bloodteethandflame

September 22, 2012

On Clutch-jumpers and Crazypants: A Very Long Post.

Recently, I’ve noticed repeated references to this person and her shenanigans through several of the blogs that I follow on WordPress, and as much as I’d attempted to avoid it, I’m beginning to wonder if this is one of those Universal slaps upside to my head.

When I look at over the trajectory of my life, I cannot deny the propensity of folks like her crossing my path, especially lately.

Maybe it’s because I was raised by two parents who had once considered themselves ‘hippies’ with a streak of ‘bleeding heart liberal’ thrown in, who raised their children to care about the environment and to have a good degree of social conscience. (The irony appears when I point out that my parents are also secretly closeted misanthropes, but I digress…)

There is the spooky-woo factor when I consider how I’d been told by several people since childhood that I seem to be somewhat of an empath…which could go a long way toward explaining why I often find it so difficult to resist being affected by the turbulent feelings of those around me.

Several years ago, I was gratified to discover in the pile of TheFerrett’s LiveJournal writings that there is a word for those folks that so easily incite, and sometimes, unconsciously manipulate the compassion of others – these people are referred to as clutchjumpers.

Once upon a time, I was an unfortunate magnet for clutchjumpers…if not, inadvertantly, a clutchjumper myself, before I learned the benefits of practicing a bit of discernment, and caution.

~~~

And so, the months have gone by, and I find mention of her again, again and again— and suddenly, it seems that several loosely related communities have had enough of her ‘grift’ as well as her story — and the length and breadth of that story goes a lot further back than I had previously thought. What a tangled web…

Upon reading her story, I realize that I am re-reading her story, because I recall seeing a signal boost a bit over a year ago concerning a young trans Pagan couple who needed food and clothing desperately as severe winter weather was approaching Boston, and they were about to find themselves on the streets. And seeing as how I didn’t have any warm winter clothing to send (I live in Florida y’all – I haven’t had to wear any ‘winter clothes’ with any regularity in years), I thought about sending her some cash.

About $25-50, possibly more.

And then I looked further into her blog, and I saw page after page of signal boosts and commentary, and I sat back and thought about it. It was Wednesday. My payday was Friday. I told my husband about the couple, and resolved to send them some cash on Friday, when my direct deposit became available.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I even lit a candle for them, hoping good things for them.

I checked back the next day, relieved to see that they had gotten some help, and she was writing of being so close to getting out of the hole of financial instability. Aw, sister, I’ve been there, I thought. Good luck to you.**

Her story actually, in some ways, made me pause, because there was something about it that struck me familiar, and thus, I was hooked.

(Slight derailment…er, background follows:)

When my family and I hit our rough patch in 2004, we had to move closer to my husband’s family, and we ended up moving in with my husband’s older sister and her family, until we could get on our feet. My husband was unemployed, and couldn’t seem to find work in his field (tech/communications) and neither could he find anything above minimum wage, and neither could I.

We both worked at our local Publix.

And then, with the help and reference of a friend in the tech industry, my husband got a job opportunity that really could bring us up and out of our financial hole that 3 years’ of unemployment/minimal wage employment had brought us to; the only problem? The job was in Massachusetts.

So, while my kids and I stayed in Florida — we had just relocated to Florida from Massachusetts a little more than a year before, so it’s not as if we could’ve afforded moving back – my husband went up to Massachusetts to live and work. (He did fly home for one weekend every other month or so.)

So, I stayed working at Publix.

And into the picture comes P, my husband’s sister, who offered to watch my two-year- old while I was at work. It was supposed to be a mutually beneficial arrangement for the both of us. I wouldn’t have to pay the high cost of child care fees and P — an unemployed widow with 3 teenagers on Social Security whose husband passed away the year before — could supplement some of her meager SSI.

But what ended up happening was something positively Sisyphusian: most of my paycheck seemed to go exclusively into repairing P’s ancient passenger van, just so I could get to work in the mornings — along with buying P groceries (she was always ‘short’ because she really didn’t know how to budget money, along with claiming her ‘handicap’ of dyslexia as an excuse to remain willfully ignorant of learning how to budget money, or anything else), so both of us were left with the boulder of poverty at the end of each pay period for well over a year.

(And it wasn’t just me who tried to financially help her. A lot of people did…because it seemed so simple: if P could just get through this week, just get through this month; if P could somehow just get a hold of a little money — $30 dollars for gas, or just that $100 that she needed to settle up that late phone bill, or the $500 for her mortgage *just this once* — she’d be all set. P was always saying that. If only, if only…

But it was never that simple: P would somehow end up behind on yet another ‘something else’ next week, next month… and it seemed apparent rather quickly to lots of folks that P was always in need of help.)

It never seemed to end.

Then, I stumbled on the Ferrett’s essay on clutch-jumpers…and I saw the situation as it was, an episode of mutual clutch-jumping from which I wanted desperately to break free.

And yet, I’m glad to report, that as painful as it was for her, when push came to shove, and when P burned out all her options, lo and behold, she actually went out, got a job.

Nowadays, she shares a home with her mother (and my MIL) at Mom’s request, and you know what?

P handles her job and her household pretty darn well, considering that a few short years ago, P felt that her life couldn’t go on after her husband passed away.

Between that loss, and her seemingly culturally sanctioned ‘learned helplessness’ (P felt it was the job of society to support her because of her ‘inability to learn a trade due to severe dyslexia’ as well as believing that it was her husband’s duty to take care of everything, financial and otherwise, and thus, P was never really pushed to learn how to take care of herself in many ways, that is, until he was gone.)

Yeah, P does still get a little clutch-jumpy at times — sometimes she doesn’t see the forest for the trees — but her life is loads more financially stable and wouldathunkit, much more drama-free.

