Graduations of Friendship

 

 

Photo by the infamous trench

In the next few days, I will be graduating from my relationship with Aquarius Girl, but not from the friendship.  She’s leaving, and though this is a wonderful career move for her and I’m honestly glad for the prospects it presents her, this is not a graduation that I’m thrilled about.

 

What makes this a little close to the heart is that she’s the first of the new set of friends I’ve made since clearing the slate of just about everyone in my circle of friends and acquaintances. Someone with a very different, positive, upbeat attitude who would be a good friend to me as well. She’s exactly the new friend I’d asked the Gods to send me, and I think we’ve had a rather positive impact on each other’s lives.  Though I’d known her for years—we’ve worked together for short periods of time here and there–we started sharing professional and personal experiences over a year ago and formed a really nice bond, and an unusual one.  There was a side to her that I never knew before.

Many of the people closest to me throughout my life have birthdays in certain “bands.”  Similar to the March 16-17^th band of friends and family who are very touchy-feely emotionally with huge creativity and very unusual ideas on life, spirituality, and relationships, Aquarius Girl is part of the February 11^th band of friends, and that band of friends takes unusual ideas to a whole new level, often to the point of being the brunt of scandal or surrounded by other people’s drama.  I could not have asked for a better choice of people to understand my unusal ideas about relationships, men, and independence.  Other women in my daily life judge me by the nameplate on my wall and the man in my bed, but Aquarius Girl and I have shared an understanding of being comfortable with who we are, the lives we’ve built, the families we’re raising, immense enjoyment of our independence as women, the frustration with particular men and their place (or not) in our lives, and the difference between living and earning a living.  We have an age difference of about 7 years but have tons in common, and I’m grateful to have had a friend like this.  There are no attempts to control each other or manipulate or shove advice down each other’s throats as happens in so many relationships.  There is simply acceptance, emotional support when the other needs it, and a constant exchange of ideas and intentions.  This is the kind of friendship I’d asked the Gods for and it’s more of this kind of friendship I want.

But…she’s moving to a new job and that means things will change.  The friendship will remain but the daily relationship will transition into something else, maybe a Thai lunch meeting occasionally, maybe a few emails in between.  Someone new will move into her old office and there’ll be new distractions here while she’ll be moving into new responsibilities (that I don’t envy!)  and that she’ll need to focus her attention on.  Things will move on and whatever our relationship looks like in a month or six months, it will be different from the one we’ve had. 

I don’t consider that a completion or an end to our friendship.  I don’t consider our friendship “over” because the physical proximity has changed.  It’s just a new way of defining how we are friends to one another.  It’s a graduation from the last type of relationship to another, and always the chance for our friendship to bloom deeply yet again if Aquarius Girl and I are ever again in close proximity.

 

 

Timing Is Everything

Photo by Kuw_Son

Sometimes things happen for a reason.  The timing seems to suck and none of it makes sense…until later.  Then it’s easy to look back at a series of events and how they had to take place in a certain sequence to get the right result.  One moment out of  place and the outcome is completely different.

My favorite example (at the moment) happened at the Florida Pagan Gathering in Altoona at Beltane.   Almost as soon as we arrived the first night, I had to go walk the labyrinth.  I can never get enough of it!  It’s a pattern of numbered stakes and white Christmas tree lights at the far end of the camp, near the lake and woods, in a very out of the way spot.  Shannon and I walked it  several nights while Aislinn went to volunteer elsewhere, and we decided we’d create a labyrinth of our own in our backyard this summer.  

After the Main Ritual, the girls and I decided to head to the Fire Circle for time later with Maggie Shayne and Boom Boom.  There were a couple of people I’d been hoping to talk with all weekend and kept missing them.  It looked as if I might not get to see them at all on this trip.  

After a short while at the Fire Circle, I was so parched from all the dust and night air that  I announced I had to run all the way back to our cabin for a bottle of water.  I’d be back in 15 minutes.  

When I returned with my water bottle, my girls and everyone I knew had gone.  I waited for just a few minutes, watching the tribal dancing and listening to the drummers.  I decided the girls must have gone back to the cabin, so I walked all the way back.  Empty!  So I headed back to the Fire Circle.  About an hour had passed by then and I was pooped from walking uphill so much.  

Shannon spotted me as I walked up.  She had that slightly desperate look in her eyes, like WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?  

Right after I left the first time, Aislinn and Boom Boom had headed back to the pavillion for a second Spiral Dance concert, and Shannon had gone to the cabin to find me.  We’d just missed each other. Back at the Fire Circle, I left just before she returned.  Timing is everything, and we had very bad timing–and sore legs!

I wanted to hang out at the Fire Circle but Shannon was uncharacteristically antsy.  She couldn’t stand to sit there.  She gave me a few minutes to rest my feet and then we got up to walk some more(!).   

Outside under the starry skies, we sat in the grass, just stopped and sat in the grass, identifying constellations in the light-pollution-free sky and talking.  It was peaceful and pleasant, and I don’t know when I’ve seen the stars so bright.

Suddenly Shannon was ready to get up and walk, specifically for us to go walk the labyrinth.  She hadn’t wanted to early but now was ready.  

We’d been at the labyrinth just long enough to turn a few corners when a little girl about 5 to 7 years old timidly approached us.  My first thought was, Where are your parents and why are you out here all alone in the pitch dark (Dark Moon night) next to the woods?  This is where my typical Mother-of-the-World personality comes into play and I get very protective of children and frustrated with errant parents.  I couldn’t imagine my kids being in this spot alone, ever.  

Then it became clear that she was lost, but she wasn’t admitting it.  She was very brave and had been well-instructed, trying not to talk to strangers or get too close to us, but we were probably the least threatening to her–a mother and teen daughter linking arms and walking the lighted pattern while talking lowly and occasionally laughing.  She’d headed just around the corner, just a few feet away from her mom to the bathroom–and kept right on going to the other side of the camp, to the edge of the woods and lake.  Poor kid was terrified!

She had cause to be–there was a bear spotted in that area an hour or so after and the lake does have alligators.

We immediately offered to take her back to where she needed to be and walked with her, while she ran ahead.  What I really wanted to do was pick her up and hug her and tell her it would be fine and we’d make sure she was safe.  It was a VERY long walk, and her worried mother actually spotted her first as we were walking with her to the bathrooms and to camp Security.  Once I was satisfied that the woman was her mother–the little girl felt safe enough then that her brave facade melted and she burst into tears–Shannon and I went back to the Fire Circle and I immediately ran into the people I’d been hoping to talk with all weekend.

I had a lump in my throat–maternal fear and protectiveness are universal–and we felt much less antsy.  Our comedy of errors and bad timing meant we were in the right place at the right time to escort a lost child back to her mother.

The Essence of Time

Mabon:  Pagan Thanksgiving, coming June 2008.

Time is of the essence, they say, but maybe really, that’s just the essence of time.

