2023’s Eight Lessons For Me
This year’s lessons ranged from the value of giving up victimhood to a commitment to my future career and to being a part of new social…
This year’s lessons ranged from the value of giving up victimhood to a commitment to my future career and to being a part of new social structures
Since I committed to writing a blog on Medium, I’ve ended the year reflecting on what I learned that year. There were eight valuable lessons in 2020, 10 things 2021 taught me, and, in 2022, I wasn’t sure I’d remember the six lessons it offered.
Bonus: Reading of My Blog Post, "2023's Eight Lessons For Me" by The B&P Realm
This is an audio reading of my annual "What the year taught me to post" for 2023. Of the past four years of doing this…podcasters.spotify.com
So here I sit, with just over 50 hours left of 2023, wondering: what did this year teach me?
Considering how challenging world events have been over the past few years for so many people, especially in 2020 and 2021, I’m once again feeling a little bit out of step with the masses, as 2023 walloped me with two life-changing events that made those other years seem like child’s play.
In the spring, I was incarcerated in a local jail for 45 days in a legal battle that would last until mid-July, and in early August, after two years of deteriorating health, my father passed away.
Let’s start with the legal battle.
In short, heading into fall 2022, because of my continuing study of astrology, I was aware that I would have six months from the fall equinox to the spring equinox in 2023 to do some important Shadow Work as part of the last transit of my Chiron Return, which occurs around age 50. Because my natal Chiron is in Aries, where it spends the most time because of its elliptical orbit, my Chiron Return began in the summer of 2021.
This fits well with the story of my life because Chiron is the Wounded Healer, and, as a person who has traveled the challenging path of addiction and recovery, I’ve long identified with that archetype.
Yet over the past few years, it seemed that I still had work to do in this area and in 2022 I began descending back into abusing substances, mostly alcohol and an over-the-counter cold medication which contains codeine and ephedrine. Considering all of the personal growth work I’d been engaged in, especially since 2014, I struggled to understand why I was doing this to myself.
In my mid-20s, I’d used LSD to help me learn to love myself — and the world — again, after falling into deep cynicism that I medicated with heroin and cocaine. So, after hearing from an online friend about some legal research chemicals, including some that were related to LSD, I ordered one form called 1v-LSD in late August. Those arrived in September, and, much as I tried, I was never able to break through the very enjoyable, recreational level to do the challenging Shadow Work that regular LSD had helped me do in my 20s.
Thus, in November, I decided to order a different kind of “legal” LSD called 1cp-LSD, hoping it might help me go deeper. And that was my mistake.
You see, unlike 1v-LSD which was legal until March 2023 in Japan, 1cp-LSD had been outlawed in January 2021. But I never checked. I just assumed that it must be legal here because the website said they shipped to Japan.
When that package got caught up in Customs just before the holidays in December, my intuition told me this could be trouble. Big trouble.
At the time, I made a deal with myself: Just don’t order anything ever again and don’t speak of it. There’s more to this story, which I’ll be writing about in 2024 on a new Substack blog (separate from the regular one I’ll be starting and based on the journal I kept while incarcerated), but I’ve already said more than I’d intended in this post.
However, I’m sharing this because, well, while I admit I acted too hastily and should have checked the Japanese government’s laws, I feel that’s all I did wrong. I have no shame about what I did. Not only did my crime have no victims, I “committed” it because I wanted to heal myself so I could better serve society. What kind of government makes such an action illegal? In addition, I’m not going to allow any external forces, even ones with the power to incarcerate me, to stop me from sharing my story truthfully.
And that leads to lesson #1 from 2023:
Lesson #1: Speak Your Truth As Earnestly As You Can, You Are Stronger Than You Have Given Yourself Credit For
This lesson took me until these final days of 2023 to grok. It may even get me into trouble moving forward.
But if it does, well, that’s a reflection of Power that should not be and its misbehavior, not mine. For too many years, I’ve absorbed their warped morality and it has twisted my sense of Self. No longer. I know who I am, and what I’m here for. I won’t be intimidated anymore.
And while I’m certain the authorities could do worse to me than they did in my 45 days in jail (and the trial and its resulting three-year suspended sentence I received), the authorities — not intentionally — gave me a gift by arresting me and putting me through their robotic, inhumane system: They taught me I’m a lot stronger than I’ve been giving myself credit for.
