The Rhipidon Society

Redirect!

HI!  If you've found your way here, that makes me happy, because this blog has been a ghost town for a while now.  The good news is, I'm picking up where I left off, but in a new location.

Please redirect yourself to my current blog, and bookmark it!

I was blogging my art only for over a year and I've realized that I need to return to writing on a regular basis.  I'm not sure where my permanent home on the web is going to be, but please bear with me and know that there is lots more good stuff to come.

Thanks so much for stopping by!

Potentially Uninteresting Update

Whatever it is, it's working. I've been checking my email only once a day, spending very little time "browsing the web," and I've been eating really, really well. I haven't consumed any wheat products since last thursday. No refined sugar either. Mostly I've been subsisting on brown rice, beans, raw fruit, salads, peanut butter, and cottage cheese, with small amounts of organic meats interspersed here and there. The hardest thing to give up is the dairy. Brown rice bread and brown rice pasta, incidentally, are delicious, and you would never know that they're "health food."

Our apartment has been transformed and our relationship is transforming too. The growth is amazing. I've been able to admit and talk about things that I'd been keeping bottled up for years, and while I'm still a far cry from where and who I'd like to be, I can feel myself growing in faith and wellbeing.

I haven't been following my plan perfectly. I haven't been to the gym or to yoga -- I can feel myself avoiding that. Nor have I been journaling or praying the way I want to, but I'm only a week and half into my 30 days and I intend to keep ramping it up. We DID go to Quaker Meeting for Worship last Sunday, which was a beautiful and very necessary experience.

I've definitely noticed an increase in my ability to focus at work, and I think the quality of my work has improved too. Because I haven't been wasting endless hours sitting in front of the computer at home, the apartment is looking and feeling wonderful. Last weekend we mounted a decorative shelf into the exposed brick and bought some beautiful candles for it. I potted an amaryllis bulb and I'm attempting to root a cutting from my large philodendren plant.

I crave nature more and more. I need the earth -- I love the way she grows.

I feel like I'm turning over, suddenly very tired of trying to articulate everything.

hot water
dark soil
cold air
green shoots
milk soap
pink skin
spices
a cutting board
melted wax
clean towels
strike-on-box matches
grey skies
an apple core
cotton shirts
pawprints
foggy mirrors
wet hair
standing still and breathing.

My Humble Lifestyle Experiment

I'm conducting a lifestyle experiment. I've always been really interested in "living right" and nutrition and detoxification both literally/physically and spiritually/emotionally. Over the years I have given all of this stuff a ridiculous amount of thought, and I'm afraid the ratio of thought to ACTION has been very lopsided for a long time. (Can you guess which I've done more of? Thinking or acting?)

What I would like to do is to implement a 30 day turn-it-around plan of action. Instead of just changing my eating habits, or starting to exercise more regularly or what have you, I'm going to do it ALL at once. Food, exercise, work, prayer, art, journaling, you name it, I'm doing it. I took some time to write down all my goals and intentions and some of it is really mundane (don't wear any nail polish, spend more time playing with the cats), while some of it is pretty intense (prayer every night and every morning, zero processed foods, a "media fast," etc).

I've tried baby steps and frankly it's never really worked for me. I think I need to give myself an intensive, immersive experience which will leave no doubt in my mind or heart or soul about the impact that this sort of change can have on your own being as well as the lives of those around you.

Admittedly, I'm not off to a very good start. I was supposed to get up early and begin at sunrise today but that plan was thwarted by some nasty food poisoning and so I'm sitting here on the couch in my PJ's being sleepy and drinking peppermint tea.

I've always been a "Highly Sensitive Person" -- I become overstimulated easily, I tend to be very emotional, and I worry a lot. One of my goals during the next 30 days is to spend less time in my headspace and more time EXISTING in the world, doing things like cooking and cleaning, praying, walking, reading, writing (not typing!), making art, etc. I also happen to be very addicted to the internet. I'm tired of inadvertantly wasting my days because I'm too wrapped up in my email, blogs, forums, etc.