At least 5 times in 24 hours, I’ve been reminded that “time is of the essence” and not to tarry.  In the back of my mind, I’ve also realized that nearly half of May has already come and gone and over 4 months of this very fast-paced year.  Not that it’s flown by without purpose–I’ve accomplished a ton during that time, but the reminder is there, not so gently, to take advantage of  time to sow seeds NOW.  The reminders turned scary at one point and just incredibly tiring at others.

I knew I’d have to ditch my work plans last night when Aislinn suddenly spiked a fever.  I let her sleep late this morning, rather than haul her immediately into the doc’s, and that seemed to do her a world of good.  That’s when a sudden problem arose with our printer that threatened our scheduled release of Kristin Madden’s Mabon: Pagan Thanksgiving.  Time was of the essence, and while Aislinn slept, I worked frantically to smooth the rip in our schedule…which I put to bed near midnight, finally.  

Meanwhile, my messages to Maverick in Afghanistan didn’t quite make it.  He was able to email me, but my messages weren’t getting through. Silly boy wouldn’t come right out and tell me this, of course, because as he tells me, I’m never wrong and if I say I sent a message, then he’s sure I did.  But time was of the essence in our communications and we barely missed each other.

A few hours later, that scene repeated itself with another man I’ve been introduced to recently, and I just happened to turn and walk the other way as he was saying hello.  I didn’t even see him. Timing was everything, and perhaps he’ll realize tomorrow when he receives my messages that I wasn’t blowing him off but was merely very distracted.

I took Aislinn to rent an old DVD from her childhood, since she was feeling somewhat better, but our plans fell through because we were 20 minutes early.  The store had changed its hours and we were out of sync with the time.  Again, time was of the essence and we chose to go back home.

By mid-afternoon, Aislinn was feeling better and her fever seemed to have broken, and Shannon was painting the living room while I worked on the printer fiasco.  I was really craving a nap but kept working, thinking I’d get a few minutes to nap later.  I never did.  Let me tell you, it’s never a good sign when you hear a THUD from the room that’s being painted and then, “HELP!”  One full gallon of paint, upside down on the carpet and Shannon suddenly at the bottom of a ladder!  (She was bruised but okay.) Time was of the essence if we were going to save the carpet.  I was barking orders to stay just ahead of time, trying to get the paint blotted and scrubbed before having to consider  permanent residence  for an overgrown fern just to hide the damage.  We salvaged ( I think) the carpet, but I was frustrated with trying to get Aislinn to understand that run-get-this-or-that meant RUN and that time was of the essence.  Time obviously moves at a different pace when you’re 15.  

But the scariest moment where time seemed not to stand still but to be moving faster than I could catch it came in the afternoon when the girls were working together and Grendel was running around the house and being a very good puppy while I was still working on the printer’s issues.  Until suddenly he wasn’t running around the house.  We’d just seen him.  We knew he wasn’t outside.  I heard him whine once or twice, but then…nothing.  We looked under chairs, sofas, beds; in closets and cabinets and throughout the Spilled Candy offices; we looked behind the refrigerator and the washing machine.  Nothing.  I kept remembering something one of my clairvoyant friends had said about him getting stuck somewhere in the house and it being very iffy for a while.  I had that feeling that he was stuck somewhere.  What worried me most was that time was passing quickly and we no longer heard him whine or respond to us.  In each room of the house, we strained to hear him. No movement anywhere.  We finally located him under Aislinn’s bed, though we’d all been in her room several times at that point.  He was in a hidden area, out of sight and stuck, and barely able to breathe.  He was disoriented and panting for a long while after, but okay then, and very happy his girls had found him.  

During the whole incident, I kept hearing “Time is of the essence” running through my head.  We had only a few more minutes to find him or we’d have to locate our rambunctious little boy later…by the smell.  There was no time to delay.  We had to find him, immediately, or we were going to lose him.

So the idea of time being of the essence has been with me all day, a not-so-subtle reminder that we cannot shrug off action that must be taken and assume the opportunity will be there for us tomorrow.  Second chances are wonderful things and should be taken advantage of when they present themselves, but sometimes there’s not a second chance, and you take the opportunity then or not at all.  And that’s the essence of time.

Facets We Never See Make Us One-Dimensional

 

Photo, left:  my Joan of Arc action-adventure thriller with the sexy cover

Three observations:  1.  Most people are multi-faceted.  2.  Most people see only one facet of another person.  3.  People can let their worlds shrink to just one facet.  A conversation with a couple of household-name authors with whom I’ve been long-time friends brought this home to me.

 

In a previous incarnation, I was a romance novelist.  I wasn’t very good at it—though my sales were quite good and some of my reviews were mouth-wateringly good—because I always had way too much plot and the suspense tended to overshadow the romance.  The truth is, I was a suspense writer trying to force-fit my books into a genre where I wanted more—much more—than just boy meets girl, encounters obstacles, and love wins all.  One of my editors told me once that whether the guy and girl get together was suspenseful enough.  I laughed at that because 1.  it was a formula-driven romance that guaranteed a happy ending resulting in marriage; and 2.  it wasn’t suspenseful enough for ME.  That book never got published.  “Too suspenseful” was the final verdict.

 

Some of my old chums from those romance-writer days have been left in suspense about my whereabouts, mainly because they’ve seen only one facet of me without realizing there’s a whole person behind the tiny speck of light and color they’ve seen for so many years.

 

The last commercial hit I had, meaning a book sold to a major publishing house with the intention of big sales, was DARK REVELATIONS, in September 2006, part of the Madonna Key series, and the last time I even bothered to submit anything to the really terrific editor I had at Silhouette.  The book wasn’t romance but rather, part of their women’s action-adventure (Alias-type) line that closed shortly after my novel’s publication.  The sales of non-romance novels weren’t as good as stories about alpha heroes.  The stats, I was told, showed that career women in general did not want to come home and read about take-charge heroines after they’d been taking charge all day.  They preferred to come home to romantic alpha heroes who’d take care of all the decision-making.  Other publishers said similar things about their erotica lines—women want dominant men in their bedtime stories, not dominant women with beta males or even dominant women with dominant males.  Sigh.  And thus my take-charge action-adventure heroine was softened up (only slightly), my editor suggested I let the hero kill off more baddies than my heroine (I didn’t), and  the cover concept changed from pissed-off-woman-with-sword to guy-kissing-woman’s-neck, all in the name of recapturing the romance market for books originally intended as women’s adventure.  My book was packed with plot and suspense, got great reviews, shocked people by killing off an unsuspected character, and it’s still one of my all-time favs, but the chief complaint was that it was “too dark” and that the ending, while very satisfying, was not the expected marriage proposal and the twosome skipping off into the sunset.  She is a grownup, trying hard, struggling with past decisions and a bum knee, strong but fallible.