~~~

And now, my family, and myself: Several years ago, I realized that I am — we, as a family, are — finally in a comfortable financial place, wherein we could actually help others a little bit…

I honestly try to help, because I know what it’s like to be on the other side of things.

But…in the interest of being brutally honest with myself about this (re: Loki, here, especially), I want to admit that when I look back at some of my choices that I’ve made in the past –those years that my family and I spent on the other side of things — I can honestly say that I had been known to show some clutch-jumping, if not downright crazypants behaviors.

Yes, there were times, in leaner, tighter years, where I’d prayed for extra money in my budget, gotten it, and then turned around, only to focus on cheap, easy, temporary fixes for my hunger or other ‘needs’ by buying pizza and cheap furniture with some of that extra. Yes, I’d even sometimes let some bills slide further as a result, because I felt so desperate to have temporary happiness (mmm pizza! hey, movies — with popcorn and candy!) rather than to be responsible and pay my bills with every last bit of that money that had been budgeted.

So yeah, I wouldn’t always use all of the money for responsible stuff — just some of it.

But I imagine that some would call that clutch-jumping or crazypants behavior because buying pizza and going to the movies with ANY of the money might seem like I wasn’t entirely willing/focused on digging myself out of my financial hole, right?

Right?

Well…maybe.

~~~

And so I find myself not totally pure on the rush to judgment front.

I admit, it’s difficult not to judge her. I mean, why can’t she get her act together? Look at all the people helping her…

*sigh*

Well, it makes me think, you know…and I have to be careful.

It makes me think of all the folks along the way — when we were in the financial rough patches — who helped us here and there.

Family and friends who’ve let us live in their homes until we got on our feet, to keep my family, and me, from being homeless.

People who lent us cash here and there. (We couldn’t have moved our stuff to Florida without the financial help of one particular generous friend, for example…)

People who gave us rides to work and school and back home when we didn’t have access to our own transportation.

And so forth.

It is entirely possible that I may have been no different in several ways.

I haven’t always known how to help myself get out of a hole.

So, concerning my interactions with clutch-jumpers and crazypants people: While I still seek to be cautious and discerning, I still find myself seeking a balanced, thoughtful way of looking at the situation.

And so, I stumbled upon this post, which I came across just the other day.

In this post, I think that the writer, Abigail Norman, conveys her message with incredible compassion and grace concerning ‘crazypants people’ — without judgment, without rancor.

And lots of balance.

I heartily recommend that you check it out.

**And then, I got distracted by another signal boost of another form, and it was strange and almost inexplicable.

Well, let’s just say…I ended up sending Jalkr my very small donation…mostly, because of…well…horses. And one very large pig.

3 Comments

September 10, 2012

Earworm

This song is stuck in my head:

http://youtu.be/S9MYXr9gY5U

And no matter how many other songs that I listen to, it just won’t budge.

I don’t know if it’s stuck because it makes me think of my girlfriend, J, our upcoming weekend (Sept 14-17th), and my various small anxieties about that…or if it’s some other thing that the Universe could be nudging me to think about.

Either way…

I don’t want to look like some kind of fool

