It’s been a little over two years into my faith journey, and so much has changed. Whereas I initially created this blog to discuss astrology, and then to advertise astrology services, I walked away from it entirely and now have a blog where I’m not entirely sure what to write. I can write about faith, and I can write about my new life learning to live more by scratch, but I realize that’s not what my dwindled audience would want.

Two years ago, in April, I was celebrating my first Easter season after returning to the Church, unsure about the future, but confident that God has me in the palm of His hand. There was so much to do and so much to learn, and so much of the decades that needed to be shed. I wasn’t transformed overnight – and I am still transforming – but I knew that once I saw the truth, everything would change because it had to change.

I don’t live in Chicago anymore. I am in love. I am married. I live in a house. I plant vegetables and herbs. I hike in forests. I go to bed early. I am interested in the people around me. I am no longer interested in being seen by the world – I now live in a place unfamiliar to most Americans, a place that can be geographically hard to explain, at the crossroads of the Midwest and the Upland South near the Mississippi River and the Shawnee National Forest. Chicago is just too far away to matter, and I don’t miss it. I’m hesitant to say exactly where, because this part of the country is a mysterious fly-over region to most people, but to me, it’s an oasis from the fly-over population that I don’t necessarily want to be surrounded by again, although this land, this community, this value system isn’t really conducive to a lot of ideological bullshit or to maintaining a Starbucks on every corner. This is a region of the country in which I had been previously told I’d need to be vigilant whenever I pass because MAGA enthusiasts are waiting behind every bush to kill me. Turns out that reality prevails and most people want to be left alone and to get along and are much more curious than anything. Think Chicago is bad? I’ll tell you some stories.

But I live in a place that scares people for absolutely no reason, and I sort of enjoy it a little too much.

And the reality is that so much of this country is beautiful, and the secret ingredient to that beauty is that coastal cultural experts are still wishing it away while it’s still feeding them and amnesiac born-and-bred but not born-and-bred in the country Midwesterners and Southerners are willing to denounce their birthright for the convenience of an Uber and an $11 coffee milkshake each morning. Socialism simply wouldn’t work here, and there can be no delusion that a suburban kid with soft hands can seize, let alone utilize, the means of production. Sure, there are your bad areas and your college town, but they’re generally self-contained and self-sustaining, and I can visit those places and leave again, getting stuck behind an Amish buggy or a tractor on the old highway.

Sometimes, you just need to find home, and when the Lord points you there, you just need to go there. It didn’t take the Hebrews forty years to simply travel through the desert, but it took forty years to heal their trauma and teach them who the Lord actually is. I have 2 down – maybe there’s another 38 to go. I couldn’t find this kind of peace in the Rust Belt, and I couldn’t find it in big cities or suburbs. And there is something very spiritually sound here that I can’t quite explain. For all the problems a place like this has, there is a strong undercurrent here enforced by faith. We just had eight people enter the Church this Easter vigil, and I sponsored one, and they’re in it to win it. Great, wonderful people who love the Lord. I would never have met these beautiful children of His, much less been able to help them, grinding each week in Chicago. We are still within the Bible Belt, so if you’re converting, you’re all in, and that’s truly counter-culture here.

I don’t make the kind of money that I used to, but I get by, and I’m fine with it, because now I have my time, energy, and the money I have to advance my own interests. I just spend my first Christmas in which I had no office parties, no office events, and no optics. I just spent my first Easter without worrying about the pile of work that will be waiting for me come Easter Monday. It’s been 11 months, and my nervous system has settled where it is supposed to be, engaged in thoughtful but not reactionary work, quiet, with a definite start and a definite end, with energy for the next day’s work.

My husband and I do not live an exciting life, but we live a meaningful one. We may be buried some day in the old Catholic cemetery by the lake, me largely unknown, my last name his last name, my origins and story lost to time. Or maybe we’ll be laid to rest in some other cemetery somewhere. I don’t know what life brings, and I don’t particularly want to set my sights too far in the future and miss this day. A few weeks ago, I was making forager’s salad for lunch and planting herbs. Now I am checking my hummingbird feeders to see if the first scouts have made their way north yet.

