Those words resounded in my consciousness the first time I saw Big Eden about ten years ago at the Quad Theater in the West Village of Manhattan.  This particular film I’ve written about a few times, but yesterday in a session with my counselor, it became apparent that the very thing I’ve been longing the most for I’ve been also resisting.

It’s so easy to fall into the self-deception.  “There are all these steps I need to take to call forth my tribe.”  And I can start to enumerate them one by one, but isn’t it true, like in the film, that the tribe emerges in the places we find ourselves, and that our tribespeople emerge more out of happenstance than anything else?  Henry Hart in the film of his spiritual awakening lives in a nurturing and loving place and he’s going to be the last to wake up to it.  That’s the struggle of the film–will he see this place, Big Eden, Montana, loves and adores and cherishes him?

So too, the question seems to be for myself, will I so awaken to the love that is everywhere around me?  Evidently it takes a deeper level of surrender than I’ve before known.  I guess this awareness emerges now, in 2012, the year of the Water Dragon, last year of the known Mayan calendar, because I need to know from true power versus mere force.

And I’ve been forcing–how I’ve been forcing!  As I have been pondering the messages of my Aries transits, I began to understand that Aries as the innocent newborn, approaches an experience fresh.  Sometimes the energy will seek to imprint his or her energy upon the place of experience, and other times he or she will sit in simple and “stupid” awe of something greater.  I put stupid in quotes because I see this type of stupid as the shutting down of intellect in a positive sense.  Perhaps there is a better word for that?  But I am aware that Aries is first and foremost an instinctual sign, and much of its power just comes from daring to press through and say “Here I am!  I am HERE!” and present his or her Aries self as worthwhile and powerful just from the place of being.

Nothing more, nothing less.

The power of Aries is in the seedling pushing its stem out from the seed up through the soil and cracking that wishful surface to salute the sun and take in the nourishment that is everywhere abundant, that the seedling knows is its due.  And yes, the seedlings are vulnerable to various herbivores that might see its succulent new juicy green-flesh and slurp it up.  But that’s life–all things feed each other.

My counselor reflected something quite important and disarming back to me yesterday.  In talking about my intentions for writing a television show about a gay couple acting as guardians for their respective nieces in a small Northeastern town as the society comes apart in a sort of Modern Family meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only where the monsters are climate change, socioeconomic instability, enviornmental chaos and resource depletion, that my intention was to write to the current moment.  (Interestingly, yesterday I flashed upon Dickens as being a necessary influence here, and I had a copy of Bleak House with me in the counselor’s office.)  I further said my goal was to push the characters toward the creation of a Transition Town in this fictional place out of It’s a Wonderful Life and Our Town both, and he asked what a TT was.  It was in the course of my explanation that he asked, “so you’re scared about these things?”  And I had to of course say that yes I was, but I felt compelled to get to the hopeful side of things.  To which he countered, “but you seem more scared than hopeful.”

I got very silent as I took that in.  Part of me was embarrassed.  Part of me thought “F*ck, he’s being a manipulative therapist!”  But part of me was relieved to be caught.  Because I have probably been marinating in the fear for a really long time, and have felt quite powerless to do anything about it because I’m one person and there’s not a lot just one person can do.  And then I said, “I guess what I’m seeking is my tribe.”

I’ve been deceiving myself that I’m in a place of hope.  I want to be.  I see that’s the direction I need to go toward, but it’s not quite the reality that I can visualize that I’m there and it is so.  I also have to do the work of feeling my feelings, of feeling lonely, scared and sad.  I’ve known this.  I’ve said as much.  And I also need to take some actions toward the creation of the tribe, but really isn’t that more just a clearing of the space and deepening my soulful connections to others and to all that is?  To All My Relations?

I now grok that it’s time to release the idea that “the next place” I live will be the one where I really find community.  I love Glens Falls and the North Country, but for today my work is in Rensselaer, New York.  And while I believe that a lot of the structures that we have in place, entities like “Rensselaer County,” “New York State” and the “United States of America,” are quaint fictions that scared sedentaries tell themselves and fortify in their effort to whistle a happy tune, I’m whistling my own secessionist happy tunes as well, alongside them. Sometimes dissonant, sometimes consonant which really unnerves and disgruntles.

For yesterday, I also was confronted with the last few paragraphs of the “Working with Others” chapter of the AA Big Book, which ends “We have ceased fighting anyone and anything.”  As I drove home from the last place I attended to my own obligations, I felt something open in my abdomen under my heart.  I guess that was my third chakra.  And the thought “I don’t have to be afraid anymore” just manifested in that quiet open space.  It came from the still small voice in my being, and it’s right on schedule I guess.  But yesterday was a day for tears of joy and a new appreciation for my juicy reality.

