Making Up For Lost Time... No te preocupas.

I have taken a proverbial page out of the blog of my good friend Elizabeth (see new link to the right) and have happened upon--albeit "sin querer" (unintentionally)--my own "FreeWill Astrology" horoscope o'the week. And Elizabeth certainly has a page to spare for me; her new blog is called "A Room Full of Books," and all I needed was the one page.... Elizabeth's blog is the absolute authority on all things literary. At least, in my world, it is. Elizabeth is my biblio-beacon, illuminating for me her opinions of her favourite tomes, and giving me ideas for great picks and must-have items. Go check out her blog. She is the most amazing rising Reference librarian EVER! She will someday rule the written wor(l)d!!!!

To get back to it, ahem, here is my horoscope from FreeWill:
"My life is about finding time to dream," M. Night Shyamalan has said. I urge you to make that your motto, Leo. The progress of your most practical ambitions later in 2006 will depend on whether or not you spend the next few weeks tapping into information that's available through fantasies, meditations, dreams and other altered states."

Now, to some who read this blog, perhaps my finding credence in astrology is akin to listening to demonic spirits. For me, however, I feel like it's affirmation from the cosmos that I'm heading in the right direction. For the past year or two even, I've been adrift in the metaphysical sea, with no dogma to guide my path--except the belief that belief systems as a rule are flawed and even deceptive and that the people who stand atop them and wave their banners are, at best, inconsistent but well-intentioned, and at worse, malevolent liars.

This belief in "no belief system" is the most dangerous kind of metaphysical existence. I have felt the lack of true and sincere belief in my heart very acutely for some time now. I have sought to fill that gap in all manner of ways (med school? smoking? partying? grade-consciousness? scholarship? agnosticism? money?), but what it's come down to is that I have to remove the impediments in the path to that lacking. I had blocked my open heart with rationalization, anger, disappointment, skepticism. Now I am trying to uncover those layers that have been blocking my ability to commune with the metaphysical part of myself.

(At least) one of my family members is worried that I am opening myself up to evil forces if I open myself up to "positive energy" of the random and unidentified variety. I understand what she means, because I saw her go through the same dark path for several years. But I feel like I've already been on that path; that when I stopped listening to my heart and started listening to my ego instead, I allowed those darker forces to wheedle their logic into me. I know what darkness feels like and looks like; I know well how I behave when in their sphere of influence. And what I'm trying to do now is push them back and out of me, and fill that part again with goodness and hope. But I'm not, at this point, ready to name the positive force to which I am praying, because I still feel like that inherently puts spirituality into a man-made box and creates more room for anxiety and anger to reign in me. Nevertheless, this force is, intuitively the same as that which I've always appealed to, but which at some point I decided was indifferent to me and possibly non-existent. It's easy to see now that this force never changed; only I did.

So I'm trying to change back. "...At this point a new story begins, the story of a [wo]man's gradual renewal, her gradual rebirth, her gradual transition from one world to another, of her growing acquaintance with a new...reality." (Dostoevsky, the second to last sentence in Crime & Punishment)

And the horoscope in LEO encourages me; that is all. And as far as its advice goes, I have been paying special attention to my dreams of late, as they seem to be imbued with transcendent meaning, full of vivid images and memorable phrases. I have begun writing poetry again (most of it, as yet, horrible--case in point in last entry); I am drawing a bit; I am trying to dig back into my memories, in order to remember the magic of children's thinking. I am looking for the divine instead of the man-made; I welcome the supernatural, the creative and the unifying.

We'll see how it goes.... !