“Life doesn’t have to be one way or the other. We don’t have to jump back and forth. We can live beautifully with whatever comes —heartache and joy, success and failure, instability and change.” —Living Beautifully: An Inspirational Journal by Pema Chödrön

It’s the last full moon of the year. I can see it in the sky through my home office window as I type this.

A month from now, on the next full moon, I will be in Mexico with my sister and father, visiting my grandmother in Morelia, Michoacán. I almost lost her this year to COVID and pneumonia. She is a strong woman. I’ve seen her temple — it is blue and tall like a skyscraper. I’ve walked her steps of suffering. When she was a young girl she was sturdy and worked as luchadora in bars to make money for her parents. As a single mother of four, she read tarot cards in the cathedral square to support her family. When I said, “I didn’t know you knew how to read cards.” She responded, “I don’t. I just told all the women that their husbands were cheating.” I hope I get to hear more stories like that.

Below is a year in review, told through diary entries. Not every day is a transformation or expansion. Somedays the gift is just being able to work and cook dinner and walk my dog and laugh at my husband. But all days I am desperate for life in however it chooses to show itself.

Completing this was a form of soul recovery. Now that it’s out of my system, my psyche has more room to play and imagine and create something new.

The book itself is 5 x 7 inches and 54 pages long. A New Temple begins somewhere in the middle and the rest is a visual journey through dreams, visions, poetry and animal spirit messages. Here are some pages from the book.

I dreamed that child me was standing in an empty room. My husband was there. He offered to build me the childhood bedroom that I never had but always wanted. Just then the door flew open and the frogs — who I call the “healing frogs” — hopped in to help.

Unfortunately, I woke up. So I meditated to re-enter the dream. I envisioned everything that child me dreamed of having: a wall full of books, a window seat for reading, a view of a river, an art easel, and a microscope.

I then envisioned what adult me would appreciate: a chaise lounge and bar cart with endless, flowing champagne, a sitting area for friends and tea, and another window with a view of mountains.

This room is now a visual safe space that I can return to in meditation for solace. If there is an answer I need, I can pull a book from my shelf. If there is something that is confusing me, I can inspect it under the microscope.

After completing the drawing, it became obvious to me that all the spaces and things inside my room are the most important aspects of my life — quietude, learning, art, connection, nature, and celebration.

I was surprised that I scored the highest in Spirituality. My first thought was, “Is there something wrong with that?” I answered myself with a gentle “no” and realized that I’m still holding on to an outdated concept of Spirituality.

My mother indoctrinated me to be “spiritually liberal” and I grew up in and out of churches. As an adult I have an aversion to group think and anything that requires my weekly attendance to evolve or grow in any way. But that is more Community than Spirituality.

I actively try not to lead with Spirituality, but I think I’m only kidding myself. Because underneath every nature outing, or meet-up with a friend, my heart beats with communion. When I’m alone, I’m never alone. There is a cathedral inside me and the church bells ring hourly.

A year in review. Here are fragments of my life in 2021. I pulled them from diary entries.

JANUARY

Have I been circling the same shallow depths for so long?

After a call with my journey guide:

She asked me to share about myself, specifically what has brought me to this moment — what has made me want to do a journey. What came out of my mouth was a word jumble of bad things that had happened to me. No, not happened to me — the bad circumstances of my life. I was born to two teenagers… we moved around a lot … my mother left us … she is bipolar … I never had stability … I had suicidal ideation since I was 11 … and 14 … and 22 … and 24 … and 26.

All this changed when I turned 30 and went on a vision quest, spent more time in nature and committed to therapy. I described how my entire childhood I bounced from one dogma to another, and how at 30, I finally cut the cord with my mother and created myself as an adult. How my career, my husband and choosing to be childfree are the best choices I ever made. But also, how I feel like I have no creative voice.

Later I realized, my voice is lost because I cut the cord with the narrator. The narrator who wrote all those poems in the past is gone. She’s no longer depressed or dark and as much as I miss that voice, it’s not coming back. I can’t summon her. I think it’s time I get to know my new narrator. This woman that I am.

FEBRUARY

I try to break free from the expected everyday.

An oracle card reading:

I pulled The Cauldron card, which says, “We become integrated and mature by watching, waiting, and trusting that all these insights and impressions will be added to the cauldron and will, one day, be fully cooked.”

This year is about creating the space. About following what ignites my heart and trusting it will guide me somewhere better. It is a waiting game, but I am the cauldron. I am the witch brewing my dreams.

