tonight josh called from omega. i lay in bed with the window open, cool air blowing in me, looking outside to the tree and sky, and listened to his voicemail. he told me that the season is ending there. he said that the chairs miss me. he said "they told me they miss your crazy hair."
for a moment i was overwhelmed by the need to cry desperately about lost selves, but then i was instead overcome with a need to change the fact that so much of me is so far from omega right now.
i am so different, and my goals are so different. i don't know if i even HAD goals then, anything beyond trying desperately to sustain the sense of belongingness i felt during that summer and the 6 months after it, before the tribe got lost. strangely enough when i think back on those times, i remember being so happy and filled with wellbeing and joy, but i also remember a distinct selfishness, too. it is odd to consider that fact, when my drive at that time was all around the concept of community. maybe the selfishness (which manifested mainly in my disregard for peter's needs) is what i needed to grow out of in the past three years of terrible thrashing and loss (and eventual steadying and redemption).
now when i look back... i think so many of my actions around the time of Omega were just related to a desperate search for home. or a desperate attachment to aspects of my life that i identified as home, whether or not anyone or anything else had agreed to be identified as such. and in retrospect, so much of my wellbeing at omega and directly afterward was related to the simple state of being very physically healthy, alert, and alive from living without the machine and with the trees for so long. sometimes it's hard to separate the causes in my mind.. was i able to joyously connect to people who were quite different than me because we were soulmates thrown together through luck, or was i able to joyously connect because my body and psychic self were at their all time healthiest due to living simply in the out of doors, with three square meals always available and lots of manual labor?
re, communal living:
i remember at one of the Kepler symposiums, talking to very sarcastic and pragmatic astrologer named Liz about all the community-seeking skirmishes amongst my post-Omegan friend crew, and her assessment then: "no one can build the community they dream of until they've had their saturn return. it just isn't possible." i was inclined to believe her then, as our household finances were falling apart and there were insanely childish standoffs over toilet paper and borrowed yoga mats, and i'm inclined to believe her now, as i sit alone in the first week of saturn's return surrounded by 10 piles of sorted bill related paperwork.
in the past year or so, my fear has been that maybe building a community, and living communally, never truly mattered to me and that is why it hasn't been part of my life recently. that could be the case, but maybe i should just feel relieved that i have been through and grown out of the flash in the pan communal vision, and i'm now in the process of steadying myself so that i will be able to attain the exact future that i am meant for, whether it be communal or not.
but josh's message filled me with a certain longing. and i am interested to enjoy this current stage of steadying and get my tangible world in order for the next adventure that i know is coming, it has to be coming. i will make it appear. and i would consider returning to omega with this new mindset in the spring, or doing something else to celebrate whatever self emerges after saturn has been integrated.
i guess the short story is that josh's voice motivated me to get up and file my papers and pay some bills and read the nolo book that somebody loaned me about taxes and generally get saturn happening so i can be ready.
