Committing to the Shamanic Path...

In her teachings around the Celtic Drum, Angela told us today that by making our drums, which as i was taught previously, hold their own spirit and become part of our medicine bundle, we are affirming to the universe that we have now committed to walking the shamanic path.

I have been in a flurry of creative activity, tunneled in within myself, visioning, creating, spinning the intangible into a tangibility that brings with it affirmation, not only that i am exactly where i need to be, but that i am not indeed crazy. That all those visions of women in community, priestesses and ritual, were not solely born within the imagination, but instead my spidey senses had been alerted and i was definately onto something. The inidigenous program at this point feels far more initiatory than it was foundational. It took a whole two years of whipping everything i had identified as authentic to the wind, and scuffing my way through a very long integration process before arriving here, where i do feel developed enough to begin lying the bricks and mortar of the foundation of what i am here to do. This week, i began by making the drum.



As lori said tonight, this path is all about trust. When beginning to journey, angela gives very little instruction, does not question and takes the results of our journeys when shared as a factual account of our experience. For much of the time in class in the beginning, i wondered if i was indeed "doing it" correctly, but as angela began to nurture this environment of trust, i too began just allowing what came, recording and working with, so much that now it directs my creative work and here and there the universe sends me indications that i am right on the ball with the journeys i am conducting. It allows me to feel a strong anchor in my personal power, a renewed sense of faith in my purpose and as such much more patience in allowing the mystery to dowhat it needs to do to bring it all about, while i just patiently move with the rythyms and allow it to be. I am so inspired, so regenerated and blissfully grateful.

Last week I conducted a journey to the spirit of the drum, requesting that it reveal itself to me and show me the energy that belongs to it's purpose. In the journey, i appeared without my cloak, instead i was wearing a maiden-esque royal blue embroidered dress, from a medieval era. I thanked my power animal for taking me to the centre to meet the spirit of the drum and he took me on his back up the spiral mountain staircase. Yet this time as we ascended i noted that the steps were no longer rock but instead a bright shiny white ivory. When we got to the top, we continued to move through this vibrantly green, plush and magically alive rainforest, with monkeys swinging from branch to branch over head. We were arriving at a clearing within it, with nothing but a burning fire within a circle of stones. I was directed to step right into the fire, and with a moment of hesitation i did so. As soon as my feet were planted in it, a drum popped up and appeared above my head. I saw myself being shapeshifted into a variety of moving images, in the elixir of the fire beginning with a butterfly, moving into the face of an old woman, then the maiden and the mother, an eagle, a tree, mountains, the earth, the skies and the cosmos. It was showing me the interconnectivity of all things, how i was part of all of it and it was part of me. A voice in the darkness explained that the spirit of this drum is about stepping into the fire, alchemy, transformation and power embued with the purpose of healing the deepest parts of the collective divine feminine. This was symbolized on the drum by the different blues in the crossbars and wrapped with the spirals of sweetgrass.
The sweetgrass was intended to represent the weaving of the different stories in life that create our reality, the waking dream, the sleeping dream and the journeying dream, together in the braid they symbolized the union and harmony of all 3.
At the centre was shiny white ribbon representing my white owl spirit, with a blue medicine bag for women's healing. The trim of the drum was filled with dancing firey flames, a symbolic representation of each face of the feminine collective at the west, north and east directions, while the south had a place waiting to be filled. In the centre of the drum was a small black circle which the voice explained was the dark fertile void to which all things grow. The beater was represented as a tree.

This journey was incredibly fluid and incredibly powerful. I got the feeling that i would need to follow all the guidance in this journey in creating the drum, that this drum would symbolize something far greater than a completion of an art project for a course underway. In my mind's eye the image stayed with me and i saw myself healing people with it, it felt like through it's construction and my attention to it's detail it would harness very strong and powerful medicine for the work i have seen myself embarking on. No wonder my outward helping is underground at the moment, i am most certainly preparing for a battle, one in which my medicine and my tools will need to be keen and sharp. My fight, is for the women, that the women will heal themselves from all these centuries of patriarchy, conquest and colonization.
That they will resume their roles as the wisdom keepers, the visionaries, the healers and medicine people, that in doing so they will also begin the healing of our great mother, our relationships to the cosmos, our children, tribes and community. And in shifting all of that energy, that we may as a collective move back into the balance and harmony with the feminine and out of our imbalance in the masculine, embodying the energy of surrendered receptivity, as opposed to distractive doing, to once again begin to honor the feminine traits in all things. This is the duty i have been charged with, this i know for sure.

