Macwriter

Mac kills PC in so many areas. I find that my workflow crashes to a halt when I have to go into the office and use their Windows systems. I hesitated in downloading any Microsoft programs onto my Mac because I don’t like anything about them, how they are organized. Even using Excel, which is still far more substantial than Apple’s Numbers program, I am quick to get in and get out. The one shining Microsoft program out there is Livewriter. It is great. I does everything that a blogger needs and wants. It has two-way communication with accounts and one can write, post, and draw from with ease.

So I am trying out MacJournal. I am hoping that the latest update will address some of the workflow problems that I had. We’ll see. A big problem for me was the lack of tag support. Not that the program doesn’t use tags, it does. But that it doesn’t draw from the list of tags one has already started on an external server. Livewriter does this well. But other programs, not so much. Instead of a seamless work environment I am forced to print out a list of tags and hang it on the wall. This. is. stupid. Either that or I am stupid and I cannot figure out a workaround.

trauma- masculinity and war

I did some reading from Chapter 3 Disconnection  of the book Trauma and Recovery and had to get up and go out for a walk.  Too much to sit still I had to allow myself some sort of anchor when dealing with the themes of this book. In talking about symptoms of PTSD and veterans of the Vietnam War a study was cited which stated Years after their return form the war, the most symptomatic men were those who had witnessed or participated in abusive violence. (p. 54)

Elsewhere it described a veteran who was very sensitive to unjust actions to others around him.  Whenever he witnessed someone doing some hard to someone else he became very protective.  Consequentially he had also became very pugnacious toward his own family and wanted to die.

The contradictory nature of this man’s relationships is common to traumatized people.  Because of their difficulty in modulating intense anger, survivors oscillate between uncontrolled expressions of rage and intolerance of aggression in any form.  Thus, on the one hand, this man felt compassionate and protective toward others and could not stand the thought of anyone being harmed, while on the other hand, he was explosively angry and irritable toward his family.  His own inconsistency was one of the sources of his torment. (p. 56)

Further on the book states with severe enough traumatic exposure, no person is immune (p. 57).  Earlier in the book was this; the violation of human connection, and consequently the risk of a post-traumatic disorder, is highest of all when the survivor has been not merely a passive witness but also an active participant in violent death or atrocity (p. 54)

Of great interest is that the book cites resiliency in people, roughly 1 in 10 as having an internal locus of control in an adverse environment.  The children studied (and followed for years) showed to be highly social, thoughtful and active coping styles, a strong perception of their abilities, and unusual sociability and a strong sense of being able to communicate with others.  The book cites a study of people lost at sea and who later developed PTSD.  Very low on developing PTSD were survivors that cooperated with other and by contrast those who had dissociated tended to become more symptomatic later.  It also lists “Rambo” types, men who plunged into impulsive isolated action and hat not affiliated with others as becoming highly symptomatic as well. 

The book cites a study of ten Vietnam War veterans who did not develop PTSD in spite of heavy combat exposure.  They were said to have active, task-oriented coping, strong sociability, and internal locus of control.  They also accepted fear in themselves and others but worked to overcome it and avoided giving in to rage.  In the book Deep Survival the survivors were ones who did not expect the world/cosmos/universe/god to rescue them.  But instead took the responsibility onto themselves.  Also, they did not try to fit the world around them to fit their expectations of how the world is, but matched their thinking to the world around them.  The world owes you nothing.  It will eat you in a heartbeat and ants will feast on your flesh while nobody knows what happened to your body.  It is no tragedy in the history of the word that a hiker falls off a cliff and dies.  That is a tragedy in the life of the hiker, the life of friends and family.  But in the world it just is. 

I have a line of thought that I want to investigate.  In the first book there are discussions of rape trauma.  There are also instances of combat trauma that is mixed into the discussion.  From a physicalism perspective I am curious if the features of both are similar in the brain (barring other questions which would naturally come up here philosophically).  But my thinking, as I walked in the park reading this book, was that the act of penis in vagina itself did not cause trauma.  Because rape shares this feature characteristic along with prostitution it has been said by some in arguments against legalizing prostitution that it is akin to rape, in the subjection of the humanity of the individual as a means to an end (that is, a tool).  This same reason against, that one becomes a means to an end, is familiar with anyone who has read The Communist Manifesto as a critique against the Bourgeois use of the working class for their labor.  On a side note I think that Marx hit the nail on the head here, and which socialists today will say, that it is a lie that business says it wishes to creates jobs.  Business wishes to become more efficient (read: cut jobs) and the worker is only as good/useful/worth the labor/manhours that can be sold.  Anyone who’s been downsized at a job should identify with this feeling readily. 

