Ways of Being Spirit-Married
This. So much this.
Thank you, Dver!
bloodteethandflame
A life in threes
Category: Uncategorized
October 13, 2014
Breathe
Most people do not understand that their true power lies in releasing resistance, which is the only obstacle to their true power!
We want you to breathe rather than try, to relax rather than offer effort, to smile rather than struggle, to be rather than do.
For your true power is experienced only from inside the Vortex……
~ Abraham Hicks
August 12, 2014
I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues
This. So much this.
She writes her thoughts on depression so much more succinctly than I ever could.
For Robin Williams.
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not…
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July 21, 2014
Month for Loki, Day 11: Outing.
I went with my kid, K, and V, to a baseball game today.
It was enjoyable insofar that I discovered that it was a lot closer to where I’m living now than I had thought it would be.
(I might just go to a game on my own, as I prefer to go to a live baseball game rather than to watch one on TV any day, but we’ll see.)
~~~
A few things happened at the game that seemed to signal that His presence, too, much to K’s delight, especially in that the opposing team’s second catcher was a young man of above-average height and build for a baseball player (at 6’3 and 230 lbs) — with long bright red hair.
What further inspired the thought was in that before the game began, this catcher – #33 – walked past us, and looked right at us for a good 20 seconds. Something V had been saying seemed to catch his attention briefly, and he stopped walking, looked at V and frowned, but then he smiled at K and I, before walking away.
(We didn’t see him again, until the end of the game, which struck me as odd, too. I would’ve liked to have seen him play.)
The other thing, was feeling the feels during mundane things, such as during the singing of the national anthem, and then again, during the seven-inning stretch.
It must have been because we sang, but K kept looking over at me, asking if I could feel that He was about.
May 28, 2014
Rest in Peace, Maya Angelou
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
~~~~
I awoke this morning to the sad news via Tweets and various messages on my newsfeed that Maya Angelou had died.
Within moments of reading the above words, I found myself unable to articulate exactly why I feel such a sense of loss.
Meanwhile, my friend, Sarah Sloane, upon hearing the news, put her feelings succinctly, thus:
“No…no. Losing Maya Angelou feels like losing my loving, empowering aunt, the one who told me that my soul had wings.”
Yes, that, Sarah, I agree with you.
Maya Angelou was exactly that.
She was an amazing writer, teacher, and activist certainly, but she was so much more than that to me.
Her words inspired me – in the truest sense of the word ‘inspired’ – and her poetry and essays carried me through some of the darkest hours while I was growing up.
I remember when my father had collected a huge cardboard box full of paperbacks and college textbooks that had been left behind in the dormitories during the summer remodel of Wellesley College in 1984. (The contractor company that he’d worked for assumed that the crew would just throw away any and all contents of the dorm rooms that were slated for remodeling, but my father has always had difficulty throwing away books of any kind.)
So that’s how I ended up with a dog-eared copy of her autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and her poetry collections, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diie.., and Still I Rise.
I don’t know if that’s exactly what my father would have intended, but I spent that summer, sitting under the back porch, readingreadingreading about the evocative power of love, grief, pain, and spiritual truth that also touched upon race, gender, and the intricacy of human relationships.
And so began my lifelong love of her poetry, her writing, and her keen, unflinching eye that always focused on the humanity in history. And whether her unflinching eye focused on the good or the bad of humanity, in the end, it seemed to me that the gist of her words always concerned the importance of moving forward, moving upward, toward the exposure of truth, and the revelation of love.
And I needed that in that difficult summer of 1984, when I was 13, and struggling mightily with myself.
I count many of her poems as inspiring, but here are three that I find especially so:
Beloved,
In what other lives or lands
Have I known your lips
Your Hands
Your Laughter brave
Irreverent.
Those sweet excesses that
I do adore.
What surety is there
That we will meet again,
On other worlds some
Future time undated.
I defy my body’s haste.
Without the promise
Of one more sweet encounter
I will not deign to die.
~~~
Seven Women’s Blessed Assurance
One thing about me,
I’m little and low,
I find me a man wherever I go.
They call me string bean
’cause I’m so tall,
men see me, they ready to fall.
I’m fat as butter and sweet as cake,
men start to tremble
every time I shake.
