Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Magic Thoughts #4







Today's magic came at the end of a scissors and a professional coloring.  I feel beautiful again.  

Monday, August 29, 2011

Magic Thoughts #3

Queen of Cups


Today's magic came from a Tarot deck - my favorite Tarot deck in fact.  Stephanie Pui-Mun Laws Shadowscapes Tarot.  It's been a couple years since I read for anyone other than my own self.  It felt good to nail 2 readings and the be able to help some people.  

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Magic Thoughts #2





Today the magic was an alchemy of sunshine, a silver convertible and Ohio backroads resulting in some kind of passenger-side bliss.  

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Magic Thoughts #1


My friend Connie acknowledges every day something she is grateful for on FB.  I am choosing to do something similar here but acknowledging instead the places where magic touched my life during that day. Hoping to do that for the entire month os September.  But why wait really.




Today I acknowledge the magic of unexpected jay feathers that land in my path.


Woodwalker

I sat down to write something this morning, but honestly all I came up with was crap......see for yourself.  I finally gave up, put down the pen (or in this case keyboard) and walked away from it.


Something's up.  Clueless about what that might be. 


My only symptoms are a restless moodiness and an extreme gnawing hunger that screams I WANT all day long.
I WANT to be in the woods.
I WANT to do absolutely nothing.
I WANT to tear off my abuser's face.
I WANT to cry because my life feels so fucked up.
I WANT to move away, become someone else and never look back.
I WANT to be loved.
I WANT to read non-stop for weeks.
I WANT movement
I WANT silence
I WANT this
I WANT that
I WANT Facebook, e-mail, TV, Pandora.

I WANT to know what the fuck is going on. 


I walked away from it before I breathed any more life into that growing gnawing feeling of WTF.  I didn't choose anything on my to do list, which is getting long.  Instead I put on my boots and took a long walk up a hill somewhere in Boone County.  When I got to the top I just sat on the ridge and let the breezes blow over me.  Here that gnawing couldn't touch me.  I was happy.  

Something happens in the woods.  I become more me.  I don't have to put on or pretend.  I can look a fool, or get dirty, sing, fall down, roll thru the leaves, watch bugs, plow thru a creek.  There is an abandon that happens there that enchants me.  There is time to pay attention to the world around me and to my body as the muscles sing (or grumble) up and down the trail.  I have time to learn that my stride is wide open on the flats and grinding on the uphill sections, but that in the steeper downhill sections there is a tentativeness, a tightness in the muscles as if every step is guarded.  That tightness clearly reflected in the energy field around me.  The woods become less green, less fulsome, less welcoming.  I try to loosen the stride and make it more natural.  I am not successful.  But I have something now to toy with which I like.  

Out there I encounter real life magic.  
Out there I fall in love - with myself and with a space that holds me so well.  




Friday, August 26, 2011

Binary Unexpected

Tonight I noticed a small star rise in the Southern sky just above the tall pine.  I'm sure I have seen this same small star a thousand times.  But tonight I noticed it's actually a pair of small stars separated by the thinnest of fingernail distances.  It was enough for today.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Celtic Crap

I'm just gonna say this and it's gonna piss some people off.  I don't care.  I hate Celtic crap.  From the overly fluted music to the greening of the everything that stands still.  I just HATE it.  I will make an exception for the decorative knotwork, but anything other than that has GOT TO GO! 

I first noticed it at a friends house where Celtic-style music plays non-stop.  It takes a lot of my concentration to just tune it out so that I don't run from the room screaming.  That's just a waste of energy if you ask me. 

 Oddly, it doesn't include Scottish (love some bagpipes much to the annoyance of people around me and don't even get me started on the yumminess of kilts) or the English descendants of the Celts.  Pretty much limited to just the Irish descendants.  Maybe it's from having Irish BS crammed down my throat from the cradle.  Maybe it's because my grad school roommate was from Cork.  I don't know.  Mostly though it just makes me wanna puke.  Big buckets of green slimy puke to go with the theme.

OK - so I recognized this pattern a long time ago but never gave it  much thought.  I was pretty sure it was just a weird preference.  But it occurs to me that the reaction is completely visceral - a kind of pukey hate.  And things like that are undoubtedly related to some past-life crapola or other.  I have had some pretty fantastic incarnations across the planet.  But, I'm pretty sure the life that took place on that tiny godforsaken island was not one of them. 