So i began preparing for the making of the drum. I had planned on painting the flames on, until recieiving word from Angela, that
fabric would be needed to cover the staples. So i configured a way to create flames with fabric and sew together a beautiful, raw and process evidenced trim that will be glued around the outside of the drum. I had my mom help me with braiding the sweetgrass, attempting to monitor my thoughts and breathe and pray my intentions into the strands, as the women of old did, that as the intentions get weaved into the creation, in the end, that drum is embued with all of that medicine. I bought the paints for the cross bars, some decorative items to add my creative touch and began preparing. There is still a ways until completion, but i have been somewhat awestruck by how similar that tangible result mirrors the way i saw it in my journey. It brings with it a confidence and an excitement of things to come.

When we received our frame of maple wood and chose the elk hide that called to us, we laid down to journey, one hand on the frame, one on the hide and the beater stick laid across our chests. Our journey at this time was one of gratitude and honor for the helping spirits that had sacraficed their lives in physical form for the creation of this drum. Angela spoke about these creations as being the destiny of the matter forms that had made their way to us, which signalled the importance of meeting the spirits of these items to determine what wisdom they may share for us in ensuring their intended purposes are honored.

I had arrived in my power spot, wearing the white shiny cosmology cloak, ellie for the first time, had a matching white bloth across her back and was wearing the diamond jewel on her forehead. She mentioned that our dress indicated the degree of sacredness found within this journey. There was no travelling in this journey, the fire of the clearing appeared at my power spot and the spirit of the maple arrived in the west doorway, the elk in the north and the spirit of the beater stick which came through as a fir tree appeared in the east. Nothing again in the south. I began to dance around the fire but in front of the spirits and circled 3 times before stopping in front of the maple tree, placing tobacco at it's roots and draping my arms around its large trunk, filled with gratitude and love for her contribution. I thanked her for her sacrafice and asked if she could offer me any wisdom to ensure she remained honored in the drums creation and uses. She said that i was to always keep the drum near my heart and to remember that the drum belonged to the heart of the people. I vowed to remember this, thanked her again with another embrace and left one of my tiny purple goddesses' in her roots before moving on to the elk. In front of the elk, while lovingly feeling his body i thanked him for his sacrafice to the people and asked him how i could continue to honor him. He replied that i should use my drum with great bravery, courage and confidence. I also vowed to do this, placing a purple goddess on a chain around his neck, before moving onto to fir and placing tobacco yet again at her roots. When i thanked her and asked the same question, there was nothing but silence for awhile. Than she stated "everything in the universe is given and nothing can be taken away, it is all interconnected and intended to continue to regenerate the whole." I looked a bit perplexed but with no more sign of explanation i hung the goddess on one of her branches and proceeded to dance again around the fire 3 times, before stepping back into the fire. Once in the fire, i looked again at the fir tree and she said, use the drum to stay connected to the silent place from which all things are born". I felt that the message was finally complete and with that, each spirit dissappeared into the air.

To Help me Remember....

A Note from an Ally...

I think we are revolutionaries, Erica. I believe that there are a LOT of people who are sympathetic to what we can share with them.... but they don't have the words for it or the way to speak about it. The gift we can give the is the gift of honouring their experience. So few do---because of the light-obsessed and light-fixated nature of our culture and spirituality. People tend to follow crowds and create the herding behaviour we see in what is "popular."

But what is popular is not always what is best or what is right or what is good..... or what is true experientially.

The truth is I am tired today. I feel like I am in constant struggle with philosophical forces that provide the basis for the colonizing institutions that have a direct impact on EVERYONE's life now. For me the battle I am called to fight is to expose and undermine those philosophical foundations so that the institutions crumble under their own bloated and fall.... so that something more humane and dignified (and based on people's experiential foundations) can took root again.

The forces we are up against are insidious and manifest in every area of cultured existence. We can deal with them one by one or we can deal with the foundations upon which they are supported.

