The Calm Before The Storm

There was a big Scorpio moon lunchtime yesterday and boy am I feeling the pull of the sucker.

Jonathan Cainer writes: "This weekend brings the biggest, brightest Full Moon for 100 years. Try to take a look at it when it is first rising up over the horizon around sunset. It seems almost unfeasibly close.... and that's at least partially because it is closer than usual. The Moon's journey through the sky causes it to perform a little dance with the Earth where it regularly steps nearer, then further back. It's now as near as it ever gets... and because it happens to be full, that makes it as powerful as ever gets. People are calling it a 'Supermoon' - although you may want to find other names to call it as you begin to notice how much emotion and intensity it is stirring up in your life!"


Yep. Sums it up in one.


Other than a horrid, persistent headache for the lasted a day, one that had had me reaching for the ibuprofen and stronger, life is okay. Just busy. And perplexing. And a bit harsh.


Saturday night I was out babysitting Bernie and Gaz's twin six-year-olds, who were a delight, teaching me about Star Wars, reading to me and going to bed, teeth cleaned, pyjama-ed and toileted without a boo. All that was left for me was to snuggle up with their chiahuahua cross on the couch and doze in front of the "The Shawshank Redemption". Bernie and Gaz found me fast asleep at around midnight, snoring in time with the dog. A great Friday night, no dramas, apart from the near migraine headache.


Woke Saturday morning after a great night's sleep (assisted  by some lovely panadeine forte). A long meditation session, a wonderful breakfast with the meditation crew at my favourite Caulfield eatery - where due to being back on the hippy diet, a faboulous bowl of bircher muesli was had. Not the normal Challah French Toast or the smashed avocado and Persian Feta on sourdough with roasted pumpkin seeds... nope, lovely, fresh, light bircher muesli with fresh strawberries and natural yoghurt. The headache started to go. 


This was followed by my three monthly haircut. I've been going to the same hairdresser for over ten years. A friend of a friend, she never buggers up my cut - it lasts for ever and keeps it's shape - having wavy hair, it's good to know there is somebody who knows your hair. I don't mind who colours it so much, but Lee cuts my hair. It's worth the half an hour drive across Melbourne to get it done.


Sitting in the chair, reading my book, waiting for the colour to set, the phone rings. It's Mum. News on my beloved aunt. She's not been well over the last few months and there was some suspicion that something more was happening. After tests last week it appears she has bowel cancer, which has gone through the wall of the bowel and metastasised in the liver. She's having a scan done next week, but things do not look good at all. She's also 84, so really, what ever they do won't be trying to save her life, but make sure that either they slow down the decay or keep her comfortable. 


This news rocked me. Not of the diagnosis - this news had been brewing for a bit, more the finality that somebody I love won't be around for much longer. My aunt is a very, very special person, knowing that her days are numbered isn't good - for her or for anybody. I contacted my favourite cousin - her daughter - the spare room is there if she needs to debrief. She said that it may get some use over the next few months.


So now, a day on, I'm sitting here thinking like this is the calm before the storm.


Reading tarot last night at a hen's party, attended by what appeared to be the noisiest family in Melbourne - a large, loving, strange, energetic gaggle of Portuguese women, I wondered if my family would ever be a cohesive group like this - not that it ever really has been like it, but there were days when we were closer. By the end of the night, 20 readings later, a very bizarre stripper who appeared to flap his bits in front of everybody in the room, I'd worked out who go on with whom, who was ill, who was unhappy, who was disappointed, who was avoiding stuff. 


(Maybe I should arrange a group reading for my family - though that would be a bit pointless as many of them are rabid Christians who think of tarot as the devil's pasteboards.)


The last girl I read for the night was a sweetie. She looked tired. Tired, sensible, quiet and frankly, completely bamboozled by this rambunctious mob.


"Why to I get the feeling you want to run away?" I asked her as I turned over the last card.
"I'm plotting it. Next year. Go interstate for university - get away from all of this. I love them, but I can't be around them too much or I go mad."
"You're the academic of the family? The quiet achiever?"
"Yep. I'm the black sheep." she told me. "I love all these people but I don't know how we're related."

I was looking at my eighteen-year-old self.

The other strange event at this tarot job - I ran into an old work mate there who was attending the party. This has never happened before. I like to keep my tarot work and my day job very separate - people are aware that I read, I just don't want to read for them. She came up, said hello and that was it, thankfully. Being eight months pregnant, I think she went home early.

To top off a hard, surreal day, I dropped in at the service station on Hoddle Street to fill the car - I wasn't tired - it was something to do with all the energy floating around me. As I started to fill the car and ancient Magna pulled up behind me. Out poured three drag queens, each at least six two, dressed to the nines, heels like daggers, though you know that they probably wear steel caps by day, especially going by their gait as they went inside for cigarettes. They were search of some club in Collingwood.

Of all the juxtapositions. It topped the day off beautifully.

So a day on, does it still feel like the calm before the storm. Yes. There are no answers as to what will happen with my aunt, other than she will die at some point sooner rather than later. Things still feel intense. The headache has passed.

One thing that's taken my mind off all the things going on - my great friend Geetangeli and her husband Bill will be in Sydney on the first weekend in June, over from New Zealand for Bill's work. They've asked me up for the weekend, so arrangements have been made - go up for the weekend and go on foodie expeditions around Darling Harbour (though I think I've talked them into taking the ferry out to Manly to experience the creations of Adriano Zumbo, and maybe go try Sydney's Chinatown. Geetangeli and Bill are foodies extraordinaire and are happy to try new things. This I will enjoy immensely. Along with catching up with one of my oldest and dearest friends who I haven't seen in about four years.

But still, I reckon this is the calm before the storm.

I'm wondering what else might happen. For the moment, I think taking to sitting under my snuggie and reading a book - a Pandora form of putting my hands over my ears and singing 'lalalalalalala' is in order.

Pandx