Nox Amicus

This morning at 8:25am the Moon was New. I honestly don’t know if I have ever posted this close to the moment. I wouldn’t call this the start of a trend, but maybe the reaffirmation of an intention.

For the past cycle I studied the property of Fortitude and examined how I bring it to my life. I spoke of it in terms of standing up and claiming what serves my greatest good. I also spoke about how the resolute advocacy brought by Fortitude can be disconcerting to those who might not be expecting it from me, or may not be manifesting it in themselves.

My journey with Fortitude began as I was moving through the gallbladder surgery and healing. While I noted in the last post that it began with my sister calling me “brave”, I’ve found that it started earlier than that. While I was in the hospital I was a collaborator in my Care plan. Every day during rounds I had questions for my doctors and they either had answers, or quickly provided them. I was part of my Care team.

But it was more than that.

When I was young, I was certainly ‘provided for’. I was sustained. And I can look back on times when I knew that I was loved. But being Cared for felt alien to me. When I was in the hospital, I felt a deep level of Care. Yes – much of it was professionally driven, but spend 21 days and nights with the same team of people, and the bonds transcended professionalism. Maybe not friends, but there was a level of Care that was more than casual.

This has been evident with every interaction I have had with my Care team since my discharge on July 29. My video calls with my infectious diseases doctor, my MyChart notes with my nurses, and my in-person follow-up with my primary surgeon in August. I was more than ‘a slab of meat for the hospital and staff to coalesce back into a whole’ – I was Sean. To call forward Rev. Jesse Jackson, I was “somebody”.

I was back in the hospital yesterday for an outpatient procedure to remove the stent in my bile duct. When my doctor came to see me, she remembered my face from our last procedure in July, and commented on how much better I looked. It was good to see a friendly face.

But the real moment came in the recovery room after the procedure. As I was floating back to consciousness, I saw a familiar face move through the door and over to my bed. It was my assisting surgeon – the one who came to my hospital room every weekday for three weeks, the one who knew first hand (especially since his hand held what was left of my gallbladder) the road I’d been on.

The road he and I had both been on.

It was the look on his face, the joy at seeing how far healing had brought me, that showed me just how bad things were in July. There was a sense of victory shared between us in those few minutes – like we had won a war together. And as we parted, I knew that as much in that moment as in July, I was Cared for.

So the focus for this cycle is Care. I want to appreciate how much Care I receive from all corners of my life, but I also want to be mindful of moments where I can express Care without being asked. I also still want to understand that amidst all of this, it is important for me to Care for myself.

The title of the companion song says it all – but the first verse called me to it:

Been beat up and battered around\
Been sent up, and I’ve been shot down\
You’re the best thing that I’ve ever found\
Handle me with care\

May we all find the Care that we need – or recognize when we already have it.

https://youtu.be/1o4s1KVJaVA

At 1:47am this morning the moon was New. This is twice in a row that I’m posting on the actual day of the New Moon. Time may be a wibbly-wobbly artificial construct, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Over the last cycle I focused on Care, and in the last post I talked about how, when I was in the hospital in July, I felt truly and deeply Cared for in a way that was unfamiliar to me.

I think one of the differences in that sensation might have been that I trusted the intention behind the Care in a way that I’d never let myself experience before. I know that people have Cared for me in fundamental ways, but my conditioning meant their Care always felt transactional. This led me to feeling as though I wasn’t intrinsically worthy of that Care; that I was going to have to be demonstrative in some way to pay for it.

When I was young I had an aunt that I would often visit after grade school, as she lived within easy walking distance. One afternoon, not long after my parents and I had spent the weekend in the mountain home of someone who had been my favorite uncle, the aunt I was visiting turned to me and asked, “Who’s your favorite aunt?” I was a child. I couldn’t see the trap – I never imagined one was being set. I didn’t know how to be deceptive, I didn’t know how to mask. I didn’t know how to do any of the things that adults did to cultivate and sustain relationships. So I told her the truth. My favorite aunt was the one I had just spent the weekend with, not her. It wasn’t that I perceived anything wrong with this one. This was just my truth.

But that truth brought a dissatisfaction into the room I still remember like it was yesterday.

Care always felt transactional, so I think that it’s funny that the time that Care was absolutely, positively transactional, lying in a hospital bed, it felt more like I was being acted on by a duty of Care, not an obligation of Care. I think that was new in my perception.

As I continue to recover and to evaluate what it’s like to be Cared for, as well as what it’s like to Care for other people, I’ve been looking at the trajectory my life is taking.

Sometimes we do things in our life out of obligation, sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes out of desire. But how many of those are truly out of choice?

This brings us to this cycle’s focus on Paths.

I had a situation recently where I was called upon to make a difficult choice.

I have been affiliated with a group that had certain expectations around the amount of time devoted to them, and the overall priority they had in the lives and schedules of their members. I had not been able, or willing, to meet those expectations – not due to any lack of respect or even lack of desire, but it simply didn’t float high enough on my list of choices that were good and healthy for me.

So I made the decision that separating from this affiliation was in my practical best interests, and in their best interests as well. It’s unfair to welcome someone dedicating their energies to you if you’re not in a position to reciprocate. While I had always appreciated those energies, and I did participate when I was able, sometimes it just turns out that the Path has run its course.

Paths are interesting things. I’ve been surrounded by people who, in the past few months, have had their Paths change outside of their control. I’d been a spectator in that paradigm for a while, until this week, when the reality of it hit me.

The IT director that I’ve worked with for the past three years announced on Monday that she’s decided to take a position with a different company. Professionally, this is signaling that I’ll be given greater responsibilities as we diversify the workload that her position had held. This isn’t a Path that I chose to take, but I am at choice for how long, and in what manner, I choose to take it.

