Where Did I Go? It
has been two years since I posted my last major
update, Completion. I have been largely absent on The Radical Virgo except
for quarterly Solstice and Equinox poems. This year, so far, I haven’t even
managed to do all of those …
… but for a good and still very surprising reason to me which I will soon reveal. What a story, even for an old storyteller like me. My absence has been for many good reasons. It
has taken time for me to deal with the death of my husband (June 2019) as well
as the exhaustion of caring for him, soon followed by eye surgery and
slower than usual healing curve (December 2019 – March 2020). No sooner was I
starting to get out of confinement to go places and do things when Covid hit. I
was grounded again.
What Next?
For those of you with a good dollop
of Virgo and/or other Earth signs in your chart (I’m Triple Earth), I’m sure
you know that the figurative version of being grounded is one of our best qualities,
a characteristic others often admire.
Grounding is what keeps life real and keeps us out of our
heads where we often get into trouble if we hang out there too long, what-iffing, ruminating and painting scary scenarios in the empty space of not
having answers.
While I was quarantined without much else to do, I
contemplated my next leg of life. Even with all that energy freed and after
many long weeks of racking my brain, I got nothing. Bupkis. I am visionary, yet
I just couldn’t see it. My inability to glimpse or even sense my future made me
wonder if I had one. Was I done and leaving planet soon? Joining Tim for
another mystical reunion?If You Need Information, Go to the Library.
In July 2020, a magical
guided meditation finally gave me a cosmic hint about what was next. I had almost
grasped the answer before but could not quite believe it was a realistic possibility. After
my husband passed, it was a natural impulse to want to travel home more often to
the Midwest—to spend time with my extended family, something I had been unable
to do for years as Tim’s caregiver.
During these trips, I started fantasizing about becoming bi-municipal
and having a condo in Chicagoland as well as my home in Rocklin. Surely I could
not consider living in Illinois full-time with the deep friendships and much
better weather I had in California, especially not after living there 48 years. I also had arthritis and aging to consider in my climate choices. Besides, how could
I leave the home Tim and I bought and shared together in a stand of ancient oaks, my tree house
of nature and nurture?
At the time I was doing live
meditations online with Andrew Johnson, a Scottish teacher I first encountered
through my meditation app, Insight Timer. He has a wonderful one called the
Library Meditation. (I recommend it and him highly.) Very condensed and
oversimplified version: You enter the library, put your stuff down, grab a book
and bring it to your spot. You sit down and look at the title. Mine read The Cusp of Everything. It blew me away.
I didn’t even open the imaginary book to see if there was any other message. Clearly I
was close. I almost had it.
The Answer
Within days my considerable intuition delivered. “Move
back to Chicago,” she said. I told her she was nuts. “Are you sure?” Like Tevye
having conversations with God in Fiddler on the Roof, we kibitzed and I oy-ed. I
called my niece Dawn (closest relative to the daughter I never had) and told
her I was seriously considering it. Within less than 24 hours, I was 100% sure that
it was what I had to do. It was what I wanted to do. It was right and holy. And
yes, I’d freeze my ass off in winter, but that’s why they make long underwear.
If Covid taught me anything, it’s that I don’t even have to leave the house
when conditions are not friendly to my health and well-being. Deliveries and
human connection are all at my fingertips right at home. Since I am retired
from a “real” job, I don’t have to go out unless it’s urgent. I can be a bear
and hibernate all winter, something we all need and rarely do. And it’s a great
time to read and write. Modern caves are even equipped with central heat.
The move made sense for so many
pragmatic reasons, but those who know me on these pages and/or in person should
not be surprised; it was the pull of my Cosmic Tractor Beam that motivated me
most of all. I was being dragged with irresistible force to the place and the
answer to “what’s next.” I just had to follow, to practice non-resistance.
Whenever I aligned with the Beam in the past, everything ended well. This would
be no different even if my Virgo self-doubt confronted me nearly every day during the process.
Beam Me Up, Scotty.
It’s pretty hilarious that my Beam was
activated by a genuine Scotsman in Andrew Johnson. It took nearly a year to get from idea to
manifestation of my move. (Covid limited air travel, and I had major work to do
on my house in California to make it sale-ready.) I finally realized that the reason I could not
picture my future after Tim passed is that I had limited my scope to
Sacramento. I could not see it because my future wasn’t there. I am aging. I am
a widow. My immediate family is gone. I need to be near my large extended family
of nieces, nephews and dozens of cousins. My family of friends in Sacramento
is a dream come true, and because of them, I will always have two homes,
especially after 4+ decades and three careers operating out of California’s capital
(civil servant in State recycling programs, astrologer and writer). I just switched which home is primary.
The one that was made for me in my birth chart in the beginning and likely until
the end.
Many people thought I was brave to
make such a major move in my 70s, but the really brave move was when I was 26 during the ‘70s. I moved to Sacramento
where I didn’t know a soul and just followed a strong hunch. I did not yet
understand my Cosmic Tractor Beam pulling me to parts unknown, but oddly, I
trusted this unseen and unidentified force. Making my California dream come true was not an easy transition. I
was living and working for 4 years in Green Bay, Wisconsin before I moved and the culture
shock was major. There were many life skills in my twenties that I had not yet
acquired and would be forced to scrape up in a hurry to survive. But I have Uranus
on the IC when my chart is relocated to Sacramento. "The Big Tomato" is where I found my
spiritual family and the place I could experiment with the alternative ideas
that fascinated and fed me, including astrology. Most of my immediate family
followed me there within a few years. As I became more and more New
Age-ish, my sister said I “went California.” I’m a Virgo; I had to correct
her. “No, I just went to a place where I could be me.”
