September 7, 2025 / wanderinglightning / 0 Comments
So many changes between the I Ching hexagram for Treading and the hexagram for Luminosity. Toss of the coins — will I look back, or ahead? “Continuous advance,” it says in no uncertain terms. Follow. Journey. Life Path.
And still I try to work the angles. Hmmm. But there’s a whole interpretation about “treading on the tail of the tiger.” Even so, I know full well that emotion is the tail of the tiger here. Drama. Pay attention — don’t step on the tiger’s tail. Focus on your footsteps.
This day is about actively walking, the journey I always talk about, think about, believe I’m still on. Stepping Into Grace. But how? My brain is still lumbering toward expression, focusing in slow motion, dragging its feet to respond with spoken words, slowly, as if I’m coming out of that damn anesthesia that robbed me of brain cells the last time I felt like this. That took two years, to recover. Two years.
And yet this is totally different.
That was a theft, an act of vandalism perpetrated by ignorance. I am highly susceptible to chemicals, to drugs, to overdose. My red hair might have been a giveaway when I was younger. We are a touchy lot, we of the red hair and freckles, biologically sensitive central nervous systems, people who are easily burned by the sun, people who hemorrhage.
I was sufficiently advanced in years when I had my back-to-back surgeries — the conservative failed one and the aggressive successful one — that no one would know, the red in my hair having already faded, mostly replaced by gray, or even weirder, by brown. I’d never had brown hair in my life.
Or had I?
I’ve been told that red-haired people live in a state of constant alchemy, as our hair color is supposedly caused by an oxidation process that changes brown hair into our gleaming
coppery-gold.
Our hair essentially rusts?
I’m more inclined to believe in Mendelian hybrid crosses and genetics. But how does that explain the sensitivity of our skin, our blood, our eyes, our brains — not to mention our egos — to too much? The medically accurate and wittily ironic term is “systemic insults.” We can’t take the harsh cosmic jokes at our expense. We react. Thin-skinned across all of our biosystems, it seems. No one manning our blood-brain barriers at the border crossing.
Which could be a gift. I mean, maybe it lets us cross other barriers easily, too. Access other realms of consciousness. Maybe it lets us travel there-and-back-again, to rethink and reshape this reality. Although honestly, I don’t think it matters. I think every one of us has this access. Our rational mind just denies it. Locks it away. Now, after the Vulture, I’m patting all my pockets, trying to figure out where I put my keys to this otherworld.
A full moon in Pisces tonight. A full moon ECLIPSE. Funny things happen on such nights, but of course, none of it is real, science says. Yet I have personally witnessed the effect of these energies, the increase in mental health crises in the people I have served, people living outside, without homes, walking and muttering and shouting and trying to sleep under skies filled with ancient signs and portents. Mental health crisis centers know the truth. Hospital maternity wards and emergency rooms know the truth.
Truth does not depend on proof. It just is, exists.
“The Veils Are Thinning.” It is the title of a chapbook of poetry by Chelsea Gilmore that I picked up in Old Town, because it spoke with succinct clarity to what is happening within me. “I am mapping these obscurities,” Gilmore writes, “these places in between and beyond. The marks show where to go and the lines reveal how to come home from the other side.”
A map. Wouldn’t that be helpful. I feel as if I’m speaking with a swollen tongue, thinking with the rusted remains of the brain I used to rev and gun and peel out into complex concepts with. Now that vehicle seems gone, and I’m left standing flat-footed on a dull, brown dirt road. I keep plodding, step by heavy step. Where to go. How to get there. Will I ever actually find my way back?
I felt the need to do chakra meditation today, before my mother woke up. Sat in the basement bedroom, tuned in a crown chakra guided meditation I like. More and more, this has become a part of my off-handed, hit-and-miss spiritual practice, sitting with some feeling of inner light and cellular universes swirling their pulsing galaxies near my tailbone, my gut, my solar plexus, my heart, my throat, my forehead. Today it is my crown, the place where my fontanel, the soft spot of my baby skull, fused as I grew, encasing a fluid self, naturally trying to protect my brain and my soul and my truth from being hurt or destroyed. As if mere human bone could save us from life.
With concentration, I was able to let go and be with the energy I felt. I saw indigo triangles of light, the color of the Third Eye. And then I had a vision.
I saw my crown chakra from above. The top of my head opened, and I looked down at my own brain busily functioning. The hemispheres were each made of a Tree of Life — one on each side, mirror images, sharing one trunk down the joining-division of the brain, the corpus callosum. Branches were frontal lobes, roots were occipital lobes. It was made of a solid, beautiful dark metal, like titanium. The branches and leaves and vines and roots were all cast in great detail, and the edges of their design were crisp and gleaming. It was powerful; solid metal and yet alive, living growing pulsing branches moving like a tree. Unbreakable. Luminous.
