Into the Mountains

A lot has happened over the past week or so that I should really at least jot down here, but things keep coming up (like the fact that my webpage database got corrupted and restoring it is going to take a lot of time and energy away from things I'd rather be doing).

Jeff and I were supposed to attend Pantheacon over President's Day weekend, but I was struggling with migraines the week leading up to it and, considering that it cost a huge amount of money for the travel and hotel, we decided to cancel the trip and use our days off to spend some time in wilderness retreat instead. This plan backfired somewhat because the local hotel we booked for a few days just to get away from the house and change up our routine ended up having terrible mattresses and I had to sleep on the floor for two nights on a pile of blankets before we decided to check out early and just go home. But they did give us half of our money back, so... yay?

We spent most of our time exploring the area near North Bend and Snoqualmie, including Mount Si. Hiking and fresh air made a huge difference with my headaches, but since coming home again they've started to come back. I've narrowed it down to environmental and/or stress-induced causes, or maybe a bit of both. I've been meditating and exercising regularly in the mornings, which seems to have a small effect, but by the afternoon the headaches return, so I'm getting in half-days of work at best. I'm getting more and more frustrated, since the pain seriously impacts by ability to concentrate for long periods of time. Not only have I not been able to get back to podcasting stuff at all, but now even my writing is starting to be effected. (But who cares? It's not like I have a functional webpage at the moment anyway... ::sigh::)

So at this point, I'm sorely tempted to just take a permanent vacation in the mountains and not come back until it's well and truly spring. Jeff is supposed to start teaching me how to drive again; I don't know how quickly it'll come back (considering I only ever drove a minivan and the last time I was behind a wheel was more than a decade ago). For now, I'm kinda stuck.

So here are some pictures from our weekend in the mountains.

Saturn Return, Part Three: Revenge of the.... Saturn?

Just a quick note: looking again at the calendar of Saturn transits that I wrote up a while back, I see that my last onslaught of major transits (conjunctions with my ascendent, natal Saturn and Pluto, plus one parting sucker-punch square to my MC) started back on, surprise, August 18. It's going to be a rough two months.

During our quick phone call today (or yesterday?), Jeff said that he thought I was handling my Saturn Return much better than he did, since at least I was working consciously with the energies. During his Saturn Return, he was externalizing those energies, so they took the form of other people controlling and pressuring him, leaving him to deal with the real fall-out only seven years later during his next Saturn square (which was, among other things, his divorce).

He has a lot of confidence in me. Generally, I'm just frustrated with myself for being subject to these bouts of crankiness and apparently so easily influenced by the goddamned stars.

But now it's way past when I should have gone to bed. I just don't want to move, since the cat is curled up on the blanket right next to me, and he's so sweet when he twitches, chasing noms in his sleep.

Diary - Naturalist Journal and Health

Tomorrow Jeff and I officially begin our work as volunteer naturalists with the Seattle Parks, attending a potluck welcoming party and introduction to the program. This Saturday is our first actual training class, and I'm hoping to be able to attend both the Saturday and the Thursday modules, both because I'm interested in getting as much out of this as I can and because I'd like to have the flexibility to teach both weekday school programs and the general public programs held on weekends. Plus, more time outside in the park - nothing wrong with that.

I've been keeping up with my naturalist journal that I started about a week and a half ago, sitting down to do some drawing and research every few days. It's been amazing how good drawing feels - quieting down to work, being able to focus and concentrate on just the details in front of me, and in the end somehow ending up with something that looks half-way decent. Unlike much of my writing these days, which just feels like a slog through a jungle of noisy details and half-formed ideas, sketching is refreshing and satisfying, helping me to focus without overwhelming me. Perhaps I've just burned myself out with writing recently, putting too much pressure on myself, and so I need some nonverbal form of creativity and self-expression to loosen things up again.

