Post-Musings on Vibecamp 3
Today I caught myself rushing around while trying to integrate my Vibecamp 3 experience enough to blog about it. I've long felt that the Mage of Aquarius blog needs new life breathed into it. There was a series of dramas and unlikely delays that killed my creative spark and aggravated old wounds around how I can express myself and how I am perceived. As such, I haven't been keeping things as updated as I would like. There's that primal wound, my Chiron on my Leo ascendant, acting up again. How many times did I rehearse what the rod of Asclepius tattooed on my arm meant, only to fumble it when people asked about it at Vibecamp? That's a literal translation if there ever was one. But I have hope now. There's been a renewal within me, some closure brought to things I didn't think I was ever going to get closure on.
It's my first day back in YYC and as soon as I woke up, I washed my face, did a little yoga, and meditated for about 20 minutes. Then I immediately started writing a to-do list and trying to carve out a little time to write about my experiences. I'm doing everything right, I think to myself. I am doing all the right things and getting the dopamine that I need in order to be the new person that I want to be and carry the lessons that I learned at Vibecamp forward.
That was when I caught myself. I looked at the new freckles on my arms from time spent being kissed by the sun and the edge of my tattoo peeking out from underneath the sleeve of my t-shirt and I wondered why I was trying so hard to tense myself into a particular shape, this new person, this new vision I had for myself and who I wanted to be, rather than just appreciating my experience as it is right now. Why must there be an "I" that I have to define rather than just enjoying where I am and my time here?
Breath. Breath. Inhale. Exhale. There's nowhere to be and nothing to prove. All the queer nerds and the theatre rejects and the highly accomplished STEMlords and the hippies and druggies and artists congregated at Vibecamp 3 and brought their vibrant, whole selves and were embraced for it. That energy is still here. It hasn't gone anywhere. It doesn't need to be worked for in order to be sustained. All you have to do is notice it.
There's an anon who goes by the name Brother Sanchez on Twitter. I can't remember his real name, despite having had several conversations with him during which he was very kind and helpful in person at Vibecamp. On the last day, as we were packing up, he gave me his great-grandma Rosie's antique comb. The thing about having my south node in the 12H house in Cancer is that the 12H symbolizes things "beyond the veil" and Cancer symbolizes the home and ancestors, so I'm very in touch with not only my own but other people's ancestors and ancestral spirits, to the point of excess.
My own grandma was a hoarder and a Pisces. She was Christian, of course, religious, but also very spiritual and vaguely witchy. She spoke to ghosts and believed she could understand their intentions, like when my mom's shoe came undone she would say it was our late Uncle Brian, who died in a tragic car accident at 17 years old, long before I was born, looking to mess with my mom. Grandma Harwood would buy bags of stuff from Goodwill she didn't really need just because stuff there was so cheap. What I've found is that both my own and other people's ancestors want me to have stuff out of sentimentality, and I'm often too sentimental myself to say no.
Those things remind me of special connections and ways to conduct ancestor reverence that other people might not find as inherently meaningful so I feel like it falls on me to preserve that meaning. So during Vibecamp I wound up with Brother Sanchez's great grandmother's comb.
But I discovered as soon as I got home, great grandma Rosie's actually doing me a huge favor, because as I combed my hair this morning, I thought about how I'm magically integrating the energies from Vibecamp into my daily life through this object she gifted me. It's such a simple thing but a huge blessing.
Want more Vibecamp-related slice of life content? Check out the AI-generated song I published on my way home, “Mountain Done“ on Soundcloud.