The truth is there are not many doing what we are doing. We will find more and more people who resonate with what we share and express (because it is their direct experience as well). Just as we will encounter those who have a lot to lose because they have profited from the "system" as it is and will look to us and our languaged experiences and understandings as literal death threats.

I know I will wage this battle my whole life. I know I will take up this struggle and that is why I am here. I know this.

And yet.... today I am tired of it.... and wearied by it. ♥

Held in the Palm of the Divine Mother's Hand....

A couple of days ago, my mom shared with me her recent writings and drawings from the visioning space. Some of them spoke of a time of great devastation which lies on the horizon, her writings a recollection of some of the moments alive within her memory, those to which she continues to grieve, those that remain somehow unreachable despite the rich aliveness within her memory, some still filled with much pain about a life she feels still remains unlived. Her words `somehow everything i did, i managed to fail at`. I asked her when she was going to set about embarking on reframing those supposed failures, to the inititiations that they were possibly meant to be, most of all i questioned her as to how she had so much faith in what i was here to do, despite the similarities of `failure`that she evidences in her own life, somehow not so different from the experiences in mine. Out from deep within me, a pool of grief, fear and inadequacy came to visit.

I spoke to her about the fears i had about mothering alone, whether i would remain stable enough to do so, as so much of my outer life seems to continually rescind and my inner life stays hidden behind the walls of my art, my writing, the space i have come to call home. I spoke of he lonliness of this path i call my own, how it continues to take people from me, passions that once promised a much grander ability to support madison`s wellbeing and my passions in the outer world. I spoke of never belonging, finding parts of community that spoke to some singular threads within me but always revealing there was never a reflectionary composite out there of what lived in here. I spoke of my longing for the divine partnership, my fears of having no more children, or partnering too late and not wanting to bring little people in at that time. I spoke of my professional concerns and whether i would ever keep this house a float or continuosly just scrape by, i spoke of feeling invisible most of the time, grief.....fear....pain...despair. She bore witness to my outcry that seemed to continue for hours, like flood gates had opened and the rushing waters burst forth. Until the moment came, the well had dried up, there wasn`t much more to say, and so i said i was tired and headed to bed.

I wrapped myself up in my blankets, held on to my elephant tight and softly fell into the dreamworld again. I seemed to dream all night, all though the details are no longer clear. The predominant dream was my wedding day. I was to be married in someone`s backyard, there seemed to be some shoty carnival going on in the background, my family was missing and claire`s parents were sitting at a picnic table. It seemed they were in the dream replacing my own. `Claire was at my side through all the preparations, reassuring me things would play out okay, despite an ongoing discovery of things that had gone wrong. I remember looking down at my faded yellow dress, somehwat old fashioned and in some weird lace, a burn hole i found in the fabric but didnt seem to mind. I`m not sure who i was marrying but for some reason i knew all the things that had gone wrong in the preparations, all the imperfect surroundings all didn`t matter, i was finally getting married, even the burnhole in the dress didn`t seem to phase me.

I awoke feeling like i had been well nurtured by the dreamworld, with an avid desire to return to bed soon and keep dreaming. I`m not sure what that dream meant, but i felt it neccessary to record it anyway.
I have been thinking about my life as of late and it`s relation to my ancestral beginnings. I just have this desire to attened to the hearth, bring more children into the world, continue sewing, painting, dreaming, journeying, writing, loving, dancing and come out of the hearth to commune with the sunlight, celebrate in community, be one with all that is. But isnt that the way my ancestral mothers lived? Wasn't all of those things part of their visioning and wisdom in attending to the needs and direction of the community.
My journey to the spirit of the drum was about stepping into the fire and healing the collective feminine, one of the things i wrote after journeying was that this part of my life was a defininate change in the energy of the masculine or doing and a move on into the feminine and one of receptivity...yet still i feel quilty for not being productive in the outer world, still i worry about the way in which i will support us, all of these questions that will for at least some time remain unanswered, so for now i continue to write, to dream, to commune, to sew, to breathe life into the future of this vision....

The Dark Man Dreams...

When i first read Clarissa Pinkola-Este's book "Women who run with wolves", I was first introduced to the concept of dark man dreams. In her book Clarissa explains the connection between Dark man dreams ie nightmares and different aspects of the women's soul that is continuing to be held in captivity. I had a hard time re-collecting these dreams in my memory, yet sure enough in this space of my life i am visited by them often. My teacher of the White Bone has asked that we keep a living record of these dreams, alongside our journeys in the other worlds, and their weaving reality within our waking dream. So this will be the first entry in which i attempt to do so.

