Everyday Alchemy: Calcination
A One-Week Memoir on Burning Away Old Stories and Listening for Soul Guidance
By the time I hit the halfway mark of this lunar cycle—the bright, staring eye of the Full Moon—I realized something: this 7-day Road Home isn’t about forcing a breakthrough. I have arrived.
It’s about trusting the momentum that’s already here.
I’ve “seized the treasure” in a way that feels almost quiet. I have my lab back. Not the one in the woods, wrapped in trees and silence, where I first dove deep into my notebooks and studies. This is a different lab: walls instead of trees, neighbors instead of wildlife, my little downtown block instead of open sky. In winter, I retreat like I always have—but this time it doesn’t feel like hiding.
It feels like Might.
That’s Ryan Marcus’s word for this 7-day cycle. MIGHT. I used to be tough in the sharp-edged way—putting up a front to survive, bracing for impact, reading every room like a threat assessment. Now toughness has been reorganized.
Favorable or challenging, I know I can adapt. I’ve walked through enough fires to understand my own resilience. At this approaching Winter Solstice, I’m not retreating out of self-protection. I’m retreating into my city, my block, my little castle downtown to birth a new year.
Like a caterpillar folding into the chrysalis, I can feel myself softening into a new form. This is the re-calibration of wings. On the surface, it looks like I vanished, extra blankets, quiet nights, fewer plans. Underneath, everything is rewiring.
Which brings me to the real work of this Road Home: listening.
Speak. Say. Tell. Share. Yes. But most importantly—listen. Listen to my inner dialogue as a kind of synergy between “me” and all the lives I’ve already lived inside this one: the girl who hid, the hermit in the woods, the woman downtown drawing circles at her drafting table… looking at the world go by outside the window.
Listen, and then act accordingly. Remember that garbage in, garbage out isn’t just about food or media—it’s about stories, too. The things I think I know may simply be the things I was conditioned to believe. They aren’t always absolute truth.
So now, on Day 2 of this Road Home, my ground message is simple: soul guidance.
That phrase came back to me when I pulled out my old alchemy notes—the ones I scribbled when I was wintering in the woods, letting the trees be my teachers.
In those pages, I had written about a fourth body: the etheric. The place where shadow lives. For the last few years, I’ve been busy learning the language of the physical, mental, and emotional—mapping them at the compass of my experience here on Earth. Now, I can feel myself stepping into a new stage. One with wings.
Ryan Marcus will continue with the 3 Bodies that are fundamental to his CALM framework.
For me… it is the beginning of exploring the spiritual body more deliberately, not as an escape but as another layer of reality to integrate. I want to use alchemy and shadow work as lenses to illustrate it—to show, on paper, how the unseen shapes the seen. It feels less like a new idea and more like my soul clearing its throat and repeating what it’s been saying all along.
If you’d like to turn this from “interesting to read” into “something I’m actually living,” you’re invited to join the (r)evolution of time Write Along by subscribing. As I map my own days, weeks, and lunar cycles as a living experiment in alchemy, you’ll get the behind-the-scenes mind maps, prompts, and reflections so you can run your own version alongside me—on your calendar, in your journal, in your life. Think of it as a quiet little cohort of time travelers and note-takers, each of us tracking our Great Work in real time, learning how to turn ordinary days into chapters of a story we actually want to remember.
The muse has my attention again. I’m inspired by what MaLee wrote in the woods, what she saw before I was ready to live it. This Road Home is my way of walking back through those notes, not to repeat that chapter, but to bring its wisdom into this one—into my city lab, my winter cocoon, my next set of wings.
To be continued…
Cheryl Crow
P.S. If you’d like to see where this “soul guidance” first sparked on paper, the rest of this entry (including photos of the Calcination Alchemy Mind Map I drew a few winters ago while studying in the woods) lives in the subscriber section. Become a paid subscriber to step into the lab with me and walk through the first stage of this alchemical journey, map in hand.
🔒 Subscriber Section: Calcination in the Woods
The Calcination Mind Map and 7 Alchemy Stages I’m sharing with you today is one of those artifacts I didn’t realize was a prophecy until now.
