Beltane                                                                                 Cancer Moon

Go now, the workshop has ended. Paraphrasing the end of the Catholic mass. Appropriate in this case having just come Mother Cabrini’s shrine. The experience of being at Mother Cabrini was familiar in its physical surroundings. In college I would always retreat to Catholic sanctuaries to be still, to reflect. I always found them/find them, soothing.

I have my Intensive Journal beside me as I write this. I left it at the workshop over the last week. It’s filled with thoughts, meditations, exercises. The tabs in the journal, some of them, have esoteric names like Peaks, Depths, and Explorations or Twilight Imagery. Others more ordinary. Daily Log. Dreams. Meditation. The workshop itself both teaches how to use the journal on an ongoing basis and creates a gestalt of life now, as considered as it can be. This latter, for the other three workshops I attended, has been enough for me. Not this time. Not sure what changed, but I’m feeling a need to keep using the journal outside the workshop.

Here are two examples of next steps that have me excited. The first is to do a dialogue with reading. In the dialogue section of the journal, orange tabs, there is a method for developing one to one conversations with people important to you, living or dead, fictional or actual. That seems to makes sense. But the other four tabs in the orange section: Works, Events, Society, and the Body perhaps not so much. It works though. The journal method posits that a dialogue can be had with work you’re doing. I wrote a dialogue with Superior Wolf and in it realized I needed to pull the novel apart and focus one story only on Lycaon. In the Body section I’m in the midst of a dialogue with cancer.

Back to reading. Here’s the method. Each discrete entity under these tabs has a conception, a period of growth, then a waning, perhaps even a death. I’ll write a focusing statement, a short introduction to whatever it is: cancer, my mom, alcoholism, reading. Then, I’ll do steppingstones that move my experience with reading from its conception, through its history in my life, and finally where reading is for me right now. (also in the focusing statement.) When those are done, I re-read them, make a comment about how it felt to write them, anything new that has occurred in the re-reading. At that point I’ll enter a meditative place, a twilight place, that will allow me to engage reading in a dialogue, not from my intellect, but from deeper within what Progoff calls my well. Then I write a conversation, a back and forth between me and reading. I’m eager to see what will come of that. Also, in completing the dialogue with cancer.

The second example is another dialogue, a dialogue with ancientrails that will both focus on where I want to go with this fourteen year old project and how it and the intensive journal can work together. Again, I’ll write a focusing statement, write steppingstones, re-read and comment, go into the twilight place, and write a dialogue between me and ancientrails as a work.

This week, the follow on week after the workshop is going to see a cleaning up in the loft, a tidying. After that I’ll develop a routine with the intensive journal and ancientrails, do some of the deep work that I left undone in the workshop like the dialogues with reading and ancientrails, but some more work in the dream log, twilight imagery log and in the section labeled testament. Probably others, too.

I’ll need both ancientrails, the intensive journal, and caring bridge to weather the critical medical work that faces both of us next week. Kate’s lung disease. Her four crowns. My axumin scan. My glaucoma check. My visit with the radiation oncologists. This time a week from now we should both have a much clearer understanding of where our respective health challenges will take us.

Down for breakfast, then back up here to get some of that work begun.

In a room off the chapel there were several windows that recounted the life and work of Mother Cabrini. It just occurred to me that those windows are steppingstones in her life. All up there with beautiful stained glass for others to see.