Language Isn’t Subtle Enough to Explain You – Your personality contains all feelings, all thoughts,all ideas, rippling through you in a vast subconscious well. Your unconscious connects with the“collective unconscious” of other peoples – dead, alive, even fictional. Why isn’t “hate-love” a word?You experience that regularly. How about “fear-attraction”? Common! What I’m suggesting is that weneed to accept the fact that a “personality” is a dynamism, not a slogan. Challenge – Facing this might seem the toughest part, but it isn’t for artists, who routinely “play”along their edge, peeking over it and imagining life on the other side. Art is the best way to expressthis, an enormous relief since it’s non-committal. Of course you’ll have to face the surprise of yourrelatives when your work becomes public: “Where did THAT come from?” But if truth be told, we’vealways been surprised to be related to these people. Danger – Society seeks to label and stigmatize. We need to explore our fear but we are afraid ofbecoming our fear. A simple safe word can’t work when people – bankers, politicians, therapists,employers - are so fundamentally untrustworthy. That is why our identification of ourselves as BraveExplorers is so vital. The vastness of our potential cannot be controlled by language. We will never bebutterflies pinned down in a museum box for the instruction/curiosity of others. Opportunity – Appreciate your self. Don’t slam the door on yourself too soon. Sometimes the worstlabeler, the most determined jailor, is Us. We are deeply afraid of wandering in the forest and losingthe way to get home safe. But Brave Explorers carry Home within them. As Nelson Mandela used toquote from his prison cell, if we are the captains of our souls we can be the masters of our fates. Wecan learn to tolerate a little ambiguity/uncertainty/ambivalence. (Henley.) Meditation - #Haiku: Contemplate Duality Causation; Polarity; Suspicious distrust; Embrace Growth process
0 Comments
The Path – Goals – Do you dream of paths diverging in a yellow wood? Checklists? Maps? Are you talking to yourself as you follow your routine? What IS your routine? How has your routine evolved? What efforts have you made to change it to newly perceived needs and discoveries? Or is your routine formed outside you, for the benefit of others?
If You Have No Goal, Any Path Will Take You There – But you won’t like where you end up. Besides, you DO have a goal, (at least one) especially since that last epiphany. Sometimes it’s something as simple as “stopping the pain” or “staying healthy.” As you become more adept at change, you realize dividing effort into “steps” to achieve a goal is critical. Take weight loss: the intimidating goal of losing 50 pounds. That won’t happen fast. Your conscious, subconscious, unconscious and collective unconscious (not to mention your pre-conscious!) are going to kick up a helluva fuss. YOU WILL CHANGE. That’s guaranteed. Studying the history of human weight loss attempts if you are not ready for the psychic pushback your body will actually double down and accelerate its weight gain. The same thing happens with alcoholism and drug addiction – trying to “control “ it often drives the supplicant deeper into their disease in a panicked reaction to the “loss” of supply. Challenge – But you can be ready. This is nothing more than the sore-muscled athlete, Day 2, thinking, I CAN’T DO THIS. Guess what? EVERYBODY THINKS THAT! Expect it! You treat yourself with loving compassion and cold compresses, hot baths and massage. In other words, there is an established map, a way to GETH THROUGH THIS. The challenge is to apply such a map to yourself, and then TAILOR and CUSTOMIZE it to your goals. Danger – Don’t go it alone. A side effect of “lessening supply” is “crazy thinking.” You will hear yourself say things like, “Nobody cares about me so I’ll just drink myself to death” Or “I WANT TO DISAPPEAR INTO THIS VAT OF ICE CREAM.” We all need somebody to talk us off the ledge, somebody who is familiar with not just our goals but what we are going through. Your id is holding the rest of you hostage, and you need an experienced hostage negotiator. So, don’t try making it through this crisis without a buddy AND a coach. AA has an acronym – HALT representing: Hungry Angry Lonely Tired These are the emotion states in which you make Bad Decisions. So when you see this condition developing – Halt. Call your hostage negotiator immediately.
