Juxtapositioning

moving things around in my head

Archive for the ‘Magical thinking’ Category

April 19th, 2012 by me

Scared

I am desperately trying to come to terms with the unfortunate fact that I have been in a place of fear pretty much all my life.

Let me put it another way. All my life, I have been afraid.

Sometimes I feel snarling and wild, an animal backed into a corner. Fight or be eaten. My claws come out. I hate this. Rage hurts. It burns like fire.

Sometimes I feel like hurling myself down a deep dark hole, never to be seen again. I think this would feel peaceful. At least, I think,  the pain would stop.

Sometimes — most of the time — I just push most of me inside. I am in there somewhere, in some tiny safe place deep inside. I feel small and helpless in there, but being bigger feels more scary so I stay in the familiarity of smallness.

I am afraid to come out. I am afraid I will hurt. I am afraid I will be shamed. I am afraid I won’t be enough. Read the rest of this entry »

January 22nd, 2012 by me

Ghost

24 years ago a ghost roamed the rooms of a newly-purchased newly-built house, walking, walking, as there was something lost and the walking would help with the remembering. A ghost pacing miles of grey carpeting that stretched in every direction. A ghost that sat silently under white walls that loomed overhead. A ghost that looked out with blank eyes upon a bare yard, pre-landscaping. The ghost had dreams and longings but they thinned impossibly gossamer, invisible in the hot desert sun.

Six months later the ghost escaped into the bright sun. The bare walls could no longer contain the ghost and she no longer swallowed handfuls of pills hoping to not wake up. Was it an escape, really? Or was it out of the frying pan and into the fire? Twenty-four years of fire. Read the rest of this entry »

November 14th, 2011 by me

Tiger

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” – William Blake

Tiger has come to me. He first made his presence known in a ritual that emerged after weeks of Bagua Chung, a circular practice that feels to me like part dance and part stalking meditation. Tiger kept appearing. Often I rode on his back in the last minutes of the Bagua walk, and he stayed and spoke to me during my meditation afterwards. Eventually I received the message to welcome Tiger more formally into my heart and being in nonordinary reality. I was to give up the power animal who had protected me since ever I began walking in dreamtime with wide-awake eyes, and to embrace Tiger, now calling to me daily, insistently, powerfully.

There was indeed a ritual, and Rabbit retreated to make space for Tiger, now Magical Tiger because, well, there is Magic. Read the rest of this entry »

November 7th, 2011 by me

He

He is a good, loving man. I have lived a long time in search of him, of the man who melts me, of the man who loves me like no other, of the man who is himself such a magical being that I weep from the beauty of his magic and from how magical I feel when I am with him. I have lived and I have loved and none of the life or love was like this. Destiny.

This man, the one I see my sunset with, the one I see in my dreams, the one I felt and knew and received months before we were ever even in the same city. This good, loving man. He feeds my heart, nourishes my soul, calls me to be my magical self, receives my inner being, my warrior queen nature.

And oh, how I love this man.

October 4th, 2011 by me

One

One year ago today, my life changed.

It happened in the evening. I was in Houston where a client had flown me to work with her and her clients for a week, Houston where it was still summer and still humid. I was in Houston still processing the recent formality to the inevitable slow painful unraveling of the previous three-plus years spent with a boy-man that morphed into ten teary shower minutes feeling what it might be like to be me if I had always felt loved. I was in Houston feeling my Self for perhaps the first time, my Self tall and pale among the Chinese community I stayed in and shopped in that week that cemented the sense of alienation and solitude I had brought with me.

It happened in the evening, in Houston. I was sleeping on the hard hotel bed and awoke, hard. I was no longer alone. I felt something with me — someone? — and it felt wonderful. A palpable presence. An energetic force. My heart twined the feeling into arms and lips and I lay curled on that hard bed, no longer alone. Loved.

The feeling followed me home. Read the rest of this entry »

September 25th, 2011 by me

Tightrope

Two years ago I learned to play a Wii Sports game. It consisted of atempting to traverse thin twine stretched between the roof of one impossibly high building and another while purple creatures with bear-trap mouths snapped at my ankles. Even though I played while standing in the relative safety of my own first-floor livingroom, the game poked some of my more unreasonable fears right in the eye, fears like becoming caught in a bear trap and having to chew off my own leg or being unable to prevent my legs from inexplicably jumping me right off the top of a very tall building. Consequently, I wasn’t very good at the game.

