Dumping Diamonds Down the Well and Let’s Cut Jesus Some Holy Slack

As I rode my bike through the driving rain to get to café 504, I marveled at the lengths I will go to for that which I love.  Coffee and writing.  Two of my most favorite parts of being a human being named Athena Grace.  Any other mission or chore could be so easily swept beneath the rug of endless excuses on a blustery day like today.  But I would walk a gazillion miles through a blizzard to arrive in the paradise that is writing and cappuccino.  Hallelujah!!!

Speaking of Hallelujah, I’m gonna dive right in and say what’s on my mind about everybody’s favorite lord and savoir, Jesus H. Christ.  (Where does the H come from anyway???)  Now that I am an official blogger, I’ve been doing a little research, testing the waters of the blogging world.  What are people saying?  What’s the linguistic climate “out there”?  So I searched wordpress on my favorite subject, GOD!  And I found this guy who was talking Styrofoam trash about my buddy Jesus.  Apparently this dude was raised catholic, which rumor has it can be a pretty damaging experience… but now he’s out there cleaning toilets in a catholic church and writing satirically hateful letters to the holy savior, J-ditty.  Reading it made my heart ache.  Thanks to organized religion, Jesus is so wickedly misunderstood!  The masses seem to think that he was this holier than thou, elitist condemning judge whose farts smelled like lilacs and jasmine.  WRONG.

Now this is my version of faith= I have faith in my unwavering intuition as to who this man really was.  First off, yes, Jesus was a man as much as you are a man or a woman.  Jesus was just like you and me. Only He happened to have an unquenchable thirst for truth, driving him to spend copious amounts of time in the Great Silence.  And ANYONE who makes the effort to spend time cultivating intimacy with the silence inside is guaranteed to find what he found.  And once you find it, you inevitably dedicate your life to helping others find this, because nothing compares to bathing in the holy light that is the truth of who we are.  None of our ego ambitions could ever DARE to stand up to the light inside.  I just know.

Jesus was a yogi.  He practiced meditation, followed the path of Self Mastery.  This is nothing outrageous, only inspiring.  So why are so many wars fought in his name?  Why are so many condemned in his name?  Unfortunately, many churches use God Realization as a hollow pretense, when their true agenda is gaining power and control of the masses.  This has very little to do with Jesus.  When I am president, I shall forbid any religious observance that condemns another.  There is no excuse for that.  If spiritual teachings and practice are not founded on the truth and celebration of our Oneness, then we have outgrown them by now.  Please people, no more infantile ideas about this beyond marvelous truth of the All Pervading Light.  Haven’t we suffered enough?

Am I trying to twist your arm off until you accept Jesus as our Lord and savior?  No way, Jose.  I could care less where, what, whom your source of inspiration is.  All that concerns me is that you have a source of inspiration that connects you with “the Highest”.  The highest meaning your heart.  The heart of the world.  Your own, personal oasis of joy and peace.  The simpler it is, the better.  Maybe it’s your dog, your Sweetie, your children, the ocean, the song of birds.  For me, it is all this and more.  It is the common denominator in all that, that moves me.  You could call it All Pervading Light.  The light dwells at the core of all that we love.  And all that we will come to love (everything!) as we open to the realization of what we are truly made of.

I know this is not the most poetic writing… I love being poetic.  Today I feel more like a preacher… but only hear these words as words of expansion, liberation.  I mean really, if I was stuck on a desert island, and I could only bring one spiritual teaching, do you know what it would BE?!

THE GOLDEN RULE.

Simple.  Do un to others as you would have others do un to you.  In modern speak, treat people the way you want to be treated.  Now, I suppose that would be pretty easy on a desert island, since traditionally, the hypothetical world of desert islands do not include the concurrent luxury and burden of other people.  But I could practice with the furry little animals, the large, iridescent, tropical bugs and the birds whose voices are portals to heaven, whose wings covertly remind us of our own, long forgotten.  Anyway, I guess now is a good time to digress… Please consider that Jesus is not out to get you or your people.  Consider that Jesus is a dude who had the unrelenting conviction to see beyond the divisions and limits born of this world of illusion… and consider that it is your Destiny to do the same… but your unfolding is a gentle, patient one.  You are blooming in your own sweet rhythm.  And regardless of the imaginary constraints of time and space, we are all the same, and just beneath the dream we simultaneously come from and remerge with the same unbounded, wholly holy enchanting placeless place.

