Tag: Healing

Chapter Fifty-Two – 3 of Swords

by Jamieson Wolf, posted in A Tarot Guide, Memoir, Someone Else’s Life, Tarot

When I arrived at Francis’ office, he wasn’t there.

He always waited for me to leave work. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t be at work. I found a payphone and called his number, but no one picked up. I called Stacey and Max’s number and Stacey picked up almost right away.

“Stacey, is something wrong? I went to meet Francis at the office, and he wasn’t there.”

She took in a deep breath. “Oh, Jamieson. Francis is here.”

“He’s at home?” I was shocked. I couldn’t comprehend why he would have gone home without me. My mind knew that we always went home together.

“You better come here, Jamieson.” She let out another long breath. “You aren’t going to like what he has to say to you. I’m sorry, Jamieson, I really am.”

I hung up and hopped on the first bus I knew that would take me to Francis’ apartment building. I sat on the bus clutching my backpack and holding tightly to it. I didn’t like the worry that I heard in her voice and the sad tone that Stacey spoke to me with. It was as if something terrible had happened or someone had died. If I closed my eyes, I could hear her voice in my mind, and it was almost like a warning of sorts.

I tried to think of what she could have been warning me against. Was Francis okay? Why hadn’t he waited for me at his work? Was he sick? The ride on the bus took forever and no time at all. Time ceased to matter while I was the bus. My book, journal and my tarot cards were in my bag, but I didn’t pull any of them out. I knew that none of them would bring me comfort until I spoke to Francis and I could feel his arms around me. I sat there on the bus knowing that everything would be okay if I could hear his voice, if I could feel his lips against mine.

By the time I got to his building and got off the bus, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was on a death march. I was filled to the brim with worry. When I reached the building, I ran into the lobby and keyed his buzzer number into the voice box. I expected to hear his voice welcoming or saying hello like he normally did, but there was only the sound of silence to greet me before the loud buzz telling me that the front door was open. I didn’t bother with the elevator but took the stairs to the apartment. I knew the stairwell was closer to the apartment door and I wouldn’t have to walk down the hallway.

With each step, the worry filled my mind until it was all that I could see. I pictured Francis sick on his bed or injured and waiting on the couch for me. I could think of no other reason for him not to wait for me. He must have been hurt. It was the only explanation that made sense. When I got to the right floor, I left the stairwell and there was his apartment door. I raised my hand to knock on the wood, but the door opened before I could knock.

Francis stood there.

He looked horrible as if he had been crying for a long time and I went to kiss him, but he backed away from me. He held up his hand in the universal gesture of stop and I did. I looked at him and I could see the seas that had been calm before were now a wild storm. The water lashed against his eyes.

“You’re only six years older than my son.” He said softly. Francis looked like he was struggling to get the words out.

“I know that already,” I told him and went to move inside the apartment, knowing that everything would be all right if I could just hold him and tell him that everything was going to be okay. That we would get through whatever was wrong together.

He held up his hand again and actually pushed me softly back from him. “No,” he said. “You’re only six years older than my son.” He said again. “I’m going to be sixty-one when you’re just about to turn forty. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t ruin your life.”

Something clicked in my brain, and I finally realized what was happening. “Francis, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be what you want me to be.”

My chest hurt and I wondered if my heart would stop. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t draw breath, I was shattering but I was still standing in front of the man I loved with all my heart, and all he did he still had his hand up, like a talisman, holding me apart from him.  “I don’t want you to be anyone else but you,” I told him, hating that my voice was breaking. I watched my words fall to the carpet at his feet, unable to reach him. “I love you with everything I have.”

“I can’t do this,” he said again. The words came out roughly and I felt like he had slapped me.

“Can’t we go inside and talk?” I asked, sure that he would let me in, that I could hold him and comfort him, positive that all I needed to do was talk to him. I didn’t realize that his mind had already been made up.

“I don’t love you,” he said. “I’m not sure I ever did. I think I was in love with the idea of you.” He didn’t say anything for a moment and in that silence, my heart broke into pieces, shattering like a glass window into so many pieces. I could hear them clattering to the bottoms of my feet, the jagged edges cutting into me and making me bleed all the way down. It was like the floor rose up to hold me and at the same time, the lights above me were incredibly bright, so bright that I couldn’t see.

“I love you,” I said. I realized then that I was crying, that tears were streaming down my face. “I love you, Francis. I love you with all my heart.”

He nodded and it looked as if my words hurt him. I could see the pain slash across his face. “But I don’t love you. Don’t make this difficult, Jamieson. For both our sakes, please.”

I nodded, unsure how to find my voice, feeling as if I were falling and flying at the same time, unable to get the world to stop moving and stay still. I stared at him, unsure of who this man was anymore. Had I loved someone but never knew them?

