My navel. My belly button, exact physical location of my personal “origin story.” Where the cord that connected me to my own fearful mother’s womb was severed. Fitting symbol for the fact that, when my own first son was born, I held him to my breast and realized, with a shock: “This is supposed to be the most beautiful moment of my life. BUT I CAN’T FEEL IT.”

This lack of full feeling, as well as my simultaneous awareness of the lack, as you can imagine, disturbed me greatly.

Seven years later, I would move from the east coast to the west coast, leaving my two sons with their father. For the next twelve long years, I would see them only in summers.

 

Now cut to August 16, 2023, when my second son Colin Cudmore, born 1/31/66, suffered an aortic dissection of both ascending and descending branches — and lived. Since then, slightly over three years now, he has been both paralyzed from the waist down and suffers from tremendous nerve damage.

(See Colin Cudmore Healing, caringbridge.org.)

August 16, 2023 happened to be the day when the transit of eruptive Uranus made an exact conjunction with my natal 23° Taurus Moon. I have been working with this ever-changing, always fraught, and incredibly inspiring, drama ever since, and will be until the end of March 2028, when we plan to move to Colorado to be with Colin’s brother Sean. (See Colin Cudmore Healing, caringbridge.org.)

 

 

Okay. Here’s what happened.

Yesterday evening, as I was showering, my finger instinctively felt into my deep, round belly button.

Something I don’t ordinarily do.

It was as if my finger was exploring an unknown cave, with lots of micro-crevasses in it. Weird. Plus, there was a weird bump. A BUMP. Has a tick gotten in there and latched on?!? YEEKS!

My panicky finger tried to yank or twist or otherwise worry it off. But the tick, if it was a tick, was persistent. All it did was create a  bad belly button sore spot.

WOW!

 

At some point I realized that I had actually, on a subliminal level, been preoccupied with my belly button for the past few days. Had been thinking about dosing it with castor oil and DMSO, in order to penetrate the skin in that vulnerable spot, which would from there work its way into the entire abdominal region. I’ve used large castor oil packs before, on the liver, to soothe and calm the liver, back in my menopausal fury. So I know they are effective.

And interestingly enough, as I write this, I realize that for the past few days, my voice has been erupting with “FUCK!” “FUCK!!” “FUCK!!!” Something I used to do, but had largely eliminated from my vocabulary over the past 20 years. Over and over again, Sagittarian fire aroused (natal Mars in Sag opposite Saturn/Uranus in Gemini, crossed by transit Uranus) I’ve felt liverish, any time I’m frustrated: “FUCK!”

So perhaps a liver castor oil pack is called for again?

Perhaps my weird subliminal focus on the navel is actually misplaced by a few inches . . .

Or: perhaps it really is time to work again with, this time, my entire abdominal region, using castor oil packs, buttressed with DMSO, which helps drive it into the interior.

BTW: afterwards, after I had put a drop of castor oil plus a drop of DMSO in my navel, and covered it, lying down, waiting, waiting, for the combo to penetrate and begin its healing journey, I began to actually focus on the fact that the navel is the actual origin of life; that I am symbolically returning to when the umbilical cord was cut shortly after my own birth.

 

I recall how I had a subliminal awareness of a sore behind my knee for a few days before the turkey vulture incident, which alerted me to the fact that I needed to actually look directly at that sore, and pay attention. Because yes, there WAS a tick there, and it had latched on, days earlier, creating a target, inside a large red sore area.

This time I didn’t need any turkey vulture help to finally notice what I thought was possibly a tick, but it turned out, not to be.

Transit Neptune opposite Natal Neptune/MC!

And wow, the navel, center of the third chakra of PERSONAL POWER.

Transit Pluto opposite Natal Pluto! 

What power? I, who have “processed” a lifetime of trying and failing to utilize my personal power to control both my own bodily desires (as a good Catholic), and my relations with others (as a good hippie, “bad” mother, and fleeting wife, four times . . .) am utterly powerless in the face of this ongoing . . . what? what? WHAT?

Transit Neptune at the root of my chart right now, opposite its natal place. I seem to be full of delusions, mostly regarding my physical body, and yet I do manage to work my way through them. So aha! Yes, let me finally recognize and honor the navel, the belly button, as what remains from when my physical body was originally rooted into physical life, through the umbilical cord’s link to my own also fearful mother’s womb.

 

All of which reminds me: Lying abed, I listened to a podcast last night wherein someone (can’t remember who) talked about the current quality of time as not only one in which the entire culture is purging all the dark gunk, both current and historical, bringing it to the light, but that this same process is working through each individual.

(Or, I would add, working through each person who is at all awake; and when not awake, is simply causing unimaginable suffering.)

DUH! Why didn’t I make that utterly obvious connection myself?

(Okay, Ann. Stop judging yourself! Just stop it!)

Yes, I, personally, am “going through a process” where I simply must let go of all the gunk in my personal history that still has me caught, stuck; and of course, I tend to assume that, as usual — after all, this part of my ego “identity,” what I’m “known,” for —  I need to (continue to) process it, i.e., “face it, embrace it, erase it.”

 

But NO! this mysterious voice said not to worry about “processing” any of the gunk.

Forget embracing it; it’s what has embraced me, its gravity (double meaning) holding me down. (Moon in earthy Taurus, Uranus/Saturn in airy Gemini/opposite Mars in Sagittarius: transit Uranus now crossing over the latter two.)

Instead, said the mysterious voice over the internet, we must simply let it go; clear it out of the way.

 

PTSD from your fucked-up mothering? So what? Clear it. WAKE UP!

Yep. No time for “processing,” at this point,

in humanity’s rapidly accelerating, chaotic —

ending/new beginning —

death/resurrection—

into what?

 

We have no idea.

Stop trying to figure it out.

Just clear it. NOW