Thank you for considering this expansive view.  And now for an orgasm report.  But first, a word from our sponsor~ the rain.  My sight keeps being seduced out the window to the saturated sidewalk.  I let my gaze soften and drink in the concentric circles doing their temporal dance about the wet pavement.  They rise and then disappear so quickly, it’s hard to believe that any single one ever existed.  Is that what a human life is?  Just a drop of ocean water, splashing on a temporary surface of individuation, only to lose its bound little self back into the universal wetness that is creation its self?  It sure seems that way.  It’s Wednesday…  Wasn’t it just Wednesday?  Wednesdays come and go quicker than each fleeting circular expression born of a single spring rainstorm.  I am thirty.  I do not know how long I will live.  I do not know when I will be blessed with Holy Sight.  I want to do my BEST at Loving.  Loving feels so challenging sometimes.

Now back to our previously programmed presentation.  Orgasm.  I feel sad to announce that it was a very anticlimactic occurrence.  Mykael and I chose to take some mushrooms in the early evening.  If I had it all to do over again, I would not have done that.  I would rather have just snuggled and bonded and made love all afternoon and into the evening.  We didn’t take enough to come unhinged from the confines of linear reality… just enough to feel sorta introspective and weird.  We both wanted to make love, but we were mildly preoccupied with the haunted whispers of non-ordinary reality.  Frown.  Plus he was experiencing some familiar though frightening aches and pains and fears (ohmy!)… so he had a lot of attention on himself.  All that said, we managed to have pretty sweet communion.  And when he finally came, it was just like I imagined.  I was totally surrendered and received his energetic offering as pure grace.  I felt like a sacred well, filled with holy water… A well of infinite depths.  When he came, it was like he poured a bucket sized chalice of diamonds into my well.  I felt them plummet through my crystalline depths, whistling with soft ecstasy as they fell into me.  But they fell up.  Imagine an upside down well, whose mouth is on earth and its bejeweled bottom could be construed as heaven.

When the diamonds rose up beyond my heart, merging with my voice, I opened my throat and sang a pure, ecstatic tone.  I didn’t sing it, it sang me.  I’m not kidding.  It was like a tsunami.  And after the maha wave broke, smaller waves lapped rapturously at my insides.  Holy fullness.  But then it was over.  And I was just me again.  And then what?  Then I took my electric, insatiable self to bed and masturbated again, because my tunnel of love was open for some serious business last night.  Hmmm, I guess it was a pretty decent night of release… but the journey of yearning far outshone the petty destination of fulfillment.

Sex Confessions Live From the Cracker Barrel

Meet Saint Theresa, my holy inspiration!

Another day on planet earth.  Please consider that it is weird here.  It always boggles my mind that my fellow humans are not constantly trippin balls about the bizarre nature of… ALL THIS… Life is a cracker barrel… so now what?  I think I spent all my enthusiasm in one place yesterday.  Next time, remind me to restrain myself so that I’ll have something to say the next day.  I guess I have plenty to say… but I miss that unbridled ecstasy feeling that lit down upon innocent Missus Me yesterday.  Today I am all bridles and bits and reigns.  I think I’ll just sit here in this less than comfortable chair and suck on my little ginger mints, waiting for the right thing to say to plunk down from the heavens into my scull.

I have plenty to say… I just feel kinda lethargic.  At least I have this pretty tin full of spicy sugar discs.  Count your blessings, ladies and gentlemen!  I guess I’ll tell you that my month is up tomorrow.  Tomorrow I can cum my brains out if I fancy. (I guess I could today too, but that would entail raining on my own commitment parade built for one…) Honestly, I am not even that excited about it.  I actually prefer not cuming.  Because then LIFE its self turns to one big blushing, revelatory orgasm.  Truth be told, what I am most excited about is my predatorial womb slurping up Mykael’s cum!  It feels edgy to share this with you… But I’m gonna do it anyway, because there is nothing wrong with talking about sex.  It’s just that organized religion would have us believe that.

