Plans, Commitments, and Manifesting
The view from Lookout Mountain in Colorado.
Please excuse us while we interrupt our usually linear style of storytelling to bring you into the present (I’ll backtrack later)...
You don’t mind, all of three people who read this blog, do you?
Great. Thank you for tolerating me, my sweets. You are all gems and I appreciate you.
I’m in Colorado currently. I don’t like Colorado. We have history. I’ve been here since Sunday. The first couple mornings after I arrived I basically woke up, cried for an hour, and paced around my sister’s empty house until I felt like I could focus. I’m scared and I’ve just been trying to release all the fear and tension from my body. I can feel myself trying to resist everything around me, so again and again, I’ve had to coax my internal forces: Don’t raise the shields, darlings. I have this. Trust me. The best thing to do is to let the energy pass through us. Attempt to block it, and it’ll get stuck within. Block nothing. Our love and our strength is greater than whatever this is. Let it pass. Just let go.
Plans (and Stuff)
I’m in Colorado on a mission. In a few days, on May 15th (the full moon), I’ll go into seclusion where I will remain until the 30th (new moon). I will be fasting every other day, consuming/journeying with plants including poisonous nightshades (these are specially prepared by a trained herbalist and not a threat to my mortality), meditating, doing lots of shadow work and ritual. On the days when I consume food I will be mostly limited to eating white rice and apples. I won’t have any contact with the outside world (no social media, email, blogging, etc.) except with my foster sister who has agreed to call me every few days to check on me. It will just be me, my trailer, the woods I’ll be camped in, the plants, and the work I’m there to do.
I’m going to attempt to heal my narcolepsy. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen during my seclusion. I don’t know exactly who I’ll be when I come out of it. All I do know is that one way or another, I will emerge from this experience altered. It’s like I’m staring down the barrel of a small death (metaphysically speaking). I have to give away all sense of control and put all my faith in the divine, which scares the shit out of me. No matter how hard I work on it (and I do), I still really like having the illusion of control.
The people who engage in the kind of work I’m about to do are usually shamans or healers who are very skilled at visiting other realms and states of consciousness. If they travel outside of their bodies they know how to get back in. By comparison, I am underqualified, and that’s why this is all a bit frightening. I’ve been a witch for the better part of two decades, but I am not a trained shaman. I’m afraid of what will happen if some part of my consciousness gets stuck outside of my body. It might sound crazy to some, but anyone who has spent time studying mysticism (or even advanced meditation) is familiar with these risks.
I don’t want to lose me--not now, not when I’ve finally figured out how to love myself. The version of myself that I am currently inhabiting is the best of my adult selves. I’ve fought hard to get here. It took 7 years for me to build this self--the progress of the first 5 years were very slow, whereas the last two have rapidly snowballed. Still, deep down, below the fear, I believe that the process I’m about to engage is supposed to happen--that it will only further strengthen and uplift me, that it’s needed to happen for a very long time and in fact, that maybe that all the things I’ve experienced as blocks, have occurred because without this initiation I could not move forward. Whether or not I come out of this experience fully healed from narcolepsy, I do expect great things to occur.
I’ll be doing all of this just outside the town I was living when I first became sick. It’s a small town. When I was living there (over twenty years ago) it had a population of about 4000 people and 7 churches... I was the only non-Christian (not exaggerating) in a middle school full of conservative evangelicals. At 12 years old I was already very politically conversant (I wrote my first petition at 12 and circulated it around the aforementioned middle school) and more progressive than either of my parents. I had my own thoughts and opinions about everything and a limited ability to keep my mouth shut, particularly around anything that seemed unjust to me. Naturally, these things did not bode well in the environment I was living in.
When my family moved back to California after only a year and a half in Colorado it was in part because my mom was worried she’d lose me if we stayed. By then I was sick (but still undiagnosed) and my mom felt like she was watching me sink. Children who were less stubborn and perhaps more sensible would have learned to conform, but I didn’t. I thought most of the people who surrounded me were hateful, ignorant, and bigotted, and I wasn’t willing to ingest what I perceived as their poison. In Colorado I learned how to be disliked and ostracized. Brightside? I also learned just how strong my convictions are. I can withstand just about any alienation as long as I still have my integrity.