I don’t wanna break my heart over you…

I’m building a wall, every day it’s getting higher

This time, I won’t end up another

Victim of Love…

August 12, 2012

Wolf/mother

On Friday, I went to the mailbox, and found that V had ordered me a gift.

I wasn’t expecting it.

My newest piece of jewelry

V says that when he saw this anklet on display, he thought of me, and he thought that I should have it. He also claims that it seemed to be the only one that they had that struck him this way. (Which is odd, since I don’t wear a heckuva lot of jewelry, so neither of us are prone to buying jewelry very often.)

It’s sterling silver, and V tells me that the beads are amber.

Personally, that would be interesting, but that’s not what surprised me about his unexpected gift of jewelry to me: it’s the wolf that surprises me.

V said that other anklets had dolphin, flower, or bird charms, or, barring that — more beading — but that this one was the only one that had a wolf.

And it was the last, perhaps, only one.

So he bought it, and had it mailed to the house.

So, I put it on, and I find that I can’t stop thinking about wolves, and especially about exactly why he’d been drawn to pick the wolf.

I mean, if he’d chosen something with a bird charm (perhaps something raven or sparrow like), *that* would make a lot more sense to me, because I’m always thinking and talking about crows and ravens…or the fact that we’ve had a few interesting interactions with birds lately…

But a wolf?

I was puzzled and a bit surprised, because I don’t talk about wolves at all nearly as much as I’d talk about birds or horses…and yet, it’s not as if I don’t like wolves. I do.

More so, and here’s the interesting part: it’s not as if I hadn’t been thinking of wolves lately, it’s just that those thoughts weren’t something I was sharing with V. (A few days before, I had shared a text with Heather S that described a strange dream that I had in 1997…but I’d never told V about the wolves in the dream; just that I shared a text of it with Heather.)

And yet, there it was.

He couldn’t explain it either.

So, first, I thought, as I had done this before, that the wolf might have attracted V because it was his attempt to find something ‘Morrighan-like’ or ‘Freyja-ish’ because we had been talking a few days before about how I’d thought of the Morrighan as my patron goddess for years, but it wasn’t because it was maybe, possibly Freyja…but even then, he would know that a bird would have been the more appropriate choice for either of those two with the options that he’d described as being in front of him. (Though he also knows that Freyja likes cats, too.)

He did admit on the Freyja note, that he did like — and thought that I would like –that it had amber. But that was secondary to his attraction to it.

So, then I thought that he’d picked it because it was ‘different’ or ‘only’ or some such, but he did admit that the amber was the only thing that had any connection with his thoughts about my spirituality.

So, not the wolf, the amber. But there were other ones with amber, he said.

But still, a wolf.

I then told him about Loki’s wife/consort, Angrboda – whom he admitted that he’d never heard of before — and I even showed him the simple (and I think I find somewhat oddly adorable) picture of Angrboda from K’s D’Aulaire’s Norse Myths, to help him out with a visualization of Her, but he shrugs.

Does she have something to do with wolves? he asked.

To which I replied, Well, They had a kid who was a wolf… and I pointed him to D’Aulaire’s toothy grey blobbish rendition of the Fenris-puppy.

He shrugged.

To which K helpfully added, See, Dad? She’s a wolf-mother!

And now, so are you, K giggled at me. You’re a mom…with a wolf!

Great band, V grins.

