Pre-Solstice Magic Monday Morning Check-In Post
How Are You??!!
The Solstice will be exact on December 21st at 3:20 am Central Time. It is such a beautiful and powerful gateway moving us from the darkest night into the breaking dawn, celebrating the return of longer days ahead while honoring the need for nurturing, hibernation, quiet, and reflection. It is a time of unconditional giving and receiving, sharing love and joy with all, and making magic and merry to set the foundation of the path ahead.
Traditionally, I bake cookies on or around the Solstice and then share them with the people I love. This year, I am thinking of making koláčky. I’ve done it once before, on the first Solstice we lived in Ojai. Koláčky are a traditional Czech and Polish cookie. My paternal grandmother, Jenny, one hundred percent Czech and more specifically, from Bohemia, introduced me to them when I was very young and made the Polish version which does not use yeast in the dough.
Jenny was a self-taught professional cook. She started as the pastry chef in the executive’s restaurant at Standard Oil in the 1940s and by the time she retired, she was running the entire kitchen and restaurant, creating all the recipes and menus and serving rich, white men as a divorced woman at a time when divorce was a rarity and a woman ascending to this level of power was as well.
Jenny’s home kitchen was always filled with amazing smells and there was always something delicious. By the time we arrived, my sister and I, she was retired and only had family to cook for. She loved being in the kitchen and food was a way she delivered that love to the rest of us. Her koláčky are just one of the many treats she made us at Christmastime and yet, they are the ones that stick in my memory.
A dream: I make a big batch of koláčky, put a slew of them on a plate, wrap them up, get in the car, and drive them to my dad. He greets me with love and smiles as we share the deliciousness handed down from his mother through my hands.
Reality: My father hated his mother. He used to refer to her as “Hitler” behind her back. Domineering and controlling with little sensitivity, she was not an easy mother to have. She was warmer as a grandmother, as is typical, yet even then she could and did say mean things at times to my sister and me, denigrating and judging us. She made herself hard to endure what she had to and then forgot about her softness most of the time.
Our father’s misogyny was formed long before we were born, a misogyny he stubbornly cultivated and grew, never seeing those in the female form as anything other than a virgin, whore, or a bitch (his word, not mine), things to be objectified or terrified of, suppressing his yin and sensitivity to the point of distortion. To be the daughter of a father so at odds with the female energy is a daunting task. I often have not been up to the challenge.
After writing that, I got out of my chair, feeling my sadness, put on some pretty clothes, and headed out to a holiday art popup presented by The Chicago Art Girls hosted at Bell Elementary School. When I got there, I recognized the school as one I had been to more than once when I worked for The Imagination Theater Company over thirty years ago. For a moment I was flooded with memories of the life that caused me to step foot in nearly every school throughout the city and beyond.
I turned the corner into the Holiday Fair's location, and my eyes landed on a giant room filled with women and their creations, from art to clothes to jewelry to skincare to home goods and more. Women expressing their love and value through their work into the world, their softness on display for all to see.
I immediately spotted Luna Delgado, someone I have recently come to know and enjoy, as she was set up right at the entrance. I have become a customer, and my face and skin have been very happy since stumbling into her booth at a farmers’ market and then into her storefront in Evanston. Her products are magical and healing. Her scents linger beautifully and subtly taking me right where I need to go.
I wandered the fair for a time, talking with the artists and enjoying their work, feeling uplifted by all the love and joy in the space. I headed back out to my car to go to my next stop for the day when I heard a woman’s voice yell, “Nora Herold! That has to be you!”
It was Teri, someone I met remotely in 2015 while working on Bernie’s first presidential campaign and have stayed in touch with since. This was our first IRL encounter and I was delighted to get to hug her and spend some time with her. I walked back in with her as we chatted about dogs and politics and other things. She was headed next to a fundraiser at Felines and Canines, a rescue organization she works with. I left her admiring Luna’s offerings as I made my way back out again feeling delighted that the Chicago magic of often running into someone you know is still running at full speed.
I then stopped at Sauce and Bread Kitchen for our weekly loaf of seeded spelt bread. Anne gifted me some treats made by her hands. I picked up a vegan latte at Smack Dab, and chatted with the beautiful beings who work and create there about this piece I am writing. And the love goes on.
To spend the full moon in Gemini energy in the company of such inspiring and inspired women reminded me of our power, the power of the yin, the cauldron of creation. We need our yang to share what we concoct in our cauldrons, but the time of yang dominance is coming to a close.
I know it looks like the patriarchal forces are winning right now. It’s a glitch. Perhaps it’s a hijack of the timeline we were on. Well, if that timeline was hijacked, we can move ourselves to another, a much more loving one than the one that seems to be playing out.
Mercury is now direct. Hallelujah! I upgraded a lot of technology last week including my internet connection, and a six-month-long issue now seems to be resolved. Mars, however, is still retrograde along with Chiron, Uranus, and Jupiter. One by one they will go direct by the end of February.
Chiron goes direct on December 29th
Uranus goes direct on January 30th
Jupiter goes direct on February 4th
Mars goes direct on February 24th
How are you?? Please drop me a note below and let me know.
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Our annual Solstice event with The Pleiadians, Yeshua, and Ursula is this Thursday, December 19th at 1:00 pm Central Time on Zoom. If you can’t make it live, registering will get you the recording as soon as it’s available (usually about an hour after the program ends). Register here
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I love hearing about your adventures in Chicago and “loving encounters” as Susan said. It reminds me to get out more often and enjoy the good aspects of community in Ojai.
I’m ok. I chose to respectfully use my best communication skills to address an old friend’s words to me that felt unsupportive and asked for clarification on where she was coming from. I was met with defensiveness. In several interactions with her in the days to follow, I continued to encounter her defensiveness like weaponizing my trauma against me. For example asking me if I was triggered when telling her about a scenario where someone was being highly inappropriate to others. I wasn’t feeling triggered. I was having an appropriate response to the situation and was more mildly disgusted. Or saying to me, “wow, I e always heard about the Kyra talk but never experienced it myself. “ this is a friend who has been a close confidant and who I trusted with my other stories of beginning to stand up for myself in relationships where I tolerated emotional abuse. So I am disappointed that this old friend couldn’t just see that her words didn’t feel good and say sorry or seek to understand why it landed with me that way and move on. That’s all I needed. I’m just in this place in life where I allowed people to mistreat me and experienced emotional abuse growing up so I don’t tolerate being talked to in ways that don’t feel good to me and want to nourish relationships where we can have loving conversations about hard things. It’s just so challenging that so many people struggle to go there and where I’m at in my healing is that I need to stand in my truth and speak up. So I guess I’m feeling grief too. I also think this relationship is not in alignment with my growth. Healing is hard sometimes.
Okay, let me be the first to comment and say I love hearing about your loving encounters and appreciation. I'm sorry about the misogynistic papa..mine too, and mine also said he hated his Mom, who died when he was 15. She died when my father intercepted the knife she was wielding aimed at her husband, my dad's dad, my grandfather. Well the knife slit her wrist and she was taken to the hospital ( this is 1944) and never came back. They were at a rental cottage in Carmel, CA. My dad and his parents. So they left my father alone in the cottage all night and in the morning my grandfather's press secretary called to tell my father his mother was dead and his father will be coming sometime later that day. Okay, this was my father's version.. but he might have had some heavy duty guilt? And he then hated his mother. And he ofter said to me that I reminded him of his mother!
Why am I telling you this, instead of the cookies I might bake? Well that's what came to mind.
Oh Nora I love you and I'll see you on Thursday
Xoxoxo susan