And now, I want to use that strength to continue to “find the others” and be a part of creating something bigger than me, something that will, hopefully, allow individuals the opportunity to live peacefully and prosperously without the threat of an inhumane Power structure hanging over their heads.
This leads me to lesson #2.
Lesson #2: It’s Time to Manifest A Local, In Real Life Community of Equals
That’s a bit of a mouthful, but let me explain. My experience in the Japanese justice system was a very dehumanizing one. No, the police who held me and the prosecutor and judge who ordered my incarceration didn’t do any physical violence to me.
Nor did I ever feel threatened by physical violence. In fact, I can’t even remember seeing a gun on the police who held me. Japanese justice — and society — is much different than in my native United States.
Instead, it was like being held captive by humane robots. No measure of logic or emotion could take the humans I interacted with out of the Program they were following.
And the reason for this became clear to me: They didn’t know me. And because I had entered their life as a “suspected criminal,” they were biased to mistrust me. Unfortunately, such is the nature of living under the giant social structure known as a State: people who have power over us are people who usually don’t know us and often don’t trust us.
And, well, ever since late May when I returned to my bedroom where 13 police officers woke me up at 7:03 am on April 4, 2023 not with donuts but with a warrant (a bad baker’s dozen, if you will!), well, too often I’ll hear a car door slam shut outside my window from the customers of the neighborhood health clinic that is next door and I’ll jump, sometimes even checking to see: Are the police back to arrest me?
In short, I don’t think I’ll ever feel safe again living under a State structure where people who have a monopoly on violence who don’t know me have the “right” to rudely wake me from a lovely dream early on a spring morning, waving papers in my face, instantly treating me as a bad guy, and behaving like I was acting up when I didn’t welcome them with open arms. Fuck them. Sorry, not sorry.
Thus, I believe it’s time we humans who share these concerns about these abusive distant, top-down structures of Power begin forming collectives outside the control of the State. Such collectives will preferably be capped off around Dunbar’s number of 150 (a friend proposes 144 because of its sacred properties, and I’m all for it). These collectives may start online, and as they are forming, they should seek to connect with similar collectives worldwide.
As my friend and fellow polymath rebel Alasdair Lord points out in this video (and his book), humans have lived in non-state-forms (NSFs) for the vast majority of our time here on Earth, suggesting NSFs have some advantages to living under the State and, at the very least, we should have the option to do so again.
Count me in.
Now, I believe this is a reasonably long-term project, but as a budding astrologer, I believe the Pluto in Aquarius transit of the next 20 years is when these small, communal structures will begin to form and to collaborate, just as the larger structures of society continue to fail in what should be the real goal of a societal structure: serving the individuals that make it up and empowering them to be stronger via a community than they can be by themselves.
Lesson #3: Astrology Is a Gift From “the Gods”, And I’m Here to Share It, With Integrity
This goes back to 2019, when a series of events set me out on my deep dive into the world of astrology. Over that time, I’ve run all sorts of tests to see if the astrological framework had the consistent integrity to improve my life — and my understanding of the world.
Well, folks, that four-year experiment is over: As of this writing, I’m enrolled in an excellent online astrology school and will do, at the very least, the core two-year curriculum, establishing a solid foundational understanding of this ancient divinatory practice so that I can, by summer 2025 or early 2026, begin a practice as a professional astrologer in earnest.
The last thing I wish to say about that here is that it was almost as though I had to really start believing that all of those planets I have in Capricorn meant something. (Those planets are the Sun, Moon, and Jupiter, conjunct my Moon’s North Node between 14 and 18 degrees, with Mercury alone in the first degree.) What do I mean?
Well, since the start of 2022, I was enrolled in a school of an astrologer who has a popular and excellent weekly YouTube channel. His paradigm is Evolutionary Astrology (EA), and I gained a lot of insight from it. However, whenever I tried to read the foundational text from the founder of EA, while I could detect some signal, something about it was too noisy for my brain. Too, shall I say, Aquarian?
(Having said that, I absolutely love reading The Elements Series and other works by another well-respected practitioner of EA, Steven Forrest, and will likely incorporate aspects of EA in my practice once I launch it.)
Anyway, several factors contributed to my leaving the school based in EA in mid-summer, but none of them are a discredit to it, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in learning astrology. I wasn’t sure what I would do next with astrology, though the founder told me I had an innate knack for it and I felt my journey with it wasn’t done.