 

I guess you could say there was a lot of me in that book.  If anything made me realize that, it was running into several old friends who are fairly famous romance and mystery authors.

 

I hadn’t seen them in several years, and the meeting was really by chance.  I’ve since dropped Romance Writers of America, the web forums, and all romance-writer conferences, so I honestly didn’t know what they were up to anymore.  I hadn’t bought their books recently or checked their websites, so I’ve had no idea what they’ve been up to.  But the thing that I didn’t even think about was that they had no idea, either, of what I’d been up to.  To them, I’d died.

 

“So what happened to you?”  they asked.  “Aren’t you doing anything at all these days?”

 

I was taken aback by the question.  I haven’t been driving myself crazy with getting another novel published in the romance market and had forgotten how long it had been since I’d mailed off a manuscript to NYC.  It just hasn’t been on my radar.  At all.

 

But these colleagues know only one facet of me, that facet being Lorna-the-romance-author.  To them, it’s the only visible facet and their only way of judging my value in their particular world.  In the year and a half since DARK REVELATIONS hit the shelves (and promptly went out of print), I’ve turned out an incredible amount of work in spite of illnesses and deaths in the family, but none of it in the romance genre and not all of it in the field of writing, and much of it hidden from the public eye.  But to people who know only one tiny facet of me, it seems like I’m a sloth, and some let me know this. 

 

I see other writers stammer, too, when asked what they’ve been doing.  Some haven’t been writing at all. The same is true of musicians and other artists.  One man recently answered the question with, “Um, I’ve been busy with a deeply personal journey.”  He didn’t elaborate and didn’t need to—I knew what he meant. 

 

I don’t think people really forget that other people have many facets to contend for time, but that people get so tied up in one particular facet of their own that it becomes their entire world and they lose perspective on how to judge other people’s worth.  It’s certainly true of writers.  I’ve seen far too many lose their sense of balance, spending 10-12 hours a day writing desperately to finish another book and get it out there, and then another 6-8 hours a day marketing.  Every day.  They stop talking to their families, let their gardens wither, and forget how to take a vacation.  They become one-dimensional characters themselves, the kind they would never want to be accused of creating on paper, and one-dimension means…only one facet.

 

As for me, I’ll polish up whichever facet suits me next, and if you want to see them all, you’ll need to look at the different kinds of work I do and see me from several different perspectives.  It may not be to someone else’s liking, but having many facets is what makes me happy. 

My Garden Gives Me Little Surprises (Or Is It the Fairies?)

” Will you dance with me, Mother of the World?” — Sharon Knight

Sometimes, you find things in your garden that you’d forgotten.  

Mother’s Day was a little strange to me this year. The girls gave me some terrific presents, and afterward I took the girls to the farm to visit my mom, which was fun.  I enjoyed running through the fields of grass–its subtle hues of green, gold, pinks–waving in the Spring breezes as the dog jumped over the grass that was taller than he is like a dolphin rising and falling through the water.  It was funny  and fun and pleasant, but there were some surreal moments, too.

On the way home from dinner with my mom and girls, the sun was still high in the sky and we made a detour through the cemetery.  That’s not unusual.  I often drive by my grandparents’ graves to “pay my respects”  when I’m in town.  It was strange that I’d forgotten until I’d already turned in at the cemetery that Daddy’s there, too.  It was…disconcerting…to remember so suddenly.

We watched “3:10 to Yuma” with my mom, figuring she might like it–as Shannon and I certainly enjoyed the pretty men–but afterwards, I was suddenly hit by one of those energy waves that I don’t get as often now.  I never could discern its origin, just that it was one of my “boys” somewhere, anxious. The feeling stayed through the night, and through the day as well.  It is less so tonight, but  still there and still anxious.  No, it’s not Daddy.  This is the energy of a young man, yearning yet somehow blocked from contacting me, most likely by himself.  And though you might think it would be easy for me to pinpoint, there’s more than one man in that situation.

Mother’s Day is always a bit difficult for me because the memories of the last Mother’s Day of my marriage are still vivid and tears at old wounds. They are memories that might slip unnoticed into the night except that they are too merged with Mother’s Day for me to separate the two.  Unfortunately, my plans for a Mother’s Day dinner outing with the girls didn’t go as I’d hoped.  I didn’t find out until too late.  They’d earlier thought that they would be with me for dinner but instead they had to go to their paternal grandmother’s for dinner, so I was alone with my thoughts for a long while.

I spent some time walking around my garden before sunset, trying to ground and shake off the disconcerting energies of the weekend.  I haven’t been in my garden much, between our camping trip and a busy week at work, so it seemed that some things had grown quite a bit.  A few surprised me, not because they’d grown so much in the past week or so, but because they’d grown so much in the past week when they’ve been invisible for years.

There’s a line of oaks the squirrels planted for me that are suddenly tall and shading the back patio.  A redbud that I planted fifteen years ago did not grow AT ALL for several years, so I dug it up and planted it in an area where it seemed much more likely to flourish.  It didn’t .  It’s lanquished for ten years.  But in the past two weeks, it’s shot up two feet and entwined itself with a young oak that’s come up long since it was planted.  

If I look around my gardens, I see other flowers and trees that are suddenly flourishing, with no explanation (not counting “Fairies at Work”) . Yes, I’ve pruned some areas of the yard, so I notice some of the flora more but many of these just SUDDENLY seemed to spring forth after long years of being runts in my garden.

I suppose it’s like that with traits and abilities.  Some stay in the background and then, one day, they suddenly burst forward, growing by leaps and bounds, taking centerstage and outpacing everything around.  In any case, it was a lovely Mother’s Day gift from my garden.

Past Life Regression: Just Another Day in My Lives

Photo by Mr. Last Minute

Some people describe their past life regressions as they would a movie, and you can almost hear the soundtrack crescendo-ing in the background.  Maybe they see it that way, too.  I don’t. 

 

I get flashes of sight and emotion, sometimes scents, too.  Sometimes they’re quick flashes and sometimes they last for several seconds and the environment and inhabitants interact with me as they do in interactive, present-day, meditative journeys.  At the time, they seem disjointed and yet, very much like my daily way of life where a memory pops up here and another unrelated one bubbles to the surface there.  There’s no storyteller’s pacing or director’s emphasis.  They are simply scenes from a life. 

 

When I’ve tried past life regressions before, I’ve looked specifically at lifetimes that had some pattern or information I needed to work on now, something that would help.  In one lifetime, I was the tall, dark-skinned, spear-carrying daughter of a Persian magician and an Amazon warrior—always pulled between the world of magick and war, between my feminine and masculine sides, and unable to be fully happy in either world and unable to balance both.  That experience definitely related to the lesson I needed to learn, the pattern I needed to examine, at that point in my life.

 

In other regressions, I’ve opened my eyes to all sorts of questions—and, after much research into obscure source material,  finally found my answers to “what WAS that?” in historical documents about Dark Age weather, Macedonian spears, and Medieval sleeping quarters.

