Small Serendipities in Turbulent Times

The past few days have been somewhat of a whirlwind. Late on Thursday afternoon, I had an MRI with dye, and on Saturday, I was traveling to a conference. It takes 24-48 hours for the dye to clear one’s system, so I was still having a few of the milder dye symptoms while traveling there — mostly fatigue. On the way up, I listened to Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan, an epic poem that follows several generations of a Sámi family from the early 1900s to the present that was recently translated into English. The rest of that evening involved me poring over Google Maps, checking in at the conference and at the dorm where I was staying, setting up my shrine space in the dorm, realizing that I had forgotten Tylenol, heading to a reception, and going back. Someone commented only that there had been gunshots heard at a Trump rally. I assumed that it was fireworks because people still set those off in the weeks after July 4, and they can sometimes sound a bit unnerving when they echo off of nearby buildings. I’m not sure how many of us knew what had happened until Sunday, and even then, it rarely came up during casual chatter between sessions. It was too heavy.

At some point, I connected with someone paganish who (I think, based on a later conversation) thought I was rather bold for wearing devotional jewelry in a work setting. This is the first time that anyone has connected the dots with my jewelry choices, and I am pleased. We ended our conversation abruptly when a few more colleagues came in. That evening, I met the suitemate who had been missing for the entire time in the dorm. She was having asthma symptoms because she had come from an area with wildfire smoke and had had to work an outdoor event. Another suitemate put a massive number of ginger chews on the kitchen counter for her benefit and left them there even after the suitemate finished selecting a few. I did a long compassion meditation that night because I sensed that it was necessary.

The next day, between sessions, we had a bit of downtime. A few colleagues and I carpooled to Nantucket to visit one of the Gilded Age mansions. In the spirit of documenting cultural reception, I noticed — and my gaze lingered on — every Greek and Roman deity carved and painted and mosaiced into the ostentatiously busy and whitespace-free rooms. (There were only eight muses depicted in the Morning Room. This really bothered me. I think Polymnia was the one missing. There’s a metaphor somewhere in there.) I knew when we left that I was about to get a hormonal migraine and that it was my last chance to take a single Tylenol pill that I did not have to stop it before it started, so I enjoyed my final few migraine-free hours feeling the sea breeze and enjoying time with other people.

That evening, we had a conference meal. They’d been decent at food accommodations, and the college was in the middle of nowhere, so I ate some of the food. Halfway through the meal, I started to feel strange, and it wasn’t just the increasingly awful pounding on the right side of my head. I stopped eating despite being ravenous (as I’d had a bag of chips and some gelato for lunch) and went back to the dorm room. The massive pile of ginger chews were still there even though the person who had left them had needed to depart the conference early. I ate ten(ish?) of them. I was nauseous and having GI issues, and I am guessing that I was mildly glutened by a spice blend or sauce thickener that the caterers hadn’t checked. I was standing in the dark with my forearms on the doorjamb and my head on my forearms with closed eyes deep breathing in between dealing with the GI things, trying not to throw up. The migraine started improving, at least.

My mind kept going back to when I was sevenish, a year or two before my family went to paganism. I distinctly remember having GI issues at that age and praying to a higher power and feeling like my prayers were ignored, as the pain was so intense. It was a big contrast to having everything line up so that even something so painful could be blunted by the presence of the ginger chews. It was deeply comforting to know that the Gods were here helping me, even when my absentminded packing had omitted something I had known I would need right as my period was ending. It’s that same certainty of the Gods being there for me that I ground myself in during uncertain times like these, at the cusp of America slipping into a theocracy. Many people believe, for very evidence-based reasons, that bad things would happen to us if hardline evangelicals were no longer held back by us having equal First Amendment rights. I agree, but we’re not going to do Late Antiquity again. We need to be grounded, and we must cultivate prudent courage.

Sometimes, I think back to something someone said on Twitter long ago. They believed that people who were very pious and well-disciplined spiritually could unintentionally make good things happen, a certain luck that is actually just the presence of bright daimons attracted to the soul’s delightful inner garden. Sometimes, I wonder if the reverse is true, too. I know that one’s own mind can turn on itself and eat itself if it is not nourished, and perhaps we can be our own worst enemies spiritually, tainting the luck at times when we definitely need all of the brightness we can muster. It was for this reason that I did the compassion meditation — to breathe nourishment into the dull wood within myself and others. May Alexikakos steady us all.