Old Lives

Today I visited someone I haven’t seen in years.  An old mentor, no pun intended.

I see now , my life changed, the branch in the road, and the freedom I have claimed.

In ten years she has spun into a dance with her antithesis, her nemesis in flesh.  A woman in opposition to all my old mentor holds dear.

The conflict has taken root in old losses, or so I believe, and it has flourished.  It nourishes in bitter twists of familiarity.  It is embraced for its definition of boundaries, its comfort in the emptiness.

It has become a core piece of her world, a focal point to be shared, the story of life to be told.

Is bitter comfort, not yet still comforting?  Does it matter what sees us through the night?

I believe it does.  Yet that belief is in degrees, to the best that we each can attain.  Always we can reach for more (and sometimes we need to sit on our heels and *reflect*).  We can be more, for always we are becoming.  Or we can settle into a pattern of predictability and certainty, an old pair of uncomfortable shoes that we have adjusted to as much as they adjust to us.

I am happier for the road I have taken.

Barefoot and dancing.  Sharp stones scrape my heels, my toes dug into soft earth.  Living.

Spin spin spun

Spin spin spun

World alight, flaming dark down

Drowning in the firelight

Ash sweeps by in a chill wind

 

Spin spin spun

Dropping spindles a plumbline

Into straight tiled lines

Quartered, I am drawn

 

Spin spin spun

Dervishly dizzy

Petals, twigs, scratching, petting

I am stroked into nothingness

 

I am spun

I am spun

 

I spin

Gregorian Resolution 2013

A year ago, possibly today, I posted about my view on New Year’s resolutions.  I like to focus on things I want to try out, something new to embrace as the new year (Gregorianly speaking) starts.

Last year, I vowed to attend one live event per month.  Some of which even were blogged about here.  It was a varied list, including:  bellydance, plays, opera (first time ever), laser show, beluga and otter shows at the aquarium, restaurant band, friends playing with Fimo, classic plays and modern ones, parade, air show, and the list actually goes on from there.

This year, I vow to cook something new each and every month.

This should balance nicely between my holy-fuck-how-am-I-going-to-ever-survive-the-psychotic-busy-of-2013 and determination to learn something new this year for pure fun.

I’ve been edging into the land of cooking more anyway so this isn’t precisely a stretch.

THE SECRET

Did you notice it?  I just gave away the secret to New Year’s resolution successes.  I’m embracing something I already am interested and have already started working on.  It’s a bit of a stretch to succeed, but not much of one, and it’s something I honestly want to do and already am doing.  I’m just going to do more of it, and more consistently.  A little push in my already direction.

And January is taken care of already!  But as with last year’s resolution, the month only improves if I fulfill the resolution more than once.  Or as many times as I feel like.  It just doesn’t let me be so lazy that I let my desire drift off my awareness and the intention disappear into the void of the forgotten.

Oh, and what was it?  A simple quesadilla.  No recipe, just a simple adding of ingredients to make a nummy lunch.  One that I could have easily done years before and just never got up the gumption/intention/nerve to do it (I’m a shy cook sometimes and hesitant to ‘wing’ it).

Do you have a New Year’s resolution?  Is it going to be easy?  hard?

Or do you live the land of ‘resolution is to have no resolutions’?  A land I am familiar with and frequently enjoy.  Though I’m finding I like the challenge of this newer methodology of mine.

Regardless of plans, I wish you all a 2013 filled with satisfaction of needs, exploration of dreams, and a movement towards your greater Path.

Blessings of the deep and wild to you all.

Saturn, the Abysmal Witch

 

The Smell of Shit

Tonight we have been inundated with the smell of shit.  I have smelled four different species of shit today.

Snake shit.

Cat shit.

Rat shit (EEWWWW)

and human shit.

You know what?

All shit smells bad.

Some shit smells worse than others.

Some have some extra spicy ingredient to make them truly horrifying.

Some have been around for a bit so the smell has dimmed but you know what?  Even old shit still smells bad, just less so.

Shit is shit.  That is the lesson of the day.

Followed quickly by the second lesson:  the sooner you clean it up, the less the smell will linger.

This pile of shit has been brought to you by:

The Abysmal Witch.

May your shits be easy, regular and smell no worse than any other shit.

~AW

Next Life Crisis

You heard the term here first!  LOL

Screw the mid-life crisis and the quarter-life crisis, let’s just call them our next life crises.