The seedling stretches through the earth, and senses there is light emergent.  And the intellect now needs to understand its duty is to support this exciting prospect.  Its not in the lead here, and I seek to align myself to Godsoul’s Will for Me as I understand its amazingly loving voice.

I will let myself be found.

Aries and Libra roughly correspond to the onset of Spring and Fall respectively.  They are both cardinal signs, signifying the beginning of their respective seasons as well as the beginnings of certain sorts of actions being taken in the world.  (As I’ve noted elsewhere, the emotional beginnings of the seasons lie in the middle of fixed signs, with the festivals of Imbolc, Beltaine, Lammas and Samhain, but that’s not germane to this topic.)  Ariees and Libra both have the dynamic of self and other, with the Aries focused on the self and frequently being accused of selfishness, and Libra focused on the other, and frequently being accused of enabling and passive-aggressive behaviors.

Aries is fire and Libra is air.  They both have an obligation to work on that self-other dynamic with the foci respectively being on the individual within the relationship and the pairing as well.  And having grown up with a Libra mom who I think quite consciously sought out to repress the Aries aspects in my character with a good deal of success, I see that I have a troubled relationsihp with this dynamic in my own life.

It’s amazingly fitting to bring all this up right now.  Nearly 22 years have passed since the Sun progressed into Aries, and this past Samhain, the Moon progressed into the sign where she will be for the next 2 or so years.  And this arrangement could not have arrived at a more needed time.  I’m finally finding the wounded male child within.

Since Samhain, it’s been a quietly dramatic struggle, one that visibly doesn’t look like a lot going on.  Basically, I’m like the seedling coming out of the seed and wending its way through the earth in search of the sunlight and the water I know will be available to me once I break the surface.  The deck is being cleared for a serious growth spurt on an energetic and psychic level, and for me it really is entering into the Aries aspects of my character.  I have both Venus and Jupiter there, in the 12th House, intercepted by Placidus Houses.

For a short time in my 20s I was confused about which house system to use, but Placidus has always intuitively felt right because of this interception.  (I even have an interception by Porphyry, which is comparatively rare.  It happens though when one of the double-housed sign poliarites happens to be on the midheaven-naadir axis, as it so happens in my chart with Taurus rising and a Capricorn MC.)  I have long felt though that my Venus and Jupiter energies have been quite muted, and I was under the impression I would finally get access to them sometime in my 40s.

I didn’t know however, that it would involve struggle, but that’s Aries for you.  I liken the Aries side of me to that part of me that will always be cranky and colicky, the little baby that didn’t have the best birth experience in the world.  In the addict part of my character, it’s the part of me that can manifest as restless, irritable and discontent, and have a volcanic eruption.  The nice thing about Aries that is also unsettling, is that the sign gets really angry, erupts and it’s gone.  Gone, poof, just like that!  And while another person might feel they’ve got all this acidic goo all over themselves, the Aries is free.

Whatever we might feel about this phemonema it’s just the way things are, and to the Libra Mother I had, this was most intolerable.  I don’t have a lot of memories of my early childhood, but I have the consciousness that when I awoke to the more or less continuous consciousness of waking experience somewhere in my 5th or 6th year, I was already “de-Ariesed” if you will.  The fiery warrior energy would come out every once in awhile in a sideways fashion, but for the most part I was the docile Taurus rising, Pisces dreamboat child even into my teens.  It wasn’t until I figured out I was gay that a small iota of Aries came back into my life.

But for the most part, the non-Aries parts of my character have been rewarded again and again.  So that has meant that the Love and Faith natures of my being have been eclipsed by other factors, most notably my Cancer moon which I admit can dominate a lot of areas in my life.  And now it’s coming to be the time when that Cancer moon needs the challenges that my Venus and Jupiter will be issuing to it in their own expression, so that the Cancer moon can strengthen and get rid of some of the smothering energies that I know so well.

I have a feeling that a lof of my best writing comes from some Aries influences.  I have this one play Timberline,, which is still my favorite play I’ve ever written, over 25 years later.  It’s just a 20-minute piece, but it captures a moment in a way that I’ve not been able to quite pull off since.  It has a spring-like freshness to it, and it’s so frickin’ present!  (I have it on Cerridwen’s Mountain for those who are interested.)