I nodded again, pulled my coat around me. “Okay,” I said. “Okay, I love you, okay. Okay, I love you.”

I turned away from him because I knew that the more I looked at him, the more I believed that our love could survive anything and I knew that it was no longer there, he had put the wall between us. “Okay,” I said again.

I went to the stairwell door and looked back at him. He was looking at me, but he didn’t see me anymore. “Bye.” I said, trying to fill that one word with everything I wanted to say but he didn’t want to hear.

I went down the stairs and out the side door. It had grown dark, and it was raining when I stepped outside. I stood there in the rain, letting it wash over me for a moment, before I started walking towards the bus stop. I was almost there when I heard my name behind me. I turned, my heart in my throat, expecting to see Francis racing after me, but it was Max. She was carrying an umbrella. “Jamieson, here. Get under here. Are you okay?”

I nodded my head but when the tears started again, I shook it from side to side. “I don’t know.”

“That was a shitty thing.” She said. “A really shitty thing he did to you. I told him not to do it that way. He’s such an asshole.”

I almost went to his defence even then. I almost told her that Francis wasn’t an asshole, but I couldn’t do it. I just nodded because I couldn’t find the words.

“Are you going to be okay?” She asked.

I nodded robotically. “Okay.” I said. “I will be okay.”

She hugged me tightly and when she pulled away, she gave me her umbrella. “Here, you need this more than I do, you have further to go home.”

More tears started. I felt like I was walking away from the home where I had been the happiest. Where Francis and I had been building some kind of life together. “Okay,” I said. “Thank you,”

I walked to the bus stop then and looked into the distance. I could see my bus coming. Getting onto the bus, all I could hear was the sound of rain and the rest of my heart falling away from me. I took comfort from the pain I felt because it meant I was still alive.

As the bus took me back to Lisa’s, I let the tears fall and they mirrored the rain falling outside of the bus. I turned to look out the window and could see my face, pale against the glass. It looked like I had become water, and I wondered if the water would take away the pain that was running through me. Finally, I embraced it because I felt like I deserved it. As the bus moved onward, taking me away from the man I loved, I knew that I was leaving a part of myself behind. I looked at the roadside and could see the jagged pieces of my heart littering the road like rubies in the dark.

Chapter Forty-Eight – Queen of Cups

by Jamieson Wolf, posted in A Tarot Guide, Finding Balance, Memoir, Personal Growth, Someone Else’s Life, Tarot

There were always people at Lisa’s house.

One of Lisa’s friends was a woman named Darnelle. She had dark hair and a quick wit. She had been the one to introduce Paganism to Lisa and she seemed to resent Lisa for how little respect she showed the Magick. When she was in the house, I knew that I was in the presence of an elder and she made sure to let everyone know that.

“You can’t conduct a ceremony without calling the quarters,”

“Says who?”

“Says the way it’s always been done. You must respect tradition.” Darnelle would say.

“I want to make new traditions,” Lisa would respond.

They had this argument often and it got to the point where I could follow it like a tennis match. “But you have to respect the Gods,” Darnelle would respond.

“What do you think I’m trying to do? The whole ritual is to honour them.”

I didn’t understand the push and pull between them. To me, Magick and Paganism made a lot of things possible because it was so open. There was no right way to find your light. This is what all the people I knew in the community had taught me. They were all Pagan, but how each person had gotten to this point was different, just as their journeys were not the same.

I thought of my own journey that had brought me here and I knew that each step I had taken had been one of choice. Paganism existed in a place beyond choice. It simply was, shaped by a person’s ideals and what they believed. Their spirit told them what kind of things they needed. The fact that Darnelle always insisted that her way was the right way grated a little.

Yet she could be incredibly kind. She would stock Lisa’s fridge and cupboards without asking, showing up with bags of groceries. There were quite a few people living in Lisa’s apartment and all of us were on welfare. Money was thin, and the extra food was always a blessing.  She always had a spare cigarette for me, and I loved Darnelle despite her rigid stance on how the occult should be practiced.

I ended up going to see Darnelle on my own and would travel to her place to see her. My mother had walked away from me, so Darnelle became a kind of stand in for my mom. She had two children of her own and they were in and out of Darnelle’s house often. Even though Darnelle had a rigid sense of what was right and wrong in magic, she was keen to help me develop mine.

“I know you’re a warrior witch right now, but what path are you going to take when the need to fight is gone?” She motioned at me with a cigarette between two fingers. “Warrior magic is strong, but it can wear a person out. You don’t want to be guns blazing all the time.”

“I am strong.” I told her. I looked into her eyes, dark like a cave that invites you in but hides so many wonders not ever seen before.

