kiya

That lyric was stuck in my head all the way home from training. I did at least eventually remember it was a New Order line.

This was a hard, intense weekend for me. (And for several of my classmates, for that matter.)

We did some energy work around the yes-meets-no polarity, which is frequently an eroticism thing for me when I'm working it; what I got when I was holding that was black and silver and blue and dark and deep and soft, an intense, demanding urge to cocoon. When I drew cards around that -- the five of Thorn's Black Heart reading, and then three followup of an 'okay, now what?' nature, I got the tower reversed, the ten of wands (can't recall if it was upright or inverted), three threes -- swords, and pents and wands reversed .... The only actually cheerful bit was in the three-card followup, which indicated that my relationships are fine and good for me.

General message: you need to pull back, stop overcommitting, withdraw, and fucking well take care of yourself, or you're going to explode. And I kept getting repeats and variations on that the entire weekend. With other things -- like how to unbind my energy from relationships where things are too tangled up for me to feel able to forgive. With my tendency to put energy at things that I can't get to right now rather than the steps I need to get there. With a bunch of other things.

When I drew the five-card for the Black Heart, and was trying to interpret it, what I got was:

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

We made meditational mandalas as spellwork, and mine was:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

I'm going to poke and refine that design and then talk to splurby about how much it would cost to get in her queue ....

When I resolved to pull back, call in my energy, not expend -- something that wound up meaning that I had a clear sense that I shouldn't try to render the images in my head in the Centre Guardian meditation/artwork -- I drew another three-card and got the Two of Swords, the High Priestess, and the Ace of Cups. Okay then.

It'll be interesting to see what that follow-up reading on the question of my enlightened self-interest turns up, in the context of all this.

(The poetry is the end of T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding".)

Because I'm not running away to Montreal or something. :P

( Some brooding cut for people who don't feel like listening to me dissect my mind. )

If I had a portable hole, I could put the boxes I've filled into it and get them out of my way.

I could put the furniture from upstairs that I'm dreading trying to maneuver out and around and out of the house in it and move it efficiently.

I found my bracers while cleaning and packing, and packed them and my garb away. Yes, I want to get back into doing a little SCA stuff. No, it's not happening right now. Thus, I don't need this, and can pack it away. Away, away, away, but not into a portable hole. That tub is in the upstairs hallway.

The more stuff I do in the house at the moment, the more frustrated I get with the state of the house. Packing is making a godawful mess. I dug up some boxes to clear off some rickety shelving into and now I've got miscellaneous packing material everywhere. Which, eventually, will be partially cycled into packing material for statues and other fragile things, when I'm done sitting here and feeling sorry for myself.

Too much stuff that I can't do a damn thing to fix, and the stuff that I can do just makes me feel discouraged.

I want the power to fold space and time.

Or a portable hole.

So last week I went out and got underwear, a double boiler, and a monkey.

( Cut. Includes photo. Also really random maundering. )

We seem to have successfully rebooted my cat, and he's now working properly. So that's something.

Went through the PantheaCon schedule and sort of tentatively worked out what things I'd like to attend, barring resolution of conflicts and depending on my mood and capacity. At the moment, I don't have much conflict on major rituals I want to go to -- since I'll be staying at the hotel, I'll be able to get to the Pomba without a problem, nothing conflicts with one of the seidh slots, I'll get to the Bast ritual at last, I need to pick between a Feri ritual and a Brighid one, and elfwreck's Discordian ritual.

Need to do packing and prep for trip, which would require actually facing the fact that I'm running low on time to do packing and prep for trip. (And back to my hostile relationship with linear time.)

Word to remember: Amphisbaena

While I'm glad to know I'm still quite skilled at driving myself mad, I do not currently need the practice. So I would like to stop now. Especially since mostly I'm being stressy about the fact that my stress is silly.

I've written six words. This is a feathered accomplishment.

( Angst, mostly Silver. )

[ Filtered mostly through Frost for language generation purposes except for the bits that aren't. ]
[ It's not LJ without contextless angst. ]

O Bast.

