Photo by Old Shoe Woman
The moon’s in Scorpio again. And tonight, it’s a New Moon. When the moon’s in Scorpio, it’s all about secrets and intensity and sexuality. It’s also about fertility—of ideas and feelings and more—and about truth and trust.
The energies of this Samhain season have been intense, even before the moon’s latest transit. I hardly know a soul who isn’t feeling either weepy or aggravated for no reason. For those of us with reason, it’s been even worse. But I’ve made a nervous appointment with a doctor and I’m feeling much calmer today after my own quiet little Samhain ritual last night by a campfire in the back yard.
The evening didn’t go anything as planned. I ended up having to chauffeur both kids to Halloween events so we didn’t have time for the annual feast between my getting home from work and their need to run off to their own social lives. Returning home 30 minutes later to the huge box of candy having been emptied by the first greedy trick-or-treater didn’t help either. And then I had to make separate trips to pick up the girls when their events were over, so I knew I’d get a very, very late start to my own workings.
While driving to pick up Shannon, I asked the Gods to show me something about my relationships this past year as I release its energies and prepare for the new year and what it brings. I started thinking about disillusionment. We say someone is disillusioned and we see how sad they are. But they have been dis-illusioned. They’ve had their illusions stripped away from them. That should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? They should be happy that they no longer have illusions because they can focus on something real. Okay, so my own disillusionment almost destroyed me a couple of years ago.
It’s still toying with me, too. The idea of what’s real and what’s an illusion. This year, I’ve been so intent on keeping away the illusions that I failed to see what’s real. In the past, I’d had some really great things-seemingly-come into my life and I’d thought-I’d WANTED-them to be real. But they shielded and showed only a certain side, knowing that I now demand honesty in my relationships. It takes a lot of energy to wear a façade for that long. And eventually, it droops and the reality shows through.
With that in mind, I’m curious about some illusions I thought I had this past year. Things I couldn’t believe were real. Like my friendship with The Treat. My own kids had told me we had an obviously strong mutual admiration for each other and they’d thought it was wonderful, but I shrugged it off. So I ask the Gods to show me, show me what was real. Was any of it real? Because now it all seems so far away, as if none of it ever really happened and I’ve little or no evidence that it ever did, with the exception of a few text messages I never erased.
Not long before midnight, I light a fire in the firepit. I cast a circle and call the Quarters. I honor my grandfather, Joe, and Anna, and all those I’ve loved who have passed. I honor the past lives that have gone on before me: Brynedd and Dageniam and Thomas and Rita and Alexandros and countless unnamed and unpronounceable ones. I honor the disillusionment of the past few years, and I honor the wonderful things and people who have come into my life in the past year and I honor those who have gone. Jillian, Jeaneen, Almolinumomiae, The Treat, others.
I light a “bleeding” candle, white on the outside and red on the inside, and offer my fervent intentions for the coming year. I sit by the fire and soak up the calm. It’s so peaceful inside the circle, almost as if bugs and blips of aggravation are pinging against the force field of energy I’ve erected around me. Not one gets through. It’s calmer than I can remember in weeks.
And then suddenly something is shown to me, something that soothes my heart chakra and jolts it to life. Even as I see it, I’m thinking, “I used to have so many epiphanies.” But in the past few months, the epiphanies have dried up since The Treat’s been gone. I miss the epiphanies, the revelations, however dark sometimes.
And then I’m shown. My newest epiphany. Things I’d forgotten or didn’t understand at the time. Snippets of conversation. A sideways glance. A lowering of the voice to share an unsure secret, not knowing if the secret would be ridiculed or relished. It was there all along, the reality of that relationship, and I missed it. Something real. And I missed it. Because I had decided that it MUST be illusion.
Only now I see it in a different light, the light of time and distance. Not just piece-parts but the whole. Though if I’d seen it earlier, I’m not sure what I would have done differently.
Maybe not been so eager to discredit the look in his eyes as my imagination. And maybe I’d have picked up the phone more instead of being shy and so damned unsure of myself.
But see, that’s the problem with trying to discern what’s real and what’s illusion. You realize how much of life has been an illusion and you start to peel it off so you can live a “real” life. Only you don’t know what real looks like. And you see something special that doesn’t fit the mold of real, and you miss it or discount it, no matter how innovative your thinking normally is. The mind’s been trained to see reality and relationships a certain way and you think, Good, it’ll be okay when it’s undefined and different, but when it really is undefined and different and wonderful, you have no idea what to do with it. You want something that doesn’t fit, and when it doesn’t fit and it’s just what you’re looking for and hoping for, you don’t trust it, have no experience with it, can’t peg it. If you’re lucky, the best you can do is figure that at least your feelings are real, but if the reason for those feelings is illusion, then what’s the point but to torture yourself?
So I’m shown the truth. Now. Now when the Moon’s in Scorpio and I’m sitting by a Samhain fire and honoring what’s passed. My intuition was there all along but I was so set on my expectations of illusion that I never really believed it. And what’s to be done about it now?
Nothing. Maybe next time, if there is a next time, I’ll be able to believe in something that’s as undefined and deeply touching as that relationship was for me. And maybe then, there’ll be more epiphanies…good ones.
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