Back to the point, being a tool.  I might say that I’ve met far too many women and friends of mine who have been raped.  I mean this that this occurs far too often.  I also have a lot of love for them and respect for their growth and dealing with their histories and resilience.  It isn’t the physical qualia of the act itself but the context that causes the trauma.  This context has many sides to it, much of which resides in the mind of the person experiencing the trauma.  The mind has many defense mechanism to deal with such trauma (see Peter Levine’s book “Awakening the Tiger. Healing Trauma”.  As mentioned above, there are attitudes and coping styles utilized by people experiencing a trauma that mitigate their developing symptom of PTSD later.  Again, the point here is that simple penis in vagina is not itself conducive to trauma.

There is another form of trauma such as when a person experiences a natural disaster or a plane crash.  My thinking here (I’ve got more reading to do in this area) is that this is something that severely shakes one’s belief in a just world.  The person that develops PTSD in this instance had a view of the world that was most unrealistic, that it could not happen to him/her, that the universe/god/gods/karma/justice/cosmic-fairness would eventually win out and they would come out.  This self serving bias has us believing that “I never thought it could happen to me” and the person might still be in denial while they slowly starve out in the wilderness, expecting a plane to spot them any minute now.  Again, see the book Deep Survival.  Those that are able to muster strength and survive typify a saying that we pagans often say to each other, that the gods help those who help themselves.  Again, see the book reference.

Is combat trauma different in this respect?  There is one side that wonders how a just-god/cosmic-law-of-truth-and-justice/karma could have a war where innocent people die.  While some religious faiths would have us believe that such things as AIDS and cancer and hurricanes are some form of punishment by a vengeful, shallow, petty god against the wicked, while at the same time saying that ‘the lord works in mysterious ways’ when it is pointed out the good people that have suffered by such ‘judgments’ as well.  But still the question lingers, how can a loving-god/cosmic-justice have such evil/hate/violence/destruction/pettiness/pain/strife as is exhibited in war?

This is a problem if one hold the view that order is above chaos as is often the case with many monotheistic religions and New Age religions.  Among many others, indigenous people, Earth-centered, and some pagan views, order is on equal footing with chaos.  Creativity is the partner of destruction.  Neither is ‘above’ the other.  Both are sacred.  Among the Northern Traditions (such as The Eddas) the world was a place of danger and beauty.  One had to be aware of both to be alive.  This same attention to the present is found among combat soldiers in theater.  They are equally aware of the hazards around them, constantly scanning for danger, yet they also savor sunsets and playful children and letters from home. 

But the question that I held in my mind, of which I’ve prepped for five paragraphs, is this: does the act of killing another person bring about trauma to the killer’s mind?  Aside from all contextual issues, of defense or aggression, of necessity or hate, just the bare bones action itself.  Just as penis in vagina does not entail trauma or specialness (a different statement than intimacy, there IS intimacy.  There is also intimacy in domestic violence), does a combat action, such as knife in heart or bullet in head entail trauma to the person perpetuating the action?

It is the case that a number of researchers in psychology are academics.  No big surprise, it takes time in going to college and graduate school to become such.  Yet it also seems the case to me that in the humanist academics, such as psychology, there seems to be a large skewedness to the worth of the individual.  Again, nothing shocking here.  It is easy for us to affirm the worth of the individual and to show care and concern for such.  But in this academic stance of the left liberal humanities it seems a given fact that the taking of another person’s life, just the action of it, creates a trauma/damaging effect upon the perpetrator’s mind.  That the only one’s who do not undergo any transformation are sociopaths.  However, philosophy would have no sacred cows and will question even such a thing as the worth of the individual.  I’ve wavered back and forth on if the act of killing, the action itself aside from context, imparts trauma.  A few hours ago I would have said yes.  A wonderful mind, when I posed my thoughts to her, asked the question of doctors and euthanasia.  Would they feel trauma?  I posed to her the link and she responded with a host of questions suitable for its own entry and thoughts. 

