Two Thursdays ago I had a wallet. A wallet and a zip. A silver card case wallet in a red leather zippered clutch. The card case I've had since my 20s, the zippered clutch only a few years. Both carried cards and cash but mostly they carried me. Everytime I unzipped the one and pulled out the other, I touched leather and metal, clasps and zips that reminded me who I was. This may sound like an overstatement, but truly, the silver case in particular was the Essential Me. Maybe because I've had it so long - that case has seen me through Camden and Europe and through the move back to Vancouver, through first dates and marriage with Scott, through babies and first days of school. Every place I've paid for something over the last 20 years, that case was there with me.
Two Fridays ago, I realized both were gone.
[insert denial, grief, bargaining, anger, acceptance and replacement of all my cards and identification here]
At the bottom of my closet, I found my grandmother's old Birks bag, and in the bottom of that was a coin purse. As I collected new cards and new versions of me, I slid them into this inherited case and tried to make it mean something new.
Wednesday, I lost that one too.
Thursday around 12:34pm the universe whispered gently, Ask Lisa. So I sent this text: "I keep losing things and misplacing things and I want to weep even though I'm not in the Weep Zone of my cycle. What am I not hearing??? I feel like the world is speaking a language I don't know and I'm starting to feel so afraid."
Lisa replied, "I'm going to ceremony tonight. I'll ask. In the meantime, breathe."
So I took breaths and wept a bit and waited a bit more.
Lisa is... complicated. I won't write a biography here, but in addition to the regular old work/family/life things she is, she is also a healer. Somehow, along the way, I became a person who got a friend who loves a Creator and knows magik and hears Truth and speaks healing. I'm pretty sure my teen-aged youth group self prayed against people like her but I think it's possible her Trinity Western grad self would have joined me. Grace and years and goodness have thankfully freed us both.
And now I am healed.
Lisa went to the water's edge and listened for me. Her still-a-child son kept the fire. Earth, Water, Fire, for real.
And as always happens, the words I'd already heard but couldn't understand echoed back and as she gave them to me, one text message at a time, something eased.
Identity. Losing who I am. Becoming someone new. But in the journey between me and me, being pulled away from Actual Me and being tempted to become someone who is not me instead. Someone else who's fears I already know instead of the Me who's fears are new and newly terrifying. I was layering myself in inherited fears about worth and value, about being qualified to be ME. Family stories about secretly being frauds were coats easily layered over top of tender, vulnerable me.
I have just quit my job. I have just decided I will be a Writer. I have just decided I will be a Coach. I have just decided I will do and be the me I have long imagined I could be one day.
I have just taken off my Competent and Paid jacket and feel quite naked and under-dressed. No wonder all those old clothes are so tempting.
Sadly (happily), they are not mine. They will not serve me in this season. But I wasn't listening to the voice that said so, and so I guess the source of that voice starting taking my shit. All the shit that told me who I was kept going missing. And not just my wallets. My phone. My notebook. I kept losing and misplacing and leaving behind all my things.
Three minutes after Lisa's texts arrived, Nate phoned. My latest wallet was on his desk. There are a thousand reasons why Nate having my wallet is it's own poetry but I will save those for another post.
"You have to not want to be afraid. You have to want to occupy your own power, part of which manifests through the fullness of the truth you're seeing."
Fear has been my constant companion for a long time but this next season requires me to not want to be afraid. That means saying no thank you to some of my inheritance; we are an anxious people, the women in my clan. Being anxious meant being In.
But for a season (or several, who can say?), being anxious and afraid is not who I am. The cord was cut by my beloved healer and Me in this season is picking up a different inheritance. That coin purse that is my Second Wallet belonged to my other grandmother; from her and her family I inherited Welcoming Others by Being Youself. The stoop starts in Grandma's backyard. Open-handed ease grew under her apple tree.
And so it begins, this season of ease. There is a lot to be afraid of, but it turns out, fear is not required anymore. I gift my red zip and silver case to the universe, a weird little sacrifice I guess, but I'm not the first human to let go of things to make space for Truth to show up.
A lot can change in two Thursdays. For me, I changed up which inheritance I'm spending. I blew through that first one in 20 years and it brought me all the way here. I am grateful for all of it and for what it afforded me. Who can say how long I can live on this one? It could take years to just remember it's there.
Regardless, there is no doubt there are two grandmothers in Heaven wondering how in the fuck their descendent got healed by a medicine woman down at the riverside via text message. I hope Jesus can explain it all for them.