A dream I had in February:

Last night I dreamed that they kept showing me an ultrasound of my womb and why I could never get pregnant. The energy that was supposed to latch on just kept “floating away,” like the smoke that comes out of my oil diffuser. The souls just kept diffusing. But I was OK with it. I don’t want to birth children. I can be a mother in other ways.

The back and forth of integrating trauma:

This day is displaced from other timelines. It feels new. Or maybe I am new. The years are piling on like dust on top of dust. I am being buried under patterns, synchronicities and routines. New goals. New Year. Resolutions. Old habits break through. I lose myself in other people and the ticking of the time hand. And like the trees lose their leaves and then return, I think that the same thing is happening to me, but no, it’s not. The opposite thing is happening to me. The leaves only fall and don’t regrow, and every new day is different and I am on a path I can see and sense, but ignore anyway. I see other people have one foot in reality and the other god knows where, and they uproot their minds and fly away so easily, yet I keep treading this darkness one step at a time. Only now I can see the form. I know I can.

….. I lean into the darkness again, this time more protected. There are no shadows. All the unknowns are outlined. Nothing scurries or brushes past in pitch blackness. Nothing groans or howls. Except for me. Darkness, I am enveloping you. It is a momentary eclipse. We’ll become the same, but I'll still keep my shape.

MARCH

I will no longer dull my edges.

On being the older sister:

My therapist told me something last week that stuck with me. My sister came into this life with a different purpose and journey, and her journey to evolve is different from mine. I am her friend and her sister, but I am not here to save her. Her journey does not have to look like mine. 

On my dead brother’s birthday:

My brother Steven would have been 36 years old today. He only lived one month. Why do they come and go and where is his life force today? What happens to these short spirits? 

SHORT SPIRITS
A light cuts through briefly 
flowers limbs and bones
sprouts from nothing 
gathers dust, disappears 
again, leaving my mother 
holding the bag, 
a palmful of ash is enough 
to spread grief for lightyears

APRIL

Anyone who goes digging into their subconscious is a witch, attempting to make sense of everything in her cauldron.

Life came to me in pieces. Slowly I could see that I had long been trying to make sense of it. Since birth. Since crawling. Since hiding. Since discovering dark rooms and hidden agendas and bad people and secret dreams and imagination and in the safety and sacredness of solitude. 

A description of how I feel:

Myself — loosened
spread all over
in another time
unanchored from now

A lesson in a dream:

I found myself hanging from a high cliff because I had climbed up the wrong way. I was about to blame the dream people for leading me astray, but they didn’t know any better. In the end, it turned out that the easier climb was just inches away from where I started. If I would have just taken a few steps back before climbing, the other option would have come into view. This is a reminder to trust myself, stand back and consider my options.

Automatic writing on Easter: How to ascend (a growing list of ways to elevate your energy)

MAY

I dust off my aura, I protect my aura.

Spiritual Border Control or How to Share Space with a Stranger:

I build a wall around my aura. This is my space. This is allowed. This is not discriminatory. We are all part of the source, but your energy is yours, don’t siphon mine. I am allowed to say mine, because this is my journey. This is my consciousness. 

When I was younger I would go out to bars and bump up against others, and kiss strangers, and bond drunkenly in bathrooms, and then wake up feeling empty. It was so exciting until it wasn’t. Then you learn to conserve, that there is a balance in connecting and sharing space. You are allowed to be selective.  

On revisiting old diaries:

I forget there is treasure in there. My subconscious bleeds out of me on to those pages. There are 15 years of confessions, dreams, wishes, changes, mistakes. I find it’s easy to get lost in that space, that time. What was I so desperately wanting? Not men — Life. I was desperate for life, it seemed.

A note about my grandfather’s ghost:

Somewhere embedded in the fabric of my reality is my dead grandfather. He comes as white butterflies, and in dreams. The weight of his consciousness I could not tell you, it is heavy, maybe tons. Like a whale, but he is just one dead person.

A freewrite about the moon/life/process:

I try to stay connected to the moon, whatever that means. I cut myself in slits. I am waning, I am waxing, I am growing myself whole. I am becoming bigger than I am. I follow the folklore, nothing should be planted on the full moon, only cut your hair on the new moon, banishing spells when the moon is large, any love spells should grow with the crescent moon. I watch myself expand and shrink in the matter of weeks, like the ocean, my body bloated with salt. I hide away when the sky is dark. I am brewing something magical inside. When the moon is bloated like my body, I bleed, and the process begins again. This constant shrinking and expanding wears on me, but I realize every 28 days I become something new, something bigger than I was before. I head toward the sun and the end of my life with hair as white as the moon and sun spots from the universe. I am spinning with the earth toward death, growing closer to my body, to the mother earth, blossoming and withering at the same exact time. This is the process destined by the heavenly bodies that govern us. So yes, of course we are connected to the moon.

