Twelve Years

Sitting in the car, cranking the engine for Warren yesterday evening, during a break in the hectic thunderstorms and bucketing rain we've had this weekend, I was looking out at the graceful fall of the trumpet vine curtaining the carport, and feeling myself almost yearning to slip away into a dream.

These liminal spaces have been calling me lately: the rain seems always to do that. Recently - over the last month or so - I've been feeling myself slide gently back into a place I started to occupy years ago. A place of less anger and more simple enjoyment; a place, if you will, which seems to be signified by the Tarot card Ten of Pentacles.

But I wasn't too happy with the underlying urge to run away into the mystic. This, it seems to me, was too similar by far to that state in which I very nearly died, twelve years ago.

Thinking about this urge for flight and the fact that twelve years have passed since I received my Dismemberment in what has got to be the most horrific episode of my life ( and thinking, too, on the significance of the number twelve, a powerful counting which has come down to us in the way we measure time) I was faintly surprised at the swift passage of those years. And I thought- well, what former state am I trying to recapture, albeit almost subconsciously, with my attraction to fugue? For certainly there have been no periods in my past in which I was quite as happy, quite as frequently blissful, or quite as aware of my awakening to my own divinity as this one.
I would not swap a single moment of my past for the gnosis-with all its attendant pain- that has been developing in me these past dozen revolutions of the sun.

I know that some of my steps have been wrong ones, just as others have been correct. I know that I will only get to travel this path through error and correction, always.So, I am about to take to my altar, this morning in a fresh state of openness to the knowledge that Spirit passes through me and through all the living World, there to ask, humbly if I can, in which direction I should set my face for the coming twelve years.