Here's a basic outline of my plan:

- Get at least 7 hours of sleep every night, always going to bed by 11 pm.
- Eat only whole, unprocessed foods, limiting consumption of meat and dairy (exceptions will be made for organic animal products which will be eaten in small quantities). Dramatically increase intake of raw fruits and vegetables, eliminate refined flours and sugars. Only sweeten with stevia and agave nectar. Supplement with fish oil, essiac tea, probiotics, and chlorella.
- Begin AND end each day with prayer. (I spend a lot of time thinking about God and very, very little time actually praying and initiating conscious connection with the divine.)
- Media fast. I will be checking my email ONCE per day, never first thing in the morning, and I will not be visiting any other websites. Exceptions would be informational sites to find out times/locations of events such as Quaker meeting, etc. I won't be watching any movies or television (other than what I have to do at work -- I work at an animation studio). I am also choosing not to listen to any music other than (possibly) ambient meditation music for yoga/relaxation/etc.
- Attend Unitarian church or Quaker meeting every sunday.
- Attend yoga class once weekly (twice weekly would be ideal).
- Visit the gym three times a week.
- Take off my nail polish and leave it off for the month.
- Do a better job keeping up with household chores.
- Play with the cats so they're less hyper in the evenings.
- Meditate. Already I'm wondering how on earth I'm going to fit this in, but I'm sure it can be done. Maybe in the morning, maybe evening, not sure, we'll see.
- Stop purchasing stuff! The only items I'll be purchasing in the coming weeks will be survival-related things like food and possibly wellness-related things like supplements. No new clothes or toys or anything.
- Be compassionate. With myself and others. Practice love and forgiveness and patience. See if I can go a whole month without talking any shit about anyone, including myself. Be kinder to my loved ones. Extend myself more in service to others.
- Detach. So much of our pain and suffering is the result of attachment, expectations, and "grass is greener" syndrome. I say screw it, grass is grass and our happiness ultimately should not depend upon stupid details and having all your ducks in a row -- rather, true happiness (I suspect) should spring from a nourishing, sustaining connection with the divine and would be, I think, the natural result of being a living example of love, compassion, humility, and peace. Also I am of the opinion that God sometimes calls us to move beyond what is comfortable for us, that we may grow and better serve the divine purpose. In this case I think it is important that we not get too attached to being comfortable or feeling good -- let us instead experience a different kind of satisfaction, one that is directly proportional to the amount of goodness that we are generating in the world around us.

For a while now I've been questioning my own motives, asking myself why I do the things I do, and how much of it is really my ego's bidding and how much of it is in fact God's bidding. Experience has shown me that doing things for selfish reasons never brings any real or lasting fulfillment. We live in a society that is obsessed with the individual and in many ways we have been taught that the indivudal self is the holy grail. While I can understand the value of self-upliftment, I think it's crucial that we not get caught up in the quagmire of self-worship and self-glorification.

I know philosophically that there is no scarcity of love or peace in this universe, that love is whole and perfect in everything and we need only realize the perfection that is already there. I'm tired of endlessly rearranging the pieces in my life, trying to come up with the magic configuration that will solve the Rubik's cube of personal fulfillment. Instead I'd like to try acting with as much compassion, integrity, responsibility, and humility as I can possibly muster, sustain the effort, and see where that takes me.

These next 30 days are an offering, an inquiry, and a confrontation. I'm hoping for a massive transformation -- I'm hoping for less hoping and more being.

This Girl Been Gone A Long Time

I think it's been over two years since I posted.

Looking back at my old entries I feel a little wistful and a little embarassed. I set a lot of this stuff aside when I went out to California and watched my life seemingly fall apart in every arena (family stuff, friend stuff, financial stuff, spiritual stuff). So much has changed. I'm not going to chronicle it all -- there's no point. Let me just say that I've been through a lot. More than I expected to go through in such a short period. I'm still regaining my balance. Last winter was dark. I've been on the upswing since the spring. Everything, everything, everything has changed. I miss writing. I'm working now, full time, in the entertainment industry. I feed my cats and I pay my bills. I do a lot of laughing and a lot of crying, too much worrying and not enough meditating. Not enough yoga. Not enough fruits and vegetables. Lots of affection, lots of kindness, lots of fear, lots of ego, lots of breakthroughs, lots of missteps.

