Treading Into Luminosity

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.

One Night, Two Dreams

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.”

C’mon C’mon C’mon

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. You apologize for existing – or are expected to. Your worth is tied to other’s emotional states.
4. 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?
5. You feel like a ghost at family events. Because your true self is not seen.
6. 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.
7. You can instantly sense who is the Golden Child in any room — and who is left out.
8. You attract wounded animals and toxic, emotional vampires, because you were trained to be a selfless caretaker without boundaries.
9. 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.

By No Means Leave Your Gods

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.

The Year Of The Vulture

August 25, 2025 / wanderinglightning / 0 Comments

Every day I come out here to see you. And every day that I do, I do.
Intention.

New moon two nights ago. Set intentions.

Reservoir Ridge is a grassy natural area tucked up next to, and extending up into, the foothills topped with pines. It’s a place that naturally draws the eyes upward. Today the sky is white with thick clouds, just like that day by Lake Superior on the highway. I know who you are: you are messengers, guides. You know who I am — me, seeker, arrogant knower, backward knowledge gatherer sometimes, get the lesson absolutely backwards, but I’m here, I’m looking and listening, watching for signs. I don’t know where to go next … because it’s not next yet. It will never be next. Only now.

I’m looking up. Seagulls as harbingers; there’s water here, up at the manmade lake, made from an intentional flood. My beloved Camino companions, the gulls, encouraging my final steps from the hills, singing me to the beaches.

I thought you were condors in Spain — but now three times, THREE TIMES, I have been corrected, by three different people, that there are no condors in Spain. Yet I know people in Spain told me “condors.” Now I find news that, in 2017, a juvenile Andean condor was found in Andalucia. 2017, the year I went on Camino. Only one? Maybe I misunderstood in Spanish. So black vultures, then — you were black vultures with 10-foot wingspans, or griphus vultures, like griffins, but no, not those white heads and frilled necks. You came to see me on the high road of the Primitivo, walking to Alta. You came to see me on the highway by the lake. Superior. You came to see me in the middle of the Rio Grande run dry. I see you everywhere here in northern Colorado. Every day at Reservoir Ridge. Primitivo. Alta. Superior. Grande. Ridge. I see the dream of the cliff, leaping off.

Yesterday, I remembered the only time I smoked marijuana, on my 25th birthday. I soared into clouds, high into the sky, and that is where I spent my entire high — HIGH. In the clouds, moving through them, them moving over and below and past me. I must have been flying, but I only knew it as moving consciousness. It was exhilarating. I kept catching my breath, like I was coming, like the orgasmic energy of soaring over a waterfall. With One. Only ever that soul-soaring with One. Out of my body and into the sky, onto the sky, but still here, still present. The most shamanic experiences of my life.

Until the Vulture.

So I asked you, Vulture: what is the message? But I cannot hear you yet. Too many words, too soon. Instead, I will remember the high of that first high. You flying up behind me, a silent shadow, blowing my hat off, lifting it off my head on the Camino. Like soaring with the One. The trembling, shaking, and tears after I met you on the highway — but the focus, stillness, realness of that meeting.

I have moved past that overwhelm and disorientation, and now I look for you, wait for you, depend on you showing up, showing yourself. And I greet you. Arms outstretched, face uplifted, I am a Y, a Why, to the sky. And you then fly directly overhead, over me, and greet me. And I have no words for those moments.

I am working on learning to ride the spiral, the thermals of the earth, like warm breath, a warm body, a warm beating heart. Ease, simplicity. Ride that air wave. Watch over the world. Watch over me.

Greeting is the first lesson.

______________________________________________________________________________

I tried to make a list of my Vulture encounters:
1. THE Vulture Encounter, by Lake Superior
2. Vulture Sentinel, sitting alone on a burned tree stump, on the way back to my sister’s cabin
3. The Twins, circling above my mother’s house, one came to check on me then left with its partner
4. Fellow Traveler, out near Reservoir Ridge, flew low back and forth across the road in front of the car as I drove, then alongside the open passenger window
5. Vulture Greeter, coming back from hiking at Cameron Pass with my sister, it flew directly over us in a tight curve on Rist Canyon Road
6. Clothesline Check-in, again a pair, again one flew directly over me while hanging out laundry at my sister’s cabin as the other circled away
7. Food Truck Friends, we see them from the canyon store’s wooden deck while eating gourmet food truck sandwiches

