Tears 2008 12 19
Ξ December 19th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ General |
Even the Benu
cries
upon immolation.
Winter 2008 12 19
Ξ December 19th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ General |
Crunching beneath the snow;
Frozen. Snapping things and
once green leaves now aflame but
Frozen.The season has revolved.
Descended into darkness and arisen.
Turning.
Anger burns in our hearth,
and metaphor becomes clumsy
and sophomoric.
But plain speech does not
convey meaning.
an open letter to the gay community
Ξ December 18th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ General |
I’ m more than a little upset right now. Not this moment, at least not uncontrollably in this moment. But overall, I’m very very angry. I’ll tell you why, even though you probably don’t want to hear it. Proposition 8. I’m furious about it, but not for the reason you may think.
Sure I’m distressed that California voters passed a discriminatory bill into their constitution. I’m even a bit angry about it. But what’s really got me steaming mad is the gay communities reaction to it. I expected anger and protests. I expected a legal challenge. I didn’t expect the seemingly endless mind-numbing rage and fountain of virulence that seems to have overtaken the gay population. Not a day goes by that I don’t hear about an attempt to boycott a business whose ceo gave money to prop 8, or angry rants about so-called traitors who aren’t supporting those boycotts, or rescinding performance rights to their music. Next all the gay interior decorators will be expected to go to the homes they’ve decorated and trash them in recompense for the legal injustice done in California.
Today the hot topic is the pastor giving the invocation at the inauguration in January. Apparently he’s against gay marriage, and the gay community feels his selection is a betrayal by president-elect Obama. I’m confused as hell, because I can’t make my brain see it that way. It seems completely unrelated to me.
But all that’s beside the point. The thing that really makes me angry is the shift of our consciousness from trying to protect our rights and achieve legal equality and parity, to trying to punish people who don’t share our goals.
We used to protest in front of City Hall, or the White House, or another government building. We used to march through the streets to make people aware of us and our message. We used to tell people about the injustices and struggles we endure.
Now we’re boycotting a movie theater, rescinding performance rights, attacking religious leaders for their beliefs, and condemning our newly elected president-to-be for level-headed equitable decisions and solutions.
I just don’t understand this need to punish people. I don’t even understand the true anger. I wish the Mormon Church hadn’t worked so hard to take away the right of homosexuals to marry in California. I don’t understand why they did. But I’m not really angry at them. A bit sour perhaps. Truth is, they are doing what they believe to be right, and I can’t fault them for that. As far as I know, they didn’t break the law, and if they did that should be addressed legally. But trying to punish them for their beliefs is just another type of opression, and it’s every bit as virulent and ugly as the struggle that homosexuals have every day of our lives.
It is not my right to mete out punishment for another persons beliefs or actions. I’m not going to boycott Cinemark because their CEO supported prop 8. What he did was legal according to our laws, and I don’t want think it’s right to try and punish the company for that. If they were firing glbt employees in a state with a protection law I’d probably feel much differently. But they aren’t.
This sort of vigilante justice makes us look petty and it takes our focus away from the battles we should be fighting. We will never have equality until everyone really believes that we are deserving of it. The legal system can not grant us equality. If it could we would no longer have such inequality for african americans or women. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to change our legal code to ensure equality for all, but we can’t sacrifice our principles in order to do so. We can’t hunt down the non-believers and burn them at the stake. We can’t attack people for exercising the very rights that we are exercising in our fight for equality.
In love,
challenges
Ξ December 17th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ General |
Life is not easy. It isn’t supposed to be. Our culture sort of disagrees with this. Our mores tell us that a perfect life is one without struggle or strife, where there is no injustice or imbalance, where everyone is free to live out their life in peace.
This is what we’re supposed to believe, but what makes us think this is even a remotely reasonable belief? The very diversity of opinion and personality that we supposedly cherish ensures that there will never be perfect harmony. Some people will always be out of sync with others, and this will eventually lead to strife.
