Snarls from Beneath All Things.

The thought of walking out into the cold and freezing to death seems so appealing. Closing the mind off from the body and letting it die... it's coming around again. It's been years since I've been this depressed. It's getting harder to rationalize my way through it.

I've gotten through it before, but each return makes me wonder if the way through was just finding ways to ignore that darkness. It's completely self-absorbed, but that urge to erase all traces of having existed and wandering into the scary wild with the intent to die feels... right, sometimes.

Much as a personality could make broad, sweeping statements of "nothing can do X" or "everything's just so Z that I can't stand it," it's not so grandiose this turn. The mind meets an irreparable paradox in its framework, and excessive association with the mind can lead a being to ignore its other faculties. The unknown factor of this paradox leads the framework into a state of destruction, although this destruction of identity and association can be confused with destruction of the entire being. We have the technology.

I need the "wilds" again. I must set forth into my own destruction, to preserve my existence. This round has a sense of humor: In the season I feel the most alive comes the inescapable sense of wanting to die.

Der Hexen and Old Timey Crotchety Business

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Homunculus Now.

Ladies and gentlemen, today we dicuss homunculi.

Now, legend has them created by mandrake or chicken eggs, in some spermatogenesis goofiness. However, the notion of personified elements as posited by Zosimos seems at least more feasible to my sensibilities. Still, it's just as silly, thinking about little men going "arrrrgh!" all of the time in some constant gory torment.

I've experienced homunculi in the same manner as nature spirits initially, faces that appear in just about everything while I'm in what folks call the "receptive state," or what most folks perceive as being "zoned out." Eventually, certain faces kept repeating, or had a particular series of advice voiced in those moments, and were a bit more accessable, more obviously drawn from some bit of absurdist creation on my part. That little bit of personalization took those faces out of the matter and shaped them into satellite beings in the mental sphere.

This comes almost as a form of depersonalization of particular traits, making a parapersona to observe, understand, and manage before reabsorbing those traits back into the home persona, of course to move in and out constantly. Much of this relates to dolls, toys, and stuffed animals as a child. In fact, most magic comes from things we used to do as kids put into some comprehensible way of observing and understanding reality in a constantly changing manner, opening up new possibilities. It's admitting to madness and using its trappings to find sanity and completion.

One method I use to understand homunculi is beginning to draw the vague pretenses of a face, and watching what happens from there, in a trance. It isn't always symmetric, it's rarely pretty, but the imperfection of manifestation in any reality is the point: these beings are a part of that massive, multidimensional matrix, and manifestation shows merely one small size of an infinitely-sided being, with that imperfection acting as an attempt to stretch or fold that shape into something understandable. That's the point of paradox: let it happen.

Once the face is finished, put it away, and do something that relates to its manifestation while still awake that day, and don't look at it. Let it do its thing until something says otherwise. It's like a sigil with a personality, relating in that human-to-human fashion, touching on the concept of progeny and creation of life.

Naudh a sammitch.

I began ruminating on the "N"-stave rune: naudh, need, whatever you wanna call it.

Poetic kenning tends to color any person's view of a rune. A lot of it becomes a matter of finding words that sound similar, which would relate to actually attempting to poke around in the roots of language and association. Learning the runes becomes a lot easier to understand as the mind removes itself from a solid, unwavering view of language.

Now, the N-phonetic rune, which I'll just call Naudh for simplicity's sake, has had Trouble, Toil, and Need listed as possible definitions. I've just recently come to understand nith as one of the possible associations with the rune, which I'm sure someone's figured out before.

Either way, the concept of nith seems to derive from a sense of a person's roundabout nature in understanding the world, deviance from cultural morality, and the emotions such as envy, hate, and malice. A nithing is listed asa person who inspires these concepts. In a modern concept, we could see a nithing as any group that Billy Graham or David Duke spits bile about, up to and including that idiocy of "well, she shouldn't have dressed like that if she didn't want to get raped."

If we were to put the runes in a circle, then across from Naudh would lie the rune Ing, based primarily about the spread of the cult of Yngvi. Conceptually, Ing relates to cultural and social elements relating to one's own culture, such as eitquette, relations with family, and community-based religious practices. However, just as the alienating and belligerently xenophobic tendencies flourish in those who follow the passive, charitable, and omni-loving Christ, so too does the Ing rune bear an incongruity with its representations.

Nith, as a companion definition of Naudh, seems to relate to our own individual needs and alienating qualities. Those who follow somewhat primitive and rapturous practices, who test the borders of law and morality, would then begin to enter the purview of Naudh: entheogenic Mind-altering substances, unconventional romances, personal ethic, etc.

Naudh itself relates to elements that challenge the relative ease of existence. Constraint, Trouble, elements that begin to display themselves when options run out. To connect this with nith, these elements arrive when the sanctuary of cultural/societal existence begins to conflict with individual needs. The Anglo-Saxon rune poem leaves a passage about Naudh as a source of help and salvation when heeded. A resolution to the Naudh/Ing dichotomy comes from balancing external, societal operations with personal "taboos", so that both have enough space. Too much time spent dealing with Naudh leaves a person alienated from society, and too much Ing leaves a person bigoted and unfulfilled, in this framework.