But there are so many more, I realized. The condors/not condors on the Hospitales route, and the one who flew directly over me as if wondering why I was on exposed tops of the mountains instead of down in the valleys. I wondered if they were deciding if I was a snack or not. When I traveled to Cumberland Island, that’s where I first hung out with vultures, dead trees near the dunes absolutely full of vultures. That was the trip I first used my name Bo. That was the first time anyone asked me what being nonbinary was like, what it meant. My next-tent neighbor in the camping area, our sites delineated by natural fences of six-foot-high palmettos, sleeping under the live oaks strung with waving Spanish moss, stars shining through the curly branches.

I have been in the good company of enormous, silent vultures over all these years, since 2017. So why now? Why me? What is the sacred lesson?

“What is the message” was too intense. Too cognitive, too much reliance on words. I know how to feel signs, by their energy — an odd rain, too much, too hard, means strange weather, possible flooding, here and in the spiritual world. Searing heat and blinding sun bleaches my bones, peeling back my skin to the skeleton of my soul. Deep snow is deep time, hushed, still.

I went to see the psychic in the back room of the metaphysical bookstore, Vulture. She was tired, used to be a teacher. So what is she now, I wondered. Anyway, I asked her about all this. The psychic said to ask you, Vulture. Ask What, and Where — but not Why. That will break the spell, break our communication, our communion. Our moment.

The way to find you is without words.
Maybe the way to ask is also without words.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Looked up to see the sun, circle of the sun, its outline only showing, light shining in a small opening in the thick clouds. The circle centered on an image: the light formed a bird, a broad-winged bird of light. The bird then immediately straightened into a perfect arrow. A Camino arrow pointing the way. As I reached quickly to get a picture of it … the image closed. No photos, please. All clouds once again. It was over. Suddenly, for no reason, I had the clear thought: “The Bird IS The Arrow.”

Wadd Ehya

July 11, 2025 / wanderinglightning / 0 Comments

Thursday July 10, 2025, brought the full moon. It rose over my sister’s mountain cabin, silently shining. I sat meditating, eyes closed, focused on listening, on the idea of listening, the process of listening. The river flows powerfully in early July, and through the open windows I could hear its constant rushing.

“Wad ehya.” Seemingly produced from the river itself, I heard the words clearly, sounding within my mind. No mistake. Spoken precisely. But what words were they?

On a hunch, I looked them up in Arabic.

Wadd = the pre-Islamic Moon God
Ehya = a night vigil, like the Night of Prayer associated with Ramadan

I read that Wadd was the god of the ancient Minaeans who lived on the Arabian Peninsula, mentioned in the Qur’an as a “god of old from before the flood of Noah.” Islam considers Wadd a false idol; Muhammad had the temples and images of Wadd destroyed, so not much history remains.

The full moon has long had associations with fertility. But I’ve only ever heard of moon goddesses, female deities. Yet the paired image of the crescent moon and morning star, Venus, both strongly connected to the mystical feminine, were once associated with Wadd. As God of the Full Moon, however, Wadd’s most sacred symbol was the snake, Yah, blatantly representing phallic genitalia. Some scholars have linked references to Yah, or yh, a shortened form of the name yhwh, Yahweh/God of the Old Testament of the Bible, to Wadd. Much is made of multiple descriptions in various Psalms about a god of procreative power, riding the clouds, his strength especially enhanced by the full moon: “The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like a tent and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.” Pretty evocative erotic imagery.

“He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind. He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants.”

Fascinating. Rides on the wings of the wind. I think of the Vulture.

There was a whole cult of Wadd. People would carve wd’b, an abbreviation for “Wadd is Father,” on personal amulets, even the walls of buildings. He was a protector, God of love and friendship. That said, I lean toward protector: the symbols used to write his name in Ancient South Arabian script look a lot like a war axe and a shield. As his cult spread into western Arabia, the Banu Kalb tribe worshipped Wadd in the form of a man rather than snake or moon, and they erected a temple in Dumat al-Jandal, complete with carved idol. According to Malik ibn Harithah per Hisham ibn al-Kalbi’s Book of Idols,

“lt was the statue of a huge man, as big as the largest of human beings, covered with two robes, clothed with the one and cloaked with the other, carrying a sword on his waist and a bow on his shoulder, and holding in [one] hand a spear to which was attached a standard, and [in the other] a quiver full of arrows.”