My goal is honesty. I'm moving toward honesty. I'm terrified, have I ever been honest before? I know not what I do. Here I am.

I am here.

I am, I am.

I didn't know I would have such a hard time practicing what I preach. It's been a hell of a trip. I have a hard time relinquishing the illusion of control. I'm in love with control, in love with predictability and clean, comfortable sweeps.

I do not feel what I would not feel. I want, I want, I want to run and hide. It would be so much easier.

(beat)

Where are my trusty symbols? Where are my old faithful escapist myths and legends? My alchemy?

Wet leaves?

More and more I turn to the earth. I turn to her, to her darkness, her slow cycles and great swells of water and soil.

I am less pretentious, I am more humble. I feel quite small. Interestingly, I am more effective than ever.

Thank you for having me.

Mental Malleability

It's amazing the extent to which whatever book I'm reading at a given time can influence the way I think. I went from PKD to Hudson's Green Mansions... and I feel utterly vapid this week compared to last.

Green Mansions, incidentally, is disappointing.

Destablization and Pseudo-detachment

PKD can be really destablizing I think. When I read his books I feel like I'm engaging in this super intense direct-download. Like I'm downloading this information straight from God, and it's just going into my head and rearranging tons of stuff really quickly. It completely disregards the existing organization of ideas in my mind. What especially impresses me is how he was able to write about divinity, God, Satan, etc in completely informal language.. and yet when I read it I feel like I'm plugged into this monolithic meta-consciousness. The way he handles the divine paradoxes.. it all leaves me breathless. Whenever I go through a PKD-immersion phase I find I start feeling kind of floaty and weird. Actually, I feel like Mr. Burns in that episode of the Simpsons where he goes floating around at night and he's glowing and his pupils are dilated.

That having been said.. I'm still digesting the Divine Invasion.

In other news, I've been thinking about the weird passivity that all these new age philosophies promote so aggressively, specifically in the context of the whole "detachment" idea. I think there's a lot to be said for "detachment" in the truly zen sense of the word but I'm afraid there's something else running rampant out there, and that's a kind of "pop detachment" that claims to be a tool for internal empowerment but which I'm beginning to suspect is actually robbing people of individual authority. When I say "authority" I don't mean like bossing other people around, I'm talking about the freedom and the strength to AUTHOR your own self, to claim your path. Let's take the popular new age series 'Conversations With God' by Neale Donald Walsch. Now, I read this when I was sixteen and I thought it was pretty fucking swell back then, but I've since changed my mind. This book, and many others, go on and on about how you just have to let everything go and stop wanting and that desire is the root of all suffering and etc. In a sense this is true, but I think it's a gross and potentially dangerous oversimplification.

A few minutes ago I was sitting here flipping through an old journal from 2003. This notebook contains pages and pages of me talking about the stuff with which I was dissatisfied. At that point I hadn't fully gotten out from under the new agey inundation and reading these old journal entries I just see all these buzzwords all over the place, words like "ALLOW" and "CHOOSE" and "CREATE" and etc. Now, there's nothing wrong with any of those words, inherently. They're cool words with cool meanings. What I see, though, is a girl who was really caught up in this new age jargon to the point where she was verbally walking on eggshells even in the privacy of her OWN DIARY. I read so many of these pseudo-spiritual self help books, I started to believe that words like "want" and "need" are highly toxic and should be avoided at all costs, EVEN AT THE COST OF HONEST EXPRESSION. I don't want this new age "fake it til you make it" bullshit -- if I'm not evolved enough to not WANT anything, I shouldn't go around PRETENDING that I am. It's painful and inauthentic. You can't just ignore your wants and your dissatisfaction with life and hope it all goes away eventually, because guess what -- it fucking won't! The only way to stop wanting and needing is to ACKNOWLEDGE the want, examine yourself and your circumstances, maybe come up with a plan of action. Start making changes! I think that's way more effective than trying to trick your brain into enlightenment by eliminating certain words from your vocabulary.

