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Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
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8:18 pm
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I have posted not in a long while... like everyone else, I've been busy with NaNoWriMo, with rethinking, refiguring, and reshaping my life to put emphasis on my own dreams and passions. I had a glorious time writing my novel this past November, and made steady progress. I was nearly finished about a week before I needed to be, but let my word count dangle at around 49,000 for five days while enjoying the company of friends.
Our Thanksgiving here in town was wonderful, our old friend Justin came over from Spokane to enjoy it with us, and that was very special. None of us had seen him in over a year (for Erik and I, almost two years). It was very empowering for me, too, spending time with someone who thinks on my level and yet is a very stable, grounded, and consistent sort of person who knows how to take actions in accord with his values. He's become a devout Catholic, and Lindsay cut all of his hair off on his request. This may have saddened me greatly, but I feel less shallow about it in the deep respect I maintain for the very intentional choices he makes for his life.
Lately I have put myself out there a bit in the community to find hiking partners to go enjoy nature with. All of my friends in town like to be at home or go shopping, they don't care much for the peace and serenity of nature. I've met two people so far for hikes, one up a mountain to Fragrance Lake in the Chuckanuts, and one this afternoon to take a stroll around Lake Padden. I have plans to meet a third to go up past the snowline this weekend. The extra time I'm spending in natural, wild places, as well as the intentionality I'm wielding to organize these hikes with these people who have cars, is doing very good things for me.
I went with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kasethen this morning to an information session on the Massage Practitioner degree/certificate at Whatcom Community College. Off and on when I was in Bellingham before I considered this program, which I had heard was very good, but was always too busy with my various music activities and education. Now, though, the time feels more right, plus I can get the government to pay for probably the whole thing this year because of the time I spent making no money in Hawai'i...
Maui Community College has great agriculture programs. In terms of sustainable agriculture and healing modalities, Hawai'i is the leader. I have not seen half of the techniques, knowledge, or products advertised or even available here on the mainland that I have seen there, in these two fields... arguably my favorites. We shall see. Hawai'i is yet ever on my mind.
I am very tired from all my lengthy biking and hiking today, but I feel good. It feels good to move, to expand, to see and talk with new people, to spread out of myself and my normal little circular activities. It feels very good. And then I can relax and go inward again on my work days when I'm at the clients' house.
current mood:  accomplished
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| Sunday, November 15th, 2009
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10:10 am
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Do you ever do something even when your guidance tells you not to? Do you ever hear, feel, and acknowledge your body's wisdom, its opinions on what you need to be doing now, and then do the opposite, for some mind-f*cked reason that you aren't even aware of?
And then you regret it terribly... or maybe you feel like such a victim that you feel hopeless, and deserving of it, and you have so much self-hate because your body's predictions came true (they always do) and you had to flee your body because you didn't have the strength and integrity and love, enough, to protect it? It told you what it wanted and needed and you blatantly ignored it, abused it, stuffed it in?
It doesn't matter what anyone ELSE does or does to you. You know who people are and what they do, why does it surprise you one bit when they act in ways you know they will? What is this crazy masochistic self-destructive attraction? What on earth is wrong with your brain? You have to wonder sometimes...
Plus now you have a splitting headache and are so freaked out and panicking and far out of your body that you'd rather go run in front of a truck than continue without being in your body. Not like running in front of a truck will make that better.
current mood:  crushed
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| Saturday, October 17th, 2009
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10:44 am - The Litany
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I'm trying to figure out what I do and don't want.
I want a partner. I've always wanted a partner and never felt completely like I can achieve my potential without one.
But I don't want to not be able to trust my partner.
I don't want to be suddenly emotionally abandoned when I am most in need of support and love, so that I am traumatized and panic and push.
I don't want to be treated sweetly and kindly one moment and dismissively and coldly the next.
I don't want to never know what to expect.
I don't want to have my very tentative sexual expression encouraged and then shut down on.
I don't want to be hit.
I don't want to be drawn into a cycle of violence from which there does not seem to be an escape.
I don't want to constantly have to deal with his rationalizations about why his violence is a good or necessary thing, or why it's all my fault.
I don't want to be insulted, derided, or looked at with disgust.
I don't want to be made to feel bad about myself.
I don't want to agonize and hundreds of times resolve to end it because it's not good for me, only to be sucked back in.
I don't want to have ANY sexual involvement with someone who has interest in or use of pornography.
I don't want to have sex again until I'm married or totally committed.
I don't want to feel like I have to twist myself and my mind and my basic expectations into pretzels just to achieve some harmony.
I don't want it to be frighteningly easy for him to forget that he loves me and that I have no intention of hurting him, I only mirror, as everyone does in relationships.
I don't want to be emotionally invested in someone who says one thing and does another, and changes his mind all the time about whether or not he wants to love/be invested in me.
This list might be added to if I think of anything else.
But, to conclude...
I don't want anyone, the idea of getting close to someone else like that repulses me, I don't want kasethen, who I am close to and loyal to. The problem is, kasethen embodies the entirety of my 'don't want'. So I'm working on moving into accepting that stating and honoring the treatments I don't want from a partner is an expression of my love for myself, instead of settling for less, settling for someone who frightens and rejects and hurts me even if he is 'sometimes' the sweetest kindest smartest and most understanding and healing person.
So writing all of this out has been more of an exercise in convincing myself that I'm settling for less than I want and what I WANT right now is myself, to love myself, to take care of myself, and not put up with this awful treatment.
... but it's hard, it's so hard. When you love and care for someone and want to help him. And even now he is being nice and helpful again. And he has always understood and been my touchstone for those other realities and worlds that I love so much. But I fear these evil patterns will never really stop. And I don't want it anymore. It's hard for me to say that, but I'm trying to love and support myself enough to say that.
I felt it a lot more when I was in Bellingham alone and quite seriously considering not going back to Maui; just leaving Erik there and staying where I was. Maybe I should have. I didn't. And now I'm stuck in Bellingham but he's here too and has charmed all of my friends and groups away from me. I will withdraw rather than let people see I'm upset or cause a scene--usually--so... my friends are on his side now, and I've left all of them with him, and myself with nothing. I didn't feel isolated when I was in Bellingham before and nobody knew or liked Erik.
In this list I originally tried to list things I wanted in a partner, but it felt so icky to me that I had to stop. The thing is, I don't want anyone, I just want myself. I love and appreciate people, but I just don't WANT someone in that way. Even from Erik I don't want to be absorbed or own him or anything, I have just always loved to have someone I was close to that could support me and I could enjoy the company of, share things with, sometimes be given revelations through. But NOT abused, hit, degraded, emotionally frightened, made to feel like I was worthless trash. I don't want that. It's horrible.
Okay I'm done now...
current mood:  blank
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| Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
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8:53 am - Happy Harvest Moon
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Sometimes I feel as if I am going through life missing something, as if I am deeply unaware of so much that is going on in my own energetic field, spirit, mind, body. Unaware of my own karma and my own blind spots. And just as suddenly I may be lifted out of it with a sudden warmth, attention, a dose of love from some unknowable source.
Since I got back to Bellingham I have been working my way through a series of books called the Ringing Cedar Series by Vladimir Megre, among reading many other things. It has been an off-and-on relationship. I deeply appreciated the perspectives and information contained in the first book, and struggled more through the second, going for weeks without picking it up again because of some internal resistance or ennui. But finally I finished it and then requested the third book from the library.
How would I have described these books' effect on me? They are powerful books, and from the hearsay have changed many, many peoples lives in very significant ways. I had not yet seen the way in which they'd worked in me, much as I enjoyed and appreciated them. Not until five minutes ago, at least.
Here is the excerpt which struck me with sudden illumination:
"One has the impression that within the milieu of the community of people living on the Earth a reaction is beginning to take place which we are not in a position to arrest--or, for that matter, even to control.
