Experiment
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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…
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Just Like An Ordinary Day
I have lost my pendulum, or it’s conveniently misplaced, so instead I decided to use a pendent I wear sometimes (when I can remember to put on jewelry). It’s a ceramic disk that hangs from a black cord. The disk is green and blue in a Celtic design and I can almost remember where I got it. Ireland? Maybe. Anyway, I asked it if it would stand in for my pendulum, which I rarely use anyway but prefer to use over my Tarot cards, which I never really got into despite having the beautiful Robin Wood deck. The pendant said yes. My questions tumbled out in a heap, and the…
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Lessons In Non-Attachment
I am told I sometimes take things too seriously. This may be true and I am learning to let go of my issues — one clenched death-grip finger at a time. 1. Control of space. My landlords are cheap. I should have known this when I moved in, I should have smelled it on their clothes or something, but since I was dealing with “real people” instead of a faceless corporation, my expectations grew exponentially. I would be treated with care, I thought. Like a person. Loved. Because I would love my place and it would be my home. My place, my home, is an extension of me. I have:…
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Boxes
There’s a box I live in sometimes. My box is just my size. Like a casket. I lie inside it, feeling its smooth wooden sides, feeling safe. Inside my box it’s just me. I was nine when I found the box. Every night I’d lie awake inside it, breathing carefully through the air holes someone had put in it, feeling the rocking motion of the waves. Every night I’d lie inside the box set adrift on the ocean, always landing on an island where there was an evil wizard who did unspeakable things to me. The box lasted at least through fifth grade. That was the year my stomach hurt…
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The Great Raw Experiment: Day 1
Art imitates life. Or is it the other way around? It’s so hard to tell these days. Over at Causecast, one of the things I’m writing this about week is raw food. And either because I’m so highly suggestible or because it seems like a good idea (or both), I’ve decided to go raw. For awhile. What does this mean? Well, for me, since I’m not going to join Mel Gibson with the Tiger Diet (go on, click on that), and I think that re-creating familiar cooked foods with some weird substitution (a raw counterpart) is both useless and a waste of my energy at this point, I’m basically eating…