Cobra on my left, Leopard on my right

I attempt, once again, to attempt to write more story. I prayed to my godhead this morning for inspiration before imbibing the Yemeni fire-seed drink. I wanted this to be a libation, not a simple tool to bring about false wakefulness. I sit, I put on music, a powerful melodic roar of strings and electricity, and I fall into a trance of research, like I did in my more alive periods.

Desperately, I attempted to drag this into the narrative, but a smooth, large hand kept shoving me away. The shove felt more like a concussion, rattling the mind each time I would attempt to batter against its force. "Let me tell stories!" I would meagerly yelp, smashing at keys and contorting my mind into a dried, screwed-up mess. The presence loomed large in my heart, lit from behind and wreathed in serpents and vines, dripping leaves and clutching a spear, a gift from the light behind it. I can almost hear what my mind translates as a brusque laugh and a playful, derogatory utterance.

"Go fuck yourself."

Thankfully, my god has a sense of humor, and so do I. I tend to forget the irrational yelps and unbridled fire of being that my god incites within me. I forget that "he" incites me to cease caring about the judgments, the consequences, the imperceptible restrictions that asphyxiate our breath, our True breath. Y'know, the ones that, in spite of having a wide space around your body and all the relaxation and health in the world, keep you from actually getting a breath.

Panic. Greek for "of Pan." The Fucking God, the wildness. We've made him so abstract in our day, either jamming his frequency into ourselves and binding our breath and action in "panic attacks" or babbling on and on about ourselves, our illusory, impermanent little beings vomited out of the biomass and tossed into Saturn's world of circumstance.

Scare yourself, now. You are Beast. You are violence. You drink the blood of footed beings (use of plastic, oil, use of animal products and human resource), you drink the blood of rooted beings (paper, plant matter, biodiesel, lumber, fungus, mood altering substances), you drink the blood of the Primordial Being (water), for you yourself are a part of it all and must inflict yourself upon the world to be a part of it. Involve yourself not in abstraction, not in the far flung scales of the World Serpent; it has the unique proclivity both to envenom and to constrict. The "world," that which you have in front of the vessel of your consciousness, contains all of the information you need to push forward.

Knowledge is as dangerous as wine. It impairs our judgment as much as it clarifies. Knowledge is power, and power is an opiate illusion of the worst kind, pushing us to chase the Dragon, the reptilian primordial force of change, instead of cultivating a safe, warm place for the Dragon to roost in our stillness. Fear not the sacrifices you make toward this goal; they serve Life, they serve our very source. Our dalliances and mistakes give us lessons, give us raw materials to shape that which we always have, ourselves, into the very tools used to overcome those mistakes, if not for ourselves, then for those mysterious other glimmers of being that swim in the same chaotic seas as we. We adapt to our dark and dangerous climates through growth, just as generations of biomass grow around vents on the sea floor and bob in lazy luminescence in the barren, lightless depths. In the darkness, we build our tools to create our next evolution. We create our own light, we change our senses, we grow new mouths to capture the Marine Snow, the foundation of life, in humility.

If it takes a lifetime to move an inch towards the Sun's chattering call, then that lifetime has been spent well. If we live to let in the world, to become a part of the world, to taste of the gutter and of the stars, and commit ourselves to combing and soothing the turbulence in the asensate roilings beneath or above the wall of our universe, if we seek to understand that the words tossed into our minds remain mere symbols, and that no exemptions exist from the connection of all, then we truly live in the light of God, even if that light comes from a bioluminescent angler fish readying to consume us whole.

Nature shows as much mercy to the cautious as it does to the valorous. What restrictions we place on ourselves and on each other serve to sever that connection to the true restrictive source, the limits of which we can only explore and to which we adjust ourselves when found untenable. We don't pick where we were born, and we don't pick what we're taught. We do pick where we go, and we do pick what we learn. What atrocities of separation do we justify? What abstract concept do you feed with the blood of others: Religion? Culture? Country? Ideology? What have these ideas done for you lately? How have they brought you closer to others, and whom do they ask you to exclude? How dare these concepts tell you whom to let in and whom not to let in? How dare a series of idiotic words in a book claim your life and determine your actions? How dare it claim to present the truth, when it presents simple smudges of lines on innumerable dead trees, only to serve its own propagation? How dare this infection muzzle you? How dare these ideas toy with us, pitting infection against infection like gamblers at a dogfight? How dare they shame us into listening to their drivel, justified with the occasional lip service to Universal Love, while stating that some are more deserving of that Universal Love than others?

Drinking the Brew of the Bent Mother

I feel like every so often I get on here, scream and shout about the world, then feel defused and affable for a bit, maybe discussing some magic, until it creeps up again with a thousand eyes of hatred and teeth of steaming, solid malice.

I would pretend at slaying this monster, perhaps to think that I might emerge the bright solar hero and gain the accolades of the kingdom. That secret, deep down, is that I really, truly, hate the kingdom, and really I just want the monster to do what it does in a less short term manner. I want to till the soil with this fury; I want to plant trees who bear fruits of despair. I want the world to see its own horrible black heart of hate. I want everyone to know all of which they are capable, for only in our depths of villainy, deceit and torture can we understand what it means to care.

If we are, indeed, the royal gift of the divine, and if indeed we contain universes within us, then no matter how we attempt to purge our bodies and souls of the muck and horror, we still contain that filth. We are unclean. We contain in ourselves rapists, torturers, manipulators, bigots, despots, enablers, thieves, brigands, and all manners of the vile professions. The only possible way to keep these villains from running rampant over our lives and the lives of others is to embrace them. We have an imperative to love all, including ourselves, and especially including the horrible within ourselves. If we bring these truths to light, we may yet utilize their abilities without excuse or apology. We will know our "enemies," for our enemies are ourselves, have always been ourselves, and will always be ourselves.