The basic evidence of such a reaction is the psychic response observed in those who have come in contact with the book. Questionnaires, along with examination and analysis of readers' correspondence attest to the fact that a majority of readers have experienced a creative urge expressed in the form of poetic compositions, sketches and drawings, along with the writing and performing of songs. Many readers have felt the impulse to make contact with and cultivate plants, or to change their profession."
That last sentence was where I stopped reading because of the sudden explosion of energy throughout my body. The sudden sense of recognition in myself. Okay, I have always loved plants, always been into nature and farming and things of that sort. When I lived in Bellingham before I had ten big plants in pots. In Maui I did a lot with plants, and plants were all around me all the time. But it is only in the past month and a half or so that an unspeakable love and longing has lodged in me for plant life... not the restless desire to run away back to Hawaii and farm, but something far more present and direct. Sometimes I buy a plant because I quite literally fall in love. The depth of love and CONNECTION I feel with my plants now... from the little sprouts I planted on the new moon two weeks ago to the ginger flower I am trying to replant to the banana trees estranged from their natural climate. I have so much love for them it hurts. I worry for their well-being and deeply resent the callousness and unconsciousness with which other people treat them. I put energy into my plants in a way I never did before. I take them to the sink to water them. I carry them up and down the stairs, inside and outside, so they can have the sun. I think about them and long for their company and feel so much joy when I am close to them. My connection with plants has exploded! I thought this was reactionary to missing Hawaii, but it is deeper than that. And after reading that passage in the book I eerily knew, on some level, that this reaction was related to my receiving this transmission. The things contained in these books are more important to me than anything. Every discomfort I have had with other books about spirituality and energy is resolved in them. I loved Matt Guest and Carlos Castenada--and at the time I was reading them their focus on amoral power and its accumulation was extremely helpful for me. Taoism and tantra gave me the space to free my energy and my external experiences but ultimately lacked something. Books or viewpoints that are all abstract, light and love spirituality, ungrounded, make me rather nauseous. The Ringing Cedar series pulls it all together. It keeps the groundedness, the darkness, the sex and violence, the sheer reality, but it brings it all together in LOVE and the ultimate creative power of humankind. There is not the fear that permeates Castaneda's books, for example. And this factor alone, I believe, is what allows it to reach into and open so many people's hearts.
Oh yes and, it's my birthday!!!! Today and tomorrow, I'm not sure which. This is reckoning the day by the moon rather than by the sun. Which, inexplicably, feels more present and powerful to me, so I will honor it. I have been blessed with extraordinary birthday gifts this year, but then, I am every year. I will explain the reason for my birthday being today:
Each month the moon passes through a cycle. Depending on the day and time you were born you were born at a certain phase of that cycle. Now, in one solar year (one revolution of the earth around the sun) there are 13 moon cycles. Not 12. Our calendar is proportioned to squeeze 13 revolutions of the moon into 12 'months'. Thus, each year, as the moon and sun come into the same relationship that they did in the exact previous year, it falls on a different date in the 12-month calendar. So, to reckon on the ACTUAL astronomical 'birthday', that is, a solar year later, the date in our 12-month calendar actually does jump around. The sun and moon are today at the same revolution and phase in their cycle that they were when I was born. So thus, if we reckon by a 13-month lunar calendar (in terms only of pinpointing dates and not re-numbering everything), my birthday is today.
( Happy Birthday! now for some more current events and adventures )
current mood:  jubilant
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| Sunday, September 27th, 2009
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11:19 am - Home vs Freedom
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I have a very deep anxiety about the issue of home. Notwithstanding the fact that I have deep anxieties about a lot of things, this one reared up and punched me in the face when I contemplated making a tentative commitment to a household--renting a room--for at least three months, and then being responsible for finding a replacement when I leave. The very prospect filled me with so much terror that I found myself energetically canceling the engagement even though nothing has been decided upon. No, no, I told myself, you have got to figure out what you want to manifest and do it or else nothing will work. So I'm struggling to continue a thread of intention into this situation, as it is a good one. My last thread of intention for a room with a houseful of wonderful young ladies fell out because I shied from it--someone else got the room. I am wondering if the same will not happen here.
I am wondering if I should not bite the bullet and flee back to Hawaii in mid-October. I am having a very difficult time adjusting to life in modern society again, of paying exorbitant fees for a home, of finding a home that meets my standards of living, of handling my instinctive balking at moving in to LIVE WITH with a pack of strangers. I want my tribe. But I don't really have a tribe. How isolating and distressing IS this to a primarily social creature? Too much so. I do have a mate. That makes things even more complicated. Because I am not sure if I want a mate, on some levels, and on some levels, psychologically, I want and require one. And not just anyone, of course. MY mate. The other difficulty is I never know what my mate's intentions are with me or if HE wants a mate, either. He wants me to move back in with him, but I do not think I want to do that.
So, I'm torn. Between wanting to stay in physical proximity to my mate and wanting to go somewhere where I will be happier, where my work will be more meaningful, where I will be pursuing myself and my passions. I find myself more and more trying to log out of society's ways of doing things, and feeling deeply frustrated that there is little I can do to.. say.. squat somewhere and build my own home by a lake. Everything is owned by someone else and built by someone else and is not the way I would have it. Picky? Yes, very. I was very happy living in a tent structure by a stream in the guava forest. I was happy in my little open-air cabins in the midst of gardens and nature and waterfalls. I was even happy in the rammed-earth hut I shared with my mate
Part of the reason I am now referring to him as my mate instead of 'my friend' as I am usually wont to do is because I want to call him out. And I want to call myself out. And discover, if I explore and push enough, what our REAL intentions are. I am coming to terms with the level of my own commitment to him, even so far as to keep me in the same town I don't really want to be in, and I want to chase him out as to what HE wants, because if I can do that successfully, and he only wants me to be there as a failsafe for when his own economic or creative independence falters, then I don't want to be there, because that's not my responsibility, but I don't know if I can leave. He's good at being nice enough to keep me around if I'm on the brink of standing up and living for myself due to not feeling nourished enough by the relationship to keep it. Of course I love him and cherish him. But that is not worth misery. And so, what I am trying to discover now are the ingredients of my misery according to my personal karma. Do I NEED to be living a different lifestyle? Why is my burdensome existence so unceasingly HEAVY?
I know that at some point in my life, or perhaps many times, I will have shattering breakthroughs of facing my darkest places and fears. I have already had times like these, but after one, follows another, and I remain baffled as to how to effectively face those fears and work through that karma. All I can take note of is my own feelings and impulses around them.
( Blah blah blah )
This is the curiosity. One truth about consciousness, is that any consciousness can be accessed at any point in place or time, but consciousnesses on different vibratory levels remain inaccessible to one another. There is a law, I forget its name, that states that one vibratory state cannot remain a part of another without changing to the other's frequency, or changing the other's frequency to its own. This is why Misht and I live in separate rooms in our house, because these rooms are literally in different realities--differing states of consciousness. I cannot enter her rooms without accelerating my own vibratory rate. She cannot enter mine because they are... 'too dense'. A being at the vibration of Love cannot tolerate the vibration of fear; it must dissolve it, transform it, or become it. That is why at times we feel pulled into lower habits or desires we 'think' we must be above, and then at a later time, perhaps, we feel the 'pull' of that lower vibration only as an irritant in our own auras that we simply just move away from. The tiger can find no place to stick its claws if there is in us no place of death. All interaction requires like vibratory frequencies. And that is how we become trapped in our own hells and cease to see Spirit, cease to see the very real connections and interactions occurring on the energetic level. If I get too caught up I often forget that Misht's rooms are even in my house. I remember that they are theoretically supposed to be there, but they, and the doors to them, have completely vanished from my perception. Perhaps this is what faith is for--those inevitable times we move through cycles of low vibration. In our reason we can know that our perception creates our reality but does not define its possibilities. And we can know that our perception can change.
