It’s Friday the 13th today, and you know what that means, don’t you? That’s right! Expect good luck! Only the best! Miracles are bound to happen today. What’s that you say? Bad luck? Who says?

If you have to have a superstition, why not have a positive one? I like to turn these bad luck things on their heads. I love black cats, whether they cross my path or not. Black cats were originally considered bad luck because of their association with the Goddess and all things feminine, sexual and therefore frightening. Friday was a bad luck day because it was the Goddess’ day, and the number 13 is bad luck also because of its associations with the feminine side of things.

So, as a lover of the Divine Feminine (as well as the Divine Masculine, the Divine Child and the Divine Unity where they all dance together), I say, let’s celebrate this day as a day of blessings, miracles and bliss! I personally expect to have very good luck today.

For example, I plan to drive into town today without my contact lens, though I technically need lenses to drive with. I am doing this because I need to pick up a temporary replacement lens and what better day to accomplish this slightly risky feat than this day of good luck and blessings? My eyes aren’t that bad, and I anticipate no difficulty, so see little need to worry. Still, why tempt fate? Take advantage of all lucky talismans and days, I say.

Afterward, I am off to a party at which I will swim in the ocean, play music, dance, enjoy life and receive who knows what magical blessings?

Miracles happen. Why not today? If you’re going to be delusional, this is a lot more fun than the other way.

Hey, it’s cooled off. What could be bad?

The pendulum swings, yet forward motion appears to have taken place, for the background scenery continues to shift into brighter and more hopeful patterns. The world seems not as dark as once it did. The encouraging voice in my head remains accessible and responsive, while the discouraging scourge which once haunted me so loudly has receded into the distance, little more than a memory, and in those moments when its volume is raised, it’s relatively easy to recognize as the lie that it is. From this perspective, my downs are downright doable, while the ups are nearly too good to stand.

And oh my, these hazy crazy summer daze, so much happening, so little brain for taking care of business. Except for the money part, life is sweet and replete with delights and near-encounters with the antlered one who haunts my nostrils with his goaty smoke. Grunt! The dreamworld remains his domain for now, and I can’t complain, for my dreams become more solid all the time. If a dime were worth anything, I wouldn’t trade my life for a million of them (though I wouldn’t say no to an offering of the same).

Ah, the elusive carrot of cash. That, in fact, remains the sole septic hole through which my current of contentment threatens to flow, ’secrets’ and ‘laws of attraction’ notwithstanding.

Ooh, I feel a rant coming, take heed:

This New Age justification for greed makes me want to point bright mirrors at the spewers of so-called secrets. I call it a scam! They name their same-old formula of affirmation and positive thinking a ’secret’ to lure those who seek to be special, plaster the masses with mass media pointing them in the direction of accumulation, the right and only solution for all dissatisfactions. They name examples and repeat insistently, “See what I have manifested for myself! A million-dollar mansion! no! four million! and why stop there? You too can own more than your share if you dare to dream as big as me, for bigger is always better! If you find yourself scrambling to survive, obviously you did it wrong!”

Ha. This so-called secret is nothing new. Though there’s some truth in this secret thing, it’s tainted by an ancient and ugly agenda: screw the people while seducing them into thinking you’re out to help them. Then the power of their collective, half-asleep, hypnotized desires (in the form of cash shelled out for books, DVDs and workshops teaching them how to be more like the right ones) can be siphoned into a many-headed hydra controlled by the same old elite, leaving the poor ever-poorer, ever-hungrier, ever-seeking the same old goals defined by the ones on top claiming to be blessed. New faces, new names, but it’s aristocracy all the same.

It takes some to get some, damn it. If the window of opportunity opens for you, it’s because you’re in a position to take advantage. If you live on the mean streets where windows don’t open, all the wishing in the world won’t change your fate without action and a bountiful helping of help.

Let’s call this thing by its name: it’s just another fake-o spirituo-materialistic pyramid scheme to feed the greedy monster of capitalism which has already sucked out half our brains. I’m not immune; I too am easily seduced by pretty toys, bright colours and flashing pictures of possibility. I lust for that same carrot even though I know it has been programmed to dangle always just out of reach. Still, I see the man behind that curtain. I know his name.

