Hi Gems!
I’m trying something new for Mystical Monday this week! It’s a Voice Note from me. Hit play right here and listen - it’s only eleven minutes and change, and I think the audio will bring the full experience. Of course, transcript below for anyone who needs it:
Voice note from Meg
Hey friends, so it is Monday and I’ve been thinking about some stuff. First of all, Mercury has gone direct again! I am not one who worries too much about Mercury being in retrograde even though this energy does get blamed for a lot of the bullshit we find ourselves up against in daily life when it is retrograde. Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo, and as a double Gemini you might think I would be especially sensitive to retrogrades but I don’t know … I guess I keep it in mind, but I don’t fixate on it.
But anyway, if you are suddenly feeling like communication is flowing more smoothly or technology is behaving better, maybe give Mercury a shout out for going direct again.
But that’s not even what I wanted to talk about!
So I’ve been doing the Mystical Monday series for a few weeks as Live video, and I said from the start that it would be an experiment. Supposedly Substack rewards adopters of this new feature but in my limited experience, there were no rewards!
So I thought that I would bring that experiment to an end and try going back to something that I am super comfortable with - voice!
Friends and family in my phone know that I am a big fan of using voice text or voice notes - bro that voice note app hates to see me coming!
I just often have way too many words to type, and I am lazy, so I make that everyone else’s problem, I guess.
But since I’m kinda over the Substack Live experiment, I thought I might try this for a while. Just record a voice note to you on Mondays and share that - I am literally recording this on my phone for you right now
I’ll pull a card from my Love Your Inner Goddess oracle deck here in a minute but! I wanted to talk about something else first. AJ - she is our 17-year-old daughter for those of you who aren’t familiar with our gaggle of kiddos - well, she and I are HYPERFIXATED right now on the song Defying Gravity from Wicked. Like we listen to it nonstop and sing it - she can actually really nail Elphaba’s war cry at the end, it’s pretty awesome!
So yeah, we’ve been listening to it so much and I’ve been thinking about the lyrics a lot. Defying Gravity is, at its core, Elphaba’s declaration of freedom, right? She has awakened to her power and now that she knows what she’s capable of - yeah, you will NOT be finding her on the ground anymore. She WILL BE UP in that western sky.
And the tension of the song, and really, the tension that has been building throughout the first act is whether or not Glinda will join her in the air or if she will, in fact, stay on the ground.
This works on a lot of levels as a metaphor, but I’ve really been thinking about it as a spiritual metaphor. Elphaba represents spiritual awakening or you can even call it metaphysical awakening if you want - it’s pretty explicit in the text, yeah? Here let’s see if I can just play it for you:
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap
It's time to try defying gravity
There’s a reason why this song has been the absolute heart song ballad for so many theater kids and so many people who have ever felt othered, there’s a reason why so many people in the queer community love belting out this song, it captures that exhiliarting feeling of embracing your own power!
Well, if Elphaba represents the awakened soul, then Glinda represents the soul still confined by the parameters of reality. There’s a moment where she considers what she and Elphaba could accomplish together but ultimately, she stays behind in Oz. If we continue on in that spiritual metaphor, then Glinda represents our attachment to the material, not material like our material possessions but more like materialism as a philosophy, materialism as a view on the world that only physical matter is real, that our consciousness is merely a projection of the human brain.
Glinda even tries to coax Elphaba into staying by saying:
listen to me, just say you're sorry
You can still be with the Wizard
What you've worked and waited for
You can have all you ever wanted
Elphaba responds:
But I don't want it
No, I can't want it anymore
For Elphaba, once she has experienced her own power, or for the purposes of our spiritual metaphor, once she has gotten a glipse of the true reality, once she has seen that the great and terrible wizard of Oz is just a lying dictator, she knows there is no going back. The build-up of tension between Elphaba and Glinda, and the way we we see the fracture in their world views play out in real time front of us throughout the song allows for even more emotional weight for that line at the end - my personal favorite -
and nobody,
in all of OZ,
no Wizard who there is or was,
is ever gonna bring me down
And so I think this is why this song speaks to so many people and why it’s such a great metaphor for spiritual awakening. And I know this might be a bridge too far, but I really don’t think it is, I think this song speaks to people who have because of the pandemic or politics or just general restlessness of the soul, have come to understand that they can’t limit their spirituality to keeping their feet on the ground anymore, they can’t be bound by the rules of gravity that they have grown up believing to be true, they’ve discovered their own power within and as scary as it might be, there’s no going back to being earthbound in their beliefs.
And sometimes that does mean a fracture in friendship or strained family relationships or choosing to leave a church or to leave church altogether.
I don’t know, I just know that I have heard from sooooo many people both before and during me sharing my deconversion series who have confided in me things like “I don’t know how to label who I am now but I’m not the same at all as I was before.”
So that’s been on my mind as I play Defying Gravity in my brain on repeat, and it felt like a great fit for our Mystical Monday conversations.
Okay, real quick! Let’s draw a card for the Gem Collective for this week.While I’m shuffling these, let me remind that you in case you missed it, I did an in-depth reading for our Shiny Gems who are paid subscribers and the theme of reading was discovering and stepping into your own power this month, so obviously this theme is big in my mind right now!
You can access that and have access to all past Gemini Wrongs archives by becoming a subscriber.
Okay, this week’s message is Bright Destiny:
It’s OK to feel unclear or even confused about what is happening in your life or within you at this time. It’s like that because you are going through soul growth. (Ed note: CHILLS!) Things will become clear in time. For now, however, let the process happen. Fear can make us try to force something that isn’t quite ready yet. Don’t try to impose a meaning, take action, or understand it all prematurely. When it is time for you to act, you’ll know it. It’s okay to relax and trust that the moment of clarity will come when the time is right.
Wow! Wonderful! What a great message for the week. Thanks for letting me talk your ear off with today’s Mystical Monday in voice note form.
I hope your week is off to a powerful start! Talk soon.
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