Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Cloak of Darkness

I am weaving my darkness, refining it, purifying it in fire, twining it with ethereal hands. I am dipping it in a milky ocean, beating it against obsidian rocks, washing it. Weaving a cloak of darkness to drape around me, protective, grounded as the earth, sparkling with the stars of heaven. This is my coat of arms, and I wear it proudly. It is not done being created.

The darkness within is not fundamentally our enemy. No more than yin or yang is evil. The Darkness becomes demonic when it looses it's anchor. I think that as long as you are alive, you will contain desire, and the whole range of emotions. When they are brought into balance, all is right in the world, heaven reigns on earth. But when parts of us are rejected, ignored, feared and hated, then parts of us become hate, fear, ignorance, separation. Maya is the world. It's beautiful and playful. Without at least some of it, there is no creation, no world, no life, nothing to love. no one to play with.

Sometimes spiritual communities, like the one I'm in, form a habit of rejecting their shadows. Hoping that eventually they will go away. And it's sad to see what happens, because they end up living half the life they could. never really complete, whole. They are cut off from their dark mother, from there own heart, because they can't accept parts of themselves. I did that for a while. What I'm doing now, is deeply satisfying. When the darkness is dealt with in a healthy way, it grounds you. It's a freedom from fear that is unshakable, like the second innocence some people gain after a hard life, which cannot be moved because it has seen all that would take away our innocence or peace, and it has swallowed it all, dissolved it in love. Dwelling on negative thoughts is mostly pointless, leading to rumination and then depression. But there is a work that you can embark on, where the darkness is transmuted into greater light. This seems to me to be the process of bringing heaven down to earth. The first step on the path is sometimes ascending to heaven, seeing the view from the mountain top, becoming aware of one's immortality. And then the second step is going back down the mountain, going into the dark and scary parts of the world, of our heart, that have yet to receive this light, and bringing them, one by one, up to the mountain top. This cannot be done if you ignore your shadow, if you deny it's existence or seek to escape from the places in you where it still lives.

The brighter the light, the more intense the shadow can become. I'm just doing what I always do, trying to describe my own path and pitfalls and any wisdom I've gained from doing the wrong thing and getting hurt or stuck. What I am doing now is very mundane. It's sacred as well, but it's grounded, it's simple. Part of me may be divine, but there are so many areas that are still afraid, hurt, angry. I think my first teacher was quite brilliant when he said that after the initial realization of the Self as separate from activity, the rest of the journey is that of action from the level of the heart. He called it devotion: action and surrender. The action is necessary. it almost doesn't matter what action. Sometimes it's just getting up and going for a walk, right now it looks like trying to get a job, trying to get a life. The feeling level tells me whether it's right action or not. The right action is usually the one that feels a little dangerous at first. uncomfortable, scary. But in the end, it feels good and right.

I felt like writing was right action. perhaps it is. though this particular writing does not feel right. How to find it.... It's the thing that needs doing. and when I've been ignoring it, like I have today, it gets progressively more uncomfortable. It rips at my chest, grabs my heart and squeezes it like an angry woman grabbing a man by the nut sack. "you know what you need to do. Now do it."

Its a testament to fear that I still often don't do it. Or put it off till she gives a few yanks. This place of action from rightness in my heart...
first off, it's blind. I don't have a goddamn clue what's right. I just have some ideas. And I go down the list.

I used to kill myself worrying about what I hadn't done. it was like the cruel but righteous woman was twisting my...heart... right out of it's socket, the pain of regret was so intense. So I worked on that, and now I can at least usually put aside my past failures, even the immediate past, and remember that doing what needs doing only ever happens right the fuck now. And the more I practice doing that as soon as I realize I've gotten off track, the more I get in the habit of going off track less and less.

it's ultimately an awareness thing. If I am aware of my predicament, I do what needs doing. If I'm not, it's a coin toss that usually ends up tails.

by predicament, by the way, is this: I am a mortal, fragile body, or at least I'm inhabiting one, and I could die at any moment. And I am deeply dissatisfied with my life and actions and feelings about my life. But if I can just do my best, I can be at peace. God, it's so cliched. How do I say this in my own words?

My mortality reminds me of what is important. My shame, when I see it clearly, is just my own heart kicking me in the balls until I do what I deeply want to do. I need that discomfort of seeing my life heading for the jagged rocks to get me past the inertia and fear and insanity that keeps me from starting these projects. And by starting, I mean sitting down, right now, and beginning to write, or play, or clean. Whatever needs doing. Every day, it's a start. Sometimes I don't start until late in the day. This is why it's easier in some ways to have a job where someone else is the boss. You're accountable to others. You need to get up, or you'll get fired. And so you get started, and it's good. I'm going to get a job soon, and I'm going to learn about jobs. I need to know how to live my life, and to do that, I need to do stuff, and find out what feels good and what feels wrong.

p.s. sometimes what feels good also feels really uncomfortable. It's scary to write a book and try and get it published. send it to editors and publishers and get subjected to scrutiny and rejection.