I have been haunted by an ebbing of lonlineness as of late manifested as a longing to finally partner again with someone cut from a similar cloth. I fear regularly, given my past experiences in relationships and my continued sense of alienation from the world that this may never happen for me. Sometimes these fears make their ways deep into the tunnels within me as different thoughts of self-destruction ie how i'm not loveable enough or desireable enough, or maybe losing my mind. At the heart of things however i know this isn't true. I know myself to be a special breed, special yet not ordinary, i like to think of myself if you were studying a statistical map as an outlier far off on the corner of the page. I spent the great majority of my life trying to re-make this outlier within me, to re-shape it, cover it in different jewels and materials, make it consistent with homogenous boxes. All of these attempts were miserable failures. I mean i did find love yes, and at times feel like i loved quite intensly, but wheteher i was ever really truly loved back is an entirely different question all together, how could i have really been loved for who i was when the make i had been portraying was not really me at all.

To date, i refuse to modify this collage of parts, some less neat, some well ordered, some chaotic and creative, some interesting and well rounded, some dysfunctional, some functional, because all of these parts are indeed me. Some of them are in need of a little shining, a little healing or working through, but none the less they are mine and gifted to me for a reason that i have yet to seen through, so my days of pretending they arent there, or sacraficing them for a larger investment ie attempting to find love have indeed ended. Addditionally, as i continue to uncover, embrace and explore all these different parts of myself, i find my margins of acceptance for acquiring a romantic partner to become slimmer. I am not interested, nor passionate or inquisitive about those others who wear false faces and fit within boxes, i wish to find another who resembles some of those mis matched parts of me, but also has their own unique embroidery to their own quilt, lives with their own questions that the continue to deepen within themselves and see through in the world that surrounds them. We are a different breed, not found everywhere and sometimes well disguised, so i imagine it will be some time before i fall into that experience. Patience would be fine, if the fears didnt consistently creep, the questions around if im aging too quickly, or if i will lose my youthfullness before the person arrives, will it be too late for me to have a baby? So within these questions, sometimes a sense of desperation arises, at times with an energy so great it's hard to not follow it through, but of course the desperation doesnt take me any closer to what im looking for, for its appearance is a sure thing that the sacaraficial lamb is alive and well and looking for it's slaughter.

All of these energies visited me last night, as i continued to also question a connection i had with one of these vibrant men a few years back who does his best to avoid contact with me. I wondered if he actually did in fact hate me or have some great disdain, rather than come from a place of protecting his vulnerable heart as he had said so many years ago. Most of all i wondered what in me thoguht it was okay to continue to set myself up for this rejection...please notice me...please forgive me...please see that i too am good. If i was strong and self assured wouldnt i infact say "well if you cant see me or want to value me, i will collect my energies from here and move on, should you ever get the need to re-visit this, surely i will hear from you". Likely a compounded trigger..

And so while i wrestled with these energies last night, i prayed to the spirit world for some sense of resolution. As my eyes lay closed and my body slowly drifted to the dream world, i called out for a healing dream..."Send me a healing dream so that i can be at peace with my relationships...". The dark man visited.