OK - I'm done venting.  Returning to my Norse studies. 

Friday, August 19, 2011

Owie Spot

Today I drove past a little parking lot in Northside.  Yunno the one.  The one that was the setting for the magical first kiss in the late March snow?

Yeah - I wish I could not remember it too.  Because as I drove by, I felt something give inside me like an overused cardboard box folded closed once too often.  Collapsing in upon itself.

How can a memory that was so sweet and memorable at the time cause so much unexpected damage now?


Thursday, August 18, 2011

The Lady or the Tiger

She holds out both hands and opens first one, "Love" and then the other "Passion."

I splutter outraged at such a shitty choice wanting to slap her.  The inner three-year-old stamps her foot and cries WON'T reaching greedily for both.  But there will be none of that.

That is the place of first resistance.  I stop.  Pull back and pout for a couple days.  That choice constantly looming, working somewhere deep in my subconscious.  Why would the peeps put such an ugly choice before me?  How can one possibly choose between them?

I try to envision a relationship based wholly in love but lacking passion.  How is that different from deep friendships or family?  Instead I imagine a relationship based wholly in passion but lacking love.  Satisfying in the moment, but lacking the essence that pastes two people together.

I come to a place where I am ready to choose one, to reach out and take it.  But at the last minute I stop and reconsider drawing my hand back slowly.  I cannot choose.  I rest my aching head in my hand.  The urge to cry is strong.  A loud sigh escapes my lips.  Impossible.

Her arm slides around me as she hunkers down beside me.  I look up and into her eyes.  Penetrating the mysteries I find there.  The tight place of my thoughts expands and I catch breath.  Expands again.

The question was not posed to torment me, but to make me think on the subject.  I understand that I have been operating in the place of passion and not that of love for the last two years.  It is time to bring the balance back.  Then maybe that thing I want will sashay into my life.


Friday, August 12, 2011

Neither Here Nor There*

*Always said with with a long i in neither.  That is a phrase my mom used to dismiss any point she felt off topic in an argument.  Off topic being anything she couldn't refute.  

Today I am thinking about my little weird
corner of the Universe where I stand
scientist and spiritual being.  
Dismissed from both with that long i neither.  

My science colleagues scoffing at anything
they cannot see or touch
anything that they cannot prove.  
My spiritual colleagues giving the same eyeroll
to the CERN supercollider as binomial equations.  

Thought being the antithesis of all things spiritual.
Spirituality being the assassin to science.    

Really?  
Is the world so very binary then?  
Just full of ones and zeroes?  
Lacking all the beautiful integers larger than one?  
And what of the space between 0 and 1?  

Can complex things not be proven
in your heart as simply as in your mind? 
Are knowing and believing simply the 1 and the 0?

A homely space of infinite beauty that.  
That is my space. 
My home. 
Between the 1 and the 0
Holding the one with my right
and the perfect emptiness of the zero in my left
in equanimity


incremental

one second ago
I was on the E key

one minute ago
I was writing

one hour ago
I was waking up

one week ago
I was cleaning

one month ago
plotting the course of 2011

one year ago
I was working

ten years ago
i was recovering from cancer

one hundred years ago
I was struggling to vote

one thousand years ago
I labored in the scriptorium

ten thousand years ago
I squatted in the mud and waited

It's About Trust

When someone requests a service from me, negotiates the fine print and shakes my hand it is a done deal to me.  And I thought it would be too for someone who bases a significant amount of their teaching on being in their integrity.

I have struggled for a long time with trust.  Especially with men.  Thanks for reinforcing that belief.

I refuse to let you win dickweed.  I will trust despite you.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Normal Horizon

OK, I have been thinking about this subject for a while now, trying to wrap my brain around how best to write it down.  Miserable failure that.  So, hoping that if I just start that the words will self-organize into brilliance the way they do sometimes.  If not, well then it will be to the reader to take what they want and walk away.