My current belief is that no, just the action of killing does not entail trauma.  However, here is the kicker.  Save for instances of big time dissociation, there can not be no context.  That is, we always have our world-view/social-laws/philosophical-outlooks/spiritual-beliefs on the nature of our identity and the meaning(s) of the cosmos/universe/reality/existence.  This is important. For it is becoming vogue to create war dramas where the soldier/veteran has psychological issues simply from the fact of having been in combat/killed-others.  This message is mixed in easily with pacifist morality.  They are hard to disentangle and to casually tell apart.  Much like right-wing-hate groups and decent church goers, or the Taliban and moderate Muslims.  Recall, it was an Islamic mystic, a sufi named Rumi that gave us such beautiful poems of love. 

In the writings above there are instances of individuals that did go to combat and performed heroically and did not suffer from PTSD.  This is a line of thought that can easily be mistaken or took the wrong way.  Our ‘man culture’ (and by extension our military culture) is very male/domination/aggression/controlling and the way to keep things together, to be a man is to win, control, dominate.  What else is a man but that which is opposite woman (in our limited understanding).  And when you think of women, do the terms nurture, soft, collective, warm, gentle come to mind?  Can a warrior (read: man) exhibit any of these traits?  Is it just testosterone?  Are men just naturally violent?  Or can we shape the context of our movement in this world.  That is, initiate ourselves into different ways of being?  In the book King Warrior Magician Lover  one page says it wonderfully.

We call these phenomena pseudo-events (gang initiations, and possibly some military conscription, and others) for two reasons.  For one thing, with the possible exception of military initiation, these processes, though sometimes highly ritualized (especially within city gangs), more often than not initiate the boy into a kind of masculinity that is skewed, stunted, and false.  It is a patriarchal “manhood”, one that is abusive of others, and often of self.  Sometimes a ritual murder is required of the would-be initiate… But these pseudo-initiations will not produce men, because real men are not wantonly violent or hostile.  Boy psychology… is charged with the struggle for dominance of others, in some form or another… it is sadomasochistic.  Man psychology is always the opposite.  It is nurturing and generative, not wounding and destructive.

How often has it been written that men are nurturing and generative?  This is where we can make a huge impact on future warriors.  It isn’t a war issue, for that is a separate political issue dealing with American interests, empire, consumerism, capitalism, trade, strategic interests, and so on.  For this I would wish for a better informed society that reads, pays attention to the issues (not listen to talking idiots on t.v.) and voted with an informed conscience.  That is, an active citizenry.  Aside from this, it is likely that warriors will still be needed.  We need warriors that can fight.  That means kill.  But this, again, isn’t a warrior issue, it is a man issue.  Some sergeants that I know went on a snatch/grab mission here in Oregon to get an AWOL soldier.  He was a ‘troublemaker’ and without any self direction and control.  His parents were somewhat glad to see the four sergeants on their doorstep to pick up the young man.  They had surrounded the house for possible attempts of fleeing (he did) in order to catch him (they did).  The mother, relieved, lamented to the soldiers “I was hoping that when he joined the Army that you’d make him into a man” to which one of the sergeants quipped “Our job is to train him to be a soldier.  It was YOUR job to make him a man”.  This statement is telling and is at odds with the notion that the military bootcamp is a ritual into manhood.  It is almost.  But it isn’t a ritual into manhood… but into soldierhood.  We are sending still boys who are very good soldiers off into a war where they can survive physically but to survive psychologically they ought to be men before hand.  This is in opposition to the needs of the military that must have eager soldiers ready to kill, to charge up the mountain without hesitancy.  It is easier to get a young 19 year old to accept this as his purpose than it is a 30 year old.  And yet the rates of suicide of soldiers coming back are highest in the 18-25 year old age brackets. 

We, as a society, do not understand what a ‘man’ is supposed to be.  It is alien for us to consider man as having traits of nurturing in its constellation.  We do not consider that perhaps nurturing is a word given to ‘human’ of which man is but one type.  Unknowing of what man is we are also unable to give our boys initiations into any sort of manhood.  Our initiations from boyhood are high school football, prom night and the first time at sex, the first job. 

