Becalmed

I got back from Scotland over three weeks ago.

When I got back, I learned that the owner of the company where I have been consulting had just sold the company the day before. The new owners saw no value in keeping me around. My last day there was about two weeks ago.

My cough is back. Again.

Last weekend I drove down to Big City to spend a couple of days visiting Mother. I briefly mention the story here.

I have kept posting once a week on the professional blog I keep under my real name.

I have a phone call once a week with Marie, and another (on a different day) with Debbie. I join a Zoom call for Sangha once a week, as well.

But for the most part I have no obligations to anyone, and nothing that I especially need to do. Let me say that again, for clarity.

There.  Is.  Nothing.  I.  Need.  To.  Do.

The technical term for this condition is freedom. Nobody ever bothers to tell you that it sucks.

Learning the lessons of freedom

A year ago—or gosh, it's been longer than that—I wrote a post about how numerology calculates your "birth number." According to John Michael Greer (magician, occultist, and former archdruid), this number "represents the fixed framework of your personality and your life, and it sums up the things about you that won’t change no matter what. It defines the lesson you have come into this incarnation to learn." 

At the time I explained that Brother has a birth number of 4 ("the challenge you face in this incarnation is to learn self-discipline and build solid foundations") and I have 22 (basically the same as 4 but with a rich inner life).

Wife and Marie are both 8's ("the challenge this incarnation sets before you is that of worldly accomplishment"). Son 1 and Son 2 are both 6's ("the challenge you face in this incarnation is learning how to accept responsibility for others").

But I wasn't quite sure what to make of Mother. Her birth number comes out to 5, an unstable number about which Greer says "you are impatient with routine …. you do unexpected things and are constantly heading for new places, and when you get into trouble – which happens fairly often! – you are good at finding a way out." But when I look at her today (in her 80's, admittedly) she is a respected professional in a field that demands a certain level of routine; her recent travel has all been to visit her siblings and their families; and when Father was acting so fecklessly as a businessman, she kept things grounded and running. Somehow none of this fits well with the almost-chaotic temperament I just described.

The patron saint of adultery?

OK, one more, but this one is just for fun. I wonder if I have identified the patron saint of adultery?

Of course I don't really think so. Adultery is understood to be a sin, and all that … or at any rate that's true in any form of Christianity that also recognizes patron saints.

But when Debbie and I were in Glasgow, on Day 12, we visited St. Mungo's Cathedral—the big Glasgow cathedral. And along with all the other sights, we got the life of St. Mungo, also often called St. Kentigern. (Apparently he was named Kentigern, but Mungo was a nickname.)

Moving on?

It's the middle of June, and maybe I can finally wrap up this series of back-dated reflections on my trip to Scotland. One of the things that I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about (while there) was, What comes next?

In my account of Day 0, I told you that I had done a Tarot reading for the trip as a whole the week before we left. I had done that only once before, back in the middle of February, when I drew: the World reversed, the Star, and the 8 of Cups. At the time, I read those as follows:

• World reversed: You're not really going to be prepared for this trip. (This turned out to be true!)
• Star: The trip itself is going to be inspiring. (Also true!)
• 8 of Cups: After the trip, you'll be moving on somehow.

I didn't know what to make of that last one, so I spent some of my unoccupied time in Scotland mulling it. And I made a few notes. Some of these follow below (after the jump break).

DIGRESSION: In retrospect, that was the wrong way to read the 8 of Cups in that context. That card can also mean "withdrawal," and I think it's safe to say that in the month and a half since coming home I have withdrawn from the world pretty thoroughly: see here, here, and here. But of course I didn't know that then.

Drinking with Debbie

I'm writing this in the middle of June, but I've backdated it to May because it's another one of my posts about thinking through the outcome of my trip to Scotland with Debbie. Ironically, last night I wrote this post here, about drinking. So tonight I'm writing another about the same topic? Sure, hell, why not?