I think I have decided that at least part of the answer to the home question lies in the location of the home. Lay up your treasure in heaven, they say, where no thieves will steal or moths devour.
current mood:  puzzled
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| Friday, September 18th, 2009
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6:29 pm - Hitting Bottom, Shedding One's Skin, and Finding the True Partner
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Some time ago I biked to work this morning thinking about those lush, extravagant tropical birds that live out their joyful, beautiful lives in a predator-free environment, until someone imports a mongoose, and they're wiped out in a year.
Thoreau said in 'Walden': "The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling."
We see the truth of this all around. But there is something bigger than this fact. Something much bigger... forged in suffering... yet suffering itself is a delicate process, and when allowed to unfold, what breathtaking beauty!
I have realizied this today; as a strange consciousness visited upon me. I am in the wake of having hit bottom. I thought it a terrible thing at the time. I looked my worst fear in the face, grabbed handfuls of it and gave myself over to its effect on me, driven by some irrational compulsion I could neither name nor resist. I plunged into the blackest place and I stayed there. I was with my friend at the time. I was unable to fall asleep. "Just keep letting go," my friend told me. I did, until I fell asleep, at a very late hour.
I woke up the next morning with the dark sickness still in me. I did not know what to do. It seemed equally impossible both to lay there and to get up. My friend climbed over me and made love to me. I hid my face, feeling all the badness and darkness in me being scrunched up in protest, simmering and concentrating and pulling my whole mind into a whorl of evil blackness and loathing. I could even less move afterwards. I tried to get up, I got dressed. My friend said some mean things, unhappy with the black state of my fear, weakness, and cowardice. Indeed I was in the deepest place of despair. I took off my clothes and got back into bed. My friend had a mind to push me--help me--to will myself through the pain by pinching and otherwise being rough with me. My mind was in a state of self-loathing and submission but finally my body revolted and I cried and struggled away with no help from my mind. I fell into something like a drugged sleep.
Really, saying it all doesn't say it. The thick heavy clenched pain of being in that space of low consciousness is highly unpleasant. Somehow, maybe four hours later, somewhere between wake and a sleep from which I was unable to move, I came out of it. My friend was being kind and sweet to me again. I did not exist. But then gradually my pain and horror came into context. I already know I have some deep sexual karma, if I don't understand its nature. In my black place I was abruptly lifted out by the sudden realization that I had lived this all out before--all the self-loathing, the humiliation, the misery, the masochism, the sexual manipulation and exploitation. I had lived it all before. Possibly I offed myself out of it, feeling no way out of that life otherwise, at the time. I had done all of this before. And in realizing that, having compassion for it, really seeing and knowing and loving and forgiving that miserable woman I had been, I was out. Out of that space of consciousness that was dredged up every time I faced... or thought too much about... pornography and related uses of sexuality. I have no precedent in this life to be thrown into that terrible space when confronted with this--and, frightened of that space, I had developed a very bad phobia of the stuff.
But in knowing my soul has done all this, for some reason now there is no need to repeat it. My friend apologized for his treatment of me, saying, "I had an intuition it was what you needed." At the time I told him he was wrong. But now I wonder if he was right. He helped me to live out the experience of that dark consciousness again. Enough to recognize it... and then bring myself out of it.
And today, even though still reeling with pain and shock and a pounding head from that event two nights ago, I found that the fear had lost its hold on me. I had no more draw to dwell on frightening images. The emotional charge has left... at least for this time around... and I found myself, strangely, irrevocably, focused on love.. and joy... and happiness at being alive. I would not have thought that surrendering to that blackness and fear would have led to this. But in surrendering to the grip of fear and pain and dark consciousness I have, ironically, lost my fear of it. In remembering that I had already been there I knew it was nothing I needed to fear. And now I have love. Even the strange recognition of the reason I was born the time I was born, as a Libra, perhaps only to keep me connected to this person I love, to remind me that love is always worth it, and is more powerful than fear. How many thousands of lifetimes has my soul lived to know this so deeply that I cannot ever truly descend? I know I am bound to suffer deeply in this life and carry a heavy burden, I KNOW this as deeply as one can know anything. I also know that there are very specific atonements I am taking care of with this choice of lifetime and particular constellation of energies and that, somewhere, great life, vitality, and joy await me on the other end. So, it's all right.
Now, I have spent quite a long time, years in fact, in typical Libra costume, fashioning the idea of my ideal partner in a semi-unconscious way. It was Rossi, or Aubri, or Vifernin, or some other creative male form. I struggled against my partner when I met him but I had known him, written about him, dreamed about, numerous times, never dreaming who he really was. You see, to take from my novel characters, my real partner is not Rossi or Aubri but Xenofen.
Xenofen.
And when I stop being terrified of him, I realize he is only mirroring myself to me, mirroring, catalyzing, and holding terrifying space for the painful skin shedding that strips me of everything, flaying me to the bone, burning through all my flesh and my resistance. On one level such realities make me want to vomit with the terror and disgust they instill in me. I have no wish to be destroyed. But it is what I most need, for some reason, to clean out the karma of Scorpio and Cancer in my soul's past, and that is why Xenofen is my true partner. All the years I was writing of him, in various forms, I did not know this. Even when he came into my life mirrored by human beings with similar energy, the energy of the chaos Dragon, I did not immediately recognize that this was my mate. It seemed too scary, uncomfortable, not at all what one should imagine a proper partnership. But the work is much deeper and more important than surface niceties, much more raw and real in the pain of true Love, rather than anything comfortable. I cannot access my joy before the pain. And in this I am rejoicing because it FEELS.... like God.
This is not yet over... but important steps have been taken.
And I finally understand this drawing I did a while ago! I knew when I created it that it had to do with 'Saturn'... but I saw only as through a glass, darkly, what that might really mean or how it might connect. Now I see... much more so.
current mood:  grateful
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| Sunday, August 30th, 2009
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9:00 pm - The Magical Fig Tree
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There have been two pieces of interest tonight...
My client's husband was watching a nature program on TV and whilst passing through the room each time I got caught up in it. It was an incredible tale about a giant sycamore fig tree and its symbiotic relationship with a tiny fig wasp. I feel as though I'd never seen nor heard of anything more fascinating in my life. I don't even remember nature shows when I was a kid being this excellently engaging. All the myriad players of the ecosystem in which this sycamore fig tree lives, all depending on it for nourishment (directly on its fruit or indirectly on the creatures that come to eat its fruit), and it likewise depending on them all to carry away its seed to new locations. As for the strange relationship with the little wasps, I guess this applies to all figs? Based on this article I found here...
I also realized, upon seeing this picture, that this was the fig tree in Pan's Labyrinth. I was innocently researching the fig tree in question, since the only fig trees I know are common figs. I stumbled on that picture and immediately thought, I KNOW THAT TREE!
Piece two.