JUNE

There is no completion to life. It just continues.

How hard it is to be human sometimes, to not neglect any part of my being — physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. … I can only be on one side of the dodecahedron die at a time.

Birthday trip to Sedona:

On the road headed toward Arizona, trusting we will meet our life somewhere along the way.

Fragments from a psychedelic journey:

It began with doors opening to the sacred chapel of mirrors. Climbing the stairs of my grandmother’s apartment building in Morelia, it transformed into a temple. … They kept telling me the imagery does not matter. The universe expanded into a bismuth stone. So many dimensions, so much work that is unseen. They kept repeating “The imagery doesn’t matter.” They kept telling me I was focusing too much on form, and my form kept shapeshifting into something else. I became gooey and shapeless and I called out, “I don’t want to be gooey and shapeless, I want form!” I want this body, and yes I will honor it. They were showing me: this is what clairvoyance is. You see the lineage and archetypes and the chakras people get stuck in. Astrology, tarot cards, breath work, these are just tools, they say. They showed me the dimension where play takes place and said all art comes from this place. Play here. Pull from here.

JULY

I am trying to exist below the surface of everything.

A dream question:

In another part of the dream, I was in an old neighborhood from my childhood. Through the window blinds, I peeked out on a group of women walking. I recognized them as children I had met and played with briefly, before moving again to somewhere new. The possibility of life-long friendships was never in the cards for me. I woke up with a question on my mind: How do I root myself in a past I never had?

On Reality Tunnels:

I wake up with the message: they’re only going to show me what I can handle. In a dream, I see myself seated on an alien tapestry, like a magic carpet. On a wall of the universe, I see messages reflected in Space meant only for me. I see others seated on their own magic carpets, tuning into their own private screenings, I take a peek. They tell me those messages are not meant for me. Stick to your own reality tunnel, they say.

AUGUST

You’re never going to lose touch with the world because you are the world.

On boredom and loneliness:

For a moment, I’ve abandoned myself. I can feel the negative space that it leaves and I think this is what you call loneliness. Ten degrees to the right and it would be solitude and it would be sacred, and I think of all the ways I can veer off course to my true north. Since birth this has been a solo voyage, so why am I aching for something other than myself? Turn your compass inward. The needle vibrates and spins out of control. You’ll need to figure this out on foot with no equipment/tools/compass. You do not want someone else, you do not need another voice to speak for you, to guide you, to hug you, to love you, to accept you. You only need yourself. Turn the compass inward. What are you feeling? The words that come up are uninspired,  bored, aimless. You feel like you need a spark. What could it be? Inside yourself there is no light on, if only you turned on the light you would see a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration and love and epiphanies and revelations — so many that you would never want to come out. Investigate. Be curious of yourself. Close your eyes. See an image that has been haunting you. 

A moon poem:

I am the crescent light of the moon
cradling my own shadow
each day I look inward 
brighten the darkness 
inching my way toward wholeness

SEPTEMBER

I dress myself in dream imagery. 

On my ancestral mothers, and the start of what would become A New Temple:

To build a new temple means to create a new language for my bloody, muddy mothers. I have been pieces of them throughout my life. In the beginning they felt like shards of glass piercing through my skin, manipulating my body like a grotesque Pinocchio. Breaking me into pieces with their suffering - but now I see what they made me — a mosaic of mirrors to see all of my soul.

Something my journey guide said:

There is no rush. Just be aware, honor what you are shown. Celebrate yourself.

A reminder:

Reminder: I get to participate in life today. Work. Create. Write. Make something out of nothing. Connect with the world.

OCTOBER

The great mystery of life is a gift.

Dreams symbolizing mental constructs:

The balcony fell down. We sat all of our friends in rocking chairs we made and then it crashed down. The children were playing in the room and pushed the bunkbeds off which created a tremor and the balcony crashed down and I thought all the older people were injured but they were not. This was the second dream about balconies falling off. I know these symbolize shedding mental constructs. In the last dream, I was sharing war stories with a stranger about living in Oakland. He said the terrace on his apartment was so poorly built that it had broken off, but it was OK because he still sees it from time to time. I asked “how?” He said a homeless man must have picked it up, because every once in a while he’ll see it in a shopping cart rolling on by.