For the last couple weeks, I have been enjoying a specific clarity in my spiritual life.  Oh how I wish it would ooze toward other parts of my life as well.  But for now, I am quite content all 'round.  The last year has seen a lot of behaviour that I think of as 'spinning' - something akin to getting on a human size hamster wheel and running til my heart threatens to burst, hoping that when I get off the world will be different, in particular more sensical.  In the disappointment that invariably ensues from this practice, things get disconnected and dark.  Most of the spinning has been in the relationship arena.  A certain almost desperate need to be coupled up with someone, anyone.  Think 16 year old girl and you would be kinda close.  I haven't stopped spinning long enough to wonder why I feel that way, or why I feel that way now, or what underlies that.  I just kept leaping onto the wheel and hoping the outcome would be different.  Sadly at the end of a nearly 2 year experiment I can say that the answer to that is a big NO!

I have been trying to step away from whatever that is that drives that behaviour.  Gently disengaging from the parts of the world that look at me sadly when they find out there is no other - only me.  Oh, I still feel it.  With very little provocation I could be over there on match cutting the next one from the herd.  But I don't really want to do that.  And the motivation to do that is not based in much other than that feeling of desperation that I don't understand very well.  I have been trying to ask myself the hard questions like whether I want a relationship at all or if I am just chasing something I have been told I should want and should have (Yeah - because those things so frequently turn out to be what I want - bwahahaha).

My life is so far from 'normal' at this point that it isn't even a dot on the horizon in my rear view anymore.  I don't know why the relationship part would be.  All I know is that it's time to stop thinking about that and take care of me.  I like her well enough.  Bonus:  she's vunderbar to hang out with. 

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Science Hooker

Or if you're a fan of TrueBlood - science hooka.

I am an unapologetic science hooker.  I make my money by selling brain space.  I work every day in a lab with other equally obsessed ...er.....talented science pros.  Lots of these blogs have talked about my love of science and how I am just made to be a science chica.  Don't get me started.

Tonight as I was driving home it was raining and the sun was shining.  Perfect meteorological conditions for a rainbow - and there it was in the eastern sky.  Thank you Physics 101 for giving me the understanding of the proper angle of the sun to predict this.  The hundreds of hours we spent firing ball bearings at each other in lab are certainly much less useful.  But I digress.

Most of the things I learned are useful to me in my life somewhere.  One single thing I learned that I wish I could unlearn though is about the magic of fireflies and how they light up.  Until I learned that, these little bugs were totally magical to me.  Now they are made less by my understanding of luciferase.  Worse, luciferase has been engineered into all kinds of things in order to easily visualize complex patterns of gene expression and disease modeling.  The mice in the picture have been genetically modified to express luciferase.  Intellectually I understand the benefit.  But in my heart it still seems Frankensteinian.  When I started my new job, we began an experiment to look at the development of cancer in mice using cells that express luciferase.  This allows us to monitor tumor progression by whole body imaging of the mice - a non-invasive procedure.  In 25 years of lab work, I have never deliberately made an animal sick or caused it suffering - until now.

I have done a lot of things in the name of science and found it amazing.  But there will always be part of me that wishes that I didn't know this particular little piece, so that sitting on my porch in late summer fireflies would not remind me of the mice calmly growing big with tumors and would once again seem more magic than science.  

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

I Come From..........

A work in progress from the writing prompt "I come from...."


I come from the frozen tundra of the North American plains
I come from a Crayola 64 pack with built in sharpener
I come from generations of farmers who broke back broke the land
I come from rising yeast, humming motors and the clash of mismatched spirits
I come from old dusty stacks of unread books
I come from barefeet on the cool marble floor
I come from icy Vikings and earthy Huns
I come from birchless forests
I come from big dripping blocks of ice
I come from impossibly unequal DNA strands
I come from telephone wires and Victory gardens
I come from silent women and even more silent men
I come from chasubles, incense and children's voices in the dark
I come from going last
I come from emerald green, royal blue and plain white
I come from small colored bottles in the kitchen window
I come from paper dolls, Spirograph and Mystery Date
I come from Betelgeuese and the small blue planet

I come from a place to which I will not, cannot return

 I have written a lot about my belly - series of poems dedicated to it. I happen to like my belly. Always have Oh, I know it's not what ...