So I’m not sure what to do with this blog. I’m not particularly interested in the hustle and grind anymore. I don’t have an Instagram-worthy kitchen but a utilitarian one from a time when kitchens were the workhorses of the home and not a gathering space. My yard is in an awkward space of being transformed into a food-growing system. Most of the pictures I’ve taken on hikes these days are for edible plant identification; I have become accustomed to the beauty of the bluffs and hills and butterflies. I have yet to perfect my biscuits and sausage gravy recipes. I still use the seasoned pans because pretty pans don’t quite make brownies the way they need to be. It’s ironic that I spent so many years as a pagan, revering nature, and now I spend more time in it and engaging with it than I ever did before. It’s ironic that I spent over two decades as an astrologer, and now I actually view the stars at night more than I ever did before. I spend more time in contemplation, more time in meditation, more time with my Creator, than I ever did before, and I don’t need to do anything special but simply be. My husband is a musician, but I am not quite ready to become an agent, and frankly, he deserves a better agent. I don’t have any pets, and we’re not quite in a place where we can have livestock (quails, maybe?).

My old life doesn’t interest me anymore. I am vaguely aware of the astrological month by date and what sign the Moon is in based on its phase, and sometimes I see the planets and have a general idea of where they are, but who cares? It’s all vanity, and not a single thing worked out for me trying to strategize the future with allegedly esoteric knowledge, and the Sun, the Moon, the planets are all just things the Lord has made, and if He wanted, He could scoop them up in His hands and toss them across the universe, and nothing need be different if He wills it all to be the same. In fact, He could have done this already and we’d never have known.

But what I do know is that I have been given back the wasted years. I have been given the things I truly wanted and didn’t think I could have or would have to jump through hoops and pay my dues before getting them by myself. What I do know is that I was one way, and now I am different, and the difference is Him. If religion, let alone Christianity, is just an opiate for the downtrodden and stupid, it’s hard to argue with the results. Maybe I suddenly became stupid and now I’m suddenly unable to manage my affairs or navigate the world. Maybe I am actually downtrodden and am just too stupid to realize it. Maybe if I was still smart, I’d be trapped in an urban hellscape on a treadmill that I can never get enough creativity, or hustle, or money, to get off of, but I’m also just too far away from all of that, and the revelry of miserable circle jerks faded to whispers on the wind and eventually to silence. I’m older now – forty-six – and in my middle age, and younger people just sound…young, and older people, if they aren’t dead or dying, are shifting their priorities. I lost weight without trying here. Even when things get bad, they don’t get hopeless, and they don’t become catastrophic, because I’m not in charge, and one greater than I am is in control of all of it. I mean, I met the love of my life at 45: what mortal could have predicted that? Astrologically, it didn’t make sense, and astrologically, we may not even make sense, but truth doesn’t make sense when read through the lens of a lie anyway. The party isn’t over: it never really ever started for me, but now I am free enough to not have to nod along with the kids who think that that’s the way life is supposed to be.

I think I’ll make some biscuits and gravy and have another coffee, maybe take my work laptop out to the sun room to listen to the birds and the wind rustling the tree leaves. That’s a sound you don’t often get to hear in Chicago. I should water the vegetables before the sun gets too high today. I have an easy dinner planned for after mass tonight, and I think I’m finally done with my errands for the week: the morning crew at Walmart recognize me now. Tomorrow and Thursday are laundry days, and if we get rained out all weekend, it will be easier to uproot the old plants to make room for new garden beds. I have just gotten a few more people to add to my prayer list, and sometimes, I think back and wonder when I will meet everyone who ever prayed for me and when all of those people will know that their prayers came to fruition in at least some manner.