Downshifting at Last

Well the last few weeks have simply laid me out flat! I have soo many projects teed up, but I’m going to pull back for a while and recoup my strength.

On Wednesday I got my long-awaited second COVID shot of AstraZeneca. (It has long appealed to me that this drug is associated with Zurich, Switzerland, the ancestral home of the guy I studied for my PhD: C.G. Jung.) I know I have to wait two weeks for it to be viable, but at least the jab is IN. I’m trying not to think about how the UK is a hotspot for COVID right now, and how even people who have had their two jabs are falling victim to these new strains. This is not the time to relax my guard!

Despite the UK delaying the end of lockdown, I hope to squeeze in some sightseeing—my favorite relaxing thing to do! You will NEVER GUESS what famous figure is associated with Manchester. 

Yes, Emmeline Pankhurst may come to mind, and she is a heroine of the highest order. Besides being born on the same day as me (rah!), she organized the UK suffragette movement and helped women win the right to vote. In fact, Time named her as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century in 1999. There’s a statue of her here in Manchester, and I plan to go and seek that out for a photo op. BUT she’s not the famous figure I have in mind. 

Guess again!

Well you might as well give up, because you’re never going to get it. The famous figure is (drumroll!) Dr. John Dee. 

Few people know that in 1595 Queen Elizabeth appointed Dee to be the Warden of the Collegiate Church of Manchester, which was effectively the only job he ever had. He arrived in 1596 and took up residence when he was 68 years of age, retaining this position until his death in 1608. Tragically, an outbreak of the plague robbed him of his third wife, Jane, and at least one of his children—an eerie forerunner of our contemporary challenges.

You may recall that I have chased Dee previously—once in London by attending the marvelous Dee exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians, and again last year when I took care of a couple of sweet dogs living near the church graveyard where Dee & Edward Kelly were said to have raised a man from the dead. The Manchester college library owns 5 books from Dee’s collection, plus they have a few weird and wonderful tales to tell about him summoning the devil within the library! 

I believe that pursuing Dee (and Pankhurst) will be exactly what any sensible doctor would prescribe for me in terms of recovering from the effort of these past few weeks.

On the other side of my hiatus, I expect to be cooking up something new, so stay tuned to see what happens next! In the meantime, if you need a bit of coaching (doesn’t everybody?!), please connect with me and let’s see what beautiful magic we can concoct together. Nothing thrills me more than helping people become who they truly are, so reach out to me asap if there’s something we might accomplish in tandem. That will revive me like nothing else, so just know that I am here for you.

warmly, -Dr. Vicky Jo