A LIFE LESS WRITTEN
What is does and What isn’t doesn’t. Joy A. Sters January 29, 2018 Had thought some different kind of living might transpire last week … that’s what you get for thinking. I did get to see once again that what is going to happen; does and what isn’t; doesn’t. *** Again, a very small world, Linda Gray Sexton’s book about her relationship with her mother just arrived and is titled: Searching for Mercy Street. It has a quote on the first page by guess who … can’t guess: SHERWOOD ANDERSON “If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has transpired.” *** Looked out and up a few times recently and saw the Full Moon forming its way into the Dream World … however it wasn’t until tonight that I checked to see its official date as it is looking close to Full but not quite there yet and found out the following: Intuitive Astrology: Super Blood Blue Moon Eclipse January 2018 January 31, 2018, brings us an extremely potent Super Blood Blue Moon Eclipse in the sign of Leo. Let’s first break down the meaning of the name of this Super Blood Blue Moon Eclipse- Super: A Super Moon happens when the Full Moon is closest to Earth. This Lunar Eclipse is going to be nice and close to Earth, which means visibility will be high and its energetic effects will be strong. Blood: A Blood Moon is used to describe a series of three or more Total Lunar Eclipses, but the name comes from the fact that a Total Eclipse gives the Moon a reddish glow. Blood Moon’s are quite rare, and we haven’t had one since 2015. Because Blood Moon’s always happen in series, we will have two more Total Lunar Eclipses to follow, one later in 2018 and another in 2019. Blue: A Blue Moon is the second Full Moon of the month. Whenever there are two Full Moon’s in a month, the second is referred to as a Blue Moon. This is also an extremely rare occurrence and makes this Eclipse particularly significant. Interestingly enough, 2018 brings us two Blue Moons! Phew! Just to put it into context, the last time we experienced a Super Blood Blue Moon Eclipse was 36 years ago, but having this type of Eclipse in the sign of Leo is extremely rare and has not occurred in hundreds or possibly even thousands of years. Whenever we have a rare celestial event such as this, we feel the energy strongly and it has the potential to cause huge ripples and waves in our lives. Eclipses always come in cycles, and this Super Blood Blue Moon Eclipse is linked to the Eclipses back in February and August of 2017. This means that whatever lessons or themes were brewing for you around that time are now coming to an end, and you will be able to bring closure and resolution to those energies. Think back to what was stirring for you especially during the Total Solar Eclipse that happened on August 21st, 2017. It is likely that whatever the August 2017 Total Solar Eclipse brought into your life is now being wrapped up, resolved and put to rest. When thinking back to what was stirring for you, pay attention to what was unfolding on a spiritual and emotional level, not just on a physical or external one. 2017 was a transformative year for a lot people, and perhaps the months since the August Total Solar Eclipse have allowed things to move in a new direction for you. The January Super Blood Blue Moon Eclipse is not only going to help bring resolution and closure to the last half of 2017, it is also going to open and activate a new energy that we are all going to be working with until the next round of Eclipses in July and August 2018. Eclipses often bring turning points in our lives. They are often an instigator for change and illuminate areas of our lives that need attention. The Moon represents our emotions and how we feel safe and secure as we move through the world. During an Eclipse, our sense of security and comfort is often shaken in some way, and we are given the opportunity to really look within and discover our fears, hopes, dreams and the truth. Seeing as this Blood Blue Moon Eclipse falls in the fire sign of Leo, it is really going to be guiding us to take charge of our lives and to step into that role of being the King or Queen of our own jungle. As this is Full Moon energy, most of the action we are going to have to take will include clearing things out, doing away with the past and letting things go. Even though the fiery Leo energy will want us to act, there is also a need to retreat and to clear things from within first. In fact, hidden truths and buried emotions are likely to stir around Eclipse time, and you may need to let things rise up before you know the best course of action. Eclipses are always emotionally supercharged, and this is even more so. This Eclipse is likely to increase your sensitivity and bring up heated emotions. Old wounds from the past may resurface, and you may find yourself digging through some muck in order to make sense of the things around you. If things get intense, or your sense of security is shaken up under the presence of this Eclipse, remember that this is just so you can make some positive changes in your life. You always have an inner power and inner strength, and tuning into lion or lioness energy and finding your pride is really going to help you. When you feel safe and secure from within it gives you the confidence to express your truth, be who you are and to go after your dreams. This Eclipse is going to be helping you find your way through this, and to find your inner strength so you can feel confident in who you are and what you are here to do. If you allow the energy of this Blood Blue Moon Eclipse to filter into your life and you embrace the changes and inspirations that it brings, you will really be given a huge push to create a new state of being for yourself. A state of being where you can feel confident, loved and supported by yourself and by the world around you. A state of being where you have the confidence to be yourself and live your truth. To achieve this state of being, you have to connect with your heart center and tune into that intuitive voice of wisdom. This Total Lunar Eclipse carries a strong feminine energy and will really help you to connect to that intuitive, softer heart-centered place we all have inside. In fact, the strong feminine energy around this Lunar Eclipse is likely to bring about global changes for women as well. Under the presence of this Eclipse, we may experience a rise up of feminine power and a focus on equal rights for women. The Super Blood Blue Moon Eclipse is definitely a special celestial event that will really shape the direction and energy of the year ahead. The best thing to do is sit back, surrender and join the Universal flow. This is an intense Eclipse and it is likely that you will be feeling its effects for a few weeks until the energy settles. Just be gentle with yourself and observe any themes, issues or patterns that emerge. If something starts slipping away from your life, or if something is abruptly ended around Eclipse time, trust that it is meant to be, and allow things to take their natural course. The January 31st Eclipse is a potent one, and there is no doubt that it will put you where you need to be and beckon you to a higher state of consciousness. http://foreverconscious.com/intuitive-astrology-super-blood-blue-moon-eclipse-january-2018 Am going to see what was going on or around August 21, 2017. It is from the SELF-INVESTIGATION Journal THESE HANDS it is the first Journal in that Series of Writings. The following is the writing done on August 21, 2017 haven’t read it yet but did see a clip from SHERWOOD ANDERSON which is rather funny to already see him show up in two different places on the same day: Monday, August 21, 2017 All True Voices are but yourSelf, externalized. -Wayneji, Spiritual Vitamins *** Nothing back from Wayneji. Internally nothing has changed. *** Frank Ocean’s SELF CONTROL has been playing between the ears. Makes for tears sometimes. Best Album these ears have heard in a long time: BLONDE. He really is a genius. It’s one of those albums that you sit down and listen from beginning to end. You make time for it. There are so few albums this happens with anymore but this certainly is one of them. THE1975 too (though it’s hard to sit down to theirs.) *** There has been sickness in the body. Release and processing out. *** There have been many strange feelings in the body … one’s that have not come up before. Have just sat through them as they arise … which is not the norm. Usually such intense emotion is moved away from, but that didn’t happen this time. There has been the sense or a sense in the air for a while now that time is short. Not even sure what that means … if it is death or what … it’s not known … it is just felt and experienced as if there is a clock on the wall, ticking, ticking and it’s ticking for the one aware of it. *** I don’t know who I am, what I will do from one moment to the next. It is just watching and waiting to see what happens, if anything, but who watches … is not obvious, there is simply just watching. There have been many fear thoughts arising and just watching them as they bubble up … sometimes dragging one under until it becomes obvious that, that is just a thought too, no different from any other and then there is a kind of release. *** We (Robert Downstairs and I) are at the Solar Eclipse in Salem Oregon. The world looks very strange right now … there is a tint on it and it is starting to get dark … it is supposed to get completely dark in 3 minutes. It is not completely dark … the sky is still light and the sun has a black hole covering it but it just came back out and it is very very shiny and bright … just a tiny blip of the sun and it lights nearly the whole sky. Glad to have come. There is a strange sensation in the air … it is like being in a literal twilight zone movie/show. It was pretty cool for a 2 minute experience. When the sun started peeking back out from the moon it was an explosion of brightness. The sky got dark but not black. A lot of people came out for this thing. Hotels were running $700 a night … good thing we waited till morning to leave. It was an easy ride up. Robert mentioned going to some dunes … sand dunes … so we may be doing that now. *** Solar Eclipse August 21, 2017 Solar Eclipse you are a trip You were no more than A momentary blip On the screen of life Of so much hype You'd think you made day Turn to night Oh wait you did If you’d blink You wouldn’t have noticed But just in time In the morning to show us That life is a Strange and incredible thing When the moon can make the sun Look like a ring. *** I have got to get better at Poetry … Wayneji said I would write a really good poem before I die … I would like that. Everything in life improves with death. Maybe some of the poetry I currently think is crappy will end up good when I die? Mebe. *** Can’t think of Mikel for long before it just hurts too much. *** Just read this in SHERWOOD ANDERSON’s PREMIUM COLLECTION … It is a short story, which actually is rather long, and is called MARCHING MEN. This small part really stuck out … it seemed a short story within a short story. It is also interesting to read it during THE HAPPY TIME because there is such a pull to be near HIM and to pro-create: CHAPTER VII (Part II) Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth. Behind the walls the mice scamper about in droves, and there is much squealing and chattering. Now and then a bold mouse stands upon his hind legs and addresses the others. He declares he will force his way through the walls and conquer the gods who have built the house. "I will kill them," he declares. "The mice shall rule. You shall live in the light and the warmth. There shall be food for all and no one shall go hungry.” The little mice, gathered in the darkness out of sight in the great houses, squeal with delight. After a time when nothing happens they become sad and depressed. Their minds go back to the time when they lived in the fields, but they do not go out of the walls of the houses, because long living in droves has made them afraid of the silence of long nights and the emptiness of skies. In the houses giant children are being reared. When the children fight and scream in the houses and in the streets, the dark spaces between the walls rumble with strange and appalling noises. The mice are terribly afraid. Now and then a single mouse for a moment escapes the general fear. A mood comes over such a one and a light comes into his eyes. When the noises run through the houses he makes up stories about them. "The horses of the sun are hauling wagon loads of days over the tops of trees," he says and looks quickly about to see if he has been heard. When he discovers a female mouse looking at him he runs away with a flip of his tail and the female follows. While other mice are repeating his saying and getting some little comfort from it, he and the female mouse find a warm dark corner and lie close together. It is because of them that mice continue to be born to dwell within the walls of the houses. Cited ANDERSON, SHERWOOD. SHERWOOD ANDERSON PREMIUM COLLECTION 8 BOOKS (5 Novels + 3 Short Story Collections) (Timeless Wisdom Collection Book 1530) (Kindle Locations 10064-10080). Business and Leadership Publishing. Kindle Edition. -WFT(2017) *** Well, it seems there is much unresolved stuff for this Super Moon to eclipse out of my person. Nothing has settled in regard to Mikel. It still hardly registers as true. Dan is now seemingly gone as well. There is no Him and Robert(downstairs) and I don’t even look at each other anymore let alone communicate in any other regard. So we shall see what this Moon clears up … if anything even need be cleared up. Not sure how SHERWOOD relates but it’s always nice to see his name. *** Harold's Mom wrote the following about Him: Harold (1969 - 2018) Harold, 48, passed away unexpectedly in Treasure Island, FL on Monday, Jan. 15, 2018. He was born in 1969, in New London, spent his childhood in Gales Ferry, and graduated from Ledyard High School. After receiving his bachelor of science degree in business administration from the University of Vermont, he began his career as a CPA at a large audit and accounting firm in Boston, Mass. Later heading west, Harold enjoyed the peace and beauty of northern California and Ashland, Ore., and worked as a property assessor in Siskiyou County. A dreamer from birth and ever up for a challenge, Harold decided in his 40s to pursue an acting career. He found satisfaction in acting around Hollywood, Calif. and St. Petersburg, Fla., earned his Screen Actors Guild card, and worked in both television and commercials. A lover of life and expression, Harold was a committed fan of pro football, electronic dance music and spicy food. He practiced meditation, shared laughter and warmth wherever he went, and saw the best in everyone. Harold is survived by his son, his parents and his sister. A small service for family and friends will follow the calling hours. The family requests that in lieu of sending flowers, people consider making a donation in Harold's memory to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse or to the charity of their choice. *** I do find it strange he died on Martin Luther King’s Birthday. I suppose it seems strange because he has been called a Dreamer. Also it is strange that they would have donations go to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse as it seems highly out of character for anything Weale would do … if he were to have a donation sent anywhere I would think it would be MAPS for responsible drug use or Erowid. I haven’t had a party weekend … not like the ones like Harold and I used to have not since we separated space but long weekends made for long parties sometimes. I hope he went out feeling good. I hope the same for Mikel. *** Steinbeck on Russia (he had recently visited) dated February 12, 1948: “The Russian pieces in the papers were very successful here. I don’t know what the book will do. The Russians have been doing such bad things lately with their art stultifications and their silly attacks on musicians and the decree about no Russian being allowed to speak to foreigners that it makes me feel sad. It looks as though we were the last ones in for a very long time. Under the new decree we could not have spoken to any of the people we did. They have already destroyed all good or even interesting painting. There isn’t much of any good writing and now they knock over music. The stupid sons of bitches. I wonder whether there is any secret writing or painting being done. It would surprise me if a few creative individuals weren’t practicing in cellars. And the small Russian people are such nice people.” (p. 306, Letters) *** Interesting insight just read from Steinbeck … his writings put my mind to ease … very few things in life do that … most things antagonize the mind but anytime I pick up this book of Letters the body/mind naturally relaxes and simple reading ensues … not reading to gain anything or learn anything just the joy of reading for readings sake … but this came through as interesting probably because I have had similar thoughts as well … especially after so many failed attempts at relationship and Steinbeck is about to catch up with me as he is currently nearing the end of his second marriage: “I haven’t asked about your girl because I thought you did not want to talk about her. I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent. Many animals from deer to dogs have no association between the male and the female except in the rutting season or the heat of the female. In this way they may be very biologically wise because the warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.” (p. 313, Letters) He was also a very sensitive man, prone to depression and also deep insights, nightmares and clairvoyance and I put this in here because just recently I went through a whole nightmarish Dark time and then Harold died and Steinbeck is writing to his friend about how he had gone through something that seems similar to what I did right before his good friend Ed Ricketts had been killed … hit by a train while in his car: “I have had the death feeling very strongly for some time now as you know but maybe this was it (meaning Ricketts). I am capable sometimes of horrifying clairvoyances. They come out of the air. My mother had the second sight and so has one of my sisters, and I seem to have it a little. But I don’t have the death feeling now.” (p. 313) Ok just one more thing and I just couldn’t be happier to hear it … because even after his having success at writing he still did not even know if he is Writer. “That god damned book is going to get written. I’m forty-six now and if I am going to be a writer I’d better god damned well get to it.” (p. 315) Heh! This body I’m in is going to be 47 in just a few … well, daze really … hadn’t thought about it until looking at the P-Tracker … which states that I will be bleeding on that day … kind of strange or ironic that I am often bleeding on the day this body was supposedly born. *** What’s a girl to do … but there is just insight after insight while reading this book … most of which, you probably are surprised to hear, has not been written into this document … however, these two things he writes relates to Wayneji mentioning that: "Every death is your own.” And there has even been a Writing Practice done on it which again was written but not actually Grokked but has been coming up again and again and now especially with Harold … because even though I didn’t see us coming back together again as a couple … I still saw myself in and sometimes “as” him and this sort of sounds like something one would write about Harold: “‘Knowing Ed Ricketts was instant. After the first moment I knew him, and for the next eighteen years I knew him better than I knew anyone, and perhaps I did not know him at all. Maybe it was that way with all his friends. He was different from anyone and yet so like that everyone found himself in Ed, and that might be one of the reasons his death had such an impact. It wasn’t Ed who had died but a large and important part of oneself.’” (p. 316, Letters) And: “I have been sitting alone in my hotel room for some days now. Impact is not sharp now—all dulled out. It would be interesting if we all flew apart now like an alarm clock when you pry off the mainspring with a screw driver. Wouldn’t it be interesting if Ed was us and that now there wasn’t any such thing or that he created out of his own mind something that went away with him. I’ve wondered a lot about that. How much was Ed and how much was me and which was which.” (p. 316) Ok … I am going to make a bit of confession and will do it here even though I sometimes actually often regret putting anything in here that could cause discomfort because it often ends up doing just that … however … Saturday I got on the bus … there had been no intention to do so until maybe just an hour or two before it happened … and that hour or two was spent tidying up the apartment and showering and getting dressed … none of it was rushed as there really was only the idea it would happen and not so much the intention. However, I got on the bus … sat for Meditation … it was incredibly quiet on the bus … noticeably quiet, as if there would not have been surprise if one opened the eyes and everyone was gone. However, after Meditation … and the eyes opened … everyone was seemingly still there. Got to Medford and still wasn’t sure what I was doing … if anything … the thoughts had been to just go the bus stop that I hadn’t gone to the week prior … but I found it rather strange that when I got to the connecting station I couldn’t even recall what bus to get on. I went to the window and looked it up and was actually kind of surprised at what number the bus was … it all had just sort of been wiped out of the mind. However I went over and got on that bus … but I didn’t get off at the stop I thought I would have … I got off at the same one I had the week prior … I walked around not knowing what I was doing or why and then I walked to the bus stop I thought I would have wanted to be at the week prior … but there was nothing there … I started to wonder if I had been duped or just made the whole thing up. The bus came back around … I got on and uneventfully made it all the way back. Actually I got off at the connecting station and walked around town for a bit … realized I totally have to get the Medical Marijuana card … I recently found Harold's and mine’s from way back in the day … I had forgotten we even got those … but they are expired now. I get very anxious in public and sometimes pot helps and sometimes it makes it worse but it is always good to have the option. Basically the thoughts around going there were that I would somehow see or stumble upon Him. However, life is probably protecting me from ending up getting arrested or something similar as I have no right to go anywhere near where He works. If I could ever even find it … I have no sense of direction and didn’t even look at the address until tonight which is a few days later … I went in the exact opposite direction of where He might have been … sort of funny if you are in the laughing kind of mood … which I am currently not. But I won’t lie and say that I didn’t get the “Warm Fuzzies” with the thought of being close, once I was close or feeling as if I were. It probably seems as if I am lying about not knowing where I was going as it seems as if it is obviously to Him or where I thought He might be … however … I never know what I am doing … or where I am going … half the time that I think I am going to a certain destination I never end up there. Energy just hits and I am moved and thoughts arise as to where I am headed but they are so very often wrong. *** The Full Moon has arrived and the Happy Time is departing … will probably make for a rather shitty Dark Time to have both the Moon and Happiness fading out at the same time. This has been a very strange and short Happy period. I suppose there is kindness in having such sad news during a fairly good space of well being for it to come in. Steinbeck says this to his young son about death (T: for Thom his son M: for Me/Steinbeck): T: Did Willy go to heaven? [Willy was the dog.] M: I guess so. T: I saw him in heaven. But where was God? M: I don’t know. T: Did you ever see God? M: Oh! Yes—sometimes and often. T: What’s he look like? M: You. T: Do dogs go to heaven? M: Yes. T: I guess the sky falls down on them. M: That kind of describes it all right. T: When are you going to die? M: I don’t know — sometime. T: Soon? M: Maybe or maybe in a long time. T: When will you know? M: Never. (p. 367, Letters) If you take a moment and really Listen to what is being shared … well it’s a very good Pointing. *** It is quite strange once the Happy time starts to fade … it happens every month but it never stops being strange as all the excitement, mania and anxieties of the Happy Time fade out along with all the stories about what might or could or would happen … often in which nothing ever actually does and I sort of stand here a moment feeling rather foolish wondering how it could all seem so real and promising when actually nothing is going on at all, except a very overactive imagination. I do not see the world as it is or even close to how it is. I get glimpses like I am right now, but this will all be quickly covered over and forgotten. *** It’s been registering very slowly that Harold has died. There are outbursts of sadness and many stories flood in of our time together. I really have not thought about many of these things in years. It seems so unfair to receive such Kindly vision after someone you love dies. I never really thought I could be friends with Harold if we weren’t in EOTS together because in so many ways we both needed a Guardian. We were not trustworthy on our own. We both made so many very poor choices in life without Guidance. One time Harold got the idea to shave his eyebrows … it just came out of seemingly no where … right before he was going to work during breakfast … I had to call Wayneji and Kayemomma for them to talk some sense into him because he wouldn’t listen to me, especially when his mind was made up and it was that morning. Needless to say through this small intervention he didn’t shave them … thank god, but little strange things like that, which happened on both our ends would come up and more often than one might think. I was just as off the wall, I just can’t think of an example at the moment, that’s the one that just showed up. *** It is a strange evening … the Moon is Full … went out and Danced under it … first time in Months catching a Full one and it’s eerily quiet around this place tonight … as if deserted which makes for Dancing! 💃 No Red Dress though. I don’t own a Red Dress or any dress for that matter. *** About the Moon Cycles: THE LUNAR CYCLE Awareness of the phases of the moon attunes us to the lunar cycle, and because la lune rules feminine energies and intuition, working with the moon can strengthen our natural instincts. Not all of our activities follow such a short cycle, however choosing days to launch projects, start programs or plans can be timed with the moon to harness its benefits. Why Work With The Moon’s Phases? “Whether we move instinctively to the lunar rhythm, or must choose to synchronize ourselves with free will, if we want a broader support for our activities, it makes sense to keep Luna in mind. She offers temporal windows for beginnings and endings, and for everything in between. She is the consummate teacher of process.” Dana Gerhardt 1 First Phase Of The Lunar Cycle – The New Moon New Beginnings… Waxing Moon, Getting Bigger and Brighter The start of the cycle, where it all begins. This is the best time to acknowledge goals, write a to-do list and think about what you’d like to create. It’s a time to speculate on new projects, to clarify ones intent, or make initial contact. Bring ideas into consciousness but launch a little later – wait until the First Quarter to take action. 2 Second Phase Of The Lunar Cycle – The Crescent Moon Getting Into The Swing Of Things… Waxing Moon, Getting Bigger and Brighter During the two weeks of the waxing Moon, Luna’s light is increasing and she’s building her form. Crescent Moon is the time to start projects and add actions to the intentions you made during the New Moon. Gather energies to help you on your way, bring new things, people and relationships into your life, energy is building. 3 Third Phase Of The Lunar Cycle – The First Quarter Making Strides… Waxing Moon, Getting Bigger and Brighter This is a time to be ambitious! Focus on really accelerating the progress of any projects you’re working on, picking up the pace sound in the knowledge of what you’re building and working towards. It is essential to make forward strides, really catch onto the abundant growing power of the moon and the momentum that’s underway. 4 Fourth Phase Of The Lunar Cycle – The Gibbous Moon Last Push… Waxing Moon, Getting Bigger and Brighter The Gibbous Moon occurs three days before the Full Moon, so we’re building up to the time of fruition and maximum energy. The moon will soon be at its peak so now is a time to be constructive, adding to what has been building for over a week. 5 Fifth Phase Of The Lunar Cycle – The Full Moon Conclusion, Celebration! The Moon Is Biggest And Brightest In The Sky The Full Moon is a time when we’re naturally accelerated, energy is flowing and things will naturally come to a head. Emotions are heightened now, too. It’s a great time to give thanks, for the things that have reached fullness, it’s a great time to consider that which we can now let go of… Do: Use lovely ingredients on your body as skin and hair are more absorbent. Careful of products like bleach if you’re dying hair. Full Moon Meditation: I am grateful for things I need to see that have come to light, to the projects that gave successfully come to fruition and for the momentum of the moon! 6 Sixth Phase Of The Lunar Cycle – The Disseminating Moon The Party’s Over, Time To Go… Waning Moon, Decreasing, Reducing In Size From Full Moon to New Moon, the Moon’s light is decreasing. She’s losing form. This is the time to let go, release, retire. Introspection is favored, internal themes. Remove anything from your life that is no longer serving you. This might include the discarding of old habits, saying goodbye to toxic friendships, closing a business or leaving a relationship. It’s not usually considered the best time to start a project during this time, it’s more about tying up loose ends and filing things away. Post off packages! 7 Seventh Phase Of The Lunar Cycle – The Last Quarter Rounding Down… Waning Moon, Decreasing, Reducing In Size This is the second-to-last phase of the Moon, and during this time, you want to take those loose ends from the last cycle and really and truly finish up. During the time from the New Moon to now, you will have become aware of certain things in your life that could be released. The Last Quarter gives us fantastic energetic support release and break negative patterns. 8 Final Phase Of The Lunar Cycle – The Balsamic Moon / Dark Of The Moon And Relax, Rest And Retreat… Waning Moon, Decreasing, Reducing In Size The moon is in its Balsamic phase for the 72 hours before New Moon. During this time it’s in its ‘dark moon’ phase of the lunar cycle, and it’s a really good window to take time out to meditate, contemplate and completely wind down. Close off, really let go and go inward. This is the most introvert stage of the cycle and privacy is paramount as you clear your head before launch into the new cycle. It’s time to get ready for the next phase, the new moon when it starts all over again! Do: Undertake practices that symbolically allow space to bring new things in – clean your house, spend some time alone. Schedule major operations, waxing or hair removal during the Balsamic Moon phase if you can, there will be less blood loss as it flows less freely and recuperation will be supported soon, by the waxing Moon. Dark Moon Meditation: I am grateful for release from the things I no longer need, for the closing of situations and relationships that no longer serve me and for the power of the universe! Star Sign Studies, Summary… Biodynamic famers and gardeners grow in time with the lunar cycle, planting and fertilizing with the waxing Moon, cutting, weeding, and pruning during the waning Moon. The waxing Moon energizes flowers and leaves that appear above ground, while the waning Moon nourishes the roots. See if you can attune your activities to la lune, see if she supports growth and helps you go with the flow… http://starsignstyle.com/the-moons-cycle-and-what-to-do-at-the-moon-phases/ Sort of interesting if you are interested in that kind of thing. Have to learn the phases of the Moon. *** Well, I think I caught the eclipse … I saw the moon turn reddish and then black and then it came back to reddish again. It is now reddish with grey … it is a slow process it’s been doing it for about a 1/2 hour now. Yep … now it is getting a tiny bit white again. I’ve never seen the Moon eclipsed only the sun. *** Posted the following on FB: Joy Sters shared Oregon Psilocybin Society's post. 35 mins · Ashland · Recently someone who was very close to me, passed away. We had been together for 7 years, 5 of which we were married and partook in the ingestion of both Magic Mushrooms and LSD which, although they did not heal all inflicted wounds, they offered a great Service to our friendship, marriage and the continuation of it throughout our years together, apart and now on into our deaths. Harold was what I would call a "Psychedelic Enthusiast" and was always looking for ways to introduce these substances to people who would not normally look in their direction. He opened quite a few minds during our time spent together and now maybe a few more will be opened in his death. The following is a clipping from the Article below, which is well worth reading especially if you are unfamiliar with psychedelics (i.e. Mushrooms/LSD) ... as it might ease some apprehension or dispel false beliefs in regard to what these substances are: “It’s almost taboo in Western culture to talk about death,” says Dr. Bright. “And I think part of the problem that people in these studies are having is coming to grips with the idea of death because of the way it’s treated in society. “[These patients’] significant others may not want to talk about it, and they may not want to bring it up. But after the psilocybin experience, I guess they feel a sense that there’s something else out there, and they’re more likely then to talk heart-to-heart and have that meaningful conversation.” https://www.vice.com/amp/en_ca/article/bjyqk8/can-magic-mushrooms-help-us-come-to-terms-with-death?