The End of the World.

Apparently, the world's supposed to end on Solstice. So much for worrying about my student loans.

While at the New Place this weekend, after discovering that this is a bit worse than we thought (i.e., the foundation needs a lot of work, and we really need a general contractor to tell us how much), a Helpful Friend asked me, "How long are you and the Husband planning on staying here, anyway?"

I realized I had no answer.

The Husband and I have agreed that this is a short-term solution until we can actually buy a little place with a little acreage, but whether this means five years, ten years, or eight months, we really have no idea. I may get an office gig offer that's just too good to pass up and teach only on weekends. He may get a better-paying job elsewhere thanks to another Helpful Friend who was at the New Place this weekend. One of us may be hurt or killed on the way to work/on our jobs/at the mall by some mentally ill person with weapons.

A lot of people's worlds ended last week on December 14th.

I don't know how you parents stand it; how do you send your children out to school after something like this without liberal doses of Valium? For you, I mean, though the kids might need some, too. I cannot imagine the horror of just-another-school-day turning into the knowledge that you will never see your beloved child alive again in this incarnation. We expect to bury our parents, but I don't think anyone expects to bury their children. Especially not like this.

But then, horse-loving children die while riding. School buses crash, children are on planes that fall from the skies, there are drunk drivers bloody everywhere at this time of year. Kids get cancer or meningitis. Hell, a girl I went to high school with had a brain aneurysm at eighteen and died while driving home from a volleyball game. So I suppose you do it the way we all go out into the world each day - having faith that, in all likelihood, everyone will return home relatively intact.

We make plans for the future because most of us need to, I think. I don't personally know anyone who just wakes up and says, "Well, let's see what happens today." So the Husband and I are planning to fix the New Place and be there for a while, but we have no idea how long that is, because life is uncertain.

The world ends every day.

Update.

So I will, contingent on passing my drug screen (no problem there), soon be a part-time employee of a certain Big Orange Sign Hardware Store. It'll be close to the New Place, and doesn't interfere with my job at the Good Barn.

I'm doing more Seven Spheres rites again, and getting new and different things this time. Tonight's Rite was to Jupiter, who's about building your own Kingdom on earth. While I was meditating on his seal (the astrological sign), I started imagining living in the New Place - where we'll put our bed, what it'll look like in the kitchen, all that. And as I was chastising myself for daydreaming when I should be meditating, I heard a Voice:

You are not daydreaming. You are imagining. Do you think the ruler of a Kingdom doesn't have to imagine their Kingdom?Without imagining the future Kingdom, all you're doing is reacting, not acting.

Duly noted. I'll be thinking of that this weekend during the final tearing-down. And being grateful for this new job and the financial relief it will bring.

...And The Thunder Sounded, And The Lightning Flashed.

This is going to be a lot more poetic and a lot less linear than usual (to say nothing of NR 17 graphic). Make of it what you will.

Tonight, in bed with the Husband. Something more than just sex, my Beloved, and I hope you won't mind me letting the whole world into our Sacred Chamber, the Bridal Bed. The incense and "Wake Wood" and the strain and the sweat and the joy. The thunder sounded with us, the lightning flashed when I opened my eyes.

I christened us both, after. And brought you water. And came out here, in the sudden cool and the damp, knowing. Knowing this was one of the instructions I'd left myself as to how to come back. It was just really good sex, some would say. I'm uncomfortable with reading this, others are thinking. That doesn't matter. What matters is that I've started to dig myself out of the grave, started to climb the cold stone stairs out of Ereshkigal's abattoir. And if I leave glowing footsteps painted in love, so much the better.

A friend of mine left a comment on that last entry, about how things now made sense that hadn't before. And I heard April, at least eight years ago, telling me things I didn't want to hear about Things I'm Supposed To Be Doing. The Gods help me and you, my friends and readers, because now I see. I've long joked about not being a good example, but a cautionary tale, but I think the time for that bit of levity has passed.

I have heard The Voice. I have spoken with The Dead. I have risen from my own ashes, blessed in love. It isn't egotism when I say that I know, now, that there are people waiting to hear what I have to say, that what I have to say is meaningful in ways I can't even begin to imagine. I have no idea what words of mine reach someone, what instructions were left with me for someone else to hear.

These are only the first steps; I don't kid myself by thinking that now everything will be ecstasy and moonlight. But I am reborn, resurrected, returned. And I will whisper to you in the dark until you're off your own hook and climb the last of those stairs to meet me in the light again, the two of us blinking in the light of the Divine.

Nothing's Normal When You're Dead, Part 2.

Obviously, I am not dead in the literal sense. I do not plan to eat foxglove or smear myself with a ton of mandrake or fast for a really long time or anything that could actually cause death. Driving on I-45 is bad enough, thanks.

The fine line between the literal and the figurative/poetic in magic is just that - fine. Am I literally dead? Of course not. But figuratively? Well, four months or so ago, I was married to someone I thought I knew and thought I'd spend the rest of my life with. I thought I had a home. I thought I had some sense of security.

I have none of that, now.

I was willing to do things I am no longer willing to do. I was willing to tolerate things I will no longer tolerate. I was someone who I am not, now. So am I figuratively dead? Yes. But it's a little deeper than that.

I've been drawn to the story of Inanna's descent into the Underworld and her time there with her sister, Ereshkigal, for years. So when I say I'm dead, I mean that you can't go through life changes like the ones I've been experiencing for the past year or so and think you'll ever come out as the same person as you were before. I mean that my old self, the person I've been for years, is hanging on a meathook, divested of her jewels and powers, waiting for the things that will bring her back to life.

