Lessons from losing $1000 cash

Choosing joy in times of scarcity and sadness

It’s summer in Canada, and that means go time. Cottage trips, music festivals, lake swims, splash parks, roller coaster rides, family gatherings, pool parties, money spent.

In planning our year of World Schooling 2024, I specifically wanted to be home for the summer in Ontario because a) we wanted to see family and b) Ontarian summer is rad.

I bought tickets for our family of three to attend a well known folk music festival in Orillia called “Mariposa Folk Festival”. It’s a festival I attended as a child, and it was such a special memory for me. I wanted time as a family, to dance under the stars, shop at local artisan stalls and swim in a gorgeous, clean river.

The road to Mariposa was prefaced by a quick jaunt to Niagara-On-The-Lake the week before. I had never been to this quintessentially colonial Canadian landmark, and I was excited to attend the Shaw Festival’s performance of “My Fair Lady”. The Shaw Festival is as good as Canadian Theatre gets. The costumes are exquisite; the singing incredible, the performances top notch. It was going to be great.

I was so excited. Truly, deep down, bone-hungry excited for these trips.

But in the week leading up to Niagara-On-The-Lake, I could see my family did not feel the same way that I did. They looked run down. My husband Kal had been away for weeks at a time, going from filming Amazing Race Canada to filming The Great Canadian Bake Show without even one day off in between. He had been homebound for about a week before our planned Niagara trip, but the road to recovery from these long shoots is not linear, it’s up and down. It’s psychological, too. Film crews go from moving 24/7, barely sleeping, high-stress and high-stakes, to home life.

The culture shock is significant, the landing often bumpy.

I thought I had built enough time into the plan between Kal’s arriving and our departing, but three days before Niagara, Zazie started to get very teary. She didn’t want to leave her Dad.

“We’re only going for two days - three at the max,” I explained. “And you’re going to a fancy play and a Safari and you’ll have your friends there and it’s going to be so much fun! We’re staying in a fancy colonial house!”

This obviously meant nothing to my six year old, who is Taurean by nature, incredibly home-oriented, raised during a pandemic, born in the very bedroom we were standing in now, looking at me with raised eyebrows and a quivering lower lip: she wanted to be home with her Dad. I pushed on because I’d already spent the money.

Three days later, in the middle of My Fair Lady, those same eyes were looking up at me, this time tinged with illness. Her eyes said, “If we don’t leave now, I’m going to throw up all over these fancy red velvet theatre seats.”

In the spirit of “hell ya it’s summer” and “come on, we’re going to have fun”, I’d let her eat dairy and chocolate sprinkled ice cream cones - conveniently denying that those are items my food sensitive child reacts to. Her immune system doesn’t do well on the sugar, dairy and no sleep trifecta (does anybody’s?), but I didn’t expect the reaction to be so quick…We left half way through the play and I was up most of the night battling a quick on-set fever.

The next morning, while we were supposed to be getting ready to go to Safari Niagara, Zazie was passed out on the couch, still feverish. I decided to admit defeat, hugged our friends goodbye, and raced back to the house in Etobicoke, where Kal greeted us with open arms.

I could feel his happiness at our return and Zazie’s relief at being home.

The next two days, Zazie was in bed, feverish off and on, coughing and sneezing, totally lethargic. I nursed her back to health and in the mean time, Kal pulled out all the camping gear, discussing the inclusion of every plate, spoon, knife and fork endlessly in his steady, plodding, Capricorn way of packing. He tested all the sleeping mats and sleeping bags. He got out all the coolers and camping bins and lanterns. Thorough, deliberate, attentive.

I awoke two days before the Festival with sore throat, burning eyes, incessant sneezing, runny nose, and cough with sore chest.

It was the sore chest that made me worry; it felt like an elephant was sitting on top of my chest. I just…couldn’t breathe. Zazie, while doing better, felt the same shortness of breath.

I realized that this was a legit flu and not just a bad reaction to rainbow sorbet. I had grossly underestimated how quickly she rebounded.

Now, I’ve had {that virus that shall never, ever be named} twice, and I could feel all the tell-tale signs. I immediately began to treat my sickness. I started chugging lemon water, vitamin c, garlic, cod liver oil, zinc, bone broth, liver capsules, bee pollen, black seed oil: I did all the things. And not all at once either, I spaced it out, I took it slow; I allowed my body to feel and respond.

The day we were scheduled to leave for Mariposa, my heart was in my throat. My friend called to check-in and I burst into tears on the phone. I had fever; I couldn’t pack the car, I wasn’t well enough to go, but I promised I’d try to join asap.

I didn’t want to spread our illness, and being sick while camping at a music festival sounded awful…but ARGH — that feeling of losing the money I’d so carefully saved was killing me! With budgets being so tight, I was so angry with myself.

