bloodteethandflame

A life in threes

Category: food for thought

November 24, 2015

Poetry: Margaret Atwood

Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

From Selected Poems II: 1976-1986 by Margaret Atwood (1987).

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November 9, 2015

So You Want to Honor The Trans Dead?

Thank you for this post!
Reblogging as the importance of this work can not be understated.
I am going to do my best to participate in this working to the best of my ability, and i encourage anyone else who is moved to do so to participate as well.

Gods and Radicals's avatarGODS & RADICALS

The Transgender Rite of Ancestor Elevation: An Open Letter to the Curious

By Alder Night

Hello, friends! I’m so excited that you’re interested in the Elevation! It’s coming up really soon, and we’d love for you to be involved.

Essentially, the Transgender Rite of Ancestor Elevation (or Trans Rite of Elevation – TRoE for short) is a collaborative nine-day ancestor elevation ritual, styled after rituals in the Espiritismo Cruzada (Blended Spiritism) tradition, which is open. It originated as the brainchild of a small group of trans spirit-workers, myself included, at the Polytheist Leadership Conference in the summer of 2014. The thought was, the trans dead, trans women of color in particular, are a “uniquely traumatized group of spirits who often” die in awful and painful ways after dealing with a lifetime of people trying to deny their humanity. That kind of pain and rage and shame and trauma

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November 5, 2015

The Other Side of Judgment and Fear

Another re-blog…but it is good and necessary food for thought today.

I highly recommend reading if you are prone to negative self-talk and worrying, (ie, ‘brain-weasels’)

elementhealing's avatarElement Mind Body Spirit

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Hello everyone, welcome ❤

I was trying to get caught up reading and commenting to posts the other day and I came to a one that dray0308 from Dream Big Dream Often reblogged. The title of the post was “Worrying About Nothing” This post was about questioning yourself, your choices and decisions rather than just living and enjoying your life.

It’s sad how often we judge ourselves. We suffer under the crushing fear that we can’t live the life we want because we aren’t doing enough, we aren’t good enough, we aren’t smart enough, we aren’t pretty or handsome enough. We just aren’t, right enough.

I’ve been to that dark place. I spent 10 years struggling with little to no self esteem and believing everything bad in my life was my fault, that there was nothing I could do right. I spared no judgment against myself. I saw my son, how we…

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November 5, 2015

Love Notes From Freyja 10/16/15

Hail Freyja ❤

Laine Mardollsdottir's avatarPagan Church Lady

You are worthy.  You flail, you wander, you worry.  You look to me for approval, and I say: you are worthy.  You weep and tear and sob, and I say: you are worthy.  You wonder if you will ever be enough, and you can never not be.  You are worthy.  Worthy of love, worthy of jewels, worthy of warmth, of sex, of comfort, and sumptuous sensuality and sacred seidh.  Worthy of all I give.  Don’t forget it daughter.  You are worthy. Open your heart to receive me, and never doubt that you are worthy of my gifts, worthy of me.  -Freyja/Gefn

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Image | October 24, 2015
youarenot
6 Comments
October 2, 2015

Good advice.

While you live, shine.

Let nothing trouble you.

Life is only too short, and time takes its toll.

– the epitaph of Seikilos

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September 20, 2015

Spread the word, they said.

Well, some folks are.

The other day, I was thinking about this duty to evangelize that a lot of Christians have got going….and this default assumption that their evangelical Christian behavior is welcome anywhere that they are.

And it got me to thinking about my own religious beliefs and how I am sometimes reluctant to ‘come out of the closet’ as it were, because I personally live in a community dominated by Christians – namely Baptists and Jehovah Witnesses.

I’ve always chalked it up to the fact that I am living in that state in the South which is not the South but still has a lot of Southern conservative Christian attitudes, namely Florida.

(But even so, I will admit that even before I was publicly identifying myself as Norse non-reconstructionist polytheist, or as  a Celtic-flavored Pagan, I still grew up surrounded by people who often made the assumption that I must believe in a God and of course, that God had to be the Abrahamic God that they and their parents believed in — despite the fact that my parents styled themselves as agnostics — because I grew up celebrating Christmas and Easter.)

