Recently I found myself dealing with a confluence of events, forgotten memories and powerful emotions. I had said in an email that may or may not ever get read by the recipient (long, long story there) that it felt like the “gods were having a go at me.” I was dealing with psychic pain starting on Thursday (which I also realized coincided with mercury retrograde AND a powerful full moon). Man, this was a doozy.

It started out with receiving legal documents at 8:30 in the morning notifying that a credit card company had gone to the trouble of hiring a law firm to try to collect a paltry debt amount. It flung me into a feeling of intense helplessness–of feeling like I had been psychologically mugged. Then I did I made the mistake of talking to a family member with whom I have an exceedingly, traumatic history with–not a wise move on my part. This flung me into what felt subjectively like a state of chaos. And the chronic health stuff (that I hope gets sorted out soon). It was too much and also feeling a lot of grief over the Queen’s death (this hit me really hard that day).

A week prior, I had taken a bad fall coming out of an acupuncture clinic–ironic because the acupuncturist had commented on how good I seemed to be doing and then BLAM! I had hit the sidewalk like a ton of bricks and wound up with multiple injuries (which are now better), but being superstitious, I somehow didn’t feel like returning to the clinic (maybe my feelings will change but I’ll probably going somewhere else). I think I also had the feeling that day and the day after the fall that I had been sucker punched by the universe.

It’s been a rough week, but everything ebbs and flows–I know that it will get better and that at some point something else will happen. Maybe being alive means that you become accustomed to dealing with chaos, but these days, it really feels like the “center will not hold” and it feels like all you can do (from a Zen perspective especially) is to embrace the chaos–that is, the anthropogenic chaos that is all-pervaisve.

The truth is that we’ve all been traumatized throughout our lives, some in similar ways, and some in different ways, and that trauma now exists against the backdrop of a pandemic. Never did I think I’d ever deal with something like this in my lifetime, but let’s face it: Humanity has always seen cycles of chaos and destruction but never before has humanity gotten this close to destroying its collective home, our lovely planet.