How do you make a living as a mystic?

Asking for a friend.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that a story that came to me while I was literally living in its spaces is requiring me to experience even more of it viscerally.  Turns out I have a lot more in common with our main character and forgotten Saint Erna than trodding a particular landscape.

I am intensely aware at the moment of how I don’t fit.  How I’m just orbiting out here with my words, unable (as of yet I dearly hope) to use my skills to care for myself.   “Just get a job” is the refrain from society and my training in it.  And yet I’ve come to this portion of life without the capability of reentering a sordid contract harnessing my fleeting time on this planet in service of another’s attainments.  My body rejects each attempt to conform with debilitating exhaustion and probably depression.  I work with my words and listen to and notice nature while we are losing it and know my time is so well spent.  Why isn’t that a worthy service I cry out in frustration?

Joy and the Labourer - Mrs Mary Young, 1901

Every now and then my conditioning wins and I try to reenter normality.  Society meets my misguided outreach with the interpretation that I am too old, too bold, and definitely too much.  I’ve succeeded beyond my assigned pay grade.   And unless I’m willing to completely lie about my life, they won’t let me pretend to be less either. Sometimes I long for my bound, numb, pleasing ways and the pretence that the money was enough.  Maybe being myself in the remains of my day is all you can ask for?

As a highly skilled scribe and illuminator Erna’s work was absorbed into that with powerful men’s names on it.  There would have been no trace of her there. She would not have shared in their renown, but only been subject to the increasing pressure and attempts to control and diminish her that a reliance on her skill for their success would have caused in them.  When you no longer agree to play by those rules it gets hard.  What choices and winds of fate would have shaped her response to that?  How did she inhabit her skill, her loves, and the times she found herself in?

What was the cost to her of making a living as a mystic and a scribe and a woman at the birth of the Age of the Saints and the decline of the Druids?  There is little trace of her in history, but the landscape remembers and her name persists.

How?

What will answering those questions teach me about my own dilemma I wonder?

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