I read a book tonight called "The Forgotten Beasts of Eld" by Patricia A. MicKillip. It is classed in the youth fiction section and is right up there with such fantasy YA classics such as Dragon's Milk and The Search for Delicious. I adored it... mainly because, I think, the main character in it is, essentially, me. She was raised and lives alone in her mountain castle in the company of fantastic beasts of legend, having great beauty and power, and is visited upon by human proceedings that bring love into her life at the impressionable age of sixteen, in the form of an infant of a distant relative. "I do not know of loving and hating," she says. "Only being and knowing." But that baby brought to her begins turning a whole new reality in her world... And the ending is unexpected and purely magical. The characters are sweet and the plot twists engaging. The language is utterly charming. I don't want to give it away... every timbre and thread of this tale could have been woven of the stuff of my own soul and my own karma, even down to details. This is maybe why I loved it so. But it is a very original fantasy (and by that I mean unique and fresh, not new-fangled or weird), and truly worth a read. I would like to say more, but again, I do not wish give it away... the detail is too personal to discuss without being a spoiler.
current mood: grateful
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9:31 am
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Morning is my favorite time of day. It was clear and crisp this morning. Whilst in the process of getting my client up for the day I wandered outside and pruned some rosebushes, just to be outside. The sun was up but still hiding behind the clouds. The couple wanted scrambled eggs for breakfast. I made some with generous amounts of olive oil. Still chill and gray outside, yet well-lit in the kitchen and dining area, and smelling like lightly cooking olive oil. A smell which always reminds me of Christmas for some reason. It is a grounding, homey sort of smell. I buttered toast and served up the eggs. I wasn't hungry yet and so didn't have any breakfast myself. Not that I eat toast or eggs. But looking at this cozy lit space that smelled so good, I found myself thinking dispassionately that perhaps in my ardor to give up everything I was giving up warmth, coziness, joy in human comfort and relationships, rootedness, any sense of a settled life. Is a raw foodist is cold to earthly pleasures?
Some people say that a raw food or fruit diet is something only a guru or someone who is trying to ascend should eat, because it lightens you too much. Others insist that a raw food, fruit heavy diet is the natural one for human beings, and you don't have to be a guru or have any spiritual aspirations to live well and joyfully on this diet. Perhaps the coldness is not inherent in the raw food but in that character of spirit which draws certain of us to it. On the other hand perhaps we just enjoy the feeling of health and lightness more than the feeling of snug comfort that comes with warm kitchens, cooked foods, and family dinners. If you are going to be a raw foodist, you do it alone. Raw foodists don't sit down to dinner together. Raw food by its very character precludes the use of eating as a social or comfort function.
So what is our comfort then? There are plenty, I'm sure. It just seems cold to me, but it is my way and so I walk it. It is not cold in a bad way. It's not as if the warm ambiance would turn into anything except illness, lethargy, and depression were I to indulge in cooked food. The warm ambiance is energetic in character and psychological in spirit. Food carries energies and states of consciousness but we can access those through other means as well without having to pass things that are toxic intimately through our physical bodies. But if we could learn to create bodies that passed toxins with no trouble... if we did not overload them beyond their capacity... if we created their capacity in the utmost of the potential of our empowerment and love, those forces that give us the energy to dispel toxins harmlessly, if we truly lived on light and prana, well, then I suppose we wouldn't have need for food but could create the experience of it nonetheless in a way that does not dull our bodies but enhances them.
Still, if I am sometimes not happy with my cold and rootless life, or think there must be more, it is little less or more than anyone else in this culture has to suffer with. Other people have more illusions to comfort them, perhaps, more habitual ways of living. But I don't know a lot of people who live in true joy and fulfillment. I am still working on taking my leave of Erik but in doing so much of the dark things from our past come up and must be dealt with... so this is my work... trying to push myself past my blocks and fears without doing it in a way that will trigger a violent reaction on the part of the blocked energy. That is the trick. So I carry on...
I am also wondering why I have a strong reaction against returning to Hawaii and instead am making all these elaborate plans to go to California or Ecuador instead. Why am I scared of Hawaii? I'm terrified of it. I felt things more and harder than I've ever felt before, and on a plane of awareness far broader and more expansive than anything I thought I had felt previously in any narrow, fear-cluttered world. Was it too much, too fast? I do not know. Well, maybe I WILL go back to Hawaii. $200 one way tickets, can't beat that...
Now I'm torn. California, Ecuador, or Hawaii?
current mood:  pensive
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| Friday, August 21st, 2009
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9:56 pm
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The sheer isolation of city living is what gets me... it was one thing when we had all these community dreams and ideas and attempted to make a life together, difficult as it was to swim against the stream. Now all of the members of our community still living in town aren't swimming against the flow anymore--they've really returned to nuclear family existence. No need for neighbors, frequent get-togethers, close and nurturing friendships, communities of people who live and work and eat and play together. None of that--just people living alone, wanting to be left alone except for occasional get-togethers, nestled up with their spouses and/or families.
I can see why people don't like to be single in our culture; it really offers no other outlets for intimacy and real human support than that of a sexual/romantic relationship. What about those of us who don't WANT such a thing? This is my difficulty. I keep wandering back to my ex when I'm not at work, after repeated failed attempts to get together with my other friends--"sorry we're busy", "we want some alone time" "maybe some other day". Unfortunately, some other day, I'm working, and I have a particularly isolating job, easy and comfortable as it is, doing live-in shifts. So, after much too much coming home to an empty house and otherwise occupied friends for all of my days off, I wandered back to Erik and I don't like that, because he's not supportive, I just give to him and feel drained because he cannot be truly supportive. But supposedly it's better than being isolated, at least some part of me feels this way or I wouldn't wander on back. I can't socialize on the internet anymore really, it just makes me feel ill.
This is why community living is so important--why it is so important we break the paradigm of the nuclear family and our individualistic, isolationist culture. It is not that I never see or hang out with my friends, it's just that I am not really part of their lives and they are not really part of mine. It is the fabric of life that is torn, however much we might drift together or apart, there are no roots, no solidarity, and hence no trust with our deepest social and intimate needs. So I settle for being close to someone who is not even good for me. This is not a settlement I wish to make, but I'm frustrated with my seeming lack of options...
current mood:  frustrated
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| Sunday, August 16th, 2009
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9:56 pm
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I miss Maui.
I miss the place that made magic of my best friend and broke him and healed him too.
I miss the place that made magic of me.
I miss the coconut trees and the gardens and the mud that stains my shoes orange.
I miss the waves and the wind and the raw beauty of sea cliffs and jungle.
I miss the aloha spirit.
I miss myself that I found there.
I miss life real and in the raw, if to an exaggerated extent.
I miss hitchhiking and seeing what brilliant souls the universe will toss me in with.
I miss the inspiration and the wild love of it all.
I miss the warm ocean and the refreshing stream pools.
I miss the guava forest of 'deer isle'.
I miss the omnipresent chickens.
I miss the giant toads running around everywhere.
I miss the crawdads and the fresh fish.
I miss oranges and sapodillas and paninis in the winter and mangoes and lychee in the summer.
I miss the huge lush overabundance of biomass everywhere, the big colorful flowers; hibiscus, ginger, heliconia, plumeria.
I miss the hala trees on the cliffs by the sea.
I miss lillikoi vines and tattered banana trees growing everywhere.
I miss panini picking in Kula and scrubbing them and getting covered in horrible little stickers.
I miss the Jackson chameleons.
I miss the still and quiet and fresh and not having to hear any cars or power lines.
I miss the whales. They were so soothing.
Then what...
Time for sleep I suppose. To journey away from what is too dark and morbid and towards all that beauty and wildness and sunlight.
current mood: crushed
current music: Running - Sarah Brightman
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4:53 pm
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I am beginning to stretch into the luxurious reality of my own body, mind, soul, self. It is a sort of tremulous unfolding; a sort of tentative movement of various petals and parts that I am unsure belong to me--knowing only that the unity of this organism must exist, must have a subconscious reality that will break upon me somehow like the dawn, through means and pathways unknown and unguessed.
So it happened--the dark cold night first, the valley of grief and shadow. The valley was there; I stared into it, turned my gaze from it, unable to walk backwards or sideways or any other direction except down, forward, ahead. That was where the path led. Well, I put it off just a little, feeling a little chancy, shaky, unsafe to descend to that place. I ate more food than usual. I found myself easily in tears no matter where I turned. Finally in tiredness I retreated to my room, lit my candles, put on my headphones, and gazed ahead of me at one of the large banners adorning my walls. Green with twin Dragons on it encircling a yin and yang circle. Everything was soft, beautiful, embracing. I listened to a little music--just two songs, drawing myself into preparation for that valley. I went into the valley and I cried, wept out my grief, my loss, my fear of change and uncertainty. Then I blew out the candles, put everything away, and laid down to sleep.