Something in me loves this image. I’ve always wanted to be massive like that. I act like I am. It’s quite ridiculous, really, this idol. So. Many. Weapons. He has his own flag? which he has then attached to his spear?? He’s like a heavenly multi-tool. Wadd can DO IT ALL. The cloaks refer to the face of the moon appearing “veiled” at times, and ancient peoples thought this was the Moon God intentionally turning his face from them due to his awesome, terrifying, unbearable power. God speaking through the burning bush or the whirlwind — or an out-of-body flight with a vulture, riding the clouds — so that we can survive the encounter.

How long have I veiled my true face, forsaken something holy within me? As if to spare others, because they wouldn’t be able to handle it. Slouched in bed, I kept ehya in my own way through the night. The moon shone bright through the tall pines surrounding my sister’s log cabin. I felt like I was bathing in a healing moonglow. I didn’t know why it felt that way to me, and I didn’t ask. I just loved the feeling, and sighed deeply, often. I dozed and woke again, sighed and smiled, and meditated on that heretic’s anthem from the Qur’an until I finally fell asleep to the sound of the river, just a couple hours before sunrise:

“And they say: By no means leave your gods, nor leave Wadd ….” (Qur’an 71:23)

What Do The Doctors Know

July 9, 2025 / wanderinglightning / 0 Comments

Oh 2025, you invisible trickster. You silent interpreter of maladies. You singer of unheard songs. What a crazy year since the Vulture Moment last May, lifetimes, eons, ago.

I’m just trying to keep up with my dreams. In the desert, I dream of boats on the ocean, tides, clouds, gulls. In the green Colorado mountains, I dream of desert canyonland, red rock and purple-blue shadows, a sheer drop from the cliff’s edge, and such an insistent impulse to leap. Because I will soar, I feel it. And everywhere, the Vulture.

The tears didn’t stop after I pulled over to the side of Minnesota Highway 61, high on the bluff edge of an inland sea change, although I did not know it at the time. I thought I was traveling up the shore of Lake Superior toward Grand Marais, the Grand Portage, and Isle Royale. I thought I was chasing a story, following what I could find of the North Country Trail.

But in truth, I was Lightning traveling toward Thunder Bay.

Who knew. Who knew I would continue on to Lake Champlain, the watery line between New York and Vermont, camping in the rain, my mind as misty foggy as my days. My words lost to tell this story. Clouds filling my eyes, spilling over as tears, again, and again, and again. By the time I reached Boston, my daughter hugged me with love, and concern. I stayed extra days, sleeping in, not leaving her apartment. It was not like me at all. By the time I headed back west, I was convinced something was terribly wrong. I was not okay.

Back in New Mexico, I tried to shrug it off. Rest. Help my son with his projects. But residual trance-like moments, echoes of the Vulture moment, still came over me unexpectedly, like sudden squalls of a silent storm, of white stillness, intense focus on the tiniest detail of anything, a crabapple on a tree, its veined leaves, the exact color of magenta against the shimmering green. These incidents scared me, scared my son. Worried my daughter when she visited. When the psychic clouds washed over me at such times, I could not come up with words. Just the intensity of vision, and of deep connection in the moment. And tears when I tried to understand, to explain, a shaking feeling in my core.

What was happening? It was so out of character. None of it made sense. Are these small strokes? I wondered after the fact. Seizures? A strong knowing came over me, that I needed to go home to Colorado. I didn’t know why. But I had to go to Colorado.

So “home” I went, nearly a year to the date from the Vulture, back to my mother with Alzheimer’s and my sister finishing the manuscript of her first book. A year of feeling myself utterly lost, afraid and unsure, strangely and unpredictably emotional. I couldn’t write, couldn’t initiate that process.
No words would come. Simultaneously, the very part-time job that provided my housing ended. It all ended.

I ended. My identity was thoroughly shattered.

In Colorado, jobless, directionless, broke and broken, I went to the community clinic where I used to refer my homeless clients. My sister came along to help explain, and to listen and take notes. She could see I was not myself. Her response — of kindness, support, encouragement, and love — let me gather some of my shredded energy. And the doctor was fantastic. She set up test after test, chasing down possible causes, ruling out … everything.