So, in that sense, I hardly think that I am the first person to point out that when you tell many people that you’re spiritual, they assume by default that you must be some form of Christian.

~~~~

But aside of all that, I’m getting pretty cranky about some of the people in my neighborhood.

Mostly because there is a woman in my neighborhood who keeps tacking these little cardboard signs everywhere:

annoyinglittlesigns

…and I mean everywhere.

Walking my dog the day before yesterday, I found at least a half dozen of them during the first 1/2 mile of my walk.  Two of them were taped above the walk signal button.  Three were tacked and/or stapled into tree trunks that were at least 100 yards from the road-edge.  And one – the above one – had been affixed to an electrical pole that held a public cable line repeater.

Walking today, there were at least eight more tacked, taped or stapled unto various things, often at eye-level.

One little sign had been twist-tied into the branches of a decorative hedge.

And it got me to thinking that someone was going quite out of their way to spread these blurbs of God.

I suspect that this is why small towns often put up those ‘Post No Bills‘ signs in downtown areas.

But no one seems to care — except for maybe me – because I watched several workers for the home association (whose job seems to be come out every other Thursday or so to clean up the litter along the sidewalks, and remove other things that don’t belong like the handmade cardboard signs of past garage sales and whatnot) – and I watched each of them stop as if to read these little signs, and then each walked away without removing it.

So, since the homeowner’s association seems to approve of these little signs – I mean, their job is to remove things like that all under the auspices of removing ‘litter’  and I distinctly witnessed each of them leaving these signs alone- I decided that I would turn each of these signs over and write my only little spiritual blurbs on them.

So far, I’ve re-purposed two with stanzas from the Hávamál, one with a short passage from the Vedas, two with verses from Thelema doctrine that came through the Ape of Thoth randomizer, and one with a portion of the Homeric hymn 26 to Dionysus.

Now let’s see if those signs stay up.

 

 

 

 

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August 31, 2015

Words from Hermes: Ordinary is OK

This. This. So much this.

Thenea's avatarMagick From Scratch

You guys. Look.

There is nothing wrong with being ordinary.

Ordinary is most people. If you think about it, greatness is really a measure of “being better than everyone else.” If everyone was just as good at painting as Rembrandt, that level of skill wouldn’t mean much. If having an exceptional skill was common, there would be nothing exceptional about it.

Some people have this idea that the gods only want exceptional people. That’s not true.

In some traditions, the point is that you have this small group of secret, elite folk who do special stuff for special, secret deities. Hellenismos is mostly an exoteric faith. It’s meant to be followed by normal people. It’s a city religion. It’s a religion meant to be followed by thousands, or millions, not dozens. We’re not looking for perfect people, or even exceptional people, we’re just looking for people who love us.

We don’t…

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August 27, 2015

Trauma…and healing.

Yesterday was very intense.
While there were not a lot of instructors, nor were there many classes, I attended a class called Healing Sexual Trauma.
Yes – I thought of J (and others) –  and I had foolishly hoped that I could finally learn -after the fact – about strategies that I should have known in order to help someone who had been sexually traumatized.

Because if anything, I’d wanted to at the very least provide others some sort of sanctuary from pain and negativity.
Instead, it seemed something that wasn’t so pedantic as ‘here are some strategies for helping yourself or helping others heal from sexual trauma’ as it was personal discussion about the instructor’s journey toward realizing and healing her own sexual trauma.  And I realized that the discussion was not so much about methods and strategies as it was about identifying and recognizing that there are traumas that need to healed within ourselves.

As an empath, I also found myself realizing and reacting to the obvious fact that I should take note that I have my own traumas to heal and how foolish I am to think that I would be there for any other reason.
Meanwhile, L seems to love to point out to me – through these sort of sneaky ton of bricks moments – that I am foolish, that I am denying myself compassion, and everything and I do  and I mean EVERYTHING –  begins with me.

He wants me to have compassion with myself and take care of myself:

You must take care of My Beloved.

And by the way: That is YOU.

However, I have always made excuses.

I have been told for so many years that it is selfish to think of oneself before others.

I’ve come to react as if one of the most hurtful insults that could be directed towards me involves being accused of being self-centered or selfish….but again and again He wants me to realize that that is damaging to me and an avoidance maneuver that is so ingrained in my behavior that it is likely not even a conscious reaction on my part anymore.

So there’s that self-awareness that He is so insistent upon, and I found myself surprised to realize this facet of my behavior.

Look at yourself; everything is self-work, you know.
And so I tried valiantly not to get overwhelmed by the sensation overload that I was experiencing when others talked of their traumas as well as trying to control myself in regards to my own traumas.
This must manifest itself as a sort of selfishness in that I want to help others/save others, even though I don’t even know how to help or how to save myself sometimes

So I want to talk and I want to share, but my talking and sharing is an avoidance maneuver. It’s me saying, ‘Let’s talk about you; let’s fix you, so I don’t have to fix myself,’ and if I do talk, it might just be my attempt to fill up the space with noise, or focusing on what anyone else is presently going through so I don’t have to handle what I’ve gone through.

It is selfish.   In a way, it is the way I block emotions in myself and block others from myself.

I hate myself for that.

I am aware that it is just me being closed up…another verbal masturbation session that I never intended but here I am talking about myself again.

*sigh*

I hold myself at a distance by talking, sometimes.  I focus on constructing a wall of words and sound to keep people from knowing me and to keep myself from knowing myself.
It’s times like that that I notice that there is such a gap between what I want to do and what I am doing, what I want to confront and how I avoid the confrontation.  The gap between engagement and avoidance.   I do lip service to a lot of want, but not a lot of doing.

(Thanks Loki.)

But how do I learn to stop doing that?

How to open myself so I can be open to others?

How to listen and help rather than just filling up space with pain and gloom and panic, wondering whatamigoingtodo?

Don’t look at me.  I’m in pain.

I can focus on your pain but that just distracts me from my pain for the moment.  I have a lot of pain in myself and I see others’ pain and I don’t know what to do about it.

I don’t know what to do with myself.

Is anything ever getting done this way?

No.  Of course not.
It’s all verbal masturbation.  This navel gazing has to stop.

 

I should do something but I don’t know what.

 

I have forgotten what’s important.

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