They Are Your Shoes

Longing for more than myself.
Studying the alive.
Learning from the dead.
Wondering about wandering,
Is it really all that they crack it open to be?
I have tried a little wandering myself,
I found it to be harrowing.

What do I love?
Joy in the everyday.
Coffee is really close,
Wine slides into second.
I suppose that there is the threat of separation
Even with beverages,
but they have been around for quite some time,
and I am pretty sure that given even the bleakest of
circumstances there are hordes that would
prioritize the importance of coffee and alcohol.
Beverages are pretty close to immortal.
That is somewhat comforting.

Relationships on the other hand.
Be still my palpitating heart.
The darn ships take so long to figure out
Are so freaking hard to sail
And then they sink
Time and time and time and time again
The darn ships sink to the bottom of
Deep, blue sea, leaving me with
The devil for company.

Anyone that is in a relationship with me now
Will wonder if I am calling them the devil,
Goodness, NO!
If you are in a relationship with me now,
You are a saint, Sweetheart, a saint.

The devil is the voice inside my head,
the one that says that just as soon as I find
the skills necessary to navigate the stormy seas
I will be harvested by the reaper.
Or maybe I won't ever find the skills
Maybe there is a sailing purgatory
Forever taunting
Until you get it right
But you never will
What would be the fun in that
Who are these gods?

Which leads me to the "hope" of religion,
Which sounds a lot like this to me...
"God loves a select few. We want to say that God
unconditionally loves everyone, and we do actually say that, but the truth is that our God is an elitist that loves people more based on race and gender, and you, Amy, are somewhat outside of his favorites list, and always have been, seeing as how you are a "grafted" ethnicity, and a girl..."

The Goddess, on the other hand, she understands. I really want to get to know her better, but it seems that she loves covens.... she loves rituals, she loves dance parties, she loves temples, and she loves beauty. All those things seem to require people, strong, sensitive, beautiful people, preferably, but we all seem broken to little pieces by the angry hand of patriarchy. The Goddess and the God, I have no "Good Book" about them besides the earth and the creatures and the celestial heavens.... Like a little hedgehog, I am.

I saw a picture on social media the other day of a man forcing a woman to suck his dick. He was wildly supported in this, because the woman was just a picture and she wasn't really doing the deed, but it looked like she was, which is highly disrespectful to all women. What was particularly disturbing was how many women approved because they didn't like the individual woman who was being disrespected. They approved of a man forcing a woman into a perceived sexual act because they didn't like the woman and they rejoiced at the thought of destroying her reputation, or what might be left of it.... that is at the core of our society. Things that people would find wildly despicable on the one hand they tend to find acceptable if they think the person "deserves" it... and the reasons for "deserving" it are almost always related to conditioned opinions.

I have been hearing a thought lately from several places along the lines of, "your greatest weakness is also your greatest strength." I think that for our society it is money. I think that for me it is thinking. I don't know what to do with all my thoughts. They aren't all good ones, but I really don't know which ones are any good and which ones aren't and even if I did know how to tell them apart I don't know what to do with them.

Everyone has thoughts, but it seems to me that some people aren't particularly good at thinking. They are better at something else... we need to work together, but they think they are good at thinking which scares me, because maybe I only think I am good at thinking. There are certainly those that enjoy telling me I am full of crap, and sometimes they are very correct, but if they would take the time to talk to me about why they feel that way it would help me reason my way through whatever it is and come to a slightly adjusted perspective, no doubt. That doesn't mean we would come to an agreement. Everyone seems designed to live life with bias, it is as if it is programmed into our life projection for the purpose of balance, or something....

At any rate, the most interesting thing about life for me these days is relationships, and what makes them tick. Are all "strong" relationships primarily based on mutual need? It doesn't seem that they start out that way all the time, but truly it does seem to be what decides longevity.... mutualism.

I have to ask myself, "Has my heart grown cold?" I am so tired of the bull shit, so tired of the lies, so weary of the shallow existence that the masses pursue with their health and wealth and sanity. Not that sanity is the goal, there are different types of insanity, some are good, some are not so good. The insanity that decided to go with gut instinct and fly when you have never flown before, even with sharks in the water below you, that is a good type of insanity, albeit a potentially deadly one, but the insanity that says "don't fly," stay here on this beach and starve in loneliness and fear, that is an insanity that is not the good kind. (Watch a documentary on Albatrosses for greater insight into that analogy.) You might argue that they are both types of sanity, perhaps, until you put yourself in that position, until you realize that is your life, you don't even have pretend to wear those shoes, they are your shoes.

Would it be true, then, that at the essence of what we have "failed" at most sadly is also what is most likely our life calling?