The other day, my best friend and I were talking and I was reporting this whole Aries thiing, and he is the one who got me thinking about the Libra Mom connection as he also has a Libra mother.  One thing Libras have a real hard time with is direct speech.  “I feel this way.  When you take that action, I end up feeling this feeling, and I want you to stop it. ”  Libra wants to negotiate, and as such categorical statements about feelings especially are very hard for Libra to integrate. As both an air sign and the one sign in the zodiac that is a machine, Libra frequently has to approximate the notion of feelings.

And my mother, god herself bless her, was born on a day when there were no planets in water signs at all.  Interesting she should marry a double Cancer (with Leo rising) and have a Pisces sun-Cancer moon son.  Now, Aries is a fire sign, and most often Aries won’t be having too many direct feeling conversations with a person.  The Aries will be more like “I did x.  You don’t like it?  Tough noogies.”  Though there’s the part of them that is the dependent child and they have a hard time holding on to that.  Still, Aries is the sign famous for “Do what you need to and make the apologies later.”  And you know, it more often than not works for them.

Still, Libra HATES to be left out of decisions, as much as they dither about them.  They are really quite decisive, and they have been historically quite adept at being generals and captains of government especially.

And when I figured out I was gay, it’s interesting to consider the Libra mom side of things, because from her then-unhip position, this was something I never consulted her about–how could that possibly be true?  Didn’t I know that of myself, I was nothing, and couldn’t I see how such an evil decision revealed as much?  That’s why she left the Bible turned to a heinous passage in my room that one night.  And then when I told her to read the “judge not, lest ye be judged part,” oh how offensive–and ARIES!–how dare I?

(Libra does high dudgeon best of any sign.)

And this dynamic set up that 5 year period in my 20s when I disowned my family for a time because I needed distance from a family that would disown me for being gay “because they loved me so much.”

And even though there’s a part of me that really wishes I was done with that whole fracas around my coming out, it’s really a deep echo of something that took place even earlier in the fractals of my life.  I have the sense that there are some events that were too difficult for the 2 and 3 year-old Dicky to be able to assimilate and some dissociation took place.  After all I was quite the docile child.  People could have accused me of being afraid of my own shadow and I’m sure I had days where I was.  Where the hell did that come from?

My brother, with an Aries Moon, got that part of me which was so violently repressed.  He took on that extra Aries energy with a vengeance and he was sort of a terror, into GI Joe, cowboys and indians, wargames, etc.  He loved sports as a kid.  I detested them. I’m sure there were certain predispositions in me toward the arts and interior crafts as opposed to the outdoors and the energetic arts.  But I wonder if there was not something more in all that, having to do with some of the things I was told to repress because it’s good manners.

The path of adulthood that I seem to be on right now is one of reclaiming all that spring equinox, baby, seedling, daring, I MUST BE FIRST! energy.  And I understand it’s really Jupiter that is driving it.  Jupiter just finished a transit through Aries–burned through the sign really quickly but it has given me an impetus to do Aries things.  Wear red.  Eat spicy foods.  In fact a TCM student suggested I not eat cold foods during the winter because I’m experiencing a lung deficiency.  I’m delighting in ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg.  I need to be around fire sign people right now.  It’s not an energy I feel comfortable with, but I’m trusting that the warmth they give off will have their needed effects.

That Libra captainship of my mother through the rocky terrain of raising us kids certainly did mean well, but she somehow got it into her head that good manners meant annilhilating this part of her kids, and was really angry when her other son turned around and thumbed his nose at her.  And today I’m grateful for it, because I need to reclaim that little guy as I go forward.

So to all the Aries and fire-sign people out there, all those who have an activated 1st, 5th or 9th House, let’s talk.  I need to get warm in your presence, and I need to learn a few things.

The last few months have seen me sew up a new awareness of mastery in my life, one that has been with me for quite a while actually.  Just as Twr has been in the wings as a “golden shadow” as he observed it to be, so too has the mastery of being a playwright/scrfeenwriter been working quietly alongside my forays into trying to please others and coming up wanting.

For the time being, I have embarked on a journey into writing several projects, and it’s difficult to know from day to day which one will hold my attention.  I have a television project, a play and several screenplay, and then there are the odd devotions now to different deities that arise.  I feel a need to find some time with both Twr and Oya sometime soon.  (Odd, I’ve been find the colors yellow, red, paprika  and burgundy quite attractive of late, and the first two relate to Twr, and the others to Oya.)  Today I’m also dealing with a little bit of a feeling of a cold coming on, so I need to take it easy.  Even so, I must go outside and commune with a few trees I know nearby.