When Mykael comes in me, I love to practice totally letting go.  I used to try to cum at the same time he did… but then I one time I simply received his energy and it was wholely holy.  It was like a seed of secret bliss being planted somewhere deep inside me… and then feeling that seed slowly sprout and grow and rise up through my body, flooding me with wave after wave of orgasmic bliss.  Through each chakra, starting of course at my root and eventually blasting through my heart so that I become a sea of involuntary scream and ecstasy.  I don’t think the wave has ever made it all the way out the top of my head and back out into the cosmos from whence it sprung.  That’s what I’ll shoot for tomorrow.  I’m not gonna be the one shooting, but you dig what I mean, right?  Surrender for president.  I always imagine Saint Theresa being stabbed by the angel’s divine arrow of Rapture as I am being penetrated.  To me, she is the epitome of divine surrender. (I’m gonna try to attach my favorite image of her to this post)

The other day I wrote about my experience of becoming a woman.  I want to add to that… that a huge piece of my becoming has been exploring, healing and savoring my sexuality.  Somehow, my experience of my sexuality seems to be directly linked to my power.  Getting comfortable feeling so deeply… running so much energy through my body.  Inviting this potent healing energy up… up into my heart, and even all the way through my crown… I’m not an expert at this, but I do know that a little intention goes a long way.  It would make sense then that “the powers that be”, (you know, the ones who for what ever reason want to maintain control of our collective consciousness) would be invested in suppressing the sexuality of women.  I still don’t even have a clear picture of what it looks like, feels like to live in a world where women are fully empowered.  It seems to me like we are slowly waking up and shimmeying free of the lopsided patriarchal paradigm…

BUT… yes, there is still a big butt… But until we are ALL inhabiting our bodies in peace, joy, ecstasy and sisterhood… UNTIL we all remember that there is ENOUGH love, enough room for each of us to shine in the glorious truth of our innate radiance… Come on, women~ don’t tell me that you have not felt that pang of envy upon witnessing a sister who is thriving.  We are so programmed to believe that one woman’s success and happiness is somehow a threat to our own havingness.  Sure, that is a generalization… there ARE a few well adjusted among us, shining like beacons, leading the way for the rest of us.(I’m pretty sure that our arrival in this place of truth is inevitable) But for the most part we are still under the thick, intoxicating spell of scarcity and competition.  God, I want us all to be free of that.  Dear All Pervading Light, please help the women of this world remember and embody the truth of the abundance of love.  Amen.

That reminds me of the lesson in A Course In Miracles from a few days ago.  It said that what we call “gifts” are not truly gifts, because when a true gift is given, it does not take anything away from any other.  In the giving of a true gift, the gift is made available to the giver as well as the receiver, because the only things that can be given are that which are Eternal and of Love.  Peace, Joy, Blessings… Generosity, Kindness…  Sumptuous stuff like that…  It makes sense to me.  The act of giving a true gift is an affirmation of divine abundance.  And in affirming that, we also receive access to that which we affirm thru giving it away.

So WOMEN~ Remember this:  Everything that we see in our sisters also belongs to us.  It is who we are.  Period.  We are worthy, whole and wildly gifted.  What about men?  This probably applies to you too.  Grrrrr… I don’t feel as articulate on this topic as I want to be.  Because I feel passionate about it.  It feels crucial and I want to be heard.  I want these words to burrow through the layers of your very bedrock and into the core of the heart of the soul of you because I want to live in a world where we are free.  I want to live in a world where we are all awake to the truth of Love’s boundlessness.  Why?  Just to see what it’s like, I guess…

But for now, I’ll just jump back to the topic of sex.  I am a MUCH HAPPIER, more well adjusted woman when I am being fucked well.  Period.  God I am so full of periods today.  But really, Mykael was making love to me last night and I realized that our sexual compatibility is a huge factor in why I keep choosing him.  It’s really awesome to have someone in the next bedroom (yes, we have separate bedrooms…Connected by a bathroom.  Isn’t that cute?) who you know can bone you immaculate.  Boned Immaculate.  Far superior to being stoned immaculate in my opinion.  Though being stone and boned immaculate at the same time is pretty awesome!  Someone who not only do I want to invite as deep into my body as possible, but also my heart, my soul, my everything.  (I haven’t been consistently feeling that during our recent tumult… but when I do… I REALLY DO, and that’s what counts.)  After he fucks me so well, every cell of me reverberates with awakened yearning and tremulous ecstasy and for hours (or sometimes even days) afterward, which causes me to shudder and gasp and explode just being near him.