Once I imagined I would be very good at walking a tightrope. The Flying Wallendas made a dramatic and unfortunate splash when I was a teenager, but you could see how easy it probably was. All you had to do was carefully place one foot in front of the other while holding a long pole. Why, anyone could do that! It’s no more difficult than walking. The height thing bothered me, though, since by then I was refusing to go up ladders or anything higher than a small stack of cats.

So it’s odd to find myself in this place now, feeling that I am stretched impossibly thin and impossibly far from the ground. There’s no safety net. I don’t know the rules. And the last thing I want is to have to chew my own leg off. I sit and breathe and remember what my heart tells me and wonder if it is enough, if I can find balance.

June 23rd, 2011 by me

Spectrum

I’ve been teetering between two ends of what sometimes seems like a vast spectrum. Black and white. Good and bad. I try to squeeze my dualistic world into at least the gentler version, yin and yang, but it evades me. When at one end of the spectrum all I feel is the lack of the other. Pain. Emptiness. Heart-hurt.

The way through this, I know, is twofold.

One, I can believe in the concept of annica. Impermanence. What I hold in my hand today, in my heart, is fleeting. It will pass. The spectrum expands with me inside it, and I melt into one end from the other.

Two,  I can work toward thinking in a more non-dualistic manner. Advaita. I can believe that the black, the bad, is not inherently black or bad but that only my perception of lack creates such pain when I am at that end of the spectrum.

Perhaps it is not a spectrum at all but a path. A labyrinthine path. Sometimes we pass one another on that path, feeling oh-so-close, and then, still on the path but occupying different points, we move apart again, bound perhaps in an endless vector that leads us yet again to oh-so-closeness.

June 10th, 2011 by me

Pathway

There is a way through. In the dark times, all I can see are the walls that close in around me, the fears that fill me with dread, the gross inadequacies of my wounded heart and soul. In those times it is sometimes all I can do to take a breath, and another. Anything beyond breath is simply too heavy, too hard.

I have been offered a path. A hand. A heart, tender and afraid as my own. And I am encouraged that this pathway may be the one that forever keeps the walls from closing in so tightly. This pathway, the one that is being created and crafted and emerges from the promise of sustainability and wonderment, may be what I need to stand on to finally reach the stars overhead.

I hold this path, a nascent bird-heart beating, fluttering, between my hands and his. If we breathe on it, it may grow.

June 8th, 2011 by me

Adrift

My feet are still floating free, unmoored. The horizon shifts every time I gaze into the waning sun. All I can do is look inside and try to breathe, every breath catching in my exploding heart. Soon I am pieces, shattered remnants, adrift on the current. Exposed. Ungathered. Withering.

Or, floating, my feet tangle in miles of kelp, deep green Medusa hair ensnaring my ankles, drawing me down. A long stream of bubbles surfaces, each one merging with the wind, rising into gray clouds drawn closely down, adrift.

Or, my breath floats around me, encircling me, motionless. Last night’s dinner sits on the stove top, encrusted, unwanted. Laundry waits in corners. Silent dry tears fill a bathtub, an ocean, adrift.

May 14th, 2011 by me

Loving

I think I am beginning to feel what love is.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that after spending as many years on the planet as I have, I would have already known what love really felt like, but no. Not being loved like this. Not loving like this.

Oh, I had an idea about love. Many ideas. An ideal. A dream. A destiny.

And I loved, as best I could. With my whole heart, the part that was open. I really did. I loved and was loved to the best of my ability at the time.

I also knew a lot about what love is not. My heart stretched across the distance between the one (what love is) and the other (what love is not), stretching so thin and so tight that it snapped, thread ends dangling into space. Now I am taking up those gossamer threads and weaving them into a beautiful tapestry, strand by strand and color by color, my heart becoming more alive and more filled in every breath, every kiss, every intertwined beat. Read the rest of this entry »