 

I wasn’t particularly interested in doing another past life regression while at the Florida Pagan Gathering but Shannon talked me into it.  I didn’t have any pressing need to look to the past—not anymore—to understand myself now.  I asked to see three lifetimes related to something in particular, but again, with no sense of urgency…just a “nice to see” kind of thing.

 

In the hypnosis session, we were to choose from three doors.  I saw specific scenes related to the environment behind each door, and spent about 20 minutes in each lifetime, allowing things to come to me rather than aggressively seeking them.  The second two doors were so-so lifetimes that related to what I’d asked for but really didn’t interest me much.  The first did….

 

The jumping off point:  …At this point, I am in a long hallway as the meditation leader has instructed, and I see a light at the end of the hallway with 3 doors.  I’m to walk toward the light and the doors.  I see the light as a candle on a low table I can barely see and move toward it.  There are no other lights in the hallway except a shaft in the ceiling above the candle opens and sunlight pours through at an angle.  As I step into the sunlight, I see three bright red, modern doors with bright brass handles and brackets.  They’re very contemporary and look like they should be the front doors to a nice two-story house in an upscale neighborhood.   I choose the one to the far left.

 

Flash #1:  As I open the door, there is a second door behind it, wooden and very old with vines around the outside of the stone that the door is set into.  I move through the tunnel behind it, feel its coolness, walk by the light of the torches in sconces on the wall. The walls are light-colored, a little peachy or pinkish in hue.  This is very similar to an upsetting meditative journey I took in late January 2007, so I’m worried about what I might encounter.  This isn’t hell, though, and there’s no one here to try to rescue. Been there, done that.  I’m alone and moving through the tunnel. I’m a little apprehensive but okay.  I look down at my feet and it seems I might be barefoot (so what’s new?!) or wearing minimal sandals.  I seem to be in this tunnel for a long time, with nothing happening, but I am moving forward.

 

Flash #2:  I emerge from the tunnel and can see the sky ahead, pinkish the horizon and a bright teal jewel above.  I don’t know if this is sunrise or sunset, but the sky over a stone courtyard in this city I’m in is breathtaking.  This is a very quick flash, but the stones walls are light in color, like in the tunnel, and are either stone or stucco.  There are trees and stone vases of flowers in the courtyard ahead of me.  The trees have a particular shape and have yellow fruits hanging from them.  Lemon trees.  This place feels old, long past.   Maybe Roman or Sumerian.  Possibly Greek.  There’s a sense of “civilization” here.

 

Flash #3:  I’m in the countryside looking at a city in the distance at sunrise or set.  The road ahead is dirt but “paved” with rocks.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of green grass on either side of the road but my focus is on the city with its stone buildings.

 

Several minor flashes of city life, mostly focused on courtyards, low walls of light-colored stone.  No focus on people.  It’s almost as if this place is very quiet and perhaps people are still sleeping and I’m walking it unseen or unheard.  There’s a serenity here, and a sense of a happy life.

 

Flash #4:  A scene in the countryside.  Bright green grass, unkempt.  This lifetime is not near water. There’s more of a desert, earthy feel to the city, so I’m relieved to see such lush grass here.

 

Flash #5:  My focus is on a woman (me?) as she walks into a room with stone walls and a stone floor and takes her place in the center of several rows of girls.  She is full-grown—maybe 20, and the other girls appear to be all teens and preteens.  They are all dressed alike in black bandeau tops that twist in the middle and tie in back.  They wear skirts that I at first think are grass but there’s no polynesian feel here.  The skirts are actually green, like sarongs or with loose elastic waists or drawstring waists.  Their feet are either bare on the stone or in minimal sandals.  They are all happy, and she’s very chatty and respected among this group.  There’s a sense of family, but the girls are too old to be her children.  They are like sisters or perhaps young priestesses, all of the same house.  The sense is less of blood family and more like a group of classmates and their teacher.  Her hair is long and black but tied behind her head in an odd way that loops outward, possibly with sticks to hold it in place.  She takes her place in the center as they are all turned to face same direction.  The scene reminds me of a class picture where they are posed or perhaps prepared to sing or perform in some way.  The young woman is important here and holds a position that is highly regarded among these girls.  There’s also a sense of joy.

 

Flash #6:  The stone room is dark and reverent, only a candle lighting the low stone wall or table.  There is a human skull beside the candle.  It has been polished and is a thing of respect.  There’s a deep sense of reverence here I cannot shake, and the skull is a sacred thing here, something of tremendous power and regard.  I have the impression that this is how the young woman was remembered and honored after her death. This place seems to be a crypt but at the same time, a place of communion with the sacred dead.

A Sexual Revolution of My Own

My own personal sexual revolution did not arrive with a fanfare of one-night stands  or birth control prescriptions or discreetly wrapped sex toys delivered via UPS.  It crept up quietly as, in the wake of my divorce,  I had a few surprises pointed out to me about myself that I had not realized, and then I spent a few years taking a huge step back from everything I had ever thought was true about my sexuality.

A clairvoyant friend who was right about many, many things, told me in February 2004, between visits to my divorce lawyer, that by February 2009, I would have a new man and a whole new life.  He told me that life was going to be vastly different in ways I could not fathom.  I’m less than a year from the future we were discussing, but in many ways, I’m already there.  I am, at the very least, quite ready and actively pursuing that wonderfully different life he forecasted.   The identity of the man  (or men?) has not yet been settled, but I can certainly see how I fit into this fantasy.

What I’ve had to do to get to this serene place with my own appetites has been to pull away and look objectively at all the things I was told–by my childhood religion, by TV and books and movies, by well-meaning friends, by clueless lovers who judged me by their own appetites–and look really hard at what I like and dislike without the context of the programming I’ve received since I was a little girl.

There are modes and methods I’ve never enjoyed, will never enjoy.  Confess that to a lover and suddenly it’s a deficiency, an inadequacy as a woman NOT to adhere to some boring man’s idea of a good time.  On the flip side, discover what you might really like or might really like to try  and discreetly tell your best female friends…and hear how that’s not really what you need because what you really need is what they really need.  Ah, no accounting for differences, huh?  Let’s draw that hard line between the sexes and what men are supposed to enjoy and what women are supposed to enjoy and if you can’t check the boxes on the list, then there’s something wrong with you, right?   

A lot of these reinforced expectations ate away at my self-esteem when I was younger.  Men told me, women told me, the media told me–I’m supposed to like certain things and dislike certain things.  Sure,be yourself, but be the self that’s been painted as “normal.”  I’ve figured it out now, and now I know that sexuality is as diverse a path as spirituality and it’s always a very “individual” path uniquely suited to each of us and hopefully intersecting with the unique paths of the right lovers for each of us.  I’ve stopped letting the expectations of others determine how I satisfy my appetites or if I satisfy them at all.  I’ve taken that big step back from the media and well-meaning friends who react in either pity or disgust if my preferences don’t align perfectly with theirs and I’ve found a place where I feel I’ve come home, much as I did with my spiritual path over a decade ago.  No lover or friend will ever make me feel bad about myself again because I don’t meet his expectations because, frankly, I’m much more concerned about my own expectations these days.  