That is the pro side of the coin.  Have you heard the news?  The news that all men are retarded assholes and all women are crazy bitches… (According to David Deida) When I heard this, I felt immense relief.  Like, “Oh!  So I didn’t take a wrong turn somewhere.  I need not search any further for the man who is NOT a retarded asshole.  You are ALL a fellowship, a vast brat pack of retarded assholes.  The only question is WHICH RETARDED ASSHOLE DO I CHOOSE TO BIND MY LIFE TO?  To surrender to and share LIFE with…  And not only that, but I am not broken for being a crazy bitch, after all!  Yeah, I’m in FANTASTIC company as it turns out (yes, I’m referring to YOU!).  But Mykael’s particular strain of retarded asshole sure does get on my nerves.  I think there might be a direct correlation between a man’s masculinity, sex appeal and his retarded assholeness.  I am very attracted to the MAN that Mykael is… but the shadow of that is his intrinsic ass-holy retardation.  Sigh… if life was all sweet and no bitter, I’d’ve gotten bored to tears a long time ago, I suppose.  I think that’s why I’m taking my sweet time, dreamily shuffling along the path on my quest to find God’s luminous peace inside me.

I Believe In Peace Bitch

Thirteen days without a single rapturous release.  Ladies, don’t try this at home.  Honestly.  It sucks.  I feel like an angrier, more brooding, less patient version of myself.  (For those of you new to my blog, I have taken on the self imposed challenge of not cumming for an entire month.)  Yesterday I thought, “Oh fuck this, it isn’t worth it, I’m just gonna cum.”  But then I thought, “No, I gave my word, not only to myself, but to You… and I am going to keep it.   Anyway, this is an experiment, an exploration… and I am a bold, courageous adventurer who takes all of this illusory drama with a grain of… something tiny but menacing… maybe a rebellious grain of renegade sand in my otherwise smooth pile of spinach (sautéed of course in olive oil, garlic and a dash of salt).”

Who knows… maybe it is just a coincidence that I’ve been feeling extra tangled in my shadow.  So that’s the report from orgasm central.  In other news, our modern day hero, Jesus Christ is scheduled to rise tomorrow!  Or is it just the Easter Bunny who’s gonna come and scatter a rainbow of cookies in my tulip patch?  Smirk.  Honestly, I am just beating around the bush, because I really feel tired and lonely and scared today.  I would venture to guess that a lot of it has to do with

I was gonna say my relationship… but then before I could get that typed out with a straight inner face, another, hella truer explanation swept down upon me.  It goes some’m like this~ FEELING SEPARATE FROM GOD.  In A Course In Miracles, it is said that the ONLY problem is the problem of SEPARATION, and it is already solved, because in truth, we are NOT separate in the first place, and could never be.  All other problems are delusional.  Like fever induced nightmares.  We have all been struck by a violent strain of Forgetful Fever, which causes us to fall into a comatose sleep, where we drift through seeming lifetimes, perpetual forevers, tossing and turning and imagining a whole host of “problems” and their glamorous carrot consorts (solutions), which we are more that SURE will bring us happiness and peace, SOMEDAY (hopefully sooner than later!).

Raise your hand if your peace and happiness are just around the corner.  As soon as you find the One.  As soon you own your own home.  Finish your thesis.  Make a hundred thousand dollars a year.  Me?  Oh yeah, I’ll certainly be happy once I figure out my relationship.  Once I sort out whether the “right” answer is to lean into the ugly pockets and imbue them with unconditional love, or to realize that I am done and that it is time to explore Athena sans another.  Oh, and CERTAINLY as soon as I figure out this whole getting paid a comfy living wage to write riddle…  Right answers.  Curse all these glistening answers that seduce me to scrutinize my circumstances ever fruitlessly… The only right answer is in me and I have a feeling It could give a monkey’s uncle’s ass about the temporal, swirling dream of my petty circumstances.  Love is not conditional or bounded.  Peace is not contingent upon anything.  Forgiveness is always an option.