I woke up in the morning knowing I was going to Ecuador. All darkness and grief of the night had vanished, replaced by a peace and harmony and an excited certainty that the next adventure of my life was about to begin--my mind played no part in all the actions and discoveries that followed. Suffice it to say... for it is too soon to speak of any of it... that the sense of possibility in me has been reawakened. My dreams ARE achievable no matter in so difficult a world.
Today at work I began reading 'Eat, Pray, Love' by Elizabeth Gilbert. It is wonderful and I recommend it, but can say little yet in summary. Although her journey seems at this junction of her life to have been more difficult than my current one, I can honestly echo her sentiments in this quote on whatever scale they occur:
"My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me out of police lineup. But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."
I am letting go once more of cherished relationships and everything my mind 'thinks' ought to be a good thing to trade it for only the best, the most joyous, the most alive. I am still not ready to talk about them--they are still too new, too forming. Just as when, two summers ago after Erik returned to school in Spokane and I was left by myself walking, walking, walking... I found myself following a path of abundance and magic that I could not have imagined beforehand and could not have allowed into my life before I walked. I met people and read books that changed my life. More than that I found myself taking actions and making plans that my mind would have insisted were unreasonable things to do or focus on, had I allowed it to do so. I did not. I never have. I live with my heart. The only problem is when I get out of touch with it as is so easy to do in our modern culture. We are always seeking that which will spark the reconnection to our heart. Sometimes we have to go into the valley first, to listen to the pain and sadness of our heart. We disconnect from our hearts to avoid that pain and sadness. But it is alive too; there is no need to avoid it. It is what makes us human. Without our humanity, we are nothing. So I am reaching this point in my life again where I can hardly believe the direction things are taking, but it is life and joy and happiness, and that is what I will always follow.
(Some would believe that they do not need their humanity, only their divinity. I am beginning to suspect that you cannot achieve one without the other and to try otherwise is to become some sort of fascist, whip up a lot of bad karma, and come around again perhaps as something less human... to have disregarded the gift of humanity. The gift of humanity is the ability to realize ourselves as God and to create. But this is within our humanity, not apart from it.)
Now I begin to realize that these strange petals I've been tentatively unfolding are, in fact ...
Wings.
current mood:  inspired
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| Monday, August 10th, 2009
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5:28 pm - Labyrinths, serpents, sex, spirals, kundalini, and elemental nature
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Human work and human care is numbing and stifling to the elemental soul. It's hard for me to grasp this, this idea, no, not an idea, just a reality--of not being human. How does one integrate that reality into a human life? Is it possible? Is it meant to be possible?
I was recently deeply struck by the prologue of Prospero's Children by Jan Siegel. Only somewhat consciously I registered a deep identification with the soulless mermaid in the prologue. Life continued.
Then today I touched the soul of myself, remembering then the one and only thing that my friend Erik is good for--the access and inspiration of those realms. I've been fighting it lately, talking him down when I see him, as not being grounded, not DOING anything... which may be true enough... but I've needed to be in denial of the more esoteric realities that he does put me in touch with, because we come from the same world. Though I have no desire to have any sort of human relationship with him, I can recognize the touchstone he has been for me concerning these other realms, and in being conscious of that, don't need to try and knock it into a relationship (for which he is utterly dangerous and incapable). In any case, this is the access point of my spiritual-sexual being--through which the cosmic is activated. I realize again how true it was what Pamela told me about sexuality--and what I've since learned--it is the gateway to our own power. That is why it is so repressed and distorted by our society... keeps us wanting.
I have realized a truth about myself today, as all of these myriad pieces came together. I was so sick and tired that I let go of my resistance and allowed myself to enter into a deep, silent, depression/sleep. Though it is difficult to talk about sexual things because of the taboo on them, I think most would agree that they certainly encompass altered states of consciousness (unless of course, like anything, you overdo it/try too hard). To let that state happen is a gift, but it takes a sinking into the fear and depression so often accompanied it in our society. I was too tired to argue with myself anymore and I felt myself sinking, like groundwater, into rich moist earth, saw grass and flowers squirming up through the little pockets of air in the soil. I was sinking, spreading, losing my ego, all sense of myself, and if I felt depressed at this, it was a relieved sort of depression.
I have read that research has found neurological connections between religious or trance experience and female sexuality. In women's brains (says the book I read), there are unique neural links between the forebrain and the cerebellum, which allow sensations of physical pleasure to be directly integrated into the neocortex, or high brain center. This explains why some women experience orgasm so intense that they enter into 'religious' trance, or altered states of consciousness... human male brains do not seem to have these neurological connections. (link)
Back to the topic in question. I had an intense series of orgasms more powerful than usual and was not in my body--so I lay in some other state of consciousness... and then Erik, in that other-realm inspiration, put his headphones on my head. There was some music playing. I have written what it is in the 'music' line in this post. Somehow this music linked all the altered states of consciousness and the fears and depressions associated with them via my attempts to be as practical and human as I could with a hundred other images and feelings--one of the most recent being the aforementioned soulless mermaid in the prologue of Jan Siegel's book. I realized that was who I was--wild, untamed, emotionally charged, elemental, unbound, uncomprehending of human cares or loves or structures. Yet still struck with the longing for them, unequipped to experience them. The creature of the wild never raised under the security of a roof, knowing no other life, longing for it, does not trust it, not one bit. It is nothing she knows. But what is it? I'm yet to figure that out because it doesn't seem to be a thing in my experience, either.
All I know is that the most real experiences and feelings I have are the elemental, sexual, spiritual, ones. The ones that are beyond human. As I am reminded by a quote from the second book in Jan Siegel's trilogy:
"No other could understand dragonkind as I did. To touch the mind of a spirit all fire, to experience passion in the raw, hunger, rage, love--yes, love--uncomplicated by the mazes of human thought, unchecked by meaningless scruples--only the strongest could survive such a contact. A weaker man would be driven mad."
I feel awfully driven mad by the elemental nature of my reality, when it seems so foreign to the world around me. How can I coexist? This is perhaps why I want to run away to the jungle--back to Hawaii where life is almost like I am inside... perhaps it is also why I stayed with Erik for so long despite it being so abysmally bad for me. He was still a touchstone to that reality of what I am--he saw it like no one else, NO ONE, in my world ever has.
Yet one can have a touchstone without a human relationship... funny, overwhelmed as I was with these realizations, crying, somewhere between fierce pain and unbearable ecstasy, I attempted haltingly to put into words what I had come to understand of myself... he listened for five minutes, though I wasn't getting much out, it was so much larger than any words, I had to choose them so carefully and yet maneuver them past the expanse of my emotions... well, he decided he was done and then took off to go to a film shoot. Still in some other world, I kept following, wanting to describe the enormity of the reality I was seeing. "I'm drawing boundaries," he told me snappily, on his bike, "you're just sulking and I don't want to listen to you at a rate of one sentence every thirty seconds." Sulking? I sort of just stared at him. How can you think I'm SULKING? Well, he doesn't get it, I thought, mildly bewildered as I watched him ride off. But neither did I care to make him get it--he'd obviously shifted out of his transcendental reality into his illusory world of fear and defenses, as he always does--that didn't matter... it only had mattered in the past because I was trying to make things a certain way, have a human sort of relationship... but I wasn't interested in that anymore... I had a precious treasure and I was grateful for it... so I just wandered on back to the house I am staying at... feeling more alive and happy than I have in some time. Yes, this is something to cry about.
current mood:  shocked
current music: Therion - Eye of Shiva
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| Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
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9:21 pm - And another happy and epiphanic New Moon to you all :)
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I am beginning to think that one of the most special, if excruciating, times of my life was the months spent at the Kahua Institute. Whatever else the difficulties of that place, one thing is true of it: beautiful souls pass through it, all of them on incredible paths. Some are dark, broody, tortured, transcendent, whose earthly reigns end in violence and quiet disappearance, yet the reverent memory of their magic longing to rise above the bloody fields never quite fades. Some are light-hearted elves, spending their days on the beach, telling jokes and brightening everyone's life with their warm-hearted love. Some are quiet warriors, solemnly doing their work to the music of some tradition only their soul remembers having been a part of. Some are poets in whose footsteps flowers blossom and seeds sprout. Some are ivory castle architects, plying their designs on the trembling earth underneath which Dragons rage, watching them crumble to dust, and finding knelt in their ruins the secrets to a successful building after all...
