Accessing my wisdom November 25, 2008
Posted by frostwolftfirerose in Personal Journey.Tags: 12 Step work, Chruch of Latter Day pSychopaths, Cleopatra Mathis, Dartmouth College, Diebold electioncunting, Patrick Carnes, playwriting, prose writing, rejection, self-rejection, writing
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As a fellow who works a 12 step recovery program, I find that immersing myself in the steps helps me immensely. These 12 keys on the scale each has its own resonance. So right now I’m following what a lot of people joking refer to as “A Brutal Path through the Twelve Steps” (substitute “gentle” for “brutal” and you get the real title of P. Carnes’ book), and I’m in the midst of Steps 2 & 3. He combines the two into one chapter, which is … different.
Anyway, there’s a segment entitled “Paths to Spirituality” and it asks various questions about the various ways one can do this and what can the participant do or where has the participant erred. One of the questions it asks is about times when I have heard my inner voice say something and I ignored it.
One of the promptings that came to me is that I turned my face away from poetry and prose writing in favor of playwriting. Every once in awhile this issue crops up, and I’m only mildly surprised it did today. Other notions that came to me were actions taken in my adolescent days. At least thus far. When this path felt foreclosed (I started typing “foeclosed”–interesting slip there!) I believed but didn’t believe what this Creative Writing professor said to me, or truthfully now what I heard her saying which was that I was a bad writer.
In retrospect, what I now see is that I behaved rather precipitously in many respects. First, I had an expectation that was soundly slapped down, that I would be able to get into the next one, that she would offer an apology beyond the one she had already given me about the fact that she had completely overlooked my application. It was sticking out of a mound of papers approximately two-and-a-half feet tall on her desk. And while she told me she would not be able to place me in the class as it was closed, she said she would read my sample. And I fully expected to be brought into the class the next term, which she pretty much shot down.
Today, as I sit here contemplating how that awful moment felt, how embarassed I felt at the whole episode, I honestly can’t remember what she said other than a couple of bits and pieces. A couple of her comments were about things I experimented with but didn’t work. A couple of things she said were about things that felt derivative. Pretty much, after “I wouldn’t have let you into my class,” I was not able to hear anything else.
I have felt a number of moments like this in my life, where something in me shattered. And I felt that again recently with the most likely Diebolded election passing the Latter Day pSychopaths-sponsored H8 Prop in Califuckedup. And the healing of this takes a process.
I can write about the creative writing event a little more objectively today because it happened 25 years ago now. And I am sick of carrying this event like Jacob Marley, and it’s time to make kala on it and let it go. And to own my part in the situation.
For the event itself is really nothing. Some events loom so much larger because of the expectations and some of the vulnerabilities that I have had. And perhaps others saw these things in me, but because of their own problems and limitations were not able to help me see through the pain I did truly feel. I took it as more than a slight–much, much more. I took it as a criminal sentence, and I’ve nursed a grudge for the longest time.
But it’s really not Ms. Mathis’s fault. She has every right to say “You, come here, you stay away.” The problem at Dartmouth was also structural in that there was only one C.W. prof per term, and while there were others there who taught the class, I always seemed to be there when she was on hand.
And it seemed to me that going the playwriting route–well at least it felt like I was wanted there. Though I’m not sure about that in retrospect either. There was a lot of pain around me that I didn’t realize how much I wore it for all to see. I’m sure I tested a lot of people’s patience back then.
In allowing this stuff to be brought up, I feel there’s a huge mountain of interconnected material there to work through, notion by notion, that like those papers on Cleo’s desk piled up over time and I get to sift through it all. Ah, yes. That’s what the 4th step is about! Which reminds me of a meditation I underwent around the Sex Point where the white wand appeared in my hand. This is something to cleanse so that I may be kala myself.
