Widening Perspectives – The Abysmal Witch

Healing is like cleaning house…woot?

It always needs to get done. Rarely get a break. Always need to do more.

I used to hate cleaning. I still often have days of less appreciation, but I’ve improved my relationship with it. I’ve come to feel the connection between the act of cleaning and the magic of cleaning. When every act of cleaning becomes a magical act, it has, for me, greater purpose, and thus a greater appeal for getting it done. Plus, I really love living in a clean home.

It’s actually a bit of a treat now rather than a relentless torture.

Even though I will need to do it again later today and tomorrow and next weekend. There are always more dishes. More dirty clothes. The floors get dirty. Dust falls on everything. Then there are the pets. Since they don’t have the wherewithal to eliminate into the toilet, there’s all that associated cleaning, too. And closets! Wow, closets are a dangerous zone. They get organized a time or two throughout the year, and if that organization is maintained, everything is good. But it’s sooooo tempting to just put that one thing back quickly rather than properly and before you know it, the whole closet has gone to shit and you’re looking at a major overhaul before it will be fully useful again.

But when I put the effort in to putting things away properly, in the closets, in the teeny, teeny kitchen. In my office area. When I use things and then complete their usage by putting them away, all becomes beautiful in the living. But the cleaning will always be there, behind everything I do, and an ongoing work on its own behalf.

That’s what healing is like. I’m thinking of emotional trauma and old physical trauma and habits healing. Things that have become embedded into us.

When I first started down my ‘oh shit, I have sexual trauma in my background, I’m going to need to do some work on this’ road, my original viewpoint was ‘let’s get this done and over with so we can go back to living a fun and worry free life’. (Yes, apparently I am referring to myself in the 3rd person.) And yes, I had this cheerful delusion that I could face it, deal with it, and have it all be over with in a year. Maybe two.

That was over 15 years ago.

Today I know that healing is an every day thing. Today I will do some healing for my nervous system. Some. And tomorrow will come some more. There will be big days, where I clear through a lot in one go; those epic healing days, like the epic cleaning days, that are intensely satisfying and make you feel like you’ve really accomplished something.

But just as with cleaning, it takes less effort, and life is generally easier to live, when the healing is done in small doses on a regular basis. Slipped on a rock and fell? Take that extra minute and let the nervous system work it out now instead of having more troubles later. Delivery company pissing you off? Have a healthy response of useful aggression (non-violent) instead of bottling up everything inside to eat at you later. As the day-to-day cleaning, ah, healing, settles in, then when there’s time for a deeper clean, we can actually go a bit deeper instead of just catching up on the little things. If the dishes are already done, things put away, then that extra time goes to washing floors or wiping down cabinets, instead of just catching up on the little things. (Called titration, btw.)

And the absolute, inescapable truth is that the healing is going to go on for the rest of our lives. We’ll get so good at it that the effort will go down. Then we’ll get so caught up on it that the effort will go down. (Or alternatively, we’ll just let it all pile up and ignore it – but I’m assuming we’re all in the ‘want to deal’ group.)

Some days we won’t bother with healing. And things will pile up a bit, and we’ll need to catch up on another day. And that’s okay. Because it will be waiting for us tomorrow.

When the healing is big and scary and overwhelming, the idea that it won’t end can seem like we’ve been sentenced to some level of hell. That we are doomed to suffer until the end of our days. Except not. Healing isn’t hell. It just needs to take us through things that can feel hellish in our systems until we’ve worked things out. Have you ever done physiotherapy? Not always fun. Sometimes downright torturous. But afterwards? If done well, afterwards is a veritable treat.

Healing our selves and our souls and our spirits is just what we do. So that we can live life to the fullest, in all our corners, bright and dark.

Things can change in an instant…but mostly they stay the same

Or change really, really slowly.

I nearly died today. One of those moments that happens periodically, when you feel the brush of death closer than usual. Not the slow caress of death from bad habits or long-term illness, but the flirtatious goosing from a near miss.

I was out for a walk, headed to a favourite park that requires walking past some major intersections. Please note that I was wearing a purple jacket, orange and black socks, and green laces on my shoes. Really, I was a jokeresque symphony of colours. Not exactly blending into the background. I have proof, check the picture. The pic is from after the rain (and thus my drowned cat impression) but at the time of this story, the rain had yet to start so visibility was perfect.

I had already started to walk across the street, cheerfully following the instructions of the little glowing white man on the pole across from me. That’s when a truck decided to run the now ended left turn advance signal. Thankfully, the person he cut off honked. I say thankfully because that’s why I looked up and paused and waited for the idiot to pass me by with a couple of feet to spare.