In TantricTarot, the Dawn card signals a slackening of tension. We were all keyed up – now we are going to get a break. Often this can be interpreted as a Reward – finally! Some little crumb to keep us going. When we have been trying so hard and suddenly we relax, it’s almost as if a sense of shock sets in. We’re so exhausted from all our effort we can’t possibly figure out what’s REALLY going on. We just want to roll with it, for now. Get our breath back. We are plunged into an almost dream-like state of particular value to Skryers hoping to Discern their future: Day Dreaming. As we allow ourselves to relax, we are flooded with images, ideas, memories, yearnings, seemingly disconnected at first. Go with it. What is this saying to you? How do you feel about it? It is in moments like these that we may discover that the high-status Soulmate we THOUGHT we wanted (Financial bro! Super-model! Sports star!)is not what we want AT ALL but someone more in tune with our cherished lifestyle and our secret sense of self. As dawn breaks, the game re-sets. We get to start again! Allow yourself to celebrate all the fresh possibilities suddenly poured so generously into your lap. Sex Cadets I shall orchestrate your life I say Make your blood sing woodwind Stretch my nerve harp-tight Across your exo-shell While you, heart racer Put me through my paces Pushing your muscle through The gates of my life Pushing past theories of the pluperfect poetical pushing like a downhill artist the speed racer you claimed to be Speed devil Speed demon Speed dreamer. In the Garden, Sex is sacred. In blindness we reach out to touch, to connect. The garden demands that we inhale life through our every pore, and the central need of life is that we must share the flame that warms us or risk its ultimate extinction. There could be no garden without the mystery and joy of pollination and propagation; doubling and tripling not just our chances of survival but intensifying our savor and our senses. The garden becomes a hugely hungry mouth, a pulsating groin, and we moan with it. The shock of the sublime. To live the dream is to become the dream. We are constituted for pleasure; igniting a increasing pleasure in a firework display that mimic the creation of the universe itself. Relationships solidify; two strengthen into one; frail flesh solidifies and love itself becomes unbreakable. #HAIKU: Need-flushed we drench the dust with liquid fire doubling to propel the spring Retreat Thought #40: SoulMates – The magic of sexual connection is the search for a SoulMate. Church of the Garden beliefs state that once found, a Souled Pair becomes capable of Time Travel, TransSubstantiation, and Immortality. Genders merge; one can be feminine, masculine or androgyne at will. One wing searches for another to form a bird and fly. If the “Sex” card appears in a spread, brace yourself! There is a SoulMate nearby! The question we must ask ourselves is: are we willing to undergo the pain of having the boundaries of our borders breached and fully merging with another? Once bonded there is no going back. LifeKoan#40: Is Tantric Marriage possible? A celebrity transgender recently remarked that sexuality is who you go to bed with, gender is who you go to bed “as.” In Tantric Marriage you go to bed as “each other.” Your knowledge of The Beloved’s body and desires is so intimate, the transubstantiation of souls so complete that you are emotionally and intellectually as well as physically devoted to overwhelming your partner’s senses with ecstasy; stirring memory and imagination and identity itself in every encounter. No sex is “routine” and no desire is prevaricated: hunger itself is sacred. In Tantric Marriage the Beloved’s devotion and insight into you is just as complete; thus the pleasure circle expands to infinity. Yin and yang absorb each other’s complementarity to forge a bond that becomes in itself immortal. One can really experience one’s own self from “the outside in”! Because you tend your beloved’s body on the micro as well as macro level you yourself are “building” the very pleasure that will release your spirit. This has special meaning for anyone following a committed food plan; you must see yourself as an athlete at “the training table.” Poor health and lack of conditioning can break your commitment’s power; the magic might fail to ignite. Knowing this we renew our vows to becoming the body our partner loves to love.