I think this might be the most depressing leg of the journey Home.  My eyes sting.  I say depressing because I know that I don’t know, but I can’t seem to free myself from the treacherous, toothy tangles of my habitual, false perceptions.  Oh!  Here is the perfect metaphor!  Have you ever gotten snagged by a black berry bush, and the more you try to free yourself from it, the more committed its grip becomes?  Maybe it just has your clothes at first.  But then it latches on to skin in cold desperation.  Ouch!  And you become adrenylized and flustered.  Then you realize that you can just take a deep breath and patiently free yourself one angry thorn at a time.  But you soon realize that is not the solution because you untangle three thorns and are now stuck by seventeen more!  The only other solution you can see is to sacrifice your clothes and your precious skin, and RIP free.

This is how my ego clings.  Clings to what?  Clings to its self? (????)   I tell myself that only love is real, only peace is real.  Only connection is real.  But then I feel my body, and it aches here.  My heart aches.  My body constantly craves.  Food.  Sex.  Caffeine.  Touch.  Stimulation.  My mind craves understanding, reasons, stories, dramas, PLANS, futures.

Meditation.  I let go.  I breathe.  I affirm my freedom.  I ask for God’s help.  And then before I can receive the omnipotent blessings of the Light, I am off on another fear-inspired meander through illusion’s ghettos.  I feel so sad about this.  I am so close.  I am.  So.  Close.  If I am so close, why do I feel so lonely and afraid?  Is that just my ego, reacting to its own terror of annihilation?   I guess so.  But now what?  Vigilance.  And the requisite tears and sweat that that requires.

I want nothing less than to see you only in your truth.  Only as the light you are.  I am not interested in relating to your false beliefs about yourself and this twisted world.  I know, I know, that is a radical thing to declare and it doesn’t really fit with this model of “reality” in which we have invested so much… but at this point, I don’t care.  I will look inside until I find something dangerously real, and revelatorily pure and true.  And then when you stand and face yourself in my still, silent reflection, you will be stunned and relieved by what you recognize Within.  This is a promise.

As I wrote that, tears began to spill at a rather rapid and frivolous clip.  Then I got up to pee and behind the locked bathroom door, the sadness flooded in and I thought it might be time to build another arc. (But would that be appropriate to glorify Noah so close to Jesus’s special day?  I oughtn’t steal this friendly Messiah’s thunder like that…)  I sat on the toilet with my head in my hands, trying to keep my sobs silent and appropriate for this public arena. (Café 504, of course)  But it sure felt good to give myself over to this earnest ache.  Then I stood up, looked in the mirror (to assess the “damage”) and realized that I am wearing my baseball shirt that says, “I believe in peace bitch”.  I got it at the Tori Amos concert that E* won tickets to on KFOG.  I had to laugh, because it is a very apropos statement to accompany today’s internal climate.

Like I said, I will find the light inside me and stop believing in fear and darkness.  I just hope I do it sooner than later.  Jesus Christ is scheduled to rise tomorrow, but I’m afraid that He’ll pass me over, just because I am more interested in what I’m gonna eat for breakfast than I am in SEEING.  Because I can’t seem to open heart to Mykael for more than a spilt second at a time these days, before it’s big, leaden door swings shut in his face, which I fear is just a mirror of all the parts of myself that I find repulsive, worthless and unlovable.  Help!  Someone please get this harsh, condemning judge OUT of me! (It’s kinda like when you are picnicking and a greedy wasp gets all up in your shit, and you can’t seem to get rid of it and the more you try, the angrier and more aggressive it becomes and you are sure that it will not let you alone without getting a good sting or two in…)  Now can you see what I have to cry about?  But the tears will wash me clean, I hope.

Like I said, I am SO close…

Give Me Cookies Or Give Me Peace

I’d much rather be stuffing my menstrual face full of chocolate chip cookies than sitting here trying to figure out which words to commit to this blank slate.  Will these words alter the course of the entire cosmos?  Maybe.  I have a hunch that every single thought and action does, whether we know it or not.  Whether we believe it or not.  And I also believe that a cut deeper is that it doesn’t even matter, since this whole world we dream is but a grandiose, self-important illusion.