Anyway, I'm not discounting the power of thought or language. I think that this whole fad is actually rooted in something very sound, but it's been perverted and glossed over and made marketable and formulaic and easy.

I personally am a lot happier since I stopped trying to adhere to those stupid rules.

The Divine Invasion

I haven't posted in a few days because I've had one of those persistent nagging tension headaches... (the same one that started the day I stopped drinking cofffe.) Anyway it's going away SLOWLY but I've had to limit my computer time because staring at the monitor makes it worse.

So, I just finished reading the Divine Invasion. JEEZ. It was amazing.

Now I've read:

Valis
Radio Free Albemuth
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
A Scanner Darkly
The Divine Invasion

...and I have Ubik sitting on my bookshelf, but I think I need to take a break and read something else before I delve into that one.

Ah man, my brain is cooked right now. I'm going to write more about TDI later tonight, but right now I need to go immerse myself in something mundane, like doing laundry. Hoo boy!

Darkness vs. Darkness

I think that what the human mind commonly places inside the "darkness" bracket are two distinctly different energies or elements which deserve more differentiation and examination. On the one hand, we have the darkness of the Black Iron Prison -- occlusion, perceived alienation from God, the "bad" end of the emotional spectrum, "evil," et cetera. On the other hand we have something that's a bit more difficult to wrap the mind around, and that is what I will for purposes of convenience term "cosmic darkness," a creative force unto itself. I want to dwell on how these two ideas are different. When you get into this kind of theoretical demarcation I think it's important to remember that ultimately there is unity, ultimately there is no this vs. that or here vs. there, but for the time being we will permit those boundaries to exist.

Let's talk about "worldly darkness." I believe that this is the energy of the devil archetype, an energy which runs rampant on our little blue planet. It is the blindness of the demiurge and the lies of the archon -- indeed it is the very anima of the archon -- the false life and the counterfeit spirit which so many mistake for truth. I think the concept of the organic portal is a personification of this occluding complex. The concept of a soulless human is certainly an evil one -- without souls, what are we but appetite? This archonic energy, the Black Iron Prison itself must in fact be self-limiting. In that it is entirely uncreative and mechanistic its only mode of expansion is viral, lateral, self-corrupting. It seems that while the divine is able to pierce the veil between worlds and dip down into our prison, the demiurge, lacking creativity, is unable to lift itself out of itself -- out of occlusion or 'worldly darkness'. It is confined to an eternal mechanistic rearranging-of-already-existing pieces -- it is incapable of creating anything new, and thus it cannot build bridges to other worlds. It is one-sided, lacking dual awareness.

The other side of the darkness coin is something which I find to be infinitely more exciting. It is the cosmic darkness, a luminous, true Darkness. This is the outward-turned Ajna-eye of Shiva, the vision which obliterates falsehood. The dark and terrible aspect of Shiva is the light which destroys the archon. It is Rudra, the howling one -- Rudra-Shiva, frightener of gods. This cosmic darkness is a dual awareness, entirely versatile. As it manifests as active destruction, it is also the yin energy, the darkened womb of new life. This is the shaman who stalks her own death. This is Christ who is warrior, protector, healer, and truth.

I have found that the most inspiring archetypes and philosophies and mysteries are the ones that seek not to cast out darkness but to integrate it fully. I'm not interested in locking myself away forever inside a bubble of white light. That's equivalent to running away from your own shadow -- it won't work, anyway. The shadow is part of the human capacity for divine sight -- it's our little piece of the Ajna-eye, and a far cry from the walls of the Black Iron Prison.

A Mind of Its Own?

Haeresis left a comment over on Max's blog that included a link to a page comparing a map of the internet to a neuronal map of the human brain. There are some striking similarities.

The hive mind is manifesting?

This Halloween

I'm going to be the Childlike Empress!