What do I mean?  Well, it’s just what it sounds like, I’m trying to decide what to be next.  We go through many transitions in our lifetime, the obvious ones of entering the workforce, the quarter & mid-life crises of whether we’re doing the best thing for us, retirement.  Let’s not forget puberty, major relationships, etc.

I think we have more of them than we used to, or than our parents had.  It was one mid-life crisis.  Now it’s a regular change-over event, a re-inventing of self from one set of circumstances to the next.

I evolve spiritually, the rest of my world attempts to evolve.  Because the more I change on the inside, the bigger the discrepancy between who I truly am and what I do.  And the greater that divide, the more intense my cognitive dissonance.

Hehehe, fun to use that phrase.  Perhaps it’s spiritual dissonance.  Or just personal dissonance.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what career to move myself over to, in order to reduce this dissonance.  And then figure out how would I do it?  How do I switch practical paths?  The mundane world isn’t as easy to shift zones in as the spiritual one.  I can’t just make a decision and do/study/practice something else.  There’s this thing called a job, and it pays me (rather well, actually), and that puts a roof over my head, pays for food, clothes, pets.  Things that can’t just be tossed aside because I feel like doing something different.

So I’m working on it.  Planning and figuring out where I’m going to go and how I’m going to get there.

My Next Life crisis.

You know the best part of the phrase?  It’s completely open-ended on how many times you can go through one in a single lifetime.  Yippee?  lol.

Happy changing!

Saturn

Accept the Spoons and Move On

Tonight I was forced to question my grasp on reality.

My sanity was suddenly all it was cracked up to be.

I was putting away the dishes and found a wooden spoon in the cutlery section.

This doesn’t seem particularly odd.

Except.

I only own two wooden spoons.  And what I held in my hands wasn’t one of them.

“Love,” calls I.  ”Did you use a wooden spoon?”

“Yes,” says my love.

“Where did you get the spoon?” asks I.

“From the cutlery drawer,” he says, “right beside the other ones.”

OTHER ONES?!?

I looked in the drawer.

Yes, two more spoons squatted insight.

Understand that I exaggerate not at all when I say that I had never seen them before in my life.

“Love, did you buy new spoons?”

Hope fizzled predictably with his “Nah, those have been there since I moved in.”

No fucking way.

There was a disagreement for the next several minutes.

My two indefutable  points:

1. why were we in Ikea looking for more wooden spoons if there were 4 already in the drawer (and not just the one we actually had)?
2. we’d cleaned out the drawer together a couple of months ago and there were no such spoons in it then.

So we came to the agreement that the spoons had appeared somewhere along the way and that neither of us knew where from.

Meanwhile, I’d contacted potential suspects–friends, who could have somehow left wooden spoons in the drawer.  No go.  Thankfully they understand this whole process and don’t consider this my final push over the edge.

But, no, they weren’t the source of the spoons.

There is no known source for them.

It haunted me.

And then my covenmate reminded me that weirdness is just part of our lives.

The lesson of the day became clear:  sometimes you just need to accept the spoons and move on.

Squeaky Wheels and Super Sweeters

On my lunch break I have a couple of things I like to do to help me relax and rejuvenate.

I eat.

I really can’t stress enough how important that one is, but if you haven’t yet learned that food fuels the body and mind and therefore soul, well, you’ve got more to work on than I can probably help with.

I frequently go for a walk.

Ahhhh, fresh air.  Today I am skipping the walk so as to bring you a small rant.  That and my body needs a break from yesterday (pilates class and a trip down to, and UP from, Wreck Beach = 474 stairs of interesting nature).  But normally I like to get out for a half an hour of good walking.  Well, okay, largely because it’s summer and the days are good for that.  I’ve done a lot of visits to the Rose Garden as well.  Ah, July, when they are all in bloom and the smell wafts thither and fro, mmmmm.

I read Regretsy.

It soothes my snarky soul.

I read Not Always Right.

And thus begins my little rant. On Not Always Right people share work stories that highlight the remarkable…encounters they have with their clientele.  Okay, people are stupid.  And many of the stories highlight that people are stupid.  But it’s not the stupid that’s gotten to me.