Am I letting current people in my life influence my appetites, as one friend from a decade ago alleged because I wasn’t following her insistence at how terrific it would be if I, too, were a bratty submissive?  No.  I’ve  taken a gander at that as well, to make sure I’ve arrived at this place on my own terms.  Looking back, I can see that certain patterns of enjoyment were always there, in the background or buried under expectation of how I was supposed to be.  I’m simply letting it come forward now and no longer caring what images have been modeled for me by the culture around me.

It’s a level of ease, sincerity, serenity, clarity,  and pleasure that feels very natural to me. The sexual revolution isn’t about the  freedom to indulge in carnal knowledge–it’s about the freedom to enjoy and express your sexuality as no one else in the world ever could.

Is “Going Green” a Fad or a Trend?

Photo by hurleygurley

“Let me hear you make decisions without your television….”  ”Stripped,” — Depeche Mode

I predict that “Going Green” will be the top buzz phrase of 2008.  And, as with most things that become “popular” when I’ve been doing them for a long while without the benefit of its popularity,  my cynicism is in direct proportion.  I’ve found far too many politicians who set their moral compass by the polls and too many sheep in the populace who follow every fad that hits their multiple TV screens.  “Going Green” deserves to be more than a fad.

I’m especially cynical, I suppose, since I’ve been  failing most of the “Are You Green Enough?” quick quizzes out there.  Me–a tree-hugging, Goddess-loving, corporate hippie. 

I usually fail these for at one of the following reasons:

1.  I’m supposed to be taking public transportation to work.  Okay, good theory…if you live in a city or someplace where there IS public transportation.  This is akin to me telling a city dweller to grow his own veggies in the 40-acres behind his Manhattan apartment.  There is no public transportation where I live, and you’d have to drive several hours to get to the nearest city that has such a system.  Riding my bike to work won’t cut it either.  Fourteen miles in one direction just isn’t going to work for me with my knee injury, especially on the roads outside of my subdivision.  I occasionally see one guy risking his life along the unsidewalked highway.   I think his name is Lance something….

My schedule doesn’t allow carpooling to and from work but I do share rides to meetings and walk once I’m parked, provided my knee is in prime condition.  (I’m a huge fan of walking, so this is doubly cool when I get to.)  I’ve also been on a flexible work schedule for years, with one day off for every 10 or less, and I’ve tried to convince my bosses to let me telecommute–since 1998.    Yes, I work for the U.S. Government where we talk a lot about going green but…well…we talk a lot.

2.  I’m supposed to be using flourescent light bulbs which save energy and the electric bill.  I’m a typical early adopter of radical causes.  I bought small round circle-bulbs  for every home lamp back when they were first introduced in department and specialty stores.  This was YEARS ago when they cost $8 each.  In the past year, however, I’ve been letting all my flourescent bulbs die out and replacing them with energy-saving regular bulbs.   Why?  Because about the time I started having to wear reading glasses, the flourescent house lights started bothering my eyes, whether I’m reading or just bumping into walls.  I’m not sure what it is and I’ve tried different bulbs and different methods, but with my latest vision change, I had to make a decision in favor of my eyesight.    (This is not a request for advice on which bulbs to buy–it’s between my eye doc and me, and the decision’s been made.)

3.  The third reason I’ve been failing these ”Green” quizzes is because I refuse to cut back on TV-watching.  The idea of cutting back to 1 hour per night?  Not gonna happen.  It’s extremely rare that I watch 1 hour per WEEK.  In fact, 1 hour per MONTH is closer to my norm.  But that’s so out of the norm for everyone else that it’s not even accounted for as a possibilty for the typical American.

Shannon watched Oprah a few weeks ago when the show was helping two “typical Amercian families” to go green.  With the AC/heater unit off and the windows up for a lovely spring breeze to blow through the house, Shannon sat with pen and paper, anxious for some new tips–and found we’d been doing all of the tips for most of her life, with the exception of public transportation.  She was appalled at the idea of typical families having three or four TVs running at once (or even owning that many), cooking different meals for multiple family members in one sitting, and the sheer volume of waste. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t typical, but earlier in the day, I’d talked to different colleagues who complained about whether to replace the newly broken TV when they have four others because everyone watches a different program schedule every night,  what to cook for each of the kids and the hubby that night,  and how much kid-chauffering they do every week.

So even though I have my preferred trade-offs for various health-related reasons, I felt pretty good about our family’s “green” habits. We’ve consistently done or tried to do the little things that add up and make sense for us, not to follow the rage but because it was right for us and our environmental philosophy.  But it also brought home the fact that we don’t usually know the difference between our “normal” and other people’s “normal” until we grow up and get out into the world and discover that people do things differently. 

I guess “Going  Green” really is different for a lot of people, and since every little bit helps, jumping on the bandwagon will do at least some good for all those “typical” families out there.

Between the Scorpio Moons, Life Shifts Fast

 Photo by gossamerpromise

To put it in Star Wars jargon, I’ve felt another shift in The Force recently. 

Here we are, half-way between two Scorpio full moons with a Taurus Sun and it’s at a new moon in Taurus.  There’s been a tug in a particular direction for the past week as Saturn turned direct and a definite shift occurring Sunday night/Monday morning with this new moon.  I’d say it’s just my own general eccentricity, but others are noticing the same kinds of shifting, at the same time.

I think the next 30 days will be quite interesting.  It seems to be a time of throwing off old emotional weights that have been on our shoulders, sometimes for years.  I’ve noted that some people are ready to leave behind the heavy baggage–both in trunks and in the heart–of old lovers and friendships gone awry and at the same time, there’s a reweaving of old dreams that seemed to have been lost. 

For me, personally, I’ve been shown the outcome of a particular dream had it come to me when I desperately wanted it, and I likely would not have survived it.  I am letting go of that, finally, and no matter how many times you’re told to let go, you simply cannot do it until you have processed the consequences and made peace with the situation.  It cannot be rushed and discarded lightly, no matter how disgruntled and impatient your friends, family, colleagues, and others become who don’t bear the same emotional burden as you do.  It must have its time, even when it doesn’t suit anyone else.  It makes me sad now to realize that the thing I wanted would indeed have brought me great joy, but would have destroyed my health.  I couldn’t have known that then, and it would have been several years later before I felt the damage of those choices.