__twitter_impression=true *** Woke up today and had no idea what day it is … kept trying to download the New Music Friday on Spotify and wondering why it would not load … except finally … hours later … the realization dawned : It’s Miercoles! It really was/is a strange realization. It didn’t even register fully even after seeing that it is so … this is how “right” one can feel when they are so very wrong. *** “And always I feel that I am living in a dream and that I will awaken to something quite different. It’s very unreal but then everything always has been to me. Maybe I never saw anything real. That’s what Marge Bailey (one of his professors at Stanford) said about me once very long ago.” (p. 460, Steinbeck Letters) For years, I would wake in a deep depression … for no other reason than for waking. A depression is currently in the air. There is the strangest kind of sadness around Harold. You cannot wait. You can never wait. There is no time for waiting. The mind comes up with a million ways we could have been in one another’s life all these years but it lies. It is simply not so because it was not so. We were volatile. I became volatile towards him and could not shake it. If it could have been some other way it would have. You get tested. Often one doesn’t even see it while it is happening. I could never write him a poem. Struggled always with love letters. It was so noticeable. I dreaded writing them and I have always been one for writing … especially love letters. In the very beginning they flew out of my finger tips in his direction, but it did not take long for the spirit of them to be crushed. Weale had a way of making you feel very small. It didn’t seem intentional, it was just his way, he barely paid you any mind. If someone or something caught his eye you were annihilated, completely wiped out and forgotten for whatever that new-next-best thing is. Boy, am I getting the sense I am writing about myself and not him. You begin to see through history … through retrospect that you do the same things over and over but you have no idea you are doing the same thing. I don’t see it right now that I am … but I am because I always have. It looks or appears different but it’s the same script. I used Harold as an outlet for this Love for Wayneji and I have done the same with "Him" … it’s projection but then it is also … in a sense … the same with Wayneji as I use him as a way to Love God (the intangible) … it is all projection … but Wayneji is the only one who is not romantic love … the mind thinks it cannot Love without the romantic aspect but it is very wrong and it knows it, but that doesn’t change how it is right now. “There is no greater Love than the Love for one’s Teacher.” Because … well there just isn’t. It is so because The Teacher is the closest one gets to God or their own Self (as other) in this world. This is not the time for explanations … they all seem like lies right now. The truth is that I failed Harold and he failed me and we knew it. The Marriage failed because we killed it. We didn’t fan the flames of Love we dumped bucket after bucket of cold water on it and wondered why we were always so dirty and sinking in some mucky mess of mud. But I loved him so much from a distance. I still do. Even his death fascinates me and of course makes me jealous. I don’t know what would have happened with his life but I am very glad it didn’t go too far down the rabbit hole because one time I looked … in the very beginning of our relationship … I got a peak down the rabbit hole that is Weale and it was scarily deep. In fact I no longer recall if it was psychedelically induced and I don’t remember the details what I remember is that from then on I was weary of him. I knew there were places we could end up that I absolutely would not want to go. I no longer trusted him. It was huge but I didn’t see it as such at the time. I see how huge it was now … as if a grenade had been dropped and exploded in the midst of our relationship but it became a part of the scenery and everyone just walked around it. HaroldTheAlligator … Harold is one of the few characters in my writings that actually named himself. We were all at MU one night … Harold and myself and Wayneji and Kayemomma and maybe Wing and AngelKitty, I no longer recall but I am pretty sure AngelKitty was there, if we were she was … because she was always there when we were. I often miss AngelKitty deeply. She was one of the very few women friends that I can claim in this lifetime. I truly loved her and I truly treated her like shit … but I also was very good to her and gave her more of myself than I do most. Anyway we were all gathered around and I think the power had gone out and we were just hanging around the living room at MU and Wayneji took out a game where he asks you questions and you say the first thing that comes to mind and one of the card’s asked if you could be an animal what would you be and Harold said an “Alligator” but I no longer recall where the word Harold came from … I will write to Kayemomma and see if she remembers. God I can’t believe Harold is dead. *** There is no writers energy in my person but there is a push … an impetus to write which is very strange … as if one is the paradox, watching the opposing forces pulling in equal amounts in opposite directions. *** Steinbeck just got Charlie … it’s 1952 … Travels with Charlie is the only book of his I have read so far although I am 1/2 through Letters now. He got him in Paris France and seems quite taken with him already. It’s a strange thing for me to read only because I have never had a relationship with a big dog such as Steinbeck goes on to have with Charlie. Wayneji’s “Charlie” was pretty much the biggest dog I’ve ever gotten close to and he wasn’t very big but he weighed a lot and I couldn’t pick him up. Wayneji’s Charlie was the first dog I ever loved. I had a dog “Pal” back when I was very young … under 7 years old that I vaguely remember loving … but Beaners/Charlie is the first dog I fully … no holding back … Loved. Pete however, is my first official dog … nearly from the beginning and heading on down the long stretch he is dragging out the end to be. I sometimes still get very frustrated even with the little bit of care-taking it requires to share a life with Pete, but I would do it all again in a heartbeat. He is basically kept comfortable and fed. He asks for very little and that is good because I have so little to give. However, there is an invisible current that runs between Pete and I that is unmistakably there. I love it. I love this experience of being so intimate with another creature. No one can touch it. No one can destroy it. It’s only between him and I. I have shared something with Pete that I have shared with only one other in this world and I can’t name it … I only know it. *** It is a few hours past since the above was written … however I came across this conversation on EOTS in the EOTS Heart Folder while searching for a few things that you will read as you get further into this document … however this seems important to put in here right now. Especially since Charlie’s Birthday was on Monday, January 29th. The first photo I ever saw of Harold … is this one of him and Beaners at MU. (Removed for Privacy) From: Wayneji To: eots Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2007 7:07:57 PM Subject: [eots] My Dearest Joysters Joy, this is a post that just begs to be private but since it shows a side of you that I want everyone to see I am sending this to the list. ------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -------- Kaye just hung up the phone with you wherein you told her that when we got off the plane in San Francisco and you checked your voice mail you found out at that time that Charlie had died. You very wisely withheld this information from us knowing that the six hour drive home would have been hell for Kaye and I. As we drove home I wondered if there was something wrong with you since you seemed distant and at times distraught. I passed it off as perhaps exhaustion. I recall one time singing a song that inserted a line in the song "Home, home on the range" where I sang, "Oh give me a home where Charlie can roam and Pete and Angel can play...". Looking back on that I can see where that must have caused you pain knowing what you knew. As we walked in the door that night there was a phone call from you telling us of the sad news. Perhaps some people would say that you should have told us right away but both Kaye and I are so grateful that you did not do so. I don't know if we could have survived the drive home in our right minds. Thank you so much my dearest Joy for your love for Charlie and your deep sense of compassion for us. Our deepest Love, Wayne and Kaye Replied: 2007/2/23, Joysters: Wayneji … thank You so much for this writing. There is a dis-belief about what has happened … it is not real for me just yet … sometimes I see a bit of it and there is a wanting not to feel it however I don't know if that is it. After speaking with you on the phone that night … Harold and I lit a candle and sat in meditation, when I got up there was this urge to type something out … I didn't know what I was doing it for, but I put it on the Hard Drive in a folder called "Charles/Charlie, Bean/Beaners and saved it. I didn't read it that night and it wasn't until I read what you said below that I went back and opened the document to see what was written … I read it out loud to Dan and he said that it would be good to send it in. There were so many things that came up on the drive home it was not a situation that I knew how to be in … and yet I was in it. Mostly there was the pull to Stillness … a Knowing that all is well even though everything was saying it wasn't as well as the dread of how you would be told and an honor that I would be letting you know. I love you both so much myPapa myMama. ~Joysters/Joy/Peanut Charles "Charlie/Beaners/Bean" January 29, 1997 to February 20, 2007 The moment I heard the message on the phone from Doc Spencer, who said you had a massive coronary and that he tried to save you but couldn't and that you had died, there was an immediate hole that will not be filled. A void showed up and there was no attempt to do anything about it. Somehow life is sort of kind in ways, we were all at the airport including your momma and poppa and somehow the tears didn't flow … they welled up but didn't flow. And the thoughts appeared not to say anything to your parents at the time … we had traveled so far from India to Germany and just arriving in the states … I didn't know whether it was right or wrong not to say anything … there was just this Silence as the thoughts attempted to figure out what would be said and when. We, Wayneji, Kayemomma, AngelKitty, Harold, mySon and I, loaded up into the rental van and I didn't look at anyone … didn't speak to anyone unless necessary and the feeling was that if I looked at anyone I would just start crying … so I didn't. We got to a restaurant and all ate sandwiches … your mom wasn't feeling well she has a cold and your dad went to get cold medicine. I opened my mouth to tell Harold what had happened to you and as soon as I did all the tears came forth and Harold said: "What's wrong?” And then mySon walked over and I told Harold I would tell him later. There was a feeling that mySon showing up was the perfect thing because it was becoming clearer that maybe the best time for Wayneji and Kayemomma to hear about what has happened to you would be when they have finally reached MU. Your dad sang in the car about you when we were getting close to Yreka … it sounded like "home on the range" but he sang "Where Charlie and Pete and Angel can play" and then again the tears welled up. I hugged your mom and did cry when I said goodbye to her and they both got in the car and headed back home to MU. I began watching the clock so that I could call as soon as they got home and tell them. At about 8:20pm I went upstairs with Harold and told him and started bawling. He held me for a bit and then I realized I didn't have a phone to call Wayneji and Kayemomma with so I ran downstairs to get it but all of our stuff was turned off from being away for all these weeks. I ended up using Harold's cell phone and Wayneji answered the phone and immediately handed it to Kayemomma. I told her that Dr. Spencer had left a message and I could already tell she knew it wasn't something good. I told her you were gone and she screamed, and it hurt so much to hear her … it hurt all day knowing that this moment was going to come … however it was still a shock to hear that kind of pain. She handed the phone to your Dad and his voice was trembling … he asked what happened and I told him what I knew and he said he would be in touch and hung up. I crawled into Harold's arms and sobbed again. Then AngelKitty called and we talked for a few short minutes but you know Bean what can one say … all the times with you just keep flashing. I want to just hold your parents so I am in however way that is. They said they are going to pick up your body tomorrow morning and I know they will have a ceremony for you … I don't know if I will be invited however I am already there with you. My whole life with you was at MU and it always will be. The only memories I have of you outside of MU are the few times we went to Medford for your haircut …which goddammit I wish now I didn't stop taking you. I remember you coming here too … you didn't like the hardwood floors and you weren't comfortable here but you did good. I know you know you are the first dog that I really bonded with and loved … you know I love Pete because of you … because you showed me how … not by doing things … but just because I love you so much … cause you loved me … maybe not in the way the world describes love but you accepted me and took care of me when I couldn't or wouldn't. MyBeaners I am going to miss you so much and yet right now it really hasn't sunk in that you are gone. Right now you are still waiting to get picked up and go to MU. How can I not see you at MU … you are MU. There is this ache in my chest and none of the reasons that thoughts say it is there connect with the ache. MyBean. I love you so much. Harold and I lit a candle for you and placed my first picture that Wayne ever gave me of Himself with you sitting on his lap on the swing in the backyard of MU … he didn't actually give it too me … he threw it out and I picked it out of the trash and asked if I could have it and he said yes so I put it in a frame and have had it ever since and that was about 6 years ago. We sat quietly for a bit and all the memories of me and you at MU came flooding in. I thought while it is all fresh with me right now I would write it down. I know this will not be easy on any of us … especially your Mom and Dad. I know that I will see you at MU … everywhere and I know that Pete will be looking for you … I know that he so much enjoyed his time playing with you and you growling at him and humping on him … I know he didn't mind and we all got such joy in watching you two play together. MyBean. ~Joysters *** So I will just ask that you take a pause here. For Bean. For Weale. For anyone you maybe Grieving for in life. *** There is such a love in my person for words … even though they have also created so much of the insanity and madness in the mind. In the mind they seem to mean something … however … here out on the screen … or in this document … they are just a story. In the mind the story seems so real, but here on the screen not so much or at all and so it makes for such Joy in writing. Writing takes the power away from words. It does here anyway. However, reading the words often imbues a kind of power … sort of as if it is taken from the Writer and then the energy sort of waits dormantly until it is read. Then the energy leaps off the page or document and imbues the Reader. *** Reminiscing … I actually had gone looking for an email on “Service” as Wayneji once suggested I read some … but instead stumbled upon this and I wonder … maybe … just maybe that the Writing that comes through my person is “Service.” -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Sharing HaroldTheAlligator. Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 09:13:12 -0800 From: Joysters To: EOTS This morning I went upstairs and Harold was on the phone so I snaggled up next to him laying in his arm as he talked with his mom for awhile...it was so nice to hear his voice flow so evenly...to listen to him talk without having to have any input of my own just to listen to the flow of him speaking...then his dad got on the phone and I listen as he told his dad about his coaching baseball and then listened as his father asked Harold to hold on while he yelled at some squirrels that had been causing some trouble and then get back on the line and Harold continues on sharing with his father about baseball and home life and Yreka and I keep hearing inside of me "i love you so much" I just keep feeling how much I love Harold and I hear his dad talking about Basketball and then Harold starts talking about when he was ourSon's age and how before it was too cool to like things like going to Lake George that it was one of the best things he could remember and how he wants to take ourSon and me there and then his Dad says he should get going and Harold says "I love you dad" and I love the way he says it ... I love hearing him say it. He gets off the phone and its like seeing Harold for the first time...like seeing a different Harold ... a Harold that's been here all along but I just hadn't seen him here and though he is looking at me like nothing is different...something is especially brighter in me right now. It hadn't all come together like it is now...so he then calls his grandma who is 86 years old and he had forgotten to thank for her Christmas Card...and for some reason I had sort of expected him to be trying to get off the phone...but I was so pleasantly surprised to hear him enjoying the conversation and really interested in what his Grandmother was saying and I was again laying there listening myself interested in what his Grandmother was sharing about how she still golfs and although she doesn't garden like she used to she still plans on planting a few things and there were just warm fuzzies all about. His Grandma asked Harold if ourSon was like a step-son and Harold asked me and we told her that since ourSon isn't yet adopted that by law it's a step-son but then Harold went on to say, I call him my son. mySon kept interrupting me while I was typing this so I went and got the Snowboarding Story I typed you guys last month or so and he is sitting next to me laughing and giggling away and I have tears coming out of my eyes that I am so filled with Joy right now. This is a Yummers Moment. Thank You. ~Joysters *** After reading that I went searching for the Snowboarding writing … it’s probably one of the first inklings that I would become a Writer or that I was a Writer … the first was when I was 19 … I started writing a novel … I only showed it to a few people but they showed some interest however, for whatever reason or none … I lost interest in writing it. However this following writing was many, many moons later but it was a first attempt at StoryTelling and keeping the reader actively involved. I haven’t seen it in years … probably almost ten … but I have looked for it on a few occasions and was not able to find it until just now. I did a slight bit of editing for punctuation and grammar but have not altered the story at all only for visual effects … I still like it: An American Family Tales of Snowboarding January 28, 2006 It's a lazy morning here in Yreka. Last night I had some caffeine at the Ski Lodge and it seems to make me stay alert even though I am physically tired which isn't a fun mix … it feels all restless. Yesterday afternoon I got so tired just out of the blue so I laid down on the LoveSac and fell into the most relaxing position that wasn't quite asleep but also wasn't all the way awake and the body felt like Jell-O or squishy stuff and Harold came home for lunch and I just couldn't move or get up it was so comfortable that there was drool running out of my mouth. Later, when I got up to start getting ready for Snowboarding there was a very lax body movement in doing so … however the thoughts that were going through were ones of hope that the snowboarding trip would be cancelled … however it wasn't and off we went. On the bus ride to Mt. Shasta (which is about an hour) mySon and I usually sit quietly … which is not like the rest of the bus. We don't plan to sit quietly in fact I find myself surprised that he sits on the bus with me each time. Sometimes he lays his head on my shoulder and just rests his eyes with me. I would say the bus ride is my favorite part so far … even though there are about 30 pre-teens screaming on it for 2 hours, I find that I am surprised at how little I hear … like it's almost background music when riding an elevator. So we get to Mt. Shasta and as we are walking up to the Ski Lodge the body feels sooooo tired and I mention it to mySon and he is like yeah me too … but we get our rented gear and put it all on and hurry over to our lesson. The bunny hill where we have the lesson is on an incline that isn't too great, but enough and it runs about 200 yards … they have this rope pulley thing that can take you up the hill if you like and last time I tried it I fell 2x and ended up walking up the hill the rest of the night. So last night I gave it another shot hoping that I wouldn't have to walk the incline the whole night. Me, and the two trainers, go over to the pulley (which is usually surrounded by a bunch of people waiting to go up) and they are sharing with me how to set myself up to get on and to stay straight up the incline without falling … at one point I didn't understand what he said and I said to him: "I don't speak English that is why I don't understand what you are saying!” And he laughed and said he was speaking Swahili or something and then I said that I once had a dream where I spoke an African language but when I woke up I didn't know what I had said. He thought that was pretty cool and I was feeling all pumped up and we get to the rope and he shows me how to line up my feet and the other trainer hands me the rope and it's all set up so perfect and then the rope is in my hands and it pulls me forward and my board goes down and my leg twist under and the trainer is yelling: “Let go of the rope!” And I do, but I'm mangled and the other trainer is yelling: “Get out of the way! Put your head down!” As the plastic piece of the pulley rope is coming to hit me in the head, but I can't see, because I am twisted and I can't move because my legs hurt and I throw myself over to the side and they ask if I want to try again??? Good Lord! (I don't try again.) Then they go on to tell me that once I master the bunny slope (Ha! Master the bunny slope!) I won't ever have to go on that rope thing again. Great. So now I am sore and disinterested and pissy and I still have to walk up the incline. The thoughts going through are ones of a spoiled brat and I am the only adult being trained how to snowboard with a group of about nine children from mySon's school (including mySon) all around the age of 11. They have us do our first run down the hill … some of us do real good … mySon is one of them! He just looks like he knows what he is doing and he is not afraid to do it. However, then there are a few of us, myself included … that seem like we all have ADD and continue to get heckles in our direction that we look like disco dancers; not snowboarders. The next time we get up the incline...the "pros (mySon's gang) go down first with ease and the instructors stay behind with “us.” Now, I may sound like we have crappy instructors however, we don’t … they are really good and really patient and keep telling us the same thing over and over again … but as I was sitting there watching his mouth move … it was as if he were speaking another language! I swear … I couldn't understand anything that he was saying … all the words sounded like words I had heard before, but I couldn't put them together to make a sentence that made any sense and I was both embarrassed and scared because I knew I was going to go down that hill again without a clue what I was doing because: I didn't understand a thing! And … I was becoming frustrated. I stood up and after watching a few others who also didn't seem to understand a thing and watched as they go down the hill, fall and stumble. So did I … and I fell and it hurt and I yelled out: “I suck at this!” And the instructor says: “No you don’t!” And I yell out: “It's not nice to lie!” As I struggle to get up with every part of this body feeling as if it were lead and my head is saying we are quitting! No more snowboarding! We can't learn this stuff! We are too old! Meanwhile I am about 30 feet from my group of 11 year old compadres, trapped in my snowboard because I had worked up such a frenzy about the ordeal that I couldn't seem to unhook the snowboard from my feet, which was now infuriating me even more and you can't do anything like kick the board because your legs are locked into it so you just squirm around and look like an idiot! The instructors finally came along and ask if I am stuck and I say yes and I think they sense that I'm a spoiled brat and say: “Can you hear us from there?” And I reply: ”Yes.” So they left me there and finally I calmed down enough to unlatch the snowboard and crawl over to everyone else. Meanwhile … I don't (luckily) think mySon has noticed how much I am beginning to hate snowboarding because he is beginning to: Love it so much! The Instructors at this point decide to spilt the group in two and mySon is saying: “I don't want to separate from you mom.” Which tells me exactly what the instructors are planning to do and I say to mySon that I am just not as good as him. MySon is the first one picked for the other team along with 4 others and the other 5 of us stay behind to: “Master the bunny slope!” Already I am thinking … I can just walk off this freaking slope and go and have some coffee and sit in the lounge with the rest of the parents and play video games on my cell phone! But my legs don't hear me and we are headed back up the slope. The instructor again explains to us what we must do to get the board to stay slow and go back and forth down the hill like a falling leaf. It sounds so graceful but I am everything but that. Everyone goes down the hill. I wait till last. As soon as I get going there is the beginnings of a falling leaf and I keep saying (out loud): “Please don't go fast … please don't go fast!” However my leaf turns into a massive brick and I crash and burn (again) and am disgusted and yell out: "I Quit!” And I immediately (which I already had been feeling like a jerk) feel like an even bigger jerk for saying I am a quitter in front of all these kids who are trying to learn how to snowboard along with this grown up baby that's throwing a tantrum! The instructor comes over to and says: “If you've made your mind up I'm not going to try and talk you out of it, but I will go up with you if you're willing and I will help you step by step get down the hill.” So I let the burn; burn and reply that I will and I walk up the hill again and he meets me up there and he holds my hands and shows me how to steer the board … and it hurts! God! He keeps telling me lift my toes! Pull up! Lift the toes! I am lifting my toes up so damn high they are freaking broken and everything hurts! I put my heels down, press down … down … down! And the board slows down and stops and I can barely believe it! I’m in pain, but the fucking board has stopped and we are standing there 1/2 way down the slope! The instructor shows me how to ease up and I do, and the board goes down the hill a tiny bit and then I pull up on my breaking toes and the board stops! We are finally at the bottom and maybe …. just maybe: I've got it! Now, back up the hill I go for our last run with the instructor for the night. I have no idea how these legs made it up there. I am freezing and sweating at the same time, but I am feeling that I am not a quitter right now! I'm feeling like I might not hate snowboarding, but that I hate that I can't just know how to do things … that I probably quit things because I can't deal with frustration and embarrassment and I don't have patience for myself to hang in there and do it again and again! But this time is different … this time I am still here … I'm not inside drinking coffee and playing video games (yet). I do the run on the hill again and I don't fall. I do however tap/bump into the instructors snowboard as he is saying: "Watch out for my snowboard!” And then I fell! Heh. :o)))) He tells us we have all done much better and that next time we probably will get to go on the ski lift! Oh boy oh boy! One of the girls picks up some snow and hits him with a snowball. He is shocked. He's not very old, only about twenty or so but still it surprises him. So then I hit him with a snowball, which surprises me and then I thank him for pushing me so hard to keep going. We all spilt up and I go find Tyler, which I spent about 30 minutes doing before I just finally gave up and went and got that Coffee and played those video games in the lodge on my cell phone until he found me. He was so excited! He went up the ski lift and down the slope 2x after he had left us and he said it was awesome. We ate pizza together and he begged me to go down the bunny slope with him again. I must be a gluten because … I did! And I fell! Discouraged I got out of my gear and into my regular clothes and I sat in the rental shack and waited for mySon because he went back up the ski lift. Finally, we were back on the bus heading home and the caffeine had kicked in and the body was sore, but as long as I wasn't moving it was fine and mySon had his head on my shoulder and we rested all the way back. We arrived to a sleeping Harold and to a nice warm fire heated home and we stripped off the wet clothes and hopped into our beds and I am so grateful that we have next week off! :o))))) ~JoySters I actually found the story attached to a very nice email conversation between myself and TheCEO. I thought of him this year as I do every Christmas since that is his Birthday … he is the only person I know with a Birthday on Christmas. *** Maybe next week will start a new series in Writing as A LIFE LESS WRITTEN seems less and less true. The following is some advice that Steinbeck gives his step-daughter Waverly about marriage that seems worth putting in here: My questions are simple and terrible. They are not personal and they don’t have to do with Jim (her boyfriend). Therefore, you can show this letter to him if you wish or if you think well:
Interesting to look at. *** A very strange thing has happened and it may be in regard to sitting on my head, looking directly into the Full Moon … Dancing under it or all of it … can’t really say but there is now this Electric looking zig-zagged line of Brilliant Light entwined with electric colors such as Electric Blue, Green and Pink. It is vibrating in my right eye. Not the left. It sort of looks like Pink Floyd’s Diamond/Triangle only it is in a zig-zag line and it is vibrating very quickly and has been doing so for the last ten minutes and does not seem to be stopping. It’s gone now but went on for a full half hour. :o) *** “A good writer always writes scared.” -Steinbeck (p.526 Letters) *** MySon reached out! (((MySon))) I had sent him a few short messages when I first heard about Harold and then let him be … he messaged back yesterday and asked if I had any photos of Harold … so I started going through them … photos are such a small aspect of our lives … they take a very small window of time and make it look so much larger. I’m not sure what I am attempting to say … I suppose the photos paint a very one-sided picture … usually of the good moments … you don’t often take photos of the bad ones or the more emotionally charged ones … you usually take photos when you are smiling and having a good time and so it makes for an album of happiness … and I suppose that is what one would want to be left with … the good stuff. Well here is the good stuff we shared: (Removed for Privacy) I mentioned AngelKitty yesterday and came across this one of her, Harold and I … if you look at AngelKitty and my hands … it says more about “us” than any story I could write. (Removed for Privacy) Here is a nice one of Harold and I in India: (Removed for Privacy) I no longer think you can imagine what it will be like if someone will die … you never will and when it happens it’s never like you could have imagined. He doesn’t feel gone at all and yet there is an ache in my chest. You really have to learn the hard way to let people in and let them stay … and it’s not that I ever kicked Harold out of me … but he has been in a remote place in my person for a long time … too long … may I never put someone I love in this place/space again … that somehow the guard will go down enough that I can see them always … not just when it doesn’t hurt. That the hurts held onto can be let go of. I so wish I could have let go of the hurt before he died. What a fucking life we had! All of it. It was so crazy and messy and good and hard and easy and full … it was never not full. It was a very full life. Too full sometimes. I have told myself a lot of stories about Harold … maybe to protect my own heart … I don’t know what the excuse … geezus. MyBoys! I lost two of myBoys this year. Oh god you see things so differently. I am sick of saying it but you do. All the things that seemed so major seem like nothing … like wind! But sometimes you can’t get back or go back or are even wanted back … just because I now “think” that I could have somehow been in Harold's life … who’s to say he would have even wanted me there. It wasn’t like he was begging me to stay. Oh god it’s all so strange. I always knew how rare he was … is … there are not any … not that I have met … like Harold. God you can hold on to so much garbage bullshit *** For whatever reason … this keeps calling out to me: “A good writer always writes scared.” -Steinbeck (p.526 Letters)
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A LIFE LESS WRITTEN ... Who Lives?2/3/2018 A LIFE LESS WRITTEN