A month or so later, I began seeking more training, momentarily finding a school that fascinated me but which ended up feeling too ungrounded for my Capricorn sensibilities. Eventually, I was led back to the astrologer whom I had first read when Pluto was leaving Sagittarius for Capricorn (2007–8) and his school, which offered a grounding in traditional, Hellenistic astrology through its first-year course, “Ancient Astrology for the Modern Mystic.”
We are four weeks into the course, and I couldn’t be more elated. In fact, just today, I pledged to the school’s Kickstarter campaign to get a big discount on year 2 of the course, which I can start in summer 2024 and do concurrently with the end of year 1.
The point is I’m serious about this and, well, as a serious Capricorn is aught to do, I’m going to endure and work hard so that when I am ready to launch professionally, I’m not going to be blowing hot air up people’s butts. Much as I’ve found many excellent, wise, educated astrologers in my four-year journey, there are still many out there who treat this ancient and profound practice lightly, thinking they can just make up things that appear to them from their guides who live in jacuzzis on the south side of a beach on sizzling Mercury (the sunburns there, I hear, are particularly dangerous.)
Yes, I’m being playful in my description, but I’m serious about this. One of the lessons these last few years has brought home to me (lesson #1 from 2020) is integrity matters. I don’t see how we, as a species, navigate the many challenges of the next few decades if we don’t up our game regarding living with integrity. And while I’m sure I’ll continue my lifelong habit of noticing the lack of integrity in others and in societal structures (apparently, this is a Capricorn superpower — and curse), ultimately, I’ve got to start with myself because a hypocrite is the very opposite of a person with integrity.
So I’m grateful that 2023 was the year that I finally landed here, committed to astrology as a way to support myself and others as I transition into the elder years of my life.
Lesson 4: Online Communities of Equals Are Wonderful
I wrote about this in Lesson #6 of 2022 with “Being a Valued Member of Communities Matters to Me” but it’s such a big part of my life — and it’s now tied into Lesson #2 — so I have to write about it again.
When I was in jail, one of the heaviest thoughts I dealt with was knowing I couldn’t communicate with the many friends I’ve made in our Emergent Commons community and tell them I was okay. I had no Internet access, and it was too hard for my wife (or son) to connect with them because the police had taken my computer and phones, which had the passwords for the community on them.
However, one of the many things I did in jail to keep my Spirit high was to think about the many fun, life-enhancing interactions I’d had with members of that community, as well as projecting into the future and visualizing their reactions when I told them why I’d been gone — “Jail? I thought you’d just taken that trip to Mars you’d been planning with your pal, Elon, man!”
And over the past few months, I’ve been working hard on how I relate to people in that community, working through misunderstandings that often trigger heavy emotions, and doing my best to really listen and understand the perspective of others while remaining true to myself.
In fact, doing all of this caused one of the members of the community, a woman who was my “debate” partner over “vaccine” mandates in the fall of 2021, to invent a reward that meant a lot to me because it meant she noticed my efforts. And that award was Peacekeeper of the Week, and it came with this lovely, light-blue suit of armor. The shield’s a bit big, but …
Anyway, one reason I love this community is not only is it made up of a rather eclectic bunch of humans, but unlike the way we are too often treated by the top-down structures we are stuck in, this community is very focused on the how of relationship and a core value is that we are a community of equals.
And that, my friends, is an Aquarian value this stubborn Capricorn can sink his hooves into.
Lesson #5: Victim Mentality Is For The … Leave The Birds Out Of It!
I’m afraid that lesson #2 about my wish to help manifest a world where humans can live in smaller communities of equals and how my jail experience and the PTSD I have from it led to this conviction, well, I’m afraid that makes it seem like I’m full of resentment for the Japanese government.
I’m not. You do you, Japanese government, just don’t throw my ass in jail again as I do me!
I said “fuck you,” not in a personal way, because besides a few bad apples that always seem to exist in police departments and other positions of power, I rather liked my captors, and I think they liked me. So the “fuck you” was directed at the idea that these individuals — and most people — buy into. That idea is the State knows more about our bodies than we do. And from that “knowing” that in then has the right to rouse a non-violent man from a peaceful sleep to whisk him away to a stint in their byzantine legal system because he ordered a medicine they think is dangerous but he knows, from experience, works for him.
All of that said, while I am even stronger in my conviction that the governments of the world have no right to do what they did to me than I was a year ago (and I was already pretty strong on that), I look at that challenging experience as one of the best things to ever happen to me.