No stroke. No seizures. No tumors, no cancers. My heart was fine. My bloodwork was terrific.

What could explain my out-of-body experience, my sudden onset of anxiety, my struggles with word retrieval? Maybe a hormonal imbalance? But I’d tried replacement estrogen back in 2011, after my cancer-related hysterectomy (ovaries too), at the surgeon’s urging. It had been a disaster. My skin tore open in bleeding wounds, and the hormones made me feel half sick. I quit and never looked back. Now, after 14 years of peace and stability, hormones?

My chart noted my “they/them” pronouns and “nonbinary” gender. I told the doctor I’d naturally had high testosterone levels all my life. All the symptoms: wildly irregular periods, small breasts, bad acne, low voice, muscular shoulders and legs, thick hair including a mustache and goatee that I shaved daily since my early 20s — plus a fierce temper and a robust sex drive.

“Do you think I might be low on testosterone? Do you think my … cognitive issues … might improve?”

“I do.” She nodded sincerely. And she wrote me a prescription for testosterone gel.

After one month, she asked how I was tolerating it.

“Great,” I responded. “Maybe it’s just a placebo effect, it’s probably too early to tell, but I’m feeling … a little clearer, in my thinking?” The over-emotionalism had calmed and faded away.

After three months, I was myself again. My mind, my moods, my energy.  My son knew I was doing better when I could crack jokes. I thought of a line from the 1995 movie A Walk In The Clouds, where Anthony Quinn is Don Pedro Aragon, the strong-willed patriarch of a proud Spanish-American family. He is chastised about his health habits, and retorts, “What the hell do the doctors know … about the needs of a man’s soul?”

Apparently, in my case, quite a lot. I had never considered hormone replacement therapy, just like I had never considered gender-alignment surgery, especially after my horrible reaction to anesthesia with the hysterectomy. That altered my cognition for sure, and it had taken me a full two years to recover. Mostly recover.

No thank you. This body was my body, pushed to its limits many times, but familiar after all these decades. I was simply … me.

And yet, I knew I was completely different now. But this wasn’t about the testosterone.

This was about the Vulture.

Ten Years From The Beginning

December 31, 2024 / wanderinglightning / 0 Comments

Careful what you wish for. And gratitude, for carelessly wishing it anyway.

A decade is a significant period of time. A meaningful measure, of seasons, of changes, especially within one human life. Easy to recognize, the decade when I grew from a baby to a child — now I was me, this person, a self in a world of joy and sorrow. How far I believed I had come from my earliest memories: a toddler, floating on a piece of Styrofoam in Grandpa’s pond, drifting backwards from my beautiful dark-haired mother in her black one-piece swimsuit and cat-eye glasses as she pushed me away; a preschooler, looking upward at my distorted face reflected upside-down in the silver knobs of our kitchen cabinets, twisted like funhouse mirrors. It was all right there, hidden in my memory in plain sight. My path, of revisiting these two themes — rejection and authenticity, leaving and becoming — was already mapped. My feet were already walking this Camino. Sometimes running.

It’s harder to recognize the growth of this last decade — the ten years since I first posed the question, “What if I just spiral out of control?” As if “spiral” were the operative word, and “out of control” just a descriptive phrase.

And yet…let us examine the evidence.

2014: I begin this line of questioning from my creaky old house on Sterling Lane in Fort Collins.
2015: I quit my job at the Murphy Center for Hope in Fort Collins and take work in Denver.
2016: I sell my house and move back to Denver, back to my beloved Tennyson Street. Much has changed in 20 years.
2017: I leave it all behind and walk the Camino Norte de Santiago de Compostela across Spain. And sing at Taizé in France. And hike the wanderweg in Switzerland, the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.
2018: I stay with my mother for most of a year to help set up her Alzheimer’s care. I tutor elementary school kids in Denver in reading and writing, just like my grandma used to do in Iowa.
2019: I run ArtStreet, an outreach art studio for people living homeless in Albuquerque.
2020: COVID closes ArtStreet. I go into the backcountry, writing for National Parks Traveler.
2021: Having given up my Albuquerque apartment, I live as a writer nomad.
2022: I take a contract job with US Fish & Wildlife in King Salmon, Alaska. I volunteer at Bristol Bay  Museum in Naknek on Saturdays. I catch salmon in the creek, icefish for smelt on the Naknek River, pick berries and mushrooms and hike past fresh brown bear tracks.
2023: I take a second contract with Fish & Wildlife in Alaska. I return to the Lower 48 in September.

