A Year Into Blogging

A year ago, I began this blog.

I’ve been posting mostly weekly, though I often skip a week.  That’s because I sometimes run out of steam.  It’s also because I have a more than full-time job.

Blogging has been and continues to be a great pleasure.   It is something I do without deadline or compensation just because I want to.  It helps me hone my thoughts and my writing ability.  It is enabling me to contemplate the book I’d like to finally write, a memoir of my life as a spiritual practitioner.   I appreciate all the comments I receive.

Like everything else, this blog is subject to change.   It started off as one thing and has evolved into another.

When I began blogging in 2014, I had an idea of why I wanted and needed to return to work as a writer.

I knew, after having survived cancer, that I wanted to do many more interesting things with this “one wild and precious life,” as the poet Mary Oliver calls us to do.    I have, gratefully, done a lot of wild things, and I want to do more.   What might those things be?   Answers keep unfolding.

One thing for sure is that I can’t quit my job.   So I have expanded the notion of what I do as “work.”   I know one attorney who is also a jazz singer and another attorney who is also a teacher of Qigong.   The really interesting people I know have multiple careers, often at the same time.

I thought about how I might enter the public dialogue about cancer and how cancer patients and survivors are treated.   I thought I might want to work as some sort of patient advocate.   I thought I might return to my old ways as a journalist.

I didn’t know precisely where I was going but I had some notions about an overall direction.

So I started writing a weekly essay about my experiences and about my views on health, cancer, and related topics.

Pretty quickly, the blog morphed on its own.

When I started writing pieces of memoir, and particularly when I started writing bits of spiritual memoir, I felt a lot of enthusiasm within myself and I also got a lot of positive feedback.

When I wrote a few essays about how mainstream media and culture deal with cancer, as in the predictable corporate nonsense about “breast cancer awareness month,” I felt repetitive of what lots of other bloggers write about, and I felt bored with it.

A wise person I respect says:  “Go where the juice is.”   That’s where I’m going.

The blog has shifted into musings more about spiritual and psychological well-being.  That’s where the juice is for me.

And, along the way during this first year of blogging, something else has transpired.

I’ve been a life-long student of what Aldous Huxley and other mystics have dubbed the “perennial philosophy.”  It is the pervading sense of nearness and oneness with the Divine Being through many names and forms down through millennia.

One of the forms that has intrigued human beings since they first understood themselves as part of nature is the discipline of astrology, the study of how planetary and stellar forces interact with human consciousness.   There is no ultimate separation between what is above and what is below.

I have worked with astrological information for many years.   I knew this was a powerful mode of understanding, and yet the local astrologers I went to gave me superficial and at times blatantly inaccurate interpretations.

A year ago, I finally got tired of it and decided that I would study the subject on my own.

That’s when I happened to have a reading with someone in another state who practices Evolutionary Astrology.   For the first time, my own chart made sense – because she wasn’t focusing narrowly on a handful of her own pet themes.   It was not like a newspaper horoscope telling me I’d soon “meet a tall, dark stranger.”

The session with the Evolutionary Astrologer, a year ago, propelled me to start reading everything I could.   Since early this year, I’ve been taking on-line webinars with some amazing Evolutionary Astrologers.   They have bright, shiny minds.   They ask and help answer the really juicy questions:  Why am I here and what are my lessons?

This is an astrology not of fatalism, but of freedom and choice, within the bounds of what is offered, by seen and unseen forces, to each individual along her or his unfolding path.

So I have now become a student of Evolutionary Astrology.   It is shaking up my conceptions about myself.   It is giving me the juice I need.   I thrive best when I am “in school” as an avid student of an intellectually challenging subject, and when I have a Project with a capital P.   This one fits the bill because it challenges my brain as well as my heart, and because I have a very strong intuition that this is just the right direction for my path to go now.

It’s putting a big smile on my face.   Just like writing this blog and doing all the other things I love.