Feminism has had three waves of philosophy and activism.  Men in this country (and the world) need a wave, a true wave, that grips us.  Not a wave where we try to lessen our masculinity into some watered down version.  But a reimagining of what it means to be man and the roles and responsibilities that this bring with it. 

and just like that… it was gone

Slow night in the bar and I was able to get out early.  I got home, changed, and grabbed my stuff.  I was going out to the woods to meet my shadow.  I went to the same spot that I had failed to have a Full Moon ritual a couple of weeks prior.  As I was driving the 30 minute drive there, I was somewhat worried that I could get into the mindset needed to contact my shadow.  Last night the shadow was manifesting in all manner of ways… tonight… not so much.  In fact I felt pretty calm and centered as I drove my truck up the winding road.  It was near 1 a.m. and I was taking my time, driving about 35 miles per hour.  As I rounded  a corner and looked at one of the houses on my left, I felt like I was back in Iraq.  It lasted only for a second, but I knew the feeling had come and gone.  It was night.  It was quiet.  There were no street lights or signs or such on this road.  Only the occasional street light above casting a pale yellow light in a circle.  A house stood to the left with a tall facade that reminded me of the style of houses popular in the richer neighborhoods in Iraq.  I was driving a speed that was about that of some of our patrolling speeds. 

Maybe I could get into the right mindet afterall.

I got to the spot and parked the truck.  All was quiet.  It is a sport in the far north part of Forest Park in Portland on the Skyline road, north of Germantown Road.  Quiet and away from the big city.  One can’t hear traffic or city hum or anything from this side of the park.  I grabbed my backpack.  Inside was simply a black candle, 50 feet of rapelling rope, and I picked up my walking stick and took off.  The path looked different than last time I went down it a few weeks prior.  The silver light of the moon cut like razors through the dark fabric of night.  Tonight there was just different shades of black. 

I walked.  No wind tonight.  Quiet.  I soon came to the same spot that I had stopped at before… the entrance to the forest.  I could not see beyond the entrance.  It was a hole of pitch black.  I stood there for quite some time, listening and letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. But I was also trying to observe the feelings and emotions within me, why I felt hesitance in going forward, where was this fear coming from, listening to the sounds of the dry wood knock against each other in the tree-tops to my right.  I closed my eyes.  I felt vulnerable.  I closed my eyes and breathed.  I observed myself and my own emotions.  Trepidation.  After a while I moved forward, slowly, into the darkness.  It was so black that I could not see the path below me.   I could make out my legs, but my feet were invisible to me.  My eyes were open as much as they could be, and yet I could see nothing.  I had the faintest notion that I was following the path, a wide path, but could not see it. 

Sounds to my left in the brush.  Moving forward.  Sounds to my right.  Moving on.  Then something dashed around in the hillside to my 2 o’clock position, twenty meters ahead.  I could tell by the way it was moving that it was bigger than a dog and it had no idea I was there.  I stopped.  More movement to my 3 o’clock, my 6 o’clock, and my 8 o’clock.  The movement to my 2 o’clock was really going wild.  It moved up the hill and back down and back up.  I stayed still, trying to discern what it could be by its sound.  I kept quiet and I kept still.  My eyes open as much as possible to let in as much light as possible, to no avail.  The movements stopped and after a few minutes I moved forward a few steps.  I could hear whooshing up the hill to my right.  I could barely make it out.  It wasn’t the same as what I’d heard growing up, but it was similar to the alarm call of a deer.  They will make a ‘whooooosh whoosh whooooooooooosh’ sound that alerts the rest of the group to the possibility of something there.  I couldn’t tell if that is what I heard or not… too faint.  I moved on.

I still felt anxiety but I kept moving.  The darkness held all manner of threats for me to be wary of.  I breathed and moved on.  I remembered walking in the forest while going to college at UAM.  My dorm was on the edge of a forest and I would often take walks in the darkness.  I took walks in the woods as a kid.  I took walks in the forest in Houston.  I took walks in the woods often.  What was this anxiety from?  As I heard the noises of the forest around me, I didn’t feel anxiety about them.  I was uncertain about the noise earlier, but it didn’t cause me nearly the alarm as what my mind had projected into the inky blackness a few weeks earlier.  I stopped and thought about this.  I wasn’t afraid of the woods as I was afraid of what was coming at me from within.  Because there was darkness and such there was nothing for me to distract myself with.  No television, no busy day, no traffic, no music, no cats, no nothing to keep my mind from dealing with things.  With darkness around me it was a highway for the shapes within to come at me. 

They were still there but not nearly as powerful as the last time I came here.  I hadn’t made it this far along the path the last time I was here.  I walked forward.  I spoke aloud to the forest, remembering a magickal name I’d used several years ago but had ceased to call myself (I had fallen out of favor with magickal names years ago) and I told the forest that ‘Moonstrider’ was here.  I walked forward still, the steps not as anxious as before and I kept waking, enjoying the sounds of the night and the scents in the air, and I came to the clearing in the path with the stars shining overhead.  I thought of this spot to do my ritual at, but I didn’t feel as close to the shadow as I’d hoped.  I contemplated this and I heard voices… human voices further down the path. 

