Knowing when it's time to go

On the first day of the new millennium, January 1, 2000, I was at a loose end in Louisville, Kentucky. The evening before, out of nothing more than a sense of obligation, I’d attended a glitzy New Year’s Eve party hosted by my boss. It was the last thing I’d wanted to do, but I’d been told it ‘wouldn’t be done’ for me not to go. So I showed up, all nice and neat in my little black dress. I intended to stay just for an hour or so, in order to be seen and then quietly to slip away. I was decidedly out of sorts at the time; I’d spent the previous few months learning to fly, to overcome a fear of flying. And, at 38 years old, the process had shaken something loose in me. The answer to the question I’d been grappling with for so many years – I know I don’t want to be this, but what do I really want to be – was very slowly beginning to come into focus. The ground beneath my feet was beginning to shift, and I was desperate for space and freedom from those too-constricting corporate chains to go fishing for something resembling clarity.

Somehow, I found myself in the corner of the large party gathering room, face-to-face with a woman who was presented to me as a local ‘fortune-teller’: a reader of cards. She told me a few interesting things about myself, and invited me to pick a card from Susan Seddon Boulet’s beautiful ‘Goddess Knowledge’ card deck. The card I drew was Eagle Woman – standing, among other things, for ‘the ability to soar to the heights’, so the blurb on the back of the card told me. I laughed, and decided that was my cue to get out of Dodge. I fled that weird, corporate-lawyerly scene to the sound of Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’ wafting across the car park.

‘Cause I have been told
That salvation lets their wings unfold ...’

Really. You couldn’t make it up.