When Debbie and I first got together back in 2013, one of the few hard disagreements we encountered was over alcohol. I remember walking past a city park with her one evening, trying to suggest that alcohol could have a place in a well-managed life as long as you didn't let it take over. Since Debbie was a nurse [still is, I guess], I compared alcohol to a medical anesthetic: you don't want to abuse either one, but each one has its place. Anesthetic allows you to undergo the pain of a medical procedure placidly; alcohol can take the rough edges off your day and let you see the world in a more graceful light. But Debbie was resolute: she had watched her parents get drunk and then beat on each other, and so she didn't see any redeeming benefits in it. (See for example her references to this behavior here and especially here.)

Challenges to modesty

One of the recurring challenges that Debbie and I faced while in Scotland was the simple one of modesty. As I mentioned before, of course we have seen each other naked in the past—it's sort of inevitable when you fuck—but that was a long time ago. We have managed to avoid nakedness in each other's presence during any of my other visits, and of course I had promised Marie "no sex and no quasi-sexual activity." Avoiding nakedness is clearly an important part of that.

On the other hand we shared a room in every single hotel we stayed at.  Mostly, each room had an attached bathroom. (You may recall that when we stayed at The Drovers Inn, in Inverarnan, the bathroom was a shared one down the hall, like in a dormitory.) But one way or another, modesty turned out to be … well, … not altogether easy to maintain.

We started simply enough, by changing clothes in the bathroom. (Or if one of us ducked into the bathroom to change, the other might take advantage of the momentary privacy to change at the same time. I did that several times.) Each of us had brought a set of pajamas to wear to bed. I wore mine over top of a T-shirt and a pair of boxers. So I was well clothed for sleep as well as for daylight. I did not look closely enough to establish what Debbie wore under her nightclothes. 

This system worked, as I've said before, up till Day 4, when we arrived at Inverarnan and the bathroom was down the hall. Since it was distinctly inconvenient to retire to the bathroom to change, we just changed clothes in the same room together and made a point of each turning to look at the wall while we were doing so. I finished a moment before she did and was in the process of turning back when I caught a glimpse of her bare back with no bra-strap across it; so I turned back to the wall for another minute until she had pulled on a shirt.

So far, so good.

Debbie and the paranormal

Something else came up during our long conversation over dinner in Balmaha, the night of Day 2. But it didn't really fit in either of my previous accounts of that dinner, neither here nor here.

I already mentioned that I introduced the concept of reincarnation as a metaphor to explain something about how our relationship felt to me. But this also led to a fascinating digression as Debbie started to tell me some stories. As a girl, she had studied Russian in high school. (This was before she traveled to work in the Soviet Union, and long before she married her first husband, who was Russian.) Anyway, while she was learning Russian she would have dreams of herself as a nanny in a Russian household. Then she would wake up with words she hadn't studied yet; and when she took them in to her teacher, sure enough they were correct Russian words meaning just what they had meant in the dream.

Then we talked about other times she had had some kind of extra-sensory knowledge. Once, long after she had stopped any communication with her first boyfriend, she woke up in the middle of the night knowing she just had to call him. So she did, and he told her his father had just had a heart attack. 

More recently, sometime back in 2016 when she and I were communicating only very little, she wrote me an email saying that she thought I had a new girlfriend. (This was of course Marie.) Actually, I told her this story because she didn't remember it. But when I reminded her, she said she was very glad I had Marie in my life.

Just a couple of little notes that I wanted to make sure to tell you about, and they didn't fit in either of the other posts.

          

Hosea and Debbie go to Scotland

So, … how did the relationship fare, between us, while we were together in Scotland for two weeks? The short answer is, I think it was fine. On the one hand, we didn't fight. In the other direction, we didn't fuck. We kissed occasionally, but always with closed mouths. All the guidelines that I promised Marie we would observe, we observed.

But if you want the full flavor of the trip, … maybe I need to talk just a little longer to describe it.

Doing nothing

NOTE: I'm writing this on June 1, but I'm posting it on May 1, just after the West Highland Way narratives. These are some notes that I originally jotted during one of the long delays in my travel as described here.

In my post about flying to Scotland, at one point I talk about getting to the airport and "do[ing] Airport things." What are "Airport things?" What is the experience of air travel?