Shortly after this news broke I went out for a walk to clear my head. While meandering, I crossed Paths with a friend from the neighborhood. I had wanted to reach out to this friend while I was in the hospital, just to offer a reason why she might not have seen me out walking, but I never initiated contact. While we were chatting during my walk, I came to find out that her 2025 was tumultuous as well. During this talk, another friend of hers walked by with his dog – a big beautiful dog whose name was Zeus. If you’ve been following these posts for a while, Zeus’s significance was noted in November of 2023. The appearance of Zeus during this conversation with my friend, where I was offering Care to her in her struggles, and our overall arc of conversation, felt like confirmation that this was one of the Paths I belong on.

This coincides with the fact that as I was walking around the bar at the band’s last gig, I found a dime on the floor. Dimes from my father are always clear indications that I’m where I’m supposed to be and on the right Path.
The Paths may be right – but that doesn’t mean I know where they lead. I’m reminded of a lyric from Whitesnake “I don’t know where I’m goin’, but I sure know where I’ve been”.

I don’t know what this Path will look like and I don’t know if it will be persistent for me, but I know that it all starts with acknowledging the fact that I need a direction.

The companion song for this cycle is an old favorite, and it ties back to my mentioning of Hills almost a year ago – how I want to be the person who stands on the top of the hill and sees where the next thing is.

So to quote from this cycle’s song: “When you get to the top of the hill, gonna be there, yes, I will.”

May all of our Paths be what we need them to be.

On December 19th at 8:43pm, the Moon was New for the last time in 2025 – just before the Solstice and the other winter holidays, so there hadn’t been a lot of time for introspection. In fact, it felt like life had been supplanted by the struggle to keep up the pace.

January has brought physical and emotional quiet though – and a gentle re-centering. The last New Moon post was on November 20th, and dealt with the theme of Paths. During that time I was experiencing changes in both my Spiritual and Professional Paths – these were unavoidable, and I don’t hold any grief or remorse – but they are still changes to fundamental aspects of my journey. In the post I recounted how noticing a dime or encountering a dog named Zeus actually helped to ground me through these transitions.

It still left me with a wonderful sense of “what could happen next?” There wasn’t fear or anxiety. Sure, there was uncertainty, but not knowing isn’t bad. Not knowing that you don’t know? Yeah – that’s not good.

For a long time I didn’t know that I did not know who I was. I was moving through the world in the microcosm of my own consciousness, largely unaware of the fact that the Sean I was Presenting was a construct designed to adapt to the world he was living in. In these posts we’ve talked at length about my being who I thought others expected me to be. Yes, a lot of that was reaction to external stimuli – someone’s body language (or energy) shifts, so I would adapt to realign. This got to the point where it was rarely even conscious. Much like swerving to avoid something in the road, the reaction happens as a conditioned response.

I’ve been noticing things about myself since I’ve been out of the hospital which have shown that this kind of behavior was far more pervasive than I recognized. It wasn’t always reactive – there have been times when I have been aware of people and their patterns or perception, where I have tried to tune myself to their filters. Person A likes this, and has experienced that; so if I present myself as this other thing, I will be more readily accepted. I can almost grant that as part of normal human adaptation. But I took it much further.

My grade school had a very small library – I think it was the size of one or two classrooms. There were a variety of books – not all “children’s books” either. There was a section on aerospace science and rocketry that seriously appealed to me when I was 9-10 years old. I wanted to be an astronaut, but I knew I had to be something that I wasn’t. That “something” wasn’t special training or education – to my mind, it first had to be about Presentation. Before I could be seen as knowledgeable or even interested, I had to rise above and be “seen”.

So I checked out those books. Repeatedly. I don’t know that I ever read them – I don’t know that I could have; they were at least at a college reading level. But my name was in the check-out card in the back. So someone would know that Sean was very into this thing.

As I look back at patterns of my life – this was persistent. I subscribed to magazines, I created accounts on websites; I left breadcrumbs and footprints everywhere to lead to a very curated version of me. To the point where, looking back now, I wonder if anything I’ve done hasn’t been part of that paradigm. That is a disturbing lens through which to view your life.

So the theme for this cycle is Presentation. Who is Sean versus who is this created public-facing version of Sean? No wonder “peopling” wears me out – I am (still) constantly on stage. How can I be more aware of this drive toward Presentation and how can that awareness nudge me closer to a life rooted in authenticity. There was a book I read years ago called “Choosing Truth: Living an Authentic Life”, by Harriette Cole. I read it, and I tried to live closer to it – but I don’t know how much of it I ever really embodied. I was always on the Path of curating a Presentation – reading the book, or being known to have read the book, was part of that.

Presentation, as opposed to being present.

This is another lesson from the time in the hospital though. My very survival depended on me being completely authentic. Sure – there was no way for me to reframe CT scans or bloodwork – but I had to be nakedly honest whenever anyone spoke to me. I had to be vulnerable, and scared, and trusting, and brave – all at once. I had to “be”.

There was a song that was stuck in my fever-addled brain for weeks – and it is now the companion song for this cycle – “Swimmers” by Zero 7. It’s a song that has gathered more meaning for me as my recovery has progressed. As a musical brother described it at the time, it represented “Being pulled where the current takes you.” It also speaks to me about existing inside uncertainty without trying to escape from it. Being. Digging deeper into the lyric, there’s a sense of living before fully arriving, or, to paraphrase the lyric, living as ghosts as our stories unfold in reverse. Not being afraid of the passage of time, but using it to give the courage to live authentically the time to develop. All of this represents who I was in the hospital – but in the macro view, it’s who I am discovering today.

So for this cycle I have been focused on how and when I create a Presentation of myself, and the effort that goes into that. It’s a constant river of shadows and light – and in it, the striving to know the reality behind the Presentation.