If I hadn’t paused, at minimum he would have clipped me but most likely I would have been perfectly aligned under his right wheel as he hit me.

He noticed me about ten feet past where he would have run over me.

I shared a bewildered head shake and shoulder shrug with the woman in the car beside the crosswalk. Idiots. What can you do?

Life can change like that, one instant to the next. Boom. Crash. Bang. (Anyone else remember that Roxette song? Well, Crash Boom Bang technically.) And all of our life can be gone, all those unique memories disappeared into shmutz on a road. We are ephemeral by definition of our lives. It pays to remember this, at least now and again.

Naturally I kept on walking. Because what else do we do? My life hadn’t actually changed. No broken bones, no death, might as well keep to my purpose. My thoughts churned around the importance of life and all of those typical things and then, as we tend to do, the moment passed and I was back in the musings I’d started with.

About a week before I’d done the same walk with friends. On that walk I came across some banana peels that demanded I take their pictures. Hey, it was my birthday weekend, I didn’t say I was sober during this walk! lol. Here are those banana peel portraits: Banana in Puddle and Banana with Bag.

So here I am a week later, on essentially the same walk, and what do I see?

Oh, banana, poor poor banana. Slowly fading into the past. As most of us do. Most of life doesn’t change in that quick instant, that lightening strike of a car. Most change is slow, changes coming in small bits, microbes eating away at who and what we are until we oh so slowly decay from living until death unto dirt.

Thankfully, it is slow! Meaning there is so much time to enjoy the moments, large and small, crazy and plain, thunderous and whisper soft.

Those goosings from death are a chance to take the appreciation for everything else a little deeper into ourselves. I know this in my head but it’s my heart that needed the reminder.

Time to go live some life. Because what is fed, grows.

Blessings of the deep and wild to you all.

Saturn,
The Abysmal Witch.

Food Happies

I know I’m sporadic about postings these days. Trying to do too many things and something languishes. Which is here and the podcast. However, something is also fermenting in the background. That’s right, my thoughts don’t sprout and grow, they putrefy or ferment. Muwhahahaha.

I go through quiet stages when I’m evolving. I like to think that’s what we’re all doing, or trying to do. Not just exist, not just live, but evolve. Become more. Expand to the very edges of our skins and revel in our uniqueness and in love.

Universal love, baby. It is where it’s at. In all its nasty, decaying, looming, laughing, sparkling, dancing glory. Because love has never been just Valentine’s love. It’s always been cleaning dirty diaper love, on babies and on parents because that’s love. Or should be love, but that’s an entirely different digression I choose not to make today.

Love has always been messy and painful, uplifting and clarifying. It’s always been the worst torture and the only reason for existence.

Evolve.

To become One with Universe. To be the Embodiment of Love. To just get something done freakingly awesomely well.

Because that is all it takes. Embrace the things that make you feel grand, completed, living a real and connected life in this crazy, fucked up world. Do what you love and do it again and again and again and watch yourself getting better at that! Revel in that. It’s never been about where you get to, though that’s good too, it’s always been about how you get there. In your time. On the path that you need to take. That leads you in a direction that refines you into Love.

So tonight’s meal is brought to you by sliding into the Land of Capable After All, past the City of And You Thought Living Like This Was Too Much Work and settling into the County of Being Really Connected To What I Do Makes Me Feel Great and Damn It’s Tasty Too. It is a lot of work. You have to love the results, desire, craze, long for the results. Otherwise you’re only bothering because someone else told you it was good for you. And even here Fake It Till You Make it works. And so does accidentally trying new things until you find yourself in the position you never really considered yourself either capable of or simply not one of those people who did those kind of things. I feel a bit like I’ve arrived and it’s good.

What I did is really no big deal for most people. I made soup from scratch, shredded chicken and sprouted rice with quinoa soup (using homemade chicken stock) and desert is lemon blackberry jam swirled cheesecake on cocoa cookie crust. Yes, I’d made the cookies previously too.

And that’s what makes this so amazing. I was a lousy or lazy or just non-existent cook growing up. My tendencies combined with other cooking siblings and a family that at the time was not overly insistent about food in any extravagant way, made for one insipid avoidant cook. Food was not inspiring to me growing up. I had favourites but I felt no call to cook.