Learn and Let Live

I believe in enemies.
I believe that enemies offer a valuable perspective of our weakness and our strength.
I don't particularly like having enemies, but they have taught me much and I am grateful.
I do prefer friendship.
(Yes, I just started four sentences with "I" and I don't give a damn if they are in a paragraph, and I know there are people that will quickly judge a person's character by their sentence structure and, well... how is this for sentence structure... f u.)

One of the things I have learned is that to love your enemy does not have to mean that you have become friends.

Having a few enemies has also caused me to look at good causes in a different way.
Being justified and perhaps even correct often results in being unjustified and incorrect, or so it seems from studying what we know of history. For example, when one group of people gets victimized by another group of people those who are victimized have every right to be angry about their situation, to demand respect, but they are not necessarily justified in their retaliation, especially when that retaliation is every bit as brutal and heartless as the original offenses. Bigotry does not justify bigotry. I do not believe in an eye for an eye. I do not believe that when the rivers ran red with the blood of men, women and children that the best answer was for the rivers to run red again with the blood of more men, women and children and yet, over and over and over again the genocide begins with a good cause.

Every good cause without love for its enemies is capable of becoming a bloody genocide.

The Larger Tribe

It isn't that we have too many humans, exactly, it is that we do not have enough humanity. We do not live with the understanding that this earth is a place for all who are born on it, all that lives on it and sits on it and exists on it. We do not endeavor to create a well-balance environment. It seems that we  endeavor to amass items for ourselves with the great fear that we will suffer and die if we do not, yet suffer and die we will anyway. I hope that there is a greater lesson. I hope that we are like little children in a beautiful playroom, left to our imaginations. I hope that our souls are without damage. I hope that there are beings more benevolent and wise that are allowing us to learn through play. Children are magical and brutal. Their innocence and selfishness are both charming and terrifying. We are not unlike them, even as adults.

Even the sacred indigenous groups that folks like myself love to learn from, even they are often highly territorial. They seem to have learned the necessity of respecting their environment, but they do not seem to recognize humans as their tribe. Our tribes are all small. All humans can trace their ancestry back and back and back and back... no one is more exclusive, no one is more entitled, no one is more sacred, no one owns the earth.

Dreams

I've had some dreams lately about people I know well, people I am getting acquainted with, and people I do not recall having met yet. They were not nightmares, but they were not entirely pleasant either, along the lines of accidentally being at a birthday party I was not invited to, a loved one vomiting on vacation which annoyed the innkeeper, and holding someone's lost keys and not being able to find the person they belong to....

I think that tarot card interpretations are helping me to perceive dreams and life with a different perspective. For instance, Death is tarot card that can mean many things. Since ending are always beginnings, Death is not necessarily a terrible card, although change can be scary and mournful. The innkeeper is akin to the Death card...

The birthday party and keys were both in a house that was not my own. It was actually a workplace of someone I know quite well and all the people in it had extreme feminism and extreme social altruism in common, but like tarot cards, a good thing out of balance is not such a good thing. I might not have recognized what the subjects of the dream all had in common if it had not been for that dream. I am grateful for the realization and I now need to proceed with perspective and feeling with my own balance in equilibrium, which is not an easy thing to do as evidenced by the many, many unbalanced people in the world...

The thing that the dream helped me to realize about extreme feminism is that although it appears to have liberated the woman, and in many ways it truly has, and I am so very thankful for those liberations, yet in the extreme sense it seems to encourage a woman to embody patriarchal principles, essentially destroying the matriarchal archetype. The patriarchal extreme is to destroy the matriarchal archetype by suffocating it with patriarchal expectations and demands, along the lines of the feminine existing solely to feed the needs of the masculine as if the masculine is a parasite, which isn't fair to either archetype. The balance is to celebrate the matriarchal archetypical qualities and the patriarchal archetypical qualities. Men and women are capable of embodying and representing these archetypes, but these archetypes are not gender specific, and each gender needs the balance of both archetypical qualities. Emotion and power both need embraced in our character,  not exchanging one for the other. To be nurturing and powerful is a most difficult, but essential combination, so very much needed.

Favorite Sounds

The first loud cries of a newborn baby

Toddler composed songs

Winter silence

Springtime birds in the morning

Crickets in the evening at midsummer

Locusts and owls at midnight, late summer

The screech of a beginning musician

Singing at the kitchen sink

Giggles at a funeral

Sobs at a wedding

The turnover of a cranky engine

Epic soundtracks at mundane times

Ancient acoustics

Your children are like you

And they are wonderful

Here’s coffee and milk

You are welcomed