I moved forward again, thinking of finding the voices.  I wasn’t anything at all but curious.  I’ve never encountered anyone out on the path at this time of night, it was after 2 a.m. after all, and I was curiouis.  I could see a small L.E.D. light ahead, useless for anything but finding your beer in a knapsack, and I stood still.  I knew that with the clear sky behind me, they being the dark forest, and I on higher ground, that I was silouhetting myself and that I was clearly visible to them.  I waited for them to move closer and when they stopped on the trail I announced myself with a ‘knock knock’.  They laughed and we moved together.  Three kids, around 19 or so, two female and one male, out for a walk.  I asked them if they heard any owls.  They laughed and said no but wished me luck on my owl hunt.  They kept going and I kept going down the path in to the forest.

The feelings were gone.  I walked down the path, it was still as dark as before and didn’t know I was moving off the path until I felt brush, but there was no more trepidation, no more anxiety, no nothing.  So I turned around and went back to the clearing.   Once there I stood and looked up at the stars and cast myself out into space, trying to fathom the immense distances of eternity around me.  A shooting star, so quick that it was like a flash bulb, gone before you really knew it was there.  I thought again of doing the ritual, but didn’t feel any emotional connection.  Without that I might as well be having a ritual where I was throwing lemon pies as dancing clowns.  It is emotion the drives things.  I recalled reading the wonderful book “Practical Solitary Magic” by Nancy Watson where she writes of the need for utiliaing the different planes of magic in order for it to work.  We could remember the Airy, mental correspondences and such, but without the emotional energy to drive it forward it wont work as good.  I felt this need now… the emotion of the moment was gone.  Just like that.  As soon as I heard voices… gone.

I drove home again.  Thinking over the situation. What meanings could I draw from it.  Do things happen for a reason?  What would Pangloss say to this?  And did not Candide  argue this point?  Isn’t my attempt to find meaning in a random series of events an attempt to rationalize the chaotic?  And thinking of space, of the stars, of the immense cosmos, of looking at the world without perception, isn’t that what humans try to do?  Assign meaning?  But of the meaning that we assign… what does this meaning entail?  I am reminded of something I thought just prior to my leaving the apartment.  I had picked up a copy of Jung’s “Symbols of Transformation” lying near my bed and flipped through it.  Wonderful information within it… I should make to read it before school starts.  I was looking at the many symbols within and was reminded of what Jung said of the human psyche.  His position was that in order to understand the soul one must look at everything that humans do, all of our meanings that we project out onto everything.  It is incomplete to study the human psyche and not take into account everything.  Everything we put meaning into is a projection of our own inner realities.  It reminds me of predictive tests used in I/O psychology… that those with a dishonest personality tend to view themselves as honest but the world around them as dishonest.  These thoughts came to mind as I drove back home.  If I was trying to find the meaning in tonight’s events (or lack thereof), and I found that there was no meaning that was clear, but that I could find meaning there anyway, that this meaning I found, or projected onto the events, was indicative of the meanings and scripts within my self.

It is now nearly 4 a.m.  I have the next two days off.  I hope to make use of them, reading books, seeing a movie, and perhaps seeing a friend or two here and there if I may.  I hope to continue this investigation into the shadow, yet I am wondering about the investigation ito the child of light as well.  What of that best part of me that I sometimes forget (thanks to theladyshannon for reminding me).

Thank you Gods for blessing me.  Thank you spirits for aiding me. 

not yet…

Hmmm.  I did not go out and do a ritual last night.  It was a late hit in the bar.  I had lit a candle for more money before going to work… and the bar got busy and I walked with the second most money I’ve ever made in this bar in 2 1/2 years.  Sweet.  But I left late late late and I decided that since I wasn’t closing the bar the next night (tonight) I’d do the ritual then.  I’m not a very strict witch… I bend my correspondences, change the times, and so on.  It is hard for me not to, hard for me to take things as rote recipes with the past that I have.

However, I had been ready to greet my Shadow self last night and it came to me.  It filled my thoughts, my urges, my intentions, etc… when I got home.  It filled my dreams this morning and my lucid dreaming, keeping me in bed for longer than I wanted, were filled with the Shadow.