The religion of advertising is both ethos and atmosphere in American life. A policy of presenting yourself in “your best light” becomes researching other people’s needs and weaknesses to find out what they can’t resist and pretending you’re that thing. The anger, suspicion and mistrust, the contempt, derision and manipulation behind these ideas does not magically go away. Therefore, we hate others for forcing us to be fake, and they hate us for not accepting their real selves. It’s a perfect storm of secret rage that torpedoes the possibility of authentic relationships. The way out is to commit to a different “religion” – that of honesty and sharing. But honesty requires knowing oneself, and we’ve discussed how difficult (and discouraging) that can be. Still, there’s no other way. We are who we’ve BEEN, who we ARE, but also who we WANT to be. And we need to want to be that person for a better reason than it looks good on TikTok or it might exert appeal over someone who turns us on. Fearful that you’ll be lonely forever? Au contraire! It turns out all of us have been yearning to bask in the comfort, the promise, the safety of reality, a place where growing things can freely evolve and connect, in peace. SUNBATHER Poor periwinkle hides within the final spiny spiral of his shell, no stronghold that from hungry file-worms’ whippet tongues nor sun-mad amateur biologists nor ten year olds; while I more evolved, lie among the oval-jointed shells, the sheepswool sponges, camouflage my breasts as comb-jellies, my hair as seaweed, fooling none yet impressing those I can’t deceive. welcome to Creativity! Today's Card -
“I create, therefore I am”. Human beings are most godlike in their creative capacity, proudly forging entirely new entities and concepts, bringing artistic, intellectual or plastic life out of emptiness and nothingness. Creativity becomes our ultimate epitaph, the “graffiti” left behind declaring, “I was here.” But we can get a considerable complex – even phobia - going about it, too. It’s hard to ask for permission, approval and/or forgiveness and it’s almost as difficult NOT to ask for those things. To be a Creator is to take a risk, to NOT play it safe. If we’re worried we might expose the threadbare paucity of our brain pan to the entire culture, there’s definitely grounds for concern. Each one of us has noticed how much easier it is to be a critic than a creator – certainly there are more of them, and criticisms are tossed off more easily than the simplest creative effort. What do we do with all that frustration, stress and fear? We jump aboard the “addiction wagon” usually – it gives us instant company! Usually it’s quite a party. But stuffing down the creative urge doesn’t make it go away. Isn’t it time to give in…and make something that we find satisfying? #Meditation: Cease & Desist: Unfriend me, Art This Judgment stuff is Risky business. 6.Retreat Day 6: Creativity: Creativity is making “something” out of what appeared to be “nothing”. We become co-Creators with The Creator. The process starts with an inborn, restless desire to participate in the ongoing dance of the universe that so gratified our senses from the moment we opened our eyes. We know it will soon be our turn to dance and we eagerly await the test. After blind yearning comes the desire for models: how will we do this thing? What form will it take? “Monkey see and human do!” We have a strong, also obviously inborn desire to imitate the competent, exciting actors already striding this worldly stage. Slowly we assemble our resources: talent, experience, ambition, connections; and the raw materials of muscle, language, beauty, color. We are getting a bit of a dance going when it occurs to us – or someone asks – what we intend by that? What does it mean? And so we begin to think. Our offering does seem to have an unintended significance, a resonance that is most personal. The difference between ours and someone else’s work is “us.” We are being asked to determine our own meaning! This is a heady layer of extra excitement, full of blind alleys and false starts. So much for youth. In midlife the game changes yet again. Youth is reputed to be the Era of Freedom but the facts are otherwise. Those freed from family or work obligations are free indeed. What do we wish to create? What gives us (or those whose opinion we value) pleasure? What do we know all about that is a mystery to others? What experience have we had that needs to be shared? What do we long to tackle that we haven’t even studied – much less attempted or tried -- yet? The glorious thing about Creativity is you learn by doing. It is a direct avenue to the subconscious – which knows better than the conscious what you need, intend, desire. Knows better than you who you are and what you mean. Jung says, “While you’re analyzing the subconscious, the subconscious is analyzing you.” The day is long and redolent of possibility. Let’s make a brief sketch of our most pressing passions and spend happy hours filling in the detail. 50. Night – Balance – For everything there is a season,