It's also been a fantastic way to learn more about the animals and plants in the area. I'm not doing all that intense research, but I have been slowly gathering sources on specific species and such. Reading the two books on naturalist journaling that I got was a huge help in giving me some direction on how to focus and what to note while out in the field - and there's something satisfying with being able to carefully observe a creature that you're unfamiliar with, and then come home and look them up in a field guide and be able to identify them and learn something more about them. I especially like the "thought experiments" recommended in the book I just finished (Tomlinson's How to Keep a Naturalist's Notebook), asking questions about what the evidence can tell you about a certain animal and its habits, for instance. (The example she uses is the fox scat she finds, which leads her to question what direction it was facing when it relieved itself, what was it looking at, why did it choose that particular spot, were there other foxes around, etc. All from a few scat droppings and never even seeing the fox itself.) I do sometimes feel overwhelmed by the idea of asking questions I don't have answers to, or not even knowing what questions to ask. For instance, I'd like to ask myself where the chickadees who frequent the trees in our front yard actually make their nests, or where the hummingbird who sometimes perches on top of the tree goes once he's done with the neighbor's feeder. But I don't even know where I'd start to find the answers to those questions or how I could track down those places even if I could find out. I'm sure there are other things I could ask - like how the males attract the females, and when the mating season starts and when nest building occurs and how could I go about locating a nest, etc. - but the number of things I don't know seems somewhat overwhelming.

I'm just getting my feet wet in this and I have a feeling a lot of my learning will involve doing the research first and then setting myself tasks, like a scavenger hunt, to seek out certain things I've read about. And of course, the volunteer naturalist training will help a lot, too. I'm very excited about taking notes and then hopefully following up on what I've learned over the course of the following week. Nervous, of course, as I always am before something like this - but also eager. Sometimes I think I really do love learning much more than I enjoy putting that learning to any kind of practical use. For me, the exploration and discovery is the real treat, the same way that learning the little details about the person you're falling in love with is a pleasure in itself and not just a means to getting into their pants or something so crude. There is joy in growing into that kind of intimacy, and that's what I'm hoping to cultivate with this work - an intimacy with the land and landscape that has become my new home.

~

I'm also feeling motivated to exercise more. I've put on three more pounds since Christmas, so that I'm pretty much the heaviest I've ever been in my life. Even that isn't so overweight, but it's still more than I'd like and I'm sure it affects my energy levels and such. I think the primary cause is simply stress, and the fact that I've allowed that stress to lead me into some rather bad habits (like dessert after dinner every night). But I want to live a long and healthy life, so nipping those bad habits in the bud right now is a fairly high priority.

It's also a point of pride, I suppose. My mother always used having kids as an excuse for her weight gain, and while I can understand that I also think it was more of an excuse than it needed to be. There are healthy ways to cope with stress, and there are unhealthy ways. And since I have chosen to be child-free by choice, even if I am a stepmother, I have to admit that I do somewhat resent putting on stress-related weight because of all this bullshit nonsense of dealing - not with the kids, but with Emily and her insanity. I'm not sure how I managed to get so far down the rabbit hole of guilt and expectation even while fighting all along against her warped belief that a woman's job is to be a mother and failure at that - or rejection of that - was a failure to be fully mature and responsible. I have to admit, I hold a lot of resentment towards that woman, not only for how she treats me (which is piss poor on the best of days, and she never had been able to bring herself to treat me as an adult), but especially for how she treats Jeff. I could strangle her for that - even now, I find myself getting angry simply thinking about it. But we've let the lawyers know we will no longer be working with them, since they misled us and overcharged us so completely, and now it's going to be on Emily's dime to file for a custody adjustment, and we can be the ones who sit back and say "no" while insisting we want to be amiable and fair. See how she likes it. And since the current custody arrangement states that Jeff has 50/50 joint physical and legal custody and that all he needs is a verbal agreement from Emily to change the specifics of times, etc. - a verbal agreement which he got from her, in front of five other witnesses - it doesn't matter how long she takes to file for a custody adjustment, he can show up and get the kids any time he wants until that point. So we're finally in a position where we're holding the cards and she won't be able to force us to spend any more money or make us miserable. She hasn't has the guts to actually enforce the incredibly limited schedule that she proposed for Jeff talking to the kids on Skype (though she insists he can only talk to them until 2:30 PM PST/5:30 PM EST because that's when they have to have dinner, she's never once ever actually had dinner ready on time, so he's been able to talk to them for longer). Since they've set up a regular schedule, she also doesn't have any excuse for "accidentally" scheduling things during that time and so cutting into Jeff's time to talk with them - if she does, everyone will know that it's her incompetence and not Jeff's neglectfulness that is fucking things up.