Desire is human and I’m okay with wishing, but now I choose to change the direction of my intention. And here it is (drumroll): I want to live on the ground in a world where sustainability is mainstream and love is the new normal.

Speaking of desire, let’s not forget our antler-headed man Pan, nor the sweet softness of his mama and main squeeze, Fat Naked Woman. If evolution happens (and it does) then our forms can be no accident. Our bodies of mostly water have evolved for a purpose, and it is obvious: our upright stance, sensitive naked skin and kissable lips clearly indicate a predisposition for coziness. Snuggles, sexy touches, strokes, licks, sniffs of pits and other niches are our real jobs, though our many layers of clothing and the multiplicity of ways we outlaw pleasure seem designed to force us to forget it.

The truth is, we are sensual creatures and our arms are made for hugging; evolution is leading us inexorably toward more love. It all adds up to God.

Love is our job, and let’s face it, nobody else can do it. Cetaceans have the bare skin required, but not the arms, and the other primates have the arms, but not the bare skin. And thanks mostly to our own doing, there are now far more of us than there are of the other so-called higher mammals.

People, awaken! All our fantasies and distractions are intended only to take our minds off our evolutionarily-mandated heart’s desires for intimacy, sweetness, funky pheremonic stews and pleasures of the flesh. Once we have what we really want, we won’t need bigger, better, faster cars or castles of gold. We’ll be too busy feeling the sensuousness of bare feet on soft soil and the sweet breezes in our hair. And really, this is exactly what we most fear and why we struggle to save ourselves from our own inexorable fate.

Resistance is futile. We will be assimilated into the grand orchestra endlessly playing its ever-evolving love song, which, though softer than the screaming sirens of greed, is so much more reliably rhythmic, musically melodic, happily harmonious and sweetly seductive than all the crass blandishments and tinny come-ons of the commercial world that once we tune in, we won’t be able to get it out of our heads. Love is a virus, and it is catching.

The song says, the time is here, the time is now. It’s time to crack the shells of the eggs which have incubated our life’s true purpose and discover that, lo, what we have most feared is our own selves! And yes, we are sensual animals, yes we love pleasure, yes, we love to say yes.

YES! Yes to life, yes to love, yes to the beauty of each precious and perfect moment, yes to fomenting a soft revolution to gently crumble the barriers separating each hungry lonely heart from its own sweet self, its Oneness with All. It’s time to fall in love with the world, our own faces in the mirror and all the weirdness we once feared.

While it’s true I blog mainly about me, I do keep up with what’s Out There, to the extent that I can absorb it before I begin to feel faint. I know about Global Warming that is and isn’t caused by us (or Them), and the moebius-like logic to justify why the answer to the question “Is Global Warming caused by people or is it a naturally occurring event?” should decide whether or not we clean up the choking mess we’re making of our (and everybody else’s) environment. I know Paris Hilton is a media-created celebrity, who is famous for, well, being famous. And blond.

Monty Python couldn’t be weirder. I know, or at least have a sense of (I can’t handle long exposure) the bizarre barf-inducing dreck that is peddled as ‘news’ in these pathetically polarized information-dazzled days. I know how hilariously slapstick and Bizarro-worldish the world has become.

With all their special effects, razzle-dazzle and sleight-of-hand, still they’re playing to an audience with a primordially low sense of humour, heavy on the pratfalls, Keystone Kops and slapstick. It bores me. It’s not my thing. Why is everybody so riveted by the show? Everybody, that is, except all we eye-rolling irony-detectors and gag-reflectors. In my world, we are the majority. The people I meet are nearly all conscious, caring, aware, good-hearted humans. So who is deciding these issues? And who gave them the power?

Out there, nothing is making sense. So I take it inside, shine my light and apply my attention to me, myself and I. I peer into my chaotic and confusing psyche to view a mixed-up crew of would-be do-gooders, vanquished victims and bemused bystanders. I watch my own show (more entertaining to me than any Hollywood star vehicle could be) as these fated friends fumble toward some kind of forgiveness, finally figuring out that there is no villain.

That’s right. Nobody doing the bad stuff. It’s just happening. Compulsion. Divine Will. Whatever. But we’re doing what we do, people, because we can’t help it. We’re made that way. We fumble, we fall, we struggle to grow and we’re getting better. Yes we are. Look into the eyes of the human next to you if you don’t believe me.