Trees, writing, recovery.  The 3 legs of Frostwolf’s Trigonometry of Divinity as it were.  (What is the cosine of this God?  Indeed, which is the hypotenuse?  I guess it would be the writing actually.  Trees squared plus recovery squared equals writing squared! Oh, Pythagoras! Archimedes–Eureka indeed.)

The mastery awakening is also due in part to my reading recently of Hesse, which Mr. John Michael Greer has been expounding on in his “Archdruid’s Post” blog.  I’m quite grateful to both Messrs. Greer & Hesse for these amazing texts.  Siddhartha, Demian and now Magister Ludi.  I have been understanding much of what is at the root of my loneliness, and it’s quite frankly because I don’t meet that many peers.  I’m sure that I sound like a snob when I say this, but I can’t help it.  I have certain gifts and talents and I have been slow to recognize them because for so long I’ve accpeted how others see me as the sum-total of It All.

The equation: Other People’s Views + Self-abandonment = Suicidal Grief would seem tto be proved therein.

Now that I’m embracing my mastery and stepping into my self-possession, I am becoming aware just how seasoned and amazing I am with my attentions to writing.  I have so much to offer.  So I will have to look into finding ways to connect with people who want to learn what I have to offer.  This will be an interesting challenge, considering that I have the South Node in the 9th House of higher education.  I need to offer it to youth, I think.  Or “the young at heart.”  It’s all about beginner’s mind and working with the heart in whatever we do.

That’s Twr’s essential message actually.  Interesting that he should find connection with Tiphareth in the Cabala.  The Sephiroth of the Heart.

I’m wondering how TV is going to evolve as our world changes with all its variations and variables. Nothing is going to stay the same, and the sooner we all start to acclimate ourselves to an ever-shifting new normal the better. I’m thinking it might be interesting to turn it into a serial play first, and see where it goes from there. It’s not the first time I’ve had an idea like this, where I get more ideas for a script than what I had originally intended.

Still, I wish I had more time to actually write. Between subbing and my construction work these days, I’m a bit swamped. I need some angels to come and help me with all that I need to do.

My anger is my friend sometimes, telling me that something isn’t right. I had an interaction last week wherein I could just feel myself as a balloon deflating, and I wonder if the other person in the interaction is consciously aware of undermining me and sucking that qi from me. Does he know he’s a vampire, wishing to suck at me like he was a sole-proprietor version of Aaron’s Rent-a-Center? He might not. In any case, I need to call upon my Godself to come down into this particular situation and help me to wrest myself from the tentacular clutching dogging me.

No more. Begone, ye beast, to be banished into history, and to free up the glorious and radiant Present. But in that beauteous Now, I must find the way to accommodate the need for rest, along with the need to make some money. Ah, yes, the exigencies of life.

The Work of this God is to be a joyful, wealthy, healthy, creative, solvent, abstinent, sober, lucky shaman by the river.  A playwright and screenwriter.  A counselor, a healer, a joybringer, a celebrant in all manner of life.  A forest creature in many ways as well, seeing as Pines and Oaks and Cedars are sturdy allies in my journey.  And what I see for myself is that future, which is coming on line.  But I have always sensed this gap, and I’m at the gap now.

I’m about to “jump and trust the net will appear.”

And in order to get to that place, I need to jump and be OK with the possibility that the net is not there at all, and that I will fall and fall and fall, until I land hopefully on my head and reunite with God Herself.

The journey of this past year since I ankled my legal gig has been one of coming to terms with the terminal diagnosis.  Do I have cancer? An inoperable tumor? Or maybe one of those terribly tragic diseases of slow wasting of which there is no cure.  Yes, indeed.

I am a playwright.

There you have it.  I am a playwright, and I have a difficulty in reaching audiences, and it’s partly built into me, and I’m trying to work with it, after having worked against my resistances all this time, and you know what?  I see that this life has quite a high overhead, and that for many a year that overhead took the form of ignoring or sabotaging my work.  And today I’m not doing that, but in so making the approach of putting my writing right behind my recovery, I’m also opening to the possible truth that there is no road here for me, that I’m coming to a place where the bridge is out.  But the end of this movie is not “he turns back to begin again, forced back to the vEmpire with tail between his legs.”

If it’s not Indiana Jones, it will be Thelma and Louise.  I must press forward.  If I’m not meant to be a playwright who gets audiences, and writing is acting is directing is living my life (eating, sleeping, shitting, pissing, having sex, putting a roof over my head), then not writing is not acting is not directing is not living my life is not eating, is not sleeping is not shitting is not pissing is not having sex is not putting a roof over my head.