Chocolate chip cookies…  Did you know that I used to be a compulsive eater?  I might as well talk about this, since I can’t think of anything else to say…  And best case scenario, my sharing could be of service to someone else “out there”.  (Strange… you seem to be “out there” to me, and yet to you, you are just “here”.  It’s kinda like we’re all self contained space cadets traveling through the deep reaches of outer space [inner space?], occasionally colliding with other travelers, sometimes with body, sometimes mind, heart… or another automobile…)

Cookies.  Lemme back up.  Sugar.  I believe there are demons inside me who thirst for sugar the way predators thirst for blood.  I try really hard not to feed these little demons, because one taste and they become suddenly activated and unrelenting, wanting more and more and more and more and… And I do not enjoy being their bitch.  When I was seventeen, I would eat myself sick.  Don’t ask me why.  It was compulsive.  God only knows what kind of pain I was masking.  But “at the end of the day” (one of my favourite expressions lately), pain is pain.  And at the end of the day, too, rain rhymes with pain and at the end of the beginning of this now moment, it is raining and my pain is at bay.   How auspicious is this collision of converging words speaking of deeper reaches that can only be reached by those willing to get DIRTY.

What was I saying?

Pain is pain.

And I try to abstain

From sugar.

But I was about to bleed and I ate some Mexican chocolate ice cream at dinner with Dan on Monday.  Which greatly excited the demons.  Then on Tuesday, I remembered that Mykael and I had been given a phat stash of cookies which were hibernating in the freezer.  (Mykael’s parents’ friends, the Spinellos have a gay son who is in the cookie business with his partner and they give plenty of the “run-off” to mom and dad)  And then crème brule on Wednesday.  Ooops.  And then… yesterday, again I was perpetually haunted by the slumbering, frozen cookies.  I woke up from my nap with a primal yearning for sugar, butter and hard chocolatey lumps.  Fine.  Athena, you can have HALF a cookie.  YESSSSS!!!!  Lucky me!  So I chomped upon the false promise of hollow heaven.  And for that moment, my body sang siren songs of ecstasy.  Consuming sugar truly can be an experience of symphonic rapture.  (Just so you know, I am on the verge of crying right now, because life is strange and my friend Dan said I would make a great minister, and when I think about praising God all day, for a living, all I can do is cry.  I will cry as I deliver my sermons, because my heart yearns and begs to break in an infinitude of pieces, one for each lost space cadet who exploded from God’s mind in that first holy combustion)

Where was I?  Cookies.  So I ate that half and then I had that old, terrifying feeling of perpetual insatiability.  I felt the whisper of weakness inside, and the cellular memory of the days when I was bored, aching and confused beyond belief and all I could do was make ONE MORE trip the refrigerator, all the while, loathing my body, not wanting to feel it, and my mind chattering up a noisy storm about how tomorrow I would diet, exercise, regain some semblance of control.  All the while feeling disgusted, so alone and A-S-H-A-M-E-D.  Shame is so fascinating to me.  I must’ve written about this before, but I just have to comment on how shame was so intelligently fashioned to perpetuate it’s own survival, because it insists that one mustn’t expose or reveal it because it is UTTERLY repulsive and unlovable, so the afflicted party must invest in concealing it, and like a fungus, it runs rampant in dark, moist areas of the psyche.

So yesterday after I ate my half cookie I thirsted with everything that I am for MORE.  And I argued loudly with myself in my head for a few searing eternities before convincing myself to break off another SMALLISH hunk.  It was weird to feel the juxtaposition of where I have been and where I am now, with a will that can kick some serious impulse booty.  My will wears steel toe boots and uses her big, sexy brains to decimate shadowy impulses with insight and intelligence.  My will refuses to lose control.  How on earth do I manage to have good orgasms?*!??*$^$#()&%  I’ll tell you how~ HARD WORK.  I laugh out loud as I write that, because it is true and if I didn’t laugh, I’d probably be criticizing myself for that truth.  But honestly, when I’m having sex, I am mostly coaching myself on how to most optimally “enjoy” the experience.  Hey, at least the incessant chatter is trying it’s best to be of service.

So I broke off another modest chunk of cookie and thrust the bag back in the dark recesses of the freezer as though it was the predator and I was the prey… Then I devoured the meager, sweet, false promise of salvation in the space between breathing moments, only to find myself feeling just as empty and voracious as I was before I consumed it.  And yes, I felt some shame wash through me, telling me that I’d be best off hiding myself from others, and best off beating myself up a bit for slipping even a little toe’s distance into the repulsive pit of addictive behavior.  All of this over not even a SINGLE lousy cookie!