 I took offense to the idea that she would find me weak. I wanted and needed to prove myself to her. Darnelle had this way of seeing what a person carried within them without them having to tell her anything. It was like she could see right into you and would judge you based on how strongly the rivers flowed within.

She lit another cigarette and looked at me through the smoke. “I never said you weren’t. But aren’t you tired of being strong all the fucking time? I told you that you can’t keep going at that rate, you’ll fucking burn out. Do you think I want that for you?”

I lit my own cigarette and took my time to respond. Darnelle demanded respect. You could speak your mind, but she demanded I take the time to respond and not lash out. She always wanted me to think of what I really wanted to say, what the heart of the matter was. “If I’m not a warrior, what am I?”

She shook her head. “No, you misunderstand me. You will always be a warrior, but practicing warrior Magick all the time will tap you out. Look at what it does to Lisa. She lets it be the excuse for her ignorance, uses it to be the reason for her rudeness.” Tapping her cigarette in the ashtray she left it there to smoke while she got up to put the kettle on. Taking out two earthenware mugs, she popped to orange pekoe bags into them and then came back for her cigarette. “No, you can’t be a warrior all the time. You’ve had to fight so much. You don’t have to be a warrior all the time.”

“I don’t know how to do anything else but fight.” I told her.

“Well, then maybe it’s time you look at magic that will help heal you instead of magic that will aid you for battle, hm?”

I watched as she put out her cigarette and went back to her kitchen to get the mugs of tea. I wondered about the idea of actually loving myself and letting myself heal from the scars that I carried not just on my skin, but also within me.

I added some milk and sugar to the tea, and we held up our mugs. “To healing,” Darnelle said.

When we clinked our mugs together, I imagined that I could hear the sound of bells over the whisper of the waves. I tried to listen to what the waves within me were saying and took a sip of my tea.

Chapter Forty-Four – 9 of Cups

by Jamieson Wolf, posted in A Tarot Guide, Finding Balance, Memoir, Someone Else’s Life, Tarot

I looked around myself a lot.

I was always trying to find my place in the world. I finally felt like I had a family of a sort made up of both people I knew from the streets and the Pagan community. My life had gone from having no one to being abundant with people I considered family of the heart.

I was so used to hiding who I was. However,  since I had ended up on the streets, I had met so many people that welcomed me as one of their own. I still found it odd to realize that I knew so many people that wanted to know me. I carried a lot of self-hatred, both from my childhood and there was a small part of me that wondered who would want me?

It turned out that a lot of people did. Sophie had weekly dinners for a bunch of her Pagan friends. We would bring ourselves and meet at her house in Lebreton Flats. It would be a gathering of like minds and kindred spirits. The people gathered in Sophie’s living room changed every once in a while, depending on who was dating who, or who was visiting from out of town. but the core group of us stayed the same. There was Sophie and her boyfriend James, Lisa, Jen. The people I knew were joined by Franny and her boyfriend Michel with Janice and Kyle to round out the group. I was a little shy around the people I didn’t know, but they soon became fast friends.

We would eat potluck style with each of us bringing something different the dinner and we would sit and play games or delve into magic by creating spells or doing rituals. It was the magic that brought us together on a deeper level as you must open yourself up wide to be ready for magic and it brings people closer together. I often wondered if the thrum of magic was something visible, the air would be filled with rainbows and shadow.

I went through a lot of different emotions when I was among these people. There was sadness if someone was going through something difficult and we had to band together to lift the other persons spirits, especially if it meant that one of our group would be leaving us. The people changed over time, but the core group of us remained the same.

I was reminded of the people that I had met on the streets and the kind of family those people had been to me. Looking around the room at these people, I could not deny that I had been lucky enough to find another kind of family and I knew how lucky I was to have these kinds of people around me.

Sitting in amongst a gathering of Druids, Wiccans, Pagans and otherwise, I thought about how my street family may have given me back my body and my Pagan family had given me back my spirit. These people hadn’t known me but had accepted me because they saw my spirit and accepted me completely. The streets may have taught me to protect myself, but this world taught me to be free. It was a juxtaposition that I was still having trouble accepting. However, whenever I felt like I had lost my place, all I had to do was come home to myself and the emotions that my body held.

The people around me were full of emotions and over time, the people that shared in food, joy, sorrow and laughter showed me that I didn’t have to be emotionally cut off. There didn’t need to keep a wall between myself and the emotions that I had been taught to bury down deep within me. I knew that if I didn’t let them out, they would rupture within me. The Pagan community were full of light. There were a few bad apples, you’ll find that in any bunch of people, but everyone was completely open with their emotions. They showed me that while I had to practice ward and sigils to keep myself safe, I was free to share my true emotions with them.