Not writing for me: Is not existing.  And I would rather do that without the burden of having to attend to a body that would only be for cuntwork in cubicle hell working with vampires with J.D. degrees.  Been there done that, rather be dead.

My new prayer for the days is that my Godself comes into my body and is present within me.  To be radiantly self-possessed, to have all my points clean and clear.  Acceptance is the answer to all of my problems.

What other shingles can I put up to declare independence from The Man?  My recovery comes first, and my writing comes first after that, and everything else must support the two of them.

Anyone need their chart done?  Writing help?  Typing?  A dinner companion–on your dime?  I’m a cheap date and lots of fun.  Perhaps we can read some of my scripts together.  It could be delightful.  It’s time we all start to acknowledge that we need each other.

And people do need me, I know they do.  The question is, will they wake up to this fact before it’s time for me to go?

If worse comes to worst, there’s North Dakota, where my Mother and brother live.  I hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, it’s meant to be.  In the meantime, I have returned to a script I started years ago.

It’s my rehabilitation of The Tempest, with a Mexican sorceress (Persefoni del Cielo) who was banished from the corporatocracy 17 years previous.  It’s set on December 20, 2012, the night before the end of the Mayan Calendar in an out-of-the-way convent turned into pagan amusement park in Seagull Junction, North Dakota.  And it’s called Ambergris Mysteries, which is the name of the theme park.  Instead of a boat and a storm, it’s a train and a blizzard, and the king is a CEO of a company called Alonzo Prosper, Inc.  And Miranda/Ferdinand are now Randolfo/Ferdinand.  (There has to be a gay angle in it somewhere, why not the budding young lovers who will boldly enter a transitional phase out of the vEmpire?)  Basically I’m trying to remove the colonialism in the play and replace it with a re-embrace of the natural world.

It’s getting to be do or die.

Where I am now:  I’m nearing the end of my 401(k) funds, and I’m on the rolls to be called for substitute teaching with several school districts.  I’m looking into teaching online courses, and I’ve got an astrology column.  I’m open to knocking on many doors if I need to, yes, even to work retail if I have to.  It feels a tad too early for that, but still.  I don’t know that I have what it takes, but I also know that there is a place for me . . . emergent.

I’m at a point where I see the need to joyfully make offerings to the gods in the form of selling my furniture, my washer & dryer, even most of my books.  I need to be more ruthless than ever in terms of what I keep, and I have to resist the temptation to buy new things.  I don’t really have the money, I’d have to go deeper into debt actually, and I don’t want to do that.  But the thing is, all these things I have right now are homage to a ghost.  I feel like a ghost in my own life, and it’s mostly because the things I have reflect who I am leaving behind.

The gap. Where I am now.  What I see across the chasm of trust in my Godself is the life in the 5th dimensional space and beyond.  It is truer than the life we lead now.  It is simpler, in some ways harder, but more satisfying.  It is a life that harkens back to older ways, some Medieval, but more realistically even older than that.  One that practices acceptance rather than a churchly death-magick upon all those who disagree or who offer new points of view.  It is a world where we as another species of God Herself’s kids realize we have lots and lots of siblings in the forms of the spruces and the peachtrees, the otters and the lions, the grasshoppers and the moths, etc.  And that we all have a place.

I don’t have a place in the vEmpire.  I know too much, and I am sick of being sucked at and I’m sick of trying to suck stuff out of you and everyone else.

The part of me that I’m sacrificing to transformative fire is the part of me that is the getter, the never satisfied part of me.  I went to graduate school and went into debt so that I could GET the opportunities that I feel I deserve, so that I could GET prizes and cash so that I could GET the acclaim and recognition that I so crave, and also the security and the status and yeah, all the boyfriends I could muster.  But the thing is, I didn’t GET any of that.  It isn’t meant to be, and all the magick and the spells, etc., to attract that into my life won’t amount to a hill of beans because a part of me doesn’t really want that.

What do I want?  That has been the question I”ve been exploring over the past year.

I want a simpler life.  I want a community where the folks inside it and I all have each other’s backs, and therefore we possess real wealth.  I want to be generous with my being and my experience and my love.  I want to embody abstinence and sobriety and eventually solvency too.  I want to know that I count, and that I can be counted on, and that others count and can be counted on.  I want to give away what I need to keep in sacred and devoted service.  I want to have my basic needs met with just a little extra to keep me feeling like I have all that I need in the world.

In the scheme of things, this isn’t a lot, but it is a lot because there is no place for the simple needs except at the tippy-tippy-top of the hierarchy where it’s seen as sort of  WTF? and dumb.

