Here’s another subtle nudge from the Universe that came across my Facebook feed yesterday:
Sometimes the words that I need to hear (to read!) find their way to me
and for that
I am grateful.
~~~
I especially love those final six words:
And nothing will
ever exhaust me.
Hail to my Beloved!
❤
Source: this drippy cold rain is bothersome and i admit i am part of the problem
Whoa.
Though I did not expect this post to go in the direction that it eventually goes, I maintain that this post may give others some food for thought.
I don’t know who this ‘r.m drake’ is…but zie sounds like Someone I know.
❤
I was thinking about the fact that Voodoo Music Fest in New Orleans is about 53 days away.
So I was screwing around on the internet, listening to music and watching videos and I came across this*
Allow me to be Frank, He said.
❤
~~~
* From Frank Turner’s new album aptly titled album, Positive Songs for Negative People
If that’s not an album that I can get behind, I don’t know what is. 😉
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.
Three years ago, my older son and I purchased a silkscreen array for making t-shirts.
He and I learned the silk-screening process, and we made a few casefuls of t-shirts for different events. The t-shirt designs that he makes are created mostly for skateboarding and music events, while the designs that I’ve created are produced as needed/ordered for kink and Pagan events.
I like creating t-shirts, and it’s always a conversation starter to have a one of a kind t-shirt.
This is one of the projects that I am working on, and this is nothing more than a prototype design that I fed into the Custom Ink Lab the other day just to see how it would look before I go forward with making a screen for it.
I’ve been working on designing a less traditional mason logo – that features Loki – but I’ve yet to create one that I’m satisfied with.
Hail Loki ❤
[The previous post has been redacted]
I am just going to leave this here.
I was sketching Loki the other day, and it got me to thinking about how other aspects of Him were showing up in my life back when I was a kid, and yet how a lot of the pieces didn’t fall into place until 2012-2013 or so.
And I got to thinking about what I did after the SitD left (around age 9), and I was thinking about how I used to draw…a lot. I briefly touched upon the subject of those drawings in a post on this blog back in early 2013, but I never wrote out my thoughts as I intended.
Here are those thoughts from my notebook…
(From 27 February 2013)
Something occurred to me this morning that I wanted to write about.
I had a brief visual/sensory upload – an unbidden visual/sensory upload while I was awake – of a man standing in front of me, holding my face in his hands. He is holding my face in his hands as if to make sure that I am making eye contact with him, and he is leaning forward, preparing to whisper into my left ear.
And this visual that I had made me wish that I could sketch out what I saw. I mean, I can draw, but I am not so skilled that I can sketch things out as quickly or as deftly as I would like. Rather I am more likely to get hung up on agonizing over every detail in my sketch so much so that I often lose the flow of the imagery and it fades quickly away before I’ve finished sketching it out.
So I was wishing that I could convey the shifting color of his eyes and the unshaven whiskers on his chin. I wish that I could convey that I had looked down at his feet, and he was wearing dirty black canvas Chuck Taylors, with laces untied and loose. He was wearing faded jeans, a t-shirt, and a shabby cotton overshirt. I remember seeing the silver glint of an earring in his ear, and I noticed the way that his russet hair curled over the collar of his shirt, and how his hair turned a darker auburn toward the ends. I remember noticing the smattering of freckles on the backs of his hands and along his fingers, and how his hands felt slightly calloused but pleasantly warm, holding my face. I remember the trace of his grin, and the way that he slowly blinked and tilted his head, as those light-colored and impossibly bright eyes of his flickered with…satisfaction? Relief? I’m not certain what word I am looking for but when I looked into his eyes, all I could think of was laughter and warmth and…home.
And I wish that I could have drawn that – the image of both my standing there with him and somehow standing outside of myself watching the exchange and the slow dawning of my recognition of who he was.
But I don’t have the skills. I cannot sketch this fast enough or well enough for you to see the vision as I saw it.
And I remembered. I realize it now. I am seeing a face that I have tried to draw before, and my heart skips a beat to think of it. Can it be?
When I was younger — younger like 11 or 12 years old – I used to draw the face of a man that I did not know. Or rather, he wasn’t anyone that solidly existed, that could easily be pinned down. Sometimes I thought that I’d made him up, that he was simply an amalgam of pretty facial features — a young man with long, light-colored hair, with larger than average, strikingly bright-colored eyes, an aquiline nose, finely arched eyebrows, and a smile that I wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a flirtatious grin or a sarcastic smirk. Most of the time I would draw him clean-shaven, but sometimes I would practice drawing facial hair – usually a well-groomed goatee or a Van Dyke beard. I’d always envisioned his ears being pierced (even though in the late 70’s/early 80’s, it was still considered rather bold and overly flamboyant for a man to have pierced ears, especially in the right ear…)
But nonetheless, this man had jewelry and his face was a mixture of traditionally masculine features (angular jaw, an Adam’s apple, whiskers/facial hair) and feminine features (long eyelashes, high cheekbones, thinly arched eyebrows). He was, to put it mildly, a very pretty man, and I often drew him in either medieval clothing or casual, almost hippie style clothing. I would always draw him into background settings, surrounded by woodlands, mountains or snow.
Over and over, I drew this man, thinking that someday I would fall in love with a man that had this face, or something close to it. Sometimes I would find myself comparing someone’s chin or someone’s eyes or the color of their hair to this man’s face, this man’s features. And I can tell you right now, that face, those features never changed. No, this man had a particular face that I loved, but never could quite find in reality. So I just kept drawing him, perfecting that face as it could be seen from a variety of angles, expressing a variety of moods.
My siblings used to tease me, that I was drawing my invisible friend.
Sometimes I would imagine him saying all sorts of clever, wonderful things to me, all the words that I’d hoped someday that somebody might say: what a friend, a lover, a confidante would say. Sometimes I would write him into stories, and they were often stories about learning and doing various activities – things I hadn’t yet learned how to do, such as how to ride a horse, or swim, or climb a tree. Sometimes I would walk in the woods, and I would imagine delightful, fantastic possibilities, almost visualizing that I might find him further along the path, sitting on a tree stump, or fishing in the river, or laying in the grass, watching the clouds.
I remember when I first experimented with smoking, oddly enough, it was easy to imagine that he smoked too. He did seem to have this smoky, fragrant scent about him that was entirely his — though I could never draw his hands holding a cigarette very well (aside of the fact that hands are notoriously difficult to draw, especially hands holding things that cast light and shadow.)
I cannot deny that I drew him so often that it seemed as if I drew him into existence somehow.
He was not simply a masculine version of myself, unless he was perhaps a part of me that I wish that I could have been.
And for many years, I drew him just so I could see his face.
It hits me like a ton of bricks today to realize that whenever I draw Loki’s face, I am drawing him; I am drawing an old friend.
And whenever I visualize Loki, I realize that I am seeing him, the handsome face of my old friend.
And I never made that connection until today.
~~~
Hail to Loki, my sweetest friend ❤
~~~
A year or so after I wrote this notebook entry, I received a message from Him, that I suspect may have been intended to make me smile:
You didn’t make Me up; rather it is that I made *you* up.
bloodteethandflame 