Odd random thought November 25, 2008
Posted by frostwolftfirerose in Uncategorized.Tags: Stephanie Mayer and her vampire kin
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But, since Stephanie Mayer (Twilight) is Mormon, could her book really be autobiography? Aren’t all Mormons bloodsuckers when you get right down to it? I mean, what options does the bitch have if she wants to stay in that jehovahsatan worshipping church?
a minor shock… November 24, 2008
Posted by frostwolftfirerose in Capital Region Notions, Mystical.Tags: Art Night Schenectady, Katie O'Byrne's, Proctors, Schenectady, Skanekta-slash-Schenecta, theater
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Over this wonderfully successful weekend with the theater’s Pop-Up Plays and New Play Fest (yea everyone who acted, wrote and attended!), I had an unexpected spirit encounter with the spirit of the City of Schenectady.
On Saturday night, between “Communion on the 97th Floor” and “Mother Explains” I sat at a table at Katie O’Byrne’s and gazed into the sunset. It was a luminous evening shaping up, on the night of the pre-Thanksgiving Christmas parade (??), though also a cold night to be sure. I was just drinking in the delightfulness of the evening, when I pondered the spirit of the place, and BOING! There she was.
I don’t actually “see” the spirits in the visual sense. A thought form emerges in my head, and Schenectady herself seemed to have a careworn quality to her, though resilient and resolved as well. She seemed to have elegant blond hair, and perhaps it was just because I was at Katie O’Byrn’e’s but she also seemed to be clad in Celtic garb, though the garb itself seemed a mite shabby. She told me that I had a stake in her progress and that the ease with which things had been happening for my group in the town was not at all an accident.
Schenectady wants … well, she wants ME to be more involved somehow, and I have no idea where this will go. Years ago, I had a vision of my “home” community and it was in a place called either “Skanekta” or perhaps “Schenecta”. (Without the -dy.) Unlike the present iteration of this place, in that version, I could walk around skyclad if I chose and no one would bat an eye. I know Schenectady was the only site where there was a police intervention in the staging of The Full Monty in its B’way tour. For pity’s sakes!
But her revealing herself to me suggests that there is some chthonic undercurrent to the place and that I have had some small impact on it, though one that might be resonating outward. I was amazed at the eagerness that the people at Art Night Schenctady and Proctors seemed to relish our participation with our anarchic contributions, and I myself had a goofy grin pasted on my face all Friday night.
I also need to say that we have some talented writers here in the Hudson-Mohawk region and I was proud to have brought these 3 writers to readings in the Proctors complex to present their visions for the stage.
I feel that some potent magick radiated outward from all these works being presented, and I look forward to seeing what sorts of pathways they open up in the future.
Places I’ve Been – The Spirits of Hanover, NH, Denver, Seattle November 21, 2008
Posted by frostwolftfirerose in Uncategorized.Tags: Art Night Schenectady, Boston, Dartmouth, Denver, Hanover New Hampshire, Seattle
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I got to thinking about my post yesterday about Dartmouth. Since graduating in 1986, I’ve only been back to Hanover twice. The first time was a year after graduation when I got a letter from my fraternity telling me that they were going to get rid of my stuff if I didn’t go back and reclaim it. So I traveled back to the campus for that purpose. The minute I got off the bus, I felt an instant sense of pain, as if the ground underneath my feet was screaming in terrific pain.
I went back there in June because there was a Feri camp in nearby Grantham, at the home of 2 people whose work takes them to Hanover and other places there-around. I saw the place had dramatically transformed–the biggest changes were in the Baker Library complex, and … well, I still have a hard time integrating these understandings of how Ivy League education has changed. Mind-boggling it is.
Energetically, I felt the place was rather numb. Cloudy. Buffeted. Drugged, actually is the word I would used. I have no idea what the drug might be, but if felt like it was Sudafed or something that sort of takes the edge off, but also makes one feel like there’s a pillow around the head and face. When I went to school there, it felt more speed-y, more amphetamine or cocaine. (“The latest thing” my mother said in December, 1986 when coke was old news, and other drugs were starting online to come. Hey, at least she was only 5 years out of date! /snark)
I have a feeling that the energy might also be one of grief, though. There was also the sense of an impending awareness that something was “over”, and that perhaps this drugged state was a boon. I didn’t choose to make a judgment about this, and while I realized at the time of my visit that the energy had changed from 1987, until I started this post, it hadn’t occurred to me to decode that feeling and then to contextualize it in cursory fashion as I have done here. I just knew there would be a fruitful vein to plumb.
