nostalgialicious

people i google (and generally find nothing about) when i’m feeling nostalgic:

ryan demopoulos: somewhere in this pile of crap i still have a picture or two of you in all your highschool geekish glory.  the last time i saw you - 5 years ago now? - was (unfortunately) at a funeral, and i tried, albeit unsuccesfully, to ignore how hot you had become.  somehow i doubt your marriage vows went anything like mine will but i admit to the occassional fantasy of free-love-enlightenment spreading through society so deeply it reaches even you.  how could someone with such hippylicious jesus hair not be touched by the swinger bug?

chris whalen: so you were my boss, and probably 15 years older than me, and you had a gross fake tooth that you sometimes kept in your shirt pocket, but i still miss you now and then.  i’m not sure what it is about my current situation that makes me want to find and conquer all my past crushes, but you’re definitely on that list.

hmmm.  this list is a lot shorter than i expected it to be.  strange.  ah well.  there are lots of other people i’m nostalgic for that i don’t need google to find but that i just can’t seem to reconnect with - renee and dylan, mel piche, troy, shan, jen (all you teletech folks)….  uw peeps like samara, potser, har, lance, val.  what is it that makes keeping in touch so difficult?

… something I was supposed to do.

this week Owen was given an opportunity to pay off all his fees owing to U Waterloo and start applying to go back to school - for his Masters, since he (unlike me) actually finished his degree.  I’m left feeling like there is something that I’m supposed to be doing, but I can’t remember what it is, and so instead I’m wandering around like a lost child waiting for something to happen.

I can’t help but worry that all this is going to end in me following him all over the globe, the whole time feeling like I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time.  How is it that this always comes down to money?  $2000 to pay off the university, another $10,000 or more to finish my degree….  Not to mention enough money to support ourselves, and then there’s graduate school afterwards (which pays, but not enough to survive and pay a tuition bill).  For the first time in my life I feel real regret over the choices I made that got me into this financial mess, and I don’t know what to do - I can’t forsee any situation that will give us what we need financially and still meet our social, psychological and spiritual needs.  I hate that the world of money and the world of everything else is constantly at odds.

anywhere but here

i’ve been slowly watching buffy, from beginning to end (i’m only in the middle of season 2 so far) and it brings me back to the person I was the first time i watched this, when everything felt as monumentally life-or-death as things were on the hellmouth.  sex and death, right?  blood and gore and teenaged flesh….

drunk & disorderly

i was drinking alone, but then people showed up and now i don’t appear to be nearly as pathetic.  owen went to bed alone, again, and i’m left here watching tv, craving mcdonalds, and fantasizing about leaving and moving back into fight club.

so instead of spending our evening together, we fought (again), we ate crap instead of a decent meal, and now i’m sitting here (by myself again) hoping that he’s upstairs being kept awake by my tv and bexxie & dev’s loud chatter, and not at all looking forward to having to go up there and share a bed.

our energy is definitely at a stage of being able to amplify each other’s output - but only at the expense of happiness.   all we do is rub each other the wrong way, and neither of us know what to do about it.

empathic visualisation

i used to think that reciting conversations off in my head, extensions of physical interaction with my nearest and dearest, was some kind of “practice” for future interaction, the product of social immaturity.

today i came upon the realisation that these visualisations were actually most often my brain’s attempt to create memory material for the things which i understood only empathically from the particular interaction, things which couldn’t necessarily be explained through a simple memory recall of the physical experience.

twenty count

Tao of Maya opens.
Aztec Jaguar roars
the gentle whisper of time:
Twenty; zero.
One breath, an eternity.
Some place in between,
wrapped in ecstasy of quest,
driven by rapture of love.
Or is ti another force,
another word,
more potent than any other
that has ever come through
with that luscious smile of arrival?
Something new,
never seen before, nor felt,
yet as familiar as
bone marrow.
It’s here. It’s now. It is….

- Haleh Pourafzal, 1995

Election Chaos Magic - Spoil the Vote!

Hey all!

With the upcoming election I have been faced with the dilemma, to vote or not to vote. I truly have no desire to participate in an act (like voting for one of the party members on the ballot) which gives strength to the party system and acknowledges this system as valid and “democratic”. Local representation is a joke when the elected do only what their party leaders tell them, and voting for any one of the rich white men (or woman, as the case may be) vying for a shot at Prime Minister kind of makes me want to scream.

At first I thought my only option was to stay home and abstain from voting altogether… but what about spoiling the ballot? Not only does that ballot gets counted, but it gives me an opportunity to shove some carefully-crafted sigil magic into that ballot box!

I have come up with a version of the Ellis sigil (more info here: http://www.marauderunderground.com/ellis.asp) to use, comprising a combination of the Pluto/Capricorn symbols to “flavour” its magic, but I imagine that other types of magical symbols or sigils used in combination with Ellis will inspire connected but more complex results.