I’m thinking about this sort of thing quite a bit lately. I’ve just gotten over some of the largest challenges of my life. Things are still hard, and I’ve got plenty of things to address in my life, but I’m here. Most of my life is pretty smooth. I’m meeting and exceeding challenges I wouldn’t have thought likely a year ago.
But I recognize that I’m having some new challenges. The biggest one is perhaps one that we all face constantly. It’s the reconciliation of self. It’s acknowledging my own philosophy and trying to live in peace with that. Herbis Orbis mentioned a struggle with self-identified hypocrisy on Twitter the other day. I’ve encountered this often enough to know the discomfort that such a realization brings. I’ve been dealing with a lot of those rising challenges lately. Who am I really? Is my philosophy congruent with my lifestyle? Am I respecting the boundaries I expect others to respect? It’s painful to have a memory as strong as mine, one that quickly summons the examples of my missteps and failures. My teachers tell me that recognizing your failures and letting them instruct you is vital not only so I may grow, but also as a way of ensuring that our daemons can not harm us through our self-ignorance. I know it’s the truth, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
The Solstice is in a few days. I didn’t even realize how close it is. This Sunday. I feel some pressure building, maybe it’s been building for a while now. I think I need to plan for some alone time during the longest night (or maybe the night prior). The universe tells us what we need to know if we’re not too conceited to listen to it.
Ah, this has been a ramble, but there it is.
New Moon, or: Apathy, Passion, and Childhood
Ξ October 30th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ General |
I haven’t written a post in quite a while. I’ve tried a few times. It just hasn’t seemed meaningful. Tonight feels a little different.
I’ve been having a lot of trouble focusing lately. Focusing on anything that’s going on in my life. Focusing on work, or play, or spiritual matters. All of it feels a bit out of sync with reality. It’s like I’m living behind a curtain of gauze and everything is just a bit removed. I just seem sort of apathetic about most of the things in my life. And the things that I feel strongly about seem to be really distant, like I’m not really connected.
My training, experience, and instinct all tell me that I need to get myself centered, grounded really well. That I’m feeling a disconnect between my self and my interaction with the world around me. But I can’t seem to care all that much. Some others I know have described similar experiences lately, similar apathies and failures to connect. I don’t like it, but I can’t really seem to make up my mind to do something about it for more than a few minutes at a time.
It’s very frustrating.
—
The room is as dark as I can get it without blackout curtains, and I like it that way. Everything seems a bit surreal in the shadows around me, like I’m sitting in the void of potentiality. The void is a bit more formless than this, but the mood is almost right.
My thoughts are starting to scatter now, down a dozen or so roads. I’ve been taking karate for a little over a month. I like it. It’s the only tie lately that I’ve felt really connected to my body. I kind of wonder if the strong reality of that connection is part of what’s casting the rest of my perception into softer light. I’m having a little trouble with my right ankle again, and now with the top of my foot when I walk. I’m worried I may need to go get it examined by a Doctor. I’m going to try and work on it myself and get Georges help for a while, unless it gets worse. We’ll see how that goes and take it from there.
I’m in a bitter enough mood that I’m wondering if it all means anything. What’s the point of any of it? Of trying to be the best I can, of living a meaningful life? Of setting challenging goals and achieving them? I’m doubting my committment to serving my community. In the last couple years I’ve seen too many people abuse their authority, go on power trips, scheme, and cause chaos in the ranks of their respective groups to believe that any of us are really different.
Are we all destined to become tyrants? Can I avoid pettiness and my own desires enough to truly do what’s best for the people around me? Is anyone really that selfless?
Winter is coming. Not just for the earth, but for me. I was talking with Shivian today about just this. I feel very alone a great deal of the time. I feel naive and silly because I can’t for the life of me understand the things that people do. All the hate and fear thrown around on a daily basis confuses me. I kind of want to write a whole lot about that, but I think it would get boring very quickly, even for me.