But I'm tired of writing about this and feeling stressed and angry about it. Obviously, my health and weight issues are deeply tied up with my anxiety and stress about the kids. I've been carrying around a sense of responsibility and thus guilt for a long time, even though really I have very little control over the situation and probably shouldn't be shouldering as much as I have. I'm finally feeling a free - or at least freer - to release some of that and give up this notion that I have to compensate for Emily's warped vision so that I make sure the kids still like me. If they can like Emily, they can like me - she's pretty awful, after all. And even if they don't.... well, maybe that's just how it has to be. But I was just hearing again recently about the study they did on the number of friends any one person can actually keep track of, and how those communities tend to be pretty small, around 150 people. I've spent too much time over the last couple years worrying about trying to please people that I don't particularly like or respect - whether they're ex-wives or editors and bloggers online - and it's a waste of my 150 people to put so much effort into that. I should fill my 150 quota with people who support and love me and help me to be a better person. People who drag me down and stress me out and make me feel unworthy - why spend time worrying about them?

Maybe it would be a good exercise to go through and list the people in my life I appreciate for their support and caring and inspiration, and consciously try to cultivate a "community" of friends and colleagues who affirm me in my work. Something to keep in mind, maybe.

~

I'm about done with journaling for now. It's a beautiful, sunny morning and it's supposed to get up near 50º F later this afternoon (and even warmer tomorrow), so I think I'll go for a walk a bit later. For now, sitting in front of the computer screen is giving me a bit of a headache (and hurting my wrists trying to type at the desk). That might be another reason why writing has been difficult for me lately - trying to find a comfortable way to do it. The physical discomfort of being stuck in front of a tiny screen at an uncomfortable desk can definitely wear on a person. (This is just me wanting an excuse to get a nice new desktop, I know.) It's interesting that sketching and drawing can leave me feeling so refreshed - I do wonder if it's not partly because I'm not squinting at a computer screen the whole time in order to do it. Going back to taking notes and drafting my writing pieces in an actual, physical notebook might help with this writer's block, if part of it is due to physical discomfort. We'll see, anyway.

~

This morning, after yoga, I did some meditation - a Three Realms working to connect to land, sea and sky. I prayed to Brighid and Manannan, who now appear fairly often as a pair of columns - one of fire on my right, and one of water on my left. The sense of their presence was powerful and uplifting. I feel such gratitude and joy for the presence of my gods in my life. One thing I really want to do - maybe even this morning! - is set up an altar for them somewhere. Although we're mostly unpacked, I've been putting off unpacking the box(es) of small decorative and ritual items, hoping that we'll first get the curtains up in the various rooms. But the curtains are turning out to be a pain in the ass and we haven't gotten them up yet, so the apartment is still lacking most of those personal touches and sacred items that are usually placed and arranged carefully throughout the space. I want to get to that soon, though.

I also want to spend some time outdoors meditating and connecting more directly to the land. But despite what we were promised, it's been rather ridiculously cold (okay, hovering around freezing, which compared to Pittsburgh's usual 10 - 20 º weather this time of year isn't so bad) and not conducive to spending much time outdoors. I'm still trying to do some walking and occasionally jogging, though. And hopefully the weather will be warming up soon. It's certainly been sunnier this week than the last several, anyway. Though I do also enjoy the rain (much more than snow, anyway).

Diary - Anger, Grace and God

Sun: scorpio (fixed water), 7:39 am - 6:29 pm
Moon: waning crescent, virgo (mutable earth), VoC
Earth: beautiful, sunny autumn day, crisp and cool but not too chilly


The shit has hit the fan, so to speak. We caught E in a direct lie about Josh's health - when we asked her what the results were from the allergy test, her response was that he was "definitely allergic." Her phrasing was circuitous enough (e.g. avoiding directly saying that's what the doctor had told her) that Jeff called the doctor himself to speak to him directly to make sure he understood the whole situation, at which point we found out that all of the test results had come back negative and the only evidence that Josh had any kind of allergy at all was E's word that he showed symptoms obviously and consistently after eating corn. (Part of her evidence, in fact, was that he shows symptoms every Monday. Obviously we can't say whether or not this is true, but if it is, it actually suggests it's not a corn allergy, since he's been on a raw vegan diet with us for months now and most definitely never has corn when he's with us on weekends. But this is just one more example of her inconsistency in reporting what exactly are his symptoms and when they show up.)