It’s no surprise to me that I became ill with narcolepsy while in Colorado. For me narcolepsy is an off switch, a way out, and a barrier that exists between me and other people. It’s also something to rail against, to conquer, to fight... And the thing is I don’t want to fight myself anymore. I no longer want to hold barriers between myself and other people. I’m not trying to heal my narcolepsy because I think that having it means that I am broken or somehow not enough. I’m already enough. I want to heal it because I don’t need it anymore. I don’t need it to protect me from experiencing my life fully. I want to heal it because I can accomplish more without it and I want to show other people what is possible. If I can heal, anyone can.
Perhaps this is a good time to clarify: I do not believe that those of us who are sick choose to be so. I would never have chosen to become narcoleptic. Narcolepsy is a crappy, exhausting, frustrating disease. I’ve spent most of my life feeling like my body betrayed me by getting sick. However, I do not believe that illness is a punishment. I also don’t believe that illness is any way the fault of those of us who get sick. I think we become sick because we are wounded. We are physical beings and many of us have been taught to suppress our emotional and spiritual woundings, to pretend that they don’t matter... But they do, and our bodies are the keepers of our primal intelligence; they know better. I believe that diseases that are non-environmental in nature (getting lung cancer from working in a coal mine would obviously be different) exist more often than not, because our bodies are trying to communicate to us in the only way they know how that we need tending to--that something inside of us needs healing.
Commitments
When I emerge from my time in seclusion, May will essentially be over. I plan to spend the first week of June in Colorado hanging out with family and decompressing. There’s a bunch of possibilities that have been thrown my way for the month of June, but the only thing I’m committed to is that at some point I have to go back to Sacramento to move my stuff out of my best friend’s attic and into storage.
I suspect that June will be when I finally start making plans to fulfill the promise I made when I committed to my current lifestyle. When I decided to uproot myself last year, sell off most of my things, and start traveling full-time it was because I had a vision. My last few years in Oakland, I felt devoid of any real purpose. Every year on my birthday I prayed to my Goddess for guidance. In 2021 I received an answer: I was told to go on the road and teach plant spirit communication. I saw myself touring North America and teaching in community centers and churches in cities and small towns to anyone who wanted to learn.
There are people already teaching plant spirit communication, but they’re teaching it to people like me--people who are ecologically and spiritually inclined, people who want to be herbalists... People who are willing to pay for it. I want to teach everyone to communicate with plants, and I don’t want to make money off it (I have other means); I want to give it away. I want to take this skill to people who have never heard of it.
People need to know that Earth and all of her creatures are sentient. That we have an abundance of love and healing at our fingertips. We need to start relating to Earth as the mother who loves and nurtures us, who is deserving of our reverence and our care. It’s the only way we’ll ever stop seeing our beautiful planet as a commodity -- the only way we’ll stop trashing and abusing her. It may seem like a strange way to go about it, but this is a large part of how I personally plan to fight climate change -- I want to help us heal our relationship to Earth.
There are obviously more immediate climate change efforts, but that’s not what I personally have to offer. As it is, I am confident that other brilliant minds who are more equipped to make such efforts happen, will. My work is to sustain those efforts by changing our relationship to Earth, by teaching people to value her, fight for her/ourselves, to remember how to live here and be a helpful/healthful part of our ecosystem.
Manifesting
Since the very beginning of my nomadic journey, I have wanted a partner to come with me on the road. I travel quite well by myself, but all of the wonder and magic I experience would be infinitely more fulfilling if it was shared. My initiation in the woods will mark a new beginning in my travels, and I’d like that beginning to include my person. I want my warrior king (I tend to think in archetypes) — someone strong, sensitive (even if he hides it), intuitive, intrinsically powerful, and passionate — at my side.
All I ask is that this person come to me alone and unattached. I have been pursued by men with girlfriends, fiancees, and wives before, and it’s very uncomfortable for me. If I am prepared to jump into something with both feet, I need the person I jump with to do so with both feet as well. If he still has one foot in a past/present that includes someone else, I won’t be able to trust that his true intention is a future with me. I have so much love and affection to give; I don’t want anything to get in the way of that.
Perhaps I’ll be lucky and my would-be partner will simply fall out of the sky and land in Colorado or California to meet me, or perhaps he will be a connection I make through Tinder. I don’t know what will happen. All I can do is keep myself open and receptive and see what comes to me. So that’s what I’m manifesting--a wonderful, loving, supportive, adventurous partner who can deal with all of my weird witchery, wants to travel with me, grow with me, and thinks he might enjoy being adored by me.
Anyway, so mote it be, loves 🌟