The Dark Man Dream

Claire and I were in a fairly large house. I called it my grandmother's house, although it certainly wasnt my lviing grandmother's and it had some resemblances to my fathers house in the way that the doors and locks appeared, but it certainly wasn't his either. A group of young men in their late teens to early twenties had picked this house to break into and hold a group of young people captive. For noe it was only claire and i. I'm also nto sure how i knew this crowd was among us, I did know however that i needed to lock the doors, call 911 and grab my "grandmother's" rifle. My first attempt to safety was to call 911 as i asked claire to run downstairs and lock the side door. The phone wasn't working, there was a dial tone, but the numbers wouldnt dial. I ran to an upstairs bedroom and pulled an old phone out, by the time i had it int he wall, it had become clear the phonelines were cut. We had managed to lock the doors but the intruders came in through the garage, how exactly i wasn't clear. There must have been at least 10-15 intruders, they were all really young, soem male, some female, all dressed in black. I had the rifle behind my back, but before they sited it was able to ascertain it was of no use to me. I'm not sure if it had rusted out, or if bullets were lacking, either way it would nto be an aid in this fight, i inconspicuously placed it behind the couch in the rec room. When they made their way in, a woman held claire and i in a rec room, while the others fleed throughout the house, doing what i didnt know. Yet as time wore on i was aware we werent the only prisoners in the house, there too was a group of us, all young people, male and female being held in different rooms by different captors. Our captor was a blonde woman in her mid 20's fairly sassy, firm but also in a way understanding. She explained that there would be a series of questions given us in this room and all we had to do to save ourselves was to answer honestly. She warned that if she was able to see that we were lying within our eyes then we would be shot. In the distance there is this remote memory of a young man being used as an example of this and was shot in the head before us, but this happened more in the communal area than lets say our specific room. I remember trying to figure out in my head what these questions would be about, and whether my answers in honesty would furhter incriminate me or get me of the hook while also trying to devise a plan that would potentially save me if in fact i had to lie..how would i keep the lie from showing in my eyes, would the risk really be worth it? Each person was asked a question, all of them answered honestly and were spared. When it came to me the woman said "What were your experiences with Christianity in your early life"...Claire let out a sort of chuckle and said to the woman well your definately asking the right person that question. Yet just as i was about to answer, also perplexed these questions were of such a personal nature, a ring leader dude was summoning the captivity leaders to switch arrangements. She left the room breifly, there was some chatter amongst the captors, my mind was workign feverishly to figure out exactly what was going on here, why and what the outcome would be. When she returned, she indicated there was a change of plans but she wasn't sure what that would be so essentially indicated a period of limbo that we would just need to sit through. With her arm across the couch she casually looked back and saw the rifle pushed back there, and anxiety filled my body while trying to utter out some excuses. She smiled and said...i understand, a bunch of people break into your house and your life is threatened your going to grab a rifle". I was relieved and also perplexed about how unthreatened she was and in a way kind,, she was our captor after all. The door to our room was open i saw a lot of the boys taking their laundry out of the washers and dryers and examinign whether colors had ran, i was watching them curiously...did they break in to do their laundry? I was fascinated by examinign all the different threads and colors within their blankets. Just some commotion in the house, me drowning most of the noise out and watchign with an alertness to what exactly was going on in this house.

A young dude (also quiet kind) but being a gangsta in the pack of course, came and asked me if i could drive. I respoinded that i could and so he asked me to go with him and 2 other captors to drive them around the block. I only drove him around the block, just once, the block seemed to resemble the one i grew up on. While we were driving his kindness shgowed and he softly said to me "you are a really good driver you know". I said thanks. When we pulled up on the street close to the house again. The mob of intruders and captors were making their way around the corner. The dude that had us had a bit of panick in his voice saying he missed a direction, seemed nervous about what the result of that would be. He got us out of the car and asked us to sit on the steps of the porch while he found out what was going on. Claire and i were sitting on the steps, i wondered why in fact these guys were walking everyone in public, was their a method to it? werent they afraid of getting caught? I also wondered why claire and i were sitting on the step and not trying to make a run for it, we had the chance of course...i was busy trying to asess the risk by potential gain, our dude came running back, the group, was coming around the corner...he told us the dudes had taken some of the women into a back field to rape them. You missed that part, he said assuringly....why were we spared i wondered?

Angela has told us that when dreams don't neccessarily make sense, we could journey into them and ask for more information from the other worlds...i plan to do this...stay tuned...<3

The Should Be life...