Standing at this chasm between the old self and the new self, between old choices and unfamiliar but desirable choice is the moment I find myself.  I have reached the bitter end of this highway, and the way forward isn’t crystal clear.  It might be for all I know, once I take that step into fate.  There might be a crystal bridge underneath like Indy stepped onto in that one film, the third in the series which I can’t remember the name of. (There was Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Temple of Doom, and then the third one.)  But I could be gracefully leaping into the Godhead too.  I can’t go back the way I came–that way IS certain death.  I might go fast with a real leap or I might forsake my sobriety for a delicious OD in a den of ill repute, or maybe I’d go the slow path of sugar sugar, oh honey honey!  But if I see the need to return to the vEmpire and take a cuntjob again, being cunted of mana and cunting others of mana to replace the lost mana that never gets replenished, then I will check out whatever way I can.  I don’t have it in me to get sober and abstinent to live a ghost’s life.

Really I have only the one choice to continue that journey into the wood of my being, and envision a joyous hearthfire where my tribe and I are communing under the stars, where we are thoroughly enjoying our amazing lives together and marveling at the miracles of another day.

Truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll have a lot of debt-money in the future.  I call it debt-money because those Benjamins, U.S. Grants and Andrews in our pockets are really not all that substantial, and they only mean what we collectively want them to mean, and they don’t even really mean that at a much higher level than most people are willing to contemplate.  At some point we will see the men and women behind the curtain, and we will see that we’ve been sold a most cruel bill of goods.

I already know these things before most people do.  I have been confused about how to make it in the dying vEmpire, and quite frankly I don’t think I’m meant to.  Right now I need to find the ways to get by and to give generously of what I do have, of the desire to be a serviceable wayshower for others, which means I have to get busy learning these things from other wayshowers myself.

This little note might scare a lot of people.  But it’s not meant to.  I fully accept that I’ve led myself to this juncture where I need to find places to eke out an existence rent-free, where I might have to let my cellphone lapse, where I need to avail myself of all assistance possible as I make this transition to a more simple means of existence.  I fully understand that some of my friendships will of necessity terminate because this is just too much for people to deal with.  (They might be rekindled in the future, depending upon how things shake out.)

Life is vibrating at a really scary level, and we are witnessing the shaking off of debris that we have come to adore.  I have held onto a certain identity – the Undiscovered Playwright-Genius – for way too long.  Its husk weakly clutches at my spirit, but it’s been my ego that has held fast to it.  The unhealthy ego needs to be purified and cleansed, and this husk needs to be added to the need-fire now.  It’s in the way of the Shaman.

I will be holding a huge sale on pretty much everything I own the weekend of September 24-25.  This will be a momentous month of trust and truth for me.  I drew male lovers in the Cosmic Tribe deck today, and I blog all this from a place of deeper acceptance and love than I have ever known.

It is with love that I retired my corporate identity last Libra New Moon, the anniversary of which is a few short weeks away.  It is with love that I  release the fame-seeker part of my ego because it’s become too much like sugar and flour and booze.  It takes more than it gives, and I’ve hit bottom.

The prayer for the day is to know Godself’s will for this God’s pursuits.  I have a list of things to do, and I have a list of things to create.  Understand that writing is still a part of my gameplan.  I am aware that we are in a state of enormous flux, however.  I need to be a part of the change I seek to happen, to be acting in support of the sacred economy being born from Gaian requirements for our species.  The vEmpire has little use for me, but the emergent culture is where my heart lies.  I need to go to where it’s warm, and to go to any lengths to bring a recovery-centered life forward, not just for myself for the planet.

Small but large.  Slow but fast.  That’s how it works in my amazing life.  One day at a time.

I feel raw from it all, having realized yesterday afternoon that very little of what I was feeling was mine. Still, I am sad I missed the opportunity to seed an exceptionally powerful new moon, which sits opposite my own Sun-Mars conjunction. I will have to go back and retroactively do a rite therefor.

There’s lots of power about right now, and it belongs to all of us. And the best part? TPTB can’t possibly touch a lot of it, because it comes from love.

Currently, I am reading Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein, and he observed that in indigenous tribes, gratitude and obligation are the same thing.   He also pointed out that our very lives are a gift, and when we show up to the gifts we have to offer and give them with gratitude, we are involved in the fabric of life in a fulfilling way.  I have gratitude for my writing, and I am eager to give it as a gift to the world.