So beautiful. It gave me a sense of wonder, and reassurance.
It reminded me who I am.
September 4, 2025 / wanderinglightning / 0 Comments
What is solid? What is real? One night, two dreams. Sleeping in the basement of my mother’s house, the house I lived in during high school. The house I left before I finished my senior year.
In the first, I find a strong smooth walking stick, a branch that’s perfect as a staff. It is the tarot Ace of Wands, I realize. The staff of power, energy, life. Potential. Fate that is not yet written. I reach for it, knowing with certainty, saying, “I need that.”
I awake, and think of the branch I found toward the beginning of the Camino, my walking stick for the entire pilgrimage. Right there on the side of the path, I had christened it Saint Thomas, after the disbelieving apostle, befriending my science-mind’s need for surety on a journey of faith, letting my doubts and incredulity support me on my path. Learning to live in the not-knowing, between being right and wrong, here or there, this way or that way. Saint Thomas, who ended up covered in talismans and treasures, colorful cords and wires, feathers, Basque symbols, shells.
I rolled over and went back to sleep.
In the second dream, I’m at a dark gathering, an ominous party, which quickly becomes demons cavorting in dark fancy costumes. I am at the masquerade ball, in hell, the psychic’s warning I’d been given. These are my mother’s family. During the dream, all I can think is, “I need that staff.”
September 3, 2025 / wanderinglightning / 0 Comments
Yesterday, I had to take my mother to Urgent Care for another UTI. She has had so many recently and blown through so many antibiotics that they sent us to the ER. We left at 2:00pm and got back to the house just before 8:00pm. I should be gracious and patient and forgiving that she LOVED the attention, but her behavior, as always: sweet, docile, self-effacing with the doctors and nurses — and an impatient, petulant child with me.
I saw how she cannot wait, delay, amuse herself with her own thoughts or ideas or memories or images. She lay in the ER bed chanting “c’mon, c’mon, c’mon” under her breath. And none of this is new. I felt it past her Alzheimer’s, deeper, into her psyche. This is how she has lived her life. Impatient, irritable, entitled to the attention she wants. Maybe it was her irritability I felt so inexplicably the day before. Or maybe I have simply absorbed some terrible habits.
I introduced myself to staff as Bo, adding, “She’s my mother. My sister and I both have medical power of attorney to make decisions easier.” So they called me Bo. So she called me Bo. Which she does not ever do.
And then, when I would step out of the room for her to have scans or procedures or bathroom breaks that involved her getting half-naked — after each break, she would say something like “there she is” or “there’s my girl” or “my daughter says….” It was fascinating, how she reasserted her view that I was HERS, and FEMALE. I would roll my eyes as staff grinned. Or simply ignore her.
This is my mother. IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM, she wanted to engage in verbal combat with me about being who I am. She asked if I preferred to be called Bo, and I said (for the 20th, 200th time), “Yes, I do. Bo.” Told her that it was a nickname, that Dad had tried to figure out a nickname for me for years, and I finally found it. But I’ve told her all of this before, of course.
She said, “He did?”
I nodded.
“He didn’t think ‘Barb’ suited you?”
“I guess not.”
“My friend Barbara was a good person,” she huffed.
“Well, I’m a different person.”
“Not a ‘Barbara.'”
“No, not really.”
“You were my little girl….” She loves to say this with theatrical wistfulness.
“Was I?” I responded. “What about this” I gestured to my overall appearance “says ‘GIRL’ to you?”
“Well, today you look like a boy, you’re dressed like a boy.” A boy in his late 50s.
“I like looking like a boy.”
“OH!”
I changed the subject. INSANE Emergency Room banter. Aren’t you sick? What are we doing?
Whenever we are one-on-one, she wants to question who I am, my way of being in the world. She wants to reaffirm her definition of my role. This has been my entire life with this person. She criticized me “just sitting there in that chair — how can you stand it?” With irritation at my nonplussed attitude. She told me I was suffering, being there with her for so long.
I laughed and said, “The only one suffering here is you. Why don’t you try taking a rest until the nurse comes back?”
I think she wants me to react the same way she does — in all situations.
Which is psychologically impossible.
The next morning, I listened to these online tarot readers I like on YouTube. They told me that my questions are the barrier to moving through the next doorway, crossing the next threshold, finding my next stepping stones on the unmarked trail. The questions keep me behind a wall in my mind — having to understand, having to know. I need to stay in the space between knowing and not knowing. This is where my intuition lives.
11:11am: driving from Reservoir Ridge to Old Town to get coffee and do this writing, I went through the North Highway 287 roundabout — which was swirling with huge, dark birds. Dozens of them. A tornado of ravens and vultures. I pulled over by the river rafting buses and got out of the car, shielding my eyes from the midday glare to look up at them. It was as if all the vultures on the Camino and Cumberland Island and Lake Superior had lifted into the sky, all at the same time, and circled together. I was speechless.