I’m young as morning and fresh as dew,
everybody loves me, and so do you.
I’m little and lean,
sweet to the bone,
they like to pick me up and carry me home.
When I passed forty, I dropped pretense
’cause men like women who got some sense.
Fifty-five is perfect, so is fifty-nine,
’cause every man needs to rest sometime.
~~~~
Preacher, Don’t Send Me
Preacher, Don’t Send me
when I die
to some big ghetto
in the sky
where rats eat cats
of the leopard type
and Sunday brunch
is grits and tripe.
I’ve known those rats
I’ve seen them kill
and grits I’ve had
would make a hill,
or maybe a mountain,
so what I need
from you on Sunday
is a different creed.
Preacher, please don’t
promise me
streets of gold
and milk for free.
I stopped all milk
at four years old
and once I’m dead
I won’t need gold.
I’d call a place
pure paradise
where families are loyal
and strangers are nice,
where the music is jazz
and the season is fall.
Promise me that
or nothing at all.
~~~
Rest in peace, dear Maya Angelou.
It is with tears in my eyes that I thank you. and wish you safe journey.
May all promises be kept.
❤
May 26, 2014
Threatened
Here’s a quote from Margaret Atwood:
“Why do men feel threatened by women?” I asked a male friend of mine. (I love that wonderful rhetorical device, “a male friend of mine.” It’s often used by female journalists when they want to say something particularly bitchy but don’t want to be held responsible for it themselves. It also lets people know that you do have male friends, that you aren’t one of those fire-breathing mythical monsters, The Radical Feminists, who walk around with little pairs of scissors and kick men in the shins if they open doors for you. “A male friend of mine” also gives—let us admit it—a certain weight to the opinions expressed.) So this male friend of mine, who does by the way exist, conveniently entered into the following dialogue. “I mean,” I said, “men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.” “They’re afraid women will laugh at them,” he said. “Undercut their world view.” Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, “Why do women feel threatened by men?” “They’re afraid of being killed,” they said.
— From Writing the Male Character (1982) (reprinted in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (page 413) from a Hagey Lecture on February 9, 1982, at the University of Waterloo)
April 22, 2014
Inventory
Here are some convenient bullet points:
– Today is Day 8 of my being on medications.
The upside is that I am sleeping better, and therefore, find myself better able to have one thought at a time in an orderly fashion rather than several random cranky ones all at once, it seems. The downside is this: an initial overall effect of sluggishness is often seen when beginning a daily regimen of (this medication), so I’m not enjoying that.
So I’m tired, but I am feeling calmer than usual. I suppose that one must take the good with the bad.
~~
– Despite being tired, I was somewhat productive today. I weeded the front garden. I pruned and deadheaded the main rose-bush, and I realized that my re-planted miniature roses from Valentine’s Day are actually going to live: there are two blooms on the plant.
I also re-potted the Salvia, and the Roma tomato and basil are doing well in the patio.
– I also walked the dog, did some housecleaning, did some laundry, and I paid bills.
~~
– I’ve been writing letters lately.
I wrote a letter to my sweetest friend that was… very well-received.
This was the third time in a row.
Perhaps this might become a Thing.
~~
-I did not go to the Con this weekend as I had expected to. I was very disappointed at first, but I was able to get around it. One particular friend who was there checked in with me several times over the weekend, making sure that I didn’t feel forgotten.
Also, other friends checked in on me several times over the last few days. I am thankful for those folks. They are good friends.
~~
– I’ve started drawing again.
I realized this weekend that I have had a DeviantArt account for two years now
….and I have yet to submit any artwork to it.
Several of my DA friends have been nudging me (patiently, but firmly) to submit something, anything…
And so I have sharpened my pencils, and I have begun…again.
Soon!
I promise.
( It feels good to stretch my fingers that way. I didn’t realize how much I’ve been missing it.)
~~
And finally…
I don’t know how to say this succinctly, but I do want to end this post with a particular piece of news that is very meaningful to me.
I don’t think that it would serve much purpose to give much background on it, except to say that I asked for something that I was certain was an impossible request.
But evidently, it was not.
I received an apology from someone that was two years and ten months in coming to me.
Following that, specific circumstances are falling together, and there is definitely something brewing to coincide with the three year anniversary of a particularly powerful occurrence in my life.