But this is not the only shift I’ve felt. Like others, I am finally able to let go of something (else) I had really wanted and there is no pain this time with letting go.  It’s simply opening my palms, the cord slipping away, and being free of dragging the weight of it behind me.  Once I realized this, Sunday evening, I immediately unsubscribed from various blogs and alerts, removed email addresses and phone numbers, and subsequently shed myself of anything left that had to do with the persons I’d held onto.  I had wanted them back in my life, but the time for that has passed, they’re no longer a part of my present or future, and I no longer wish for their return.  Whatever was there has been honored and released, and is now nothing more than a faint and fading glimpse of memory.  They are now the past, and that’s where they’ll stay.

Yet, like others, I am feeling a strange re-weaving of dreams shoved aside several years ago.  It’s like coming to a hole in the tapestry, a rather large hole you must go around and that you’ve been skirting the perimeter of for years, and finding suddenly that the threads are coming to life, coming together in a slightly different pattern–a patch of violets now instead of a tulip, but a garden nonetheless–and that you no longer have to make your way around a vast hole but can see the form of what fills the void.  That form in the void grows more solid by the hour.  This reweaving of dreams and promise of new gifts is part of the shift.

We let go with one hand, palm open, cord slipping away.  And we open our other hand, the fist that was closed by loss or misstep, and cup our palm for the key to be dropped into our grasp.

***

If you enjoyed this post, please check out our other posts on astrology, ritual, and magick by clicking the appropriate category to the right.

The Most Basic Rule for Happiness

Photo by maniya

An email sent to me without a BCC jarred me back to the realization of what it takes to be happy.  Enough time has passed for me to evaluate where I’ve been, the decisions I’ve made, and how it’s working.  And yes, my most basic rule for happiness is still a good one.

Plain and simple?  Stop being around people who make you unhappy.  Of course, that’s not really “plain and simple.”  No one can make you happy but yourself and it’s not really other people who make you unhappy, though they can cause a lot of consternation and drama.  It’s your reaction and proximity to such people that make you unhappy because of the buttons they push and your willingness to put up with it.

The secret to staying happy (or becoming happy) when someone’s intent on making your life hell is to remove yourself from the situation as quickly as possible.  But that’s not easy either.  Sometimes you’re married to that person or related by blood.  Sometimes it’s a business partner or a group you’ve considered friends for many years. Sometimes it’s a stranger on the street who sneers at you or says something entirely disrespectful.  In those cases, where the connections are shallow or non-existent, it’s so much easier to cut the tie and get quickly away from them, but same principle applies:

How do you feel when you’re around this person or people?  Do you feel good being with them?  Or do you feel like crap every time you’re in their presence or in a conversation with them?  Those feelings are an indicator, a reaction to something in your connection with that person that says there’s something wrong.  I’m not talking about feelings of guilt because you’ve done something wrong, but rather, just feeling ignored, oppressed, de-valued, discounted, disconnected.

I’ve done a huge amount of clearing out old connections of that sort, though I usually don’t realize it until something happens to remind me, and then it’s always a shock.  There are the major clearings–the divorcing of the ex, the distancing of overbearing fathers and inlaws, the cutting apron strings with teachers–and then there are the lesser releasings, the ones that are really no less important to getting to a happy place in life.

After returning home from a fun trip with people I enjoy, I was surprised to find a series of messages from a social network of writers I was a part of for around 15 years.  The message was awful news about a member of the group, sent as individual messages rather than to the group address. My heart goes out to the person who was injured and I’ll put her on my healing altar, but my second thought was, why did I get this?  I left the group of 100+ friends just shy of a year ago, and only three people from the group have been in contact with me during the past eleven months.   The message stirred up a blend of shock for the injured person as well as sadness for an old situation I’d put behind me and a sad lesson about being happy.

Ultimately, I left the group because I felt like crap every time I interacted with people there and it had been that way for quite a few months  by then.  I’d noticed an unusual degree of people disagreeing with anything and everything I said.  In the past, I attributed any professional disagreements (there weren’t many) to my taking my writing career in a different direction, but this was different and energetically very cold.  It was personal.   A relationship with someone else in the group had ended privately and quietly, and many in the group assumed they needed to take sides and stopped communicating with me.  It was not something I’d wanted and wasn’t any business of anyone’s there, but by the time I left, there was only one person who was openly speaking to me.  It wasn’t a matter of people simply being caught up in their own lives, as sometimes happens.  The final blow was when  two of us were going through a similar situation, posting our discoveries to each other, and hers were acknowledged  and mine were ignored.  They were often the same discoveries, but she was the only one who acknowledged them.

I sat at my computer one night, hurt that another group of people I’d considered long-term friends, really were not.  It was a little too close to the bone to acknowledge that I’d been spending my time and love on people who could so casually withdraw their affections.  I’d experienced the pattern a little too often, with this group and with others in my life, and I’d tried to hang on with this group because they’d been in my life for so long.  They were important to me.  But I had to apply my basic guideline for happiness, and “happy” was what I was working  to bring into my life.

I asked myself how I felt when I even thought of this group.  For many years, I’d been really warm and fuzzy when I thought of being a part of  this group.  Not now. I didn’t feel happy or a rush of friendship or even like I was a part of the group anymore.  I felt that my input wasn’t worth acknowledging, either professionally or personally. Everything I said was discounted.  I couldn’t get a clear connection with hardly anyone anymore.  I felt intentionally ignored, shunned even, with my communications going unanswered.  I felt like crap.

And that was the breaking point.  Why was I staying with people I felt awful trying to interact with?  Maintaining a relationship at all–not to mention hoping one would flourish–had become like a drill into bedrock. How could I reach a point of happiness if I felt like crap around certain people?  I logged off my primary social and professional network of 15 years and never went back.  I dropped the professional associations I was a part of and stopped going to national and regional conferences.   It was part of my slate-clearing process toward finding a consistent state of joy in my daily life.  

My communications to individuals in the group since then have gone unanswered.  Only three have initiated any contact since I left.  None have acknowledged any family or health crises or major joys, and only one acknowledged a death in the family.  Essentially, they have no idea of what’s happened in my life this past year. I’m content without them and I don’t get the constant negative reinforcement I used to, so I’m glad I followed my basic rule for happiness, however hard it was at the time.   I used “feeling like crap” as the impetus to leave the situation, so I could feel pretty damned good later.

Life is too short to waste moments you could be happy on people who don’t value you or in situations where you don’t feel good about where you are. 

***

If you enjoyed this post, try these:

Life Improvements/Finding Happiness/Positive Thinking  

 

 

 

7 Tips to Stop Getting Advice You Don’t Want
Body Image:  Are You a Temple or a Tool?

The Long-Awaited Honest-to-God Secret to Happiness
Body Positives:  Getting Personal but Keeping It PG
Defining Contentment
Do Something New: An Unexpected Weekend Among the Trees
Don’t Pity Me
Enjoying My Flaws
Home Is Where the Spirit Is
How to Love Mondays
How to Make It Better
The Bracelet Challenge
The Best Advice a Teen Ever Gave Her Mom
The Miracle of Bad Things
The To-Don’t List
Why Some People Will Never Be Happy

 

Back from Beltane 2008: FPG Festival Summary

 

***Photo of Lorna and Aislinn hamming it up in the cabin–the poster behind says, “Helpful or Harmful?  Know the Difference!”  (talking about bugs, not brunettes)***

We’re back from the Florida Pagan Gathering’s Beltane 2008, and it was a blast!  Kudos to the coordinators and staff of this festival–these folks really know how to put together an event.   