Getting sick I had wasted a week of my World School adventure money. I felt like I was letting down my friends and letting down my family.

And then, through my haze of snotty tissues and garlic vapour, I saw my husband and daughter curled up together, totally content, two cozy caterpillars in a cocoon of quarantined love. It made me remember how good quarantine was for my family, how we got to be home all the time together, and how few and far between these moments of family closeness have been in the last six months.

I completely surrendered. I completely surrendered to the realization that in my planning for this trip back in December, it was impossible to know that what my family would actually need at this time was home.

I completely surrendered to the Universe’s wisdom.

I began to refocus my energy around the loss of the money.

I asked myself, How can I enliven my feelings towards this money loss? How can I reposition my view to see this happenstance as an opportunity for luck and good fortune? I realized I could just give the tickets away to someone who wouldn’t have been able to afford it, and gift them freely. That thought made the lump in my throat ease. That thought made the energy flow through my middle chakras again.

And so, that’s what I did. I gave the tickets away.

When I stopped trying to hold on so tightly and I released into the knowing that this year’s festival experience was not for me, I felt a deep sense of peace and a heightened connection to the friends that were surrounding and supporting me. It felt like I was gifting back into a loop of infinity, with an absolute knowing that what goes out, comes back in.

A wave of infinite abundance.

As I meditated and released the money, giving it freely back to the Universe, I began to see the infinity symbol in my third eye. I knew it was a divine symbol but I didn’t know very much about its meaning. I knew it had something to do with sacred geometry; when I connected to the symbol, I felt a wave of calm wash over me.

I went online and my favourite astrologer Pam Gregory had recently posted a video detailing a meditation for connecting to an infinity wave. Immediately, I thought, wait, what? Is the “infinity wave” really a thing? Synchronicity.

Turns out, it’s a thing:

I watched the above video where the author Hope Fitzgerald explains that to connect with the healing powers of the Infinity Wave, all you need to do is invite it in.

And so, I invited the Infinity Wave, and I could immediately feel the impact. I asked for the heavier, denser, negative energies to wash away, from my spiritual body, from my emotional body, and from my physical body, and I could feel Steiner’s Threefold principle in action.

I agree whole-heartedly that finding meditative practices like these are important because of the times that we’re in. It is important we maintain a sense of balance with the present state and make peace with our past and future.

The Infinity Wave is a gift from a loving universe to help maintain feelings of well-being in our current environment of chaos. Pam Gregory explains, “It’s a consciousness within itself that connects people and smoothes the waves between people and smoothes the waves within us if we’re in distress.”

I was surprised to hear Pam and Hope speaking about the impact of Sedna, represented by a planet that was moving into our orbit, and her connection to the healing waves I was experiencing.

In a dream in 2022, the Goddess Sedna appeared to me.

Sedna, Inuit Goddess of Marine Animals and the Sea, Image: Pinterest

The above image is how she appeared to me in the dream, gazing down from the sky silhouetted by a huge full moon, killer whales on either side of her, with marine animals gleefully jumping and diving, joyously falling into an endless body of water.

Her message was simple. “Play!” she said, as if she was gifting us the water, the world, to play in. I felt she was reminding me that even in sadness, we can choose joy. There is always choice, to maintain a light-heartedness in times of sorrow, death and confusion. Not unlike the meaning from Roberto Benigni in his film, “Life is Beautiful”, where he finds moments of playfulness and joy, even when life is at its darkest and most evil. I was so impacted by this film and especially this moment when he is captured while trying to flee, and is walking back at gun point, when he sees a child’s eyes watching through a slit in a wall, and he winks. And he marches, playfully.

As a mother, so many times in the past four years, it has felt like this: dancing and distracting and protecting childhood despite the environment we find ourselves in.

It is the simplest thing to do and the hardest thing to do to find joy in the darkness.

Connecting to the infinity wave through meditation is a powerful tool for returning to equilibrium and balance, to gain mental clarity and a sense of peace.

Image: Hope Fitzgerald @spreadinfinitehope

I may have lost the thousand dollars but I gained a beautiful lesson and an important meditative practice for calming and healing. I also chose my family, and prioritized their needs and wants above my own “idea” of what my family needed and wanted.

This next full moon will be a doozy, happening this Sunday, July 21st, and for people who are sensitive and intuitive, there is a genuine escalation of physical and emotional symptoms arising. Let us use all the methods in our spiritual tool kit to keep our feet on the ground and our playful natures intact.

Choosing joy is the great lesson we are all here to learn.

Until next week…

Kate

“All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” ~ Pablo Picasso

www.spreadinfinitehope.com/infinitywave