October 26, 2002

• Metaphysics and me–1973 version

  Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

  Since 1969, I had been studying metaphysics, meditating, practicing spellcraft and ceremonial magick.  My metaphysical experience started with I Ching, the Chinese oracle, and I had become adept at reading Tarot cards.  I was also using astrology for social engineering as well as for its predictive aspects.  My friends had started calling me “psychic”, but I have always preferred the title, “oracle”.  But that’s semantics, and this is metaphysics.  I was channeling Spirit, going within, listening to the wind in the trees and the babbling brook, and looking at the pictures in clouds, tea leaves and candle flames.  I didn’t yet have a crystal ball, though, and for some reason every time I entered a room where others were using a Ouija board, the thing quit working.  This was during the same period of time that Stony and I found three Ouija boards in dumpsters and in a house we moved into.  It made me intensely curious about the boards, and sent a little frisson up my spine.

  Planetary transits, the angular relationships formed between the points of longitude of planets at ones birth and the realtime longitudes of the planets at any given time, were giving me some general ideas what to expect.  Besides having read what published astrologers had to say about how to interpret aspects, I did some research myself.  I looked at aspect maps for certain critical times of my life and observed the patterns.  Then I looked at planetary progressions and transits for a year or so ahead.  In 1973, my first Saturn return was coming up:  the ringed planet had made one full orbit since my birth and would soon be within orb of conjunction with my natal Saturn.

  Saturn relates to institutions, establishment, and restriction.  Its orbital relationships mark life’s passages:  puberty, midlife, maturity.  During the time Saturn was within orb of conjunction of my natal Saturn that time, it went through a retrograde cycle, making three exact conjunctions in succession before moving on through the crowd of other planets in a heavily populated part of my chart.  I could see that interesting times were coming and I had a theoretical grasp of what it might bring:  growing up, settling down… and what else?  I wanted to know more, so I asked the oracles. 

  It was my practice to seek spiritual guidance in crises.  Every time I had a tough decision such as whether to stay or go, or which way to go, I asked the oracles, I talked to God, I looked for signs in dreams, and I sought visions.  Alaska was always the way to go, but Colorado first.  That was the oracle’s advice at one of the forks in our road.  Many times in those early years of my access to Spirit I had disregarded the oracular guidance and many times I had acted on habit, logic, fear, cultural programming or other motives without seeking guidance.  Being guided to Alaska was like being ordered to have a good time.  Body, heart, mind, soul and spirit–I totally wanted to be in Alaska.  And I loved it here from day one.

  My oracles were telling me that my love life was in transition.  The relationship with Stony was ending.  It was in my best interests to disengage from him.  But he “needed” me, and I was programmed to need to be needed.  My mother said the way to achieve security was to make myself indispensible to someone.  With my Virgo bias toward service and attention to detail, and my intuitive grasp of people’s feelings and drives, I was good at pleasing.  One of the men who loved and hated me said I was hard to let go and impossible to hang onto.  He was one of the smart ones.  I drove a few men to distraction in my youth, while my sociocultural programming was in conflict with my heart and soul.  It wasn’t exactly a picnic for me, either.  These are the issues that were coming to a head then, like a gross inflamed boil ready to pop.  It just needed the proper pressure….

  When Stony and I showed up on Mary’s doorstep, she greeted me with a wry look and some mock scolding in her voice, “What took you so long?”  I had been told in Seattle that when my household items arrived in Anchorage, they would be warehoused until I came for them.  I was told where to pick them up, the Sea-Land warehouse.  I’d given my address as “in care of Mary….” with her address, and Sea-Land had delivered an ironing board and five cardboard cartons, addressed to me.  So, she had good reason to suspect that I would be following soon after.

  Mary had told Jill, another close friend from OWCC, on the phone, and Jill would be flying up for a week’s visit.  Donna, yet another prison sister, was already in Anchorage, working, back in the Life that had taken her to prison in the first place.  Same old shit, another town.  The four of us there in Mary’s living room, remembering the women we’d known, naming names, writing down lists, just so we wouldn’t forget anyone, was a moment of bonding that cast the entire prison experience in a softer light.  Mary’s little boy, Che, born in the Oregon State Hospital during his mother’s sentence and kept by foster parents who brought him to visit her each week, was running around, a noisy toddler.  Stony was off in another part of the house, out of sight.

  He had been getting into things, looking in drawers and shelves, snooping and pilfering.  It was a perennial issue between us.  He was a klepto, a greedy kid who saw what he wanted and took it.  That was at odds with my “ethical theft” indoctrination.  To him it was all simply breaking the rules, while I was operating under a different set of rules.  I’d never steal from a friend, or from anyone who had less than I had or who would really miss what I took. 

  I had been taught to take from corporations with security systems and shrinkage insurance, and to use what I took to support the underground economy.  I had asked the oracles, and had received confirmation that this system was just, more just than the prevailing system in the military-industrial complex, and wouldn’t hurt my karma.  I questioned this concept of the Flow, and received from the oracles confirmation that as long as I gave of my time and talents, seeking to help and not harm, I was okay in taking what I needed.  In practice, it boiled down to buying hamburger when we had a little bit of money, and stealing steak when we were broke and hungry.  I guess that was just a shade too complicated for Stony.

  Jill saw Stony opening cupboards, and Mary discovered some of her private things disturbed.  It was an unpleasant scene.  Mary wanted us out of there ASAP, or at the very least, she wanted him out of there.  We couldn’t stay long, anyway, because she lived in subsidized housing with strict regulations regarding tenants and guests.  I had been trusting the Universe and living in the Flow for a couple of years, since my freight yard epiphany [a story that concludes here], so I wasn’t surprised when a “lucky break” turned up.  At that time, I still tended to worry a bit when I felt hunger or homelessness breathing down my neck, but I was getting validation of the Flow all the time.

  Stony ran into one of the Boulder radicals, Bear of the STP family, the firebrand who threw bottles at police cars and preached violent revolution.  He was in Anchorage, along with several other people we knew, because of the pipeline, seeing it as a likely nexus for some interesting mischief.  Through Bear, Stony got someone to front him enough illicit stuff of one kind or another to sell and have enough profit to pay our first week’s rent.  And after that week was up, we’d be set, because I had found a job.

  On my second day in Anchorage, first full day there, Mary had told me that the free clinic just across the street from her place was looking for peer counselors, people to answer the crisis hotline and do intake and referral for social services.  I walked over there and got my name on the list to be interviewed at the next staff meeting, two days later.

  To be continued….

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  • 12:26 pm
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