Who Lives? Joy A. Sters January 22, 2018 Woke up with thoughts of Weale, which is a first. It still doesn’t seem real, probably a blessing. It’s the same thing about “Him.” Both are ghosts. They vaguely show up and then disappear and show up and disappear. Weaving in and out of what I call “my life,” weaving a web; a ghostly one, not an actual presence; just the sense of one. The last five years of this life have been nothing but ghosts. Halloween everyday. *** The following was started back in September of last year and has been pecked at over the last few months in incremental writing spurts but was finally finished tonight: WRITING PRACTICE/DISCIPLINE #46 Joy A. Sters Title: IT’S ALWAYS GOING TO COME BACK TO WHO? Part: 1B (3 PAGES EDITED) Date Started: September 29, 2017 Time Started: 2:03am Edited: January 22, 2017 Time: 4:31am No matter what; it is always going to come back to “Who?” No matter what you have read, learned, taught, believed, lived … it is always going to come back to: “Who?” Who has done it? This is the most important to See, because the mind is always going to answer: “I do.” And it is up to the one that sees that thought, whether to either accept it or see through it. It doesn’t matter if you tire of the question, avoid the question, don’t believe the answer, run from the answer, attempt to hide or distract yourself from the answer, it is always going to come back to: “Who?” “Who” is it happening to? “Who” lives? “Who” dies? “Who” perceives? You are not going to escape this; that you would even want to is the funny joke. The Cosmic Joke. It is what you are searching for in everything and yet run from at the first sign of discovery. You run from it by looking for a distraction. You run from it by searching for tangible answers. You run from it in attempts at making a “better” ego. Never looking to see “who” is doing all of this? You just blindly continue along with: “I do.” However, it doesn’t change the fact, the absolute fact, that there is no: “I.” You are not capable of doing anything. Who you “think” you are is not capable of doing anything, because a “thought” isn’t real and has no power to act. It doesn’t matter how many times you avoid this, it still remains the same and is always waiting to be re-discovered. Every time you re-discover it; it comes alive in you. It is re-awakened in you. Once you have a firm commitment to Truth, “who?” shows up with greater frequency. When you start to go crazy or enraged, if you are lucky it will show up … like a breeze or a wind in the air of calamity: "Whooo?” And you will begin to see that you are following a story over the Truth. You won’t always want to give up the story, but you will see what you are doing. “Who?” Is the tool of Emptiness; which opens one to Stillness. “Who?” Is the only True Answer; all other answers are lies, distractions from what is True. It requires no belief. It is not a theory, concept or idea. It is only a theory, concept or idea when one hasn’t directly discovered it. It is only a theory, concept, belief or idea, when one only reads about it, such as you are doing now and does not go on to discover it for themselves. There is no in-between. You either investigate or you don’t. One leads to Truth and the latter to lies. In the beginning, the ego hears “Who?” as a preverbal slap across the face. Immediately it stakes the only claim of truth it has with the phrase: “I do.” This phrase is so deeply ingrained in one’s person that it is rarely, if ever questioned. Even after years of interrogation you will be surprised to find that it still remains as the same accepted answer. It is heard and accepted as true even after years of investigating: “The Lie of the I.” Which is why you are reading this now, because you have seen through the Lie and yet still accept the answer: “I do.” It is still accepted as a valid response to an unanswerable question. However, it is not valid, yet serves one well if used as a trigger. It can be maddening how often the trigger is overlooked, yet if you just stop, when you do see, those stoppings are enough to start placing large amounts of Space between you and thought. You won’t see this right away. It will be, possibly after years of vigilance, that one begins to see with enough Space that it is a lie. Then, even when there is acceptance of the thought “I do,” there is enough space there that one “Knows” that it is not so. Knows without doubt that one is not the thought: “I.” Anything that starts with “I” or ends in “I” is simply not true. Slowly but surely, as doubt in the “I” ensues, dependency on all thought begins to lessen. You start to find that you don’t really give much credence to what you once claimed as your own thoughts or anyone else’s. The mind starts to naturally drop down and away, because it has nothing to offer or contribute and even when it “thinks” it does there is Space enough to accept or reject whatever thought appears: Impersonally. The best practice for this comes when you are not distraught and caught up in emotional windstorms. Just close the eyes and ask: “Who?” To whom do these thoughts come? Who Sees the thought … “Who?” Who is aware of the stories running through the mind? Who claims them as their own? And do not accept the thought “I” as a valid answer. Just simply see it as not true. Don’t try to accept or reject it, just see through it as you would any liar that comes to your doorstep. You know when someone else is lying, but you almost never see the one’s you accept as your own. All thoughts are lies. You are aware of it. You acknowledge it as true, but rarely do you see it. Become Committed with a capital “C” to knowing that the “I” is a lie, not even a liar, because even in that one gives validity to what is not true. “I” is simply a lie; simply unTrue. This is what you become Committed to Knowing. This is what becomes one’s True Life’s Work. Keep the head bowed to Emptiness. When the head is currently raised, it is raised to the allegiance to the lie. When it is bowed, it is in submission to the Truth. The Truth of who you Truly Are. When the head bows, it bows to itSelf: To One’s True Nature. You will not escape this question, not this lifetime, this very Lucky Lifetime. Namaste. *** Here it is whittled down to one page: WRITING PRACTICE/DISCIPLINE #46 Joy A. Sters Title: IT’S ALWAYS GOING TO BOIL DOWN TO WHO? Part: 1a (1 PAGE EDITED) Date Started: September 29, 2017 Time Started: 2:03am Finished: January 22, 2017 Time: 4:38am No matter what; it is always going to come back to “Who?” No matter what you have read, learned, taught, believed, lived … it is always going to come back to: “Who?” Who has done it? This is the most important to See, because the mind is always going to answer: “I do.” And it is up to the one that sees that thought, whether to either accept it or see through it. It doesn’t matter if you tire of the question, avoid the question, don’t believe the answer, run from the answer, attempt to hide or distract yourself from the answer, it is always going to come back to: “Who?” “Who” is it happening to? “Who” lives? “Who” dies? “Who” perceives? You are not going to escape this; that you would even is The Cosmic Joke. It is what you are searching for in everything and yet run from at the first sign of discovery. You run from it by looking for a distraction. You run from it by searching for tangible answers. You run from it in attempts at making a “better” ego. Never looking to see “who” is doing all of this? You just blindly continue along with the thought; “I do.” However, it doesn’t change the fact, the absolute fact, that there is no “I.” You are not capable of doing anything. Who you “think” you are is not capable of doing anything, because a “thought” isn’t real and has no power to act. It doesn’t matter how many times you avoid this, it still remains the same and is always waiting to be re-discovered. Every time you re-discover it; it comes alive in you. It is re-awakened in you. Become Committed with a capital “C” to knowing that the “I” is a lie. Become Committed to Knowing that is True and as you do it becomes one’s True Life’s Work. Keep the head bowed to Emptiness. When the head is currently raised, it is raised to the allegiance to the lie. When it is bowed, it is in submission to the Truth. The Truth of who you Truly Are. When the head bows, it bows to itSelf, to One’s True Nature. You will not escape this question, not this lifetime, this very Lucky Lifetime. Namaste. *** Here it is whittled down to one sentence: WRITING PRACTICE/DISCIPLINE #46 Joy A. Sters Title: IT’S ALWAYS GOING TO COME BACK TO WHO? Part: 1a (1 SENTENCE EDITED) Date Started: September 29, 2017 Time Started: 2:03am Finished: January 22, 2017 Time: 4:43am No matter what you have read, learned, taught, believed, lived … it is always going to come back to “Who?” who has done it? *** It’s been a few daze and am just now reading on STEINBECK: A LIFE IN LETTERS … which I’ve been reading on sort like sipping on a cup of coffee for the last month or so while being immersed in ANNE SEXTON’s bio … but now am getting fully sucked in. He is so different in so many ways from ANNE but very similar as well … he just processes life differently but some of the foundation of their life seems very similar … however, he is very calm and she was very animated. He drinks people in and then can write about people so very well or at least it seems … she more or less could only write of herself as that is all she knew … but she knew herself well. I have only read TRAVELS WITH CHARLIE so far but am thinking I will pick up OF MICE AND MEN soon … not sure … I have already seen the movie but imagine the book is very different. I loved the movie. Of course John is another author that WAYNEJI turned me on to. I am going to write all of letter in because I just read it and it has come up to repeat here. It is a description of a girl from MICE AND MEN that he is explaining to an actress who is going to play her on the stage version and wants to know more about the character but the character sounds so much like my character and maybe most women in general that it seems worth repeating here … most women I meet are this guarded … in fact I just had a conversation with a woman like this just the other day … she connected with me over Weale’s Death … we had all been very close at one time as close as our cemented over hearts would allow and at the end of the conversation she cut off all ties with me (again) because I wouldn’t promise that I wouldn’t share what she shares with me … with Wayneji … I said I could promise that I would let her know if I did but that I couldn’t promise that I wouldn’t do it and this made her mad but not for the reasons she claims which is that it is a break in trust and confidentiality because we always shared everything with Wayneji and nothing ever happened to her because of it her fears have nothing to do with me or Wayneji. The things that came about for our sharing were not anything we wouldn’t have desperately wanted. In many ways I think she said it just to get me to do it … to have the Light of Wayneji shone in her direction … but as of right now nothing has come of any of it … at least not to the naked eye. So here is the writing … I sort of wish I had the Kindle version because it is a bit long but I bought a used printed copy … a very old one that smells delicious. I stick my nose in it quite often and now know why people say: “Get your nose out of that book!” Because they smell so good. It is rather sad that dead trees smell good. Live ones smell best. Ok here we go: Los Gatos, 1938 Dear Miss Luce: Annie Laurie says you are worried about your playing of the part of Curley’s wife although from the reviews it appears that you are playing it marvelously. I am deeply grateful to you and to the others in the cast for your feeling about the play. You have surely made it much more than it was by such a feeling. About the girl—I don’t know of course what you think about her, but perhaps if I should tell you a little about her as I know her, it might clear your feeling about her. She grew up in an atmosphere of fighting and suspicion. Quite early she learned that she must never trust any one but she was never able to carry out what she learned. A natural trustfulness broke through constantly and every time it did, she got hurt. Her moral training was most rigid. She was told over and over that she must remain a virgin because that was the only way she could get a husband. This was harped on so often that it became a fixation. It would have been impossible to seduce her. She had only that one thing to sell and she knew it. Now, she was trained by threat not only at home but by other kids. And any show of fear or weakness Brough an instant persecution. She learned she had to be hard to cover her fright. And automatically she became hardest when she was most frightened. She is a nice, kind girl and not a floozy. No man has ever considered her as anything except a girl to try to make. She has never talked to a man except in a sexual fencing conversation. She is not highly sexed particularly, but knows instinctively that if she is to be noticed at all, it will be because someone finds her sexually desirable. As to her actual sexual life—she has had none except with Curley and there has probably been no consummation there since Curley would not consider her gratification and would probably be suspicious if she had any. Consequently she is a little starved. She knows utterly nothing about sex except the mass of misinformation girls tell one another. If anyone—a man or a woman—ever gave her a break—treated her like a person—she would be a slave to that person. Her craving for contact is immense but she, with her background, is incapable of conceiving any contact without some sexual context. With all of this—if you knew her, if you could ever break down the thousand little defenses she has built up, you would find a nice person, an honest person, and you would end up by loving her. But such a thing can never happen. I hope you won’t think I’m preaching. I’ve known this girl and I’m just trying to tell you what she is like. She is afraid of everyone in the world. You’ve known girls like that, haven’t you? You can see them in Central Park on a hot night. They travel in groups for protection. They pretend to be wise and hard and voluptuous. I have a feeling that you know all of this and that you are doing all of this. Please forgive me if I seem to intrude on your job. I don’t intend to and I am only writing this because Annie Laurie said you wondered about the girl. It’s a devil of a hard part. I am very happy that you have it. Sincerely, ~John Steinbeck (p. 154-155, Life in Letters) It’s not that the story is the exact match with my life, Rebz life or this woman he writes above … but it is like most humans, isn’t it? The stories are different; the end result the same. Most humans are not very trusting, want to be, but aren’t. It’s not even gender specific. We are all so guarded; even when we think the guard is down. But life is a funny and miraculous thing and opens us when we least expect it. *** Another quote from JOHN, it is such a good book on being a Writer … especially when you Know, but don’t know you are one. Sort of like Heart and mind. The Heart Knows; the mind is clueless: “I’ve been writing on the novel (about vigilantes) but I’ve had to destroy it several times.” He wrote Elizabeth Otis shortly afterwards. “I don’t seem to know any more about writing a novel than I did ten years ago. You’d think I would learn. I suppose I could dash it off, but I want this one to be a pretty good one. There’s another difficulty too. I’m trying to write history while it is happening and I don’t want to be wrong.” (p. 162) If you ever read this book … read that letter about what LIFE magazine did or actually didn’t do … there are always so many fuct up things that happen in life. But also you never really see the whole picture and since everything unfolds perfectly there are really no bad guys, but it sure can seem like it. Anyway I put that paragraph in because one time a History teacher at SOU asked me what I was going to write about in regard to History and I was surprised to hear myself say: I am writing History right now! I am in history and writing about it right now. However there also had been the idea at the time to write about Psychedelics and Spiritual Teachers in the 20th Century. However, since that time … I have seen that so much has already been written it’s rather pointless. Yet I still write! JOHN comes through as such a Classy Man. *** It’s been a few daze … but you don’t know that unless I tell you … because I have stopped using dates … for the most part. Not for any particular reason … it used to be because it felt as if these writings are stalked … as if there are eyes/I’s peering in on it … but that has subsided and the dates haven’t come back. So it’s been a few daze and tonight am once again reading on STEINBECK and am just so impressed with him as a man … as a human … as a fellow writer … even though I am not nearly his league I am still in The Calling. Reading him makes for the realization that I have been raised in a very different generation … I hear it in the way he is able to stand his ground and in a sense has a firm foundation in what he Sees or how he Sees something coming into fruition. Well, let me let his words say it to you and then you can assess if it comes through that way for you: “One other thing—I am not writing a satisfying story. I‘ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied. And still one more thing—I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are written.” (p. 179, Letters) He is speaking about GRAPES OF WRATH which I have not read but have seen the movie and sort of wish I hadn’t. Hopefully there will be time in this life to finally get to read this work. There are so few people like him anymore. Not stubborn people … there are tons of them … that is not what I am talking about … I am talking about people who have Vision and are not willing to compromise. The world I currently live in is built on people that will compromise what they “think” they believe in … at a drop of a dime. But this is also the big difference … for STEINBECK … it is not a belief … it is his Character … it is the make of of his Character … it wouldn’t be the compromise of an idea but of himself. Unrelated to the above … he also knows his work so well … his intention … what he attempts to get across to the reader: “I know that books lead to a strong deep climax. This one doesn’t except by implication and the reader must bring the implication to it. If he doesn’t, it wasn’t a book for him to read. Throughout I’ve tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness. There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself.” (p. 178-179) *** Thoughts of Him have still had me going a bit mad, loopy, looney. It’s the Happy Time … although starting to fade … so it is to be expected. There was a bit of snow also this morning, which of course, is a reminder of Him, though I no longer remember how these two things linked … Him and Snow? But they have … they have linked together in the mind’s eye and today when it started to snow … the Joy of first seeing it was torn in half … there was still some of the Joy of seeing the First Flakes but a sadness was also upon my Heart … it felt Heavy and lessened the want to go outside and play in it. In fact it was so Heavy I wondered if it had actually made the snow stop or if He had Heard it and stopped it Himself. Because it stopped. It looked as if it were going to be a big ole storm and then it just trickled down to nothing and the sun came out and then it rained on and off the rest of the day. *** “The dead sleep with their eyes open my grandfather would say. They are watching you from the past.” -President Frank Underwood (House of Cards) And: “You know people, you know them for years and then suddenly they are like strangers in your own kitchen. Familiar can turn foreign on a dime.” -President Underwood (House of Cards) And: “Oh, let it go. It’s done.” -Former President Underwood (House of Cards) Genius. In so many ways this show is Genius. Thank you DAVE CHAPPELLE for turning me on to it. I think SPACEY did most of the writing, acting, directing as well? Some of the scenes are so very well done and visually, cinematically, the actors! OMG it is so good! So very good. I used to think that Netflix only created crap shows but they have won me over since OITNB, THE CROWN and now HOUSE OF CARDS … each one has really just been mind opening and at times blowing and some of them that I have seen could stand alone as motion picture. I have seen some episodes of THE CROWN that I thought could have been Movies for the big screen they were done so well. I don’t know anything about Kevin Spacey’s personal life … but he is a fucking GENIUS of an Actor. I am not saying he doesn’t have some things in his past he needs to correct … but isn’t ruining his career just making two wrongs? Wouldn’t it be more helpful to have the two or however many people are involved work it out. I don’t mean with monetary reward either … I mean really clearing the air out. Going to the person(s) you have caused trauma/drama too and working it out somehow to make amends? Destroying two lives does make sense, does not serve anyone. SPACEY has done for me what no one has done since JAMES GANDOLFINI in THE SOPRANOS … he has made me Love the Bad Guy. *** Just found out “Dan” in Spanish means “Give.” *** “The Vacuum can only be a Vacuum; when there is nothing there.” -Wayneji (June 5, 2003) *** Human is a very strange creature. It does some very strange things … hence the WRITING PRACTICE: DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH ANYTHING THE EGO DOES. John Steinbeck seems to really have been tested in this regard: Many years later he wrote to his friend Chase Horton: “Let me tell you a story. When The Grapes of Wrath got loose, a lot of people were pretty mad at me. The undersheriff of Santa Clara County was a friend of mine and he told me as follows—‘Don’t you go into any hotel room alone. Keep records of every minute and when you are off the ranch travel with one or two friends but particularly, don’t stay in a hotel alone.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. He said, ‘Maybe I’m sticking my neck out but the boys got a rape case set up for you. You get alone in a hotel and a dame will come in, tear off her clothes, scratch her face and scream and you try to talk yourself out of that one. They won’t touch your book but there’s easier ways.” (p. 187) Geez! This was in 1939! It is a strange and awful world at times. People will do awful things. For what? He does go on to say that all the meddling only sold more books. “The two most important [things], I suppose—at least they seem so to me — are freedom from respectability and most important — freedom from the necessity of being consistent.” (p. 193, Letters) This book of Letters is like a Treasure Chest falling in ones lap … I’ve completely forgotten about Kerouac and Sextons Letters as they pale so in comparison with Steinbeck but please do not hold this against them … the books are so different … such completely different characters and John is just much needed at this time. He is a much needed Force of energy because things have been so low for so long and here is a man where the whole world is attacking him and he rises up. You really have to read between the lines but he is such a Great Man of Character and yet it is his lack of Character that makes him so Great! “I want this book to be itself with no history and no writer.” (p. 181, Letters) He is saying what has been coming up so clearly in here for years … the Writer is not the Author. He knows, he Knows it too! Do most Writers? Also, he is a writer who is on the precipice of war and is beginning to sense its coming. The sensitive often do. I suppose. I don’t like to “think” that war is coming … but sometimes it is felt. Like a march almost. A Heart Vibration. This will be the first World War with women actively fighting in it. Speaking of Marching, just this past weekend there was a women’s march … maybe this is a woman’s war? Always something. Always something to fight about. We live in heaven and constantly create hell. For what? To be right. People think happiness is being right … I am or have been one among them. But that is just a momentary happiness … not true and lasting happiness. It is like the momentary peace between wars. It is not really peace … it is just the momentary contentment of being right. But people never keep whatever popular idea of what “right” is for very long and as soon as the tides sway … and the next thing to be “right” about flares up and the next war appears. It’s the children who always suffer war. Never the men and women who are too busy blood-lusting for it. It is the Children … Earth’s Children who sacrifice the most. The Ageless, Timeless Child. *** “I was washed up and now I’m alive again, with work to be done and worth doing.” -John Steinbeck (p. 197, Letters) *** John would use cocaine to relax plants before killing them … although he says it is quite expensive to do so, even back then: “I’m doing (to me) fascinating work trying to relax anemones before killing them. They are terribly retractile and must be thoroughly anesthetized before the formalin is introduced. Cocaine will do it but that is expensive.” (p. 197, Letters) I already know that it is just as horrible for a plant to be killed as it is an other living species and animal … they are no different from human. I don’t like knowing this. I don’t like killing and yet am nearly maniacal about eating. Strange what he does find to work: “It is — heavy mixture of oxygen in the water which gets them very drunk, then a weak solution of aspirin (believe it or not). When they are deeply inert—a shot of epsom salts, fairly strong solution and after six hours a formalin wick. I foozled it last week with too much aspirin, but I think it will work when I get the amounts worked out and that takes many tries. Sound silly?” -John (p. 198, Letters) Wayneji suggested always that we put aspirin in the vase with cut flowers. He also would share with us to blow air with the mouth into the bottom of the cut stem. When I would do this I would always get the utter sense of the complete futility of the attempt to breath back in what had been so callously (in most cases) cut off. Steinbeck saw a Manta Ray 60 Feet Across!!!! Sixty Feet! OMG God! I wonder if humans allow such a specimen to exist anymore or if they have killed them all by now. Steinbeck is also a hunter … but just mentioned they went Bighorn Sheep hunting and he was happy to have found no sheep. :o) “The people we meet on the shore have never heard of Europe and they seem to be better for it. This whole trip is doing what we had hoped it might, given us a world picture not dominated by Hitler and Moscow but something more vital and surviving than either. From the simple good Indians on the shore to the invertebrates there is a Truer thing than ideologies.” (p. 201, Letters) *** The energy started up but then there were distractions and it fizzled a bit but there was a push to keep going with whatever would come. It was going to be titled Beautiful … but then after the distraction the whole thing morphed. BEAUTY (Previously titled Beautiful) Joy A. Sters January 26, 2018, 2am (Written in The Sacred Space) Beauty, they say … “Is in the eye of The Beholder.” Beheld and beholden in the one that Sees … Light in another. The Dreamer; Dreams The Seer; Sees Beauty Reins; Entwined in these. Light Burst Forth What Darkness Hides. What is Reached for is Lost In Rising Tides. A Moment Shared A Lingering On. A Passing of Night. A Raging Storm. The Rising Dawn … These Mysteries Surface Time and Again Allowing the Beauty To be Discovered From withIN. Well, it’s not anywhere near what it seemed it would be. *** Recently there was a Glimpse or a Flash of Seeing everything out of the eyes as The Mind. No separation. Simply Mind … which included everything about what I think I am … this body (i.e. mind). It was quite pleasant but didn’t last very long. Sort of similar to putting on Virtual Realty goggles except that the body itself is the Goggles. *** Ha! *** Someone bought my house. :o( I know it wasn’t my fucking house but still. :o( Sore Loser! Yes I am. *** “I halfway believe that I dreamed you.” -John Steinbeck (1943-48) *** Some of the reporters over here are viciously resentful of me and some are very kind. But every once in a while one of them goes out of his way to tell me how much my stuff stinks. I think they are probably right. I get very tired of it. -John (Letters p.259) *** Interesting: “Also I have a symptom or two that you will probably recognize. Sudden blank brain—nit knowing who or what I am. They only last for a few seconds and are followed by a blinding headache which lasts a few seconds and then alright.” -John (Letters p. 265) *** “And I do want to go sit out on the rocks and fish and not catch anything.” -John (Letters, p. 271) *** “Among other unpleasant things, modern war is the most dishonest thing imaginable.” -John (Letters, p. 273) *** What a surprise to just read the following: “I have been planting cypress trees to fill in some of the old ones that have died. They seem to belong here. The Monterey Cypress is unique in the world except for one part of China, and the myth is that the Chinese explorers planted them here. It is known that the Chinese planted trees instead of flags as a token of discovery.” -John (Letters, p. 276) It is only interesting because i have never heard anyone that I can recall ever mentioning Cypress trees. *** It’s taken a while but I finally was able to sit down and write Tony back: Hey T ... for weeks you have been on the mind and I have wanted to write but just have not been able, until just now to get myself to do it. Your email about "getting out soon" sort of set something off inside of me ... like a trigger ... I was flooded ... inundated with the past ... I had no idea I was holding on to so much about and in many ways against you. Maybe it was similar to those times that you have sent letters out to people sharing that you saw what you did and apologizing ... I was seeing it like that ... as if I were writing you a letter I wasn't going to send ... because I saw that when you would send those letters ... it really left no room for the person to say ... Hey, wait a minute ... this doesn't exactly get you off the hook! But because you sent the letter and never really connected with the person (i.e. my mom in this instance I am thinking about) it sort of cleared the air for you and left a pile of shit on her/our doorstep. Now I am not saying that what you sent to my mom all those years ago and to the many others you sent them to was crap but it came through a few weeks ago as a rather crappy thing to do to a person, because I had thought of sending a letter to you and spilling out all the things that I was finding still hard on my heart about you and the trigger to all of it was you getting out of jail because we have done this on a few occasions now and the person that gets out is not often the person that wrote the letters or in this case emails all those years, months or whatever length of time. The "you" that is in prison is only one aspect of you and in many ways, it is the humblest and easiest aspect to interact with ... the one that gets out of prison not so much and usually after a very short time just disappears off the radar, but that was then and this is now. However, I was surprised to see how much anger I still had coming up around your person ... there were just so many things I was seeing that I wanted some "better" aspect of yourself to do something about ... but you see it is all in the past ... there is nothing that can be any other way ... things just went how they went ... but it has taken me weeks to even get to the point where I could write you anything at all without it being in an attacking way and maybe even this is ... I don't know but I don't mean it to be. Most of what came up is around Mikel but not all of it and so there is probably much of the Grieving processes still being gone through. On top of that ... just last week my ex-husband died. It was unexpected and has been a rather crushing blow unfolding upon my person and there has been a great sense of failing him ... the things that you see after someone you love dies are very different from what you experience of them when they are alive and it is very saddening to see how great the contrast is. He was/is a good man and am lucky to have known him. We were together a long time and I always sort of thought we would be hanging around each other to the very end ... but the very end came way quicker for him than I would have imagined and now all chance of anything imagined is just fantasy. So it's been a challenging couple of weeks, to say the least. One of the things that came up while I was going through whatever that was I went through in regards to you .... is that your children will probably have similar feelings toward you and it came up to share with you ... though completely up to you whether you heed what is shared ... that you face them defenseless ... don't have excuses for any of your behavior ... just stand there and let them say it how they see it because that is how it is for them ... whether true or not ... it is how they see it and if you can stand there ... sort of with your hands down and just willing to be seen as something you would rather not be seen as ... and just Listen to what they have had to go through ... what they feel they have lost in their life around you or whatever it is that they have coming up for them ... if you can allow them to have that ... you will give them a Gift that is Huge beyond what most can imagine. You see in the end ... no one is really right ... we just have ways we wish things would have been ... but never were ... and we just want to be heard and accepted which is why you wrote to my mom and me asking for forgiveness all those many times ... well, you have it now ... you are forgiven for anything that has transpired between you and I and I know it is the same for my mother ... but it has been time, in a sense that has healed these things and of course you and I coming back together time and again and sort of hashing it out. Now I am not saying to let your children, should anything ever come about, to treat you like shit ... I am not saying that at all ... I am just saying to Hear them and for a short time ... bare the weight of blame without defending yourself against it and not belittling yourself for it either ... just be neutral if you can ... like a Tree ... sometimes when I am very distraught I will go up into the forest and sob to a Tree and hold onto it and then I give it a big old hug and sometimes a kiss and thank it for Hearing me ... and there is always a great relief and often times release in me ... in fact it happened with what I was going through with you ... the real Healing came one day when I went up into the Forest and I just broke down and was basically insane with anger and frustration and then found myself holding on to a Tree and sobbing and then the air cleared and some pretty deep and profound insights appeared. So if you can be that Tree for a time ... especially if you ever go to have a relationship that is anything more than superficial with your children ... this may be helpful in that regard and I am Hearing it for myself as well. If you think I have escaped the anger of my children because I actually was there in their lives you would be wrong ... whether a parent stays or leaves there is always stuff to process out with one's children because we all see the world and our parts in it so differently ... but none of us are correct ... we are all wrong in the way we see things ... it's not about trying to become right ... it's about allowing the space to be heard ... whether we believe it right or wrong or anything in between. I often wish I could Hear more clearly than I can type because the words flow out but aren't taken in as easily or completely. Through the years of sharing with you ... everything that I have ever said/written has also been processed in my person ... you may have thought that you were going through some of it alone but I was and am always going through it with you. I will close now and let you process some of this through. ~JoySters *** I know that time didn’t create the forgiveness … but I didn’t want to preach or sound like this is about teaching him anything … it’s been coming up since Wayneji mentioned the tendency in my person to do so … but once you see that things cannot be any other way than how they are it takes the edge off the concept of “forgiveness” and eventually wipes the concept away completely … but it can be a slow and gradual process. It certainly has been and is here … I still so often forget that things are how they are not how you want them to be … the obvious is not often obvious. It also doesn’t make life any easier … but it does make you more Aware of how you lie to yourself about it. *** First dream in over a month and the first remembered, recalled or written down of the year: DANWEALE - E - AND THE T (Dream) Sunday, January 28, 2018 8-10am Had a dream about Weale. Don’t remember all that much about it now but we were living in a house somewhere with Tman and Pete. I was working at a place I didn’t like very much … and had come home for lunch and Dan was there and Tman and Pete too. Dan had snagged some E and we decided to take some before going back to work. He breaks them in half … they are Pure White … we take it and he leaves and I can’t find my keys to the car. Tman is not interested in helping find them and is playing with Pete … he is young … maybe 5 to 8 years old … it’s hard to say. I find a set and go out to the back yard … it is a beautiful back yard and I feel more at home in it than in the house … two neighbors are out there and they want something from me that I can no longer recall what as the dream is fading fast … it was a long one with sexual undertones. I get to a car … can’t tell what kind and get in and try to start it but it’s the wrong keys and I realize I am not going to get back to work. But then I do … it’s an office a bunch of stories high and made mostly of glass but not colored it is very clear and it makes it very bright inside. There are cubicles but you can’t see the walls. I am “high” but no one can seem to tell. I feel very good and barely mind being there. That is all that is remembered. It wasn’t remembered at all … until it just popped into the mind’s eye a few minutes ago which was hours after having the dream. It was nice to see Weale and not be angry with him. I wasn’t angry in the dream at all … we were getting on quite well. He was kind and being what I would call his basic normal self. When he is just chill and not stressed and worried about anything … that Dan was nice to be around and I enjoyed that Dan a lot and if we were both in that space at the same time it was super awesome … which basically was how this dream was. We were both sort of in “chill” space. You don’t know this, very few do, but Dan and I got married on E. I started to get cold feet, but not for the reasons one might think. I felt too ugly to get married. How strange huh? I looked in the mirror and all I could see was this really ugly person and I didn’t want to leave the hotel room. I was panicked. This is one of the greatest things in my relationship with Dan is that he sort of understood the mental illness or what I go through because he had taken so many psychedelics. If he hadn’t he wouldn’t understand the insanity that arises. I mean he brought E with him to our Wedding … that is a bit out the norm … but he did and there was no intention to take any before