~~~

Do you like it?, V asks.

I nod.

So I hope that you’ll think of me when you look at it, V said.

And think of me too, blurted K, just wanting to be involved in the conversation.

~~~

But then, there’s today…

And things have been grumpy and difficult.

So, the only thing that I can think of when I look at the anklet today is that it is a reminder that when things get rough…

This mother gets thrown to the wolves.

1 Comment

July 17, 2012

Autocorrect

OK, before I forget all the little things that I’ve been meaning to post — most of which makes me look sideways and grin to downright feeling a mixture of awe while simultaneously fighting the urge to flail — here’s one thing that just delights me:

I have a friend who is driving down from Atlanta tomorrow. We are texting back and forth this evening, about how excited we are to be seeing each other tomorrow. She is making me laugh with her turns of phrase, and whenever I try to type ‘LOL’

…..autocorrect changes it to ‘LOKI’

Her: <insert funny/flirtatious turn of phrase>

Me: LOKI!

Her: ?

Me: autocorrect! I meant LOL!

Her: Oh OK. 🙂

And that happened a two more times after that…

🙂

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July 14, 2012

A sneaky ton of bricks.

“Are you the new person drawn towards me?”

Walt Whitman, 1819–1892

Are you the new person drawn toward me?

To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;

Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?

Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?

Do you think I am trusty and faithful?

Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?

Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?

Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?

I love this poem.

And there is actually a reason for my posting it, which I’ll get to in a moment.

~~~

But first, I wanted to express my consternation at being very near the halfway point of the month, and yet, my intention of writing a daily devotional to Loki here, obviously, has not happened.

Though it hasn’t been for lack of material – though I did worry/panic a bit at the possibility that I would run out of things to post, and yet, surprisingly, that is not a problem — but it is entirely due to my inability to actually commit to sitting in this chair each day to actually post something.

And that is a problem.

Because now my brain is sorta backed up with stuff, and I have this wild ADHD-fueled desire to Post All The Things(!!).

But, with the help of some deep cleansing breaths, I’ve realized that I can commit to, at the very least, posting today about this poem.

Well, because, you see, this poem kinda snuck up on me, in a very specifically strange and delightful way, and I figured that finding this poem this morning was a sign that maybe I should talk about this poem.

Today.

In a post.