I was one of them too, I gather, though I've no words to portray the tangled karmic cobweb that is my own soul's adventure. In recent months I've dropped the introspection for the unchecked torrent of intuition and emotion, hedging wild bets on that most elusive and disapproved form of knowing...
But taking a moment to rest in the places that have meant worlds, whole new worlds, to my spirit and my heart, Kahua takes the cake. Naive and terrified and longing for a wise and magical old Dragon to snatch me up from the mundane starkness of my pain--he did--the gems of energy gifted to me in this place were the seeds for everything that followed, forget it though I may in the turbulence of travel and relocation that inevitably followed in the raging tidal trails of Maui.
I was caught up in chasing that old Dragon's power and majesty, longing to learn it for myself. I was learning to shake out, to detox, to compost every block, fear, and negative emotion, to feast on tree-ripened fruit covering the ground in the old mango groves. I was learning about 'tantra'... I was experiencing a jolt of freedom that completely intoxicated me. I was feeling the bite of shackles that I fought to destroy. And I was opened to new worlds of my own sacred power and intuition... recalling especially the beautiful one-time phenomenon, after a weekend retreat at Kahua, when Erik and I first made love. Every time since it had been nearly an afterthought, a magical attempt at moving energy I'd barely known existed. But that first time it was an effort of creation... of re-birthing... that shocked my sense of who I was into a shape and form far larger than I had, perhaps, ever imagined.
I was getting my hands and feet into the earth again. I was learning to swim, learning the ecstasy and revitalization of diving into ice-cold waterfall pools. I was tangled in powerful triangles and soaking up every moment of it. I was meeting all of the fascinating and beautiful souls I mentioned earlier... people who cherished me and, rather importantly to my sense of self and usefulness, cherished Erik. We had beautiful adventures cruising the ocean cliffs, spear-fishing, sprouting and planting sweet potato shoots, tending earthworms, chilling on the beach, attending pranayama and yoga in the mornings before work, building a lovely terraced papaya garden. Improvising operas in Raphael's weekly classes. Learning the joy, simplicity, and absurdity of who we really were.
In September, Erik ran off to Ram Dass and I ran off to Elam, some of our dear friends from Kahua stayed on where they were, and after things crashed for me at the mad monster house, we all got together again... as we often did until our friends left the island... to disappear to Hana, bury each other naked in the red and black cinders at the red sands beach, ground all our energy in our Mother, and be reborn in the embrace and encouragement of the Goddess.
All of these magical experiences petered out, to some extent, in the months following. I finished a novel, took care of Jeremy's goats, learned a lot of fascinating things, attempted once again to get to the farm I'd been WANTING to be on since the beginning... then falling, fracturing my spine, and nursing myself through the rest of my convalescence, part of it on the mainland in deep confusing about the next branch of my journey. I returned to Maui and to Erik, adamantly convinced I was done with both and I was running away to a farm on the Big Island where I'd be in fruit all my days, just like I wanted.
That didn't end up happening, so now I'm back in Bellingham, still with Erik, my cherished friend, so proud and happy to see him matured, his eyes lit like they never were, loving and gracing me instead of seeing in me something that needed controlling or punishing. It's nice.
Part of me is frothing to be free. Of what? Of life? Of attachments? Of responsibilities? Of everything?
But in remembering Kahua I'm reminded that places of magic are not made by fruit alone, or even fruit at all. The magic was, and remains, in the people. In the divine beauty and power of creation that every human soul possesses.
The fixation with food is a hard neural circuit to transcend. We all depend on food for life. And yet I am beginning to suspect that man is not fed on bread alone. And in the absence or presence of bread or fruit or vegetables ... of any kind of sustenance... something is STILL THERE.... that something is the Universe, the Ultimate, that which has given birth to us and holds us still in abundance and love, giving us rein to our most joyful bliss. And in touching other souls we are reminded of that bliss.
It is a powerful love and an energy that cannot be substituted for with a healthy diet, clean air, economic independence, or material security and possessions. Cannot be substituted for... or provided by... any of these things, as lovely as they are. They are precious gifts but they are only secondary.
And in beginning to realize this I have to deeply question where my true allegiance lies and where, ultimately, the choices I make will take me. Do I want, really, to separate from those people who mean the most to me? I don't, really. Maybe farms and fruit and fresh air and oceans and cliffs and waterfall pools aren't as important to me... and never will be unless I can share them with the people I love.
Maybe I'm not enlightened. But maybe I'm finally learning how to love and be loved... maybe just a little...
This is all an extremely painful thing for me to admit to myself or to say... because I love and pine after being able to see the stars, breathing clean air, eating delicious natural food, being in nature, bathing in streams... yet those things do not make me happy on their own and even my ideals of community living and support must be forged in my own life with the people I love and want to build things with.
For those who are wondering about the auto-detect location... I certainly was!!!! technology these days... anyway.. I was kindly flown out to Minnesota by my family for big family reunion.
current mood: contemplative
current music: theme from Pan's Labyrinth
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| Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
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8:28 am - first waning moon in the shortening days
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I had a very sobering dream last night.
In my dream I was a member of a large family with lots of crazy power rankings and violence. It was an edgy existence. One had to play strange power games to survive.
In my dream one day I got fed up with it and said or did something unforgivable in the system... I forget what...
I had to run, and I found myself at a big upstairs window, behind a door I had locked against my family. I started ripping the window to pieces. Some piece of me thought, you can't break a window, physically that is, but I knew I could; it was coming apart under my hands. I was punching out the glass bits and ripping out frames like they were made of cardboard. The dream was almost lucid in this way, as I had, throughout it, the power to change the details of events to bring about the outcome I wanted, though I wasn't aware it was a dream.
I finished destroying the window and leaped out, landing on the ground and running for the woods. I changed into a giant lion, but my family also knew the arts of shapeshifting, and I knew this would not fool them as they would come straight after me in their own beast forms and still tear me to pieces to get me back under their control.
So, instead, I worked some magic, a powerful spell that would make it so they could not recognize me. I changed back to human and began to walk unobtrusively through the wooded paths. The house and backyard were just like the ones I grew up in as a child. I was trying to get to the adjacent property without giving myself away.
The mother came out and found me, but she did not recognize me, and was obviously distracted about FINDING me. I said hello and continued walking.. as I reached the edge of the property I thanked her for allowing me to walk in her beautiful lands. She smiled politely but remained distracted.
I had escaped! I made my way to a farmhouse and asked for a place to spend the night. The woman who owned the farm graciously gave me a bed. In the morning when I awoke she told me I could have some food but must be gone before 8am. The farm workers were all up and finishing breakfast so they could go out to work. For some reason, I had all of my things with me--and suddenly there I was, with nothing and no one, with the whole wide world ahead of me.
I knew I wanted to be on a farm. I knew I wanted to go back to Hawaii. Suddenly I had nothing tying me down and I could.
I suddenly woke up, looked at the clock with some vague recollection of a temp agency appointment at 9am... it was a quarter to 8. I had indeed left the woman's house before 8am... but what an irrevocable gift she has given me in allowing me to stay the night there...
