Dislocation: Earthquake, Eclipse, a month of the flu
In this post: A pile of things that feel related to one another, having to do with eclipses and emergence and the importance of walking toward darkness
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“It will be right over our heads.”
“What matters is we’ll be together.”.
”It’s the end of the world as we know it.”
”Totality,” a girl’s voice calls from the radio.
This week, where I live—on the edge between New York and New Jersey - we had a little earthquake. Though people all over the east coast felt it, we at the Luxury Nail Salon in Woodcliff Lake did not. Our feet were soaking in olive scented water. Our hands shrouded in warm wax mittens. “Somebody Feed Phil” was playing on the enormous TV screen on the opposite wall. Phil was eating waffles (I think) when “Oh my god!” the woman at the pedicure station beside me gasped. “We’ve had an earthquake!”
The TV screens reset from morning talk shows to Breaking News! Cell phones began to ping all over the salon. My sister in California. My son. Did you feel it? Are you okay?
Ultimately, the earthquake was, according to my other sister, “A big nothing burger.” She lives in Brooklyn. They, too, didn’t notice it.
Then, a few days later, there was an eclipse.
In Burlington, Vermont, where my son lives, every hotel was booked weeks in advance. “All the AirBnBs too! It will be right over our heads.”
Unable to get a room, my acupuncturist decided to drive up anyway, leaving at 5:00, the morning of. “We’ll have our adventure,” she said. Even if they had to view the whole thing from the car. “What matters is we’ll be together.”
I’ve never seen a full eclipse. Only two partials (and even those I didn’t actually see. During this one, I was on Zoom, talking with my therapist. The room went dark around me. We kept talking. The light came back.
In my first partial eclipse, August, 2017, I was in Los Angeles. It was six months after my mother died and, desperate to see my daughter, I’d gotten in the car and drove to her — from New York.
It had been more than a year since I’d seen her. I’d never seen the apartment that she’d found - all on her own - and which she shared with two women I’d never met. I couldn’t ‘see’, in my mind’s eye, the neighborhoods she haunted, the coffee place where she wrote and talked to friends.
I wanted to get there and absorb her new life into my skin. I wanted to hold her and smell her and feel the heat of her skin. Maybe then, I could return home with a sense of where she was. Maybe then, I wouldn’t feel so dislocated by her absence.
So I got into my mother’s blue Hyundai - part one of my inheritance - and I started driving. I was going because I needed to touch my daughter. It was my mother who’d died. It was my daughter for whom I was grieving.
I needed to travel - to see as many places as I could, one after another as the land opened beneath my wheels. I’d spent years flying over things. I wanted to be down on the ground, getting caught in the rain, figuring out where to eat, using the scrappy ingenuity I’d inherited from my mother. I wanted to watch the scenery change. I wanted to live.
Also, I felt deeply disturbed. It was the first summer of Donald Trump’s presence in the White House and in the months since his election, I’d found myself tracking his movements the way a bunny tracks a predator. I felt small and vulnerable. Body tense. Braced for trouble. My mother was dead. The country was being handed, peacefully, into the control of a lunatic. I needed to change the subject in my brain. Burnt out from teaching, from helping my mother die, from living in an empty nest after so many years of living in a nest that was so full.
I drove because I’d changed. I’d been working with the Soul Caller teachings for seven years. This had made me into a different person but she hadn’t been road tested yet. Could she come out from behind the desk? Out into the real world. What would she do if challenged by a flat tire, a crabby hotel clerk, a medical emergency? Could she, could I, stay whole?
I drove through cities trying to rebuild after the factories closed, towns made of malls and fast food restaurants. I ate at truck stops, photographed windmills, got lost in acres of cornfields. In Indiana, (Hi Andrea! Becky! Jan!) Chicago (Hi Linda! Hi Kathy!), Nebraska (Hello, sweet Dana) and in Denver (Hi Claire!) I sat with clients and students who’d become dear friends via Zoom screens. I hugged my cousin in a hotel parking lot. (Hi Laura!) and rekindled an precious friendship (Hi Christine!)
Ten days in, as the sun set, I approached Denver, watching lightning bolts crackle at both dies of the highway. “You’ll be okay. You can do this.” my husband’s voice on speakerphone.
I came to the check in desk and, when asked my name, replied in a mashup of words that brought the manager running. “Sit here. Breathe through your nose. Drink this water.” Altitude sickness is real.