Now, we all have our own custom fashioned relationship to food, sugar, addiction, self control, impulse… But I share this with you to poke so much fun at my own particular combination, because if I didn’t, the mechanism of fear and shame would do everything in its power to convince me that I am ALONE in these wormy little habits and that they are utterly unlovable.  I used to believe it.  Sometimes I still do.  But mostly I find it amusing.  Mostly I want to illuminate shadows that we might share, so that YOU can feel more human, and therefore, you, WE can be FREE.

Relationship, the Inner Critic’s Reign of Terror and a Visit From Jim Morrison

God is really trying to test me today.  I got to café 504 and they are playing disco music pumped up to exorbitantly high volumes. Is it the Bee Gees?  Maybe.  All I know is that the base is bouncing me like I’m a fussy infant, which ironically is making me feel like I’m a fussy infant.  I feel a lot of pressure to say cool stuff today, because yesterday I came to the café and wrote, but was not nearly brilliant enough.  My thoughts just never coalesced into much beyond dirty pond water.  So today I have to prove myself, or else I am not a writer.  Do you believe I think like this?  Cruel and almost unusual… Except that it is usual.  This is the kind of unconscious pressure I live under in every waking moment.  Do you think that’s why I’m so tired all the time?  I bet.

God, I have a bone to pick with you… Lately you have been sending your muses to fill my mind with excruciatingly brilliant ideas for writing topics at the most heinous moments.  Little gemish sentences flutter through my mind when I am trying to sleep and my linguistic butterfly net is more than hidden in the thick folds of nocturnality.  Why do you do this to me?  And then I come to the café, hoping that all these dazzling, winged strings of English will reappear the instant I call upon them, but instead you fill my head with whiny disco, a superficially bassy beat that could only be a result of black market “roids”…and I am left to fend for myself.  Well, God, I just want you to know, that this scenario is NOT ideal for me… but God?  I also want you to know that I’m gonna roll up my sleeves and muscle through it.  I don’t need your tattered, greasy “magic feathers”… No way, dude.  I can do this by myself.

Okay, that was my inner teenager, rearing her pimply, confused head.  Thank you Dear One.  Now, the truth is that I may be able to live life all by myself, write cool shit in a state of divine renunciation, but yuck!!!  Who wants to do that?  I want every single word that sprays across this virgin page to be graced by some kind of Love that would knock the socks off of socks themselves.  If it is not from love, for love, by love then why bother?  I wish they had taught me that in school.  No, not bible study class.  Don’t try to label me a god fearing Christian, just because I have a proclivity for holy names.  Jesus Christ.  School.   You know, garden variety, limping and broken, public assed, free education…

My foot tickles. (Strictly for the record…) I have been feeling the seven year itch with M.  We haven’t even made it to two years yet.  And I’ve been making ready to quit him.  But then I keep coming back to the unrelenting question which auspiciously haunts my mind.  Am I just meeting my own edge and choosing to collapse out of habit?  M has been helping me illuminate this vicious critic in me.  Yes, that would be the very same one who tries to prevent me from writing by leading me to believe that if I don’t do it perfect, than I oughtn’t even bother doing it at all.  So who am I to think that I’ll EVER be in a relationship with a man who is exempt from this merciless, fault finding beast who lives in my wounded mind?  There IS no such a man.  (I would probably even scrutinize the large pores on Jesus Christ’s nose, or become repulsed by Krishna’s luminous, blue skin over time…)

I sure have created M to be hella faulty though… Why?  Why is it so much easier for me to exist in the problems, when perfection sings out unabashedly glorious from beneath every footstep?  No, I’m not just being poetic.  Life is so generous with me.  Love blooms inside me, regardless of the season.  Not Hollywood love.  Maybe that’s the problem.  No, Athena, the “problem” is your addiction to problems.  A Course In Miracles teaches that the O-N-L-Y problem there IS, is the problem of “separation”, which is already solved, because it was an illusion in the first place.  Wow.  I know we all “know” this… It is beyond IN to preach about how separation is an illusion, right?  But have you ever just been sitting at the café, or parading your cart about the grocery store, and dared to actually look around you, feel around you and do your darnedest to just surrender into oneness?  Hmmm, doing your darnedest and surrendering seem kinda antithetical… On your marks, set, SURRENDER!!!  I said SURRENDER, damn it!!!  Then her face twisted into a soft, modest grin.  A grin that actually smoldered like a dying fire, but still it gave off plenty of heat to thaw the hearts of cynics.