~*~*~
So, often I'm horrified that I came back to the mainland, and that I brought Erik back. He's a horrid sorcerer of a growing soul and the universe consistently enlists me to do his bidding on a soul level... what karma this is I am not sure but I am ready for it to end... as much as he has grown and matured and become a decent, even good, friend and companion, it is often a grim decision to come back to the place one doesn't want to be, ostensibly to 'make money', then usually finding how silly that is when one's only available paid work is the thing one can do anywhere... art.
So I'm thinking about moving to Ashland, Oregon next month. Hitching or on the street if need be. I just have to be free... in any case I will, at least, hit the road. Onward.
^___^ <3 <3 <3
current mood:  determined
current music: Leahy
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| Monday, June 15th, 2009
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7:52 pm
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It startles me, now that I'm planning to head back to the mainland for the rest of the summer to work and save some money, how much Hawai'i and everything it is has become my home. They say home is where the heart is, and as always my heart is torn between the people and opportunities among people that I love, and the wild life force of the land out here.
There is something magical and powerful about Hawai'i. I had a dear friend once describe it as the only place where the elements of fire and water truly met. I think this is a most apt description--there is no place so raw and alive and astrologically and geometrically significant. In the middle of the boundless depths of the Pacific, where the sun is hot and strong, the mountains catch copious rain, and life grows huge and lush and vibrant. And there are so many colors and climates all in one tiny area. This place is deep and significant. Maui, like always, mirrors to us ourselves, externalizes everything that's held us back internally for years. How valuable and precious is it that there is a place which will do that so ruthlessly for a lost and oppressed humanity?
Nevertheless I'm postponing my plans to go to the farm on the Big Island, for dozens of reasons. There are things I want to explore that can't be done so well without resource in the jungle, relationships I want to cultivate and celebrate, whilst we are all in town! I want to save some money so I can travel to the places and experiences I want to have, so I can avail myself of services, courses, and learning that will brighten and enrich my life. I want to love my loved ones and support them in all their dreams and endeavors, cherishing their beautiful and magical souls.
And yet I want to be where the energy is raw and wild and life and nature embraces me. I want to be where the ocean meets land in sheer craggy cliffs and warm sandy beaches, where mountains tower in their clouds in the midst of the vast Pacific. Where I can most delightfully breakfast on papayas, lychee, star apples, apple bananas, and mangoes. I can't get any of those things on the mainland really... no bathing in streams, showering in waterfalls, diving into the warm ocean under a hot tropical sun.
Fire and water. The cascade of creative life sparking with the deep and placid depths. It's all here. But I still have karma to work out so, off I go.
Oh, I will miss you, Maui. Hawai'i. You've become my home in so many ways, you are that Otherworld that I always sought, in so many ways, and leaving you is like waking from a dream.
Even though I'll probably be back in three or four months tops... but we'll see where life and travels take me.
current mood: melancholy
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| Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
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10:24 am - We always follow the MAGIC...
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What tugs our hearts, riles our spirits, fills us with the tantalizing taste of the fruition of all of our glorious, beautiful, ecstatic being.
We follow the magic unless we're too afraid... many people are...
But no matter of practicality or social custom can stop us from chasing the magic. It can perhaps channel it for us into socially accepted norms, patterns of our psychology culturally inherited. Nevertheless the waves of change flow, slowly enough through the generations. Things do change. People change, cultures change, the world changes. We need not worry that it won't happen.
( Because it's long... )
current mood: excited
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| Saturday, May 30th, 2009
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8:40 am
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A couple of nights ago I made my own intentionality about Maui... not only have I been proactive in contacting people and laying out my itinerary for the next few weeks or months, I've been 'thinking positive' so to speak. Those couple of nights ago I went to Maui in some sort of half-waking dream. I climbed down the trails that crisscrossed the cliffside near Barbara's property in Huelo, and sat on the rocks by the crashing surf. It was nighttime, and the moon must've been out, and whether it was or not it was certainly waxing. I was in touch with or communicating with a Dragon, I don't know who it was, I only remember it large and silvery, fluid and expanding all over the place with wings and tail and limbs and spines. A dancer of the elements. I sat there remembering the energy of the island, feeling its wild life force stirring at the base of my spine, and then, slowly at first but increasingly completely, I felt my attitude towards going back to Maui transforming dramatically. I became excited and empowered about it instead of feeling harangued and helpless. This, at least, was Maui's major challenge for me, and I realized that. No one gets in or out of Maui easy. She pushes you hard. But it's amazing what she can do with you.
Since then I've had to try to maintain hold on this wild life force that's been dancing inside of me with the waxing moon. It's not quite half full yet and all of this has begun when it was barely new--I remember how very dark, desolate, and bleak I felt. Then the tides shifted and I have this... oh, it's very beautiful. There is a certain sense to being aware of how one's own cycles turn with the lunar cycle. I am entering a new world and a new set of possibilities as I embrace what was so recently my worst terror--returning to Maui--and find that the terror was only of movement, change, wildness, and life. That's sort of what Maui is about. It's intense. But it's so alive. Once I stopped trying to clamp down on that aliveness, stopped trying to control it somehow, it made itself real and beautiful to me. That is a wonderful gift. Not that there won't be challenges. But they are half the fun. They make life rich and exciting and fruitful. Through the stoniest soils we strive to nourish ourselves with a stubbornness and resiliency that only life can boast of.
And I'm going to the Big Island in a month or so. ^.^
current mood: delighted
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| Sunday, May 24th, 2009
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9:22 am - On Financial Promiscuity
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I got a book from the library called 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and have been thinking a bit... the book details a certain way of life that involves a lot of principles of intent and reality creation, much like 'The Secret'. In this way it is inspiring, pointing to our ultimate creative potential and ability to live our lives the way we want to live, to do what excites us (the author says, in the book, that idleness is highly destructive, and the point is to have things to do that one wants to do and to organize one's life around that--not in creating more idle time).
But I find myself ambivalent about the book because of its pyramid-scheme-esque approach to money-making. I could have gone off and sold blue-green algae (a product I certainly have experienced working for me well and do believe in) and still could and made some money that way but in the end it comes down to my attitude towards products... I don't like them. Trading within a community I like, certainly, but on a mass corporate impersonal level I have to ask if this product is something I even need. Most things aren't. There are some products that are nowadays of course produced on that level and rarely ever locally that I do need--shoes, clothing, raincoats, tools. But these are 'few and far between' purchases... nothing on the level of 'I need this many dozens of people to be spending this amount of money per month on this product so I can make a big cash flow'. That's all puzzling to me. I am more content buying and selling within a close-knit community where the primary relationship is wanting to help and care for everyone's needs.
Then there is the issue of doing what excites me. Living in an entirely wholesome way does that, certainly. I want to work for my food--I mean I want to grow it or forage it from the land. Less and less am I liking to spend money in stores. It rubs me the wrong way. The other things that I am strong in, that I like to do, are writing and art and music and patience and spiritual presence and healing. That's about it. I like to work outdoors growing food, too. That is about the extent of what I feel myself really WANTING to do, where my true strengths are. I don't want a four-hour work week that involves pyramid scheme practices with a job or product that I would not spend money on myself... I'd rather have a twenty or thirty hour work-week doing creative work, healing work, farming work, that I LOVE. I would like to be a massage therapist. I would like to be a painter. I would like to be a healing musician. I would like to live in the jungle and take my food gratefully from the earth. I would like to be part of a community, part of a partnership, all working for the support and love and common good of one another.
So right now I'm torn between intending to travel to the South America jungle and intending to go to school for the other things I would like to do--massage therapy, healing musicianship etc... both of which are very very far away from manifesting at this point in my life. Still they are something to keep in mind. My reluctance to have any sort of involvement in the system is frustrated and thwarted by the REAL LACK of community and occupation outside of that system. I imagine it exists somewhere. But in some sense we are all in that world, that world marked by the beast, and we are all either succumbing to it or fighting it in some way. How do we live in a way that is enriching and meaningful to us and yet not cave into a system that is attempting to provide for all those same needs with an ulterior motive?