[notes from the future: this was perhaps necessary, working with my darkness, but suprissingly it seems to have come to an end.  Not that it's all done but it's done enough that it's time to move on to something else.  Which is still figuring out work and living in the world.  but the part where I talk about my guilt and shame motivating me to do stuff was ineffective and I don't recommend it for successful and continued creating.  I've found a system that is much more effective.  I might say infinitely more effective, since the system of guilt got approximately nothing more done than without it, and this system gets something more done that if I didn't have it.  I should write a post about it.  To sum it up though, it's much more effective to focus on what you do want to create rather than what you want to avoid (shame, for example), as long as you are also keenly aware of where you are now. Anyways, I'm maybe explain it in a new post.]

I have no idea where this came from

She had slender legs, like a swan.
But not a swan's legs, no, her legs were like the swan's neck, soft white, supple, rounding and swelling as the neck met the body and the legs met the butt.   She had green eye shadow, deftly applied, and her lids drooped indolently.  She was thin.   Ballet dancers are often unhealthily thin.  Ballet teachers are often unhealthily cold bitches.  The two go together.  You can expect a cold bitch ballet teacher to say to one of her girls, "you're getting kind of fat there.  I think soon you'll barely fit into your leotard."  And you can expect the impressionable ballet girls to take the comment like an arrow to there heart, embedded for years, festering and radiating out in all aspects of their life.  Ballet is an art for people who hate themselves.

But people who hate themselves are an easy target for other people who want things from them.
Brusequa was one such man-boy. He wanted pussy. Not literally.  Certainly he wanted to insert his prick into some female reproductive anatomy, but beyond that, he wanted the manly conquest of doing so, the status, the power, the smug sense of self worth that came from having stories about women submitting to him, letting him, begging him to give it to them.   Brusequa was, is, not a sympathetic character then, but to someone who had not been introduced to him via this open and truthful portrayal, he would be seen as clean, pleasant, and agreeable.  He had good manners.   He had a handsome body marred only by a too long neck that was an asset to the ballet and a too big nose that was a punishment by his author.  Something to keep him from looking to good, being to self-confident.

Don't think this made him appear humble, no, it made him present himself as even more prideful.  But it was just a tad bit of an act.  Not totally believed, for who could love that gargantuan nose.

Needless to say, he got the ladies he sook with his entry into the world of ballet. Men are always in short supply, so he could be a prima donna much of the time.  And being around all those women, so insecure about their pudgy, bloated waists that were almost as wide around as there wrists.  Oh la la.

"Francqua, Francqua, you must be joking. Oh girl, you are a silly creature."
"Oh, Brusqua, don't taunt me so.  I'm serious.  I'm practicing my part."
"It can't be.   Look at that frolicking.   You look perfectly ridiculous."
"Oh don't say such a thing.  Here, let me show you."
And the delicate creature proceeded to dance for smug Brusequa.

[writers note: what the shit is this? I'm so fucking tired. I just wanted to write something today. but ...must...sleep. faaaiilling.
sleep]

The ultimate secret of all fad diets

I'm going to save you a lot of time trying out different crazy diets and give you the drop of truth behind the mountain of bull shit.  OK, here goes:

Don't eat lots of any one thing.
Eat lots of different things.
Avoid processed foods.
Eat lots of plants.
If you need to add extra flavor to make it not taste repulsive then don't eat it.

OK?  That's it.  You want a good diet, there it is.  If you really want to get finicky some things that may have a hard to measure additional benefit:

Avoid weird chemicals (that's partially covered in not eating processed foods, but also means you avoid things with chemicals sprayed on or injected into them.)
Eat stuff as fresh as you can get it.

And to sum it all up in one simple concept: eat like a crazy forest hermit.

Elaboration:  eat like nature intended us to eat.  That's quite variable if you look at different 'primitive' peoples.  Extremely variable, depending on the environment.  But if you can understand and apply this principle in a non-insane way, you don't need any of the others.

There.  Now for god's sake stop giving people money to tell you fractions of this over the course of weeks and months and years and spend that time and money eating good food.



Happy Death Day

I'm not exactly sure what a Yartzite is.  I'm sure I could look it up quickly on wikipedia.  But so could you.  Stop being lazy.

For now I'm going to assume that it is the Jewish name for the yearly remembrance of the day someone you cared for died.  Yesterday was my grandmother.  Who's name, to me at least, was mamu  (pronounced "ma-moo").  And my name to her was "the little one."  Even when I finally grew taller than her (which was quickly.  She was quite short.)

Today was a friends birthday.  It struck me as quite appropriate, though novel to me, that a religion would have the equivalent of a birthday, but for death.  After all, They are, for all people, two of the most important days of anyone's life.

After my closest friend killed themselves, in addition to the grief, was an experience that made me unafraid of death, and quite certain that the core of who a person was kept existing after their body stopped working.  It was just a feeling, a feeling that, though I could no longer hear him as clearly, nothing about him had really changed.  He hadn't stopped existing.  I felt him.  It was the same kind of non-verbal, deeply intimate connection we had always had.