the ceremony … until this happened … there was no way I would have gone. It is very hard for me to recall now because we took it and had such a good time and a very good ceremony … but I wouldn’t have budged out of that room without E. I had never seen myself so ugly before. I have seen this face morph many, many times but this was a very different kind of ugly and I couldn’t shake it. You could say I wasn’t supposed to but here’s what happened. Dan showed up and I took some E … as did he … we decided to do it together and the rest is history. I spent a long time after that feeling that ugly though. Not as intensely as that day but for the next few years I just felt ugly. It’s shifted … sometimes I see it but now it is just an aspect of this character that sometimes but not with much frequency shows up. There is so much that shows up in my person you don’t get too attached to any one of them. Now there is a bit of tension arising but that dream had actually been nice and even relaxing. I felt lucky for a long time to be with Weale. He was usually pretty easy going. If he was tired or grumbly … look out … but I didn’t know that for a long time and we had many ugly fights before I did and would just avoid him when he was in that space. However we eventually started to avoid each other all the time to the point we were living together alone. And we had so many fights about things that were so very dumb … but those dumb things ruined our marriage. I didn’t like him very much by the time we split up and I was madly for him when we met. I was inside out upside down madly. But you get to know someone like you know yourself and sometimes you know them more than you know you because you are watching them so much and not yourself. I blamed him for a lot of things that really changed him from the man I fell in love with. Because he was willing to change and then I liked the change even less than what I had wanted to change in the first place. But this was not seen until long after we had split up. That was very hard. I didn’t see a life without him. It just wasn’t a concept that we wouldn’t be together but we weren’t and he was pulling further and further away all the time and it wasn’t long after he left that I started falling for someone else and that was all very strange. I was super surprised when Dan moved away. I was scared and disappointed and surprised. In retro anyway. It all looks so different looking back. Dan even said to me that I or he one of us would spend our days reflecting. I didn’t know what he was implying at the time but it “Rang” as something profound when he said it. Sort of like it was echoing throughout the mind. I miss him every time he goes away. I have missed him and had to go through some pain with each move he has made over the last couple of years. We were so close. I would say there was nothing we didn’t know about one another. I thought he had balls to leave me. I was proud to see them. But then I was pissed he had them. He could be so cocky and arrogant. Really and truly like princely kind of shit. I’d think I was married to royalty sometimes … but that aspect of him didn’t stay too long either … it was like facing his three year old self and that kid was a brat. When he came around I would have Tman and Weale to reckon with. Boy they both knew how to push my buttons. But sometimes it would go too far and they often would feel badly, but it would be too late and a certain kind of damage was done. You can only be a punching bag for so long before you just get smooshy … you can’t take a punch anymore. Nothing firm about you. I was a squishy sqooshy mess. I feel a bit frightened without Dan in the world with me. I felt the same when Mark left but in a much more devastating kind of way. There is something you kind of take for granted where you have someone in the world you can touch base with if the floor falls out and I don’t even know what I actually mean by that, but I know that if anything major ever happened they would be there. I feel it now like I have lost another one of my men. My Boys. Two of myBoys this year. Mikel would have had my back too. I don’t know if they thought that about me but I hope so. Anytime Mikel had reached out in a sort of desperation I had been there … this last time he didn’t really reach out … not like he would if he wanted me to intervene. I am just trying to understand something. Just letting it go now. *** PIG POT PIE (Dream) Sunday, January 28, 2018 8-11pm Had another dream … don’t remember much about this one except being in a house in the kitchen with a man who was cooking … he was fat and grubby looking in appearance and had me keep checking on the pigs that were in the oven. It was disgusting … there were all kinds of pig body parts … especially heads and I had to keep turning them in this massive pan and blood and puss was splattering everywhere. Wouldn’t even have put the above dream in here as it is/was rather disturbing, except that the first thing that was read this evening is about pigs: “The letter is unsigned. Instead it is stamped with a drawing of “Pigasus,” the flying pig which Steinbeck used throughout his life as a symbol of himself, either-bound but aspiring. Sometimes the pun is spelled with Greek letters and often it is accompanied by the motto “Ad Astra Per Alia Porci” (“To the stars on the wings of a pig”): “a lumbering soul but trying to fly,” he once explained it and another time, “not enough wingspread but plenty of intention.” (p.296, Letters Steinbeck) It was the first thing the eyes laid on after that dream so it seems(ed) ironically strange. January 29th, 20181/29/2018 A LIFE LESS WRITTEN
Who Dies? Joy A. Sters January 19, 2018 VANISHED Joy A. Sters January 19, 2018, 1:06am (Written in The Sacred Space) Years ago … So many moons … You Vanished from my View Taking with you all I knew of You and I How can one’s memory Be wiped so clean? Years spent holding hands Was all a dream. You took our life Walked out the door Distanced yourself Gave no more. Are you closer now? Can you get into all the places I tried to keep you out of? I didn’t want you there. I didn’t want you to know That you could hurt me. So angry. So angry with you. So angry. It was probably you that was always with me As I dreamed of someone else. I could never be with you. I held so much against you. I didn’t want to be the strong one. I wanted you to be so much. I wanted you to be everything I couldn’t, wouldn’t? I could never see you. It was the same with Mikel. I could never see you. You Vanished And I did not search for you. You called and I slammed the door. All I could see is you mocking me. You can’t rage against someone who Just disappears. Vanishes. You just … Disappeared. Vanished. Gone. I always thought we would Come back together. Be Friends. True Friends. I did think that. We had too much in common. Were so much alike To not come back together again. But we won’t now. Or we have more fully. Who can ever say. I know where you Truly Live. I will always remember … How scared we were … Like two little children Standing in front of a candy store. You and I. You were afraid to go in. So was I. So was I. But I took your hand And we walked in together. I will never forget that. In that we are Forever Brothers. I do know how alone you were. I know it right now. *** The other day … in the last document of A LIFE LESS WRITTEN # 05 I got up and deleted or typed over: “God has no voice, but uses all voices.” Or something like that or similar … it is no longer in memory but when that came through it was a very powerful statement … one that was not intellectually understood but completely grokked. However, then something in my person shifted and I didn’t want the insight. I wanted it to go away and so this was typed over it before the document was ended: “When I die it will be a relief for most people, which is a pretty good gift to give someone … most people when someone they know dies end up with grief and pain and anger and agony pretty sucky fuct up gifts, but the gift of relief! That’s amazing!” Now it is two daze later and someone I was very close to at one time has passed. Has died. Has Vanished. And it is so strange because all of the recent Writing … in looking back … in retrospect is as if it is leading up to this as if the intuitive side was/is preparing the blow to not be so great. You see everything so differently after someone you love dies. You see everything very differently. It’s been raining for two daze. I was looking at death as if it would be my own … as if life is preparing me to die … removing so many “others” from my person. Maybe it still is so, but I was surprised to hear you passed. I don’t feel it. Not at the moment. What a very strange thing life is and death is and life is after … after the ones you love leave. You left me a very long time ago. It feels long now. It feels very long ago. You said I was leaving you … even though you walked out the door. I didn’t think you were lying. I just didn’t see it as true. I still don’t. I don’t see it as true or untrue … I just don’t see it. Nothing about how I once saw this life is true. Nothing. I don’t know if I will live. I mean really live. Live fully. I don’t know if I have that ability or if that ability will come into fruition. I keep waiting for something to open me. Nothing does. I want someone to come and open the Fortress doors, but I keep building thicker walls. Did you? Did you build thick walls while you were away? I don’t want to cry. If I cry it must be for you. Not for me. No more tears for me. I felt you asking for me. One occasion … one which I didn’t write anything down. I never wrote about you. Almost never. I never questioned why … well maybe once or twice but I never wanted to say a bad thing about you and sometimes I was oozing at the seams with them. But it was never because you are bad and maybe that is why it was not written because it was just venting. Venting one’s own frustrations with themselves and projecting it on the “other.” Maybe I always knew that even though unconscious. I was not coming back. I couldn’t turn around. I gave myself away … to someone else … without intention and certainly not to hurt or get even with you. I know you know that. I know you know I didn’t do things to hurt you. I don’t think you did either. Ok maybe once or twice I thought it but I figured you had to process certain things out. Your family must be taking this hard. I am so glad you were close with your mom and began to grow closer with your dad. I wish I was not such a self-absorbed person and could have been there for you more. I am so glad you knew I love you. I had thought many things about “us” but there has never been any doubt about the love … the Love … The Love. MyBrother. Will you make me Speak. Will you make me Speak now? Nothing ever comes to be Said. Words do not come. These are not Words. Not really. I know you know what I mean. The Rain sounds beautiful. So much of life just slips right through one’s fingers. It is so easy to miss someone that is dead and so hard to reach out to the living. Oh my god we showed each other so much didn’t we! There are so many doors I can now walk through because we did together. Hard Times. Very Hard Times. Which is probably why so much was held against you. Did you hold much against me? I don’t know how or why you have died. You never had too much holding you together. I owe so much to you but not in a way most would hear that word. “Owe.” I Owe things that can never be repaid only Gifted in the Moment one is in. Be Alive in me. Ok? Be Alive in me. Give me the balls I couldn’t have when you were Alive. Help me to Live before I die so that others can “Owe” Gifts they can Pay Forward. Help me not be so afraid of Love. Of Loving. Don’t let your Life be wasted on me. I am coming into the Happy Time right now … thank God because if this had happened last week I might be there with you. And why I am thanking God for that I don’t know. This last Dark Time was so intense that I was actually going back to my 14 years old self and attempting to convince it to really kill itself. It seems crazy now. But I couldn’t see that it would get better for that one … that 14 year old one … only worse and worse and worse and so I sort of begged it to find pills that would really do the trick. At 14 I would wipe out everything. Everyone. Anything after the age of 14 others would be deeply affected. I would be fucking up more people than I can handle. Anyway. Whatever. Did you have to go through that? Was the Dark Time I had last week or the week before or whenever that was … was it that hard for you too? I have forgotten your Dark Times but you had them. I can only vaguely remember the thoughts that would have you spinning … did they come back? … To haunt you? I want to write to Wayneji … but say what? Sorry you lost another son. You were a son to him … a Son for a time. He took you so far under his wing you were barely visible at times. You took him in too huh? His shoes are too big for anyone and I wanted you to wear them so badly but when you did I all I would see was how big they are. I am a blind one walking. You know who told me you passed? Patrick. He didn’t even tell me he just said something about being shocked. I only read it a few hours ago and it is from a few daze ago … I went to your Facebook of all things … I already knew before I got there … but I went for confirmation … how sad huh … that is how distanced I am from life … that I find out about death of someone so very close to me at one time … so very close and yet now so far that Facebook is the announcement? I don’t know how in the world Tman is taking this. I don’t know what your relationship with him has been like the last five years. Not a clue. I know you went to Africa together a few years ago and am so glad you did that. I haven’t talked to Tman. Not in months … well actually not in years but I haven’t shared words with him in months. There is a WRITING PRACTICE that came through from one of Wayneji’s Pointings that: “Every Death is your own.” Have you touched many lives since we parted ways? This man says this about you: Alexander Diaz January 17 at 11:34pm · My good friend Dan Weale passed away on Monday, I received the news today. Not many people knew about Dan, but he was my neighbor up until a year ago. When I first met Dan, I thought he was a square. It wasn’t until after a few months of Dan living next to me that I learned he was far from that. Dan earned his CPA at a young age, then decided the corporate life wasn’t for him and moved up north to assess property value, many years later he moved down to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. Once Dan and I got to know each other and became good friends it was a daily ritual that I would come barging in after work to share our stories for the day. I learned a lot from Dan, I learned to not take life so serious. I learned that you can have it all, but it’s easier to have nothing. I looked up to him in certain ways. He was at times the cool dad that I always wanted. In many ways, my friendship with Dan shaped a lot of who i am today. I’m not sure why I’m writing this, but I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. So this is my goodbye. See you in the afterlife, Weale. You really are a good friend but a very challenging Lover/Husband. I know you absolutely can say the same about me so this isn’t about that. I have taken a long time to heal from our relationship. But even the last few months things have been shifting … I have seen it but I also saw that I couldn’t ever go back. Not that you were asking but it came up a few times as if you were and it just didn’t ever seem possible. All the old patterns would come up. But you kept/keep touching lives … that’s what you do … that’s what you did and you open minds … that’s what you do … that’s what you did. I am sure that you have gifted Tman very many different ways of seeing the world. I hope you two had grown closer. Goddammit. The mind is going to close up again. It is wide open right now with a flood of all the amazing things we faced together. We really did huh. On the edge of one’s seat kind of things. I trusted you enough to let go and see everyone in you. In fact … holy shit … I didn’t write it down because I just don’t write about you. Until now. But I saw you recently … about a month ago … in the mirror again … just as real and closely as I had seen you that one time looking in the mirror at MU … both times have been Ganja enhanced but that did not lessen the blow. I saw you and I didn’t turn away. We had a short conversation … not with mouths but in the Heart. I said, in a sense, that you are welcome here always but that I wasn’t coming back. Couldn’t. Too much has shifted. But I saw you … me as you. I don’t know what any of that means. I was just glad not to have wanted to move away from you. To have you in me and be ok with that seems/ed HUGE at the time as if air was clearing out between us. I had forgotten that until just now. Holy Shit you are dead. The feelings are coming now. Raw. For You. Raw for you. I couldn’t feel you for so very long. To angry. To pain-filled. To Raw. Oh god you were so stubborn. Sometimes trying to budge you would weaken me so much. I forget how challenging it must have been with you on the other end attempting to hold your ground. I have imagined at some points in time that some of the things I have written might hurt you. They never were meant to. I imagine you know that, but I also imagine that didn’t make it any easier. I couldn’t not write just not to hurt you. Do you know that now? Strange that I can write about you now that you are gone. I didn’t want to give too much away about you … maybe … it’s hard to say now. It’s really hard to say why now I can say so much. Maybe because I know now it won’t hurt you. But I won’t say anything you wouldn’t say yourself. I am so sorry I shut you up. You were such a free flowing person at one time but when we came together I wanted to hide and you didn’t and then I didn’t and you did. Was this Dark Time so hard for me because you were leaving? Were we … are we still that close that my Heart Strings were crippling me as they did you? I remember being your mother a few times. You were such a scared little boy. I couldn’t ease your fears but I could hold you and did. I made you face so many fears didn’t I? Didn’t we? We faced so many fears together and apart, but together. You opened me. Sexually. You prepared me. Oh god it was not easy for you. You were so afraid and tender too. I often see tenderness as weakness. It’s not, but it is often seen that way in my person. You know who I saw us like … lately … within the last year or so I saw us coming together like Pat and her ex-husband Frank … except that we would both still be in EOTS … but that was just some fantasy … my whole life is a fantasy. Thank you for facing the challenge that I am. I didn’t always appreciate it. I am sure the cracks that are starting to appear in my person will allow the Light to break through some un-serving stories. Death always does. It aways breaks up what I have lied to myself about. Hidden behind to keep the pain away. Often I have thought that I will never be capable of a “real” relationship because of how I turned on you. How something so bright could become so dark. How there is a fine line between love and hate. But I stayed. I stayed for a long time. Even when I would get so scared of you … I stayed. Even when I had no idea who you are. I stayed. Usually … even until this day … when the Dark Times come and I don’t recognize anyone … the world shifts from bright to dark and people I know become scary strangers … I run and close the door and hide in my room until it passes. But I didn’t with you. Even when you became the scary monster I stayed. I think that changed something dramatically in my person. To stay with the one that is feared. It has happened with so few people in this life … usually I run far far away, even if I don’t move an inch. I don’t understand any of this. I am no closer to understanding death but it is happening more and more in this life. Soon I will know no one in this world. I have so few that I know. Soon there will be no one left that I now know. It’s three am now. A little over two hours since finding out. The feeling of wanting to vomit is here. A gagging of sorts. I am going to go read an email you sent me … at random … anyone will do. I went to the EOTS HEART folder that I have which was created over a decade ago when I was in EOTS and would put things in there that touched my Heart. I didn’t even have to type in “Dan” it just was the first post the eyes laid upon (the first is from me and the second is his response to it). It’s from June 14, 2006: Joysters wrote: Please just scrape this into the trash can...I don't know what I read below...I read it again and heard something totally different. Maybe I am not used to hearing Dan with an authority or as an authority and it sounded different without the "Teaching" but when I heard the Teaching then the authority fell in line. If that makes any sense I guess it doesn't matter but I hear it different now. It's hard to hear Dan cause of the way we are with one another. I don't hear Dan...not in the way I heard it the third time through. I hear Dan through filtered ears and the filter is one of attempting to protect myself...so I hear him alot as if he is attacking me. Maybe it is because I've attacked him and so I expect attack, maybe it is because he has attacked me at times. I don't know and it doesn't matter now. The first two times I read Dan's post it sounded like he was a bossy-know-it-all. The 3rd I read it it came through selflessly. Like always awareness will do it's work :o) Dan...I look forward to hearing you :o) Dan Wrote: I’m not sure if anyone can tell, but I'm a glutton for punishment. (just kidding Susan, put the whips away...well, for now anyway ;)) ) You know, when Joy first told me what she had written to James and I there was an instant defense that came up. Like I had to prove to Joy that what I had written to Rebecca was 'right' and that what she was seeing in me was 'off', or even 'on, but not overly relevant'. But that passed pretty quick. Well, it seemed to because Joy came upstairs after me after I quietly left the breakfast table (where she initially told me of her response), and apologized for 'being irritating'. (some apology, huh? ;)) ) But when I got to work it was clear it hadn't completely passed, as I started crafting a response to Joy that seemed to lay out my side, while getting in a few jabs of my own. After looking at it though, I saved the response into my drafts folder. I then saw James had responded and then Ted, and that Joy responded again. At that point I was just kind of appreciating the exchange, and really feeling into it on Joy's side. Well, really just kind of appreciating her. Appreciating the dynamics between us and, well...loving her. And when I saw the post above, all there was left was a Knowing, and a deep caring for the one I call my wife. I don't know where I'm going with this post. Maybe just to here. But I do know that myJoysters is mylittlebaby. Mysweetbaby. We may get into it like cats and dogs at times, but there's something underneath all of it that makes even the cat and dogging special. Something that kind of says: I don't care what you say. I love you. :) It's also the same thing that allows Joy the room to say what she says. Though I may tell her she's off her rocker, I still listen to her. I Hear her, and if there's something to be Seen, it generally will be, even if it apparently takes a bit of time. Joy and I are getting to be quite a unit. Those on the outside looking in may not think that's the case, but they don't see what I do. Or you do. Yeah sure, maybe we've got a ways to go in a lot of relationship areas, but that's why we're together, isn't it? Cruising along on the SS Mu-now. (pronounced like Minnow) Yup. :) -Dan In a sense, that could sum up our relationship. Deep Love. Not dependent on anything … even being active in each other’s lives. He Knew me. I Knew him. You can’t save another person, but you can Know them. Funny … strange things pop into the mind as remembrances … but just this week … well this week has Uma (EOTS) birthday in it and it came up on quite a few occasions to Draw a Birthday Card for her because she is the only one left in EOTS I haven’t made one for … but I didn’t. I thought too much time has passed. Uma doesn’t even like me. Why would you make a card for someone that doesn’t like you and who you haven’t even shared any words with in a very long time. I just didn’t do it. That is the bottom line and I think I was still angry. I think some anger came up around sending her a card. I don’t know now I just know I didn’t do it. Sort of wish I had now … just to touch base. I miss those guys. But I am tired of knocking on the door. Happy Belated Birthday Uma. UmaLooma. I hope you are well. I’ve thought about you lately … even before knowing it was your Birthday. I had thought about you as I feel I am probably entering into menopause and you once mentioned how happy you were that it finally arrived … one of the few women, if only woman I ever heard say that about menopause … but you did … said you were so happy to see the highs and lows the rollercoaster of fertility gone. I have shared a few precious moments with you Uma. I have a few tender memories stored in the Mind’s Eye of you and I. *** I almost forgot and hardly know how that is possible now that it is being vividly remembered … but yesterday I had a rip-roaring-mind-splitting headache. Nothing would get rid of it. Not aspirin. Not Pot. Not sleep. Nothing. So I stopped trying. It just ran its course and this morning or night upon waking … it was gone and forgotten until just now. I suppose it seems more impacting or important knowing that Dan has passed. It is so strange how it is not sinking in. It’s just bringing up memories. Why can’t life bring up good memories before someone dies so that you get in touch with them. I don’t know if it would have made a difference, but I wish I had now. I wish I had just slightly touched based. Something. Anything. But as always … I did nothing. I don’t know what makes people fall apart. Dan has made this more obvious than ever. I went from wife to no one in what seemed like two-seconds flat … and he went from husband to no one in the same amount of time. How do you claim you love someone and then it just fizzles? Fizzles so completely that you don’t speak or have any communication at all for years. How do you fall for someone else so fast? What I saw so clearly is if it could happen with him it could with anyone. That things that you say don’t last. Even when you make commitments to one another … but I could never make a commitment to him. I tried. Clearly made valid attempts and couldn’t do it. I Love(d) him but never in the way I portrayed it. Or the mind and memory plays such crazy tricks that you never know … you can’t ever know if anything you say is really True. It all washes away but what remains is TRUE. What remains when all words have failed is: TRUE. *** OMG! I am always so close and yet so far!!!!! If I had just been one bus stop down the road … I would have been standing right in front of Him! GRRR! (Photo removed for privacy) Isn’t that sic? Come on! It’s like living here for what … over a year with Him living only .3 miles away and seeing him once … maybe twice the entire time! What a strange and twisted thing life is. I wonder if He knew I was there … why would He put that He works there up today? And did it while I was there? He put that He works there on his FB today! It’s a pawn shop. I hope He doesn’t let people pawn their things for addicting drugs! LOL. I am sure absolutely no drug addict wants to hear that! When I was standing there at the bus stop … I had the thought show up to go down the road to the next stop more than one time … maybe five times! Because where I was standing didn’t smell too good. But I didn’t. I didn’t go. Didn’t budge. OMG! I don’t know how I didn’t go! Stoop! How can you constantly be so close and so far. Why did life bring this man into my world? Do you ever get to know? What would have happened anyway even if I went one bus stop down … He would have thought I was a nut. I was bouncing all around out there … nerves ... nervous. Overstimulated. Had gone to a THC and Cannabis Fair and totally got overwhelmed and freaked and left after less than an hour. Bumped into Glenn from This and That in Etna. Just as I was running out the door. It was very strange because I so rarely see a familiar face. It was a very brief encounter. He looks well though. *** Good Lord! Life is so freaking strange. You know I am freaking about it. Like a school girl! God! Grrrr! Duh! D’oh! *** Saturday night … FRANK OCEAN sent in a post saying there is an update to a song he’s been working on with the band N.E.R.D. which I was turned onto a few months ago through the songs LEMON and 1000: “The Truth will set you Free, but first it will piss you off.” I never went and listened to the full album … however I went to Spotify just now and listened to the FRANK version of: DON’T DO IT And was like D - A - M - N that’s good! So I just left the album playing and was finding song after song to just hit the fucking nail on the head and was bouncing all around! It is so rare to have an entire album suck one in but it is so DAMN good I listened to it 2x in row!!! And speaking of DAMN guess who is featured on a few of their songs … yeah you guessed it: KENDRICK LAMAR! Ha! Such a small Artistical world … also on the album is ANDRE 3000 and Rhianna, Ed Sheeran, Future, Wale and M.I.A! Who I was so surprised to hear her because I haven’t ever heard her featured on anyone else’s work so when her voice just came out of no where I was like YEAH! You go Girl! Gucci Mane is also on it but I am only a bit familiar with his work. And of course FRANK!!! :o) It’s a fucking awesome album … even better Ganga enhanced! Listened to it the second time through after a few tokes of SOUR D. Best album of 2018! Already! Even though it is probably is from 2017. It’s 2018 for me! We are only 20 days in and already I have the album of the year! And look at the title of the Album … which I will end this LIFE LESS WRITTEN on: A Life Less Written ... No Preaching1/24/2018 Week of January 10, 2018
Wayneji mentioned recently that there is a tendency in my person to Preach. *** The Darkness has hit deep and hard this time round. Woke up violently angry two nights in a row and was surprised to see the seriousness of Suicidal thought again. Anne Sexton says the thoughts are addicting, maybe they are. They provide comfort. They provide an end to what seems endless. No one that has not had depression or faced the other side of mania could possibly understand how close one comes to walking out on yourself. The other day there was a cut that came so deep I couldn’t even stop the tears in public. Sobbed in public. The rages that have been appearing lately, at other times in this life, would have ended in self-violence. Something has shifted. There was no desire to punch the face. Usually the face would get severely punched, bruised when times such as these would come, but this time the urge to hit one’s self was not there. Was noticeably not there. Surprisingly not there. Something has shifted. I won’t mention what brought on these feelings of self-hate because they will be used to create more if shared. One is alone in this insane world now. There is no one that won’t use information to create more pain. *** Speaking of pain, on a walk the other day there was an internal conversation with Tony going on … not really with him it was more like writing a letter in the mind. I hadn’t realized that there was still quite a bit of anger in my person around my teen-age relationship with him. Things I had never said but probably still felt all these years because it was coming through as if nothing had changed. I don’t know if I will write him but if I do, I will put it in here because the words are not flowing right now. *** Recently there has been such horrible doubts arising about writing. Whether one is actually good at it or not. It’s shown up in the past but not with such serious force as it has recently. Basically it all boils down to: “Who cares?” Who is it that cares whether the writing is good or not. Just write. It’s what you do. It’s the only thing that still calls out to you. It’s the only thing that still makes life worth living. It’s the only thing that doesn’t leave you. It could just stem from the Darkness. There is a small reprieve right now. One is well rested and there is a cloud of it lingering above but it is far enough above to allow the barometric pressure to read: “Watch out for low lying clouds coming in from the East.” So you know that it is just a short reprieve, but any is a Miracle at this point in time and is well received. *** The sense of losing it all … just completely falling apart have surfaced. Some moments have been so intense that the thought of hospitalization has appeared … it’s been a long time since those thoughts have floated through and add to the want to end it all. *** There is a growing appreciation for Anne (Sexton) showing up at this time in life … I suppose it is just to know that someone out there has gone through similar things. Often when there is a sense of “missing others,” she will remind me of how having others around often just exacerbates the intensity of the crash, the fall, the insanity. No matter how good you get, how great you feel, the other side will always appear and often with the same intensity of how good or great it had been, will be how hard and deep one will crash and burn. She is a reminder that romance fades, the good life turns bad, love doesn’t conquer all and that insanity can and often does; end a life. *** “A work of Art is wiser than its maker.” (Page 222, Anne Sexton) *** I no longer recall if it was a Vision or a Dream. A few daze ago there appeared a hole in the left hand and pain began to grow … a deep bone pain. Then it faded as quickly as it came and blood was coming out of this hole in the center of the hand, but then the blood disappeared and only the hole was there. Just standing there … ever so still with the palms of the hands facing forward, away from the body. Just the left hand. There was a question … internal or external is not clear … it was just asked: “Will it always hurt like this?” *** Loving humans is the most pain-filled Life endeavors. *** It is so very easy to overlook Miracles. Such as recently writing about Paranoia and a low lying fog and since that writing anytime there has been paranoia … I’ve walked out the literal door and a low lying fog is there! Also the Wind has been playing many Mysterious tricks but I hadn’t been seeing it until this very moment as a way, as a reminder to ask oneself: “Who?” Who is experiencing this? The Wind has become more of a reminder of “Him” than of “Who” and maybe that has been the great Mistake. Maybe “He” should come as the reminder of “Who?” Just a flip, just a slight shift of view changes everything. The weather has been playing all kinds of tricks lately; all kinds of trickery on the mind. *** "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it, staying at Home”. -Emily Dickenson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson *** It is still always so strange and mysterious how these people (Dickenson) fall in one’s lap … with such interesting and impeccable timing. I will not be surprised to find out she suicided but am not hoping that she did. She was a recluse and suffered depression. Am actually quite surprised to read that she did not take her own life. She actually died of Bright’s Disease which they say they treat with abstinence of alcohol, cheese and red meat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright%27s_disease Three daze into the New Year and there is quite a low pressure system going on in the body … The Dark Time is here. It was a pretty good happy time … always seems so short even when it is rather long. This last one was very manic … it might have had something to do with a Full Super Moon that I missed (because I was too tired) … I did get to see a glimpse of it on a walk with Pete and that was nice.