On my 60th birthday, I purchased an angel with a broken wing in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I had stopped there - in the small town of TK - because I was afraid. I had never seen anything so terrifying as those mountains. They were so much bigger than I expected and there were so many of them, they dwarfed everything I knew.
I thought about turning back but I didn’t. I had been brave before: When my son was born and again when my daughter was born. I could be brave again.
I got back in the car, entered the Rockies. After that, everything changed. The land took me up. The land took me down. I gasped at at the steep slope pitched upwards. I gasped at the canyons. Nothing I knew about land applied here. The trees were taller. The sky was bluer and wider and seemed much higher. The was more room here. The scale of my body changed. I felt incredibly small while, at the same time, weirdly big.
The soil changed from brown to red.
The hillsides were striped in blue and green and gold.
This can’t be real - I kept thinking while knowing at the same time that it was.
I saw the great Colorado River, drove through Navajo territory. I climbed off the trail at the Grand Canyon and slid down to a perch where I sat on the ground for almost an hour. I didn’t take photos. I didn’t call anyone. I just sat there, awestruck and let the land ring through me. Then, I got up and started driving to Sedona.
Standing atop the vortex at Bell Rock, earth energy snaking up my calves.
I drove to Phoenix, made a west turn and straight to LA.
And then, there she was. My girl. In my arms, on the other side of the world.
She smelled, as she always has, of honey and salt and beeswax. She looked, as she always has, beautiful. Stunning, really - but older now. Stronger. Sun-kissed and stable. My whole body relaxed.
Then, three days later, I was standing on the sidewalk in Los Feliz, watching my daughter walk toward me when the light turned eerie.
A man came running out of the cafe. “Don’t look directly at it,” he warned, handing me a pair of cardboard viewing glasses. As I reached for them, the special lenses caught the light, projecting dozens of tiny moons across the sidewalk. I never did look up at the sky.
According to astrologer Lorna Bevan, the effects of a total solar eclipse last much longer than the actual event. “The geo-physical shock window’ . . . extends a week before and a week after. You will feel a pronounced ripple in the local system's space-time continuum … affecting your physical, nervous and somatic body. It has the potential to disrupt the Earth’s crust.”
In 2017, the “pronounced ripple” started with the presidential election. It started with my mother’s death. This time, it probably started with the flu.
My husband had it first and he had it worse. Steroids (for the cough) and antibiotics for the pneumonia. For me, it was a few days of fever and sleeping. Then, once again, dislocation.
I spent a month floating through dreams, being sung to by mermaid healers.
I dreamed of trains leaving without me. A house full of sisters. A friend looked right through me. Am I transparent? I wondered.
It was deep and long and even now, one symptom lingers. The energy of my voice was weakened - not laryngitis, not infection. Just this . . . softening.
I could speak but after just five or ten minutes, my voice would ask me to stop now.
I felt pressure in my upper chest, my throat felt tired as if it wanted silence. This affected my writing (also a voice). Though I was writing every day - long explorations, new pathways of discovery — I didn’t want to . . . I couldn’t publish any of it. If I tried, composing a blog post or essay, the part of me that writes (let’s call it “my writer”) would just . . . leave. Hush, She’d tell me as she slipped through the door.
Quiet now.
It was the strangest thing. It’s happened all the way through this essay. A resistance to rushing to conclusion. A refusal to make meaning until meaning that matters appears.
And meaning that matters, it seems, only appears when I wait and watch, attentive and present, listening.
Eventually, words come but only when I am very quiet inside.
Last week, on the day of the earthquake, I read the astrology report out loud while Lubia painted my fingernails in #16 color gel. (Writing this essay, in a moment of curiosity, I looked up the name of gel color #16. Bare my Soul. I kid you not.)
“This is is crazy,” Lubia said and we laughed.
”It is,” I agreed.
But it’s not crazy - not really.
When a mother dies, when the ground rumbles, when the moon erases the sun - even for a moment - we feel vulnerable. Shaken, stripped of the stability we depended on, our sense of security falls away. Yet the truth is - we were never in control.
All that’s fallen away is the illusion.
Look - a single tidal wave can sweep our structures to the sea. One forest fire and the home that we thought we owned is ash. A diagnosis. A death. A door flies off a plane.
This is bigger than our preferences, our plans, our dreams. We are part of something huge, which is terrifying - and weirdly, in the deeper dream layers of awareness, profoundly reassuring. Liberating. It offers us choices we do not have when we lend our trust to instituions, to systems, to presidents.