Right now.

~~~

Being a native New Englander, I am somewhat familiar with Walt Whitman, as Whitman is often lumped in with Longfellow, Thoreau, Frost, and other poets/writers of that time period….and Longfellow, Thoreau, and Frost are definitely associated with New England in a lot of ways. (Even though I was somewhat surprised about 20 minutes ago to re-discover via Google that Whitman is from New York. Hmm. I don’t consider New York as being New England, so that seems a bit off, but I digress…)

So, I would even say that I somewhat like Whitman’s poetry, and I considered myself familiar with a lot of his poetry, too.

But, mind you, Walt Whitman is certainly not enough of a favorite poet of mine that I maintain a digital collection of his poetry or anything.

But this particular poem?

I’d never seen it before.

And I almost typed ‘…until today’ but if I said that, it wouldn’t make any sense, really, because I found the poem this morning saved to my ‘Favorite Bookmarks’ list.

Now how could that be if I say that I never knew that this poem existed until today BUT it was somehow added to my Favorites list previous to this day?

Because it so seems to have been.

And yet, I don’t remember ever adding it to my Favorites, and this is my laptop, and no one else uses this laptop but me, and yet, it was obviously added before this day, because there are several entries before and after it that I do remember adding.

So.

What does it mean?

I don’t know…and yet, here is this poem that speaks to me today about something that has been on my mind for weeks, concerning authenticity.

I don’t know what this poem does for you — and feel free to let me know how it strikes you — but I know what this poem did for me this morning.

It got me to thinking about Loki’s ‘face’/’facets (and my own, too, of course.).

It caused me to think about how each face/facet exists alongside the other faces/facets, and how these faces can be ones that are intentionally shown, or they can be ones that are intentionally hidden, or even faces that one doesn’t realize are being shown/seen or hidden/known until one is ready to see/know them….

Hmmm…there are so many of them, aren’t there?

And it’s funny how this poem seems to have shown up on my Bookmarks suddenly, and its words hit me like a ton of bricks.

This poem is, in my opinion, a sneaky ton of bricks.

But then, again, it strikes me as definitely a poem about approaching. Approaching someone whom one wants to know, or one thinks that they know, and this poem can serve as a little introductory interview.

Ah….I see what you did there.

How so very… Loki of you.

July 10, 2012

Loki and Sigyn image

This is the Carl Gebhardt print, Loki and Sigyn, 1896.

It hangs over the bed in my bedroom.

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July 10, 2012

Loki Tangles the Threads

The same logic can be used for other elements of the late Loki traditions: In

Iceland and the southernmost Danish islands, Loki is associated with tangles that

appear when sewing or spinning, but in such differing forms that the one can

hardly have been borrowed from the other. This tangle-Loki can easily be explained

from the Vatten (see § 4.1.2).

Today, I decided that I would work on some embroidery on the altar cloth that I’d been using on my Loki-altar.

Previously, I’d had all sorts of ideas for these complex designs that I was going to embroider onto the fabric.

But then, I couldn’t find my finer needles. Anywhere.

So, with the one needle that I did locate, I decided to stitch something simple…like maybe ‘Loki’ spelled out in runes on one corner.

That’s just 4 runes, I thought. How hard can that be?

I’d figured that the whole process would take me maybe twenty minutes, a half-hour, tops.

Evidently…not.

Four runes, each about 1/2” in height/width, took nearly an hour to complete.

The thread kept tangling. Or downright knotting up.

I had trouble trying to make a simple chain-stitch.

Several times, I had to double-back on the previous stitches just to get them to show…that is, when I didn’t find that a previous stitch didn’t catch, only to see the last two stitches unravelling or pulling out altogether when I pulled things tight.

It was silly.

I’ve never had so much trouble with an embroidery project before.

My goodness.

I know that it might be my perfectionism, but really…

So I was not surprised to have found that quote about a particular Icelandic/Danish folk belief (see above) in Eldar Heide’s Loki, the Vatten, and the Ash Lad while I was reading this afternoon.

😉

3 Comments

July 9, 2012

Holding the bowl

Yesterday, my offering was to hold the bowl for Sigyn.

(I try to hold the bowl for at least 15 minutes, or longer, if I can.)

Usually when I am in the space, holding the bowl, I think about many things, but mostly about what it must be like to be in the cave with Them. The space that I use is somewhat small, and I keep it dark, or mostly so, sometimes with only the light of Their candles on the altar.

So, I think about the dark, as I begin my mental wandering: Is it cold? Is it wet? A desolate, gray place…