Right now, I’m exhausted from the 6+ hour drive home, my calf muscles are so sore from all the walking I did that I’m hobbling like a crone, and I’m anxious to snuggle down in my own bed again.  I’ll have some particular stories to share later, but for how, here are the highlights of what I really enjoyed (that I can remember right now!):

- I LOVED seeing Aislinn blossom in her element.  She volunteered for a total of SEVEN two-hour shifts, hung out at the Spiral Dance concert with Boom Boom,  latched onto “Auntie” Maggie Shayne at the Fire Circle until 1 in the morning, helped Raven and Stephanie Taylor Grimassi hand out Faery Stones in their workshop, and made new friends from all over Florida and all over the world.  I loved that she exchanged leis with two women who’d been left out of the lei exchange…and that she exchanged leis with the lead singer of Spiral Dance.

- I LOVED seeing Shannon stumble upon some epiphanies of her own, reawakening some forgotten dreams and wishes.  I liked seeing her eyes light up during Christopher Penczak’s workshops and hearing her whisper little snippets to me that let me know she got it, really got it, when he was talking about the New Age aspects, Christian aspects, historical aspects,  scientific aspects, and various branches of paganism and how everything fit together.  She found someone who really connected the dots for her and couldn’t get enough of what he had to say.  

- The two cranes that flew over at the exact moment the May Pole was complete and the May Queen and King announced.

- The labyrinth–we’re already trying to figure out how to install one in our backyard out of Christmas Tree lights and string.

-  Blue margaritas.  No worries about designated drivers.  If I had too much, that wrist band had my campsite number on it….  

-  Spiraling through the fires at Main Ritual and the fire-jumping.  I was tempted to jump the fire myself, but between my violet gypsy skirt and knee injury, I decided it probably wasn’t a great idea.  Besides, do I really need extra fertility?

-  Tish Owen’s Past Life Regression hypnosis session.  I haven’t played around with past life regressions in a several years, and this one was quite vivid.

-  Meeting Christopher finally in person!  He’s a phenomenal speaker, and pulls together many of the things I’ve been trying to connect for the past few years.  I really enjoy his energy, but even better…I actually learned some new things from his workshops and the meditations he led were very powerful.  In many ways, I feel the insights I had via Christopher were exactly why I was at FPG this time.  I’ll keep most of those to myself, but a few, I will share soon.

- I thoroughly enjoyed Raven and Stephanie’s Faery Stone Workshop, especially when the faeries took his stone away from him. He’s got to learn to drive that thing!

- The Fire Circle.  I love sitting and listening to drums and drums and drums and watching people dance around a bonfire.

- I loved seeing Maggie again after almost two years.  She looked healthy and happy–not too skinny, very natural, very relaxed.  

- The Spiral Dance concert was fun and full of energy but my fav moment was when they suggested they’d love to see some dancers in front of their stage, and Shannon was the first on the floor, dragging Maggie right behind.  That was such a kick to see the two of them out there–and others joined in right after.  There is NOTHING like a live concert!

- I really liked meeting Gina Estevez and didn’t have enough time with her.  I felt like I’d known her for ages.

Things I didn’t like as much?

- The first night, we had campers wake us up to borrow our shower way after midnight….and then another set borrowed it at the crack of dawn to the point where the cabin residents couldn’t get a shower.  One of our roommates reported it to the staff and they took care of matters instantly.  Did I mention how well-coordinated everything was?  The staff did not put up with crap.

- As with any festival–of any religion–someone in a workshop has to be a know-it-all and play challenge-the-instructor.   Why is that?  I don’t really care that another member of the audience does it differently.  I’m there to hear the speaker, often specifically to find out how other people do things differently.

- The disorientation upon returning home.  I never thought much about it before but I think in the future, I’ll be very careful to attend the opening ritual (we arrived too late) and the closing ritual (we left too early so the girls could study for finals).  I didn’t “connect in” well until the middle of the next morning and I had a hard time disconnecting when we left.  Normally, if I don’t stay for a closing ritual, I do a walk-through of the area, sort of saying good-bye.  This time, we overslept and had to pack the car and leave quickly.  So adjusting to “reality,” as Shannon calls it, was difficult when we returned.

But as for now, I think I’ll burn one more stick of Nag Champa, put on some more iTunes drums, and have another cup of mead.  Well, maybe not the mead….

Magick in Reverse–a Beltane Surprise

(Photo of Aislinn with Kat and Murv (M.R. Sellars) at the Samhain 2006 Florida Pagan Gathering.  She’s about 6 inches taller now and can’t wait to reconnect with friends in Ocala )

6:08 PM   I’m laughing all the way home. I have four new special-order tires, a complete re-alignment, and a hole in my purse, but I’m happy.  I’ll mow the yard when I get home, fetch groceries for camping, and finish my book project tonight with time to spare in the morning to finish packing for our trip to Altoona for the Florida Pagan Gathering this weekend.  Only two hours ago, the trip had been iffy thanks to a hole in one tire that turned out to be holes in 3 tires with an already-patched fourth.  But the ride home is smooth and wonderful, and I feel great, and at mid-day Thursday, we’re hitting the road!  I’m feeling some major mojo effects!

6:02 PM  The manager at the tire store shakes his head and tells me he’s amazed.  He can’t believe I’m back in the store after I had to leave empty-handed this morning with bad news that I’d taken so in-stride.  But he’s happy about the way things turned out and he wishes me a safe trip.  

5:55 PM   I save my file, turn off my laptop and put it away, put the picture frame back on the wall, return the chairs to their rightful spots, and grab my purse and credit card.  The woman in the lobby just looks at me like I’m crazy.

5:50 PM  Just as the doctor leaves, a woman with short black hair walks into the lobby.  She sees me and does a double-take.  I don’t care. I’ve made major progress here with my trusty laptop….

5:45 PM  The manager walks into the lobby to give me status on whether my new tires have been put on my car yet and stops cold.  He laughs.  “You really DID make yourself at home, didn’t you?”  I grin back at him and explain that yes, I did, and I even turned off the TV.

5:30 PM  I look up from my laptop in time to see a local ER doc walk into the lobby.  He looks at me and starts laughing.  “You took them seriously when they said to make yourself at home, didn’t you?  Wow, I feel really unproductive!”  He looks tired, like he’s had a hard day.