It was a quiet New Year’s spent with a man named Glenn who I met at the bus stop in Medford on Friday, which was the 29th … he stayed here for 3 days … basically catching up on sleep and rest … it all came about rather strangely … I had thought I was going Ice Skating with the last $8 that I had … the thought was that it would be $6 for skating and then $2 for the bus back as I was already very tired but the idea to go offered up some energy. However I ended up getting on the bus and sitting for Meditation which ended me up in Medford. I got off the bus to wait for the one going back and there was a bit of commotion going on at the bus stop … a girl was making a bit of a scene in the girls bathroom (which was packed with people) and she was attempting to get a young man to go in with her and help her carry out her bags … she was acting like she was fuct up on something and she was aggressive and even came over to some kids that were coming back from the mall and was saying stuff about their bags and one of the kids after she went away said to the other … “I can’t believe you interacted with her … I always just ignore people when they do stuff like that.” And I “got” this girl that said it … and I “got” the girl that was fuct up and acting out too. They were all teenagers … probably 16 or 17 years old … 2 girls and two boys coming back from the mall and then this other girl acting up and her friends all seemed around the same age too and I saw that I wanted to stay closer to the kids to from the Mall … I wanted to be near their energy which was so calm and relaxed while this other girl was frantic and aggressive. I was happy the mall kids were going home on the bus with me because it is rare to be around people with their kind of energy … I guess I was realizing that there are some people that feel safe in the world at all times and it’s because of their innocence … the mall kids were really “kids" … innocent. I often feel so frantic and lost out in the world but these kids have had security in their life … real long standing solid security they don’t know that the world can completely change in an instant and I sort of hope they never do. There is no joy to be found in the discovery that there is no security in the world if I could do it over again I would do it with a false sense of security all the way. I used to think it was cool or interesting or something special about knowing that there is really no ground to stand on … but it’s gotten old and rotted now. God it takes all of two-seconds for the world to go from bright to bleak … the Dark Times suck. Anyway … all this was going on with these kids which wasn’t really much at all … it was just a few outbursts and then a bunch of standing around waiting for the bus (just like war) … However, during this time I noticed a man who would smile when he looked at me and it was a friendly easy going smile which was not only on his mouth but eyes as well. I nodded in recognition and then when I was going to get on the bus he said: “Stay warm.” And as soon as he said that I found myself walking over to him instead of getting on the bus and showing him the writing in the little notebook that says something like: “If you can use a few days of rest come with me.” And he did … he didn’t hesitate or anything and we got on the bus which was packed with people … we even stood for a while by the kids from the mall and I sort of wish … in retrospect … that we had the whole time because instead we then went to the back of the bus and the guy I had asked if he could use a place to stay … knew people back there and I started to feel uncomfortable as if I was being set up for something and that sort of deflated the spirit a bit. However we got back to the apartment uneventful although he didn’t quite understand what he was doing here and I really had no idea as well but he took a shower and I made some stir fry that came out terrible … even accidentally dropped the bottle of Sriracha sauces into the fry and had to scrape it out … it was a disaster and only the start of the: “What the fuck will I make to eat?” Mind set that ran through for 3 days. I had no idea what to make and he was not very pleased with any of it and rightfully so with the Stir Fry but I made a Chili that wasn’t too bad however he sort of snubbed his nose at it and left most of it on the plate the few times that I put it out … the same with the waffles … but since there is very little food left and no money again for at least another week I kept serving it … neither of us went hungry so all is well … I guess. The first two days he was pretty out of it … on the first night … which is rather hard to recall now … but we hung out a bit … played a game of Rummy and were sort of feeling each other out. Pete nearly vomited … he dry heaved. I had to pick him up and run him to the sink and hold him over it and so I worried a bit about that … because I thought Pete was also getting some of the contact high or energy in a bad way … but it did not go on for long … Pete went back to sleep and didn’t do anything like that again the whole weekend … and Glenn would sleep and then get up for a little bit and would ask for a movie or something and within 10 minutes he would be back asleep so basically it didn’t put me out much … I just had to sort of walk around him for two days as this place is so very small it leaves you no room at all to move around … but it went ok. He wasn’t much up for chatting … not in the way I have it set up … he seemed to avoid it which was fine because I had nothing to say. We didn’t interact very much but surprisingly I felt like I was with a friend. A few basic insecurities and fears came up but they also subsided very quickly. I don’t often invite seeming strangers into the home but he didn’t feel strange or like a stranger at the time of the invite. There actually was no thought about it at all … it just happened. I can’t explain it because he completely was a stranger. He was most interested in why I invited him back but I truly had no reason … I asked him if he had good rest and he said yes and so I said: “Well, that is as good a reason as any.” I on the other had got very little at all … but there was HUGE contact highs going on or he was a Magical person or something because I was LIT the fuck up the first two days … couldn’t sleep barely at all and had such warm nice waves of energy floating through … the mind however was very concerned about not getting rest … the body could give a fuck less. We were both awake at 12 when it hit The New Year (which is bullshit but who cares) (Yay 2017 is over) LOL. We sipped sparkling apple juice and I can’t remember what else we did … not much of anything … we didn’t do anything barely at all except on NYD when he seemed to be getting a bit of energy and I was starting to go Dark … I could feel it coming on and it is so disappointing because the Light Bright Happy Daze make you think the Dark Daze are not going to come again … that some how you have made it through and don’t have to go back to the Dark Side … but to no avail it happened and when you see it creep in … you see how you start to treat people differently. He was starting to become a stranger … even though had spent two full days with him on the third day it felt like I didn’t know him at all and had some strange man who could not be avoided in my tiny little room. Luckily the night before we had watched a Dave Chappelle … who is hilarious as always and he mentioned that the world is turning on (against) Kevin Spacey because of something that happened a long time ago … let me go look it up cause I have always liked Kevin Spacey or at least I did a long time ago when he did all those good movies … oh shibby … Dave is taking hits on his joke about what went down with Kevin … I don’t know the whole story but of course I am on Dave’s side because it’s fucking COMEDY people … it’s supposed to be fuct up and not right … that’s what makes you laugh so uncomfortably hard to be around someone that has the balls to say what you are thinking and then you turn your back on the one who says it … fuck you! Fuck me too! I do shit like that all the time. LOL. Dave Chappelle is taking heat for some comments he made on his new Netflix special -- that actor Anthony Rapp was not really harmed by Kevin Spacey's conduct because he "grew up to be gay anyway" -- but some big comedians are squarely in Chappelle's corner. Chappelle cracked the jokes during his special, The Bird Revolution, referring to Rapp's claim that Spacey tried to grope and seduce him at a party when he was just 14. Chappelle quips: "And not to victim-blame, but it seems like the kind of situation that a gay 14-year-old kid would get himself into.” We got a trio of comedians who say it's all fair game. Norm MacDonald praises Chappelle as the greatest comedian on earth. Donnell Rawlings says don't expect any apologies from Dave. And Adam Devine says going after "royalty" is off limits. http://www.tmz.com/2018/01/01/dave-chappelle-concert-netflix-anthony-rapp-gay-comedians-support/ Anyway no one is saying that it isn’t fuct up what happened … if it did happen but also 14 is the age where kids … all they want to know about is sex … that is until they figure out what it is. Anyway … Dave mentioned this whole thing going on with Kevin Spacey and how he now is bummed because he won’t know how HOUSE OF CARDS ends and I had never heard of the show but if Dave says it is good I would like to see what it is all about so New Years Day we watched Netflix’s House of Cards so there was a distraction from the amount of space or lack of personal space in the room at least for me and Glenn pretty much stayed awake the whole time. I am bummed that I missed the Super Moon … I was asleep for the night by 9pm on NYD and finally got a bit of rest … but at the expense of missing the MOON! :o( Glenn left early yesterday … he looked good and rested and the day was nice out … not a cold day to go back out into the world … he said he was having some troubles with White City VA (he served in the Air Force) and how they weren’t really helping him out. I think he said he was going up there for meds … he said he was diabetic but that he drinks so that didn’t make much sense to me cause I thought you couldn’t drink when you are diabetic. I took a hike up da hill … couldn’t stay in this small space anymore … was feeling quite overwhelmed … but it all went well. I stayed up in the mountains walking around almost all day … the body was so fatigued but it felt so good to be outside and I laid down quite a few times and just fell off to sleep on the forest floor and then would hear a rumble or noise and bolt up … never saw anything. Kept asking for Healing. Because when I left for the walk I felt like shit. The body felt so very heavy and it had gone through some things during Glenn’s stay … nothing major but certainly noticed and I attributed it to sort of like having a contact high of sickness … it’s hard to explain … because in the beginning it felt good but towards the end it was very heavy and it also very well may not have had anything to do with him but you know how this mind works and often attributes things to the “other.” However his first night he was in an uplifted state … the next day not so much but he slept through most of it … however the second day he also seemed to be in some pain or something as he would curl up and make noises and there were moments where there was some concern in me that he might start getting loud. Those are the times I remember that I don’t know the person next to me and what the fuck am I doing? But then I remember I never know what the fuck I am doing and just chill and see what happens … so I rode out the worry and it passed and so did his pain seemingly because the third day and night there was not a peep out of him … so it is not pain that he normally has to go through it was just something he processed out those first two nights, but I did wonder if I was picking up any of it because I felt not very good the third day … the first two was just like being in a haze but the third I felt weighted, heavy and grumbly and so when I headed up on the walk I was really slowed down … nearly walking at a crawling pace … it took seven hours to do what I usually do in four but I didn’t want to come back to this apartment . When I asked: “What is this … why does the lower half of my body feel so horrible?” The answer that came, one which I didn’t actually like hearing was that I was supposed to be on a FAST and that the body had been prepared for FASTing … but I wasn’t notified? Usually when a Fast is coming I am warned of it … but since there has been little food eaten on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Sundays the long 3-4 day Fasting has basically stopped. But now food has been coming back on those days so I don’t know what is going on … nothing is clear like it usually is or if not clear at least a bit more obvious … so Fasting didn’t happen and the body got sick because of it. Who knows? That is what came up. It would be near impossible to Fast with another person around … it’s hard enough not to eat when you are alone … but when you are around another and you have to feed them that doesn’t seem a good time to Fast … I always fail when it happens that way. Also the bowel movements have been horrendous the body is really going through something and it’s not something that has happened before as far as I can remember … I thought it was severe constipation. Gross I know … why the fuck am I even saying this I don’t know. *** On the walk/hike the birds were friendly and close. *** Had woken in such a grumbly state this morning/evening. Really grumbly. The fighting kind of grumbly and was so please to find myself alone. I couldn’t shake it no matter what I did … no happy thoughts helped … it was more the sense that punching someone else in the face would make me feel better … it’s a strange thing to wake up to. The body is heavy. The boobs are massive. So I looked at the calendar, the P-Tracker calendar and supposedly today is the Flowery Fertile day … well if so … how in the world does any woman ever get pregnant … because this doesn’t make we want to make love it makes me want to punch you. It doesn’t make any sense … why would you feel so horrible at a time when you are supposed to pro-create? I don’t understand the body at all. *** Just went and read some things on the Internet and some other women seem to go through similar such things … they are saying it could be undiagnosed anemia. Well, I do get heart palpations that is one sign. Oh it is iron deficiency … I had this when I was pregnant with Mikel. Recently it came up to eat Red Beans … I crave them a lot … it’s what I ate nearly the entire pregnancy with Tman … Red Beans and Rice was all I wanted … I thought he was vegetarian but it seems I probably was anemic. They suggest Red Beans and also Prune Juice … which I’ve been craving because funny enough on the bus back here … Glenn was drinking cranberry juice and offered me some which I turned down but thought to myself: “Wish it was prune juice.” I didn’t really think anything of it at the time. They also say raisins (which I bought a 3 lbs bag of last month). It also says Dark Greens … which I have not had any greens in a long time … no money and they don’t last … they go bad after like 3 days and I can’t eat all that much with Fasting on 3 of the days. *** Ok it’s taking a life time to start to understand the basics of being in this body … but right now … the little egg inside of me is on it’s way down the tubes … like The Corridor story I wrote about the egg and the sperm … so my girl is down there waiting to get united … but no one is coming so no wonder she is pissed off and making this whole body ache. Maybe if there was some a chance in hell she was going to pro-create she would be in better spirits but she knows it’s not going to happen … but why ruin my day along with yours! Uma(EOTS) mentioned once … but it made a profound lasting effect because I hadn’t ever heard anyone say it before … she said that menopause was the best thing that ever happened to her (usually I would hear the opposite) and that she was so happy not to be pulled around all over by the highs and lows of an egg (not exact words). I know it now. Although there is sadness to have never had a daughter (Uma has two) … sort of … not even sure if it is sadness anymore … I think what I am sad about is that the Fairytale didn’t happen … there’s no point in a daughter without the Fairytale … not in Joyland … so there’s not so much sadness about not having a child but of not have a story fulfilled … whether that is true or not I will never know, but it is what comes up right now when looking at this whole thing. *** So I’ve probably looked at all of this before and forgotten it but it all seems brand new again today: Cervical mucus changes: As you near ovulation, your body produces more estrogen, causing cervical mucus to become stretchy and clear, like egg white, which helps sperm swim to the egg that’s released during ovulation. Cervical mucus changes happen in most women, Moore says, but you have to know what you’re looking for. The amount of cervical mucus and what it looks and feels like varies from woman to woman. To test it for ovulation, insert a clean finger into your vagina, remove some of the mucus and then stretch out the secretion between your thumb and finger. If it’s sticky and stretchy or very wet and slippery, that’s a good sign that you’re in a fertile phase. https://www.thebump.com/a/ovulation-symptoms-signs-of-ovulation This happened last week … so I was prime last week. I was really prime LOL! Heightened sense of smell: For some women, a more sensitive sense of smell in the latter half of a normal menstruation cycle can be a sign of ovulation. In this fertile phase, your body is primed to be more attracted to the male pheromone androstenone. I hate to even say this here because I swear up and down all the time I am going to stop talking about “Him” altogether … as it has been way, way too long to talk about someone that is no one … but … but … the other day in the forest not yesterday but maybe two days prior … I was bumbling around and stumbled upon some oil … it had been in a dilapidated tent … actually I walked past the whole thing (which I have done numerous times) but something called me back … I cannot explain these things even to myself but it’s how I end up with someone I don’t know in the apartment for three days and basically I trust it … usually I trust it because it has never steered me wrong in all the times that I have followed it … however I don’t always follow it and there is no seeming rhyme or reason to why or why not or how I do … but there was a pull to go over and so I did and there was a little bottle of oil … I looked at it and started walking away and it literally called me back … so I went over (huffed) and picked it up and opened it and smelt it and it reminded me of Him … of how I have never once in my life paid attention to how a man smells and yet with Him I cannot forget. I don’t know if he smelt like Sandalwood … I just know He smelt so good I couldn’t stop thinking about it for so long … even still. But this little bottle triggered thoughts of Him again. Anyway … they are saying above that you get a certain heightened sense of smell around ovulation … so does that mean that I have never been around another man that smelt good my entire life at this time of the month … only Him? Did He only have that perfect scent for my nose? How in the world or maybe the question is why in the world would you figure this out. They go on to say: Breast soreness or tenderness: Breast and nipple sensitivity, tenderness or soreness can be another sign of ovulation, thanks to the rush of hormones entering your body right before and after ovulation. Not that you care … but let me tell you that my nipples were so sore and sensitive the other day I had to change my shirt … not while Glenn was here … but right before that … I hadn’t had anything like it in years … such sensitivity it felt as if someone had been pinching them or scraping them with sand paper. And now today they are so fucking swollen and sore that I don’t even have to move to notice it. Yesterday my uterus and backside felt like my boobs do today. Maybe this is menopause … maybe this is the end of all this madness. Nothing against Glenn … really and truly because it seemed to swing both ways … there was no sexual energy in this room. Which you might think odd … I am thinking it is odd to be in the throes of ovulation and have a man 2 feet from you at all times for three days and have no sexual energies at all … but I swear there wasn’t … he was not an ugly man or gross in anyway … it just wasn’t there … he didn’t smell badly, but he had nothing going on that had my nose perked up. *** I wonder what this egg would have been … shit I thought I was done with all this non-sense but it’s coming up again. I wonder what it would have been … a girl … a boy … cute … ugly … sweet … mean … kind … smart … intelligent … would it have had more of my attributes or His … what color hair … eyes? I look back at Mikel and Tyler and they were very similar in many ways other than sports … basically most of their differences were in the way I raised them not in how they actually were molded … both are handsome … both are sweet … Tyler had more anger in him … always … he was always more temperamental and aggressive where Mikel was more sad and passive … both of them had/have very unique ways of seeing the world. Both are very intelligent and smart … they had both … have … I don’t often remember Mikel is dead … I suppose it is the kindness of being separated so long before it happened … but I go in The Sacred Space and he is there … in a box … so it is not denial it is just forgetfulness … both have outgoing personalities which they didn’t get from me … but they made friends pretty easily and kept them as well … not something they got from me either. It may have stemmed from them basically being only children … they were so far apart in age that they weren’t really siblings … they were but at a distance … like two only children and so it may have had something to do with filling a void whereas I had so many siblings I was always surrounded and looking for a place to just get away. Who knows … you never really know. *** Kobe looks like he was quite literally “The Party Animal” this last weekend: Look how tired he is! Poor little guy. I had a huge hit of missing Tman the other day … I wish I had been able to write him the Love Letter that actually poured out of my Heart at the time. I came across a Beagle … she was walking down the street and I stopped and petted on her … and the eyes! The Eyes! I first flashed of Kobe but then I saw Tman in her face! I saw so much Love! I can’t even barely write it now … there was so much beautiful emotion to it when it happened. It sounds so poor quality now … it was alive and real! And so full of Love! I saw another one too … another Beagle … I can’t place where at the moment but a similar thing happened … it is like looking into a human face. It really is … I momentarily forgot it was a dog. Just a flash … a quick moment flash where it is not a specific animal … not really human or dog just LOVE looking at you. *** OMG! Tman’s hair is so fucking long!!!! He is a hippie!!! Boy does he have Mark’s facial features. I don’t like to say it or see it but I know he is so much better off without a whack job like me in his life but sometimes I miss him so terribly much. I think in my Heart that he will do great things … he already has! I hope the drink doesn’t get him. I hope he always is able to walk away from the drink when it is time to walk away. Even Kobe is not looking happy about it: Dogs know. Just like Pete dry heaving the other night … Dogs are very attuned to energy. You know I was so concerned about Tman getting a dog while being so young and in school (at the time) and then if he met a girl that didn’t like his dog … but boy oh boy was I wrong (thank god). Kobe is like having another family member … I feel like he is. Seems others do as well: Before … a few days or a day before Glenn showed up … I was getting very huge hits of why no one likes me or wants to be around me and why I was kicked out of EOTS and I agreed with all of it as I was seeing it … I wouldn’t want me around either. *** It’s kind of funny that I would say the above and then open an email from Tony that says nearly the exact opposite … but of course you say things in jail that aren’t actual in reality … I often think that in regards to “Him” (yeah I know him again) but I do think that because my fantasies are so wild and imaginative and yet reality often is not that way at all … of course there is Magic everywhere and when the eyes are open to it you see it … but often the eyes are closed … but here is a story from Tony: From: ANTHONY SANTANA Date: 12/31/2017 4:22:00 PM To: Joy Sters Hey there Joysters, I wanted to drop yo a little note to let you know what Cuhristmas mans to me since you asked. Every since I was a little kid I always wanted Christmas to come around because it was the only time of the year that everyone you know would get together with their families whether or not they were getting along with one another. I remember being in foster homes and how their families would surround themselves with each other at Christmas. since I never had a family of my own I always looked forward to this. At one point in my life I can not recall I lost that feeling and Christmas became a very depression time for me and I hated the very thought of Christmas season. Then one Christmas I was selling Drugs to someone I knew and found out that she was using her money that should have been spent on her kids for christmas buying drugs from me. Since I knew full well what it was like to put drugs and that lifestyle in front of everything including your kids I felt horrible. So what I did that Christmas was I went around and with all the money I had from selling Drugs I believe it was around 2500 to 3000 dollars. I took tht money and bought all of the kids gift cards to various places. From that moment on I chose to give of myself at Christmas time no matter where I was or who I was with. This year I made Cheese Cake and enchiladas for all 24 people on my tier. I just feel that for me Christmas has become a time to give and by doing so I feel good about myself. I can't expect my own family to just reapear in my ife and I know it is unrelastic to beleive thta My kids wil ust up and forget everthing I have done to them over the years by not being there for them. So instead I give of myself each year and yes it has a very real calming effect on me that I cannot describe. So that is my christmas story. As for the Ocean Grove thing you mentioned in your last letter I am with you 100% on that I too am extremly happy to know that there is someone out there (you) that knows what I am taling about when it comes to Ocean Grove. Some of the best memories in my life have come from there and if it wasn't for Ocean Grove I would have never have met you and that would have been horrible because you have always ben and will always be one of the most influential people in my life and even though I now that I have not been in your life these past 25 or so years You have always been the driving force in what it is I look for not ony in a friend but in a Girlfriend as well. I may not fully know you as an adult but I do you know you in your purest forma nd that is when we were kids before we knew what expectations were and when our lives were simple yet complex at the same time. I knew what love actualy felt like for the first and only time in my life when I met you. With that said I want to wish you a very Happy New Year and to let you know that I am a better man today for having you in my life and to thank you for the best gift you could every give e and that is the gift of you. I will love you always, Love Tony aka T-Rock There is probably very little difference between Tony and myself … we have good Hearts but strange ass minds or thoughts or whatever it is that makes you fuct up and do fuct up shit and not care … you want to care … but it just doesn’t come out like you plan or would like it too. Like if I was in the Happy Time all the time … I would be an incredibly great person … I even like me at that time and that is not an easy feat … but that is such a very small window and the rest of the time I am basically an angry asshole, with bouts of paranoia and outburst of intense energies. For me Christmas is not one day a year … in fact it sort of pisses me off that it is set up as one day a year and basically it has all become a gift giving celebration and not the celebration of the Teacher or the Teaching or Love! I can feel it in the air though … these last few years I feel Christmas Magic in the Air … it is a wonderful thing so it is obvious now that it is not only about monetary things but it really has come to that. I have no idea why I am so chatty today. Will write back to Tony since I am. Happy New Year T. :o) Even though I don’t actually believe we go into anything new or that there even is such a thing as “years” … it’s all man-made obviously but since day goes to night and back to day again … man “made” time so that it can track life as it seemingly moves along in it … but actually we don’t have any idea if time actually progresses or not … for all we know what we are currently in … is no more than a dream … similar to at night … you fall asleep but there is no time there … is there? Not if you look honestly … you can jump around to any time and any place in a dream … especially if it is lucid … if you are awake in the dream … so “time” as you and I “think” of it may not actually be at all … it may just be an aspect of a dream that is endless … you can’t have time in something endless … something that has no beginning and no end … you can’t track that … but obviously humans get bored and want to figure things they will never figure out … out. I know these things intuitively and have seen many things I cannot explain logically so I don’t have any doubts that there is no such thing as time but because I believe in it (which sounds like a contradiction but it’s not actually) I live in it. I had no idea all that was going to come up just by saying Happy New Year. I am glad you had a nice Christmas and that doing something for others fills you … have you ever thought of attempting to extend Christmas to every day and not just one day a year? I seem to be way too moody and unreliable for it, but I can see it and almost grasp that way of life … where you are a walking, living, breathing Christmas Present 365 days a year. The thing is … sometimes the Present is a slap across the face (not literally but sometimes) … you know when you have to say or do something that you know is going to hurt the other person but if they don’t hear it something worse is going to happen to them. I often find this with people and their health or well-being … I have met so many people that are really close to deaths door … within a few months or sometimes years if they don’t make certain changes … but when you say something about it they often don’t speak to you again … everyone wants things to get better no one wants to do what it takes … I get it … I don’t even have a problem with it but recently I have been wanting to steer clear of anyone with health issues just not to even have to say it … but luckily it is not up to me. One example is of my brother Johnny who has recently had health concerns … major one’s … has even had surgery … but anytime I bring up anything in that regard he shuts me down or sort of pats me on the head and says yeah yeah sure I will … but has no intention. But soon it is going to catch up with him and he is so young and has a young son too and things are not getting better … so I wrote him a tough-love email and that was about a month ago and haven’t heard from him since. But I know what I said is a Gift … even though he received it as a Slap in the Face and basically told me silently to fuck off. So you can lose people in this world by having Christmas everyday. Christmas Presents aren’t always what we want but what we need. We have become a society only concerned with getting what we want. What we got is a very sick fucking planet with horribly sick humans on it. Like you, I went through years of depression around Christmas … I had it this year … I basically did nothing this year for Christmas … I don’t have any reason for the depression I could blame it on a lot of things but basically it was just depression … just sadness … bodily and mentally. It’s rather hard for me to see you as a drug dealer … I mean I know you have been almost all this life and I have known of it … but I always picture drug dealers as hard and thuggish and I’ve never seen you that way … you’ve always been so sensitive. Recently I saw a movie called “MOON LIGHT” it was very very well done … cinematically spectacular and heart wrenchingly good … it is about a drug dealer and his life from being a child to a man and how you watch as his innocence is destroyed one act at a time and it is so real and raw and well done that you almost don’t notice how amazingly well done it is. I don’t want to say too much about it … maybe you will see it someday. I wish you had sold Ecstasy or LSD or mushrooms that are mind expanding and not things that are destroying society like Meth. But Ecstasy and LSD and shrooms are not addicting so there isn’t high demand. I truly hope you don’t ever go back to selling addicting drugs. I made a commitment early on in life that I would not touch Heroin … it’s a very strange thing that it even came up at such a young age when none of it was even around and honestly I have never known anyone that I am aware of besides Mikel that ever did it … but I made a Commitment basically as a child, to never touch that drug and haven’t and then after an insane short lived time on Meth I made a Commitment to myTeacher to never touch that stuff again and haven’t. It is the same with alcohol … last year I had a bought with it … I also hadn’t remembered that I told myTeacher I wouldn’t touch it anymore … I don’t know why I didn’t recall this … but I didn’t … he called me out on it and I just didn’t recall making that promise but after he called me out on it … I saw a new Promise/Commitment form … there is now a Commitment to not drink and in a sense I am aware of the consequences … in a sense I feel that if I had not broken my word … Mikel wouldn’t have died. I am not blaming myself … I just feel it that way … that some how the two (drinking and Mikel) are linked and in a way I cannot explain but I recall my telling Mikel one time that I wasn’t going to drink ever again and I lied. I did drink again. It is a horrible thing to see your Word is not good. If you care about those kinds of things … which I do … I don’t give my Word lightly in fact I haven’t given my Word in years except for a few things … but my Word is not good and that lowers a person. I am a lower person because of it, but I am not going to try and make up for something until the time comes to make it up … meaning I am not going to go out and attempt to prove my Word is good again … I have tried that and failed miserably. If there is something I am to be tested on … it will show up without my doing and I will see if my Word is any good now. Life has a way of doing that. Of testing you when you make a Commitment or Promise and it is always Pass or Fail … there is nothing in between and the Failure can be great … in this case Mikel. I am very chatty today … there is some kind of restlessness in my person … I woke up feeling horrible … just terrible and couldn’t snap myself out of it. Dammit after just typing that I see now that my Word is still no good … I had forgotten all about it but I sort of gave my Word … not sort of … I did … I gave mySelf my word that I would quit Caffeine Pills, but I haven’t. I actually did some today in attempts to snap myself out of a funk … but there is no excuse and so my Word is still no good … I wouldn’t even have seen it if it wasn’t for this sharing with you. I don’t know what the price is for breaking one’s Word in this regard but it is often quite high. I would love to not give my Word to anything. I never know what I am going to do. I don’t like to do things that hurt others and so Heroin, Meth, Drinking … those things hurt others and the legacy of that hurt ripples way out … fuck I am bummed now. It may seem like I am taking this lightly but I am not … it’s a strange thing because once you do it … it feels like … oh well I fuct up this badly might as well just keep fucking up. Because caffeine feels good and life doesn’t. Not usually. Anyway now you are seeing the shitty side of JoySters that doesn’t follow through on her Word. I have lost a lot of people because of it … maybe all of them. And you know what … it is horrible to be surrounded by people who’s Word is not good. Even when you are alone. Even when there is no one else calling you out on it … you know it … you know you are a lower class of people and you attract them … you attract what you are being. Well I am going to end this here. I am glad that Christmas went well for you and that you enjoy serving others … recently I mentioned to someone that what I liked about him or the thing that stood out the most that I liked was that he could see when people were in need of something even when they weren’t aware of it themselves. That is sort of like what I was saying about Christmas everyday … he doesn’t do it just on Christmas … he does it when he sees it. I’ve been looking at that and at my surroundings at times a bit differently. It is nice to give someone something that they want, but it is exceptional to give someone something that they need. Love. ~JoySters *** So after sending the above some things have come up … and not to make excuses … it’s just what is coming up … because … and I almost wrote this earlier this morning but it didn’t happen … this month or last month basically has been looking at: Thy Will; not my will. And from looking at it … there is no “my.” When you see this … and it isn’t this clear all of the time … obviously … but when you see this as True then you know nothing can be any other way than how it is. You know it. So when I write to Tony about my Word not being good and it’s not … but there is a game in that … the “Guilt” game that seemingly keeps one doing poor behavior out of feeding the guilt. It’s not coming through so clearly … it’s like guilt is another addiction. But even that is Thy Will not my. And it is Thy Will that it is seen. I almost wanted to tell Tony it would have been great if he had not given that women the Meth and that is when I saw what I was doing … as if I can see far and wide … which I can’t … I don’t know what anything is for and I forget that all the time especially getting up on the high horse and acting like I know a better way. Wayneji has said many times: “Better is the enemy of good.” And that: “Everything is always right; there is no opposite.” But … And he also says: “No buts!” You would be amazed at how much goes in one ear and out the other but occasionally certain things stick in the middle … thank God … literally. *** I had a dream about Kayemomma last night and the mind keeps trying to remember it and can’t. *** 2017 01.04 - Quite a few Insights came through today but they were the kind you don’t actually write down because it seems so silly in the moment to write down something that is so obvious … however now … after some deep rest … it is not obvious or even remembered what they were. However one of the was to start a sort of practice before falling asleep to attempt to go back … all the way back and to see yourself doing it … just keep going back … first through your own life … see yourself going back in age until you can’t go back anymore and then see the world do the same thing and then the earth and the universe until you get to the beginning … until you get to the place where you can’t go back any further and what remains? Stayed in that “place/space” for awhile yesterday … in what remains. *** KAYEMOMMA AND THE NEW DOG (DREAM) January 4, 2017 9-10 pm Had a dream … a dream that is fading fast, Kayemomma and Wayneji Sold MU to Mac … they didn’t live very far away though and were still moving their things out. At first I was at their new house and they had a new dog … it was kind of ugly … that was the thought and first impression in the dream that he was ugly, but I can’t see the dog now … it was small and plump and grey haired … long grey hair and it had a very nice disposition. I immediately liked him even though I didn’t think he was all that cute. There was also a neighbors dog that was driving me crazy with its’ incessant barking. I went somewhere with the new dog and bonded with it … actually fell head over heels for it. Then I went to MU and was helping Mac get moved in and Kayemomma moved out … she came over the next day and was telling me how Finny had