This week, we’re running a series of letters from my Planet Waves co-creators (introduced here). Tonight’s letter is from Fe Bongolan, my friend, mentor, astrology client and fellow political junkie. I first met Fe in San Francisco in 2004. The hand-written Planet Waves logo that we use everywhere was scribbled using a Sharpie pen in Kinkos Copies on that very trip. Fe is one of our roots into the Earth, into soul and into reality. — efc
Dear Planet Waves Reader:
I am fortunate to have had the right teacher at the right time whenever I was at crossroads. Each came to me as an answer to a prayer. They were often totally unexpected, not in a shape or form I would have predicted. They gave me the right information at a crucial moment, leading me forward on the path. The right path. They led me to my life in theater, to the people who would turn out to be my dearest friends, and to all of my jobs.
Since I was a child, astrology had always held a fascination — actually an obsession — for me. I looked to it for answers, or at least clues. What was I going to be when I grew up? I found myself still asking that question in my forties. When I happened upon Eric’s writings on the Internet fifteen years ago during the early Vashon Island days of Planet Waves, I knew I was meeting up with the next guide, the road sign, the map to where it was I was going. What it was that I have been. Where I could be going.
I was in a life that increasingly was no longer mine to claim. Unfulfilled by career and the incessant call of familial duty, my time was not mine. Even with the frustration of that kind of restriction, mostly of my own making, I was afraid to venture out into the world beyond the gates of my history, my culture, my fears.
Yet, the call of so much left undone waited for me in my dreams like a specter in the closet. I was at a major jump-off point in my adult life, stuck in the middle of the four-way intersection, not certain where my path would lead. Going back was not an option, and yet the new was fearful territory for me. ‘The new’ was finding my freedom and my passion.
I remember Eric Francis’ words as though I’d read them yesterday: What you need now is to FINALLY allow yourself to listen and think with your feelings. Which in my old Catholic brain was the road to hell: allowing myself to say and do what I think and feel.
In actuality that was the expressway to heaven: freedom to be myself, unfurled. The wisdom in Eric’s writings and Planet Waves astrology inspired me to take a leap of faith and purchase my first of many one-to-one readings with him.