On top of the corn allergy issue (and Jerilynn's newly invented gluten intolerance, which E says explains why Jerilynn eats too much (?!)), E has taken it upon herself to insist that Jeff quit his job in order to stay in Pittsburgh, and even started job hunting for him (despite not being able to find and keep even a part-time job for herself and being entirely ignorant except for the most general terms about Jeff's skills and job qualifications). Besides all of the obvious reasons (e.g. a struggling economy) why it would be idiotic for him to quit his job and leave a career he loves on the assumption he can just find a different one.... her assumption that it's her responsibility to order Jeff's life is pretty mind-boggling.

When confronted with all of this directly - especially after the blatant lying, which made Jeff the angriest I've ever seen him - she justified her behavior and even claimed that she hadn't lied. She emailed him earlier today saying that they were going to have a talk when he dropped off the kids and he better be prepared to "stay for a while." He wrote back saying that he was too angry to talk to her right now and that he would email her. Unfortunately, this weekend we'd happened to borrow the van so that all of us could attend a boy scout event of Josh's, so when we arrived to drop off the kids and the van and pick up Jeff's car - she was sitting on top of it in an attempt to ambush us and force us into talking. At first she tried to sweet-talk Jeff, saying (in a double lie) that she'd only wanted to say one quick thing, and that was that she thought the plan for the move (which she had vehemently objected to via email) was actually a great idea. Both of these things were direct contradictions to things she had said in emails earlier. When we repeated that we weren't interested in talking to her right now and we would be communicating through email, her mood suddenly swung in the opposite direction. (I thought our response was pretty restrained, since we didn't point out that she had ambushed us, knowing we were angry with her and still ignoring our explicitly stated wishes, and then lied to us right in front of the kids.) She said with angry sarcasm, "What a great example to set for the kids!" (who, if she hadn't decided to corner us right in front of them, would never have even known whether we were emailing or calling), and then turned on the kids are snapped at them to get inside. Speaking of great examples....

I am, admittedly, very angry and still a bit shaken up. Her audacity in lying to us continues to compound every time she gets caught in another one, and her manipulative behavior I could never imagined would have gotten to the point of literally trying to prevent us from physically being able to leave (though, after all, this was the woman who broke into our apartment and then used it as a reason that we might as well give her a key so she wouldn't have to next time, so.... I guess I shouldn't be surprised).

Jeff and I have decided to try a strategy recommended to us by some folks who also have experience with high-drama exes over child custody issues. It's called "low-contact," and there are ten basic rules. It mostly involves making sure that all communication is written and documents, brief and to the point with no room for vagueness or exploitation. There are some recommendations that we're not sure how to handle - for instance, always making exchanges of the kids in public places where the ex can't make a scene or ambush you - but we can work that out somehow.

Reading the list of recommended strategies, I could definitely see some areas where I've been responding or reacting in ways that weren't helpful and that just fed into E's need to create drama and conflict. I'm trying not to be too hard on myself about that, and just resolve to do better in the future and keep my own anger at her in check. I think I got sucked into seeing things from her perspective - not so much agreeing with her, but thinking of the kids as some sort of project that needed to be carefully watched and controlled and protected from negative influences. The other night on the phone, I found myself telling my mother how it was hard to just let things go - especially lies that E tells to the kids - because it wasn't about Jeff or me at all, but about what was best for the kids and that was our end goal: do what is best for the kids. But of course, that's exactly the story E tells herself - that she needs to lie or manipulate others in order to protect the kids and do what's best for them. But ends don't justify the means. Compromising on personal values is not helpful for the kids, no matter what the end result might be. And I don't want to be the kind of person who is always angry and on the defensive and obsessing over all the ways their other care-givers are "doing it wrong." That's just playing E's game. And it's not a game I want to play anymore.

The thing is - last night I prayed to God. I was restless and angry and couldn't sleep, and I just kept arguing with E in my head repeating the same tirades over and over..... Finally, I just closed my eyes and prayed to God - not a god, but God, the god I knew in my childhood, the god I'd grown up knowing as the Christian god, the one who was in some way I never quite understood related to Jesus and his love and sacrifice. And I asked God to help me to find clarity and peace, and most of all to discover in myself the place where I could trust in Love and surrender to that trust and be the better person that I so much wanted to be. And almost immediately, I felt a wave of relaxation sweep over me and soon fell right asleep. And today... well, it's been stressful, yes, especially the confrontation with E. But I do still feel a certain among of clarity, even despite the stress. And that clarity is mostly about myself, and the things that I could be doing better and the ways that I can reclaim that center of myself that's sustained me for so long. That's why I trust it. It wasn't suddenly some clarity about how awful everyone else was or how they could be doing better - it was a way through to my own core, my own center. It wasn't judgement. It was grace.