I realized too yesterday as I was making my meals for today that I was carrying some “Denver” energy with me, and had been unconsciously all my life. When I lived in Seattle, I met a fellow Denver native doing theater, and we once had a chat about Denver’s energies. I told him I had an idea for a play where the cities of the Untied [sic] States became people, and that Denver was a Hispanic boy who didn’t value his vaquero past but wanted to be like “the big boys.” Ya know–Pittsburg, Miami, Chicago. I thought of New York as an Ivana style Dominican drag queen (“No 14th Street, are you loco?”), San Francisco as a lesbian couple, Seattle as an Asian woman who wore black and smoked a lot, Boston as a liberal white racist (who looked strangely like Angela Lansbury), Chicago was a black working class dude who was racist, sexist, homophobic, all the “-ists” you can think of, but you still somehow liked the guy.
Well, I’ve been thinking about Doug’s comment on Denver of late which was that it felt like artistically one could only get so far and he or she would hit a ceiling. It was like there was no way to ascend or move beyond artistically in Denver. It’s instructive to note that for the Beatniks, some of whom settled in nearby Boulder, for the most part Denver was a somewhat neutral, semi-friendly way-station on the way to San Francisco. Denver has been more about boom and bust than quite a few cities out there. My folks lived through a few of those. After I moved to Seattle, I had the opportunity to return to Denvoid (Denvoiceless sometimes I have also called it), and found that there was an unsettling amount of violence in the air. I was still quite overweight back then, but violence is something that my fat body still could respond to, and I was quite distressed to walk down E. Colfax, and have at least one Mexican fellow hiss at me. (I also passed a couple of belligerent white drunks as well on S. Broadway as I walked up to E. Colfax from the Mayan Theater, it occurs to me.) The last time I was there, Denver seemed to have become more like a patchwork of elements. I noted that Downtown felt quite sterile and flat, though there was an undercurrent of sass and Hispano-Nimue style sauciness (!) and that S. Broadway and the Broadway Terrace and Baker Neighborhood areas felt clean and delightful. Capitol Hill hadn’t really changed energetically much since I lived there. I still liked it quite a lot. Colorado Boulevard–well, it felt like the bloom was off the rose. Perhaps it was getting ready for some renaissance of its own. Cherry Creek felt a mite coke-y to me, though it had a giddy sort of fun to it. My sister lived in Engleweird, and I felt a “thirtysomething” sort of romance around the South Denver area nearby.
Actually a part of me for a moment considered moving back. I think there’s some bidness I have to of-care-take there, but … I will trust the time for that comes in its own good sweetness.
Seattle–well… I felt merely tolerated and “yes, but of course” while I lived there. The energies of the town were respectful, but I think the town was well shut of me. (Btw, I felt a more sinister element the last time I spent a few days in Boston. I really felt the evil that had resided in that town in the pre-Revolutionary era that had taken root there and had not ever been dislodged. There was an uneasy coexistence with the intellectuals, scienties and culturati. But still the malefic financial sector’s influence in this little London was fairly . . . Jehovahsatanick to say the least.) Seattle was ever deferential and somewhat “Libra-indulgent” in that there was a firm “we’ll see” energy going on there that I never could get beyond. It wasn’t like Denver’s ceiling per se. The barriers were horizontal rather than vertical. I felt like institutions and possibilities there were foreclosed on some level. Interesting things happened there, but actually right now I can’t say that my time in Seattle served to forward me in any way. It was the place I had to go to start grieving and healing my family wounds. It was there that I performed my “Requiem Familiae Morellae” (the Requiem for My Family Even Though They’re Still Alive”). And it helped me to transition to NYC and NYU-FWIW.