passed away. I was taking it rather hard, but not trying to let her see that. She never got to tell the whole story because I woke up but it started out that she had been watching a movie and he got into something. Also there was a comedian in the dream … she was coming off stage after her show and I was walking with her … I knew her somehow and she was so happy with how the performance went because usually she can’t tell all her jokes or is sad because she would have to leave some out, but this performance she got them all in and was excited because her family was there. She was an older woman … grey haired but young in Spirit. Also MU had a river sort of like Scott River running behind it and it was situated in a wide open space with the road not far from it … a dirt road with sandy dirt and some people came through on dirt bikes. So much of the dream is now lost from memory. *** 2018 01.05 - Today or actually yesterdays WOD is: The WOD doesn’t come until later … going to practice on yesterdays. MIRA’S MOIRA Joy A. Sters (Written in The Sacred Space) January 5, 2107, 1:45- 12pm Mira had always been a willful child. Rarely did she do what was asked or told of her. She also didn’t play nice with other children. Her parents would bring over or take her to playmates they thought might improve her behavior, only to find it was a near impossible feat, as she almost always converted them to her ways rather than the other way around. However, Mira was also a highly intelligent child, though not in the bookish way, she hated school and made quite an uproar each morning before being forced to go. She didn’t understand all the pressure from adults about the importance of education. Even when she became what is called an “adult,” she saw education as a way to keep a giant machine oiled and running, that schools were basically a day-care center for children, while the slaves go to work. She had learned about slavery in school, and didn’t see the difference between how people were herded like cattle then and how they are herded like cattle now. The monetary reward only made it that much more obvious. Slavery hadn’t ended, it simply had morphed. People were unaware that they had become slaves to money and possessions. They traded freedom to chase a carrot dangling in front of the human eye, which made them blind to the machine, a machine that sucked the life and joy out of people, then spit them out and left them to die in poverty. Rarely did she meet a person that was whistling to and while they worked. Very few people, if any that she met, were content and enjoying their lives and school was no more than recycled information that kept one from discovering their own innate Teaching and Knowledge. As a child she didn’t understand all of this, but as she grew up, it became more and more obvious, but not to anyone else. If she attempted to show someone what she had come to know they would get angry, no one wanted to see the hypocrisy and eventually she came to realize that those that are supposed to; do and those that aren’t; don’t. However, it was a long winding road to this realization. In her attempts to reveal to others what they were unwilling and unwanting to know, she grew angry and bitter. No one wanted to know that they were/are a slave. They didn’t want to know, because to know, meant that something had to change and very few are interested in change. Basically the majority just want to bitch and moan about the way things are because they get pleasure from complaining and misery loves company. No one wanted to stand alone like her. "It’s just the way it is." They would say, but she couldn’t let it rest, it nagged at her day and night and she began to go a bit mad. She had no idea how it could be done differently. She went to university and saw that it was just another mechanism to keep the wheel turning, as even there, there was no education, only preparation for what one was to do for work and a place of creating more of the same. She didn’t last long. Her mind was beginning to unravel. She didn’t know what to do or where to turn she only knew that: It is time. As it would echo through her mind, over and over: It is time. And similar to Nat Turner, who upon learning how to read, discovered he and every black person in the country had been imprisoned as slaves, when under God all were free. She saw the same prison for herself and her fellow man in the society structure, but no answer to what the change would be. So she became quiet and began to ponder. She envisioned a life where one was not forced to do something they didn’t want to do, simply because there was no seeming way out. She would ask: “Why give me vision, with no ability to do anything with it? Why make me see, when I am surrounded by those that do not wish to see or hear?” Like Nat she wanted to free her people and like Nat her people didn’t believe her talk of freedom, as most of them already thought they were free, taken care of and provided for no matter how poorly that was. Many years passed and she found herself being pulled deeper and deeper into Silence. Not the silence that comes from lack of noise, but deep abiding Silence. She became inwardly Still. Finally one day the answer came from the Stillness of the Heart: “There is no such thing as freedom in the world, everyone is a slave, to become free you must lose the dependency on the world and become dependent on God/Stillness the animating Force of all life.” The message came like Rapture. It wasn’t in words. The words formed later around what she could not explain even to herself. The world had vanished. All personal self had vanished. What remained is beyond words, as if language is some meaningless thing meant only to confuse one from what is True. There was nothing, nothing, no thing … that was everything! She now knew that complete freedom has nothing to do with the world. That she had been looking at it all wrong. She had been looking to change the outside, people, the world, the universe at large, all the while overlooking the absolute Freedom within. Life had laid, what she thought of at the time, as obstacles at her doorstep, but eventually it became obvious it is fate. Shortly after the Revelation and Rapture a Teacher appeared in her life. At first she didn’t know he was a Teacher, but considered him an authority figure and one that was saying things she innately knew but was never able to articulate. It was not long before she up and moved as close as she could to him. The road of Teacher/Student is one of many ups and downs, in’s and out’s, but ultimately it is based and ends in Stillness. Everything that the Teacher did somehow pointed her back to Stillness. This may sound a simple feat, but take a moment right now, if you will and place all of the attention on that which doesn’t move in you. If you are one of the lucky ones, you immediately become Aware of Stillness, however for most, the noise of the mind (thoughts, visions, insights) the incessant noise of the mind, makes it near impossible to become Still. It took many years after the Rapture and meeting her Teacher to finally come to a place that Stillness began to be primary and the mind (thoughts) secondary. Eventually, she opened a school of unlearning, where people would come and she would begin to help them see through what they had been taught to discover the Stillness of their own Self. The change that she had attempted to envision in her youth began to manifest naturally as more and more people became aware of Stillness: The Truth of who they Are. She had always thought that it was something one had to figure out, but it is that thought itself that leads one astray. However, even that served. Everything serves! As her life came to a close, she began to see the web that had molded and transformed her life. She saw that everything that happened had to happen and that it is the same for everyone. Everyone is in the perfect moment. There is no wrong way to go in Transformation. Everything is perfectly set up. Everything unfolds perfectly and that was/is: Mira’s Moira. *** American Slavery, Reinvented https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-labor-in-america/406177/ Angola for Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ABpWhY5Xzk *** That didn’t come out so badly. Had given up on it or walked away from it a few times but kept getting pulled back. I’m glad I got pulled back. One of the things that comes up strongly in the writing is to follow through, which is not something that comes naturally to my person … I’m a quitter … the things I should quit I don’t and the things I do quit … I shouldn’t. But whatever … there really is no such thing as either. Things are going to go how they go. The head is now pounding though and the eyes really hurt. Burn even. I had no idea that would be the story. Not at all. Put it and THE TABERNACLE up on JoySters.org. http://www.joysters.org/the-tabernacle.html http://www.joysters.org/miras-moira.html *** 2018 01.06 - The other day while in the forest … I was hugging a Tree … yeah I know sounds cheesy right? But really it is not so. I never intend to hug a Tree … not in the way I did the other day … often I go up to Trees and lay hands on them … almost always I put my hand out when I pass a Tree … it is not intentional either it’s just what happens and I have a few favorite Trees that I actually look forward to seeing and always spend a few moments with … I even Kiss Trees … not with any regularity but rather in the moment that it comes up … it doesn’t even come up … it just happens. So the other day I was touching a Tree up in the Forest … it was a large Tree from what I now remember which isn’t actually all that much but it has come up a few times now to write this down so here we go. I had gone up to the Forest with an intention for Healing as I wasn’t feeling all that well and so often when that happens I will find the body under a Tree or pressed up against one … I used to do it all the time when I had backaches … I would place my back up against a Tree and leave it there for a few minutes … I rarely get backaches anymore. So I was pressed up against this Tree the other day … with my front pressed up against its Trunk because my uterus was sore or my woman stuff was … it was heavy and weighted and just didn’t feel right on the bottom half of the body at all so I pressed up against a Tree for a few moments and while doing so the Tree started Speaking but not with words … it’s more like Transference but even that is not really it … but flashes were flooding the minds eye and how the focus this year would be on Trees … nothing specific other than in a sense this year is dedicated to them … that sounds lame because every year is … but it came through differently … it came through as a reminder that I am one. My bio-Father told me when I was young and on numerous occasions when we would have “those” kinds of talks where he would tell me things that are not of the normal conversations a daughter has with their father and there were so few of them that the ones we did have … left a lasting imprint. One of the ones that left the most lasting is that my “real” mother (not bio) … in a sense … my Spiritual Mother who my father said he procreated me with was/is named “Cypress” and that I am a Tree … a Cypress Tree. I have never really looked much into Cypress Trees although I did again this morning and just put them up on FB and he never said any specific kind of Cypress and I have often had thoughts of my Spiritual Mother as this sort of Ghost-like Phantom in space who is huge … just so very huge but not unwelcoming. I have never had bad thoughts about “Cypress” my Spiritual Mother and after all that has transpired and transgressed in my relationship or lack of with my father I have never thought ill of her. In a sense … I don’t even see her as “outside” of me … in many ways, that I don’t articulate well … I sense or experience the “Universe” inside me more than outside. So all this life there have been un-investigated ties to the Cypress Tree and I was being shown the other day that I am one. I have been shown I am one once on Mushrooms … I actually was a sapling for an entire day (which in Mushy time is very different … by the way, mushies might become legal in CA and OR! Yay!). So what came up is that my life is dedicated to them, not only to the Cypress Trees but to Trees in General and of course is secondary to That which all things come from. Obviously, I have had some kind of conscious or unconscious relationship with Trees or I wouldn’t have “Writers For Trees” (WFT) all these years and am so sensitive to using paper products and a sort of inner desire or calling out for the support of Trees. I saw that the Vietnamese Cypress is almost extinct and surely that stems from the war. We (America) really bombed the fuck out of that country. http://globaltrees.org/threatened-trees/trees/vietnamese-golden-cypress/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthocyparis_vietnamensis Strange that I have such an affinity and close ties to trees and yet life has gifted me with a black thumb. I cannot keep anything plant or tree like alive with any success. I don’t know what the role will be with Trees but this Tree in the Forest was making it seem as if it is already in motion. I still have the image/time in the mind where I went through the Red Woods in California barefoot and was told that I would be helping people with Sexual Abuse and that still hasn’t happened and that was almost 3 years ago … so I don’t know how these things work … when the Trees Speak … but whatever it is that they transmit stays alive in my person. It doesn’t go dormant it just waits … for opportunity? I don’t know. *** For A LIFE LESS WRITTEN sure is a lot being written about. *** THE TEACHER IS TURNCOAT WITHOUT A SIDE Joy A. Sters (Written in The Sacred Space) January 6, 2018, 6:19am Continued January 8, 2018, 2:20am - 3am Once upon a time a man had a Direct Realization of Truth and went about spreading the news. First, he went to A Course in Miracles Newsgroup because he had spent some time reading and studying the book, and was familiar to the people there who spent most of their time bickering amongst themselves over how they interpreted it. However, upon his Direct Realization of Truth, the way he saw the book shifted and he now had the vision to see where and how people could and would get so far off track in what they considered “their understanding” of what was read. Most of those that he now interacted with saw him as a traitor to the text, even though the book itself says to put it down. They lashed out at him and personally attacked him and his family, anything they could get their hands on to make him out to be a very bad man. Here these people were studying a book on Love and Forgiveness and yet were spending all of their days and nights, digging and searching for things to quite literally hang and destroy this man with. Fortunately, all of their attempts failed. Very few saw the hypocrisy of their actions, but a small few Heard where he was pointing. He saw this and created a Newsgroup of his own “The End of the Search,” meaning that the search itself blinds one from seeing they are already “in” and “are” what they are searching for. Word quickly spread and in no time there were more than one hundred members to his group. He wrote and spoke on many topics, most of which you would never hear about in the mainstream world. Basically, he was a renegade of his time. After a few months he opened another group, one where he took members of the EOTS group that had responded with enough openness of mind to Hear deeper pointings, as basically the entire Teaching boiled down to one simple question, but this question is so utterly profound that it usually takes Hearing it in so many different ways and over such an extended period of time that few remain committed to knowing: “Who am I?” However, this small sub-group soldiered on Hearing and sharing on a deeper level, and with a bit more intimacy and privacy than they had in the EOTS group but also remained in the EOTS group as well. They then began sharing what they were beginning to understand and know with the members of the EOTS group, in a sense becoming “Teachers” themselves. Over the years the number of group members in EOTS would swing up and down … some people just could not Hear what was being shared with generous ears. It is very hard for The Ego to keep an open mind, while attempting to protect itself from its own demise. Some people left quietly and others left and made attempts to destroy The Teacher, to make him wrong and to convert others in believing that he is a bad man. Luckily their attempts would eventually fail, but often after they had done some pretty horrible things to his person. Those that remained began to see him more and more clearly and likened him to The Good Shepherd and themselves to the Flock under his care. Love, however, is a ruthless thing. Many will claim they love you and mean it in the moment that it is said, but The Ego is a wily beast and although it claims it seeks its own demise, often when it begins to happen: The Ego fights tooth and nail against it. You cannot be near The Teacher and not begin to lose who you think you are. In a sense, The Teacher is a “thought vacuum.” The Teacher sucks the thoughts/beliefs you have about yourself and everything else away, but does not replace those thoughts/beliefs with new ones, you just become empty. Empty of yourself, of who you think you are. This can be a very uncomfortable time for those that are full of themselves and was for many and many left and few returned. The Group became smaller and smaller, until only a precious few remained as The Teacher is a Turncoat, a renegade against The Ego, but The Ego cannot fight The Teacher because The Teacher does not have a side. There is no side for The Teacher to be on, in fact, The Teacher isn’t even actually against The Ego because there isn’t one. However, it takes a very rare individual to discover this and it is even rarer to find another one in the world once you do. However, if you have stumbled upon this story, you must have started to unravel from the strong ties the world binds one in, in the false belief of individuality and as you unravel, those that have unraveled before you, miraculously and mysteriously show up and as they do you become: THE TEACHER. And find yourself: A TURNCOAT WITHOUT A SIDE. *** Turncoat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turncoat *** WALMART AND THE SACRED SPACE (DREAM) January 8, 2017 11pm-12am Had a dream … one of those kinds where you are not fully asleep … you are skimming the edges of sleep, but don’t know it. In the dream I was in The Sacred Space and looked out the window and there was the face of a young black man looking up and in at me. It startled and then frightened me. I closed the blind quickly and sat on the floor of the room not knowing what to do … then the dream morphed into another dream … I was with two young boys and we were going into Walmart. As soon as we got inside we were excited like little kids in candy store and started running wildly all around … although I was in an adult body I was very child-like in person and seemed no more in age than the two boys I was with which seemed to be around eleven years old … we went to pay for something and the man at the counter asked me what was the deal with Christmas why was there always so much fighting around it and I paused only slightly before saying that it wouldn’t be a problem if everyone just minded their business and didn’t force one another to participate in it. The man bent down to pick something up and there was a woman at the counter too who was either keeping him company or worked there. I walked out the store with the boys and realized I had just spoken out loud and that freaked me a bit not only because I had spoken but because I had said something that didn’t feel true and so I checked in with myself and it came up that Christmas is Idol worship, but that it is still best to just leave the whole thing alone. *** Dr. Bronner's is donating $5 million to MAPS for MDMA. :o) https://www.drbronner.com/all-one-blog/2017/04/donating-5-million-maps/ *** Recently, actually on Saturday … Wayneji sent and email that sent the mind body into a tailspin. When I first read it, it hit like a ton of bricks ... a vision entered the mind of being hit, beaten upon by a man that am holding on to for dear life while begging him to help save me from myself. It was a very strange thing to see. Some time past and I read it again … wondering if I am just “off” right now, because I am in a bit of a dark space … but the second time I read it, it hit even harder … like a bomb … that is what kept coming up after reading it and all day yesterday … I felt shell shocked or my idea of it … it felt like I had opened a Bomb and it had exploded and psychic shrapnel was stuck into some very tender regions. This all transpired around the time the computer was being shut down … I went to respond and say something about how it was hitting me but the computer wouldn’t work … it was not working in a way that had never happened before and so I just quit and shut the whole thing down … but it didn’t stop whatever was going on in my person in doing so. I felt sick with it yesterday. It is the first email from Wayneji where I have felt hated. I know this is all “my stuff” but still I felt so hated by him. I couldn’t shake it. So I stopped trying and just let it all be whatever it was being. I had no way I could help myself. It all seemed so justified. And it wasn’t just the head that felt sick the whole body felt sick. Now tonight I am reading it again and nothing in it seems as something that would trigger such intense things, in fact it seems a rather casual email but it certainly was not received that way. Energy is a very strange and in this case intense thing. This week, or actually last week but it is still not finished … I have been tidying up a WRITING PRACTICE from September … it was started and nearly finished back then except for the last page and I put the last page in last week but still haven’t gone through an edited it yet. Well, I got a full dose of “Energies” on Saturday and yesterday … today I am just freaking tired. Scribble ... A Life Less Written12/31/2017 SCRIBBLE
A LIFE LESS WRITTEN There is almost nothing in life that reveals more clearly that one is not doing it, than writing does. Not just writing, but also editing of the writing. It doesn’t matter how much a wish to write is had, if the body has no inclination to writing, it just simply: Does not happen. It is the same with editing, which has been rather frustrating this week, because The Corridor was submitted for Copyright … which is something that happened quite out of the blue. Actually a few things happened out of the blue. An email came in from the Willamette Writer’s group about a contest for short story and I found myself submitting: Big Top Circus As an entry. However I read in the instructions that it is wise or recommended to copyright the piece before sending it … when looking into copyright it said that if it is a compilation you will want to submit it that way and not each one separately, even though Big Top Circus was being submitted to the contest as a stand alone short story … that is not how it actually is, it is part of the collection. So then I went through The Corridor and realized that it never was edited … slightly but really not much at all and there were typos and then the “tense” was all wrong and certain consistencies were missing. I got as much as I could done that night before submitting … I actually wanted to wait a day but inside was saying: “No, no, no another day will not come … you must do this now.” And when there is that type of inner talk that is riding on the energy to do it … one sort of just sits back and watches it all unfold. However … it was right … as it usually is because that energy has not come back again. The Corridor was submitted for copyright approval and Big Top Circus was entered into the contest but there has been absolutely no ability to continue since. I have 23 more stories to edit and there is a push to have it done before Christmas, but I can’t get the body to do it. I try. I sit down and start editing and get a paragraph in and the eyes blur … or the mind will wander in such a way that I cannot get it back. It just makes one see that you cannot do anything … you have no control. You can think all you want to, that you do, but you absolutely do not. Plus if I push it, it makes me hate the writing. Sometimes I will love the stories that are written but if I am trying to force myself to read or edit when the energy to do so is not around, I end up hating the story. I hate the writing that comes through. It looks and sounds horrible. It is such a strange thing. I am struggling to get through: Teacher And have been attempting to rework it for over a week and just can’t get it done. *** Funny and interesting, writing the above seemed to have sparked some energy (mebe) to get the editing done, because “Teacher” is now finished and it was interesting to read and good … where all week it seems horrible and poorly written and not interesting at all. Very strange. Very strange indeed. *** F - G S - G S - till 3 - G / 3-9 - B / 10+ G *** Anne Sexton writes: “Writers are such phonies; they sometimes have wise insights but they don’t live by them at all. That’s what writers are like. When you read what they write, whether its their poems or their letters, you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.” (pg. 160, Autobiography) Look up Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (Sexton Fav) (pg. 161) *** Both the angst and beauty of the Holiday Season is upon me. It is as if one’s chest begins to be pulled in two completely different directions: One in Joy; the other in Sadness/melancholy. It is the strangest of sensations and only seems to come about this time of year. It’s not depression. It is much different. There are triggers, scents of nostalgia and longing for something that has never happened. It is the same longing that comes every time of year at this time. *** Not sure what is going on, but my person has turned very sour.:o( *** Look up Steinbeck’s Dissonant Symphony. *** Steinbeck writes: “You know the big pine tree beside this house? I planted it when it and I were very little; I’ve watched it grow. It has always been known as “John’s tree.” Years ago, in mental playfulness I used to think of it as my brother and then later, still playfully, I thought of it as something rather closer, a kind of repository of my destiny. This was all an amusing fancy, mind you. Now the lower limbs should be cut off because they endure the house. I must cut them soon, and I have a very powerful reluctance to do it, such a reluctance as I would have toward cutting live flesh. Furthermore, if the tree should die, I am pretty sure I should be ill. This feeling I have planted in myself and quite deliberately I guess, but it is nonetheless strong for all that.” (Pg. 31, Life in Letters) It is strange that some writers … especially in this instance, notice their great and deep relationship with Trees and yet still print. I get it because I have printed and still use paper, as little as possible, but still do. But we are so connected to Trees in ways that even I don’t currently understand, I just know. When Steinbeck writes that it would be like cutting into live flesh … I know it on that level and yet he and I have chopped down trees. Is it just the “killer” in everyone … there is a killer in me. I know this. I watch it. I have the capacity to kill. Sometimes it seems everything that is done is in exact opposite of nature. And yet nature is a killing machine. Maybe it is just my backwards thoughts or maybe it is just thought (period). Maybe if one just stopped being concerned about anything and everything then it would all just be what it is … which it is anyway. *** Help me not to be so opinionated and to write without such criticism. To write things worth writing. This has been a request for years. Please help. *** Steinbeck also writes so sweetly about his wife, finally an answer to a Prayer. I really have wanted to read a man that is in love with his wife and finally I have; am. You can hear it so clearly the love his words ride on: “Carol’s business is growing nicely. She gets prettier all the time. I’m more in love with her than I ever was. Sometimes I waken in the night with the horrible feeling that she is gone. I shouldn’t want to live is she were.” (pg. 37, Life in Letters) As the above was being typed, Mark came to mind, as if he were momentarily here and saying: “This is how I love you." My heart still breaks. My heart still breaks. Do you know love is True when your heart still breaks after 15 years of separation? When you still feel that one as close as if they have their mouth gently breathing on the back of your neck and you like it? There is no time in love. Maybe it is why you can say: “I will love you forever.” And it is True because the moment you are in when it is said, is forever. I would have never known … would I have ever known … how deep love is without Mark? No, probably not. You don’t know what you are in when you are in it. If you could only see what you are in things might be so different, each moment so much more precious. Someone recently read a piece I’d written on Academia for an Art class at SOU, it was about failure or something like that or maybe it was perfection, but what was written about was on being as mother. It was a decent enough piece, but I didn’t hear it. I didn’t hear a word of the words that came out of these fingertips for if I had I would have done something! I knew and yet I still just kept on walking past. It is if one’s own (not really) words come back and haunt them. But it probably is better to see, even if there is nothing you can do … it is still best to see. I feel this with Tyler. I want so badly to be in his life but not as a hinderance, and I am. I don’t bring “joy” into his life … how strange that you would name someone something they are so completely far from. I almost taste how completely joyful our life could be together if I could just be someone else. Tyler and I have so much in common … so very much that we are nearly the same person and yet I don’t have any relationship with him at all. *** It is not that I would wish this upon Steinbeck or anyone, but so very much appreciate that he does: “You see the haunting thought comes that perhaps I have been kidding myself all these years, myself and other people—that I have nothing to say or no art in saying nothing.” (pg. 39, Letters) *** Lately, suicide has been rearing its head again, the mind is looking for an out. There wouldn’t be a care in the world if one just didn’t wake up into this world again. It’s the main draw or pull towards alcohol … that momentary break from who one thinks they are … nothing does it like alcohol but with such high penalties. All through “Grant,” they talk about it, which, by the way, is an amazingly written book. Thank you, thank you Ron Chernow who is one of, if not my favorite living writer, him, Richard Bach and Neal Donald Walsh are my favorite living ones. Neal because he wrote and published what I was actually going through at the time with Conversations with God, so he is still ranked very highly in my book for doing so … it takes balls to share things, intimate things that can make you look bonkers. And Richard Bach because he is able to word something in a way that I still struggle so much with … and he words it so simply and beautifully and in such great stories that the masses can hear it, maybe not completely, but they get a taste of something that is very hard to word. Interesting that after writing the above about alcohol, which seems to be something that many writers struggle with, Steinbeck writes: “Last night we went berserk and bought a quarter of a pound of wonderful jasmine tea. It is the grandest stuff I have ever tasted, and I have fully made up my mind to give up liquor in all forms in its favor.” (p.40, Letters) The only reason alcohol is so hard to let go of in my person is that it is so easy to get. Pot on the other hand is easy to get but it just isn’t like alcohol, it puts me to sleep like it most times but not until after it rocks my whole world and I don’t always want to have my world rocked. Pot has one take responsibility (at least the kind I smoke) where alcohol eliminates it. Will have to try some Jasmine tea … haven’t had much luck with teas … don’t like them very much. Am down to hot lemon water as of late. *** I am going blind. It is very strange to watch happen. Each day the vision gets worse not better. Even in nature now, things have lost their sharp edges and people are blurs whizzing by in the streets … rarely can I see a face clearly anymore and its strange how little I care. I should care that I am going blind and I actually don’t … it’s just surprising and interesting to watch. *** I have only two long sleeve wearable shirts left that I rotate by washing as soon as they come off. One of them is now see-thru from washing it so much. They are both still very comfortable, cotton and long sleeve … I rarely can find a shirt that I like, that fits well and that is comfortable … those three things are hard to come by and is why I have been wearing the same two shirts for three or more years now. No one ever sees me so it doesn’t matter. I do have other shirts, I just don’t like them very much. I don’t even know why I keep the other shirts around. *** Word of the Day: Doleful THE DOLEFUL DAZE He picks up the magazine flipping through a few pages, his eyes fall upon a story about a building that has burnt to the ground with twenty-five people trapped inside. He momentarily ponders why the tragedy of others somehow appeases a restlessness in his person. Is it that things could always be worse or that there actually is an end insight? He doesn’t ponder it long, but he doesn’t get an answer either. He is in the waiting room ten minutes too early to see his therapist. He doesn’t know why he keeps going; he doesn’t even like her. She’s fat, which annoys him and over-the-top with cosmetics, so much so that she nearly looks fake, but it’s also part of the draw, because reality is flimsy and he loves what he hates. Seeing her makes him want to rip her face off and he is just relived that finally there is someone else’s face, besides his own that he would want to do that to. The best part of his therapy he has discovered; is hating his therapist. Normally, he doesn’t hate people, at least not in general, but he does’t often like them either. He used to have hope for humanity; but it died early on in life. Life progressively confirmed his worst fears about humans years ago, that they are shallow, selfish, vindictive (at the very best), creatures that are to be avoided at all costs. However, there are a select few he does not feel this way about, yet so few; that all hope in humanity has been lost. He masters conformity and uses it as a skill for avoidance. His doleful face. He wore dolefulness on his face like a shroud. His daze were doleful. There is an air of dolefulness about his person. The many happy faces only confirmed his doleful state. *** It is such a pain, but for whatever reason my person often writes fiction in past tense so then after it is done one has to go back through the entire thing and change the tense. It happened with The Corridor and was/is maddening. *** It is so strange and yet warming to read things by great writers such as Steinbeck that you have written yourself. He says in a letter: “Where then are the masterpieces?” (p. 51, Letters) This came out in a poem recently … sometime this year. It’s not that they are my words … that is especially obvious in Poetry, but that the same words come through the Writer … whoever the writer is and that they came through Steinbeck as well is warming. *** THE CORRIDOR Is up on Scribd and the website: http://www.joysters.org/the-corridor.html *** FIRST SNOW!!!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY JORGE! *** It didn’t last long, but it was a much needed treat as the whole body has been in an agitated slumbering state … not sure what it is about the first snow that gets the spirits so high, but once out in it, everything shifts and the body had so much energy and was bouncing all around. *** THE MOUNTAIN TOP Made it to the top of the Mountain … had left with the sun shining and thoughts of not bringing a scarf or even a coat it seemed so warm, but something inside sort of yelled: “Just go!” So the scarf and coat were left on and thank god because about half way up the sky started to cover over with dark clouds and then it started raining and the trees were all blowing around like crazy. It was quite a spectacular thing! Got to the top completely fatigued, the body has had very little sleep lately, it’s starting to get scary and things aren’t functioning quite right but, insomnia, it is what it is. At the top it was raining but sat down between two very large trees and was leaning the back up against one and was surprised to find how much flexibility is in a tree of that size and stature. It felt so good, like a child being rocked back and forth. The wind was really whipping it all about and the rain was not coming down too hard and it was cold but not freezing. Had thought the first snow might come then. Waited for it … but finally gave up and headed back down. The whole thing was a bit of an adventure and there has been very little adventure around these parts lately, so it was an extra special treat. Am surprised the legs have anything left in them today, but from all the bouncing around they just did in the snow, it seems they do. An Unwritten Life (Continued)12/30/2017 AN UNWRITTEN LIFE