This means that I’d never made chicken stock before. Hel, I roasted my first chicken less than 6 months ago. And yes, the chicken stock was made from another chicken I roasted (because it really was pretty damn easy and sooooooooo tasty and I could buy a chicken that was free range, organic, etc). And now I’ve made chicken and rice soup from it. Even the rice wasn’t just rice! It’s TruRoots sprouted rice and quinoia blend. As to how have I never made even chicken noodle soup before? Well, not big on soups and didn’t grow up with it all the time (sometimes we had homemade, many times we had Lipton) and well, I just didn’t see it on my list of easy capabilities or something. I don’t know, k, it’s just weird.

This was, however, not my first cheesecake (I’m braver with baking than cooking, but not my all that much). It was, however, the first one where my cookies became the crust. They were really good cookies too, with extra cocoa, semi-sweet chocolate chips and white chocolate chips, that were super soft and crumbly. So I embraced the crumbly. And the jam? Well, that I didn’t make, but my friends did. Lemon Blackberry jam and don’t doubt for a second that they picked every one of those blackberries.

This was a full wholesome meal, made frame scratch. With scratches in the scratch! And I think it’s the scratches in the scratches that are making me feel pretty damn proud. The realness of it all makes me feel connected and healthy. And the gift from friends? That just makes me feel loved.

Love to you All, too.

~The Abysmal Witch

p.s. I only cut my finger once and I’m so much faster at bandaging these days. 😀

p.p.s. While starting to clean up from dinner I then have this absolutely happy moment and yes, I feel like I’m bragging, I’m just so damn happy about it! And yeah, kinda proud too.

FB moment: “That moment when you look at your wall of mead and think “shit, I’m going to have to start drinking some of this, I’m out of space and there’s almost no more storage in the closet”. And then you stop. Realize what you’ve just said to yourself. “Holy Fuck, I have a FULL WALL of MEAD!” That’s a good moment.

(To be fair, though, only 4 rows of shelves are mead, the other 3 are my magical library so it’s not as much mead as it may sound like. Oh, still a lot, just not *that* a lot. Which actually makes it harder, not many bottles left of any individual mead, so I can’t just drink them *casually*. Snort. I’m a hoarder, and in this instance I’m almost okay with it.)”

Wanna see? Well, for now you get a Samhaine picture of it with poor lighting, an unsteady hand (it was really low light! lol) and angle to really showcase it because the only other pic of it I have handy would be incriminating for friends of mine. In appearance, only, mind. 😉 Someday I will have a better picture, but that! That is NOT THIS DAY! Happy trials!

Next Life Crisis

You heard the term here first! LOL

Screw the mid-life crisis and the quarter-life crisis, let’s just call them our next life crises.

What do I mean? Well, it’s just what it sounds like, I’m trying to decide what to be next. We go through many transitions in our lifetime, the obvious ones of entering the workforce, the quarter & mid-life crises of whether we’re doing the best thing for us, retirement. Let’s not forget puberty, major relationships, etc.

I think we have more of them than we used to, or than our parents had. It was one mid-life crisis. Now it’s a regular change-over event, a re-inventing of self from one set of circumstances to the next.

I evolve spiritually, the rest of my world attempts to evolve. Because the more I change on the inside, the bigger the discrepancy between who I truly am and what I do. And the greater that divide, the more intense my cognitive dissonance.

Hehehe, fun to use that phrase. Perhaps it’s spiritual dissonance. Or just personal dissonance.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what career to move myself over to, in order to reduce this dissonance. And then figure out how would I do it? How do I switch practical paths? The mundane world isn’t as easy to shift zones in as the spiritual one. I can’t just make a decision and do/study/practice something else. There’s this thing called a job, and it pays me (rather well, actually), and that puts a roof over my head, pays for food, clothes, pets. Things that can’t just be tossed aside because I feel like doing something different.

So I’m working on it. Planning and figuring out where I’m going to go and how I’m going to get there.

My Next Life crisis.

You know the best part of the phrase? It’s completely open-ended on how many times you can go through one in a single lifetime. Yippee? lol.

Happy changing!

Saturn

Getting Quiet

My New Year’s resolution (yes, I dared to have one and no, it was not to be nicer to people-sorry, in-joke) is to be better at rest. Getting a full amount of sleep. Taking breaks from tasks to recover so that I can do more better in shorter times. Ideally.

To set the backdrop, I don’t spend a lot of time on my balcony. It’s nice. i keep it decorated and decently clean. But I’m rarely comfortable spending time out there.

Yesterday, I went to visit a friend. She and her partner regularly go outside for a smoke, they sit in their backyard, look at the trees and relax.

Today I realized that I avoid the balcony because I am bothered by the idea of simply relaxing. I should be DOING something, not just sitting on my ass.