Sometimes, I visualize things – long shadows in the flickering light, the flash of reptilian eyes and movement above me…sometimes, I can almost see Loki’s face. Almost.

Sometimes, I think about the sounds: Ragged breathing. The hollow echo of water. The soft hiss of venom hitting the bowl. Fshht. Fsssht. Teeth grinding, the muffled gasp upon the sharp intake of pain…

Mostly I think about how it must feel: the tight twinge in muscles shifting, the weight of the bonds, the sweat of effort beading down the back of the neck…but most often, Their fathomless grief and loss that mingled with the fatigue of time.

But yesterday, I found myself feeling something entirely new.

Now usually I eat before doing this ritual, as I often make offerings of a portion of whatever I had for dinner, for Them. Sometimes, I’ll put them on the indoor altar, if there’s room, or I will leave the offering for Them on the outside altar, much earlier in the evening.

But, yesterday, in my hurry, I did not bring the food offerings to either altar before I began, even though I had eaten, and I had set aside a portion, as usual. (There was also the bread, beer, and fresh water that I’d meant to bring to the indoor altar – but I’d forgotten that, too in my haste yesterday.)

So, there I was holding the bowl, and oddly enough, within a few minutes, I was suddenly hit with an overwhelming wave of hunger. My stomach knotted and rumbled, and even though I had eaten a full meal less than a half hour before, I felt struck with hunger pangs as if I hadn’t eaten in days.

And then it quickly dawned on me. Here was a situation that, strangely enough, had never really occurred to me before: The incredible level of hunger and thirst that They must have felt while in the cave. Perhaps I was feeling a brief portion of Their hunger…?

So, I’m almost ashamed to admit that I broke off from the devotion after only ten minutes…but when I did return, moments later, I was certain to bring all the offerings, including the bread, the beer, and the water before I took up the bowl again.

Hail Loki! Hail Sigyn!

11 Comments

July 8, 2012

Honestly, I am almost ashamed to admit that I didn’t know what ‘fracking’ was!
But this is important stuff, especially if you care about the environment and finding alternative energy resources for our future. Thanks!

July 7, 2012

A Strange Dream

(Actually written 22 June 2012 in my personal [read: paper notebook] journal)

Once we arrived at the campsite, we were tired, but we didn’t lay down until very late in the evening.

So I was laying there, thinking about how devoutly I wished that sleep would come.

Then, I began thinking about how out of touch I felt with spiritual things.

I found myself wishing again, that I could talk to the gods in my dreams.

I wanted an explanation of sorts; I wanted something to explain as to whether or not…I was being noticed(?)

Something tense, sad, and dark was bubbling up within me, within my thoughts.

And so began a seemingly mundane dream, interspersed with wildly shifting images, shapes and faces, concepts and colors. These then became rapidly cycling mental impressions and imagery of my siblings and parents, and I looked around to find myself sitting by myself at a Formica table, in a mostly empty diner. What I saw around me seemed something out of Hemingway’s short story, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.

The atmosphere struck me as both peaceful and yet a little bit melancholy, as I was surrounded by muted voices from people with drawn, insomniac faces, lit under bright, flourescent lighting.

And then it came: Like a narrative voice-over in a movie scene, a young boy’s voice rang out clear in my head, loud and close to my ear, and he said:

Even though my Father doesn’t mind (doesn’t like?*) you talking to him, I think that you should know that…you have a spider on your face!

The boy’s voice sounded caught, breathless, as if the presence of the spider was a sudden and unexpected interruption, and he’d actually meant to tell me something else entirely; there was something meaningful that he’d come to explain…

But I suddenly awoke, my face tingling, to find myself swatting from my face an actual spider.

It was a little grey spider, with bright red points on its legs and back, and I’ve no doubt that it actually had been crawling on my face.

I watched as the spider skittered away over the rumpled sheets, disappear over the edge of the mattress, and unto the ground.

The spider was real.

And I am left wondering, now.

Who is the boy? And more importantly, who is his father?

~~~

* The boy’s voice, though rather loud, seemed to swallow a word there, and I couldn’t tell if he said ‘mind’ or if he said ‘like.’

It bothers me, as that particular word in that sentence seems to be the most important word of all to have understood in order to understand the overall meaning of the sentence, in my opinion.

Part of me wants to believe that it was mind and not like, simply because, whomever it may be that the boy was referring to, it hurts my ego to think that “(his) Father” is bothered by my talking to him!

*sigh*

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