shed : transform : repeat

a two-faced god and a snake year in store

This winter has been a fallow period so far writing-wise, and I don’t have anything polished on offer today. But I thought I’d allow myself some on-the-page meanderings. It’s good to let myself think out loud a bit, to find out what’s percolating below the surface.

I’m feeling betwixt and between (again) and guessing I’m not alone in this. It’s kind of the January vibe. The month is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman god. Installed here on the first page of calendar, he looks back on the old year and ahead to the new, without yet fully entering it. The year’s momentum doesn’t really pick up in earnest until Chinese New Year / Imbolc, after all. As a new year, January’s something of a false start: still liminal.

Roman coin featuring Janus. image credit: Brittanica

January’s for poring over seed catalogs (like my favorites, Southern Exposure, Fedco Seeds and Strictly Medicinal) and plotting the garden layout. For imagining possibilities, in other words, rather than realizing them. Sure, routine work goes on, but the big stuff has to wait.

Like a seed, myself, I feel charged with creative energy, but it’s not yet time to sprout.

Waiting for the right time looks to be a real theme for the Snake year ahead, actually. The snake knows nothing if not how to bide her time, quietly coiled, until SSSNIK she strikes, quick as thought. (Then back to waiting again.)

The snake’s not easy to pin down. Too slippery. She’s about subtlety and transformation, sound and cymatics. Predictability isn’t her MO. One thing she can be counted on to do, though, is to shed her skin periodically.

I’m in a shedding process now, rubbing and wriggling my way out of some old structures that have frayed and become encumbrances.

With my acupuncture and herbal work now happening under the auspices of Meridian Health Solutions, my old scheduler has become superfluous; time to downgrade and trim the fat.

More interestingly, with the medical side of my work solidly housed at an independent clinic, I’m free to nix my current website and start over. This possibility is a juicy one because, for as along as I’ve been in practice / in business, I’ve been torn between competing impulses: towards marketability on the one hand and self-expression on the other. Torn between archetypes, between job descriptions and even between names.

There’s Jonathan Edwards, you see, and then there’s Jed (or Djed). The first guy’s the clinician. He’s got some gravitas; he can be kind of stiff, too. Prone to taking himself a little too seriously. As his abbreviated name suggests, the other one’s…nimbler. More playful. Fleet-footed and mercurial, Jed’s the alchemist, the magician. And for a while now, he’s been hemmed in.

The hemming logic that goes something like this: “acupuncture and herbal medicine are fringe enough without adding divination, astrology and ritual into the mix. You’ll scare people off if you let it all hang out there.” This voice has had me tone down the weirdness—massage it, explain it, downplay it—even when, in truth, that weirdness is at the heart of what I do.

Of course, there’s another voice that says to embrace the weirdness, be the damn wizard already and don’t apologize for any of it. Marketability be damned.

My current approach deals with this tension through a kind of segregation. My outgoing website is divided into two sides, one for East Asian Medicine, the other for astrology and divination (including what I’ve been calling ‘wayfinding’). It’s a compromise: to own the full range of what I do, without leaning all the way into either identity (as straight-laced clinician or weirdzo wizard). To allow them to coexist within their respective domains.

But now that Jonathan’s got a steady acupuncture gig, he has no need to market himself. This changes the equation. Frees Jed to do…well, whatever he wants. And what he wants is a do some freelance wizardry.

Ole Jed’s plan is to put together all the tools and techniques he’s gained to help people see possibilities and problems before they arise, to help them navigate the currents of their lives with grace, and to help them take targeted action—upstream action—to effect change in alignment with their particular fate. It’s practical magic, under the guise of astrological consulting. Exactly how to put it all together remains to be seen.

That’s all still to come this year, even as Jonathan puts on the nice shoes and holds it down in the clinic on Tuesdays, Thursdays and alternate Saturdays.

First, the shedding, the wait, the patient abiding. A few loose ends to tie up, a few more tools to get on board. A new public face to put forth when the moment is ripe.

See you in the Snake Year.

Next Up: The art of choosing one’s moment