Troy-Albany Trance-Formations

So I have to say I’m quite grateful to be at work these days.  It gives me something to do, and I’ve been able to connect with people about my loss.  I sense that Kitzel’s passing has a lot more meaning for me than meets the eye, given the state of this stranger and stranger virtual world that has our minds by the short-hairs.

The days of forcefully putting one’s viewpoint over on others is fast approaching its belated close.  I’m sure that there will always be the windigos among us, those crazy individuals who think that they can just take and take and take, and get others to do their bidding for them.  Until people reach their tolerance point and say “you do it yourself” en masse and shrug their shoulders.  Funny.  When I was a little kid, two years old, my dad asked me to get him a piece of the newspaper, and I was involved in blocks or something and I evidently said “Get it yourself,” and he just went apeshit and whaled on me.  Dad, the hard-drinker that he was, may have been in an alkie state at that time, but I was always troubled at my mother’s smiling while she told that story.  As if to say, “See?  You got yours.  Ha ha.”

At some point though, the water-carriers’ backs break.  Our collective pain brings us to our knees, and while the insanity-meisters would like to think that’s the point where “Aha, they’ve got us,” it’s really the moment that Goddess/God enters the picture.  “I can’t do this anymore.  God can, I think I’ll let God.”  The insanity-meisters, the windigos, forget that people can make this move the energy in ways more beneficial to us.  They HATE that.  They don’t want ANYONE to get any benefit.  Least of all themselves, really. 

The terror on these people’s faces does amuse on some level, some schadenfreude is being had.  Do I feel prepared for whatever’s coming?  Not in the least.  I just know that somehow I’m protected, but that doesn’t make this any easier.  Protection and healing have not really implied ease for me–I’ve had to and continue to do things that were/are asked of me.  Part of me may struggle with certain requests, like the body’s request to please stop eating sugar and flour.  Some things were voluntary on my part–it was relatively easy for me to give up booze in retrospect, and working on my codependent relationships goes through times of relative ease, and other times of amazing discomfort. 

Rhythms run through my life.  Grief seems to be like a black sun, perhaps that nigredo phase of alchemical transformation.  I’ve been aware that many things are falling away and quite a bit of this dross is stuff I have been actively praying.  I have been actively praying collapse, and I do so because I am aware that we have been in a terminal phase for quite a while.  Will our “social death” for lack of a better term be like every other garden variety death, or will it be like the phoenix, where we must-needs die for us to be reborn from the ashes?  We pagans believe in the phoenix notion of life and death for everyone, not just the mythic creatures.

I know that Kitzel is returning.  The thought crosses my mind that perhaps this new cat that’s entering into my awareness might be a reincarnation of one of the dogs I grew up with.  I’m thinking Sir, who, rather than putting up with nonsense, ran away from my druggie cousin in 1983 when my family declared bankruptcy and had to move out of the house I spent my miserable adolescent years and intellectually-blossoming high school years in Littleton, CO before it all got fasci-fied, and in that process had to put down our older dog Larsie (who was not doing well at the end anyway–half blind and body slowly being eaten away by tumors), and give up Sir. 

I never really got to grieve my ancestral pets, the doggies I grew up with.  They’re all in the summerlands and they eagerly await my transition, I’m sure.  Though they want me to live the fullest life I can as well. And Samson/Sir will probably capture my attention in a spunky and showy way, just like the old woofers did.  Kitzel was really more like Larsie in many ways.  Beloved Kitzel-kitz.

I sense that this grief prepares me for wider grieving to come.  And work as a death-priest–meaning that I will probably help others transition out of this life and into whatever comes next–will most likely be a large part of my Work.  As well as giving comfort and solace to the grieving, even as I will need to seek solace like I’m doing now.  And so it begins, gracefully enough with (Oh, GRACE!) the death of my cat.  But there’s that tenderness that Jane Siberry and Padgett Powell refer to in “Calling All Angels” and “Texas” respectively. 

All this reminds me of the tenderness of our lives and the paradox of fragility and resilience the reside side by side.  Oh, please Goddess, heal whatever rigidity and brittleness that may afflict me.

So mote it be!