chelidon | whereabouts, hard lessons and dread doors

I'll be offline tonight and most of tomorrow at the least. My wife and partner, Claudia, whom many of you know, will be going in for a thyroidectomy tomorrow. Good thoughts, energy and wishes for a successful operation, a complete excision of the cancer, and a swift and complete healing, are all very much appreciated.

I keep sitting and writing notes about what the last several weeks have been like, trying to distill it into something that makes some coherent sense, but really, I just can't, not yet, not fully. There are some dread doors I'd hoped not to have to open and look through, at least for many years, that I've been having to wrestle with, day in and day out. Claudia's prognosis is very good, and she has assembled and woven together one of the most amazing, deep and skillful circles of personal, medical, magickal, energetic and emotional support I think I've ever seen. She's one of the strongest and most strong-willed people I know out of a tribe of very, very strong and strong-willed people, and she is a passionate, skillful and relentless fighter for life, and for what and whom she loves and holds dear. It's for some very, very good reasons that one of her given names is Claudia Manifest. And she wants to live, and be well and healthy, and be here to share this life for many, many more years. I trust that will happen, and I believe that it will. She, and we, will fight this with everything we have, and that's a lot.

And, one possibility I have had to stare right in the face is that of losing the person I love most in the whole world, and the person who is the mother of our child, and the person with whom I always intended to spend the rest of my life. In all likelihood, everything will be fine. We all reassure ourselves, and each other, that everything will be fine. We believe everything will be fine. Yet, there is that hugely chilling word, "cancer," and many of the steps we must take -- medical advance directives, living will, and so on, are in preparation for the worst. And we hope for the best. All kinds of events and encounters keep coming up in which the universe shows us the stark, unadorned truth: we don't know, we can't know. We can hope, we can pray, we can take refuge in probabilities, use all of our skill, trust in the mysteries of the medical profession and hold good intent, and...we can't know. It's like a shadow-version of the Fool's Leap. When you take that big leap out into the unknown, when you step off that cliff, you don't, you can't know if you'll fly or plummet to the rocks below, or perhaps something else totally unexpected will happen. If you really know ahead of time, it's not a true Fool's Leap. The total mystery of the result is one of the essential, fundamental characteristics of the act. You can have faith, in skill or luck or best possible outcome, but you really, truly, don't know what's going to happen. And yet, you leap, you step out, in faith that this is what you have to do, even if you don't know fully why, and you hope for a good outcome, that the story ends with a "...happily ever after" and not a "...and his body fed the crows." ;>

Now I find I'm in a form of Fool's Leap where I'm pushed over the cliff -- I have no choice over the leaping, but still no knowledge of the outcome. I've had to give up my sense of control, to face the fact that I don't know, I can't know. I can hope, I can pray, I can divine and think I know and reassure myself and others with bits of knowledge and comforting statistics and good-hearted platitudes, but really, truly, I don't know. You do everything you can, and the story unfolds as it will, from first chapter to last. That's the lesson here, and it's a hard, hard one to swallow.

I've lost friends before -- young, suddenly, and I know the hard-taught lesson of living your dreams, of having the focus to use what you have to get what you want. doing what you dream now, not "later," of saying the things you need and want to say to people now, not "later," of not wasting time, because you never know how much you, or anyone else, has. And this, now, is again different. Deeper, harder, new and darker levels of the underworld in which I've had to wander and explore.

It's sometimes hard to talk about success without sounding like a pompous ass, but there's an element of appropriate pride here, too, of right-sizedness, not being overblown, or deflated, of acknowledging both your strengths and weaknesses. I think there's a trap that it's possible to fall into when you've manifested things successfully, especially in the face of what seem like near-impossible odds. It's the opposite of the trap that people who feel blown about by fate can get caught in, those who because of their experiences, come to feel like they absolutely have no control over their lives, that it's all random, leaves tossed in the wind, hopeless. It's possible to build a world-view where you come to believe that you have virtually no control over your life and destiny, and to some extent that can be a self-fulfilling prophesy -- you believe that you have less control than you really have. And on the other side, it's also possible, even though you "know" better, to come to unconsciously sense that you have more control in life than you really do. Perhaps there's some natural hubris, or more accurately, blind spots, that come along slowly and surely with each successful creative manifestation.
Both errors are based on fear, fear of the unknown, fear of mortality. Many kinds of magick, from the very first cave paintings for the successful hunt, are designed, at least in part, to bolster our sense of control over what seems uncontrollable, to deal with that fear of lack of control.

Claudia and I have built a lot of wonderful things together over the last 21 years, and along with many others, we've worked and played hard to create the world in which we now live, as best we could. And if it had been easy, if things had been handed to us, if everything just fell into place, it might be easier to discount it as merely luck. But it's not been easy. We worked our asses off, made a lot of hard sacrifices, tough choices, dreadful mistakes, built and rebuilt, and worked in partnership to manifest a lot of wonderful things: relationships, groups and friendships, art and magick, beauty, ways of living and a fertile, healthy environment in which we and people we love can spread our wings, grow and live freely, as our true selves.

But you know, the hard lesson there is that no matter what you do, there still will be things that come up over which you have little or no control, things which are simply beyond your ability to change. You pull together all of the pieces of your self, your souls, your will, intent and desire, become ever more complete in all your parts, study, play, work, live, love, and...do your best. You do what you can. And sometimes that's enough, sometimes that's good, and brilliant, and successful. You go, you rock, w00t! And sometimes it's not enough. Maybe it's because you didn't have enough skill, or resources, or experience, or had bad timing, or chose not to dedicate enough time, or just flubbed it. Or perhaps it was an impossible situation to begin with, perhaps it was simply beyond your control. And you still go, you still rock, and...then you have to chose how to deal with failure, to pick up whatever pieces are left and move on.

The reality is that we all have more or less control at various points in our lives -- there are times when all you can do is hold on tight and try to enjoy (endure, survive) the ride, and times to dig in and force the universe with all of your will and passion to reform itself according to your desires. And many shades of grey along the continuum between, and the holding of both/all of those possibilities at once. And I've been on that ride for a while now, trying to figure out when to hold on and when to let go. It's an old, essentially human problem -- remember the Serenity Prayer? ("Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. ") You know, the difference between knowing something, and KNOWING it? And some lessons, especially the hardest ones, you have to keep coming back to, at different levels, to different depths. Ah, thank you Dark Mother, may I learn your lessons deeply and well, so that I don't have to get them again ;>

To put it all in perspective, there's so very much to be thankful for, so much about life here and now that is incredibly good, full of love and passion, beauty, delight and wonder. And even in the midst of living one's dreams, it can still be very, very hard. And that's life. As always, life is about the living, and we'll all be sharing life together, in whatever ways we can, as long as we can. Blessings are everywhere, and I am grateful.