No, what’s making me grit my teeth is the repetitive examples of people who lie or yell or often lie and yell at the employee to get their own way.  Such as lying that the employee got a hair in their sandwich (when it was their daughter’s hair) so as to get a refund & a free bagel.  They’ll lie about who served them, what they were served, the state something was in, etc, etc.  People are lying so that they can gain something for nothing.  People are yelling and screaming at employees to again get something for essentially nothing.  In some of the stories it is even acknowledged by the perpetrator that they’re doing it because that’s how you get something for free.

This froths my ire.

What happened to the land of personal integrity?  Of behaving as a decent human being?

When did it become so engrained into society that instead of curbing such behaviour we have somehow engendered its propagation.  I see many notices of being positive of being friendly and kind pushed around on facebook.  I think that these are lovely if not always realistic (because somedays you’re going to get mad and is it really wrong to get that way?)

As I type this the thought occurs to me that this push to always be nice is simply the other side of the coin of the push to always be an asshole in order to get ahead.  I’m not saying it’s wrong to be nice or right to be mean, not at all.  But what about the folks on Regretsy who talk a mean line but who are frequently very generous, supportive and kind?  What about the sweet people who can’t be bothered to actual help someone else?

The point is, we are neither always kind nor always cruel, not in our humanism.  We are both, a swirling mix of chocolate and vanilla into a marble cake (ohhhhh, cake) of positive and negative experiences and expressions.

And at the core of both of these is an inherent selfishness, isn’t there?  The squeaky wheel is out to get whatever they can by whatever means (typically negative) they can.  If I yell enough, someone will give me something to shut me up.  Many people I think learn this in childhood from their parents – if I scream loud enough, my mommy will give me that cookie even though she said no originally (so parents, keep to your ‘no’s!).  And no, I’m not blaming all parents, but there is a component there, don’t you think?

I don’t want to come down too hard on the other side, the always kind and gentle folk because let’s face it, they’re a hell of a lot nicer to be around.  But it doesn’t make their approach necessarily more healthy.  Be gentle, be kind, be forgiving.  There are times and places for these things, most of the time, many places.  But sometimes?  Sometimes we need to be tough, to protect, to fight, to put up our healthy boundaries and force others to respect them.  ((Mind you, if you take the gentle, kind, forgiving to a different spiritual level, then a slap on the face can be the gentle and kind approach to a situation, but that’s a whole different conversation.))

And what drives that behaviour?  A desire to be ‘good’?  To do good?  To be seen as good?  Sometimes I wonder if there is a hint of the selfish behind some people’s sudden and intense embrace of such concepts.  But that’s just some musing on my part.

The ranting is all about the Gimmees.  They make me think evil, nasty thoughts, and not the good kind.

Perhaps Not Always Right by its very nature siphons off examples of the worst of us and it isn’t an epidemic of self-centredness.  But still, but still…

Discombobulation…and closet re-orgs.

Do you ever feel that way?  Just discombobulated in everything.  Things not fitting together in quite the right way.

Oh, the majority of my pieces of things have been really great.  No, seriously, aside from when I want to kill him, having my partner move in with me has been a fabulous thing (if you had asked me last year if I would be living with someone the following year I would have snorted my kahlua and chocolate milk all over you); my job has changed which has brought challenges both interesting and painful; my coven has changed which has been unadulterated goodness.  Despite my partner being a foodie, I’ve kept my body in the shape that makes me happy.  There are two new (1 as of yesterday!) slithery bodies in the house (we now have a ball python, a desert king and a corn snake).  I’ve started dancing again in small doses.  I can feel the magic around me, swirling, pulling, daring.

So many different pieces, trying to get them to align in the best way possible, to find my way in my severely changing world order has been interesting.  And a challenge.  And while that is mostly under control, it has left me with a sense of not really knowing where from here.

I mean, sure, you’d think that I’d just settle in, that I would savour getting everything resolved and organized (we got the last of the boxes unpacked yesterday).

Apparently not quite.

Oh, I’m savouring.  Hell yeah!  But how will this all work going forward?  The most wonderful option would be if it would all just work out with no effort and no planning.

Ha!

That’s what the universe says to that.  Or I say to the universe.  Depends on the day.

Today I feel somewhat combobulated.  It makes a nice change but I don’t trust it.  It could easily just slip away into the dis and I get left once more floating in a sea of not-necessarily-articulated options and pulls.  Pulls being our interests, desires, wants and needs.

