Blog 88

I decided to herald the last day of Venus retrograde actual (April 17^th) by writing about a former attachment I am saying adieu to for good; I can feel it deep within my bones…

That would be “The Land”; the heart of my love for Arizona.  I was married to it and had intimate Knowledge of its every part.  My awareness extended in an expansive radius, so that I knew what was around the bend and over the rise, in some directions for a span of fifty miles or more.  I knew the mountains and the valleys and the way the wind whispered through them; I knew where the Sun and Moon would rise on the horizon and how the stars would fall through the turn of the year; I knew when the storms would come and how they would play through the valley; I knew its history and witnessed its movement into the future.  It was my island at the core of my Universe.

Every time I left The Land, and even put a thousand miles between myself and it, circumstances would unfold that returned me.  Even (and maybe especially) when I resisted and bemoaned its existence for there were times when I believed this heart-center of my known Universe was a vortex – a magnetic whirlpool – that sucked me into it and kept me on the brink of drowning there.  It was where I departed from for the Oregon dreamtime, and the place that called me back from the dream in the end.

My mentor, Al, had implored me not to move from The Land for at least a decade, and then, if I moved, to retain it in my possession, always.  He called it an “intersection point” and suggested that it was because of The Land I would cross paths with “my people” – the group to which I “correlate like a star within a constellation of stars and circle through lifetimes with”.

It had sounded so strange at the time.  I remember debating with him that my Fate would find me anywhere, to which he reminded that “like time is to potential, so is place to purpose”.  It was among those many things Al said that only ended-up ringing true in hindsight and was one of those things I inadvertently (and in spite of my rather rebellious spirit) ended-up doing largely as he suggested.  After my return from Oregon The Land remained my home for another 10 years.

Like Simon Magus discovering Helen at the top of a tower in Tyre and inviting her out into the world, it was my now-husband who asked me to relinquish my attachment to The Land in a way that wouldn’t let me get pulled back.  The understandings I had arrived at (and the goals they had stoked the embers of) led me to feel that my purpose there was complete, and contrary to Al’s assertion, I didn’t want to retain anything simply for the sake of retaining it.  Now-husband helped me to find a way off my island and travel far beyond the boundaries of my known Universe into an entirely new sphere of existence.

But that doesn’t imply I unwove The Land from my heart-strings.  Even within states of happiness and fulfillment, I thought of that relinquished place quite often and wondered if I’d ever know another place as well, and love it as much.  A few times when the path seemed on a downward turn, I wondered if I’d been wrong to let it go…  Especially as time brought me organically into more agreement with Al.

This was complicated and compounded by a rather strange, if not almost unbelievable, thing.  Years after leaving The Land behind us, it was decided in the midst of our hunt for new land that we wanted to correlate the community to Arizona’s Orion (see here).  This meant that within our desired region, our future home would be situated along Orion’s chakra line; all we needed to do was locate the “King’s Ruins” from which we could connect the dots (of ruins) to discern the line…

The map told us the ruins were right under our nose, yet finding them proved a difficult animal.  There were more than a few candidates and the distance of time had bestowed a number of names upon each, none of which belonging to King.  It took friend-Amy’s extended vacation in Washington and “random” encounter with an obscure Arizona history book to figure out just where we were talking about.

Astoundingly, but not surprisingly, they were the hilltop ruins that had been framed by my living room window when I lived on The Land, literally across the street from my then-home.  Apparently the ranch I’d known by its historic name had briefly been owned by the brothers, King.  It wasn’t then too much of a leap to predict that Orion’s chakra line would prove to cross The Land; and of course it did.

That is the moment when my search for another piece of land in AZ ended.  I had already experienced the thing I was looking for and made the conscious choice to let it go.  Been there; done that.  For as much as it hurt, it was clarity.  I saw how in that moment I could repeat myself or I could use my Orion-experience to find a reversal…

In the Mystery Traditions the constellation Orion is associated to any Hero who is, as a major theme, suspended-in-wait.  This includes the chained, like Prometheus; the Hanged Man, such as Odin; the banished, like Shem’Yaza; Moses in the wilderness; Jonas inside the whale; Osiris in many ways; and on like this.  Where the hang-up occurs inside of time there is suffering; a feat of enduring “the wait”.  Where it occurs outside of time there is rest; a suspended animation of some sort.  Both are suggestive of motion or, rather, a lack thereof, but more importantly signify the act of anticipating movement or waiting for change.  The Hanged-Man is either of symbol of patient endurance, or a harbinger of a great reversal of the (energy) flow…

As I move to commit myself to a new valley and a new Land, it occurred to me rather suddenly one day that for the first time in two decades I can say that I am no longer attached to the Land-that-was.  I’m not even sure I would have said that a month ago.  And I find it interesting that this feeling has surfaced from deep within me, seemingly out of blue, as Venus-retrograde steeped us in the energy of Andromeda, the Morning Star affectively cutting the chains which hold the maiden back.