Or so says the back part of my brain.

Tonight I went outside for my own nip of bud though more importantly to take a distinct break between tasks, between things I was working on. It felt good at their place, surely I could do something similar in my own home?

And it worked. Okay, yes, we have to ignore my twitchy, must move, must do something, must must must voice, but after that it was calm, it was peaceful, it allowed me to regroup, as it were, and settle comfortably back into myself.

I didn’t wait until I was too exhausted and then crash out from the exhaustion of pushing myself through the horror of doing what I “should” do. Instead, when that feeling came on, I went outside, took a break, gave myself just 15 minutes of relaxing and contemplating and BEING.

Then came back in and it was round two of doing…wait, I could do whatever I wanted. And I did do it. I did the things on my list but because I wanted them done not so that I wouldn’t feel guilty.

Recognizing and using the power of breaks and rest is my New Year’s resolution. Here’s planning towards it being a new habit and soon.

A night of fabulousness to all, and to all a fab night.

~Abysmal Witch

No Respite…For Anyone?

Do you remember when stores were CLOSED on New Year’s Day? And Christmas Day.

I don’t mean a few stores, I mean everything except for a few gas stations, the odd pharmacy and the occasional restaurant.

The streets were near vacant because there was nowhere to go except to friends, family or nature.

Today I drove to a friend’s place. It is New Year’s Day. Parking lots had a noticeable amount of cars in them. Not as bad as during the holiday frenzy and yet, still, a plentitude of cars dotting the asphalt landscape.

But surely I was mistaken! Surely people aren’t actually shopping on New Year’s Day.

Nope. That Winners had someone coming out of it. Those other people were headed into some other store.

Yes, there were still places closed. But it wasn’t like before. It wasn’t a case that almost everyone had the day off except for near essential services (food, gas and medication). Some number were still free from the work world, but many were not so lucky. Not nearly enough of them.

The joy of these days was that the world rested. In the midst of the silent season, we would go quiet, rest and celebrate that rest.

Now our culture has led us to strip ourselves of even that. Despite the joy I take in the season, I see many nasty roads we are taking ourselves down. This one in particular struck me painfully today.

We’re forgetting how to let ourselves rest, how to turn off, how to let go. Despite broader understanding of the need for rest and respite, we are taking ever more steps towards a world where that is forgotten, devalued, tossed aside like three day old chicken bones that never saw the inside of a fridge.

Sadness.

~Abysmal Witch

Halloween Philosiphizing

The other day I was thinking. I know, I know, it was a dangerous thing for my poor little mind, but sometimes even I need to go down that road. And after some minutes of the poor little mice struggling to overcome inertia and get the wheels turning stuff like the following spewed out:

Halloween is one of the few co-created society-wide events in our society. Christmas is another one, the other “major” holidays less so. These are events where a majority of people buy into the event and work together to create an atmosphere. With Christmas, for example, people put lights on their houses and decorations outside for others to share in as an experience.

Small examples of this that I’ve experienced are small weekend pagan events where we all agree to co-create a particular world around us. I go to one entitled Pirates & Faeries. Everyone dresses up, decorates their living space, and work together to decorate our shared spaces. The results are spectacular. We live within a fantasy world that we have all worked together to create. Which also means that everywhere you go lies within that world so long as you stay within the boundaries.

Halloween is co-created on a much grander scale. Sure people opt out, but enough opt in that the entire day becomes a co-created “fantastical” world.

Monsters and dead things abound.

My gods, just think about this, being fearful is encouraged and celebrated. And then we’re taught to laugh at our fears. We are taught to wear our fears on the outside of our skin, to BE the very horrors that have us hiding under our covers.

How gods-freaking-fabulous-tastic is that?

Seriously. Look at this outlet we have given ourselves from mundane reality, and it’s for everyone! AND we’re saying it’s okay to be scared. And we’ll join with everyone else in making it happen. How wacked is that?

This is the only holiday/celebration in my society that goes beyond the shared co-creating of an environment (xmas does that with all the lights and external decorations) and invites us to GO INTO EACH OTHERS LIVES!

There are only two generally, sort of accepted ways to visit someone’s house if you don’t know them:

1) you’re selling something, from god to floor cleaners, cookies to makeup, you’re there to sell.

2) you’re begging for help, like a phone call for your car, a run-over pet, psychotic man in mask trying to kill you who turns out to be your brother who killed your older sister many years before and has now escaped from the prison/sanitarium and is now going to kill you

But then there is this bizarre, magical third reason:

3) It’s Halloween.