So now, while this enlightenment takes place in its slow-graying northern-daybreak way, western society stumbles to a gasping conclusion and we all applaud the final curtain’s fall.

And of course, the green world grows, as it always has and ever shall. And early next year, Pluto, the Mother-force of collective emotional will, is moving into Capricorn, the sign of physical reality and responsibility. And dwarf planet or not, when Pluto changes signs, watch out. Pluto’s entry into Sagittarius in the 90s brought on the religious fanaticism we’ve seen the fallout from. Aids and the discovery of mass institutionalized child sexual abuse marked Pluto’s transit through its own death-and-sex-and-power sign of Scorpio.

So hey. It’s working out. Mom’s going to make us fix it, soon enough, in a way we can’t argue with, and the ones who can’t get with the program won’t be allowed to be reborn here. It’ll be slow, (being Capricorn) but it’ll be certain. Since Pluto was in Capricorn’s opposite sign Cancer at the time of its discovery, its transit through Capricorn will mark our collective Pluto Opposition. Time to grow up, humanity.

As Rob Brezsny would say, Glory Halle-fucking-lujah.

The rain outside soothes the pain of my excess dryness. I feel parched places opening in soft petaled quivers and shivery sounds of satisfaction. She who Remembers has always showered pleasure on this green grass and black welcoming soil. There has never been need for toil, though we moil through our fettered, furrowed days in a haze of fret and worry, hurrying on errands deemed necessary, spurred toward destinations that disillusion and disappoint. Each foiled appointment with destiny messes with our minds, blinds us into fascinated imaginings of an axe that we fear will fall and sever the golden thread of our precious eternal selves.

So we chant our litanies, weave our spells of guilt and fear, hoping someOne will hear: “Our Father, Who Art somewhere up there, please forgive us the crime of being human.”

We’ve twisted perfectly good truth into skeins of fantasy, woven it into densely complex tapestries of chaos, cause and effect, then pointed to this as proof that God does not exist (even as we prayed to His ghost). We persist in this outmoded, ill-logical, out-of-sanity, vanity approach to life, the strife, stress and distress we suffer grist for the mills upon which we grind our dreams to fine powder, which we sift into the minds of children and innocents who entertain our jaded brains with novel reactions to extreme stimuli.

Once, I believed in villains. We all blamed our shadows for their perfect ability to mimic what we found most odious about our own desires; yet the fires of life burn eternal despite our intent, demented attempts to make it stop. The world will not end just so those who seek oblivion may find it. If oblivion is what you want, you shall have it, but please, stop striving to obliterate the lives of All. All does not seek oblivion. All seeks to live.

The joy and pleasure of plain old life is ready to return to our tales. Soon, our old trials will resolve into a sinless new beginning. All the heroes and villains we imagined were merely filler, fodder for frittering away moments which we refused to fill with our awareness and interest.

The possibility of finding out what actually is happening scared us into inventing gory stories to explain, process and justify our fear. We created a nightmare existence made up of our own collective resistance to discovering the Real.

“What if?” This most destructive question (that can never be answered) continues to be asked, haunting our hearts, bedeviling and daunting our most noble purposes, crystallizing parts of us into habits of discipline and crumbling others in servile surrender to the cold careful eyes in the mirror.

Bringing it back to Here and Now, the rain still patters overhead, the damp in my own hair nearly dry, the washing of my aura having progressed ever so slightly into the past as the future continues to unfurl in its usual direction of motion. Oh, the magic and the challenge of this single perfect moment, the Now in which I dancingly strive to thrive, resisting new habits and ditching old.

As this moment ever-unfolds into newer, scarier emptiness, still my petrified private parts continue to fill it with ghastly, ghostly old tales of triumph and torment, imagining adventures and pretending participation, sitting in seats of power on centre stage, while the audience, the parts of self not written into the story relegated to watcher status, lurks in shadow, hating that boring position and plotting its own version of the film, a sequel which will bring the hero to her knees and restore justice and balance to the world.

And so the pendulum swings, and the wheel goes round and round.