4:35 PM  I have SOOOO much work to do and I’m determined to make it fast and pleasant tonight.  I can’t afford to lose the time I’d spend sitting in this lobby, waiting for them to put new tires on my car.  I quickly locate the nearest outlet behind the fridge and coffee machine and plug in my laptop.  Then I pull a chair around opposite of the chair I’m sitting in–in a T-shirt and shorts–but it’s too low for a desktop and hunching over hurts my back.  I flick off the annoying Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama news bites on CNN and walk across the empty lobby to a huge framed poster of a guy lecturing the audience about the right kind of tire to buy…and move it to my chairs where I place it across the arms as a make-shift desk.  Voila!  My laptop fits perfectly, along with my papers and USB mouse,  and I can be comfy while I work!

4:30 PM  The manager takes my car keys and points out the lobby in a very friendly way.  “Make yourself at home,” he tells me.

4:10 PM  I’m home, working on my book project.  I’m a little stressed about how to get everything done and then spend tomorrow morning at the tire shop–IF the tires actually arrive before noon. Either my schedule is about to get blown or the entire trip is, but I’m staying confident. I’ve been visualizing myself dancing around bonfires ever since I got the bad news this morning. Then the phone rings.  It’s the manager of the tire shop.  “Uh, Lorna?”  he says.  “I have some very unusual news. You’re not going to believe this….   Your tires were scheduled to come in tomorrow and I was hoping they’d arrive before noon but….uh…they’re here now.  The place that we special ordered them from had a guy come through town this afternoon and he said that for some reason, someone put the tires on his truck and told him to bring them down a day early.  So if you’re free for the next couple of hours, we can put them on for you tonight instead of in the morning.  This is really unusual.  I’ve never had this happen before…”

Spiritual Epiphanies: Understanding Why We Sometimes Can’t Accept an Apology

 

Photo by   Daniel Y. Go

 

Not long ago, I was talking to Bev Walton-Porter about  people who say they’re sorry and why we sometimes can’t accept an apology.  From a spiritual standpoint, this has bothered me because for many people, I can accpet an apology, forgive instantly upon that apology, and move right along, but for others, it’s much harder to move on.  The result of our conversation was an epiphany for me because I realized what I expect in an apology and what “sorry” means—or doesn’t—to me.

 

For me, I’ve never been able to accept a mere shrugged-off  “Sorry.”  It reminds me too much of the little boy who kicked me in the skins years ago, grinned, and said, “SSSSSorrrrrrryyyyyyyy!”  Then did it again. 

 

“Sorry” itself has never been enough for me.  Earlier this decade, a woman I had gone to extra lengths to help bit me.  Not literally, but it might as well have been. She was one of the first people to teach me to stop playing Good Samaritan to every wounded stranger.  The situation had to do less with her than a friend of hers who’s a reviewer for a  magazine that has mostly refused to review any of the books I’ve published.  The reviewer wanted me to hire her as an editor (before I knew she was a reviewer) and I refused, for reasons that had nothing to do with her editing abilities and everything to do with her constant politicking. The woman I had been helping was not a very strong personality and she somehow got involved in the situation, panicked, and did some things that were very threatening to me legally and damaging personally.  She has, quite a few times over the years, come back to me to offer her apologies for what happened and what she did.  She takes responsibility for it, though with plenty of excuses about being bullied, but she has never undone the record she created–which would take less than an hour for her to do but would make her look like a lunatic to the police.  It’s always about how she’s making these great efforts to ask my forgiveness, and she always makes things worse by trying to guilt me into forgiving her because I’m a spiritual person and should “understand.”  She never did and has never done anything to “make right” her original actions. 

And that’s part of the epiphany.

 

Thanks to Bev, I realized that I have never been able to accept this person’s apology because she’s done nothing to “make restitution.”  She could have spoken up instead of playing the victim.  She could have publicly announced that she was wrong and that she wouldn’t be bullied anymore by her friend in the publishing industry.  She could have done so many things that would have reversed various written accounts of her testimony against me.  Instead, she makes a yearly (at minimum) pilgrimage to beg my forgiveness and tell me how sorry she is for what she did.  We have no other contact.  Her apologies don’t mean anything to me other than rubbing salt in an old wound, but realizing why I can’t accept her apology is an epiphany for me.  I don’t spend much energy on thinking about her, and I could probably wash my hands of it and move forward entirely if she didn’t keep coming back to tell me how I should forgive her.  If she were in a 12-step program, she might realize her contact does more harm than good, but it’s still about her and how she can make herself feel better if I’d forgive her and not about fixing what she broke.

 

I wish I’d been more aware of this in my marriage and in my divorce proceedings. An angry  “Sorry!” from my ex only hurt more, but when, right after I filed for divorce, he came back to me with promises not to do it again and that he’d change, I almost went back to him.  In truth, had he held out another week or two with the changes he’d promised and the action he was taking, I’m pretty sure I would have stopped the proceedings.  It was not only a sincere feeling of sorrow for the pain caused but also action to make things right that I could have and would have accepted.

 

It’s not just one-way though.  When I make a mistake or do something hurtful (almost always unintended), I try to make things right.  For me, it’s a matter of personal responsibility, and in accepting an apology, I guess I have to see taking responsibility and at least an earnest attempt to rectify the harm done.   Meanwhile, I continue to try to accept people as they are, but that doesn’t mean I have to condone their flaws or enable continued hurtful behavior.

Reverend Wright’s Conspiracy Theory about HIV and AIDS

Book cover:  the second edition of Access, the first novel published by Spilled Candy Books.

If Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s allegations of the US Government developing AIDS to get rid of undesirables sounds like a conspiracy theory novel…it is. 

The book is called ACCESS, and it’s a spiritual suspense thriller written in 1996-97 and first published in 1999.  It’s based on Government documents that were newly declassified in 1995 as well as some oddball statutes and Congressional testimony that, oddly enough, is now nowhere to be found online. 

Much of it is, however, still found in the book, including Congressional testimony about a contract to create what strongly resembles HIV.  A lot has changed since then–biological warfare agents like anthrax and botulinum toxin (botox) were uncommon terms for most Americans, bunker busters weren’t regularly discussed on CNN, and La Femme Nikita was the closest thing going to the action-adventure heroine who was tough-as-nails on the outside but vulnerable inside, which was long before the spate of Alias-type heroines on TV this century.  At the time, the novel’s concept was rather original, both in content and characters, though it starts very, very slowly before turning into a frantic pageturner in the last third.

So much of the technology in this book in the mid-90’s is just now becoming widely known but the conspiracy theories are uncomfortably close to what Obama’s friend, Rev. Wright,  clearly believes the US Government is capable of doing.    I wonder if he read the book, read the same research that went into it, or if he’s just theorizing without knowing the documents that really were out there, available to the public who knew where to look, back in 1996.

Find out more about the book at http://spilledcandybookstore.com/Access.html

Proving Your Intuition Is Correct

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