I’ve been trying to find a few forums to post in and see if I can’t spread the word, here or in the US with the upcoming election. I’m not trying to sway people who are already decided in voting - do what you feel you need to do for your political system. I’m simple seeking out all those people who otherwise wouldn’t be voting at all… This is your chance to get counted without agreeing to the fake-democratic process, and hopefully bring a little chaos and magic into the proceedings!

If you want to discuss Ellis more, please do!  And pass the info on to any other chaotically-inclined folks in North America who might be interested in participating - lets make this HUGE!

something blue

yesterday owen & i went to the wedding of his 30-year-old born-again-christian cousin and her just-turned-23 fiance.  surrounded by people who truly believed that the state is a natural extension of God’s creative force, who subconciously recognize that love and sex open a doorway to God but like children feel the need for God’s (and the state’s) permission, i felt only overwhelming grief.

at the end of the ceremony, as the preacher (and best man) announced them husband and wife, just before leading them to sign their 4-page-permission-granting-document, the groom broke down.  in his face i saw every second of that raw need for love and acceptance, for sex and desire that he had felt in his lifetime, the overwhelming relief at finally being granted access to the middle echelons of human emotion on the pathway to god, and every future sacrifice he would make to maintain access to the muddled incarnation of the Goddess standing before him.  all of this passed through his face in the 30-seconds he fought off tears, feelings i could see clearly, feelings i know the young man doesn’t even have the language to express.

i’ve been reading nancy friday’s “men in love”.  she says the one thing she has come to understand from studying both men’s and women’s fantasies, is that men need women in a way that women don’t understand or reciprocate.  men’s need to love and be loved, to experience the breadth of emotion which will elevate him that much further up the Tree towards godhead, is something that women don’t understand and have not the capabilities to fulfill.  the patriarchal structures and practices which developed out of men’s fear of being without women have doomed them as well, keeping women from the very knowledge which allows them to lift men up from this dark and lonely place to feel the power of God in us all.

these ceremonies which focus on elevating the status of marriage above all other relationships don’t serve to truly bring men to God, but instead exploit the needs of the ignorant into forsaking all other community, sacrificing friends and family for an unfulfilling love.  how can i possibly teach people that we all deserve the love and intimacy which a strong community can provide - that no God and no state have the power to deny us that right?  i want my wedding to show people that the love that exists between two people has the power to enrish every other relationship those people have, that it is powerful enough to spill over and spread throughout the web which connects us all, if those people are willing to accept, that it should be the backbone of healthy, sustainable and loving communities and not of this cancerous monstrosity of a state from which we are so desperately trying to break ourselves out.

to vote or not to vote

…. that is the question.

this election is a farce, albeit no more so than any other in which i’ve voted, but a farce nonetheless. the nature of the party system divides our country in the process of allowing people to feel as if their opinion matters, when in reality they are voting for “representation” that does nothing more than listen to a party leader and not the people at all.

this past term i saw liberal members vote for conservative-proposed legislation, or abstain from voting altogether, giving approval of bills which go against what i once believed to be the core of the canadian left platform, all in the sake of avoiding an election the liberal party didn’t think it could win.

a joke. it must be some game, some theater. people dislike the system, feel disillusioned and ineffective. and yet somehow, it carries on, because under all that we don’t know what else to do. and so i sit here with the same dilemma that those liberal party members faced when their choice meant raising their voice against what they had once claimed to stand for (or, i suppose, calling in sick), or quietly losing their job:

to vote, or not to vote.

yesod, h2o & the origins of life

yesod is typified by two sets of symbols which, upon first glance, seem to be incongruent.   yesod - the foundation -  is the final true sephira, the place in which conciousness becomes matter, and is described with symbols of strength.  it is known as the “machinery of the universe”, and that which both purifies and complicates the unity of the divine energies without dividing them. on the other hand, the ruling plant of yesod is the moon, and its angel Gabriel, of the element of water.  water symbols are typically seen as descriptors of emotion, of flux and fluidity.

but looking at the physical nature of water, we can see how the two descriptions align.  the hydrogen bonds of the water molecule are atypically strong, lending conhesive and adhesive properties to this life-giving substance.  water is the thing that scientists look for when seeking out new life on distant planets.  it’s polar nature draws in different molecules, allowing them to get close to each other and interact.  it filters the UV emmenations of the sun, protecting the precious cells within, it regulates temperature, and it allows a free range of movemy through 3-dimensional space for molecules and newly-forming lifeforms to interact. it provides the medium in which all life on earth is formed (from the Origin of All Life, to every mothers’ womb) and in that role complicates and diversifies the once-united divine energy, without dividing it.

the element of water, its physical manifestation on this earth, is The Foundation.