Time to leave it all behind, returning blindly back to this moment, here and now, oh yes, the deep slow breath, vibrating my dancing particles in my mostly space, my emptiness of self, opening into the discovery of something fractally beautiful, delicate, new, indestructible and true.

It’s been a while since I posted here. Here are some random bits I’ve written over the past week, as a placeholder until I write more. It’s been a busy time. Transformational. Big. Hoo-ha!

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The grey skies continue to dump their load between bouts of sunshine, and being so weather-centric in my mood is making me feel schizophrenic. Happy? Sad? The negative ion count is oscillating and so am I.

It’s not so bad. Life feels more natural that way, connected to the real world of nature, the cycles of seasons and weather, even though I view the wind and rain from the quiet side of the picture window. I can imagine that I am out there, though the experience exists only in my mind and memories of actually being there. This is better.

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Summer Solstice begins the countdown to the year 2012, significant in New-Age circles for various reasons. If you count the days from June 21, 2007 until January 1, 2012, it comes to 2,012 days. I don’t know what it means, but it’s cool.

This is the shortest day of the year
The hours of daylight at maximum
Now, we open the gate to transformation
Dance, sing, play, celebrating
The changes in the world
but first we go through our
Own kaleidoscopic unfoldings
Sweet and bitter, cycling in and out
Pleasure and pain, heartbreak and joy,
Love and isolation.

Life rocks.

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I like the word ‘thrill’. It sounds like its meaning, a frilly, fluttering feeling that ripples through the flesh as it is spoken. Life lately is one thrill after another. Even the quiet moments contain depth and vastness, opening more and deeper as I expand myself to notice.

Life feels wonderful these days.The smallest things cause me to grin in goofy gratefulness. Synchronicities, minor and major, are becoming commonplace. I’ll think of something I need, then realize it’s in my pocket, though I don’t remember putting it there. More than once. Little things are adding up to make big things which all fit together in meaningful ways. My life is integrating. Praise is radiating my way from unexpected directions. God is proving Themself to me, skeptical brain is surrendering. Though my fuzzy-minded mystic self has predominated, still the skeptical part of my mind has been rigidly resistant. That’s melting now. Damn, it’s working!

I thrill to the knowledge of self-as-God, God-as-All reflecting back to me-as-self, as Dr. Bronner would say, All-One-God. The old soap guy knew things. We each are a religion of one. Each of us approaches the Infinite from a different angle and perceives it in a different light, whatever we want to call it.

Call it ‘the human spirit’ if you want to label yourself an atheist.

“Here we are now.” Yea and hurray!

Oh the horror!!!

Some people have phobias about spiders and snakes. Not me. I like spiders. I once lived a whole winter with a huge wolf spider hanging out in the corner of my bedroom. I called her ‘Charlotte’. We had good talks. I like snakes—they’re so sensuous and magically graceful and gorgeous. I enjoy slugs, I call them ‘the slime people’. Very little in the animal or insect world has the power to give me the creeping heebie jeebies.

But one thing does. Ticks make me freak in a most amusing (from an outsider perspective) and dangerous manner. There was the time I saw one diving into my foot on the freeway—I wasn’t even driving and I nearly caused an accident. Peter had to pull over (not easy with me spastically flailing and shrieking like that) and pull it out.

Fortunately, he’s good with ticks and calm under pressure. Unfortunately, he’s not here. I woke up this morning and, brushing my hand across my upper back in the process of getting dressed, I felt what I thought was a giant zit or boil. Sore and lumpy. I looked in the mirror and

FREEEAAAKKKK!!!!!

It was a tick. Its swollen little (gulp) body, legs waving, poked out of my skin, buried headfirst. In. My. Flesh.

Red emergency lights flashed in my brain and I kicked into ‘get it out of me NOW’ overdrive; took a pair of tweezers and very carefully (amazing, considering the level of insanity I was experiencing) pulled it off me. In pieces. One piece of which stayed there, and is still there right now.

The good news is, my healer / acupuncturist / herbalist friend will handle it for me when I see him later on. Pull it out, clean it up, do what is needful.

At least it wasn’t one of those yogurt-raisin types that dogs get. I can’t bear those. Of course, I didn’t bear this very well either. What is it about ticks?? I cannot get over this. Now I’m scared to walk in the woods. And I keep feeling things crawling on me. Sheesh.