In the afternoon, I listened to Jerry Wise talk about specific behaviors of Scapegoats who had Narcisistic Parents:
- Peace was temporary, chaos was inevitable. This turmoil was the family’s “emotional wifi” that keeps you tuned in, attached to the family’s dysfunction. You learned to expect instability.
- You replay arguments in your head, perfectly. Blamed for everything, constantly defending yourself, you were never able to express your true feelings or your true self.
- You apologize for existing – or are expected to. Your worth is tied to other’s emotional states.
- You get tongue-tied when speaking your truth, because your voice was silenced or dismissed. Maybe this is why I’m still struggling with word-finding since the Vulture?
- You feel like a ghost at family events. Because your true self is not seen.
- You fantasize about proving them wrong, because you were taught that you were the problem. But that desire to prove them wrong keeps you emotionally entangled with their view/role of you.
- You can instantly sense who is the Golden Child in any room — and who is left out.
- You attract wounded animals and toxic, emotional vampires, because you were trained to be a selfless caretaker without boundaries.
- You dive in and share too deeply, too quickly. The flipside of lack of boundaries.
Hate binds you to the hated object. And anyway, these feelings are not yours only — they are emotional strings connecting you to the relationship system. Which is emotional fusion.
So yes, she does want me to follow her into dark places and share all of her negative reactions.
Not be the self I am. Still. After a lifetime together on this earth. Even as her brain is slowly disintegrating.
Is mine? How much longer will I stay here? Are my medical appointments about done?
Am I as impatient as she is?
My questions are the barriers to crossing over. An unmarked trail is not a journey of entitlement: it is a revelation. It reveals itself as you take each step.
September 1, 2025 / wanderinglightning / 0 Comments
8/26/2025 ODIN
Maybe I need help. I know who I am, after all: maybe I need Odin.
This is the second time I am calling for help at Reservoir Ridge. “ODIN.” Loud. Strong.
Alone.
Silence.
I walked out to the cattails in the wetland area. Horses in the pasture next to the open space walked with me, along their side of the fence. I felt rain beginning — a drip — so I turned and headed back. One big appaloosa horse, big male, a loner, had remained behind while all the rest had walked west, toward shelter. He walked over toward me, looked at me; swished his tail, and slowly walked away.
Sleipnir, I thought. Odin’s 8-legged horse.
Looking up, I was startled to see a huge, boiling swirl of swallows, seagulls, and two vultures all circling directly over me. I raised my arms to the vultures. One cut across the circle, flew over me. Then all the birds — all at once — flew away. Scattered. One vulture, the other one, flew away last, circling higher and farther away until I could no longer see it.
Thought and Memory. I have no idea what is happening. Odin’s named birds are ravens, not vultures.
8/29/2025 WRATH
No more mellow pasture walks. My irritations are all coming out. I call “Odin” and am given people. People walking into me, talking over me, crashing past me on mountain bikes, greeting me unnecessarily, repeatedly, awkwardly, to allay their own fears. You’d think I would have more empathy, since I’m sure these awkward salutations are what Odin gets from me. Wasn’t greeting the first lesson?
But this doesn’t seem like how I actually feel, this irritation. It feels like an overlay. And yet it wells up, an energy to look at without becoming lost in it. As if I should study it.
I cannot tell if the birds overhead are vultures or ravens or hawks or crows. Too high. Too high above me to identify. I’m not sure what I can identify.
The I Ching shows me “Limitation.” Harmonize with the changes by adapting. Everything you will ever need can be found within. A sense of limitation, or lack of freedom, it suggests, is the reason we make changes in life.
This is all caused by The Wanderer. I am The Wanderer. And in one of his many guises, Odin is called The Wanderer. I am sensing a new way of seeing, after the loss of my metaphorical eye and all. Gave it up, Odin corrects from within my brain. Gave up an eye for wisdom.
There was a time before, in my life, before the Vulture, “to disconnect and wander into the unknown to explore how to move beyond limitations in thinking.” And that time is passed. This is what the
I Ching says. But I hear Odin’s voice. He calls for clear-eyed communication, bonds and agreements — in relationship to others. He called me back from my solo travel writing. DONE, he told me. A fierce call, that was.
Weirdly, or should I say, Wyrd, Odin speaks clearly to me through the Chinese Book of Changes. “Limitations may seem like obstacles to forward progress, but these obstacles are really an opportunity to change how we view restrictions. Autonomy may have to make sacrifices when in relationship with others. The limitations we face serve our wellbeing. In what way is a limitation setting you free?”
9/1/2025 SILENCE
The vultures didn’t show up today.
Maybe I didn’t show up today.