Uncaged And Tree

The tree in the background no leaves, really, though the photo is light green - maybe it is a spring tree, just getting ready to sprout with new life? It’s the home of a butterfly, and there are birds flying in the distance. There’s a big hourglass imposed on the tree’s trunk, with mirror images of leafless branches on one half, and full, leafy trees on the bottom - the hourglass also seems to invoke an infinity symbol, vertically. There’s a transparent heart at the base of the tree, and I can see some of the roots. 
 
Weirdly, it reminds me of this monologue I performed years ago, just coming out of Freehold, written by my friend Orla, who I coincidentally, just saw last night as she passes through town back to Ireland. I hadn’t seen her since my thirties, and she was part of a small group of friends who went through 9/11 together back in 2001, here in Seattle, and the show this monologue was part of came out of that. She brought the monologue up last night, when I mentioned I had just done “In the Time of the Butterflies” and alluded to similarities between butterflies and birds, which were prominent in the piece she wrote, and both birds and a butterfly present themselves in this card. In Orla’s monologue I performed, the narrator opened up her chest and tons of birds flew out, and all stood on the tree above her, “waiting for what she was going to do next”. It was an extremely powerful monologue for me during that time, but as I’ve discovered, throughout life, you can still have dialogue with art you made in the past, in different ways. It appears this piece wants more dialogue.
 
This morning I woke up to find a physical manifestation from a recent energy shift. A teacher in Boston produced a cut version of my play, Loom, for competition in the Massachusetts Educational Theatre Guild annual high school contest. They won the preliminary round, but alas, didn’t go further than that. Still exciting, though, and just having the piece discovered on NPX completely unsolicited a few months ago in the first place began a bit of an energy shift for me in terms of my own writing, so when the teacher wasn’t paying me my playwright’s fee for use of my piece, I started to go down an unpleasant road. Immediately after they were done, he asked me for my venmo, which I gave him, and then: radio silence. Two weeks later, I sent him a gentle reminder. Another week of completely silence. I started wondering what I was going to do. I mean: $200 isn’t a life-changing amount, but it’s more the principle of the thing. I kept thinking of what I was going to do: write him a nasty email, threaten to talk to his higher ups at Everett High School, try a heartfelt, artist-to-artist email...I went so far as to look up faculty and staff at the high school, doing a google search to find out more about him. I was actually getting a little anxious and stressed out, and the initial excitement of the play being selected, performed and winning the preliminary round started getting polluted by my bad feeling. I thought to myself yesterday: I don’t want to be that person who threatens and tries to manipulate. Maybe I just make my peace with the fact I’m probably going to get stiffed, and let karma do the rest of the work. I don’t know. Universe, please help me figure out what to do. It felt like an energy shift on my part.
 
And this morning, I had $200 sitting in my Venmo account. The universe didn’t even answer me with what to do: it just rewarded me with what I was struggling with all along. And yes, the $200 is nice, but more important to me is the ENERGY SHIFT I arrived at on my own, not only was it its own reward, but I also got the actual $$ I was due, without having to write any letters or really, do anything other than be patient and make my peace. 
 
It makes me wonder if the tree with the birds from that long-ago monologue is still there, on my astral plane, and if those birds have been watching me ever since. I think of other subtle energy shifts I’ve made over the last few years, and how my life has changed because of them. It’s not like, a 100% transformation, of course, because there are still threads that connect me, and I’m still learning and growing. But I definitely LIKE the person I am now more than I liked the person who performed Uncaged back in 2002. I feel like those birds have been watching me make missteps for SO LONG...or maybe I shouldn’t think of them as missteps. Maybe it’s just part of the journey. 
 
When I read the description for the card’s meaning, after having written all the above, it’s weirdly SPOT ON: “...as a time factor, it indicates a long time either into the past or the future. It is a slow growth; the tree also does not grow overnight...keep going with things that are important to you.” This is not all, but it definitely tracks with what I’ve written based on the experience of being paid for Loom and the experience of performing Uncaged during a time of huge, personal transformation. 
 
More than anything, it assures me I’m starting to move towards something a little more deliberate, energetically, and more sentimentally, assures me I am still, in fact, ON THE PATH. 
 
 
 

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