Not sure what all this means really. This blog post idea came to me in the meditative moments of shredding lettuce, cutting up a tomato, onion, pepper, etc. And I was eager to get to it today. Just as I’m eager and excited to get to the Pop-Up Plays tonight! Art Night Schenectady November is Upon Us. And the ensuing weekend should prove to be fabulous.
H’ray!
Acceptance Is the Answer to All of My Problems November 18, 2008
Posted by frostwolftfirerose in Uncategorized.Tags: 12 step programs, acceptance, belief addiction, fire, gratitude, Proposition 8 California, religious addiction, vEmpire
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In most 12-step programs, the common theme of November-time meetings is gratitude. Actually, I tend to think it becomes the default topic for the last 2 months of the year as yule/Christmas/Saturnalia etc. is the time of gift-exchange. And it is actually a grand thing for one’s spiritual fitness to give gratitude as frequently as possible.
I start off this post talking of gratitude even though the title refers to acceptance for reasons I can’t quite fathom. I understand that often gratitude arises from accepting issues at a deep level, and over the past few weeks I’ve been challenged quite a bit. Prop H8 has challenged me in some necessary ways, where I try to hold a space for all positions, even the ones I find personally repulsive and well, anti-me.
It’s been identified elsewhere that the real problem with the [e]x-ing-out right is that they are acting in the very ways they accuse the other side of acting in a classic act of projection. I’m quite aware of that tactic. It’s common to alcoholic homes, many of which also suffered from a collection of addictive beliefs which had the common theme of belief in the awfulness of people and from which the fruitless attempts at control would emanate in all forms. I can look back at my childhood and notice that my case-of-beer-a-day-drinking Daddles attempted to control the family because he himself was outta control with the beer. And I suspect that there are hidden addictions in addition to the public-face addiction of on-the-sleeve pietism that belief addicts present, first in “the religious crack-dens” as it were, and then taking their malady into the collective commons. While I imagine there are other problems going on, as with Ted Haggard and Pastor Becky from “Jesus Camp” who appears to this compulsive eater as someone with an eating disorder, this addiction is accompanied by the desire to scapegoat, to project and deflect their own actions onto individuals they would discredit out of some misguided sense of self-righteousness masking the desire to get the attention off of their own sicknesses. And they fool people . . . for a time.
I posted recently to a thread on a blog that I’d never seen before a comment about these notions, using the metaphor of a fire in the basement as Ran Prieur had recently noted about the rage-aholics and violence-prone followers of Mme. Palin. There was an attempt to present a rational discourse about the marriage question, which I actually had posted about maybe a day earlier, that if this was a rational place, we would see “civil unions for all” or something like that. The word “marriage”–a word discredited due to both its sacramental and patriarchal power-over past–should be forever retired from legal parlance and the focus for government would be squarely on the contractual aspects of partner-bonding. That is the “simple” solution, as unpalatable as it is to the unreasonable zero-sum folks on both sides of the equation.
And sure enough, scrolling down there were the h8-ful comments from the mine-is-better-than-everyone’s religious belief-addicted perspective. I didn’t stay to see if anyone took the bait, but only a couple of people really understood or registered what it was I said. I can’t make people see what I see. I have to accept that other people are doing the best they can, though it’s about to get tougher for all of us with the vEmpire going down the tubes. It’s quite a difficult thing, as anyone who’s ever had to deal with addicts knows, to try and show up and be present with a person ensconced in their problem. There’s no dialogue possible. Everything I would say to someone so enslaved unbeknownst to themselves would get skewed, which is why people in this situation are counseled not to engage. “Oh,” “uh huh”, “that’s interesting,” “I see your point,” and then when they ask what do you think, “can I get back to you on that?” and then end the conversation and move on as quickly as you can. Detach with courtesy if you can’t detach with love, and only detach with an axe if you can’t see any other way out.
