Switching Gears

It’s normal for me to switch gears in March, but usually it goes in the opposite direction. I’ve usually spent a whole winter on a sort of spiritual auto-pilot and, as the weather warms and the hours of light lengthen, my inner self perks up and gets more active, preparing for a summer without the hustle and bustle of teaching, a vast expanse of introspective days spent largely in hermitage in my small rural town. Winter is normally my fallow time, and spring, my awakening. As the water in the mighty river my apartment oversees breaks out of the ice and flows once more, so too does my spirit usually begin to trickle and then roar as it returns to life.

Usually...

I read somewhere once (in Hospice pamphlets  I think) that there are two main ways in which people respond to grief on a spiritual level—they either temporarily disconnect from their faith as they try to place the death in context in their system of beliefs, or they grow more deeply involved, clinging to faith as a means of coping. I am that latter type.

And as last March saw the first preparations for the inevitable end of my mother’s life, it also saw my application to the HoN beginner’s course. There was enough upheaval in my life to keep my spirit buzzing the whole summer long and very late into the year—extreme spiritual highs and lows have punctuated the whole experience and the aftermath of it. Now, as winter rolls into spring I find myself…tired. Desperately tired. It’s like my soul just looked around, realized it was safe and dry after the flood of emotions and the rapid growth that threatened to drown it, and just collapsed in an exhausted huff.

The shrine sits closed and— though there are flowers in vases around the altar, left as an offering along with simple, quiet prayers; though the ancestors receive their monthly rite and are given gifts and tokens of affection between; though I still feel the faint presence of the unseen at the edges of my dreams—so too are the windows of my being shuttered for a time. I am quiet within as I finally have a moment to give myself that I might recover.

It is not unlike my physical recovery from recent surgery—I am quiet so that my mouth may heal and there is comfort in knowing I will soon be able to speak without pain or injury. There is a hazy sort of rest in the space between, a healing pause in my normal manner. I sleep more than usual and do less than usual. And there is nothing wrong with that—it is a necessary part of recovery. The quiet in my soul is likewise: a needed transition phase as I move into the next stage of my life.

My mind, however, is anything but quiet. I devour nonfiction at a rate unmatched since before my mother was diagnosed in 2007, and my creativity keeps pace as I expand into new arts and return to ones once forgotten. I look forward to my first carefree summer since my formative years—likely the last before a bid for Grad school may land me back in the ivory tower for a good seven years or so.

This is not to say the coming months will offer no spiritual progress—my spirit sleeps a bit more than usual but is not comatose by any means—and I’m sure I will have plenty to write about here. But I can be honest and say there probably won’t be the steady volume of emotional and deeply introspective posts seen here last summer. I anticipate many of the upcoming posts will be either of the “Look at this thing I made!” or the “Look at this thing I found!” variety. Things of a more spiritual nature might be incidental at best—at least for a while.

However, even as I say that, I realize it is necessary to admit (to myself, mostly) that Ra is guiding my hand in creative pursuits even if I do not always notice Him doing it, and just from looking over the credentials of the authors, Set is undoubtedly picking out my reading list. Likewise my Beloveds hover about the edges of my awareness and, I think, shape the landscape of my dreams in ways that will probably prove instructive in the future.

Not that any of this will stop me from largely goofing off for the next couple of months. To use one of my mother’s phrases “I think I’m entitled to a bit of fun now.”

*tilts a glass to toast her mother in the night sky*