The very seclusionary religious community that i was raised in taught me early that a woman's role in life was to be married to a strong christian dutch man somewhere between the ages of 18 and 22 and to get busy on bringing up a large dutch family. Children should be spanned somewhere between every year or every other, most of us would go on to have at least 4-6, some of us would have 9-11.
When i look at many childhood pictures that my mom saved in a big blue rubbermaid box, many of them were focused on bride's and bridegrooms, their eternal love, little innocent hearts chiselled everywhere around them. For as long as i can remember romantic love was a fixation of mine, up until the last five years of my life, there was hardly spaces in between boyfriends. I wrote about love, sang about love, longed for the fated truth i had been told was my own, a husband that would love me deeply and for eternity, and the magical moments i would experience raising strong healthy children. I tried desperately to make this a reality, pregnant by 21, divorced twice by 24. The problem was, the reality of marriage never reflected the vivid romantic imaginings i had envisioned most of my life. Marriage became a symbol of suffering, a prison of control and an acceptability of abuse. The first love, abondoned me when parts of who i was began to glisten, when troubles made themself known, he wasn't going to stick around to help me figure it out. My heart bruised and broken i walked right into husband number two. He would spend the majority of our marriage, emotionally de-tached, oblivious of my need for emotional intimacy despite my consistent giving and vocalization of these needs and later quite comfortable with dragging me across rooms, throwing me on top of trucks, dis-connecting phone lines when the state of emergency got more severe and sleeping with other women when the stress at home became too intense. When i finally had the courage to put him in jail, i was met with silence and shame by my father and told that despite the fact that i had no longer been safe in the walls of my own home, i should never have proceeded with contacting the authorities, instead i should have just gotten better at keeping my mouth shut.
It was here, that the desire for marriage, for life long companionship died. I was determined to never sacrafice myself again for the guise of romance and to build a life of independance that would ineveitably instill a different set of values in my own daughter who would be watching how i lived my life and interpeting it as the "new normal".

I have been single for five years now, have grown in many ways and learned many things. But still a silent weeping of this aloneness continues to seep out of me. I have gotten very good at being alone and in the limelight am quite confident that the constructs of marriage and relationship as we have defined it, is nothing less than a complete sham, a mockery of what we perceive and call love. Yet sitting in the bleachers at Madison's skating lessons, surrounded by the mothers and the fathers arriving just a little bit late all dressed in their buisness suits, small pains begin to make themselves known and i am aware despite the hard shell i have constructed to deflect these things, deep deep down there is still a soft calling, a longing to again experience "my one special person" in the world, a companionship, an intimacy, a relationship that spans the years of a lifetime....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoNtYC_XDC8&feature=related

The living dream and the living nightmare....

There were some undeniable experiences in my spiritual life and the subsequent inner work that followed that proved the universe a mysterious place, ripe with alternate realities somehow withheld from the mundane thinking brain that led me on this exploration into the variety of screens demonstrating the wealth of different realities. It was a time of awakening in my life that somehow proved to be a remedy for all the hardship, all the trauma, providing a meaning to the abhorrent life experiences I seemed to continually be met with and offering a ray of hope that it was these experiences that had given me a glimpse of a different reality rich with respite from the darkness i had always known. It was a time of excitement over new possibilities and a naieve assumption i had somehow found answers that may lead me to a potential end. A discourse i could add to my work within a system full of corruption and human and ecological devastation. I had an answer, a remedy, an argument to fight for to call out the sinister power puppeteers and finally provide a way to freedom for the oppressed like me that i had pledged my life to serve. It was a long awaited answer that came just in the nick of time. My mission: do the inner work. Remove the obstacles that clouded my being so as to make my channel to the other worlds clear and fluid. Create a strong relationship, where continual answers may arrive and then fight for it's right within the spheres i once beleived were there to educate me.

Four years later, i find myself with a pretty severe case of apathy for both the good work i conducted in social work once bursting with passion and also a keen cynicism about the work of spirituality. I've read all the books in both arena's. They proved to be a variance of ideologies i fed my brain with the intention of growth awareness, yet i fear they instead have acted as some sort of poison, an other delusion serving to obstruct my view from reality. Informing the mind in my view is a decision to proceed with some sort of brain wash it's just a matter of which form of poison you wish to feed it.
There is still a gap between what both arena's of information feed me and what i have actually experienced in my lived experience. At this point, the safest bet is to allow my lived experience to be the clearest channel of truth. Yet, i am also confronted with the idea so common in many spiritual practices and orientations to the world, that my lived experience is simply a part of my story, a living dream, isolated to the realm of further delusion to which i have grounded myself. It is between these spaces, this conflict i continue to wrestle in which i find myself, apathetic, passionless, directionless and curious as to whether this will remain to be my continued sense of self despite my greatest efforts to temper it, or if in fact this is another chapter of the seeding which at some point will burst me forward into another realm of full bloom. I suppose all of it is a mystery.