I think my adrenals are awake now. Hoo boy.

Since childhood, I’ve been prey to this life-wasting pattern:

I struggle to the surface of dream late in the morning, a corpse rising from the crypt. I scrape off graveyard soil, toil through fog waiting for a sign of conscious presence in my body. Through the day I slowly perk up. I retire when I must, when body crashes but mind keeps going, buzzing, elated and inspired. By next morning, it’s the same thing over again.

Rarely, I wake early and my day feels rich and full. But mostly it’s a wasteland.

Can I please be a morning person instead?

Time to meander the myriad mall-like hallways of my mind, tasting trickles of past experiences that twine like wisps of scent tickling the nostrils of cartoon characters, lifting and wafting them down already-trodden pathways to play in pastures of the past where the bad is safely-mapped in easily-avoided, well-marked nodes of trauma.

Those red warning blinkers still serve to divert attention from pains I was trained to avoid. ‘Don’t go there! You know what happened next! No, stay in the happy birthdays, Christmases and summer vacations of your life, sans strife, sans growth and challenge.’

If I could choose, I would lose divisions and meld my mind with the Infinite. My boundaries would blow in a blissful implosion; all considerations of self versus other would vanish like bubbles into the air.

Knowing all, feeling all, experiencing and comprehending with full lucidity, that is a good dream.

t must be sweet to be God, knowing each sparrow that flies, every dancing particle of thought crossing a worried mind, cradled within one consciousness, held in the awareness of all-embracing love. I like to imagine God as Mama and Papa, the all-gendered helping hand, wise words, soft cradling lap and abundant nourishment. In my infantile mind (comprising much of what calls itself me), I cry baby bird tears and blindly open my mouth for cosmic kindness and sustenance.

I’ve been thinking about God a lot lately, though I can be skeptical as the next cynic in my hard-assed ’show me’ self. Still, I must admit to hearing the small voice within that whispers, “I Am.” It explains itself in terms undeniably, lucidly sane yet if I listen to it, I am labeled crazy or at least creepily vain. Society is beginning to define itself (despite lip-service bible-thumping done to placate a silent but vote-heavy majority) as atheistic, preaching a paradox of random clockwork, chaotic order, and meaningless beauty.

If no higher truth governs our lives, why should we feel such desperate craving for meaning? If a hunger exists, it signals something important missing. Like God, the vital vitamin with the power to sustain life.

To be sure, not everyone feels this way. To some, abandoning such a seemingly futile search is blessed relief from a burdensome task. But others can no more abandon our seeking than we can refuse to see with eyes wide. Because one is blind, must another blank her vision or deny what is plainly visible?

Okay, that stretches the story out of shape, making a claim of clarity when the foggy forms I see are admittedly amorphous enough to be nearly anything. Still, the words whispering in my inner ear make a perfectly loving and kind sort of sense and teach me things I am not aware of knowing.

I must believe something. Why not this?

I’m in my ‘issues’ again, glory be. I grew up in the wilds of Northern BC, and even there, I felt crowded out by louder, funnier, more attractive others. I lurked darkly in the corner, simmering with Leo Moon resentment at not getting the attention I craved, yet unable to ask for it.

I saw a video of my childhood a year or two ago for the first time. In every shot, I stand gloomily aside watching the others shriek and mug for the camera. I felt ever on the verge of tears, aching for what I could not have.

This is my central mystery, a pain that prevents me from performing open hearted despite my drive, my creative fire. I can’t imagine what caused it, and I’ve worked this wound from every angle yet it alone remains intransigent. Within, I feel a chorus of excited children trumped by that lone lost one, she who holds her hardened heart apart from my own growing life. I must reach her, teach her, touch her, yet she has me stumped. I would call to her, but she will not hear me. Her heart waits for proof of magic, a reason to live.

Now, I breathe past the hard place in my chest, heart beating in time to the rhythm of knock-knocking on the door to my life.

“Awake!”

The cry is a clarion but I am deaf, seeing only red flashing on my interior walls. Beset from the beginning, I forced myself to forget the regrets that dogged my footsteps until forgetfulness became a habit, ingrained as breath itself. Now seeking the denied sustenance of memory, I assign new agents to the task, sifting through the dusty aching past for clues to who I was meant to be and might still become.