2017 12.04 - The other day the most amazing and beautiful thing happened. It has taken a few days to allow for it to soak in and to be able to write it down because, if this is ever read by anyone other than the one that experienced it, it probably will not sound, or come through as amazing and beautiful as it is, mainly, because that is not how people seem to “think” or “hear” words pertaining to masturbation and orgasm. However, it is what occurred. There was nothing planned about it, there hadn’t been one in a long time, masturbation that is. There had been no masturbation in quite some time, not even a slight inkling to touch the body in the sexual domain and there wasn’t much of one at the time that this transpired. There had been some slight thoughts of a sexual nature and images that had a sexual charge that showed up, which hadn’t appeared in quite sometime, but it wasn’t creating sexual friction and the blood was almost over, so there wasn’t really anything making a want for touching the body. However, the coconut oil was grabbed and the body laid down and the hands went in the pants and immediately the body was turned on. It all happened rather quickly. Much quicker than things of this nature usually do and possibly it is due to the Kegel's, which have been done with much more consistency than ever before, or maybe it’s because this body is almost never touched, or that it has been years since the last sexual activity, or the images and sounds that were flashing through the mind’s eye, or the pressure and touch of the hand, or the Full Moon outside or all of it! Which is probably the most accurate. It was so warm and full and intense, nearly from the first instant the hands went in the pants. The interesting thing is that even though it was all very intense, in the beginning, there was no foresight or sign for what was to come, it all seemed very normal, but then in what lasted maybe all of five minutes of build-up … the intensity of an orgasm arrived and it was even said internally: “I’m going to cum.” And then did … with the words: “Oh my god I love you so much!” Reverberating as energy throughout of my person! This was so beautiful. That is the only word, words ... that came to mind both then and now, and I have never called sex or any orgasm beautiful; but this was: It was so fucking beautiful. And it lasted longer than any before! It was like laying there in warm wonderful, beautiful, thick and comforting fluid. But even that is not true because there is nothing, no word that represents what happened. It was just so beautiful. And I cried. Sobbed really. And even through the sobbing the sensations continued as if the orgasm was not going to stop or fade. But then it did. And although I have said this on numerous occasions, it keeps getting topped every time because this was/is as of now: The best orgasm ever! And left no desire or want to touch again after laying there, which seemed quite a long time; just basking in these amazing feeling and sensations as I had never known you could feel so good in the body, that it is capable of such amazing sensations of pleasure. And it felt wrong (bad word but the only one coming up right now) it felt wrong to write about … as if it would dirty or pornographify something that was the most beautiful, gentle, tenderest of experiences. It seemed there is no way to write about this without it sounding “dirty” but there was nothing dirty about any of it. It was so PURE. It was as if one were an innocent child … not being touched by an adult … but how an innocent child can feel things so intensely because there is nothing to compare it to. The Purity of Innocence. *** There was a tiny little pudgy bird hopping around on the ground yesterday. It let me get very close … even bent down and was surprised by how trusting it was being. Then it hopped a bit away, but let me get real close again … within arms reach. Then he flew up to a tree branch and again let me get real close before he finally flew away. He was the sweetest little thing. With the most technical of movements. I don’t know why birds look so mechanical in movement, as if they aren’t real, while humans look so fluid. When humans turn their heads it seems a smooth functioning, but when a bird does; it seems mechanical. *** 2017 12.06 - Whoever or However it is that landed Anne Sexton in my lap … Thank You … Thank You … Thank You! Talk about a Kindred Spirit! Or she does; she talks about finding a Kindred Spirit in Carolyn Kizer, but I have found one in Anne! “The whole trouble being that my writing has guts; but I do not.” (Page 68, Letters) She is so alive! But no one understands it or her because they are all trying to trap her into being what they want; not what she is! *** Recently, last week or on the 24th of November whenever that was … a short story was started: MASTER OF DREAMS But then there was no energy to stick with it and a day of writing was skipped and a day in this reality is more like a week because, well because it is, to skip a day in this reality is like skipping a week in the “real” world. So a week was skipped and then a reminder came that my Nephew Elijah’s Birthday was coming and so a whole day was dedicated, basically to writing this story and entwining him into it, which was quite easy actually, surprisingly so. It was finished in one day, which is amazing, it is only a 13 page short story but it seemed to come out very well and I thought of him and having a conversation with him while it was being written but I didn’t have the feel that “I” was writing it and for sure it was not the case because I read it the next day, actually I read it that day and thought it good enough to send but then it was read again the next day and it was not remembered, it was more like reading it for the first time again or for the first time ever. It’s good and cute and basically the first children’s story written, it’s actually more pre-teen because he is turning or has now turned eleven. *** Sweet! Anne says: “I am kind of a secret beatnik hiding in the suburbs in my square house on a dull street.” (Page 71) Beatniks! :o) She also writes: “This is a jerky letter, because I am in a lousy mood.” (Pg. 71, Letters) But you can’t tell at all … her writing energy is so good … and often it seems the way or the same with me. No one can tell how fuct up things are. Everything looks and sounds normal when it completely isn’t! The Writer is not the same as the person inside. It is, but it isn’t. Can’t explain it even to myself. I’d always expected people to see how challenging things are inside but they don’t, they can’t and if it is spoken, they over-react because it is so incongruent with what they believe about what they see or “think” they see. She ends the letter: “If this letter is awful, please forgive. I have wrenched it out of a clearly depressed day.” (Pg. 71, Letters) It is not an awful letter at all, she hasn’t written an awful letter yet! And you most surely cannot tell she is depressed. *** Interesting that Anne spent three days in a hospital crying, and then when she got out her father died about three days later. Sensitive people pick up many things that others that are not sensitive cannot bare. Meaning that there is no link in this book that implies that Anne’s hospitalization had anything to do with a pre-cursor to her fathers death but I see it. It is all mentioned in the same letter to Snodgrass (page 81, Letters). She is an orphan now. *** 2017 12.08 - Yesterday I was laying down and the trees that were being looked up at began to dissolve. It was attributed to some discomfort. However, it was a reminder that I used to dissolve all the time as a child. Not actually all the time, but during times of undo-stress the world would dissolve and “I” would be gone for a time and then reappear. As I got older, I forgot that this happened, but it was a clear reminder yesterday that it did happen, that it used to happen, because it was the exact same thing that would happen back then. It wasn’t a complete dissolution because that which was causing the discomfort left and as it left; the world became solid again. *** Writer’s Energy is gone. Simply shut down. It is a strange thing when this happens and one sees the expectation that it will always be here. Without Writer’s Energy, it is a sensation of complete emptiness. Not empty-fullness, but completely hollowed out. No imagination. No imagery. Just endless darkness. Not depressing. There is no emotion at all. *** Yesterday there was a little bird hopping around on the ground. He didn’t seem to notice me, while walking up and I was not that far away when noticing him. He was a plump little thing, looked as if he had swallowed a golf ball or that the egg he would lay would be himself completely. He was that tiny and simultaneously that large. I slowed the pace down and crept towards him, but he did not seem to mind or care. He had a bright White/Red/Black streak on the very top of his head sort of back from the eyes to the back of his head and then beautiful green wings of many different shades of green that shifted, morphed and glisteningly glowed in the snares of the sun. He would hop two or three times and I would creep up on him a bit closer and this went on for about 3-5 minutes until I was so close I could have stepped on him or picked him up, neither of which were attempted. He seemed to either have no fear of my presence or no recognition of it. It was quite a treat! *** The other day there was an attempt made to recreate the most recently incredible masturbation session; with absolutely no success. There was even the thought that one wouldn’t expect to have such an amazing thing happen again, but there certainly was expectation and such huge disappointment with what resulted … which was one of the lamest orgasms ever. Whatever that was the other day was PURE MAGIC! You can’t create or re-create PURE MAGIC … it’s a Gift from Beyond. *** The Darkside of the Moon is here. It comes on so quickly. It’s catches one off-guard every time. Life loses any luster it had. Everyone looks like the enemy. So many synchronistic or coincidental things have been happening that the mind is going a bit nutty. Too much stimulation. An example is of a recent “session” for lack of a better word where promises were made and then almost as soon as the session was over … all the promises were broken. Then I went to take Pete out and there were two young men walking down the road and one of them was yelling at the other something like: “You don’t listen. You look like you hear me, but you don’t hear me. It goes in one ear and looks like you are hearing me, but then I see it goes right out the other!” And the other kid was just walking along listening or not listening and it was sort of a trigger as to what had just happened … I sort of felt as if I were being yelled at as well … but not in a bad way … the kid wasn’t yelling at the kid in a mean-spirited way … but he was really loud about it. Then later in the day on the way back from a walk … in the Foresty area … those two same young men were walking up and I sort of inwardly said to the one: “Still getting yelled at?” And he smiled and I sort of chuckled inside and then they were right up on me and I sort of locked eyes for a second with the kid that had been yelling and he had the Brightness in his eyes and I flashed of MoeDirdee of all people and sort of said an inward: “Hey Moe!” This is only one of things that have been happening all the time with greater and greater frequency and I don’t know if I am going crazy or just losing my mind. I had flashed of a time where Lauren (bio-father) told me or I remember him telling me but it might not be true at all … this was a very strange time for me … it was when I was 12 or 13 and he told me that he had poisoned Easter Dinner. That we were having Lobster because that is what everyone wanted (everyone but him?) and so he was going to poison it and kill them all so don’t eat it and then we can run off and live happily every after? I have no idea if any of that is true. But I do remember being very scared of him after that. No one died and I think he ended up in the hospital shortly after. Hard to say there is no time in the mind that isn’t skewed anymore. But the strange thing is … the very next day after having this flash or vision or whatever it was … there was an advertisement laying on the sidewalk that had a giant lobster on it. It felt very intentional and I got scared. Wayneji once said I am a horror story. Seems so most of the time. *** 2017 12.11: If God needs your belief; it’s not God. *** The sky is so brilliantly beautiful and bright tonight. Saw a shooting/falling/fallen, twisting, twirling Star tonight. It looked like a defective firework coming down. *** “We’re going to Tavern on the Green after the shareholders meeting. I want you there. The limo will be down stairs at 7am tomorrow morning. Be in it.” The towering CEO with a large presence demanded while pressing the button to the elevator. The doors open. He gets in and disappears out of view. She has only been his secretary for four days. She was completely overwhelmed and had no understanding how she had even got this job. It was a type of promotion. She had been working for the Vice President of Benefits and Compensation for the last five years, and when he CEOs secretary had taken ill and they transferred her over to him. They never stated why they chose her and she was baffled by it. She is twenty-three years old with two young children and a long-time-term live in boyfriend who is father of the youngest child. They have been together for two years and have had some bumps in the road, but are held together by a deep abiding love they have for one another. *** PRESSURE Joy A. Sters December 12, 2017 (11pm in The Sacred Space) Pressure, pressure Pressure all around Pushing at the inside Pulling one to the ground Surrender, surrender Give up your game of might You struggle for things You think you want But haven’t got the fight. Plunder, plunder You never will be found The vestiges of a sound mind Will only keep one bound. The world of shadows taunts you Emotions lead you on Entwined in ego boundaries Leave one pressed upon Testing, testing It festers in your womb The life you never lived Has sealed you in a tomb Broken, broken It all just went so fast Before the sail had lifted The flag had donned half-mast (Finished 11:11pm) *** Poem Edits: PRESSURE Joy A. Sters December 12, 2017 Pressure, pressure … Pressure all around Pushing at the inside Pressing one to the ground. Surrender, surrender … Give up your game of might Clawing for the things you want Yet haven’t got the fight. Plunder, plunder … You never will be found The vestiges of a sound mind Will only keep one bound. The world of shadows taunts you Emotions lead you on Entwined in ego boundaries Leave one pressed upon. Testing, testing … It festers in your womb The life you never lived The sealant of your tomb. Broken, broken … It all just went so fast Before the sail had lifted The flag had donned half-mast. *** This might sound a bit sick, but I am so excited. Just found my first Paranoid writer! I haven’t read anything about him just yet except this small blurb in Anne Sexton’s Biography. “Delmore Schwartz, exiled from friends and family alike by paranoia.” (Page 109) Paranoia has been the biggest curse in this life or maybe it is the biggest blessing … one in which has kept things away. You just never know. But there is paranoia here that seems to grow greater all the time … however Stillness does as well so it is a strange thing to have paranoia riding on Stillness. Delmore is handsome. He didn’t age very gracefully. It didn’t end well for him either: Schwartz was unable to repeat or build on his early successes later in life as a result of alcoholism and mental illness, and his last years were spent in reclusion at the Columbia Hotel in New York City. In fact, Schwartz was so isolated from the rest of the world that when he died on July 11, 1966, at age 52, of a heart attack, two days passed before his body was identified at the morgue. This is probably how I will die as well, except I won’t have written anything noteworthy such as he did. He also was friends with Robert Lowell, everyone who was anyone in Writing was. They actually lived together as roommates at one time. Hmmm … it doesn’t speak to anything about Schwartz’s paranoia. :o( This says much more than Wiki did but it’s a blog so who knows how true it is: What was the source of Schwartz's despair? Much of it could be traced to his horrible childhood. Neither parent seemed to care much for the future poet. The father was a philanderer, the mother wildly jealous. It was a very dysfunctional family. One day, with the young Delmore in hand, she discovered her husband in a restaurant with a person she referred to as a whore. She proceeded to scream at her husband, as if Delmore wasn't there. Recalling humiliations of my own childhood, I know exactly how Schwartz must have felt: lost, vulnerable, floating through space with the sign of Cain branded on his forehead. The father abandoned the family when Delmore was ten; the increasingly reduced circumstances of the isolated family, now headed by an increasingly moody mother, must have weighed heavily on both children. Things got much better before they got much worse. As already mentioned, he had become quite famous at an early age. Critics hailed him as a potentially great writer; one referred to him as the "new Chekhov." He studied at various universities; he attended Harvard for several years, but never received a graduate degree. Schwartz became the editor of the renowned Partisan Review. He taught at many prestigious places, but never remained at one of them for long. Inner peace was elusive, however, as this excerpt from his poem, All Night, All Night, indicates: "O your life, your lonely life, What have you ever done with it, And done with the great gift of consciousness What will you ever do with your life before death's knife Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?" This excerpt gives another good indication of Schwartz's talent; it evinces a perfect marriage of music and meaning, the mark of a true poet. The meaning, however, is hopelessly bleak, another version of "It would have been better if I hadn't been born." Feeling worthless at his core, Schwartz sought fame at the surface. This is a common strategy of those who are both broken and ambitious; it doesn't work. In 1943, Schwartz published what he thought would be his major work. He expected it to rival Eliot's Wasteland as a modern classic. He named the 261-page poem "Genesis, Book One." Was Schwartz playing God in order to silence his inner critic forever? This is what he said of it, "I fear that it is so good, that I, mere I, am not the author, but rather a team of inspired poets." Few agreed. One critic was downright hostile:"Who, except at gunpoint, would read Delmore Schwartz's autobiographical epic, Genesis, Book One--Book One!" Schwartz's tragedy is that he became famous at an early age, and was never able to revisit his early success. After the failure of his second marriage, which, like his first one, ended in divorce, Schwartz deteriorated rapidly. For the last nine years of his life, the once famous poet lived as a recluse. He ended up in a seedy hotel near Times Square. His addiction to alcohol and barbiturates, an attempt to relieve the symptoms of his mental illness, was destroying him. One day, after emptying garbage, he collapsed in the elevator of the hotel. His body lay in the morgue for two days before it was identified. https://thomasdorsett.blogspot.com/2016/04/poetry-and-paranoia-starlights.html No one every talks about paranoia but how can you? You think it’s real: If it didn’t seem real it wouldn’t be paranoia. Why are some thoughts so much stronger, so seemingly real? God knows. The mind is a mean-spirited thing at times. A mean-spirited phantom. And it’s not just thoughts because you have the thought and then there is an energy and sometimes action by yourself or another that validates the thought and pronounces the energy so that the thought becomes more powerful and then it grows and spirals out. It maybe “past” lives stuff. Some of it, but mostly here in me … it is still of being watched. Even though there is a growing ok’ness with being seen, it is when there seems as if there is an intention of an “other” to do something with what is seen that makes for madness. I no longer have the fear of being killed, unless I am walking down the road. I often fear that cars want to hit me. Intentionally run me down. But the more spongey part of this mind feels that it has something to do with “past” lives or “all lives” and sort of being tapped into that because the fears are of things that have seemingly happened and that is why they are so real … so maybe all these things are happening in some kind of parallel “space” right now and so it feel as if it is happening (because it is) but the mind can’t understand it because it can’t actually see it. (Side note: Apple has the most gawd awful spell check program and changes word spellings before you can even finish the word and it’s always a wrong word … it always changes it to something that is nothing like what the word was/is supposed to be.) Oh, ok, I have one paranoid thing I can share. The other day while out and about … I stood up from where I had been sitting and Ryea Paige/TheLittleBindiRock was missing. I had just had it in my hand. I had had it in my hand all day. I had it all along the walk to where I had arrived. I actually had it inside the glove so I knew it couldn’t have been dropped. I no longer had the glove on, but I had been sitting in the same spot since I had arrived and could recall holding it. You must understand that I am very cautious with this Rock because I have misplaced it before. I have thought it was gone, taken, missing quite a few times, one time for months and I can never explain it’s comings or it’s goings. However, because of this I am so careful with it. I know it is missing like one would notice a finger missing. Therefore: I started to lose it … not just the rock, but sanity as well! I don’t mean a tiny bit. I understand that no one will “get” the attachment to Rocks, especially this one because I hardly understand it myself, but there are few things in this world that are as dear and treasured to my person. I have had this Rock in my hand for years. It is the daughter I will never have. It is the one that holds my hand and walks me through life, because most times I can’t even get out the door and somehow this Rock helps. I still mourn “MURock” and it’s been five years since I lost him on TheRanch. I can still see Him in the mind’s eye … I know what he looked and felt like as much as my own son who is no longer alive. They are precious to me. I become very attached and am … so I was completely freaking. There had been a man sitting across from me and I started blaming him. I know these false thoughts from years of torture so I try not to buy into them. However, I was really freaking out I had checked the backpack two times … completely. I had walked up to the counter two times and looked there. There just was no where for it to have disappeared to and then I started thinking that it was “taken” I can’t explain these things either but often when something “bad” happens I think I am being punished by the unSeen. I know things can be taken away this way, as they have before, but I also know that because they have I often think everything is and then I freak about why. What have I done to lose this now! And there are always answers. Millions and trillions of reasons why one would have TheRock taken and I kept blaming that man, that guy who had been next to me. This is the real paranoia because it grows and becomes more and more real. The mind becomes solid in what it believes and then there is no appeasing it in any other way. This all went on for about a half hour and finally I just gave up. Surrendered. Lost. Accepted defeat. Accepted that one of the most valuable things in this life was now gone. Death. You cannot even grok how completely devastating the above was. If I had written it at the time you would get a sense of the “franticness” but this is days later and it’s all resolved now so there is no way to relay the insanity. It was as if one were going to “break in half” and at the same time was “surrendering in defeat.” I finally got up from where I was sitting. People had moved in and were sitting across from me and were talking rather loudly and I was already in a very strange state. I went and sat at a table away from everyone and as I sat down I put my hand to the back of my head, not even sure why, but when I did, I realized what I had done: The head had been hurting when I arrived at the destination and when I sat down I put Ryea Paige/The Little Bindi Rock on the back of the head, under the hat I was wearing. I didn’t think much of it. I know these hands have good energy in them and TheRock for sure as well and I thought or it came up that it would help with the headache and it did because the headache was gone. However the paranoia had now ensued making a disaster of everything. There was such a great release, Release … RELIEF! I sobbed right there in front of the giant picture window looking out onto traffic. I sobbed for once again blaming innocent people for doing things they were not doing. I sobbed because I was so happy and relieved and I sobbed because I am so crazy and I know I am crazy and I can’t help myself. I am near tears now. Because this isn’t an uncommon event. This is every day of this life. People exacerbate it. Being around “others” makes it even more crazy, but even when no one is around: Paranoia is. It is similar to being judged 24 hours a day. The thing is … sometimes, usually things I am not paranoid about, things that should make me paranoid: Don’t. Or maybe because of them I am. Such as when I was about 30 years old I worked for a couple out of their home and they had their niece staying with them. She had two young children. I rarely saw her, however one day they came into where I was working and told me I had to leave and the reason they gave was because their niece wanted to kill me. She had a meth relapse and for some reason voices were telling her to kill me and she was afraid she would. Now that should be enough to make anyone paranoid, although I had been paranoid for about 15-17 years prior to that episode. In so many ways none of this makes any rational sense so a rational person is never going to understand this kind of … well whatever you call it … sickness … mental illness … fear? It’s not fear of death … it is fear of thoughts. It is a fear, a deep seeded fear in a phantom that right now I can say: “Oh paranoia … big deal it’s just phantom thoughts.” But when I am hit with it. You wouldn’t even recognize me. I am not the same person I am right now typing this. A whole other person comes to life. Then on top of that there is depression and mania. Right now there is extreme restlessness, which is probably why all this babble is spewing forth. Anyway, thanks for the trip down memory lane Delmore Schwartz. *** Today’s Spiritual Vitamin is: “Everything that one sees and thinks in this world is Perfect. Nothing is wrong at all - it can’t be wrong and show up. Said another way, everything that shows up is right. Obviously. It can’t show up and be wrong - it’s impossible. Everything that shows up is right but ego mind doesn’t necessarily agree.” http://www.spiritualvitamins.org/december-13th.html You might imagine that knowing this would eliminate paranoia … but it doesn’t. It does however bring a smile when paranoia isn’t present. It is True. Even paranoia is right. See that is where the ego/I/me comes in and says: “Paranoia can’t be right … it sucks too bad.” Sucks for who? It’s all mind. If there is talk, inner/outer it’s all mind. Who speaks over the Still Voice of God? Only mind. Only the ego speaks. *** Rainer Maria Rilke’s: Letters to a Young Poet. *** Had another Dream. This one was sexual in nature, but not in a way I can really understand. Again most of it has been forgotten … the mind is like mush lately it will not retain any information for very long. It feels like mashed potato head. However, there were two men. One was old(er/ish) and the other young and if I am recalling right they were both naked most of the time and I was as well but it didn’t feel like nakedness. It felt very natural. So little is remembered I’m not sure why the attempt to write this down is even being made but it ended with attempts to buy candy … two specific kinds. Now and Laters and also these chewy other kind of the same fashion but flat and long where Now and Laters are short and stubby. *** Have had Bruce Springsteen’s album BORN IN THE USA sitting in a corner of The Sacred Space for over a month, waiting for the perfect moment where the urge, inclination, time to sit down, put the headphones on and let the sounds sink into and out of my person, appeared and it finally did yesterday. It is the first Album purchased thus far and it was the first album I ever purchased when I was 13. Born in the USA was the first album I bought when I was 13 years old. I only ever owned two albums, this one and Michael Jackson’s THRILLER. Not bad choices for a 13 year old eh? So yesterday all the packaging was removed from the record player and the record was placed upon it and the headphones attached and I laid down and let the sound of Bruce’s voice and the musical instruments of the E Street Band play into my person. I never heard any of his music this completely before. I could see myself at thirteen hearing him sing Glory Days and was surprised by how intimately he sings I’M ON FIRE it touched my heart so completely. He is a storyteller! An amazing Artist, Genius and Storyteller and maybe I have always known this, but I didn’t remember it when I sat with him and shared a shot at the CHEERS bar in Long Branch NJ when I was 27, it seemed almost natural at the time to do so. Although I did save the glass the shot was in for years, eventually misplacing it to too many moves. But I never lost the memory. Hillary a girl I worked with had invited me to go and I thought she was a crazy girl and lying about it and have no idea what made me go with her because I hardly knew her at all and never saw her again after or don’t remember ever seeing her again. We were sitting on one corner of the bar, Bruce and I, and Hilary was on the other corner and couldn’t reach us and was clamoring to get over the bar and making quite a scene. Anyway he bought me a shot, we sucked it down, shared a few words that I no longer recall and he took off to be with whoever he was with and Hilary and I left. It was all very casual and strange. Especially Hilary because I have no recollection of why she would invite me or why I would go. Also my best friend in Middle School, Lisa Cancel’s mother went to school with Bruce. So there have been a few links to him all my life but it is not what made me buy the album at 13, nor now. At thirteen I just adored his music, his sound. I can’t even say what it was even after listening to it yesterday, except that True Art attracts the Artist in a person. I have always been an Artist but truly I am the Art. Yes, I know how egoic that sounds but it is not egoic to the one who Knows. I have learned a great deal about what is “heard” and what is “True” these last few years. Almost everything “heard” is not true. Actually everything “heard” is not true. But you know the trick about words. There are words that Point towards what is True. So it has come up a few times to write in here about Kendrick Lamar’s album: DAMN. I have seen it two times now at the record store, but it is $30 so the odds are I won’t get it anytime soon, but I did listen to it again on Spotify and it is so good. So very good. He is a genius. The album DAMN is genius. It ranks as the number one album for me this year. It is a story. It is an album you want to hear all at once, which is what records are for, basically. Records are so you can sit down and really HEAR a good Album. I love the space between songs on a record. You get that short pause before the next song comes on. It’s like a palate cleaning for the ears, for the entire body. Michael Jackson’s THRILLER is next on the list. I never got to meet him, but would have liked to. I had pictures of him on my bedroom wall when I was 13. He had on a yellow, baby yellow outfit and looked so handsome. I would also like to have in the collection WHITNEY HOUSTON, ANITA BAKER and SADE. Just one album of each of their music. Whitney’s first one with SAVING ALL MY LOVE FOR YOU on it and ANITA’s RAPTURE I Think that is what it was called, RAPTURE OF LOVE? And SADE’S the one with SMOOTH OPERATOR on it and then of course KENDRICK LAMAR. Eventually a good one of BOB DYLAN and one PINK FLOYD and of course one from YANNI. Lastly two from FRANK OCEAN both ORANGE and BLONDE. Oh boy the list keeps growing but there is not a want for a large collection. Just one’s of music that has left an imprint and also has a story to tell. Records where when the mood strikes you … you sit down and give it your time. *** Almost passed out tonight. Stood up a bit too fast but not enough to do what it did. It is a bit intimidating because there is nothing going on that would have caused it. There have been some slight heart palpations lately, but nothing that would lead to fainting and it was very close to completely passing out. But didn’t. So that is good. There is food in the body but maybe lack of sleep. I don’t know what to do about it. There is just not good sleep right now. I don’t know if lack of sleep can make you pass out, but I am too tired right now to check and hopefully will get some rest. The body is tired but the mind is so freaking hyper alert grrrrrrr! *** Best movie seen this year: MOONLIGHT (Barry Jenkins) It is a very raw, brilliantly done film on the destruction of innocence. It starts out real slow … you don’t realize the magnificence of the Artistry almost until the very end, which makes you want to immediately rewatch it to see all that is missed while underrating the film. I wish I had seen it on the BIG SCREEN! It’s so casual, that you almost miss that that is the HUGE and amazingly genius of it. It is in the intimate moments, the intimate wordless moments that so much is revealed and said! It’s a movie you will want to watch as if you are sitting down to listen to a good album, a favorite record, because that is what it is … a record of one man’s life and struggle in such a way that it slowly and deliberately breaks your Heart, intimately breaks your heart and offers understanding, a glimpse into what so many, self included, judge without any knowing of what they are judging. It is not a woe-is-me film even though you sit there wanting to rescue, make a change, do something! And Trevante Rhodes … all I can say is D-A-M-N! Yummy … yummy … yummers! What a perfect actor for the part and the younger versions of “Little” and “Black” are so well done by these young men with such depth to them. If you think you need words in life, this movie will reveal how wrong you are. Oh boy Trevante is only 27! He looks so grown! Yum he is right up my alley! If I had an alley! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevante_Rhodes He also was in the following: After graduation, Rhodes moved to Los Angeles and immediately began working as an actor, playing supporting roles in the Terrence Malick film Song to Song, the Nacho Vigalondo film Open Windows opposite Elijah Wood, the Eddie O’Keefe film Shangri-La Suite and the Matt Jones / Dave Hill film The Night Is Young. Trevante played the role of 'Ramsey' in the Tyler Perry / OWN series If Loving You Is Wrong. His television credits include the Fox series Gang Related and the HBO series Westworld. Even Westworld … I don’t remember him from that. A Texas boy too! Oh and that G-R-I-L-L they have him wearing at the end is so damn perfect! Art! What a fucking amazing piece of Art this film is! I so rarely see a good film anymore, not one that really hits hard and on so many levels like this one has that I am probably am a bit over the top on it right now. However there have been some really good ones … not ones that hit the nail on the head like this but: Bridge of Lies (Spielberg) Hated Eight (Tarantino) The Man Who Invented Christmas Are a few that felt like time was not wasted … usually I turn off a film within the first half hour nowadays just not to waste time on garbage or mediocre. *** Am sort of amp’t up right now. These last few months have been some of the worst “happy” times one can recall. I keep writing it off as “that time of year” because usually deep depression sets in around now, but it doesn’t feel like depression … a lot of anger and angst and so much paranoia. I hate staying in and hate going out. It’s awful. An Unwritten Life12/29/2017 AN UNWRITTEN LIFE 2017 11.25 - In THE LAST LION: WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL VOLUME 1: VISONS OF GLORY 1874-1932 his peers at that time were publishing: Virginia Wolf: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE D.H. Lawrence: LADY CHATTERLY’S LOVER Travelone(sp?): HISTORY OF ENGLAND Evelyn War(sp?): DECLINE AND FALL A.A. Milne: WINNEY THE POOH - MOTHER INDIA How strange that there is a book … one that Winston quite liked (seemingly) titled “Mother India” it is probably not strange to you but it is to me because I have always thought of India as my mother … the Mother land … America the Masculine Father and India the Sacred Mother, even wrote a short story titled: My Father (America) is killing my Mother (India) It was a very real seeing at the time. *** 2017 11.26 - It’s rained nearly all night and well into the late morning/afternoon … the wind even howling at times. Mikel … myMikel … I don’t even know if you like the rain or the sound of the wind. I have tried not to make this a day about all the ways I failed you … it’s been quite a challenge in that regard. At around 3-4am the wind really started howling but could not get this body to go outside … which is strange because it is usually around that time that I go out for a walk … it was shortly after that I realized this is the time you were born … 31 years ago … on the east coast … which would have been 6-7am. You were such a beautiful baby … almost all mothers say that but you really were. You changed everything about the world for me with that young life filled body. I couldn’t have loved you more and this is true even now … even after all of the failure it is always Love that makes me see it. It is how deeply and completely I Love/loved you that I see how deeply and completely I failed you. Again I digress. The other night an ad came through for a vintage record player … it was even in turquoise of all colors :o) and the fingers clicked the button and bought it … it seemed so strange because I have had no inclination for a record player … in fact I have not a single record to even play on it. It came in the mail today … your Birthday … how funny and strange that they deliver on a Sunday. I do wonder if it is yours … if you had these hands buy it so you could listen to music you want to hear through these ears now. I don’t know. I went to the record store yesterday and all the vinyl albums are way out of this pocketbooks price range and so many trees must die just to wrap them … but maybe you have something else in store … it kept coming up that “used” would be the way to go … so maybe there is some kind of used album trading thing out there. No matter how often I go over it in the head I can’t see that I would have found a way to “see” you while you were alive … you were so layered with the lies of this mind. There was layer after layer of thought that you were just like me and if you are like me then it is hopeless. I had hope for Tyler … because he escaped me … he wasn’t subject to the mad ups and downs of my person … he was … but not on a daily basis thanks to military school. But you didn’t escape and in fact you were with me at some of the worst and at a time that you really could have used stability. I never gave you any except my Heart … the Heart … I know without a doubt or thought that you knew you were/are Loved. I didn’t not love you because of the way I saw you I just didn’t believe I could help you in anyway without dragging myself down. Things have changed so much since you died and it’s been such a short time but I now know how wrong I was. There have been deep trenches dug in this Heart this year and I sense that there has been Healing between you and I. I don’t feel your anger so strongly … in a sense I feel your compassion for me and mine for you. You were never really a son … you were a best friend and a brother … one that I took for granted and sometimes vice-versa. Erlinda seems to be doing fairly well. Her hair is green again but it looks very good on her. I can see how you fell in Love with her … she seems very easy to fall for. She also seems a lot like you … a RebelYell … which I hope you always heard as a compliment … my calling you RebelYell … I meant it as a compliment. *** You think your rage is justified when your expectations are not met; yet it is the expectations themselves that create the rage. Get away from me. I am sick of your justified anger. *** Anne Sexton on editing one of her poems: “It is kind of like sandpapering a sunburn, but I am doing it.” (Page 57, Letters) :o))) *** From Anne Sexton, page 60: “People who belong together; do not need to be glued together.” That is a beautiful way of saying it. It was supposedly said by Freud while on his death bed. Repeating the repetition here. :o) *** Yesterday two dreams were had, actually there were quite a number of dreams but only two were clearly remembered … one was of coming home to The Decompression Chamber and finding it had been robbed. It was very disappointing. The other was of making out with my first husband Brian. It was noteworthy only in that I don’t recall ever dreaming of him before and also it was Mikel’s actual Birthday and Brian sort of played the fatherly role for Mikel from ages 3 to 7. I didn’t wish to get up and write any of it down yesterday … there was a mental push to do it but no energy or impetus to actually get up. However, it kept coming up today to at least jot it down that they were had. *** 2017 11.29 - Internally or externally:: "Who speaks over The Silent Still Voice of God?" This has been coming up for months, especially after smoking a bowl or eating some oil (which by the way the oil … which had been forgotten about for months … is fucking intense!). About 30-45 minutes after ingesting the whole world changes and it’s like: “What the hell is going on?” And it comes up: “The oil!” And I am utterly surprised because I will think I haven’t taken anything because it doesn’t seem like you do when you eat oil. It is a very strange thing when it comes up: "Who speaks over The Silent Still Voice of God?" It is as if the mind/thoughts go: Eeeeek! Because it is momentarily seen what they are doing, what thoughts or words actually do … they actually speak over: The Silent Still Voice of God. It seems such Arrogance! Bigger than Arrogance. And you want to put a hand over it’s mouth, but there is no hand! No mouth! It is a very strange thing, especially with Cannabis because the sound can be quite deafening. Both the non-sound of Stillness and the massive sound of thought. It also can make for a bit of paranoia but no more or less than what is usually had. The strangest part is not being able to do anything about it. It makes you want to stop thinking, but you can’t you simply see that they are rather obnoxiously blunting out or clouding over or screaming over: The Silent Still Voice of God. An Unwritten Life ...11/25/2017 It came up to post the following jottings/scribbles into the blog ... something about sharing ... sharing life instead of hiding. The following are things that were jotted down after a months hiatus of writing ... myTeacher had told me to entertain the "thought" of deleting everything I'd ever written and to give up any ideas of "teaching" and so after that month there was an inch (actually it was there all along) but a deeper itch to write that manifested itself in what is written below.