I continue to see my life through a spiritual lens and continue to study shamanism providing a grounded approach to working with my inner being, my own life experience and relating to the cosmos, despite my thinking brains skepticism and sometimes cynicism about what it is exactly that i am doing there. Am I entertaining another fairytale, a hope to escape the terrors i have seen in this world and malignantly going through the motions of another realm of bullshit serving as a good distraction from all of that which many parts of myself feel no longer strong enough to see? Or am i continuing to entertain an actual truth, a pearl of wisdom within my being that continues to drive me forward despite my blindness to the purpose/meaning of it all, with hope that somewhere within all of it, the rabbit hole will open up again and i will be reminded of those many realities i once saw glimpses of but now seem only a product of my imagination. In any case, it still seems a valid enquiry, despite that i wouldnt dare lay any truthful claim to it and bring it to the world at this point. I;m not sure anymore of what truth is really truth and so i continue to lie within the abyss while moving through the motions of creating a should be life.

There is still a perpetual dis-association, a looking for some kind of mirror in the world and continually comign up short handed. The world of the spiritual, the intellectual debates and fancy language that happen there, sometimes feels no better than the joke of wisdom pranced around in academia. Sometimes it appears as if greek to me, where i have lost an ability to interpret, although i have this memory of when i was so versed and able to fluidly protaganize the best of arguments. Then there is the world of academia, also once a close friend of mine. A place where my sense of passion and self-empowerment was fueled, also a sense of meaning/purpose was created and i had a mission in the world that i cared deeply about and felt my voice/knowledge would make an impact. I naievely entered this world and brougth great harm to my being. People don't really understand what they're doing there, the system continues to wreak havoc and great abuses against mankind and operating as a part of it, made me feel little more than a co-conspiritor, a position i could not live with.

There is a definate reality to that part of the world. The corruption, mind-fucking and continual abuse, that if your recognize will simply make you a target of some form of delusion. How could i continue to support and rehabilitate the clinically insane, delusional and paranoid, when most of their accounts of reality, often delusional to the unaware mind, seemed more an accurate perception of the reality i had witnessed in the system that those who were in charge of diagnosing and treatment. |It was after all the clinically insane that in many ways helped me to realize how distorted my own interpretations had been or how i had bought into the dogma that was fed to me about my own imbalances. There is that world where police officers abuse and beat women and racial minorities and are continually curtailed from being exposed to the general public or any sense of recourse for their injustices. There are the feminist organizations that treat women as uncapable and mentally ill, delusional and crazy, yet claim to be in the buisness of advocating for their equality. Whose equality? The middle class, that remain sheltered and unscathed from the horrors of the street, or being sexually tortured and abused by your father and brothers that will continue to manifest in the victims coping skills as an adult. There is a reality to the pathetically corrupt and injust game of criminal justice, that protects the criminals and punishes the victims and offers neither of them any route of healing to cessate the violations in the first place. There is a reality to the underworld of all these things being manifested in the entire ways in which we do things, the systems of operation we create and have founded our societies upon and that are often present in the very people we have given the authrotiy to make our decisions for us.
Finally, there is a reality to how we have consturcted a system that silences, kills, diagnosis or medicates any one of us who may be aware enough to recognize these crimes against humanity and ecology and deems us the crazy ones, rendering our insight unvalid, our rights limited, our deaths more than a possibility. |These dark reflections that continue to live and breath inside me, i still remain afraid to speak aloud as a result of all of the aforementioned factors, so here for the first time i make my voice known.

As much as spirituality and inner work offer a new way, a fresh paradigm or living entity that creates new avenues of hope, i wonder sometimes if it also acts as a blinder, a way to pretend these ugly scars are no longer there, a white washing of everything real into some better intended reality, especially when we can just chalk it up to someone's projections within their living dream. How do the two unite? Or better yet, how do i begin to bridge these divides in order to carry forth the truths that remain important to me. As much as i would like to, i still carry a strong resistance to sitting on my meditation cushion and chanting away my pains in the midst of these everyday realities that continue to be experienced by so many. For now, i am a bit immobolized and realize that before anything can ever be brought forward from me, i need to heal some of the far too open, far to bruised and annihlated parts of self, build the resiliency neccessary to walk forward in wisdom and not naiveity, that i may walk in confident knowing as opposed to offering myself up as the sacraficial lamb. The work has to be done carefully, meticulously, with the wisdom of the white owl indeed.