How It All Turned Out
I will skip over most of the details except for
a few. I could not have sold my house in California at a better time on
Mother’s Day 2021. The market was high and I got a great price which allowed me
to make the expensive, cross-country move and to replace the many things I
could not realistically take with me. After nearly a year of looking, I found a beautiful home in the Northwest
suburbs of Chicago, 7 minutes from my niece Dawn’s in an award-winning community. My vet
nixed tranquilizing and flying my little black cat Kira cross-country. (I would
have shipped my car.) The altitude can affect the uptake of the drug and is
dangerous, potentially even fatal. (And believe me, Kira would have screamed so
much; flying without sedation was not an option.) So we went on a family road trip. Dawn’s daughter, my grandniece Ashley, did the driving while Ashley’s
daughter Ana and I took turns keeping Kira out of mischief, mainly out of the driver's way. To my great
surprise, I found out that my little fur girl loves the open road. It’s just
stop-and-start driving that she hates, thus the yodeling all the way to the
vet. She did her mom proud.
The Here and Wow.
 |
Rebirthday: 22-Sept-21
|
While no one place holds everything
for us as individuals, I could not have imagined the joy I have experienced
moving back home. “Place of Birth” is no longer a simple a piece astrological
data on which my chart is built. Being in my birthplace returns me to my
natural horoscope where my most angular and theoretically influential planet is
Mars in Cancer on the IC (trine Jupiter in Scorpio). I used to see t-shirts
that said, “You can take the girl out of Chicago, but you can’t take Chicago
out of the girl. Little did I know how much I embodied that idea. Or the
t-shirt I actually own, “I’m just a Chicago girl living in a California world.”
Until I was back in Chi-Town experiencing my favorite season of autumn, I never
realized that this thing called birthplace is visceral for me. Here I had my
first feelings of climate on baby skin, environment and “home,” long before I
had the language to describe it. Chicago is in me. It is me. It is an environmental and magnetic geographic force that pulls my molecules and energy together in a
certain way, at a certain frequency. There is much to explore for future
articles on the influence of birthplace, whether you live in yours or not.
But at the most personal level, everything I ever wanted is
here. My eyes frequently well up over how happy I am. All my dreams have come true in
this place—of a big family, a beautiful home, fun, culture and lots of people
who love me and love to hang out with me and make the time to do it. The big
family didn’t exactly happen in the timing and way I had in mind, but there are
advantages. I didn’t have to raise my grandnieces or nephews or send them to
college. I still get to enjoy them to the hilt and vice-versa. Auntie Mame
has already moved over. There is nothing like hearing my 7-year-old Aquarian great
grandniece spontaneously yell from the backseat of the car, “I love you!” When
I found my birth mom in 1988, she took to calling me Miti Manifesto. Miti (Me Tee) was
her nickname for me, short for my birth name Maria Teresa. Birth mom Helen
marveled at how I manifested things, including her after a 38-year separation
by adoption.
Combining my Manifesto persona with
one of my others, the Queen of Synchronicity, I materialized a piece of artwork that paints a picture of why it’s good to surrender to
your Cosmic Tractor Beam. (See opening photo.) It is a gorgeous dream catcher batik in teals and
soft blues and warm browns. It is the emblem of how I did as I was told and the
Beam caught everything for me in the web of the dream catcher and brought me
here to them. (So that's what my intuition meant by The Cusp of Everything!) The dream catcher hangs in my living room in the most
prominent position in my home. It will be a constant reminder of why it’s good
to get out of your own way and stay open to the universe’s other ideas for you. They may even be your own ideas with a slight twist that's even better than you imagined.
Astrology’s Place and Future Directions
Enough about me! (Sun in the 5th.)
What does this new and deep re-rooting mean for my blog, my writing and the
things that might entertain and inspire you? I’m not yet totally certain.
The Beam has yet to clarify. But I know I am getting close. Throughout all my
ordeals of recent years, astrology has not been as prominent as usual in my life. At least
not in the way it used to be of analyzing every event and development by
planetary positions in the sky. Astrology is much more integrated for me now, a
kind of touchstone and inner knowing that no longer drives my perceptions of
life but is simply a part of them. There is culture shock here, too. I’m
not in California anymore, where even the
most skeptical person knows enough metaphysical lingo and ideas and has the manners not to eye
roll. My relatives are quick learners, though. They now speak of Mercury Retrograde in hushed tones and the younger ones are very meta-curious.
I expect the Radical Virgo blog to
morph even more into its “astrology-plus” direction with more theme posts and
possibly even spin-off blogs or writings on larger topic areas. My first big
writing project is a book. It's a memoir, My Life in
the Lost and Found: The Power of Reconnection. I am 5 chapters in and plan
to work on it this winter while the weather is rude. There may be other
installments in the Micki Michaels
novels, my humorous mystery series, but later rather than sooner.
Although I wrote a book called The
Crystal Ball, I don’t have one. Just a Cosmic Tractor Beam that's sometimes full of surprises. Stay tuned for the next ones.
Photo Credit: Rebirthday,
Joanne Robinson.