I don't mean that I'm going to hang here until someone rescues me. Inanna gave instructions about what should be done to bring her back, and I trust that I told myself how to come back. I also trust that, as with Inanna, some of these instructions won't be carried out, but other things will happen to take me off the meathook.

In keeping with the recent trend of my receiving messages from people who didn't intend to speak to me directly, some of you may be Father Enki, and have some message that's important for me now. Don't be afraid to share.

Nothing's Normal When You're Dead.

It's been a rough four-and-a-half months or so. And things just got rougher.

The Husband is rebuilding an old workshop on his grandmother's land into a home for us, though we've run into a major snag - our friend, J, just broke up with his wife in a fairly spectacular manner, and so will be leaving the state and taking his wealth of rebuilding knowledge with him.

This led to another round of "WHY IS THE UNIVERSE RAINING FIERY DIARRHEA ON MY HEAD" on my part,  which in turn led to me shooting a message to a friend who's a professional psychic about things going Wrong for a while now, and what I'm doing/not doing that may be causing this. Psychic friend's answer was that, off-the-cuff, his opinion is that the Wrong is due to a "deep blow to your self-esteem causing an almost self-induced self-punishment".

I talked to a newly-witchy friend about Psychic Friend's quick answer. "Is he saying you're doing this to yourself?" she asked. Yes and no, I told her. It's not that NewAge thing of "you're poor and suffering from AIDS in some impoverished nation because you didn't think hard enough about being the next Nobel Prize winner" crap. It's more like I'm attracting Icky Stuff the same way a person with chronic low self-esteem attracts partners who aren't generally very good for them, or how if you already have a cold, it's a bad idea to hang out with people who are sicker than you are, and -

I realized that I may not have taken proper steps to get the Bad Woo of my previous situation off of me. I also realized that I am an idiot for not realizing this sooner.

Whilst brooding over this, I went and read R.O.'s blog. He talked about a message he got about being reborn from the bones up, how "you have died, and are being remade". I thought about how I've been telling the Husband that Samhain wasn't "normal" this year, how Faire wasn't "normal" this year, and how I need something to be "normal" pretty damn soon. I thought about how I spent a good chunk of Saturday night relaying messages from a dear friend's dead mother, something I've never done before. I thought about the whole lot of it together, thought maybe I ought to celebrate Saturnalia this year, then pondered R.O.'s cautionary bits about Saturn energy being very, very dark and how Saturnalia looks like a comparatively lighthearted holiday.

As I was about to pester R.O. with this apparent paradox, Something or Someone said, "Nothing's normal when you're dead, girl."

I'm dead. This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable explanation. Nothing's been normal, I haven't been at the top of my game, it's been one-step-forward-two-steps-back for months because I'm dead. People have been saying things that have been really meaningful to me even though they didn't have me in mind at all when they said them because I am being called back, called forth.

I've been looking for answers. I got them. So now it's time to put the pennies over my own eyes, to wind myself in my own shroud, to say goodbye to myself. To send myself off with the proper rites.

Then it'll be time to rise, new as the sun at dawn.

Update.

In the midst of trying to get a lesson scheduled today (she turned out to be a sweet grandmotherly lady who loves horses), the Good Barn Owner told me she's already bumping up my pay per lesson to only $5 less than I was making at the Bad Barn.

It's still not enough to keep me from having to take a day job, but it's something. It's something, the Gods be praised and thanked.

Wherein The Dropout Dilettante Hits A Little Close To Home With Her Last Post.

As you may well know, I love Deb, the Dropout Dilettante, at Charmed, I'm Sure. In her most recent post, her Muse says the following: 

"How could you possibly think that you would be okay dropping dead in your cubicle with nothing accomplished, nothing finished? How could you ever think that you would be okay living your life in a cubicle again? And still you try. You apply to jobs promising safety, promising health, promising security...Security is the whore in you that never lets you fly. You're so close. You're so close. Don't give up on me yet. Don't give up on us yet."

This hits a little closer to home than I'd like. It's what I've been thinking about most of the time.

I lost my marriage, my pets, my home, and any sense of security. I lost a great set of in-laws. I lost the future I thought I'd have with the man I thought I knew. But in the wreckage of all, that, I got the job at the Good Barn.

For strictly financial reasons, I may have to give that up.

When I told the Husband that I was going to a staffing agency, he made a face and said, I wish you wouldn't go looking for a day job just yet. Can you work forty hours a week and then teach until seven or eight at night?

Watch me. Watch me do it because I need this. When I worked forty hours a week and then went to the barn and rode almost every night, I was happy - and, given the amount of time I've had to think about things since The Disaster, I've realized that I haven't been happy since.

Twelve years is a long time to be unhappy.

When I got the job at the Good Barn, I thought it was a sign that things were turning around. Now, while I know that most of us whose talents are a bit off the beaten path usually have to have day jobs, I do not for the life of me understand why the Universe would grant me my heart's desire - teaching at the Good Barn - and then make me give it up. 

This has been a trend since The Disaster; if I want something, I'm almost assured that it'll look like I'm going to get it, only to have it pulled away at the last second. It's made me afraid to want. It's made me afraid to dream. At the same time, I'm afraid not to, because the things that make me who and what I am aren't going to go away. Insurance and a 401K aren't going to make my heart sing; guaranteed hours and paid holidays don't make me feel like I'm doing what I was meant to do. At the same time, Uncle Aleister never said that doing your True Will would pay the bills, did he?

So I burn candles, I sprinkle incense, I wear a charm in my sports bra. And every day, I pray - please, let me have this.