a time for every activity under heaven. 2 A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. 3 A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. 4 A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance. 5 A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away. 6 A time to search and a time to quit searching. A time to keep and a time to throw away. 7 A time to tear and a time to mend. A time to be quiet and a time to speak. 8 A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace. Ecclesiastes 3 Balance is a key law of nature to avoid the dreaded stagnancy. Once our conscious is in harmony with our subconscious, our dreams will balance our waking life. Even the worst nightmare can be looked at objectively, as a story with potential significance. Moderation in All Things – said Hesiod, the Roman poet 750 BC and it’s still good advice. We use balance as a whetstone to sweeten our pleasures and soften our griefs; torrents are unsurvivable. Challenge – We need to set up our brain’s “reward system” to handle pleasure and suffering or we will be prescribed drugs in an attempt to achieve the same effect chemically. Drugs can be useful as training wheels; ideally we want to teach our systems to achieve the same effect naturally. Calm is the first step to balance, so we must learn to calm ourselves. Meditation and yoga offer the best methods for reliable self-soothing. First we assert calm over our breath, then our bodies, lastly our thoughts. It’s not that difficult! Reminder: we do it every night s we fall asleep. Danger – Unfortunately our contemporary life has become a competitive pursuit of “highs”. A good life well-lived provides natural highs – learning a sport, falling in love, listening to music, having children, enjoying the grandeurs of nature. Our intellect teaches us that every “high” is dramatically enriched by thinking about it! That’s why we are called the species “homo sapiens.” The pursuit of highs without the thinking and enshrining stages always leads to excess and grief. Highs for their own sake inevitably disappoint, leading to a pursuit of more and more dangerous highs, which, if we are not thinking about them, sharing them with others and incorporating them into our beings, damage our ability to experience joy. Opportunity – Joy that is held in the mind and considered is joy endlessly re-experienced. It will be yours forever, and you will be able to share it with all the people you love for the rest of your life. Conscious dreaming (often called lucid dreaming) provides the best avenue to filter these experiences down to your subconscious level. Always have a joy to think about just as you are going to sleep, and another for when you are waking up. This will sharpen your apprehension of ecstasy and deepen your life. Meditation – #Haiku: Stability To assert balance; Employ wealth of Eternal universal mind The Daisy = LOVE “Is love real?” Love is the secret. Love is the answer. Love is what we say we feel when we look into the Soulmate’s eyes According to our long, rich tradition of romantic literature, it’s a connection/identification with someone else so powerful (and so rewarding) you would walk through fire for that person. Biblically defined as: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” Love is the opposite of the winner/loser “fuck you” ethos. Love is patient. We can’t expect the Soulmate to be on the same page with us immediately, or all the time. We must work out our differences, analyze our difficulties and strategize solutions. Love takes time. Love is kind. We handle each other gently, with care. Thoughtfully, with reverence. Slowly. Savoring. Love does not envy. We are not competitive with each other. When we wrestle, it is in play, for joy, not because we want to trounce the Soulmate or knock the feet out from under the Beloved. Love does not boast. We are not seeking to impress each other. Love is not a hierarchy where we can lift our status above the Loved One. Love is not proud. We can admit fault. We can say we are sorry. We can weep with the Beloved and we can begin again. Love does not dishonor others. There is no “score”, no winner and no loser. We don’t take tales of the Beloved to friends, family, social media or the public space. Love is not self-seeking. It is not transactional: “what can I get out of this” “you are not giving enough” “you are not making me look good.” Love is not easily angered. We resist anger, touchiness, rage over our self-importance. If we are angry we cannot join, touch each other, embrace whole-heartedly or solve problems. When you get angry over a problem, now you have two problems. Love keeps no record of wrongs. When we say, “I forgive you”, we mean it. Love does not delight in evil. We do not seek the diminishment or disrespect of the other. Popular “bondage” and “sadism” games that memorialize the helplessness and subjection of the Other are dangerous, volatile and can be triggers of the past and map out a bleak future. Love rejoices in the truth. The truth evolves because our brains evolve. Truth is a process as our lives are a process. We are all heading for an end goal – both together and separately – if we can figure out what it is. Truth is our ally in this dilemma, because it tells us the real results of all our strategies which allows us to calibrate our efforts and improve our outcomes. We must speak truth to each other and we must grow in stature enough to dare to speak truth to Power. Love protects. We shelter. We nourish. We steward. We cherish. We assess. We unite. Love always trusts. We believe. We have the best assurance that God is good and that truth, justice and love will win in the end. Love always hopes. Things will get better tomorrow. We will work towards constant improvement. Love perseveres. We will never quit. We are in this for the long haul. #Haiku: Love Waves Sound travels forever Like love; Stars’ boundless dance Launched By mortal hearts Homing=FORGIVENESS “Is forgiveness possible?” The “Homing” card equals forgiveness in the TantricTarot deck. Forgiveness is like coming home. It means to hypothesize a place where the past doesn’t matter, where mistakes are healed, where love conquers all. Sounds like heaven, doesn’t it? Soulmates create heaven for each other. We can taste and enjoy it, now. Nothing is held back. Love requires that we desire each other’s “good.” There is no tiny part of us hoping for the other’s denigration so that we can rise. This means forswearing the Scarcity Mentality. We must believe there is enough love for us both. Love is without status, without competition. Just closeness, forgiveness and togetherness. If a Soulmate