That being said, I see that I have a distribution problem.  I don’t know how to get my gifts to people who could use them, and it’s difficult because I really do have to rely on others to transmit them, unless I convert all of what I’ve written in play form to narrative.  That is not an easy thing to do, and some ideas are only going to be expressed in the form of a play or a screenplay.  They won’t be as satisfying if I convert them to novels and stories.

Still, I see that I am writing, and I am introducing a different concept into my life, that of having the courage to rest, and I see that by doing so I have more energy for the remainder of my day.  If I get the appropriate amount of rest and meditation and spiritual practice, the quality of my energy toward the remainder of my tasks is prodigious indeed.

Over the past few years, I have felt pain about that aspect of my writing which is about recognition.  I have long understood that recognition and fame are basically mood-altering experiences that trigger me.  I want more of that great feeling, just like it’s sugar or what I imagine heroin must feel like.  A day at a time I stay away from all Evil White Powders, as well as John Barleycorn and other various addictions as I go along.  (I’m now almost 3 weeks clean of sugarfree gum, which unfortunately I can go to town on!)  It has become dangerous for me to go into bookstores and look at the Drama section because my envy gets triggered.

In the 4th Step of the 12/12, it talks about worry, anger, depression and self-pity (WADSP) as being cause to do an inventory, and I feel envy is a WADSP cocktail.  I don’t need a huge exposure to it–all it takes is a mere second and I’m off to the races.  It takes some time before I can rein in my crazy-ass head about it.

I see that part of the issue for me lies in the faulty conception of self that is slowly leaving me.  It certainly as left me where some of my compulsions are concerned, and now I must turn my attention to the desire for fame in writing.  I must remember I write to be of service, that it is the Work of This God.  When I’m in the flow of the work, I’m not thinking of awards and acclaim, I’m immersed in the world of the characters and the actions they undertake.  I’m doing the Work because I’m called to it, and because it’s fun, and it’s up to my Godself and my Fetch and my Talker in allignment, and a crisp and sharp Iron Pentacle working in combination with the triple soul, that will summon those for whom the writing is a balm.

If I write the healing work, those most receptive to the call will hear it.  That is part of the sacred contract I set up before I was born.

The self that was–separate, distinct, egomaniacal–is dying into the self that is becoming, which is distributed and connected to others and because of that, is in right-sized pride some of the time.  When the pride point dips into shame or rises into arrogance, then some shifting around needs to take place to bring that bubble back into the acceptable level.  The soul lives outside of myself, I must remember.  There is both individual and collective here, and it works in some mysterious ways.

I’ve been aware that I need to take care of some things in the past.  I have a couple of amends I really need to make, and interestingly one of those amends is to someone in Boston, who I need to visit, and while I’m there, I also need to visit Harvard since it’s been appearing majestically in my dreams of late.

I had a dream that I was in the doctoral program in playwriting at Harvard, and that I was searching out a place to write at Samhain.  There were all these people dressed up in Halloween costumes and they were headed to various parties, and much of the interior locations of the dream were decked out in orange and black, lots of spider and jack-o-lantern motifs.  (One room was decked out in mylar, however, and made me wonder who the Pisces was that put that one together.)

I found myself in this comfortable room.  I could see the brilliant October afternoon sun blazing and the trees with their autumnal leaves, and then I heard someone playing a CD of classical brass music (Purcell or Handel or Bach).  Said “this is the place,” and found a wingback chair.  Then the real world intruded with a phone call.

I know I’m in the right place with all of this, though it’s quite contingent and to my ego feels precarious.  Still, isn’t that true of most people these days?  I sense that more and more people are waking up to the gifts of desperation that are everywhere abundant.  Perhaps we will start to act upon this new sense of self that Mr. Eisenstein has suggested is as much impelling us to return to gift-economy ways as anything else.

I’m eager to discover just how this will work where playwrights and theater is concerned.  How can P2P playwriting work?  Ideas?

Of late, I’ve become aware of the place of the Ego in my life.  In the Feri trad, we don’t seek to sacrifice this part of the Self, but to pursue spiritual technologies that make this self-aspect healthier.  As I start to practice my witchy work, I see that the shiny, sharp human pentacle that I am becomes more supple, resilient, and observably healthier.  As a writer, I need to have a humongous and healthy ego, to be able to withstand all sorts of slights and misunderstandings.

Part of becoming a healthy ego is the need to not coddle toxic relationships.  Hence, I can never work a vEmpire job again.  In 12-Step terms, where an alcoholic says one drink gets you drunk, where a compulsive eater says one bite of sugar gets the calorie train rolling (or some non-Morellian variation thereof), so too can I say “I’m one abusive supervisor away from the 6-story swan dive into concrete.”

