For months I have been listening to podcasts and reading things about the idea of soul contracts. This might be a little woo-woo for some, but the more I listen, the more it makes sense to me in so many ways. I’m not here to convince you of it, just saying there is a connection for me, and it has radically reframed the life I have lived.
If I imagine all the hardships I have gone through as lessons I contracted myself to learn, rather than traumas that happened to me, it changes the perspective. I have not yet fully gone back and looked at my life in this manner yet, but the major things have bubbled up.
As you have probably gathered, if you have read this blog for any length of time, both my parents died suddenly within a year of each other. I lived in anger for almost 10 years at being left alone with no guiding wisdom from them, not being able to share joys and heartbreaks, and frankly, it was like having a toddler like grudge against them for 10 years. Let’s just say letting go isn’t my strong suit, but for the most part, the lessons in life that have impacted me the most have been about the power of letting go. By my astrological chart, I am a hoarder of things though this is mostly information, but it has spilled into art supplies and containers. Damn I love containers. It is a place to put all my hoarded information! I digress.
In the last few years, I have identified visits from my dead parents as birds. This is common from my understanding because it is the easiest way to get us to notice them. My father is a red-winged blackbird, my mother a robin. I was walking on my lunch last week at a local park that is an exit away from where I work. It was the one nice day we had in a string of rain soaked weeks. As I walked in the hot sun I started to notice a pattern. A robin would fly across the path in one direction and then a red-winged blackbird in the other. This happened like this for a quarter mile. Not what I would consider a coincidence. It felt purposeful.
On the walk back to the car, I had this sudden realization that I needed to write a chapbook of poetry about my parents from a perspective of the soul contract. I chose them for the lessons I would learn with them, they were two souls that had to somehow cross paths to create a life I would drop into. The poems themselves are not going to be filled with the woo, but the concept will be running in the background like a computer virus. The poems are going to be experimental and concrete when looking at their lives from a higher perspective rather than from having experienced life with them without any context or knowledge of what was going on in the world. My memories of them will be tightly packed, narrow prose poems. Their lives outside of me wild and free, my perception of their lives in tight spaces.
I consider this project to be cathartic. It is giving me an awareness I never had before and I am excited to see where it leads me, what I might learn from it, and how sharing it with the world might influence one to look for the lessons in their life rather than sitting in victimhood.
A few weeks ago, I saw a picture of my friend Beth Anderson working on a beautiful beaded bird. The material looked like cross stitch fabric and it caught my eye. She told me it was a paper that gets placed on a firmer fabric to bead through, but the idea stuck in my mind about how I might try this on the scraps of cross stitch fabric I have lying around…there is a lot. So I used up leftover beads from another project and then stitched around with floss that I felt would go with it. I’m not done but this is how it is going and I am making this for a friend’s wife. I’m not exactly sure what it is cause I was just flowing with the universe when I started it, but I like the feeling of it. I’m excited to try out some more of these.
I built myself an herb drying rack in my mystical office which is where I keep most of my plants, herbs for teas and tonics, and where I write sometimes. It is a glorious space. I am in full swing with gardening at this point. I am working on growing and drying my own herbs and flowers for the things I make so the intention in them is stronger and I love feeling self-sufficient.
The sun is out again today so I am going to go play. It is the first day of Farmer’s Market in my small town and I will be happy to see all those vendors shining faces again. They are such a wonderful part of my life. They are community. It is what we all need these days.
Read. Write. Make funky art. Call your friends. Dance in the sun. Try wearing a smile all day that makes people wonder what you are up to. Be kind. Support the small press and local artists.
Aleathia
Aleathia Drehmer 