keeps doing the same thing wrong, pushing his Beloved into the position of Enforcer, Critic, Teacher or Detective, the relationship is under such threat its future is imperiled. In other words, one can’t be forgiven until one stops being a danger to the soul of the Beloved and the soul of the relationship. We must commit to desiring the other’s good, and to demand health and life for ourselves. When the Homing card appears in your spread, not just forgiveness but absolution is in the offing. We know there can be no forgiveness for us unless we have learned to forgive others, but perhaps the hardest thing is to learn to forgive ourselves. We must even forgive God for the pulse of history and the electricity of circumstance, for the physical web in which we are all caught. Give up trying to assess who did what to who and why; letting it all go as your eyes turn to the future. There is no resolution in simply showing wounds or admitting wrongdoing; but there is healing available when we hold each other up in the light. But we have to want it. We must want to come home. How many times do we have to forgive ourselves? When asked how many times we need to forgive others Jesus made the quick calculation of “seventy times seven” meaning, “a lot.” If you think about it, you’ll realize we are going to have to forgive each other and ourselves a lot more times than that! Possibly multiple times per day for the rest of our lives. Don’t we have to forgive ourselves for constantly underestimating ourselves, for saying “I can’t do this” without even trying, for insulting ourselves and verbally (and for all I know physically!) Be a loving partner to yourself so that your Beloved knows how to love you. My Grandmother’s Ghost My grandmother never cried Emmie you’re a stoic Everyone admired her. That’s why She haunts us; pressing her face accusingly Against the glass beneath the stairs. On windy nights she Threatens God, maligns His angels; for the little boy who died Of scarlet fever; without once Calling her name; and the collie dog run over And the storm that forever uprooted Her wedding tulips. Mother shakes her head, says, “Poor Gran Will never be done; she’s got Too much grief to catch up on.” The gazing ball=PROPHECY “Can anyone foretell the future?” Who can predict the future? If you could, would you perform the same actions all over again? What do you regret? Sometimes grief lies in wait for us at our happiest moments. Would you change anything? How about altering your Soulmate, fellow traveler on life’s journey? Would you roll the dice again? Skeptics say a stopped clock is right twice a day, but whatever the causation, sometime prophecies come true. A creeping suspicion comes out of nowhere – manifesting as reality. We guessed the truth. This magical card in our spread confers the gift of prophecy – we are going to be right about some future event; often one where we have been discredited or disbelieved. Sometimes we need to cultivate our gift; we don’t “know” yet; we need to think about past present and future, make all choices with our eyes open. It could be that the answer to the question we seek is known to us alone but we have to learn to trust and understand. What fresh new worlds might we create with our new clear minds? Cedarwood Chest Grandpa died young that’s why Grandma never opened The Cedarwood chest Till my twelve years unlocked The scent of dreams preserved Like mullet in red wine. Never used the wilting nightgowns Featherstitched sheets Between whose coffee-colored creases Bay leaves crumbled (like my reserve when you laid hands upon it) how it comes back that mossy sad perfume! I want to lay you away in darkness and tissue but I can’t I must use you and risk Your wearing out |
Alysse AallynAlysse Aallyn is a poet who sees tarot as a key to accessing the unconscious. She is the author of four well-received thrillers, Find Courtney, Depraved Heart, Woman Into Wolf and I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, one historical novel (Devlyn) and a book of short stories (Awake Till the End.) She has three published books of poetry – The Sacred Quiver, TheHot Skin and The Five Wounds and edited another (The Feathered Violin.) She trained in theatre at Circle in the Square Theatre School and Martha Graham School of Dance. She appeared in the part of Isabella in Jean Giraudoux’s The Enchanted at the New Yorker Theatre. She has held writing fellowships at Brooklyn College and LaSalle University. Her novel Depraved Heart won a 2011 CT Press Club fiction award and her play Queen of Swords was a semi-finalist in the 2014 National Arts Council First Play award. She has been invited to read her original work at The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC and has taught creative writing at Catonsville Community College. Woman Into Wolf was a semi-finalist for The National Playwrights Conference (2016) and her play Our Father’s Restaurant was performed on Pacifica Radio. She has also appeared as a crime commentator on ID - TV’s Blood Relatives.Her play, Let’s Speak Vietnamese was published in Dramatika Magazine. She directed The Maids for Theatre Upstairs in Columbia, Maryland. Other plays she’s written are The Honey & the Pang about Emily Dickinson’s posthumous career, Cuck’d– a modern Othello, and Caving, in which the theatre is transformed into a cave for a spelunking dare. Rough Sleep, (based on her novel I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead) was produced by Manhattan Repertory Theatre (W. 45thSt) in 2019. Her latest play, The Dalingridge Horror, (short version Leonard & Virginia) explores the partnership between Leonard & Virginia Woolf in their own words and was a finalist for the Tennessee Williams 2021 award. Her newest poetry collection, Haunted Wedding will be appearing in 2022 from Thriller Library. Archives
September 2022
Categories |