Thank you to Ella Perigrine for connecting me to this Vermeer painting, "The Astronomer", that bears such a striking resemblance to Tom. It has been a year since Tom died unexpectedly on winter solstice 2024 and it has been a year of a myriad of feelings and thoughts on the matter of his exit for me. I have weathered a scope of everything from deep sorrow and confusion to resentment and rage of spiritual abandonment over his death. All the while understanding from the teachin

Diagnosed Mortal #20 This is the last hurrah as I end this series. I reflect upon my experience writing these essays and think aloud about the things I think I will miss in being without a body. So it ends.... Of course I made it through the surgery in flying colors. All mended thanks to the miracle of modern medicine. I was mystified about the things that rose up in me and it makes more sense to me now how I would be examining those things in a much deeper manner since writi

Diagnosed Mortal #19 In this post I reflect on an important turning point in my life. Like a soldier's war story.... I was called up at age 50 and I answered. Astrology has taught me, long after the fact, that I was moved by celestial forces in this story. At around fifty years of age the asteroid Chiron passes over the exact spot it was stationed at a person's birth. The understanding of what Chiron represents lays down a bit of a navigational clue as to how a person would a

Diagnosed Mortal #16 Thoughts about the wandering peoples of the world and what it might mean if everyone is really homeless. When I wrote the essay for this post I was trying to understand what Jenkinson was getting at in our being orphans and homeless....uprooted from our sense of place. I never did quite follow what he was putting down personally in this regard that summer. Reading the essay now, it seems I fell into a kind of romantic hole in my trying to process the po