~~~
I tell you, so much in my life comes in threes.
March 13, 2014
Adventure Time!
Ah, what a week it has been.
*sigh*
So. I was negotiating another avoidance maneuver, er…reading one of my kid’s comic books, and I came across this particular piece of brickwork from a dodgy character named Randall:
“Hey, while I was in the trash I had some time to think, and I think that I learnt something! Like — a moral? I think that I was wrong to try to find cheats ALL the time. Maybe the best things are those that take the most work, you know? Maybe how you get somewhere can be at least as important as where you’re going.”
Just call me Randall today.
March 5, 2014
The latest words that the Internet has offered me taste strange, but not unfamiliar.
Some days, I don’t have to look very far into the Internet, before I find a sneaky ton of bricks.
First, there’s these:
By our nature we are drawn to relationships because of the sweetness we actually crave to experience. But that is just what draws us in. Just as fruit draws us in to forward its own procreation, relationships draw us in by their own sweetness, so that we will come to the pit, experience breakdowns, discover ourselves and be forced to evolve, just as nature does.
Breakdowns are designed to happen. They are meant to happen for the purposes of our own evolution.
Garrison Cohen
How strange it is that a few days ago, I was talking with a friend, and I suddenly found myself unpacking emotions attached to an event that occurred in my past that I’d never allowed myself to feel, because the event was a source of anger and shame.
Sufficed to say, that unpacking led me to a realization that I did not like about a situation with which I am presently struggling. I’d like to say that now that I know of it, I’m not going to hide from it, but then again, I’m pretty stubborn.
Childish, even.
I do not want.
I will not go.
I refuse to move.
I did not move.
I don’t want to see.
I don’t want to know.
I am afraid.
I can’t, I said aloud, to Him, later that evening. It feels impossible.
And so, not too much later, I was surfing the web, avoiding my husband, and vacillating between tears and anger…
And I see:
Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration, it’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
Muhammed Ali
~~~~
I don’t feel better.
March 5, 2014
FCK the editor. FCK
Evidently, Opendiary, a blogging website that had been around since 1998, is now gone.
This is significant in that I blogged there for over 10 years, and it would seem that any attempts that were made at backing up any of the diaries that were hosted there have malfunctioned.
All diaries have been deleted.
This is upsetting to a lot of folks. A lot of diarists never backed up their diaries, unfortunately.
Mostly because backup attempts – the ever malfunctioning FCK editor/function backup – was easily corrupted. And even if one had followed the prescribed and laborious set of steps that the FCK function required, there wasn’t any guarantee that the backup itself wouldn’t be corrupted. FCK didn’t play very well with a lot of system platforms, or text programs.
One thing that Opendiary was infamous for was that the site was in a continual state of being ‘down.’ This was so often the case that there were several forums whose main function seemed to be to notify users as to whether or not OD (as it was called) was actually up and functioning on any given day.
And that went on for years.
I stopped blogging there in 2011, and came to WordPress.
While it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Opendiary was bound to die at some point…it still sucks to think that one of the first blogging sites of its kind could just disappear off the face of the Internet, rather than evolve with the Internet.
Why was Bruce Ableson (Able son, eh? How’s that for irony?) so *unable* to adapt to the changing face of Internet blogging?
According to Wikipedia, in 2008, there were 561,000 active users whose blogs were being hosted on the OpenDiary site.
Over a half million users on a website. That is mind-boggling when you consider that the site was already 10 years old back then, and Mr. Ableson still hadn’t figured out how to keep his users happy.
He never did. He never could.
One wonders why.
Maybe that’s why he gave up on February 7th, 2014, at 12:01 PM, and commenced to delete everything off the servers.
~~~~~
Still, it is disappointing to consider that 10 years’ worth of writing that was being stored there is just …gone… now.
~~~~~~
And it would be even more ironic to think of him coming over to WordPress, or Weebly, or even LiveJournal (oh, there’s another dying blogging site), to brag about how he did The Web Log Thing first, and yet, managed it all so poorly.
The man didn’t know what the hell he was doing, even though he was one of the first to do it.
You know what that is?
It’s a FCKing shame, that’s what it is.
bloodteethandflame 