Hmmm, I wonder if this is what a closet or drawer feels like when you pull or dump everything out of it, sort through it all and then start working on getting it all back in, minus a few pieces, perhaps with space for a few (planned?) new items, and everything hopefully making more sense as you put it back into a probably re-configured space.  I think I’m at the contemplating parts going back in and where the best places are for things and what will get left out and what kind of space will be left over for the other important things that I’ve wanted to put into it but never had the room for.

It’s an interesting time.  I really want my “closet” re-org finished.  I’d like to move on to other things, thank you very much, Universe.  Just saying.

Deep and wild blessings to one, to all, and to you in particular.

~Saturn

~The Abysmal Witch

(My) Eight Blisses of Yule: #4 Understanding

Yes, I know, Yule is fading quickly beneath the onslaught of the coming sun, but I still have my litany of 8 blisses to share!  So I’ll try and get them out in the next several weeks (this is me setting a realistic timeframe rather than the one I wish I could make but deep down know that I meet).

Understanding.  One of my favourite things to do at this time of year (we’re pretending it’s still Yule time as I type this) is to give the “perfect” gift.  The perfect gift isn’t in the item.

It is in how it is received.

When the other person’s eyes, face, body light up.  When they get that grin or laugh, get teary or just really solemn before they give you a great, big hug, that’s when I know I’ve given a perfect gift.

Because it was something special to them not necessarily to me.

Giving the perfect gift requires seeing the other person for who THEY are, and not getting sucked into seeing on them reflections of our own needs and wants.

It is so easy to assume fall victim to the “I like it so they’ll like it too” attitude.  There has to be more to recommend something as a gift for a particular person than just that I or you like it.

Giving the perfect gift is allowing yourself insight into the who of someone else.  At the deepest level, you let go of your own ego to let in the sense of the other person, to understand what it is that would bring them joy.

Yes, knowing the person, their likes/dislikes, whether or not they have the same sense of humour as you, their complete addiction to My Little Ponies, these are all tells.  We pay attention to the person, know what they are like, what they’ve shown preference for in the past, or not.  We apply that knowledge in picking out the gift.

Some might say that this isn’t any mystical experience, it’s just good social etiquette.

Well, and it is.  And when done out of duty, that’s all it is.  But when it’s done out of love?  Then it is a gift of love.

Understanding the other person is the gift we receive when we give a perfect gift.

Love is the gift the other person receives when they receive from us the perfect gift.

I firmly believe that we experience love through attention.  Without getting into any real specifics:  We give attention to people we love.  When someone pays attention to us, we feel loved (whether we want it or not, though it always feels nicest when it is mutual).

When we fully embrace understanding (or love) then we have reached a mystical experience.

And when they open the gift, and their face lights up, and I get to see that I was right, that I had connected with that person, understood them, given even just one person a perfect gift for that year, then I know I have understood, truly understood and joy is then mine, too.

~Abysmal Witch

 

Getting Quiet

My New Year’s resolution (yes, I dared to have one and no, it was not to be nicer to people-sorry, in-joke) is to be better at rest.  Getting a full amount of sleep.  Taking breaks from tasks to recover so that I can do more better in shorter times.  Ideally.

To set the backdrop, I don’t spend a lot of time on my balcony.  It’s nice.  i keep it decorated and decently clean.  But I’m rarely comfortable spending time out there.

Yesterday, I went to visit a friend.  She and her partner regularly go outside for a smoke, they sit in their backyard, look at the trees and relax.

Today I realized that I avoid the balcony because I am bothered by the idea of simply relaxing.  I should be DOING something, not just sitting on my ass.

Or so says the back part of my brain.

Tonight I went outside for my own nip of bud though more importantly to take a distinct break between tasks, between things I was working on.  It felt good at their place, surely I could do something similar in my own home?

And it worked.  Okay, yes, we have to ignore my twitchy, must move, must do something, must must must voice, but after that it was calm, it was peaceful, it allowed me to regroup, as it were, and settle comfortably back into myself.

I didn’t wait until I was too exhausted and then crash out from the exhaustion of pushing myself through the horror of doing what I “should” do.  Instead, when that feeling came on, I went outside, took a break, gave myself just 15 minutes of relaxing and contemplating and BEING.

Then came back in and it was round two of doing…wait, I could do whatever I wanted.  And I did do it.  I did the things on my list but because I wanted them done not so that I wouldn’t feel guilty.

Recognizing and using the power of breaks and rest is my New Year’s resolution.  Here’s planning towards it being a new habit and soon.

A night of fabulousness to all, and to all a fab night.

~Abysmal Witch