This is much larger than you or me. That much is clear. Looking at these people, I can imagine that there are “entities” if you will, that are sucking them dry. Just as there are elements in booze and drugs that make a person into those shells we all have seen, just as corn syrup and sugar/flour in all their various forms turn a person into a pair of unseeing eyes in a mass of flesh, some element sucks the soul out of people who really try to enforce your/my belief in their soulfulness, despite objective evidence to the contrary. And to the addict mind, the worst thing someone else can do is to surrender to the truth they find painful to see: The person they/I love, who is so afflicted with this pernicious affliction, must be released to their fate. If they hit bottom, great. If not, let me hope their suffering ends quickly.
It’s plain to see that these people, Mormons and Catholics and Evangelical Christians really really hate their own humanity. And while they may have “earned” this shame and guilt and self-hatred through their own destructive and bankrupt actions, if I add to this aspect, I am keeping it going. vEmpire, addiction, religious fear-based persecution, cancer–they all operate in these Uranian, jumpy ways and they rely on our participation to keep them going, especially our judgments or our enabling, or our making excuses. (Which is why I can’t really be pleased at a democratic party win of the Presidency, because they aren’t showing the surrender aspect we all need to see and to work into our own lives.)
I’m not sure what’s going to happen in Cali–over time, this proposition can not stand. It’s basically an abuse of this referendum system to create a subclass of citizens all the while arguing that people who are basically saying “GTF off my foot, fool!” are being intolerant of intolerance. It’s a truism that your civil rights end when before they get onto my body. This attempt to foreclose governmental responsibility to ALL of its citizens and ultimately to criminalize minority expressions through the Diebold back-door are worthy of contempt and deploring. (Deplorement? Deploration Neither of them sounds like their words-am I right?)
Civilized people in general need some sort of “Civ-Anon” meeting where we talk of how to detach from the tapeworms, the vampires, the imperialists, and the belief addicts who seek to make end-runs (into the void) around that inevitability that “man plans, God/dess laughs.” We need to come together to be cheerleaders for the view that humanity IS worth something, IS worth continuation even though we’ve made a grand mess of it all.
My prayer for anyone who reads this is that you remember you’re delightful, that you are as flowers are to bees, and that you are delicious and necessary indeed. And may that act as a tonic to those who truly believe the soul-sickness of their own raging self-hate that radiates out into hatred of this “vale of tears.” True, there is sadness, there is loss. People we love, animals we love, trees we love pass away. But thus far, life continues along. And it can continue along for the foreseeable future if we let go and let God/dess.
Blessings.
Am I a part of a new meme starting? November 12, 2008
Posted by frostwolftfirerose in Uncategorized.Tags: Obama-Gorbachev
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I posted the other day that I would like to visualize Obama as the American Gorbachev.
Two odd things: First, I saw an Onion story with a picture of Obama and four of his disguises, one of which was Gorby. (!?!?!!!) And then I see a headline on line that reads “Gorbachev urges Obama to apply Perestroika in U.S.” (Or some such wording.)
I am not the only one thinking this. Wow. I… Wow!
Face Everything And Reconnect November 12, 2008
Posted by frostwolftfirerose in Uncategorized.Tags: fear acronyms, god acronyms, Hekate's Prayer for the Common American, magick, spellwork, Taurus full moon
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Acronyms for “fear” can be a lot of fun. So can acronyms for “God”–Grumpy Old Disaster and Grand Orgasmic Daddy are my favorites for the dysfunctional Jehovahsatan grump-old disaster I fired and all the amazing god/desses I now work with who encourage the awareness of my sacred body and its gay ways.
Anyway, tonight I am to do my third and final requirement for a spell I put forth a couple months ago, and I am afraid. I’m quaking in my boots because I really feel like I’m about to enter into some unknown territory, and I really don’t know what’s going to happen. But I have to trust what I’m being guided to do.
And this means I need to do my work. This is in greater service to the whole on some level.
I’m not sure which song I will perform tonight, should I only get one. I’ve put this song up on other sites and in my previous blog (disappearingchef.blogspot.com–Perhaps one day I will revisit that one.)