And that sounds very Christian, I guess. But I still believe in all the things I've always believed in as a Pagan, I still believe that there are many gods and that the world is alive and thriving with beings of all kinds. It's just.... I'm thinking maybe I was too hasty to try to abandon the god of my childhood just because he got slapped with a Christian label before I knew any better. I no longer think of him as the only god, but.... I don't know. Maybe he's still my god, if that makes any sense. Or, at least, one of them. In the somewhat lackadaisical liberal Christianity I grew up with, there was a real relationship there that grew not out of dogma but out of my own self, my own center. And it nourished me and nurtured me and guided me well. Then I learned more about Christianity and understood I could not be Christian in good conscience.... but maybe I assumed that meant I couldn't have that relationship anymore because I'd always assumed it was a Christian one. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe that doesn't matter. It feels sort of like... coming home, the prodigal son.

Or maybe it was a coincidence. I don't know. But I think I want to see where it leads. To allow myself to pray to "God" as I knew him, and see where it takes me. I guess we'll see.

Diary Tarot Card

What insight can you give me tonight to help me find the clarity I seek?

At first, it seems that Temperance (XIV) is a block to the energy flow in the spread. Both the Page of Cups and the Two of Wands face towards the right, towards the future and the realm of activity in the external world; yet Temperance faces towards the right, towards the inner world and the past, where memory and intuition alike reside. After this first impression, though, the spread seems to suggest another interpretation - Temperance as a balance point between two opposites, the watery realm of Cups and the fiery realm of Wands. Even in the card itself, fire and water mingle in a spiraling yin-yang, dancing outward as dragon and phoenix as the angel of Temperance looks on.

So what, then, does Temperance balance? On the left, the Page of Cups is a card of intuition and innocent dreams, a connection to the deep waters of the unconscious where imagination and wisdom are born. The figure (as the artist describes) seeks out a place of quiet solitude where she might contemplate the golden shining reflections in her cup - listening to the still small voice of her intuition and giving free rein to her dreams and inspiration. On the right, the Two of Wands is a card of eager action, looking with attention and energy towards the future. The female figure sits upon her companion, a lion of strength and courage, perched on a high rock outcropping, over-looking the lands of her ancestors and (as the artist describes) imagining what great deeds she might accomplish now that those lands have passed on to her. She looks forward to all the great things she might manifest in the world with the resources available to her, and in her solitary stillness she makes plans and imagines possibilities. Both of these cards are concerned with the future, but those futures concern different realms - the inner and the outer. While the Two of Wands is a figure of strength and courage who is willing to act on her dreams in order to accomplish great things, the Page of Cups is a figure of receptivity and mystery who is willing to quiet her own thoughts in order to explore the realms of the unseen and the only-half-imagined.

Temperance in the center is a card of balance, but not only that. It is a card of dynamic and harmonious balance - in which opposites are brought into a dance with one another, rather than being restricted or arrested in a binding compromise. Temperance is a card of process, and the process is one of balance and harmonious relationship. Both the Page of Cups and the Two of Wands have their vulnerabilities. The Page of Cups is still a young woman, not yet risen to the wisdom of a queen, and her withdrawal into herself to seek her intuition and the inspiration of her dreams can too easily become an excuse for idle fantasy and naive, wishful thinking. On the other hand, the Two of Wands is a card of action and eagerness, at just the start of the journey, but the power of the will can become too outwardly-focused, resulting in rigid willfulness and stagnation which is isolated from the intuitive wisdom that could give it direction and focus. In both cases, a dynamic balance between the two are necessary to give each card's energies limits and boundaries in which to work most effectively.

Yet Temperance faces towards the Page of Cups on the left. In the end, I think this reading indicates that I have moved too much to the right, towards the energies of will and action of the Two of Wands, and that to find that healthy dynamic balance I would do best to look "to the past" and allow myself more of the solitude and stillness I once had, in which to find the time and space to listen more deeply to my own intuition and explore my own dreams. Perhaps this choice might put me at the risk of appearing foolish or naive, too much of a day-dreamer, to those who are eager to judge me as immature, just a silly page. Maybe this is where the courage and strength of the Two of Wands can serve me well - in being willing to be vulnerable in that way, and to more courageously seek out the solitude and quiet that I know my own soul truly needs at times.