Eight months ago I quit working a job that crushed my spirit so much that it had made me doubt my own personhood, my own worth, and had made me think i was going to be forever trapped in a cycle of Monday thru Friday greydom with too-short weekends that were spent blitzed out of my mind with the impending dread of another Monday spent compromising my ethics, sitting through pointless beginning-of-the-week meetings, and trying to catch up on all the other work that i had slacked off on the week before because, inevitably, by Wednesday, i had turned off my brain and not done any work for the remainder of the week.
I hated that job so fucking much.
I spent everyday looking at grad programs at schools across the country, potential other jobs that i could work where i wouldn't feel so compromised, and wondering what i was supposed to be doing in my life because, fuck, i was in my late 20's and aren't you supposed to know by then? What weirdly specific or technical thing would i spend two years in a master's program studying, so that i could prove to someone, anyone, that i was worthy of a paycheck? Whose political whims would I cater to?
I quit. I quit in January. I wandered dizzily through the rest of the winter, feeling a reality outside of a cubicle. Then the spring equinox turned, and my head cleared a little (just a little) and I peered around the corner to summer.
What awaited me in the summer season?
Summer smacked me hard, humbled me, and quietly shut my bedroom door while I sat naked in the bed and cried for hours at a time. Summer made me its pale, weak little bitch. Summer brought me to my knees and told me I was never going to be able to pull my feet out of its sticky, humid swamps. Summer silenced my voice, convinced me I was worthless. Summer asked me for my plan, where is your plan? You don’t have a plan, summer said. And I believed her. And I drank another glass of whisky and pulled the covers over my head.
The blue moon showed her face on August 31st. She made me bleed and she made me cry, and I wasn’t sure what was happening but I could feel a change in the wet gulf breeze. But I didn’t respond. I just turned my face and drunkenly tiptoed back to bed as the buzz of the crowd faded into the background.
A shift in the universal energy flow began to bend toward me on the 17th of September. A poke. A prod. A homebrewed sign. And on the 19th, an insistent tap-tap-tapping on my shoulder happened in the palmettos and pirates and politics. And then on the 21st, plants began to rear their heads toward me and say my name. And then the equinox turned on the 22nd, and my voice returned. Softly -- But it returned. Summer had passed, summer no longer existed. It could no longer taunt me because the planets said it couldn’t.
The harvest moon reached its fullest point on September 29th. I spent five days in a state of chaotic leafy mess, for a timespan of the two days before, the day of, and the two days after the harvest moon. My ears buzzed. My eyes burned. Love was confessed. Souls were bared. Energies were shifted, separated, reunited. Blood that had begun to flow before the Blue Moon filled continued to flow through the madness of the Harvest Moon.
The wet gulf breeze brushed my face again on the night before the harvest moon, but this time it whispered in my ear, too. An indiscernible message. But I rubbed my eyes, opened them a little wider, and then pushed my covers down a little further so that the whispers weren’t so muffled.
The morning of October 8th met me with tea-induced deja vu, and I extended my hand and received. I offered myself back into the folding flows of space and time and my left foot followed my right foot out of the soggy swamps and into the crisp, papery leaves.
Today, I stopped bleeding after a month and a half. Summer has passed. The blue moon has passed. The equinox has turned. The harvest moon has tugged me and re-directed my gaze to a sense of purpose, to a sense of the circular, to a sense of belonging and desire and vegetables and com-mune.
And for the first time, for the first time in my existence, I suddenly don’t need to prove. I don’t need to prove to you *why* I exist. I don’t need your paper, your degree, your job, your career. I know precisely why I am here, and it is not to earn another piece of paper that costs thousands of dollars. It is not to work at a job that someone else tells me is a “good job.” It is not to work my way through the ranks by the ruthless pursuance of higher education or the riding of dicks. It is not to play into this system of dis-ease and capital and concrete that money-mongers have convinced us that we must play into.
I exist. That is enough.
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"Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand - relax.
If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there.
If you relax, you start vibrating with it.”
- Osho |
