saw the threat to beauty and the arrogance of assumption, and said, No.
It validated the response I’d had to a personal weather forecast, but I know I did not need that validation, the weather is the weather. And don’t we all live within our own weather? Seasons unto ourselves, with patterns, cycles, and revelations. So, maybe dance within your own circumference and then give yourself some rest in order to metabolize those inevitable moves. And don’t even bother with the outer circle where the fish are waiting to slip under your feet.
Instead of being dredged along behind the war ships, pulled in endless circles, focus on the sun rising in your chest.