So it makes sense to me, to celebrate someone who you deeply love, yearly, even after they die.  It also makes sense that the celebration is a little different, because your connection to people after they die is different than before.  But I think they like having people who love them gather and laugh and think of them with love, and it's a good excuse to gather together with other friends and enjoy each other's company and maybe eat cake or something.  At the very least, death should remind us to live.

I make no guarantees about an afterlife   Who knows how the world works for sure?  How could you ever be certain of anything besides exactly what's in front of you right now.  But for myself, I'm not afraid of death, and, though I miss those that die, I don't grieve for them ceasing to exist, but for myself, and for the others who will miss them.

Death is harder on the living.  I don't want to die, but when I do, at least I won't have to live with it.

In either case, fill your life with love and things that matter deeply to you.  When it's your turn to die, how do you want to feel about your life?  Don't wait till you're old to think about that.




Friday, October 5, 2012

The Desert Assasin

[Idea for a story from a sticky note I found, covered in cobwebs and dust bunnies, as I cleaned and re-arranged my room]:


The Dessert Assassin

"I've got a problem with a certain... vanilla ice cream.  He gives me a headache.  I need him... taken care of."

"I can do that."

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

"I want to see panda porn.  It would be great because they'd be so reluctant."
-Me


(if this doesn't make sense, additional information: pandas, especially in captivity, but even in the wild, are going extinct as a species because for some reason they don't want to have sex any more.)

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Conversation Fragment


"...ok, I'll wear the wig next time they're all over, but they can't take any pictures, and I have to wear my bathrobe as well.  That will be awesome"

"nooooo. you can only wear the bathrobe around them if you're decent underneath it."

(thinks for a moment) "yeah, I'm pretty decent.  I work out you know...."

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Grammar

Talking-to: "You spanked mah pigs, boy, and nows yer gonna get a talking-to like you wouldn't believe."
Talking-tos: "Those pigs all need talking-tos, if you ask me."
Talking-to's: "Those are Grandpa Talking-to's pigs boy,"
Talkings-to: "and its talkings-to, not talking-tos."
Its:  "no pa, the American Heritage Dictionary says its talking-tos.  Also, you mean it's, not its, it's means it is, its is a possessive pronoun"

(pig shit fight ensues)



[this is what happens sometimes when I try to learn grammar.]

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Titles: the sticky tired long goodnight

I was just coming up for air and as I floated on the surface of the dark ocean of my life at one thirty AM, I felt the desire to put myself to sleep with a post.  Blogger has re-jiggered it's look and has my page views displayed at the opening page, and I was incredulous to read a number over three thousand for all-time page views.  That seems grossly above what I should be getting for page views, since as far as I can tell I have about nine mostly anonymous friends who check occasionally to see if I've posted anything new six of whom are followers who know when I do.  Perhaps there are several page views per visitor or something.  I'm not sure how I'd feel if thousands of people read my blog.  befuddled, I guess.  Perhaps honored.

For some reason summer is ramping up my activity level.  It's been low to medium for a while, but all of a sudden I'm quite busy.  I don't prefer having to use a calendar/organizer to keep track of meetings and jobs, but it is nice to be busy with good work.

Thinking about names for my new blog... Something that conveys the jist of what I like to write, which is honest, beautiful, dirty, humorous, uncensored, informal, straightforward, and heartfelt.  "eloquent dicks"?  Also I guess I have to make sure the name is available, which is tricky.  Also I have to decide if I want myself traceable to it. It would be lovely to have the freedom of anonymity to write under.  I think I'd like it to be publicly accessible and anonymous, perhaps I'd let readers of this know about it, except anyone who's my  facebook friend could read it then.  I'd like to be able to make it personal, which means people I know should, for the most part, not know about it.  So I probably won't post the actual name here.  Just brainstorm.

open entry
the elegant rantings of a perverted hermit
death and bugs  (I think someone else has prior claim to that one :)
The Way Back Down (and sub title: penis penis penis penis)
Bathing Suit Flying Dreams
The only choice left
Gratitude for the moment: an assortment of erotic parables
Uncensored: life inside an unusual mind
The fantastic, erotic and scandalous life of Mr X
in search the nameless perfection my heart alone knows
the mad rantings of a strange pornographic spiritual crustacean


ok, time for bed.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Old posts, fuzzy slippers, a new name?

When I read posts from my friends blogs, it makes me want to write posts. Goddanm, they're so fucking interesting. So's it makes me want to give that back.

It makes me warm and fuzzing thinking I may be making someone else feel warm and amongst friends telling storys and sharing pieces of writing on a snowy winter day with a cup of hot chocolate and fuzzy slippers. Which is maybe a bit like how I feel reading friends posts sometimes.

Anyways, I'm going through my old posts, spell checking and posting old drafts that never got published. And maybe there will be some new ones. Though honestly, it may be time for a new blog name. I think the old one doesn't fit any more. I feel like I've graduated or something.