Sometimes, losing everything is a portal. An eclipse. Sometimes, even without that door, the plane stays in the sky
When I try to name my favorite moment in my 40-day cross country journey, I always land here. I was driving home, a few days out of LA, in rural Colorado. On my cell phone, the NPR ONE app turned to Radio Lab. They were reporting on the recent eclipse, playing audio recordings of the moment when the moon crossed the sun. In my travel journal, I wrote:
As my car passes through fields of sunflowers, clouds of butterflies lift from the ground. My car is completely surrounded. I slow down. 10 MPH, 5 MPH. The butterflies seem to be accompanying me. My car passes between two ponds. “Totality!” a girl’s voice shouts from the radio.
I replayed that episode, more than once. Alone in the car. I was experiencing a totality all my own. The realization (every day) that I can handle what comes my way. The realization (every night) that even though I am one woman moving across the landscape in her mother’s blue Hyundai, I am not alone. The realization that even though most days I have no idea where I am or really where I’m headed, I am part of a totality that seems to … like me. That may even love me. The awestruck security of trusting that even when the voice on my GPS falls away for miles and miles, there is this other voice to guide me.
I was having a moment of congruence, where everything that has fallen falls into place. Realization. Aha. Crystal clarity. I was experiencing the simple awareness that I am never, ever alone.
Human beings are far more flock creatures than lone rangers. We are fields of consciousness organized into families, fan bases, football pools and poker clubs. We move inside our group identifications, our political movements, the rituals of our chosen faith like schools of fish, swimming in the water of mind stuff. Even as we are all of us floating through space, pulled by the planets, moved by the moon.
When we become aware of the totality of which we are actually a part, when we surrender to the true adventure of being alive, we come to the “great catastrophe” with wonder, with courage. For we are held in the amniotic atmosphere of this earth, this field of nature, this life-support system, this bubble of love.
One last story….
Yesterday, just before the quake, I was driving toward the nail salon dictating notes into my cell phone - threads of a new workshop about Constellated Readings — about going out into the world and opening to what is offering itself to our attention.
I turned off my phone and climbed out of the car. I had walked maybe ten steps when I spotted a piece of folded white paper on the ground. Curious, I picked it up. A package insert from a beauty product. The words Dewey Skin Cream below a tiny mandala, the very symbol that I wear on a chain around my neck. A gold-filled charm that my daughter bought for me with her first paycheck. The quartered circle. The symbol that represents the soul seed. The symbol that sits at the top of all my web pages.
Coincidence? Sure.
Message from an angel? Maybe.
Miracle? Who knows?
What matters is what it meant to me. Here’s a small touch to let you know that you matter. That we’re listening. And maybe even a little nudge about that Constellation workshop. Good one. Let’s get it out there.
Something IS in control. And it is listening to us. We can relax. We can let go. We can let ourselves be supported by love.
I’m excited to talk about these new workshops.
Excited to engage this complex (and infinitely debatable) notion: Are you saying that I am the center of the universe? Are you implying that the whole world revolves around me?
Well, what if I am?
What if it did?
We’ve known for centuries that we are influenced by cosmic forces. Solar flares. Astrology. God. I have a case to make about how WE (all of us) affect the totality.
Here are some questions to take into the eclipse today. Contemplate them in your journal. Roll them around in your mind as you drive through your day.
What if the world does revolve around you? What if my thoughts have an impact on what happens in the world? Think of the butterfly that lands on your sleeve. The impact of that. What if you, like a butterfly, have an impact when you land, when you show up?
Simply hold this notion as a possibility. Notice, does it change the way that you experience reality? Might this change the way you speak to your mother, your partner, your child? What if something so simple could be so fundamental to changing the world?
If the world is built around you, what might you have to be responsible for? How might you begin to change what you pay attention to, what you focus on, how you spend your days?
Take these questions to your journal. Take them into the eclipse, into your dreams. Take them on a walk. As I did. Out of that walk, this post made itself.
I am sending you all the love tonight. All the best blessings for this week.
May the eclipse be a portal opening before you.
May you step through it into another room, another world.
May you leave behind all that’s no longer needed.
May you open to what is offering itself to you.
xxoo
Amy
Here’s that footnote
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Welcome back, Amy. It is good to hear your voice!
Thank you, friend. My voice is feeling rusty but writing is (maybe) helping tone things up.