The stakes are raised far beyond mere praises or roses. The ground has secrets to disclose, and it will. None can know the consequence of this stone telling, least of all the self which seeks to greet severed pasts and weave them into a web of self, a new way of wholeness. The stew cannot be seasoned for greater digestibility, nor can the crushed glass of broken dreams be sifted from the savouries and delights that drew us into this divine peril. Rising steam wafts and streams in oracular patterns; ever-shifting, truth exists only for those whose vision is adjustable.

It is time, now… NOW, the moment which never passes, this and none other. I take a breath, look around: it is still now, I am still here, and that alone can never change. I deceive myself with dreams of timelessness, imaginings past and future, but always now draws me to itself with inexorable gravitational force, and I land with a thud in reality.

Certainly past, future and dream have their place, but that place is here and now, along with everything else that ever has been, will be or might become.

This moment is roomier than I had believed.

“Honey, I shrunk my life!”

This, the cry of the modern, semi-sentient human. We think ourselves so much smaller than we are meant to be; therefore we shrink ourselves, for thoughts are things, articles of intention, particles of magic.

Why diminish ourselves, deny the glory of our true heritage?

The answer is simple, but the question is not easily resolved. In the beginnings of things is the source of fear: change. Once, we had a beginning of bliss and beauty and we sought to preserve that perfect moment forever. When we failed, we feared, and as we feared, we failed.

The mystery is resolved, the ‘ornery, miserable child’ revealed in naked identity: she who remembers. Too aware of what I ought to have been, she could not accept what I was forced to become though I myself did the forcing, compressing my burgeoning self into ill-fitting molds for the purpose of presenting an acceptable package to a world that rewarded falsity.

I did this well, as I did most things, and my inner purist hated me for selling my soul to the devil of convention. Now, as I quest to restore my Self, I bless that child her bitter intransigence.

This gives me chills to read, and I’m the one who wrote it. That is, I think I wrote it, unless I have a puter poltergeist, a crazy poet hackmeister who slips strange pained ravings into my system. I thought I’d post it here, in part because it typifies (or perhaps justifies) the title of my blog, in part to challenge myself to reveal a voice that tends to stay hidden even from me.

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I seek release of ancient death, the kind that lodges in shoulders and makes its home there forever, never shifting, expanding or serving any shred of hope on the platter of my life. My flesh and bones are home to much that is not me, entangled in my roots and veins, training my new cells to become like them as the old ones grew and died. The torment takes place on levels too small and multiplistic for me to be aware. Even if I could, there is another issue besides what is held in my tissues and organs. I have a resister in my psyche, a hidden lifehater which keeps my motivation at minimum. I have a leak in the basement which leaches out life force, and desire cannot catch fire for there is no container in which it can grow beyond its vulnerable infancy. My tiny flames are extinguished in the drafts that whistle through my breached borders, claiming all in the name of ancient agreements someone made for me, claiming to know my mind.

Where was I at the time? I have sought to answer that question, quested, but that triggers a contest between my seeking self and the resisting strictures that control my very soul, saying, “Thou shalt not, no matter what, grow beyond the bounds of your bonsai pot.”

I say, I care not what contracts were signed in my blood if my consciousness was not aware of the signing and if my will and body were not aligned with the action. My heart’s desire is new, now, a tremulous fire held sacred in the deep places, jealously guarded and hoarded by my patient lifelover which has waited eons. It will not chance the loss or risk a cost beyond my capacity to bear.

I writhe in the agonies of twisted essence seeking release. I groan and moan with the need to adopt postures impossible for the flesh I bear, I jitter and twitch, I itch and stagger. Calling in light and help from the core of creation, that which fosters growth and continuity, I commit to enduring what must be endured for the sake of what may be born in its aftermath. I am patient, or I am composed of partly-patient parts which is nearly as good. I am ready to meld myself together, to align into a living force in the world.

I think I am ready. I want to become ready. I seek readiness. Help me, those ones whose role it is to help, who seek pieces like me who have fallen through the cracks and now struggle to find our way back to the light. I open to receive to the extent that I can, to the extent that I must.