When I was younger, after graduating from my MFA program and early on in my debt-servitude when I began to get a glimmer of just what I had done to myself by signing onto this insidious lottery-form of underearning and self-esteem erosion, I was quite eager and enthusiastic for my various projects.  There were some project that didn’t jazz me as much, but for the most part I really grooved to my writing.  A lot has happened since then, a lot of pain that has escorted the various forms surrender has taken over the years, and it gets ever deeper.  The writing element has returned, but it is not the same.  Before, I lived for my writing.  I may have had a miserable work life, loneliness in the relationship sector, nights of crickets sexually, etc.  But at least I had my writing.  I often wondered if it was a codependent relationsip.  Turns out my writing vanishes when codependence starts to enter the scene.

Gone are the various codep rel’s from my life, and my writing has returned, but it feels fragile and delicate.  And being the product of this ersatz economic reality we have inflicted ourselves with, I spend inordinate amounts of time telling the inner worry-wort to convert that energy into prayer already!  I am a writer, and I need to do my writing work.

Blogging is a part of that, and I have been lax with this blog and the other 3 I have started.  The struggle to understand what my Work is and how I can now bring money in and how to make it all work together symphonically is the question I wrestle with.  I’m presently involved with something that doesn’t really suit me, though I’m giving it a superb shot.  I need to start to make a certain transition and I need to find some way into teaching as one element that will feed my soul.  The other day I read a natal chart for a new client, and that felt so amazing.  That is also part of what I am called to do.  So I need to start to attract the right clients for this astrological God as well.

My recent Dartmouth trip has underscored that I have a lot of talents, and that the codep-rel’s have been obscuring this wondrous being that I always knew I was.  To be fair, some of the self-deception began at Dartmouth, when I had no idea that I had entered into a realm of subtle expectations that I had no idea held sway.  Yes, I did feel a certain responsibility about being “the first” Morell to go to an Ivy.  (And I do hope my niece will apply to Big D as well as the odious H–if she must!)  And I did see I had to fight for some of my accomplishments, though I made them bigger than they needed to be and spent a lot of excess time writing 12 page papers when the assignment called for 6-8.  (Didn’t learn that lesson till my Senior year.  Dang!)  I did however, feel woefully outclassed by my prep-school peers and those who were more single-pointed in their focus on success, and my ensuing alienation and self-recriminations, while absolutely unnecessary, were at least understandable.

I knew, going through my college years, that I wanted a complete life, however.  And with each passing day, I see that more or less I have one, though at present it doesn’t seem like much.  Yet I feel like I’m at the turn of the corner somehow.  Before the turn felt like it was just ahead, now I feel I’m right there, perhaps a couple feet away.

With the stuff that has happened in the past year, I see that I am reclaiming my divine self, my child self, and my Genius.  The work of alignment and Iron Pentacle does have a slow payoff, but it pays off nonetheless with the patience and the simple act of showing up every day.

I have been showing up to a daily meditation (more or less) with Vesta, goddess of the heart, and the guide for this continuing transition.  I am now faced with an interesting charge, to be sure to get enough sleep.  It’s strange to factor this in, but perhaps getting enough sleep will force the worry crapola away?  I don’t know, but I can hope.  I can put that into the Goddess-Box as it were.

Still, I need to be confident that I have all that I need, and that I can show up to take the next right action, and not need to be rescued.  That I can rely on my own Godself to guide my actions and thoughts and that I am certainly capable from this place of Wholeness that I have been cultivating over the past 2 years.  The fellow I was at Dartmouth, as much as I might not like who I perceive he was in the light of my present understandings, did at least pride himself on getting things done, and in purusing goals vigorously and with fervor.  I now reclaim that aspect of myself and push forward into whatever is coming next.

And so, I blog today.  Yesterday, I started writing the text for an e-book that I hope will serve as a contemplation of the 12 Zodiacal Signs and the times of year they cover, and the possible correspondences for a transitional collective phase they might offer individuals in terms of how to focus on vocational possibilities.  I show up each day and ask my heart, the fetch Andu, the orange-blue dragon-muse Starbjoerne, and other guides (mostly Elecampane right now), to assist in lighting the path to whatever writing must out.  I will probably look at the 2nd draft of Beauty All Around Me in the next 2 days, then send out a revised draft to 4-5 friends for insights and comments.  And I will take a couple of other actions along the way to step toward the vision of the Shaman by the River.

It’s all of a piece, and it will work out as it must.