Late morning of the 8th day of “12 Days of Christmas,” 2012: on birthday, “perfectly positioned,” Dad’s ashes in garden

Last night around 7 p.m., I got out some of my sacred objects and arranged a little circular altar on a prayer rug on the floor in front of the fire in the woodstove. Told my housemate Jim that I was going to be in personal ritual for awhile, so not to bother me. I’m sure he probably wondered what was going on, hearing little bells (twice, to open and close), smelling sage (to clear the field), and then silence, immense silence from outside his closed door.

I do this ceremony every year on the eve of my birthday, which also, usually, happens to be the actual day that the Sun returns to the exact same place it was at my birth, 27°00 Sagittarius. Ye gods, that’s conjunct the Galactic Center! — I always think to myself whenever I remember the degree of my Sun on the day of my birth. Why? Why did I, my soul, choose to be born on this very day? Mysteries abound.

And ommigod, this is not only my birthday, this is my 70th birthday, inaugurating a whole new decade. Funny how, for the first time, I feel this particular decade as one of honor, that it is an august honor for me to have reached this cusp, to be standing on the brink of an immensity of which I do not even come close to understanding the significance.

So glad most of my questions, the really important ones, remain unanswered. So glad that they pull me forwards, into yet more explorations of horizons I had never dreamed existed when I was young, and culturally conditioned to be fearful, shy and of no value unless I confessed my “sins” on a weekly basis. Of course, as a kid, I had trouble finding any sins, except of course those which were habitual, unstoppable, like “thinking bad thoughts” about my sisters and brothers, parents, whoever! Like “being tempted to” — whatever! You name it! I was human, and I had desires, strong ones, which I kept banked like slow burning embers that eventually had to ignite into a roaring flame, and did.

So there I was on the floor, yesterday evening, “meditating.” And what I got was that I am “perfectly positioned for whatever is to come next.” Oh! Well, okay. Not that it tells me anything, but it does say that I’m ready.

Oh yes, and what I got on an inner level was the conscious recognition of a strange sense that has been growing in me over the months and years, and recently started to accelerate: that the skin of my body no longer contains my spirit, but that it has become permeable, the spirit living inside and out beyond its perimeter. Or maybe a better way of saying it would be to say that it feels like the atoms in space of which my body is composed, and which themselves, physicists tell us, are mostly space — it feels like that space inside every cell, inside every atom in every cell, is growing, expanding.

Ever since I began tai chi practice 12 years ago I have increasingly experienced myself more as a current of energy than as a body. Every cell in my body feels alive, and works harmoniously with every other cell to produce this sense of an internal continuum. But now, it seems, I’m taking yet another evolutionary step.

Let’s see if I can describe it.

I always knew I wanted to “open space.” (Where openspace is a verb, a gerund, “openingspace”) That this is my mission here on this Earth.

Now it’s happening, to me! Is this Ascension? This sense that my 3D body is no longer so 3D, that it is morphing, at least my internal sense of it, and me, into a centered node of energetic currents, like flames, reaching and retreating, moving in concert with “me,” my will, as I find myself moved to go here or there, to do this or that. No thought really, very few actual decisions these days, just a sense of being pulled in the direction I’m meant to go, or this constantly reaching and retreating energetic signature is meant to go . . .

Besides this, a feeling of immense gratitude for all that this body has been and has given me, and of the person who I apparently was back then, 50 years ago, 30 years ago, all those decades spilling out like beads on a chain, or flowers in a lei, each holding hands with all the others, and none of them I particularly identify with! Somehow this “story” that I tell myself about “what happened” in my life feels evanescent. Real, and not real. Here and not here. Here today and gone tomorrow and yesterday.

And along with this increasing transparency and interpenetration of body/mind/spirit is a sense of lightness, ease, as if all I have to do is show up, be here, and I will be “perfectly positioned for whatever comes next.” YES!

Afterwards, after I closed the circle and rang the little bells again, I got up and took the little baggie of grey ashes that I had been apportioned after our Dad passed away in August (see The Grieving Time for lots of stories) out onto the land of these two houses, mine and the one I bought next door to turn its sunny side lawn into the GANG garden, and sprinkled them, the tiny, grey, gritty bits, everywhere. I especially focused on the GANG garden, because that was the one project of mine that he really understood and loved. He’d remind me that he was the one assigned to tend his large family’s food garden when they were growing up, in Wisconsin. And so he really appreciated that I was doing something that he had done, and thought this was a really good use of my energy compared to all the other woo-woo stuff that I do that he either thought ridiculous or downright heretical to him, a staunch Catholic, right up to the end when a crisis of faith deepened his humanity for me, and meant that I didn’t have to think of him as a fallen icon, but as a deeply human being, troubled by doubt, like all of us, though his didn’t surface until the very last days.

Funny how we never know what comes next, eh? Though, hopefully, we will all be “perfectly positioned for whatever comes next” when it does.

P.S. Son Colin just called. He and Greta will be serving sweet potatoes and steak to me in my honor this evening. Told them I’d get the dessert. (Some kind of torte. Better than plain old boring cake.)