WhyTheWondrousStrange

I have always had a penchant for that which cannot be explained by logic and hard science. Being quite intuitive myself, I know there is more to life and the world than meets the eye. Having grown up next door to my maternal grandparents, I was instilled with an acceptance of the wondrous strange from an early age.

My Italian grandpa was, I believe, a male witch. Not only was he a walking encyclopedia of natural remedies, having begun his life in southern Colorado as a ranch hand and then later as pick-up truck bed farmer, he grew his vegetables to the rhythms of the moon. I remember sitting across the table from him, as we drank tea, his gnarled knuckles holding the yellow-covered Farmer’s Alamanac as he plotted the next move in his garden. Much of my summers were spent in his garden with him. Watering. Weeding. Cutting vegetables to eat on the spot straight from the plant with his pocket knife. Tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peas. And rhubarb, which my English grandma would wash, cut, and stew into a sticky sweet concoction encased in flaky crust.

Grandma was a gardner, too. Her love, though, was flowers. Her flowers were like her babies. She fed them and watered them, and held their blossoms like delicate, wobbly baby heads in her hands as she talked to them. Grandma was known to talk to things most people do not. She believed in ghosts and swore there was one in her house. And she let me know early on in my life that I had a gift. It became apparent when I was quite young that I knew things. Things no one had ever taught me. And, I learned early on that there was a powerful voice within me. I learned to trust my intuition.

Paradoxically, though, I also learned how to keep secrets and stuff emotional and psychic pain for I grew up in an environment that was a magical conflation of dark and light. There was trauma, yes, and thanks to that fact, I developed a keen awareness of my surroundings early on as is typical of children of trauma. And when I say "thanks," I mean it. As in, grateful for. Were it not for that trauma and for the dark night my soul experienced because of it, I would not be who I am today. I would not be an intuitive. I would not be a healer.

Now, having said that, I offer this: any astrologer who looks at my chart could say this emotional depth and hyper-awareness are courtesy of my being a Cancer with a Scorpio Moon, which is conjunct Neptune, among other aspects.

While trauma may have left a powerful mark on me (for it left me both fragile and ferocious all at once) I also received genuine love and adoration in my growing up years from both of my parents and from my maternal grandparents. And, while I openly acknowledge the dark from my past to create awareness and open dialogue about taboo subjects, it does not deserve the honor as the single most defining factor in who I am. I consider it one item on a list of endless items, most of which are positive, even idyllic.*

What creates our identities is as complex as the celestial, planetary dance in the heavens. Events in our lives, our families, the people we meet and interact with, the culture in which we live all shape who we are (on an on-going basis), as does, I believe, the position of the planets at the time of our birth.

For all these reasons, I have come to care about the human plight to be authentic. I care that there are people who suffer, who are sidelined and ignored because they're not understood. I care that there are those who don't shine due to spiritual pain and cultural limitations.

Having been one who was silenced (and not only from trauma but from being a woman, as well), one with important things to say, a fringe voice with fringe ideas, I want to reach out to others who have been silenced in some way and offer them a space to speak, because when marginalized voices speak, we change the world.

Trauma can leave a person with a sense of not belonging, as can being one who does not fit the mold of cultural norms. If we know we are different, it can be easy to believe we are strange. When I was younger, striving for a solid and socially acceptable identity, I fought my strangeness. Aging is a wonderful thing, though, and in living this life of mine, I have learned to embrace my strangeness, and in doing so I'm able to accept and love the strangeness in others. And when I stop and experience another's strangeness, whether it's through a face-to-face conversation or through someone's writing or art, I see just how wondrous we truly are.

Why the wondrous strange?