A dream about past perspectives:

I am in an empty parking lot in Mexico. I intentionally sit facing a cliff and look out upon a vast and unknown territory that is my home. A rear view mirror appears to be growing out of the cracked concrete. I gaze into it and see the magical blue sky behind me, the clouds marching. I see a mariachi band walking past. A walking celebration of life. I can’t stop gazing into the rearview mirror.

A case against compartmentalizing:

All last week I pulled the death card. An aspect or construct of me died. The construct is the idea that I can compartmentalize these aspects of myself. If you lob off a side to a prism it becomes less luminous. We are all multi-sided, messy and beautiful humans. I sit here spiraling in my thoughts, a multitude of voices chiming in, wanting to say things, ask questions. This morning I meditated and I met an angel in my sacred space, and she held me and I asked her how can I be more myself and yet be pure. She said the answer is desire itself. I am allowed to be complicated and dark and scared and guarded and hesitant and still be pure in that sense. Yes, I am a spirit having a human experience, but I have been so, so, so, deeply human in my errors and ways and it is the intention of my desires that pull me closer to my pure self.  

NOVEMBER

What is this individuation process? I thought I was supposed to be getting clearer and now it feels like I’m getting more complicated.

A dream about shadow work:

In a rented room that I share I try to put together my dilapidated furniture. I broke a mirror trying to move it. My furniture is old, chipped and from my childhood. I see other rented rooms designed so extravagantly. I wish my room was swanky and stylish. I keep rearranging furniture, trying to design something beautiful and minimize the space my shadow furniture takes up.

On controlling the expansion of consciousness:

My gray hair was growing in. At first I was happy, this was the mark of living. It said to the world, I am still here and I am sticking it out and I love every minute of it. On a closer look in the mirror I saw that my grays were growing in the opposite way, from end to root. I felt a desire to control it or cover it up. I didn’t want to be vain. I woke up with the message that we cannot control where awakenings and wisdom choose to appear.

How to get closer to heaven:

My hope is that by the time I leave this life I am closer to heaven, by the way that I love, by the way that I walk the earth, and by the grace that I gift myself.

DECEMBER

For the first half of December, I do not journal. There is no excavating of my psyche or logging of my dreams. I put all my energy into completing this small book of visions, poems, dreams and animal spirits that I call A New Temple. It is dedicated to my ancestral mothers who appeared to me last August during a psychedelic journey. It is an artifact of my subconsciousness and it is available here.

It’s been a long year of inner work. I set off in the beginning of the year to get to know my new narrator — the woman that I am now — and I did exactly that. I am ending this year closer to myself than I’ve ever been.

Short musings on suicide

The Suicide Booth is almost here. I’m pro-suicide in the same way I am pro-choice. Being a woman who is childfree by choice is a kind of suicide. I have sovereignty over my own body, mind, heart and spirit.

The New York Times @nytimes

A 3-D printed pod, Sarco, was created as a way for people to end their life without a doctor. The plan to introduce it in Switzerland has raised alarm even among right-to-die advocates.

December 16th 2021

I was 8 years old when I first learned what suicide was. My mother and I were stopped at a train crossing. She told me if I wasn’t in the car she would have parked on the tracks. Late in life, she was diagnosed as Bipolar, with PTSD. There have been many late-night phone calls from her desperate for death — and that pain was as real as any physical or terminal disease.

I don’t know who, if any one, should regulate who this pod is for. I think of all the reasons that led to my own failed suicide attempts: depression, disillusion, poverty, and a prevalent feeling of having no control or influence over my own circumstances. Thankfully, I transcended all those situations and emotions and came out on the other side.

Depression is a state of consciousness and I hope to never be that low again, but I do believe — from direct and personal experience — that death is a fundamental human right.

Philip Nitschke @philipnitschke

Prof Hooker's rejection of an AI mental capacity test for Sarco use misses the point. The test is not "to help people make these type grave decisions", they've already made the decision, the AI is to remove frustration of their plan by idiosyncratic psychiatric review..

December 12th 2021

[Side note: I follow Philip Nitschke on Twitter and subscribe to the Exit International newsletter, because I do find the evolution of the Right to Die movement fascinating.]

Note: This post is an excerpt from my weekly mind dump newsletter, sent out each Friday. I cross post when it’s something personal, but if you don’t mind hearing from me once a week, you can subscribe here: https://claudiadawson.substack.com/

OTHER POSTS FROM THE PAST MONTH:

Astrological Consequences Or How To Embody Freedom
Late night revelations
The Mandrake Man Dance
Spirit orbs in Oakland
A case for growing angel wings
Dream fragments
The Inner Why Technique

You can find past moon letters here.