It was an odd experience. I was so closed off from people before and I was being asked to be open. My life was abundant with the people that surrounded me, and the core group of people had my back. I knew that I could be completely myself with these people and it was frightening and wonderful all at once.

I had spent my entire life so far having to keep so much of myself hidden from my parents, family and friends. I couldn’t talk about my disability, the abusive home that I had survived, my sexuality or my gender. There was much that was off limits for me to be able to form lasting relationships with other people and it was exhausting.

Looking around at the people that surrounded me, at Sophie, Lisa, Jen, James, Franny, Michel with Janice and Kyle. We were an odd sort of family, but we were a chosen family together. My life was abundant with so many emotions and that was okay. I didn’t have to hide anything anymore.

Especially from myself. I didn’t want to hold on to so many unnamed emotions. When I got back to Lisa’s that evening, I filled a cup full of water and then wrote the emotions I had been holding onto for so long. I wrote quickly listing off everything I could think of. I wrote about my anger, my self-hatred, my fear of being who I truly was and being completely myself. I filled both sided of the small piece of paper and dunked it in the water.

I watched as the water smudged the ink and softened the paper, making if soft. I swirled the paper until all of it was completely wet. I took the paper out of the water and began to shred  the paper into lots of little pieces until the cup of water looked as if it held wet snow. If I looked into the cup, I could see the letters that had been the words of my emotions, their ink fading even as I looked at them as the water continued to soak into the paper.

Standing, I walked off the back porch towards the edge of the garden. I poured the entire cup of water and paper into the dirt. I watched as the paper settled into the soil and if I tried to spell words with the letters I could see. With each word I spelled, I was making that negative emotion into something else.

I was letting go of the past and finally looking towards the future instead of merely living day by day. I wanted to dream of something more.

Looking down at the letters in the dirt in front of me, I tried to find a word so that I could divine what awaited me in the future.

Chapter Twenty-Five – 4 of Wands

by Jamieson Wolf, posted in A Tarot Guide, Finding Balance, Memoir

The idea of having my own home was still odd to me.

I had to share the washroom with four other men, but my room was mine and no one could take that from me. My meagre amount of clothes barely filled the dresser, but they weren’t in my bag or on the floor. I had my notebook on my desk, and I had alarm clock on the ledge of the window so that it was close by.

It was a comfort to have somewhere of my own to go home to. My childhood home had been filled with love when it could be found, but it tended to hide a lot. There was no love that could stand in the face of violence. Other homes held expectations that had cut off my air and forced me to be someone that I wasn’t. I was disabled and gay and I didn’t fit in.  I was reminded of this so often in various ways, most of them cruel. I tried to take my own life rather than live in a world that would try to take my light.

Home was not a word of comfort for me.

It took having my own room, four walls that provided safety, to realize that home had to start with myself. I had to be at home within myself. Only then could I carry the feeling of home wherever I went. This room wasn’t the ideal home, but it was mime. It was somewhere I could lay my head, somewhere I could read and a place where I could heal.

When the thinking got to be too much, when the four walls became too enclosing, I went looking for those that I loved who felt like home to me. I thought of these people as kindred souls, the ones that helped to keep the flame burning on the candle within shining bright. I found myself drawn more and more to Lisa’s place. It often felt more like home than my room. There were always people dropping by to visit with Lisa. They were from the Pagan community like Sophie and Jess, and they were so open and welcoming. If I had a question about Paganism, something I was struggling to understand, they helped me.

I started going to the Pagan brunches every Sunday at the James Street Feed Co. Everyone shone. I was surprised at how much I felt at home with these people. They were so warm. Almost all of them hugged me close as if they had known me for years when we may have only just met. The Pagans that Lee introduced me to were some of the most beautiful people that I had met. Their light made them beautiful.

They seemed to come from everywhere and from all walks of life. Some of them worked for the government, some were social workers and private care workers, others were artists and poets, dancers and singers. The people that I met at the Pagan brunches didn’t fit any kind of category. They were all completely themselves and seemed to defy categorization. There were Wiccans, Druids, Bards and all manner of different kinds of Pagan. Instead of turning a blind eye or a judgemental one towards what they didn’t think fit in, the Pagan brunches welcomed everyone.

Everyone was home within the tree of life that Paganism offered.

After I attended a few more brunches, I felt more at home with these people that had welcomed me as much as I welcomed them. Much as I had felt at home on the streets, or in my one room, I felt at home here. I got to know more of the people and it felt like I was getting to know myself the further I let myself delve into Paganism. It was a revelation.

I found myself reading more about gods and monsters and the different paths of Paganism. I was gradually finding my way through it all and I had finally found the comfort home within a faith and spirituality that would finally have me just as I am without having to change who or what I was.

Just as I had a physical home in my room for my body, my mind and spirit had found a home, too.