In some ways, it’s a mirror of what I went through 25 years ago at age 25 when drug addiction led me into the California legal system. Perhaps this is, again, a reflection of my Capricorn nature, since Capricorn is ruled by Saturn and Saturn is about enduring challenges and learning from them. It’s also about limits.
And boy, did I experience limits: In a 24-hour day, there were many days where I only got out of my 12 ½ by 8 ¼ foot cell for about 10–15 minutes to wash my face and hands. In addition, I had no English-language media for the first half of my stay.
It was the exact opposite of life “on the outside,” where we are all drowning in information. As a result, I realized just how creative I was, just how many things I could do to pass the time, ranging from doing astrological “math puzzles” in my head (trying to use what I knew about how long planets orbit around the Zodiac to figure out what signs they would be in certain years) to filling four notebooks with very small handwriting of about 95,000 words of a journal that will form the foundation of that Substack blog I plan to begin publishing in 2024.
But that wasn’t all I did. No, I invented the world’s next great sport: Bread Ball!
Bread Ball evolved out of Thread Ball, which was me finding — and making “thread balls” out of — loose bits of carpet and clothing on the floor of my cell and then flicking them as far as I could across the cell. Those threads were hard to come by and often broke apart, so I next invented Bread Ball, rolling into balls small pieces of the breakfast bread we were given every morning and then putting them into complicated tournaments with brackets that I documented in my notes.
I kept this on the down low, of course, because just trying to imagine myself responding to an interrogation from one of the police officers — -”What are you doing? Playing Bread Ball, sir!” — was enough to send me into either hysterics or night terrors.
I got so absorbed in this activity that I began writing about them in my journals, reverting to my sportswriting days, writing “game stories” about the crazy proceedings. If you want to hear the full, hilarious details, again, follow the “jail journal” blog (I’ll post the link to it here when it’s ready, so if you don’t see a link, well, it’s still on the way. Come back later!).
(LOL — I just realized that perhaps sharing about that openly will be the next “cause” the authorities have to lock me up — because it really was kind of nutso! Ironically, it kept me sane).
Last, to drive the point home that my 45 days in jail taught me a lot, and I don’t feel victimized by it, in my second week there, I had several nights in a row of very resonant dreams, something that had never happened to me (I’ve always been a dreamer, but usually they fade or, if I have one that lasts, it’s rare, and never have I had so many in a row).
This got me thinking about just how many natural abilities we have that may be buried under the many activities of our busy modern lifestyles.
Anyway, much more to write about this, but the long and short of it is, much as I appreciate when people offer me sympathy and say they are sorry I had to go through that legal challenge, well, I’m glad it happened.
Lesson #6: More Free Time, Please!
I’ll make this one short. Because of my legal troubles, I lost most of my paying work. This meant, just like in 2020 when I quit my regular day job to become a freelancer, I had much more time on my hands.
And, well, I love it.
And I think that if more people had more free time, rather than this being a situation where “idle time is the Devil’s playground,” I think people’s nervous systems could resort back to a more natural state and, as a result, they’d find within themselves all sorts of unexplored talents. This could then help them orient themselves to a life of Service to humanity, rather than a life of selfish motivation.
At least, this has been my experience and, as a result, I feel I’m going into 2024 in the best shape of my middle-aged years.
Lesson #7: Grief Has Its Own Time Table (On the Loss of My Father)
Yes, it’s time we get to Big Event #2 that I mentioned at the start of this article.
On August 8, 2023, my beloved father passed away. He was 78 years old.
Before 2021, he was a healthy, energetic, sharp 76-year-old. Then, in early summer 2021, he started experiencing some strange neurological symptoms — higher anxiety, tingling in his fingers and feet, and, well, to be honest, a bunch of other stuff I’ve forgotten. That was the beginning of a Hellish two-year journey in which my hard-working brother and wonderful mother did everything they could think of to help my dad.
Unfortunately, while there were a few periods where things seemed to be improving, nothing stuck, and, I suppose, on a Soul level, my dad decided in August that there was no coming back. Our family has long talked about how we don’t want to live out our lives as a vegetable or as a burden on others, so it doesn’t surprise me that Dad died when he did. In fact, the major emotion I felt when my mom told me he’d passed away was relief, not only because he was in a lot of pain at the end but because my mom (and brother) were exhausted.