They're prepping him for surgery now. Diagnosis: string.

The vet says the vomiting isn't a good sign, but the fact that he's been moving around is a good sign.

And that he doesn't know what the chances are overall. He may be all right. He . . . may not. The vet doesn't know what to tell me.


O Bast.

I'm going to go do Rite and make offerings and pray really hard.

103 words. Just now. Fat lot of good that does anyone; I don't even know if they're the right words. Piffle.

Lennon's sick. (teinedreugan, this is your first-order reminder to call the vet.)

I'm not doing so hot myself. Stupid damn guts.


It's hard not to be consumed with pointlessness, distracted by anything other than what I ought to be doing. Those impulses of self-immolation surface again, licking at the inside of my skin; I could be doing better. I should be doing better.

My fault, my failings; burn, burn, burn.

Helpless-hopeless-useless.

Burn.


[ Editorial note: Bonfire's being polite enough to share front. We let him write. Part of the consumption of pointlessness was getting him a user icon, anyway. ]

[ Song output oddly ironic. ]

[ Stormy addendum: Rar! Let me *snarlteeth* post this damned entry. Maintenance. *manyteeth* ]

[ Addendum addendum: fuckitgoingtobed. Game over, try again later. ]

Talking to ardaniel about stuff having to do with self-value and self-esteem, and the changer pulled this up.

Insidious stuff, psychological damage, abuse, battering, and what have you.

They say "Come"
And they say "Go"
One more night
And then it's tomorrow
Serving time for another man's crime
Ten long years.

Yeah. That's how it feels sometimes.

Addendum, as of two hours later:

And some days it don't come easy
And some days it don't come hard
Some days it don't come at all
And these are the days that never end.

(Meatloaf. "I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)".)

Not one I'd recommend.

Got up this morning after spending several hours lying in bed with a meh. And dealing with really odd dreams. My subconscious is clearly nesting again. Or at the very least heavily pregnant and covered in kittens. (Hello, Bast; how are you?)

Dealing with miscellaneous meh. I decide that it's warm enough to take my orange out to see if light and heat will revive it, and I also bring down the pot with the tulips my mother-in-law sent us. I turn around to go back inside, and see a box on the stoop. With the logo of the place for the plants I bought for my aquarium.

We were planning to go on a dirt-and-tank-purchasing run . . . on Friday.

Well. Panic mode. teinedreugan is not unamenable to coming home and dealing with panic mode. I go out and get some things from the pharmacy down the road (my pots for planting the lilies in are too big for the tank). Got that. Scrambled to get food. Drove up to Ipswich.

I break this narrative to point out that near the place we get supplies for such things, there is a small, discreet sign: "Myopia Hunt Club. Members Only." Does this worry you as much as it worries me? Anyway, we were going by there, and there were horses and hounds milling about across the road from that. Very odd; never seen such a thing before. Sort of strange to know I live a half-hour's drive from that.

Plant store closed. Other plant store closed. Yet other plant store closed. Well, bugger. Went to get tank. I'm wondering if the parrot in the shop there was an eclectus -- it had hairy feathers and was the right shade of fairly flat green with the red and blue flash under the wings. Would have been a male if it were. Got tank, got heaters, got pebbles.

Wheeling the tank over the curb cracked it at one corner. Well, bugger. It was at the top of the tank; that's not as bad as it might be. And we were going to Home Depot anyway for dirt, so we got sealant too. Got dirt, though not the ideal sort of dirt for this purpose. Got bricks. Got rhythm. Got music. Dodged through vast hordes of of Fakus trees (if fig trees in pots are Ficus, then synthetic fig trees in pots are . . .). Got stuff.

He got paged on the way home with a borderline-bafflesome issue with the sattelite. Well, bugger.

Then we got into an accident and the passenger side of the car won't open anymore. Well, bugger. That made it interesting to get the tank out, as it was in the back seat.

Got all the miscellanea ready. Started working on plants.

It was just the irises.

This is the point at which I break down into one of these hysteriae.