There are other things going on, other aspects to the shadow, that I do not understand.  I was tempted, nearly did so, in leaving last night after an hour at home, to go to a club and throw myself into the mix with strangers, in wild and crazy sex.  There was enough of me that was watching these thing within myself that I was curious as to what was going on.  There must be something of importance here, something to learn, to let go of, to grow through… and if I was to put myself into these situations then perhaps I could keep enough of my wits about me that I could notice the things going on within.  When I’ve done these things in the past I note to myself that the memories are blurred, that as soon as I finished with the episodes, my memory that night was fuzzy.  

Hmmm… it is a quagmire of uncertainties.  Reading other accounts of shadow work there are positives learned, behaviors, lessons, guilts dropped, and so forth.  Whatever the additional complexes of my shadow self are, the major funciton behind it, the big drive, is from my childhood.  The same things that go on today in the darkest recesses of my mind were there when I was a kid.  I still recall some of the ‘bad’ daydreams that would come to me.  Hmmm.

I told my therapist that I am ready to jump in the cave.  That venturing a little into it and then back… was growing old for me.  I wanted to leap in completely and let what happens happen.  If I must fight out tooth and nail or if I change or if I shed light or what… I was ready to do it.

I’ll do the ritual tonight.  I wish I had more to go on… more additional meanings to add, more things to make it more of a ritual and improve its chances of impacting my subconscious, of bridging that gap.

deep ecology

I just read Dolores LaChappelle’s essay “Ritual- The Pattern that Connects” in one of my many books. She makes good points, but the essay is lacking for me personally. She is apparently a successful writer in Deep Ecology, yet this essay specifically lacks ‘umph’. I see it as inefective against anyone but the choir, and if Ed Abbey is correct and all writing is political, is not the aim of such writing evangelic conversion?

Conversion… rituals… ecology…

I thought of these topics on my ride around the neighborhood in search of one of the many green squares on my city map. I was looking for another park to visit and I got lost in a subdivision. Up and down roads and hills and around bends… and I never was able to get near my goal of reaching the forest that was so clearly marked on my map, who’s trees were so clearly visible against the Summer evening sky. Perhaps I needed to approach from the south? I don’t know. Sunset came and went and I gave up and turned to home.

I was blocked in my progress by the streets that I traveled, restrictions made that were created to streamline movement by most everyone into the direction and mode that most everyone wanted, namely vehicles along suburban streets to and from home and work or the mall. But what of someone like me who just wanted to go forty meters in that direction and stand underneath the firs?

This is symbolic of many things, among them poor planning and lack of consideration of the topocosm of an area. Topocosm was used in LaChappelle’s article, it means “the world order of a particular place”. But among other things, it seemed to warn me of the danger of beauracracy, that is the reaction of many in the environmental wings to want more regulations, more laws, more agencies to police dumpers.

What is the world order of this place that I now call home? What are the details of the Tualatin Watershed? As I ponder this idea as it relates to me personally, I wonder how many people that live here know. I wonder how many know simply what the name of the watershed is.

The themes of place, religion, ritual, ecology, society are usually not far from my thoughts. I’ve shied away from linking religion with thoughts of ecology and social changes in the past due to my avoidance tendencies of organized religion as well as what I believe would be an attack by some Christians. Yet perhaps the idea has some merit. Perhaps we could use some pseudo-religious rituals that link us to our particular place; rituals that transcend whether one was Christian, Pagan, Muslim, Jew, or Atheist. How would one go about initiating such change? How would one go about keeping it open, away from being taken over by group identity (example, Republican Values taken over by group identity of the Christian Coalition).

How does one create a deep culture?

I place my book down (Deep Ecology for the 21st Century) and I look at “Totem Salmon” and “The Tipping Point”, both calling me. It is midnight, however, and tomorrow I have a double shift at the restaurant, and all weekend I have drill with the National Guard, followed by another double shift stint at the restaurant on Monday, before a blessed three day weekend. I intend to lose myself in the mountains, do some fishing, and count stars and wildflowers, perhaps naked.

Goddess, grant me insight and wisdom. I am trying to build a bridge from Japan to England and I wonder if a bridge is what is needed.

Orange

Oregon. My fourth Autumn. My fourth Samhain grows nigh. Samhain. How many Samhains have I observed someplace. After working a bar in Souther Cal I spent Samhain with some tarot cards on the beach listening to the Pacific Ocean crash upon the shore. Samhain in Arkansas and a cold snap and I was out in the woods under a silver moon. Samhain, the time of the dead.