Of course, Naudh also stands for undoing tensions, such as creative struggles of bringing the internal world into the external, through creative, technological, mathematical, or athletic ventures. Aren't symbols cool?

Seeds of the Luminescent Pomegranate

There's a star exploding in the center of my chest. It's no big deal.

Still sittin' alone. Old board games bring the Mysteries to mind. Not really sure why.

I can feel the leaves and the sighs of the evergreens. I feel like a cat that comes to a person's door every night, yet will never get in. No harm in trying. It's hard to see clearly through the haze of emotion, and I don't want to give up, like I have before with anything difficult. "This Vagina Mine teaches patience, diligence". A semi-unreachable focus seems to stabilize.

The hemispheres gradually work together. Thought augments Feeling. Senses augment Intuition.

Sounds begin to explode once more into muscle. Sorrow in the civilized world feels nearly meaningless. Slowly, I feel like pieces return to the whole. I feel emotions release. I can see the stars again. I can feel that sticky bioluminescence.

I might need to dig up more of this. I feel a little like I've come out of decade-long funk and my muscles are still weak, yet the endorphin surge seems to push me forward for more: more crazy visions, more spirits, more of God throwing me into the Abyss. They feel like a reward for existing.

Hazards of the Flaming Wind and Ghostly Leaf

Salvia has an interesting way of stripping emotional barriers that are otherwise present, yet that same stripping can allow hostile energies to come forth, especially when stimulated. Sometimes the lesson it imparts is to allow that flavoring, that spitting little dram of cataclysmic fire, to exist and cool down. The key comes from learning that we may experience these feelings without constantly reacting to them. Without that separation, a person can be led to constant distraction and interruption, derailed at the slightest change in plan or change in environment. Invention comes from weathering through that transitional, non-physical discomfort and seeking either reconciliation or later prevention. Of course, those same emotional promptings, if unable to remain tethered, can inspire tremendous movements of action, when used sparingly. That allows drama to be, well, dramatic.

The Eastern Seaboard of the US has been a bear to navigate. Rarely do I feel more pallid and bleak than in the sun. My skin chars with a disturbing ease, and my eyes, accusomed to low light and shade by coloration, overload with the influx of illumination. Both have me clamoring for a nice, cool cavern with phosphorescent fungi in opportune pockets. Light and heat do increase the effects of certain recreational means of mine, and so in those moments I do cherish it. It's all a strange beast to follow.

The Very Real Yet Mythic Individuality within the Universe Great and Small

In a fascinating diagram on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, the Milky Way has been laid out, with a diagram popping up, displaying the placement of our sun and how far everything is within the galaxy from it. The Sun is in a little tangential branch called the Orion Spur, breaking off of the smaller Sagittarius Arm, which runs parallel to the larger Perseus Arm. The smallest little tributary of our galaxy bears the whole of our existence. I'm perked up on caffeine, salvia and chocolate, watching the little green tree in the cafe dance in the breeze and consume the photons from the fancy track lights, senses fighting through the sluicegates of interpretation. Our planet, so full and bustling with information and activity, twirling away in this minor stick of the galaxy, nowhere in the neighborhood of the major metropolitan arms of Perseus and Shield-Centaur.

Sometimes events eclipse certain strong associations and experiences within the conscious mind. The willingness to step back and allow a person to endulge their own need to be the special one can sometimes undo one's own associations and unique expressions of connection. From no shortage of ignorance on my part, I allowed a person's need to take ownership of the spider totem eclipse my own associations, forgetting how I would play in basements full of black widows without any fear, or how I would become enraged when my father would reflexively kill spiders. As I'm writing this, a young lady who has seemed usually very closed off and skittish pours open with adoration towards this retriever that has recently undergone hip surgery, showing no shortage of brightness and love in his presence. The parallell existence that the animal poses has ignited her own totemic energy, and I'm inclined to understand it as originating in what Kundalini would note as the Heart Chakra.

Even then, parallel could very well lack the proper range of expression. Sometimes, instead of embodying similar qualities to an individual, a totem can embody qualities that the consciousness lacks, and the Martial quality of separation for a totem has an attractive quality. The Venal qualities of mirrored traits would best prove examples of the attracting of similar traits, running together through the same current (such as electricity through copper wire). This is where Mercurial observation can diffuse and differentiate, allowing for perspective on the intensity of these matters. Then again, the all-encompassing quality of associative principles may be something that I in particular experience from the symbolic Mars and Venus in the sign of Pisces upon my birth, and conjunct, at that.

Objective observation seems an impossibility. Nevertheless, in acknowledging the bias, the observation can in turn move towards that objectivity. Reason is a silly beast.