In any case, here it is again. It seems apropos of what I’ve been going through
“Hekate’s Prayer for the Common American” by Richard Morell
copyright 2005
Here you lie, in tatters shredded from this vulture culture
Now, I shall gather you up, and stitch together a quilt
Could it be that you have gone too far, you’ve gone clean right off that edge
Centers have not held for such a long time now.
You turn your heads bravely towards what you see down the road
looming out in the distance, hurricane forces– can’t avoid them
Mindful furies demand your attention
Mechanized monsters pounding your faces into a crying earth
Here, oh here I’m standing next to you
at this Crossroads whither your annihilation?
This white, white pained face
remembers you
I’m thinking of you
Wondering about you
Smiling at you
Hoping for you
praying, wondering
What course of action you’ll take.
There’s a lot of energy swirling about, and tomorrow is the Taurus full moon. My appearance tonight at this club will be a continuation of a spell. I’m painful eager curious about it.
Thin Veils Indeed November 11, 2008
Posted by frostwolftfirerose in Mystical.Tags: 2008 electi, 2008 election, ancestors, Fool card, samhain, Tarot, vEmpire
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Last week probably was a poor choice for attempting to commune with death deities, though November ought to be the appropriate time for this. In the witches’ calendar, this is the new year, and the beginning of winter. It is the time to start going within, and in years past, the Lammas-Yule window has been my favorite time of year. It still is, but last week’s events did manage to put a wrinkle in my brow.
And a large part of it was that I was communing with the dead as we pagans are apt to do around Samhain. November 6 was the day that the Sun reached 15 degrees of Scorpio, which is the technical start of the Samhain season (until the Winter Solstice and Yule). 15 degrees of the fixed signs mark the celestial half-way points between solstices and equinoxes–a mathematical consideration really, academic. In any case, the election just happened to coincide with this work, this time, this energy, this need, and I was not in any condition to respond to the events but merely to react, to go deeply into my fears.
And I really am grateful for that. I got a taste of something that I don’t want, and what’s more, a lot of people are on my side. It’s an interesting thing to witness other people coming forward to speak alongside me, even though I rather think the way our society approaches these significant partnerships to be insufficient and weighted toward the rich, the male, the caucasian. Gay marriage to me, while it needs to be a part of the discussion if only because the institution confers certain benefits, isn’t really where I personally would like to put my focus. I can actually respect different sectual [sic] preferences’ desires to confer their sanction over partnerships, even as I maintain my jersey-barrier spiritual boundaries around my own sacred authority and refuse to accept/allow their squawky invasions of my personal space and their abusive “for-your-own-good” unhealthy pride (read arrogance) that would brazenly attempt to control my sacred and sexual and affectional choices.
I don’t choose to be in their congregations for a reason, after all. I wouldn’t mind being in the Church of Jesus Christ Bottom-and-Top. And there are fellowships out there with that homoerotic Christ notion, but for the most part, I’m content working with the Gay Jesus as guardian of my Iron Pentacle. I am, you are, we all are the Body of Christ. We are all called upon to become Christs on our own, and to Mormons and Catholics of a certain authoritarian and fearful/forceful (read pathological) bent, this is heresy. Gay people and witches make choices arising from our own sacred connections, not ones dictated to us by spiritual vampires. Hence the word heretical being applied–we are choce makers and decision-makers–that’s all “heretic” ultimately means, chooser. So MYOFB already, stay the f*ck out of my handfasting. Don’t want you there, go to where it’s warm already. It’ my job to make it Iceland for you khnts.
(Lovingly so, but still. The cobalt blue jersey barrier IS meant to keep out the unsavory and the willfully blind, the batshit insane and any hostile reps of the vEmpire. Go and have sex to your hearts’ content–but over there where I can’t see it, thank you very much.)
In any case, I’m finished with the Feri death deities for now. They told me we are finished, and that I need willow love, and that there are great plans afoot. I drew the Fool card for the year, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE that! This will be quite a fun and unpredictable year all right.