From 2014 to 2023, I felt energized. Not all my choices were easy or smooth. But I felt like I was definitely on my path. As I learned in Spain, to be on Camino is to be on track, living my life. The carvings over the doorway at the cathedral revealed the magic to me: the Omega and the Alpha. Reversed. The ending is just the beginning.

So here I am, at the ending of this first measure of my grand spiral experiment, 2014 – 2024. What have I learned?

Time passes — in moments so small and fleeting that you don’t notice. I was 48 when I started this experiment. Now I see 59 coming over the horizon in just a few weeks. The end of my 50s is here. Old age arrives soon. Am I noticing? I think so. I try to relate to the passage of time by relating to the sun each morning, and the stars at night, and the seasons changing, which all sounds trite except that these are the measures that are the most real. I notice my aches and twinges that come on with the weather. I notice how my energy ebbs and flows now with the earth’s seasonal energy, a time for celebration and harvest, for resting and renewal, for effort and new growth, for flourishing and enjoying this life. I’m trying to just let it all be okay.

Leaving was worth it. I have traded traditional security for the life experiences I always wanted. I do not regret these choices. My soul is satisfied with my sojourning. And yet.

Returning was hard. So hard. I tried to return to the Lower 48 and floated lost, adrift among my kids and old friends. I felt unwelcome and uneasy. Almost immediately, my mother fell and needed stitches, needed rehab, needed, and my sister asked if I could help care for mom — and I said no. In fact, I panicked, the old runaway energy roaring up like bile in the back of my throat. So I ran back to King Salmon, only to have the Universe rebuff my frantic advances. Suffice it to say that housesitting for the local drug dealer did not pan out. And blew up my trust with someone I loved.

2024 was a shadow year. A goddamn saboteur. It kept blowing up all my trust with all the ones I loved. I was so in love with my journey that I never saw the personal heart ambush coming. I lost a couple people along the way, which was so painful. I started to doubt — doubt my heart, doubt my love, doubt my path. In my distrust, paranoia slowly rose up like a cobra, dark, swaying in the murky background. I couldn’t see the path ahead. But I wrote for National Parks Traveler, so I took off on the highway again. A runaway child with means to no end in sight.

The Spiral Way is an expanding path. Another kind of wandering away. Way leads to Way; trails lead to other trails. I followed the North Country Trail. In between, I followed river kayaking trails and canal towpath trails and scenic hiking trails and old rail trails and even an art trail through the Hudson River Valley. And each trail was not enough.  I felt dissatisfied, disjointed, as disconnected as the broken North Country Trail. Almost a trail. Almost a story. Almost a life.

And far from anyone I know or love, driving an unknown highway north along the edge of the Great Lakes, my Camino found me: a huge, dark bird, floating in the sky, drifting in slow, spiraling circles. Its silence grabbed my attention. Fully.

I cannot explain this moment. But I was no longer aware of the road, or the car, or the steep embankment between me and deep water. I only saw the dark form in a white sky, and I was physically drawn toward it, no windshield, no glass, just moving into this new blank space, a white fog, approaching the huge bird in slow motion. And at this slowed pace, out of all measurable time, I heard my mind clearly state, “There…is a word…for that. And that word…is the name.” I stared intently at the huge dark bird, hovering just the way it hovered, slowly almost-circling without any thought of movement, the way it almost-circled me.

“VULTURE” my mind fairly shouted — and the moment was broken. I found myself in the car, driving on the highway. Immediately, my whole body began to shake, and I began to cry.

Over a turkey vulture, something I’ve seen hundreds of times before.

Somehow, whether I called or she called, I don’t know, I was on the phone with my daughter, who encouraged me to pull over and park. I remember her concerned and soothing voice. I remember looking at my hands on the steering wheel.

“Did I just have a stroke?” I asked. Am I dying? I didn’t ask.

Did I die? 

I remember that moment in the sky with the vulture as if it just happened, a moment ago, one second ago, as if it is happening again right now.

I don’t know what comes next. But I am not okay. Or maybe, I am just not the same. Maybe this is the trailhead to a new kind of trail.