Sigh. Questions, questions, all with answers we must wait upon very painfully.
current mood: thoughtful
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| Monday, May 18th, 2009
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8:41 am - The Nature of Instincts
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As human beings we bear certain expectations of our environments, certain instinctual needs that are keyed to our ability to thrive. These include many things such as the desire to eat healthy food that feels best in our bodies, the desire to be accepted and involved with groups of other human beings, to be close to and part of life with people we have connections to and history with and love for, the desire to be in an optimal environment to provide for and care for ourselves in the best of health, the desire to do meaningful work, the desire to use our physical bodies, the desire to be our own person... lots of things.
So I find it strange and puzzling that my great need for fresh raw food near straight from its source (and not from the store where it is neither ripe nor fresh), and for clean and fresh water and a warm climate where my body can move and function and sweat and be refreshed and soak up nutrients from the sun and not be frozen and bundled, and also my need to be close to nature and not caught up in funny trips of spending money or being constantly pressured or even living in a box... that my great need and desire for all of these things seems to, situationally, be in conflict with my need to be around multiple people that I love, to have friends and a group that regularly spends time together and supports one another. Then there is my great need to explore my own distortions and desires and duality of mind in the realm of my inner world and my dreams and through this to unleash my creativity. If I keep a handle on my energy and my boundaries this need doesn't have to be in conflict with any of the others, although certain environments, and notably a lack of thought pollution towards a contrary consciousness, are certainly more conducive to dream work.
So I have a whole set of desires and now have to figure out how to manifest a situation for myself where all of them are met at least satisfactorily if not overwhelmingly. Add this to the struggle of attempting to do such in an oppressive system where most attempts at such are discouraged and thwarted, and the anger and depression that sometimes encroaches in the space of this reality. I find it very often exhausting. I read something in the preface of a book by Starhawk that reminded me so much of the experience I have been struggling with of late that I had no way to express or explain... in any sort of way that anyone wanted to listen to or understand what I was going through.
"For me, the journey began in a place of despair. ...I was haunted by visions of annihilation. Images of the city destroyed, of curling flesh, of the sudden flash in the sky--then nothing. I could not look at a friend, at my family, at children, without picturing them gone. Or worse, the long, slow deterioration of everything we love. Perhaps the value of the horror stories is that they bring despair to the surface, make us face it instead of feeling it as a drain on our lives so constant as to remain unnoticed."
This is the place my journey is in now... the uncertainty, the fervent need to somehow escape the oppression, to do something to create the consciousness I want to see everywhere, the love of life and health and creation and community, what we can create for each other with this. But to understand the deep importance of all of this is to be aware of what threatens it, and how sorely. It's frightening. It's very frightening. We have hard work to do and no time to diddle around in things that aren't important--because in the end, everything is important.
My back is healing phenomenally well and I've been able to go up and about many many places without my brace... it's time to say goodbye to my brace now, I think... although I will get a followup appointment back in Washington just to make sure. Just in not wearing it for the past couple of days the strength of my back has increased hugely and the pain dropped almost completely to zero even when I'm sitting up, up all day, or even doing things. I still bend my knees instead of my back but I should do that anyway--healthier body mechanics.
current mood: contemplative
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8:10 am - Sunshine and Strawberries
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After long dreary days in rainy cold Washington this past month or so I semi-reluctantly dragged myself back onto an airplane to fly to Los Angeles to visit my dear old friend JC (with hopes to hook up also with my sister and my other friend Yao Chi who both are in the LA area). I had hardly stepped off of the plane before I was practically bouncing off the walls wanting to get into the sun. JC picked me up at the airport, and she informed me it was cold, but I was unconvinced, oh, I was so so SO happy to be back in sun and warm air and have only to wear a dress and not layers of jackets and pants and socks. If I was meant to live in a cold climate, I would have been born with a fur coat.
We went to many farmer's markets and gorged on farm-fresh fruit, strawberries and CHERRIES and peaches and love (another luxury I don't get in Washington), we went to the beach and walked and sunned and played in the surf (I didn't realize how much I had missed that, although Santa Monica beaches are very brown compared to Maui beaches). Like a boggled jungle muffin I went nuts over the curio items at farmer's markets and flea markets such as reasonably priced banners with Dragons and dresses of a magical sort and of cuts and styles that I like, that look good on me, and that I hardly see anywhere. I also spent a significant portion of my savings as if I'd never see these things again (which I probably won't, barring any further trips to So Cal).
The most fun and adventuresome day was most likely yesterday, Sunday. JC and I met up with Yao Chi and Alynna's PG at Canter's Deli and my sister Alyssa and her boyfriend Dustin showed up too. It was a joyous reunion for me (though I had never met Dustin or Alynna before) and I was sad to see my sister go. Funny how broken-hearted I feel when one of my close family members leaves when we have been together such a short time. But, I haven't seen my sister in five years and we were never close. I think we shall be closer now. After this JC and I accompanied Yao Chi and Andrew to a flea market down the street where I spent some aforementioned money. I was torn at one point between a beautiful fairy-like but modest dress and a very wild warm style in rainbow rainbow rainbow that felt just right to me. I can't decide, I said to JC, and she said, let's ask them! But--I said, but she was already over there asking them. Purple or rainbow? What do you think the people with two of the most polychromatic characters around are going to say??? The situation was funny enough to me that I started sketching it as a cartoon that night...
Also last night we had a 5.0 earthquake near right on top of us. From what I understand of earthquakes, by the time you notice what is happening, it's over. This one was not so. By the time I noticed what was happening, and JC said it was an earthquake, my brain decided it was over, but it wasn't, it was getting worse, walls shaking and everything else, and I was getting a little O_O yikes. It was long! Just before JC was about to have us dive under the table it stopped. I was rather freaked out and said I was going straight back to Maui where such nonsense didn't occur. JC's cats were scared to death too. But boy it was fun and exciting...
Am I forgetting anything? Oh yes... I watched Pan's Labyrinth with JC. Twice, I loved it so much. I fell in love with that faun. And we had many delightful conversations about the philosophical implications of the film. Was it real or in her head? I claimed it was real--because, I said, there is a spiritual reality underlying physical reality all the time, and the nature of that spiritual reality is Heaven or it's Hell but which it is has little, if anything, to do with the environment, circumstances, or events occurring in physical reality. My own experience bears this out if I compare Spokane (where I was very much psychologically in hell, though nothing very extreme happened events-wise, I was deeply traumatized by Spokane and it took me a long time to get out of that space of anxiety and despair) with Maui (which, despite being intense and the events there quite out there and extreme, starting with a 56-year-old sorcerer seducing me in my desperation and culminating in the breaking of my back, with even more crazy things in between, traumatized me not at all and at the end of it all left me feeling refreshed, matured, stabilized, and happy). What then is more real to me? The events or peoples' interpretations of them, or my own experience of the feelings and psychological realities, or you may say the consciousness, that accompanied me through these events? One was like a fun if difficult learning experience from which I gained much fruit, and the other was like a torture session which only tore me down. There is quite a difference and so I said, even if you die, if your spiritual reality is of the 'Maui' kine, it's so worth it to you. If it's the Spokane kine nothing's worth it even if nothing happens! Events, though, they spark peoples' fears more than anyone's profession of what their experience of things actually is. I had people who ignored my cries for help in Spokane jump on the events of Maui with warnings and fear, when I felt awesome. When I feel awesome I pretty much go with it. It hasn't let me down yet--if you look at the consciousness space I was in with it.
The last thing is my curiosity of my dilemma now... which I might put in another entry since this is long already.
current mood:  happy
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