Samhain is also the beginning. With the passing of the horned god into the underworld thus begins the season of hibernation, the retreat into one’s self. The beginning of the butterfly is not the emergence from the caccoon, but the spinning of the caccoon.

Autumn. My favorite season. Every season holds something about it that I love, yet it is Autumn that I cherish the most. Autumn is that season most like my personality, where I feel the most comfortable in. The colors, the scent of leaves on the ground, the harvest of pumpkins and corn, the dry grasses, the crisp clear nights.

Today found me at the apartment with Eliza. Not doing much of anything save handle several phone calls from dancers. It was in the latter part of the day when, after meditating in the bedroom for a short bit, I discerned a very real need to be out in the woods. I told Eliza I was going out to Mt Pisgah and asked if she wanted to go. She declined but understood my need to go as well. With daylight waning I headed out to the arboretum with a journal, water, a walking stick, and a book on paganism. Paganism?

Walking through a stand of maples and oaks I wondered as to the nature of the Goddess. It is hard for me not to do so while walking through a stand of trees on a gorgeous Autumn day. Instantly my mind fired with logic, skepticism, science, and philosophy. Why would a philosopher be asking himself on the nature of the Goddess? I cannot begin to recreate the thought forms that entered my mind at the time, there were no linear progression. I’ve tried to diagram such thinking before with the result appearing like a mixed up flowchart. When I first saw a graphical representation of the parallel distributive processing model of cognition a few years back I said to myself “a-ha… that looks familiar.”

Kierkegaard came to mind. While questions as to how do we know what reality is and rehashed arguments with people over existence (the disciple of Kant rings loudly in my memories) and last night’s reading in the latest issue of Scientific American on String Theory, Kierkegaard was behind it all. What difference does knowledge of String Theory make to a man buttering his breakfast toast? Looming behind all the reasons why I should not believe in a god at all was the voice of Kierkegaard… when he said that he wanted a Truth by which he could live and die. As I read a few days ago in the book “The Future of Life” by Edward Wilson,

“It is exquisitely human to search for wholeness and richness of experience. When these qualities are lost among the distracting schedules of everyday life, we seek them elsewhere. You [Thoreau] discovered the human proclivity to embrace the natural world.”

Again, it must be noted that the human mind is biologically dispositioned to finding patterns… even creating patterns… creating patterns when there were none (but are now). It was said by someone who’s name escapes me at the moment that “if God did not exist then we would have to create him”. And another thought was that if horses had a mythology, their god would be a horse, and cats would have cats… so it is likewise no wonder that the human mind imagines that God (if such a being exists) is one with human characteristics. This has been used, by myself, as an argument against God.

In the distance I could hear many scrub jays yelling about. Perhaps they had found an owl or a hawk and were badgering it. Jays and crows are my favorite means of locating owls whereas I take a walk in the woods and await my unknowing scouts to locate my subject for me.

But suppose God is not as orginally imagined as in my childhood. I used to imagine God to be a being, seperate from everything, apart from it all, who snaps his fingers and creates the universe. Before the holy snapping of fingers… nothing, afterward… everything. This notion of a god does not fit in my thinking at all any more and in such a belief I consider myself an atheist.

I cannot grasp the notions of the universe in my mind. I see animations on the t.v. about galaxies, read bits of Spinoza on the nature of infinity… and I cannot wrap my mind around them all. Yet within the infinite there are patterns and directions which I, as a human, take more meaning and experience from than others. Humans are nothing if they are not creative, cognitive entities. It is, therefore, not a downfall that our gods be human as well, for it is this essence of humanity that defines us. Without it we cease to be human and are instead a type of ape.
It is the recommendations of drug therapists that when a person tries to kick an addiction said person likewise cease visiting the locales and people they were accustomed to visiting. When a person goes to such an location, where drugs were generally taken, the brain learns that a chemical is about to enter its system and it begins to prepare itself for it by producing neurotransmitters. If the person does not take the drug then there is an imbalance in chemicals in the brain and the person feels the need for the drug. The more the person take the drug, the more these biological habits, the addictions, are reinforced. Likewise, habits of ritual can preclude habits of thought. For instance, after all these years it occaisionally crosses my mind to say grace when I am sitting at a dinner table with more than one person. If I am alone, or eating a lunch in the car or such I have no such thought cross my mind. Yet if it is a dinner with one or more people with place settings, the thought generally crosses my mind to say grace before the meal. Such is the result of years of my father saying grace at the table before meals during my childhood.

