The Destroyer Makes Itself at Home

It was a rough winter. Loved ones and friends experienced a similar season. Extraordinarily bad experiences of the sort that happen once - maybe twice - in a whole lifetime, showed up serially and simultaneously in several lives. What felt personal was reflected globally. The tragedy mask booted the comedy mask, which took off on a sabbatical to Far-Off Lands. Or maybe Traverse City. It's nice there in winter. Greyscale is my normal state, but this was beyond that and deeper. Dark and low. I wrote about being The Reluctant Molt, discovering that everything I knew about me and my methodologies was neither true nor helpful. I read a Deepak Chopra book about synchronicity and being open to messages. And I looked up my archetype. I chose carefully, looking for a .edu site which might mean postgraduate work on Jungian stuff. I answered the questions honestly without trying to outsmart the test hoping to achieve a particular result. I clicked submit. And there arose on the screen, in enormous black type THE DESTROYER. I went ziggity boom, adrenaline sluicing around, and then melted into a puddle in my desk chair. This cannot be! I'm a nice person, maybe The Artist, or The Trickster, but never The Destroyer. I recovered my drippy self, decided to read what that means before investing in a buckled sweater with arms that tie in the back. Not everyone meets The Destroyer in a lifetime, but it's not terrible, if you need to face a dragon. Which I did and do. The cycle of all life is birth/death/rebirth. The Destroyer shows up to knock around old ideas that don't suit, to clean house with a blowtorch, and to rattle the bars on whatever cage is keeping you from being your best self. I claimed to dear Beckie one time that I was a rebel. When she stopped laughing, she tapped her fingers on the table as she said, "A rebel. Who obeys [tap] each and [tap] every [tap] rule." I demurred. "Okay, I'm a rebel wannabe." The cool thing about confronting the dragon/destroyer is that once the beast is living with me, there's a chance I am free to be the rebel I see myself as. It's never too late to quo all over the status. And I've got The Destroyer hanging out in my artist's dungeon. Flame on, baby!