We are BP. I am BP. I haven't done a goddamned thing about that oil spill. I haven't traveled down to the Gulf to help clean up. I haven't put any effort into shaming the creator of Girls Gone Wild out of business. I haven't lifted a finger to reduce the crime rate of my city. I haven't cleaned up any of the litter blowing around my streets. I have spent time watching the vicarious inane actions of the unsuspecting on reality TV in lieu of traversing the path my heart has laid out. I have lied to countless people and I have padded myself well on the larder of others. I have allowed myself to follow in the wake of others' ambitions like a remora, or a tick. I have discarded my fire in the name of flaccid tranquility. If I were to tally up my perfidy I would have an excellent corner of Hell situated for me on conspiracy alone, to say nothing of deception. That said, I doubt incarceration would do much to change my ways. I have a vengeful heart that forgets easily, yet forgives in the same manner that a single ant might count grains of sand. That said, I forgive my vengeance, my envy, my sloth, my gluttony, my lechery, my vanity and my greed. I forgive my perjuries and my perfidies, in order that I may surpass the need and desire to resort to their usage. They characterize me just as much as my accolades and accomplishments; not at all.

We still walk a meaningless void as the dangling phalanges of some unseen process. How well might we submit to this process? How might we destroy the "I," the frozen chunk of detritus that meanders down our stream? Come forth, Beast; I lay down my sword in order that you consume me, and I shall issue forth from your belly with your secrets.

The Shattered Gray Expansive

When was the last time you thought about giants?

I remember when I was starting to get into this whole Norse worldview and I was reading the various myths that involved the jotnar, or "giants" as we'd translate them into English. Whatever proportions these beings might have would fly around wildly, especially in relation to the aesir, the focus of the narrative. So much rowing about was made on "who" the giants were supposed to be that I feel like a lot of folklorists lost "what" the giants were supposed to be. Not every myth's an allegory for society (*cough* Homer! *cough*). What if the strict relative volume that we experience in Midgard just... doesn't occur with giants, as if forced perspective and points of view would shift wildly and their relative placement and size in space-time were somehow screwed up? The best example I can think of is some dull, neurotic person standing in a road, screaming about all of the things s/he can get or have to keep safe, caught in this mental loop ("Oh no! I'm worried about Thor killing me, so I'm going to steal his hammer, Mjolnir. Oh no! Now that I have his hammer, he might find it, so I have to hide it. Oh no! Now that I've hidden it, I don't know if he'll still find it or not, so maybe I'll just give it back to him. Wait! I had his hammer! I spent so much time working on this, I have to get something in return! I want... Freyja! Yeah! I'll give them the hammer in return for Freyja's hand in marriage!") Of course, there's no reasoning with a giant; everything they think about is just blown out of proportion, so you give up and walk away. Somehow, the giant takes up exactly the same percentage of your field of vision at 500 feet away that he did at 50.

That's the thing about the jotnar: they have no sense of proportion in physicality, and even less in terms of situational moments. I have this notion that if a jotunn just took a deep breath and showed some sort of consideration, maybe they'd get by without being walloped by Thor or thoroughly embarrassed by Wodan. "Hold on a sec; I'm in Valhalla, and I'm really drunk. Maybe I should just own up and go home before I start saying something stupid and making these guys angry at me." "You know, this potion was made from the blood of a god. Maybe I should just leave it with those two stupid dwarves, or even better, tell the gods about it so that they can give their kinsman rest and I can earn a favor from them." See, thinking along those lines would have made lives a lot easier for the giants in question, but nope, they had to go shooting their mouths off and taking stuff that'd best be left untouched, out of this unslakeable self-interest.

Thankfully, here on Midgard, we human-types have the advantage of getting over that self-interest. I might even go out on a limb to say that the antagonistic jotnar might embody the overblown self-interest that leads us to situations where the gods repeatedly smack us around. The creation myth of Ymir's death at the hands of Wodan seems to spell that out rather clearly: the singular Giant contains all matter that we know, and that singular giant continues to grow, simply spawning off more of itself with no differentiation between anything. So, thanks to some interaction of the Fate Cow, the other self-created being, Wodan and his three brothers (who might just be he in triple form; I've since stopped caring) come about and chop this One Giant into all manner of little pieces to create the world as we know it, thus casting out that monomaniacal initial being into a vast universe of explorable parts. It's rather telling that giants persisted after this, as some level of self-interest is healthy, but leading a person to charge in headlong instead of addressing them as sensible equals and engaging in communication doesn't please the powers that be all that much.

I have to wonder about the "giant" rune, as well, Thurisaz/Thurs/Thorn. I got thinking about the line "woe to women" in the poem and thought about the times my energy got caught up in myself, expressing as some neurotic self-perpetuating frustration that froze my libido, which in turn froze the muscles in my back and ran "loner" and "restricted" loops in my mind while alienating and frustrating my sex life with my partner. The misery seemed to seek to perpetuate itself not only in my thoughts, but in my interactions with others, shouting louder and louder to drown out the identity of the problem. It took a few massage sessions, a fainting spell, and an inordinate amount of patience and love from my consort to break through to the core issue and awaken the fire between us once more. While I can feel myself falling back into those thoughts and patterns every so often, it now lasts for a moment before I take a deep breath, calm my thoughts, and loosen the muscle. Yeah, I still have my work cut out for me, but I feel like the process has given me tools and focus.