Treading Into Luminosity
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.