None of that makes it easy that he’s gone. And, in the months since, I’ve come to discover that grief creeps up on me unexpectedly. When it does, I allow it to be my companion. I don’t rush it. Instead, I welcome it, understanding that it reflects my love for my dad.
There’s still more grieving to do, but I’ve no idea when, where, or even how. In a week, I’ll return to the U.S., and we will have a party to celebrate my dad’s life. I’m super happy that’s the way my mom wants to do it because it’s always bothered me that Western cultures turn the death of a person into such a drag.
It’s sad to lose someone, but it’s a natural part of life. So why not celebrate who they were and, as you do that, see if you can take those things you are celebrating in that person and be more of that in your life?
At least that’s what I’m trying to do.
Lesson #8: Being More Generous Has Its Rewards
My dad’s name was Leonard, Leo for short.
I called him dad, mostly, though in my teenage years due to his prowess on the ping pong table, a friend who was a regular at our house and who marveled at my dad’s skill, dubbed him “Lennyotis, the God of Ping Pong,” which we sometimes shortened to Lenny.
Still, sometimes people called him Leo, and one of the positive characteristics of the Zodiac sign of Leo is generosity.
I must tell a funny story before I share more about that. You see, my dad died on August 8, 2023. Not only was that the day of the horrific fires in Maui, August 8 is also the day that some of the more “woo woo” elements of the astrology community call the Lion’s Gate. It has to do with being in the middle of Leo season, the numbers 8/8, the star Sirius and Rick Moranis in “Ghostbusters.”
(Okay, maybe not that last bit. I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity for an obscure Rick Moranis reference. How did that geeky guy ever become as big of a star as he did? Ah, 1980s, how I occasionally miss thee.)
Anyway, referencing back to how I want my astrology to be grounded, about a week before 8/8/23, I saw a video of a quirky, fun, and very human astrologer who I’d come to enjoy in which she detailed what the Lions Gate idea was all about while also having some fun with it. This led me to post some humorous ramblings in the Comments section of that video, and, well, we had ourselves a good ol’ time.
So, when I got the call from my mother that dad had passed away around 10 pm on 8/8, I just had to laugh. Was this dad’s way of cooperating with the Universe to remind me to be less judgmental? Or to even take my jokes less seriously? That’s an interesting thought. Anyway, who knows? All I know is I loved the timing.
But more than that, as I dug into the symbolism of that timing and talked with my mom in the next months about who my dad was, I kept landing on that word: generous.
My dad gave to everyone without the expectation of receiving anything in return.
That’s a really wonderful trait, and while it’s something I feel I probably did learn from my dad and have been reasonably good at, thinking about what aspects of my dad I wanted to carry forward told me that I could be more generous.
Before I end, let me be clear: Generosity is not limited to material support. If it was, well, I’d be in trouble because, so far, I’ve never earned much money in my life.
No, while generosity can be expressed with money, at its core, it is a gift from our hearts and has no limits.
In fact, I’d argue that we can be more generous with our time, more generous in our forgiveness, more generous in our interpretation of the behaviors of others, and more generous in our beliefs about the human condition.
Again, it’s likely there is more to come about this because I think it’s important. I’m going to continue working with it in 2024 and beyond.
For now, thanks dad, you are surely missed, but I’ll do whatever I can to carry your generous spirit forward.
Conclusion
And that’s it, folks; we landed on eight lessons this year, but just like in previous years, I have no serious reason why. It just worked out that way.
While my “Bye, Bye Medium, A Retrospective (Part 3)” is my official sign-off from Medium, I feel it’s consistent with the trajectory of this blog to post this “What I Learned This Year” here at the end of the year.
Having said that, I’ll also cross-post it to my new Substack, which, like the jail journal, I’ll post the link to once it’s up and running. I plan to have the link to that main blog up within a week so I can share this article as well as the final of these three articles I’ve been working on this week, “The Astrology of the First Half of 2024.” That astrology article will be more of the stuff I’ll write regularly on the new blog.
However, perhaps the most consistent lesson I’ve learned from doing this blog on Medium these past four-plus years is that I excel at writing essays on big topics with personal stories and humor to make reading them less challenging. So, I’ll likely continue those kinds of posts, as well.
Anyway, if you’ve enjoyed this post and/or my other writing, please consider following me over to Substack.
Until then, thanks for reading, and Happy New Year! Let’s make 2024, a year that looks to be historic in its impact, the best year we can!
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