But truth be told, I just don’t understand. I don’t understand why people are so mean to each other. Don’t get me wrong, I have a serious sadistic streak, and I make my share of cutting remarks, but I never do so from a place of malice. The thought that something I say might actually hurt someone is abhorrent.
I don’t understand why two men getting married is something to be afraid of. I know I’m not alone in this, but I just can not come to see how it makes sense.
I’m 28 years old. I’ve seen and done things that most people would find shocking. I’ve studied more types of magic and paranormal theory than I like to admit, and practiced a great deal of what I’ve studied. My sexual fantasies have ranged from the sensual, to the violent, to the disturbing since early childhood. I’m smart, reasonably well read, and I keep up with the news to the best of my ability.
I’m not a child, but I feel like one a great deal of the time. I feel like a young man who is faced with a world that does not operate under any of the rules he understands. I feel as though this world does not value my ideals or principles, and as though it would rather see them crushed than realized.
I don’t understand how someone can write “You’re right, that’s the way it should be, but let’s do it this other way because it’s not that way.” I don’t understand someone who can see fundamental problems and just accept them as what is.
I feel like the tears that I shed for the hated, for the scorned and shunned, are poor recompense for their legacy.
Suffering is the forge at which the soul is tempered. I understand that. Agony is a part of the life I’ve chosen. What I don’t understand is why there seems to be an over-abundance of people dedicated to being hammers, coals, and bellows.
lumpy bed
Ξ September 4th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ General |
My bed is lumpy. Very lumpy. I shouldn’t say that it is lumpy though, this implies there are many lumps in the bed. In truth, there is a single lump. It is more of a large hump. You see, the air mattress that I am currently sleeping on has decided to set free some of its internal walls, and as a result, a large central part of the bed inflates a great deal further than the rest of it.
This results in a lumped bed, which of course results in some fascinating sleeping conditions. I’m not truly very tired though, which is not helpful since it’s almost one in the morning and I am instead laying here typing. The cat is not helping much either, she feels I should be petting her instead of playing with the keyboard. Poor kitty.
It’s beautiful outside. The wind is cool and crisp, almost as if it were really autumn already. I think I’m going to lay here and enjoy it as I drift off to sleep.
kind of angsty
Ξ September 3rd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ General |
On the train home listening to Loreena McKennitt. The red line feels like it’s rushing head long through the subway at his moment, and I am sitting in the back of the car facing out behind the train. I wonder what it would be like to have this seat in the very last car of the train. Probably kind of cool.
I’m not a journalist or a news blogger, but the stuff going on with Starhawk, The Pagan Cluster, and some of the reclaimers (I know scarecrow) is really bothering me right now. It upsets me that police abuse authority so commonly and so heinously, and so few people even seem to mind. For real coverage, head over to The Wild Hunt.
I spent some time yesterday writing about contentment. About the first harvest of the year, and where I am as I look forward to the second harvest. I’m thinking in alchemical terms at the moment. Astrologically I know that my feelings of frustration with authority figures can be laid at the feet of Saturn’s return to my birth sign. I feel as the destroyer, the cycle of deconstruction and challenge. I see the face of Shadow everywhere I turn, and embracing it is difficult. I get the impression that I may be severing some ties that have been around for a while in the near future. I loathe that potential, but I’m not shirking from it. If the bonds that have risen in my life are no longer suitable for the person I am becoming, then they must be relinquished.
But it is hard to know what chains to break and which chains keep us safe.
Ah, enough with the philosophical meandering. It’s masturbatory today. I have much of this on my mind, but it does not overwhelm the rest of the world. I’m going to do a load of laundry when I get home. If I do a load a night I will be done sometime over the weekend. That will be good. The el is moving very quickly again. I’m wondering what the rush is. I wish it were this swift all the time. At this rate I’ll be to Bryn Mawr a good 20 minutes earlier than normal.