Um, wtf? Why on earth is it acceptable on this one day of the year to go wandering to some strangers house, ring their door, and ask for CANDY?!?

Just stop and think about it for a minute if it hasn’t already struck you. Outside of Halloween, have you ever just gone up to somebody’s house, knocked on their door and expected to receive something nice? Just try and picture it happening. Try and picture doing it.

It’s weird.

And yet on Halloween, it’s expected. And that it’s okay for kids to do it (even now when we’re terrified to let them touch dirt let alone talk to strangers). And that those who have opted in (with the lit pumpkin) have agreed to a social contract to open that door and give out goodies.

This is so freaking bizarre it makes me proud to live here.

~Abysmal Witch, in her element.

Gorging

Had to do the grocery shopping today, part of life’s necessities, but I also do it as a once/week big shop and cook to see me through most of the week (too busy most days to worry about cooking and that pesky lunch thing! just nicer to have leftovers to reheat).

I was in the grocery store and I wanted desperately to pick up something tasty and satisfying that I could gorge myself on. That I could eat until the deepest parts of my soul were satisfied. I wanted to slurp it up, shove it in my mouth, eat and eat and eat until utterly and completely satiated.

This is not a good feeling.

This is a feeling born of something deeper and nastier.

But I didn’t think about that. I just wanted to satisfy the craving <little voice in back of head crying out “warning! WARNING!!!”>.

Problem was, I’ve embraced a fiscally responsible world, with a budget for things like groceries, and I’ve been working on losing weight by being conscious of what I’m eating.

So everything I looked at either a) cost money I wasn’t willing to spend or b) wasn’t perfect enough for satisfying the gorge desire to warrant the calorie cost.

Went through the whole grocery store going, “hmmm?” ummmm “naaaahhh”. It was a rather annoying and clearly pointless trip to the store. I bought vegetables and meat for tonight’s dinner and this week’s lunches. Cereal for breakfast. A vitamin and fresh bandaids (Disney princess faeries this time hehehe). No donut croissants, no bags of chips, no chocolate bar or candy or anything “bad” for me yet oh-so-tasty.

Why? Because every temptation I picked up I did an internal test of “will this satisfy my need to gorge? Enough so that it’s worth the calorie & financial cost?” And the answer was always no.

And you know what happened when I got home?

I had my cereal breakfast for dinner (it was a weird and rather backwards day in many ways). And I felt full. Not utterly satisfied, but full and in no need of further food. So much for the gorging desire. A bowl of cereal filled me up to the “I don’t want to eat anymore right now” state.

This was an almost accidental handling of the emotional burning urge that underlied the gorging desire.

And I’m damn glad.

If I was really good I’d sit down with the feeling and get closer to understanding its source and its underlying need. But instead, heading to bed, strangely satisfied with the results of my day.

A Little Love Dissection

Unconditional love. It sounds like such a wonderful thing, instinctually we know we want to stretch out and bask in it, but what actually is it?

Well, unconditional tells me that it can’t have any conditions on it. Ergo, no limitations, no boundaries.

What if I and my loved one are separated by distance? Doesn’t matter, says unconditional love.

What if I and my loved one are separated by time? That we haven’t seen the other for many years or more? Doesn’t matter, says unconditional love.

What if my loved one hurt me? Doesn’t matter, says unconditional love.

What if my loved one is lost to me? Doesn’t matter, says unconditional love.

Unconditional love does not contain the other types of love, though they may often be present at the same time. Unconditional love transcends the other types of love. It is cosmic. It encompasses all. It knows no boundaries, no rules, no exceptions.

All other loves have their own edges. Times when they are present and reasons when they are not. They are not and never will be unconditional. And this is good. One is not better than the other. They are different and they serve different needs.

When other loves are present, the potential for unconditional love exists. Whether it will manifest is dependent on too many factors to predict.

~Abysmal Witch

What Matters in Your Moment?

Every once in a while, usually when in the midst of a really good moment I’m not paying enough attendion to, I notice what’s important.

Lying on my couch, my fuzzy girl on my chest, I realize that I’m focussed on the television, on some movie or tv show that is already hard to recall.

And not on her, warm, purring and relaxed on my chest, one paw up to touch my cheek.

She’s getting old, my baby girl, over fourteen. And she may have many years left, but also may not.

So I pulled away from the tv show, hugged her a little closer, focussed all my attention on all I felt with her curled up on me.

I took that moment into me. Because she matters to me, far more than some generic entertainment.

What’s important in your moment? Where is your attention? These are the questions I hope to remember to ask myself more often.

~Abysmal Witch