The air is crisp, the sounds of a squirrel chewing on a pine comb nearby reaches my ears. There is not much daylight left.

Take the daily images and interactions with people. Money and fame are shown on the t.v. over and over. Eliza had watched a show on MTV called “Cribs”. To me it was not a celebration of fantasic homes, but instead of a loss of self. At least in my own world. I am unable to truly know the mental events in the lives of the people on the t.v. Yet the thought which enters my mind is that we reinforce petty gods every day. The god of money, of popularity, of the status quo, of a hip-hop culture, of a conservative culture, of mindless sex and drug escapism, of the fantasy worlds of movies, and where are the deeper gods, the more meaningful ones? In reference to the movies, most movies are crap and yet I love to watch them because I do love to live in a fantasy world from time to time. It is enjoyable to plug into another world and out of my own world. Yet the best movies are the ones of art, of a truer meaning, a relation to things human and personal experience. This is what “The Core” lacked completely… and to me what “Gladiator” had. It would be interesting to note what a horror movie could do if instead of relying on gore and shadows they delievered the story with an existentialist manner.

Goddess… are you there?

Yes.

In thinking of Chaos Theory it seems to me that even though the central tenent is that there is always an unknowable element of chance, of unpredictability, common images produced are one of fractals… and a pattern is readily recognizable by many. We seek order out of chao with our minds.

In the infinity of the universe, which patterns do I seek? Which gods to I give service to on a day to day basis? Money? Politics? The Goddess lives within me and is everywhere I look. When I die, the Goddess of my heart dies too… but she lives on in the hearts of others, shaped by their own lives. Such a mental phenomenon then begins to transcend the individual. Jung wrote of this and such is the topic of research in social psychology, sociology and I/O psychology. But I mean to keep this personal. The Christ that lives is that within your own heart. Christ is dead in mine, replaced by the image of the Goddess and she has, it seems, a cyclic life of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. It appears that in this time of the Mother, nearing the Crone, the Goddess in my heart is the Maiden.

Passing near a stone monument to the biologist Mr Douglas who looked around the Willamette Valley for Sugar Pine in the 1800′s, it had a note of how he was one day shooting down pine combs from the tops of trees too tall to climb and how the Native American who came to investigate the noise considered killing him but didn’t because they consider crazy people to be sacred.

A clearing. How many hours have I spent in this clearing? Sunrise, sunset, mid day, night time. I’ve watched deer and turkey, rain and grass, and this time I found a spot and sat down. Across the meadow were two trees, oak, with brilliant orange foliage. Below their boughs were fallen leaves. It seemed as though a giant hand had painted the trees with too much color and some had fallen from the tree onto the ground below. The sun was nearing the Coastal Mountains and the western sky was a rust-colored belt on the horizon. Above me was blue deepening into purple. I watched as the brilliant orange of the trees deepened… deepened into darker orange and finally out of color and stars lit up on the sky above. During the time it took for the sun to set I just sat and watched. My mind would be peaceful one moment and the next it would travel some obscur path of meaningless garble. I even rehashed movie scenes and t.v. episodes as well as other mundane thoughts. Then all of the sudden I’d realized that I’d wasted precious moments of sunlight, that the orange of the tree were deeper than before and I would awaken to the beauty around me, admiring the needles of the douglasfir tree, the sound of the coming night forest, the scent of the meadow and the wood beyond. Again I’d slip, unknowingly, into another series of meaningless thinking before I’d realize it and would bring myself back to awareness.

What meaningless days do I live. Our days are the products of our thoughts and our thoughts are so very easily carried by the currents around us. Before one realizes it a day, a week, a month, a decade is over and we are left standing on a river bank wondering where it all went.

Samhain. I can remember Samhains of the past. Standing in a room of fellow pagans celebrating Samhain, drinking wine and beer and mead and eating and having fun. Of lighting candles and incense in the hills SE of Irvine, California. Perhaps it is not so bad for me, an atheist, to give attention to human aspects of the Infinite. For we seek patterns where there sometimes are none and perhaps if we do not seek out or create benefitial patterns, we fall into the patterns that happen to be around us, whether they are negative or positive. What gods do I visit during the day? What rituals do I keep?