Well I am sitting here imagining oneness as I scan the scene, abounding with a colorful bouquet of “others” and “things”.  It feels awkward, given all my habitual ways of perceiving “others” and “things” outside me.  But yet there is something that tingles with shy unity.  It sorta tickles like they’re all in me… Is this far fetched or overtly obvious?  Flip a coin, if you ask me…

Back to my edges in relationship.  I am waking up from this dream of co-dependence.  But then it feels so familiar and comfy that I don’t really WANT to wake up.  But then I do.  But then I don’t.  But then I DO… confusing, eh?  Totally.  All of these voices inside me, vying for the driver’s seat.  The warrioress rises to command at the surface of my mind.   She is intolerant of my stuckness, (and has a proclivity for blaming external circumstances and people I portend to love) intolerant of my habits of closure, hiding, playing small.  Her less than gracious response it to knock over tables and pillage the ancient villages built with bricks of dense repetition and plastered with calcified thought forms.  She is a revolutionary at all cost… unfortunately, though, her head is still stuck up her egoic ass hole more often than she cares to admit, which doesn’t always  make her the most trustable leader.  Then there’s the father, who is constantly scrutinizing all my actions and thoughts and telling me that I could be doing better and more and better and more and better and more.  And the child who is always just a little too empty and needs a bit more… more of anything, you name it, but at the end of the day, if you’re keeping score, it all simmers down to Love, doesn’t it?

What’s the point of all of this nattering?  The point is very clear.  There is only ONE solution to all of theses neurotic problems!!!  I MUST THROW MYSELF AT ERIC*’S FEET AND BEG HIM TO TAKE ME BACK!!!!!  Just kidding!  Did I trick you?  Even for a second?!  Sometimes that’s all I have is the ability to poke fun at my severely limping humanness.  Honestly, I do think that from time to time…to time.  That if I was back with Eric*, I would be happier.  More at peace and there would be hope that one day, I might be blessed with a single, tantalizing taste of fulfillment.  But no.  It’s find the light inside me or BUST.  And not just one, single bust, like bust and be done with it… no, it’d be like bust and bust and bust some MO’.  Maybe they call that “combustion”.  Bust until the day I die.  Bust until this illusory body is beyond exhausted from racing manically about on the hamsterish wheel of samsara.  I know it’s playing the odds, to hope for liberation anytime soon… but what is the alternative?  An unfulfilling, abuse ridden marriage to insanity.

My old landlord once told me that Jim Morrison often wore the same outfit for weeks at a time.  That was very healing for me to hear, because I only have one hoodie and I wear it every day…  Is it because I’m too poor to buy another?  Or is it because I hate shopping?  Laziness?  Unworthiness?  Could be all of those… or it could just be because I am a careless rock star at heart.  Sometimes (often) I wake up and put on the very same clothes that I peeled off and threw on my floor the night before.  Now, once upon a time that was a wholly unattractive behavior… but thanks to Jim Morrison, now it is rebel-hip and careless-creative.  You wouldn’t understand unless you were a *real* artist.  Grin.  Maybe… Maybe not.  But like I said, it’s healing for me to consider this.

Now for a quick update on the orgasm front~ It is strange… I have met so many edges and instead of spilling over them, I just hang out, like a leisurely Parisian, strolling thru the Jardin Luxumbourg on a Sunday.  Have you seen the Parisian contingency in the jardins on Sunday?  They might just sit, dressed in Sunday best, quietly drinking in the spring sunlight as it pours with passive passion on their native French faces all morning.  MAYBE they’ll read the paper.  So that’s how I have been meandering through sexual ecstasy these days.  It’s not half bad… though I do miss cumming.  Another trick I use to keep from spilling over the edge of the pounding waterfall is when I feel that “ohmigodd shoot here it cums” feeling… I totally relax.  Then I put my attention on the physical location of my heart, and naturally, the energy rises.  Jeepers, who knew it was that simple?!