I’ve been absent for a bit here at Rx for the Soul®… As sometimes happens home and family has kept me far away from the keyboard… annnnnd you may have noticed- I changed my Instagram and FB handles- a decision brought about by some honest self-reflection on my part…
Rx for the Soul® has been the business name for my spiritual writings for a very long time- but as much as I try to stay ‘business-y’, on most days my makeshift business chariot morphs into a pumpkin of home and family, and I end up hugging the shoulder of the mystical, while I careen down the busy highway of a very ordinary and very domestic life.
This is not a new observation…For as long as I can remember I have been blessed with a very full and a very loud daily life, and the ability to walk in two different worlds.
The ‘full’ part of my life is derived largely from the self-inflicted angst of a creative mind that never stops creating, while my ‘loud’ comes from a symphony comprised of two competing notes…. Motherhood, and Mysticism.
And although the word ‘Mysticism’ is loaded – a quick glance at the standard dictionary definition normalizes it immediately:
mystical | ˈmistək(ə)l | adjective1 relating to mystics • spiritually allegorical or symbolic; transcending human understanding 2 inspiring a sense of spiritual mystery, awe, and fascination • concerned with the soul or the spirit, rather than with material things.
So, the world of the mystic is not as far from everyday life as we have been led to believe- and there are A LOT of us Everyday Mystics out there hugging the shoulder while we make our way down the freeway ?
I am someone who happens to think we are all born with not just an IQ, but an MQ (Mystical Quotient) too, and I don’t think anyone who knows me well would argue the fact that my MQ has always been higher than my IQ (…and to that I say, so what? ?)
That MQ has always been my North Star so to speak- the thing that draws me forward into the world and gives me purpose…but on a July morning in 1991 I gave birth to my first child @suttc013 and felt motherhood’s immediate gravitational pull on my world. I welcomed @thestyledseed in 1992, and our caboose child @a_roskoski in 2007. (I have birthed a little constellation!!) — All parental pride and humor aside, dividing myself between this North Star of Mysticism and the intoxicating glow of this Constellation of Light called Motherhood has been the balancing act of my lifetime.
If I had to describe my life in 150 words or less this would be my essay:
After a very full day in a very loud life, Momma has finished being Momma for the day. She has done her work in the professional world, washed a few dishes, kissed her husband (@rosko2112) and through various means both physical and virtual, made sure her three children are all warm, fed, and safe. As the sun sets and the world grows quiet, Momma gets her Mystic on and gets busy in another realm, rappelling away from this world and into the next, mining earnestly for gems of truth. While she is deep in the esoteric underground of her being…. An asteroid called family life comes crashing through the stratosphere and knocks her mystic hardhat (replete with headlamp) right off her head. The mining excursion ends in a hot minute and the juggling act begins.
This scenario has played over and over in my world- just like that movie ‘Fifty First Dates’…. Yet despite the fact that I do not feel equipped to juggle the motherhood thing and the mystic thing well… both things continue to follow me around each day, the way a hungry dog follows the butcher.
This always felt so hard… and then one day… I finally heard the Public Service Announcement from Fate and Choice. Heck, before this I never even knew there was a PA system in the Universe… I figured it out a few years back during a little family crisis. Said crisis erupted on the very day I was set to release a new book -about mystical things of course. On this day, one of those asteroids of the maternal kind came hurtling from the cosmos and landed front and center in our world. The book release went out the window- eclipsed fully and completely by the demands of motherhood and family life. (That asteroid was sizeable – the book did not re-emerge into the world for another 5 years.)
So, it was on that day, as I was struggling with the ‘why me?’ of it all, that I first heard the Public Service Announcement I had never gotten before:
‘Mysticism was your destiny. Motherhood was your choice.’
I swung my head around to look Fate and Choice square in the eye.
Wait. What?
Again, came the stern rebuttal of Fate and Choice…
‘Mysticism was your destiny. Motherhood was your choice.’
… and as these words settled in….you could have heard a pin drop in my soul.
Revelation is not too dramatic of a word to use here. It felt like two magnets that had spent the better part of the last quarter century of my life opposing one another (with an invisible but absolutely impenetrable resistance between them) had suddenly flipped around and stuck perfectly to one another end to end.
I understood in an instant, that I had woven this cloth that my life felt so tightly wrapped in. I had been destined toward the mystical, it was the very fabric of my being-, but I had chosen to add in the threads of the maternal.
This all made perfect sense.
For 28 years I have been jumping out of the moving vehicle of my spiritual life, so that I can stay in my lane as a mother- in large part because children do not much appreciate having a weird mother- and I get that ?…But these days, my young adult children are not all that impacted by my spiritual shenanigans, and the caboose child- well, turns out he is the most socially sensitive of all three of them and I embarrass him by simply exchanging Oxygen for Co2 in my lungs . . . so I figure if I am cringeworthy (as the caboose likes to say) simply through my lung respirations, why not go for broke and reveal my inner nature on social media with a new declaratory handle like momma_is_a_mystic?! (Could there be any more efficient way to hop out of the spiritual phone booth with my cape on?)
No more expending energy to fly under the spiritual radar….no more keeping it on the down low that everything in my life (even my self-care routine) is infused with a touch of the mystical – (I trade tarot readings for spray tans (@bronzedebeaut), and I tell my hair dresser to be careful with my crown chakra (@mhires14)… and my social life provides no harbor from the esoteric either… if you meet me at a dinner party (@leigh.goddard), I will probably find a way to talk about death and the quandaries of an afterlife … (not because I am morbid – because it is the ultimate ‘something we have in common’ topic, and puts us smack dab in the middle of the greatest mystery in the Universe… and living in The Mystery is where I love to be.
I may be unique, but I know I am not alone… there are a lot of us out there who are trying very hard ‘to do modern life’ the way the world expects us to, …but we also want to grow our souls.
- We want to be able to stay soft while we live deep.
- We want to evolve in our spiritual maturity– while we exercise, eat right, and balance our hormones.
- We may know the future is female, but we also know there is no way forward without respect for, and right use of, both the feminine and the masculine.
Those of us who have tangled the threads of Fate and Choice (like I have) want to mine for the Light when we are able, and throw off our spiritual hardhats when we must.
We need to be reminded…. That we CAN be Everyday Mystics– and get to work on time, be loving partners to a mate, drop a kid to soccer practice, and fold a load of laundry. I have tried for a long time to keep very clean lines between my personal (domestic, maternal, familial) life and my writing life- and of course there has been some bleed through, but in the grand scheme of things, that self-imposed separation has kept me from sharing a lot of the most potent spiritual lessons that the universe has given me.
We shouldn’t have to choose between a deep and interactive spiritual existence and modern life…and we for sure should never have to be alone in silence while we seek balance between our choices and our destinies.
For those of you who know that your daily existence (Parenting, Marriage, Car Pooling, General Adulting etc.) IS your spiritual path- if you want to catch my posts about Everyday Mysticism in real life- watch for graphics framed in hot pink and black. (Those are the ‘Momma is a Mystic colors!) When you see these colors, it means that I am writing about the beautiful mess that is motherhood + mysticism + modern life. Instead of letting my beautiful mess interrupt the business of my writing at Rx for the Soul®- I am just going to give it a seat at the table.
In the meantime, when not slaying domestic dragons, I will be wearing my hardhat and mining for Light- and continuing my quiet conversations with Fate and Choice….