AN UNWRITTEN LIFE The only difference between a written life and an unwritten life is … one is written about and the other isn’t. If you have a love for the written word, the latter can be hell. The only good thing about not writing is that it leaves you with nothing to lose. *** STOP October 27, 2017 (3:10am) Joy A. Sters (In The Sacred Space.) When the heart stops beating And the silence is deafening And the longing for wind Is the source of all pain … Then the dream is over For the one and only Lover Who did not leave a mark But a stain. *** HATE FILLED EYES October 27, 2017 (4:45am) Joy A. Sters (In The Sacred Space.) Your angry “hello!” and Hate Filled Eyes are the constant reminder to Stay Inside. *** You begin to see that without the thing you love, you are nothing. You have nothing. There is nothing to hold onto. Without writing there is no joy … no Joy … no JoySters. Without writing life seems very bland and boring … all the things that would be written about become listless … just another “thing” to see. The longing to share what it is like at eleven a.m. and roly-poly bellies … dare I go no further … writing pushes one to go a bit further … tempts one to write a bit more than the comfort level normally allows. “Bellies, bellies … roly-poly bellies. Bellies, bellies … eat them up … yum.” Or in this instance not so much yum, more roly-poly than yum. *** Yesterday at Tudor Square one of the trees and Pete (dog) got a trimming. It had seemed as if they had come to cut the tree down, as has been the case so many times before; when the tree chopping men appear. It is a very tall tree, not as majestic looking as the one diagonally from it, yet still quite beautiful in it’s own right. After going inside and coming back out after the men had left and expecting to see a giant empty space where the tree once stood, what was seen was the windows of two of the apartments that had been blocked by all the branches that had previously been there. It has aged with its trimming … leaves that had been bright green are now yellow and burnt orange … it takes a lot out of a tree when you chop it up, but it will survive and it is quite pleasing that Tudor Square protects its trees because it has very beautiful ones on this property. Pete had a helluva time too. He is not fond of trimming and understands no more or less of the process than the tree. Because of this there is more firmness with him and his body during the trimming as not to hurt him from the squirming. There was one snip that went a bit too far into the black gunk that surrounds his tear ducts and a tiny bit of blood appeared and made for pain in both our bodies. Held him closely and apologized from this Heart to his and he was calm … didn’t make a sound but it was felt that it hurt him and that hurt. Now he is quite bald (Pelon!) where he had been quite furry and his balls look so very huge! He now has big pink balls, ones that had been hidden by a furry backside which is now barren and they dangle from his tail-end as he walks. He shivered for the first time this morning on the walk, however it was a necessary procedure to trim him back as food was getting stuck under his chin when he ate and piss and shit on his undercarriage. Neither of us like the process of trimming and do it as rarely as one can get away with. It had been long overdue. By all accounts he should be dead. He is now thin as a bone even though his eating habits have not been altered. He is brittle and yet more flexible than he has ever been. He never makes a sound and only complains, which he does with a snort like sneeze when he is rushed away from his bowl or rushed back from his walk. He does not like to be rushed, just as much as this one does not like to be outside, so we snip and snort at each other in our own ways. *** It is said un-examined life is not worth living and it has come up this last month from the brief hiatus in writing that the same can be said from here: A writer's unwritten life is not worth living. The body is pre-disposed to writing. It is also pre-disposed to negative thought. Flashes of The Whites of West Virginia appeared this morning and seeing that one becomes imprisoned in a mentality. You can go to school and get educated, you can go to the Mountains and become spiritually Aware, but the mentality is the greatest challenge or obstacle of all. It quickly will suck one back in. It is not surprising at all that so much of society is drug induced. This body has been pouting, screaming (internally), crying and longing for escape. Writing is an escape from the pain of “not doing.” If you think or believe that there is not deep emotional pain hiding behind the writer as much as it is behind the drunk or drug addict you probably would be mistaken (it is a bit of a paradox) because Truthfully there is nothing behind the writer, the drunk or the addict, but it seems there is until those things are put down for a time. First an unbearable (nearly) boredom sets in. You don’t know who you are without them. You realize how dependent you are on them. There is nearly a clutching and clawing to keep them, but you see at the same time that it will be taken from you. You begin to see there is nothing you can keep in this world. Nothing. Not as a theory but as an absolute truth and then you want to go back. You want to go back and hide from the Truth, but it’s too late. Then without the distractions of whatever addiction you had been distracted by, you begin to hear the thoughts again, you begin to see the insane mentality that you have been in prisoned by and it is no walk in the park. You see how deeply you still believe in the things that have never served you in life and yet still cling to as a dark heavy blanket. It makes you want to go back to the addiction (like right now). You would rather die than let it kill you. What a strange conundrum. Meaning you would rather kill the body than the ego/thoughts/personality. *** It’s so easy to lose things in this world and so terribly hard to get them back … sometimes … most times … impossible. It took over five years to write the JOURNALS and less than 5 minutes to wipe all those years away. Five minutes. Do you know how heartbreaking that is. Yet it takes a lifetime to become who you are in the world and just months, days, hours to lose it upon the death of the body. It is the same when you watch them take down a tree. It took in some instances 50-100 years for that tree to become the magnificent energy force and less than an hour in most cases to tear it down. You can know that nothing you do can save anything, you can intellectually know it, but as you are going through it, as you see the actual reality of it all … it is a devastating blow. You can’t hear: “To whom?” You Hear it, but you don’t hear it. You rage against it as if the raging means anything. Death throes. The want to “save” is so deeply programmed into the psyche. *** The paranoia this month has been debilitating at times. Without writing as a distraction the paranoia becomes so huge. There was so much effort and challenge just to go out the door this month and so many instances of paranoia that the layers were building on top of one another. *** Breasts are a source … the source of human food and nourishment. Humans have forgotten their source; the life source. Humans are the sickest species on the planet. Humans forgot how to feed themselves. Breasts have not forgotten; women have forgotten their breasts. Life pours forth out of them; a stream of goodness that humans block, dam off and then wonder why such high incidences of breast cancer ensue. *** Just the image of your face in the mind’s eye, makes for crying, undefined tears. *** Yesterday I woke up so well rested and happy … so very happy … so happy that I know that I have not been happy in years … it only lasted maybe five minutes, possibly not even that long, but long enough to know it … to fully feel it … and then it was gone and a horrible day ensued … dark and depressing and there was nothing one could do … you can’t fucking think happy thoughts … happiness is not a thought … Happiness is Happiness. It was still worth it … still worth having those five minutes. I don’t know where they came from or how come they showed up like that and then was just gone. It is not possible to understand why this body is prone to such horrible darkness and only gets five minutes of happiness every what … five years? :o((((( *** SCAVENGER November 6, 2017 (3:39am) Joy A. Sters (In The Decompression Chamber) A scavenger for pleasure One walks the streets alone Never seeking anything else For pleasure is its home. (Or: It seeks not for anything else, as pleasure is its home?) *** This was supposed to be the year: “The Year” Where it all came together; instead it all fell apart. *** There was an injured deer, practically a fawn hobbling across the road yesterday. It was going so slow compared to its siblings but the mother waited up … which was sweet … had watched as the hands went out to it … the thought that crossed the mind: “Whatever you need is yours.” There was the sensation of no holding back, then this incredible warmth radiated from the Left Hand. So much so that it was a bit startling and when looking up the mother was standing there in front of me. It was very strange and I started to walk towards her and she didn’t move and I went all the way onto the people’s property and started into the enclave she was enclosed by, and had no idea why I was walking towards her but continued to and then she got startled and ran off, but she had let me get quite close. The hand thing was quite strange and when heading back to the apartment I asked internally about it and it came up: “The Left Hand Gives and the Right Receives.” *** Woke from a dream of being white trash with no way out. No way. You can’t even see you are in it so there is no way out of it. It’s just cycle after cycle of the same hell. There is no one out of the hell to put a hand in and say: “Hey did you know you are in hell?” There was a guy in it. God he was so fucking gross. And groped a lot and there is nothing that could be done about it … there are no people in whitetrashville that you can go to … you can’t report anything … no one gives a fuck. Spent the last hour of the dream attempting to lock a sliding glass door that was never going to lock. Woke depressed and so dark and negative. Suicide is really the only option in that scenario. Nothing is ever going to get better. *** 1000 EYES November 11, 2017 Joy A. Sters Have you ever had the sensation of 10,000 eyes starring out of you? Starring out and judging every move, every action, every thought that goes by? And not often kindly. Most often the eyes are screaming! Can you imagine eyeballs that scream? See if you can. It is a silent screaming hell. Have you ever heard Silence Scream? It is a deafening sound. Maddening in fact. It makes one insane. You’ve seen the images of a person going mad, holding their hands to their ears as if you are screaming at them, but the sound is from the inside. The sound has no voice and yet is louder than any outward one can get. It makes you hate. It makes you hate being alive. It makes you hate waking up from sleep. It makes all the interactions one has with reality a living nightmare. You think you speak to one person but you are speaking to 10,0001. Behind the one set of eyes are 10,000 others looking at you, judging you, telling you who you are before a single word comes from the mouth you think you are speaking with. You think you can understand the madness of paranoia? You can’t. You can’t understand madness. *** Had been lying down and someone inside (the head) asked: “What day is it?” And I couldn’t figure it out … kept thinking “Wednesday” but then it became so completely obvious there is no such thing as Wednesday or any day … it’s all made up! It’s all made up! No wonder people often when in a hospital after an accident or something similar do not know what day it is … meaning after a concussion or something of that nature … they don’t remember because there is no such thing! One is trained and programmed to believe there is such a thing as “Wednesday” or any other day … week, month, year, season, but it is all lies … it is all made up … and they call you “crazy” when you don’t remember the lie! There is something wrong with “you” if “you” don’t remember or admit to the lie. When they are the crazy one’s for believing in something that doesn’t even exist and attempting to force you into stating it does! *** TRUTH OR ILLUSION (Written at NW Raw, Ashland OR) November 18, 2017 Joy A. Sters There is no way to discover whether what you are in is real or a dream, until you begin to test the waters. It truly is the scariest and most exciting part of being alive, because when you think the world is real, there is very little excitement to it. It is dry and mundane and is basically planned out for you. However, as one allows for the possibly that what they are “in,” what they are experiencing is not as real as they had imagined it to be then a sort of relaxation sets in. At first there maybe a tensing up but eventually as you continue to not get sucked into the falsity, the realness of the lie, you begin to relax and let life have you. It has had you all along … even when you were thinking that you were doing it … it was/is not so. It is scary only in that you will not have anyone on your side so to speak. You will be alone in the discovery for a time. Not forever because as you begin to Awaken in the dream others Awaken with you. This is both the exciting and the scary part. Everything … although not changing at all, becomes unpredictable. If you become scared just internally ask: “Truth or illusion?” Don’t ask with the expectation, or knowing of what the answer is or maybe … just allow for it to reveal itself. Nothing experienced with the five senses is real, however, knowing this intellectually is the deadness of life … the juice is in the not knowing; but allowing the possibility that it is so. The deadness of the world is in judgements and opinions, the Aliveness is in not knowing what anything is for. The Truth is that you don’t … no one does … if they say they do it is just part of the lie because if this is a Dream/Illusion then anything can happen at any instant … anything … things that cannot and have not been thought yet. Ten years ago there wasn’t an inkling that you would be talking on a hand held device to another person on the other side of the world in real-time video … the Truth is you don’t even know if they are there. So be silly … lighten up. You are so fucking serious about something that doesn’t even exist. However, this is all intellectual until it isn’t. *** The sensory is Aware of something other than itself. “I” is the sensory. The sensory is Aware of itSelf, The Self. The sensory is Aware that it doesn’t exist without it, The Self. *** Walking down the road the other day the attention kept being drawn back to THE OBSERVER IS THE OBSERVED. For a split second … a brief instant … it was obvious. The body is not the observer … however the body became Aware of being seen through. *** IF (Written in The Sacred Space) November 20, 2017 If I ever start to forget you; I just need to smoke a bowl, hear the wind, feel the rain or see a Caddy and you are right back here as if you never left. *** After writing the above … no lie … a storm started … rain and wind all night long … so rare … so very rare … you were either Listening or Reading or whatever it is you do that allows you to Hear me. *** The other day … just really out of the blue … cannot even remember how it came about … however a Book about Anne Sexton letters came up on the Amazon account … I know nothing about her … have only heard her name in passing and not even sure what kind of passing that would have been in … however I clicked the button and ordered her “LETTERS” book. It wasn’t even impulsive it just Happened. Then I ended up at the Hannon Library today, this morning … which is odd in itself because paranoia has been running high lately and going outside has been a low point of the day … however because of the rain (mebe) it was a bit easier to get out the door and the drizzles kept me from going all the way up da Hill as I still have no boots that do not leak water all through them and only the Vibrams as an option which also are not waterproof. All those words just to say that a detour was taken to the Library and grabbed Kerouac's Letters … Vol. 2 … and sat down and he mentions that Allen and Bill B. are together in Tangiers and there is an inkling to look into Burroughs … check and the library has some of his work and go over there and start pulling all these amazing books off the shelves … none of which are Burroughs but one of which is ANNE SEXTON: A Biography. Read the first page and was hooked … I think I have heard of her because she killed herself. Those thoughts have been running high again too and an “out” has already been put in place just in case, but it is not likely and I know I was told no “outs” but it happened anyway. *** The mind is so terribly dark. The body fatigued. *** Anne Sexton spent time in 1945 in Lowell Massachusetts … where Jack Kerouac was from and the odd thing is that I am currently reading both of their books of Letters (Kerouac 1940-1956 and Anne 1928-1957) … there is something to proximity … it’s yet to manifest itself in and understanding but at this point just an Awareness that there is something about Writers and proximity. Jack also had feelings that he would be a great writer. Lately there have been flashes of how there is “no time” not in concept or theory but actual experiences of “no time” because things that are revealed span through decades but can be seen instantaneously. It is very hard to word … but an example is that Tyler said something 15 years ago that happened now … I can’t say what it is but it was revealed that he was seeing it 15 years ago and it took till “seemingly” now for it to be actualized. This is just an example … but there have been so many of them and some are scary and some are not and they come from all angles and from many different people pointing. Anne also wrote letters late at night marking one (3:30am) and Kerouac did also. And Kerouac wrote his Awakening experience to Cassady … it is so similar in Nature to what happened here, which is strange because what is happening here is what one falls back on in the worst of times because it isn’t something that has to be proven … it simply IS. *** The rain tonight is amazingly beautiful and has been down pouring from time to time. *** The mind keeps attempting to figure out what is being revealed in “timelessness” but it can’t. It can’t figure it out, but it keeps trying and it doesn’t understand how it doesn’t have control … it sees it … it is so blatantly obvious at times, but it still struggles so hard to understand it. *** Kerouac in Letters also writes to Cassady about The Snake … he hasn’t gone into detail yet but the few mentionings of it sound so similar to The Snake that came about on the LSD trip … where I was Marma guarding the 15,000 year old Snake … which I basically remember nothing of except that it was under the earth … deep under the earth and I was nesting, guarding it as a Marma. *** You may wonder why this is called “An Unwritten Life” but there is nearly nothing about this life currently being written … just this tiny bit of scribble. However it did come up yesterday that a short story a week would start to come through and that it would be put up on the Internet under Writers for Trees (WFT)/JoySters. *** GROWING SOME BALLS (Written at NW Raw, Ashland OR) Getting tired of life walking all over you? Every new event weighs you down … every new person quickly becomes a burden … you know why … cause you got no: MUTHERFUCKIN BALLS!!!! And it doesn’t matter the gender you place yourself under … when you have no balls you are living a dead life … growing balls doesn’t mean you walk all over people it means they don’t walk all over you. You cannot ask for respect from anyone else until you have some for yourself and growing balls demands respect of yourself. However, don’t be fooled into thinking you know what any of this means … you have no idea how to grow balls, yet if you are willing for life to show you … they will begin to form between the legs (not necessarily literally but ya never know!). You will know they are growing because you start to stand taller. The back begins to straighten out … the spine becomes elongated. You are not concerned with what others might be thinking about you and if you are concerned, you are not concerned about that. Allow for some silliness in this. Growing balls is not about growing angry … it’s actually about lightening up, being less concerned, less afraid of looking straight on at what is appearing before you and not cowering away when it doesn’t necessarily fit with what you expect or want to appear. Be firm in your Self … be firm in your “SELF.” This means that you are standing tall and firm in NOTHING! Now that’s a trip huh? Growing Balls happens as you relax into life not fighting against it. It probably sounds exactly the opposite to most … but those are the ones that aren’t growing them but fantasizing about what it would be like to have them. Most think that being hard and cold and kicking ass left and right is having Balls, but it is nearly the exact opposite. Having Balls makes one nonchalant, not uncaring, but not fooled by those that claim “caring” as a tool to “get” something for themselves. When you have Balls you aren’t attempting to “get” anything from a situation, in a sense you watch it unfold while you are standing Tall in your Self. You are, in a sense, a very real sense: In the world; but not of it. And you know it. You Know it without thought. You meet each situation from the Inside out. The unMovable Inside that is the True you *** The problem, if you can call it that, with some women, not unlike myself, is that we were/are sexual … and not necessarily maternal, yet one things leads to another and then there you go. Even through all of the mad ups and downs (at least as things are currently being seen) there has not been a regret in tying the tubes. It was the one True Gift I could give myself at the time. The freedom from fear. Freedom from a fear of becoming pregnant (you should not underestimate the power and weight this fear holds on women or at least this woman) and the fear of sex … some deep seated fear in the core of the identity that can’t almost even been seen clearly enough to describe but something about tying the tubes … removed this fear. It was 23 years ago now since that fear was removed … however it is still clear after 23 years that there had been a enormous fear that tying the tubes dissipated … it wasn’t pregnancy related, but it was not dissimilar in the intensity of fear. *** Have had some pretty deep insights lately. Last night one was strong enough to get one up and jot it down: “If you knew who you were hurting … you would never hurt another or yourself.” The above came through after a thing that I cannot explain and probably should not attempt to try, but am anyway … it was clear that it is always the Self … even though it is not clear to “me” that it is … and that since there is only One … forever and only One … if you kill yourself it all goes. You can’t understand this but you can know it. It is all God … there is One without a second. You are always facing The Self … it, what you are facing, does not face you; because you are a lie, the lie. How does one grasp this … you can’t … but it can be Grokked. Also a poem came through yesterday … like a burst of energy … a burst of energy that words were riding on … there have been so many different energies lately … no where to go … the feelings of being boxed in … coffined in … overstimulation in every direction. Written in The Decompression Chamber after an energy burst with the following words riding on the energy. BIDING TIME November 24, 2017 Joy A. Sters The time was biding. Meaningless words … mingled … with less than living. Where is the Masterpiece Oh Great One? The search in Mediocracy does not go far. Wishing … Fantasies … Shooting Stars Laughter fades behind barred Doors. A generational legacy of a distant passed. The illusion of time … Biding. *** You will only know if a poem is good to you … not if it will ever be “good” to anyone else … the energy that came through to write the above on was/is good … there was darkness around it but the energy itself was/is Pure. It felt so good to have it come through. It’s been awhile. *** Anne Sexton’s Letters are a delight! She is so open … seemingly open … it’s not necessarily the words … she hasn’t figured out how to close down … she hasn’t been attacked enough for the illness yet … to be shut down from those around her. She also met Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell! Lowell actually taught her (Kerouac too?) in class. Proximity. Something about Proximity. It came up earlier this morning (yesterday morning) as: The Writer’s Vortex. And each era(?) seems to have a group of them. Is EOTS this era? Is EOTS my or was my Writer’s Vortex? We were/are all Writer’s in/to one degree or another … without writing there would be no EOTS (outwardly anyway). Started using the Write Doe Bay Workshop bag just yesterday … it didn’t seem anything noteworthy at the time but it does right now … had been storing it in the closet stuffed with odds and ends … but now it is in use again. Just noticed earlier today that there is a tree on it … a tree that has roots in … nothing. :o) (((JF))) *** It came up as an Insight or a Vision or something of that nature after smoking a bowl … that if Mikel had not shown up … the person I would have become would have been very bad and destructive if it lived very long. Very bad. Of course one will never know … because he did show up and then became everything I was afraid I would. *** Just read two poems by Anne Sexton and Love … THE AWFUL ROWING TOWARD GOD https://ikereeser.wordpress.com/the-poem/ Rarely can or do I say “Love” about poetry … rarely does any (that I’ve read besides Rumi) hit a chord or even keep the attention on to the next line … but this one did. The other was about 3 generations of women and her daughter she called of all things: Joy. I found it quite good until about the 7th section which is where the attention was lost and stopped reading and started skimming, actually it might have been section 5 but who cares. The title of the Poem is DOUBLE IMAGE And it is the last line that struck the deepest chord in its pointing toward Truth. I, who was never quite sure about being a girl, needed another life, another image to remind me. And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure nor soothe it. I made you to find me. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53110/the-double-image *** “Poem” energy came through this morning during Meditation … since it was Meditation … it was not written … and probably cannot be now as the “energy” is no longer here … seemingly … let’s see: PARANIOA You seep in and through the crevices of mind as a dark and eerie fog making every word every sound echo, repeat, echo, repeat the voices, the many voices always something always something always something is wrong wrong, wrong … something’s gone wrong. No that is not the energy that it came through with … it was similar to watching a movie … a creepy movie with a fog coming across a lake … except I am the lake it crosses through and over “I” is the lake … the lake called “I.” I can’t write about paranoia (at least not yet) while in it because I am too paranoid and I don’t know who you are … whoever you are and there is no rational way to share that. However I also cannot write a poem when the “energy” has left … even if some of the words remain … the first four lines are pretty close to what originally came through … but the energy isn’t there. Probably if you write you know what is being shared here … it’s not even writer’s block … there is no block … there is nothing … it’s a deflated balloon and who the hell wants a deflated balloon? Their gross. Went back and did some slight editing and although it is not exactly it … it’s not as bad as it was (Doh! forgot to keep the original … which so often happens). A Banjo Named "Fir"4/7/2014 Day two of a three day full Fast, no food, no drink, no speach. Music is heard from the upstairs apartment. Drawn to the sound one sits on the porch and listens. Frantically the fingers strum and the vocals sing out a sound that makes the heart expand. A thumb goes out as cars, trucks, busses go by. No one stops. She turns - our eyes meet, she waves and says, “didn’t expect a concert on your front porch did ya?” Thumbs go up to her in gratitude.
In early Spring Song of the Wilder-ness - A Banjo A neighbor walks by. Words are exchanged. A ride is offered and one gets to go along. Up and through the mountains we drive. On top of Etna Summit the Winter still prevails. Snow is blinding and the musician is in ecastasy at seeing such a wonder. Down the other side it is as if nothing ever happened. Clear roads. Clear skies. The drive is long and winding. Through forests and off-paved roads we climb. Three in one vehicle, two that speak - one witness. The smell – Stagnant cigarette smoke - Etna Brewery Clothes We pull into a hidden driveway. Paintings of welcome to those that arrive. A truck blocks the passage. Friends mingle and mix. Laughter and reunion. Odd looks at the speachless. Silence can be deafening. In the Deep The Silence Fell - Short The journey continues. Mossy green trees and hills. Make-shift cabins here and there. Everything coming alive. The smell of wet and rebirth. Arrival at the mainhouse is greeted with friendly smiling faces. Eyes alive with Knowing. “Hi I am so and so, who are you.” A note handed over “In Silence, not speaking.” Ah the nameless one. Yes – just like you. Inside we go, people hustling and bustling around. Food is cooking and there is warmth that is stronger than the fire in the place. The night is coming and the mountain is coated in snow. Stillness – Pristine – Pure “I” thought appears -Things to do Farwells said and again a heading off. Where once were three now two. A rambler and a mute. Winding back through the mountain terrain. Majestic white trees line the way. Head out the car window like a dog in it’s joy. Crisp fresh air that strips one of fatigue, enlivens the spirit and lightens the load of road. Late doorstep arrival her name is “Fir” A 3 in 1 mystery entwined About the WriterI am not who I think I am and neither are you. That is the Good News. Archives
February 2018
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