༄ཽ

We don't need to believe in any sort of explanation for our existence to exist. There is no need to understand some explanation of the genesis of our lives and all their complexities to experience it.

Without caring about the narrative, we can continue to live in all our mysteries and simple wonders. I think that's the important part.

Sometimes I think dysphoria is a sign that something inside us is still not completely broken and buried, something is still alive. I don't know what to say about dysphoria except it's like breathing and heartbeat, but not the physical one, maybe it means life, a different life, and the only answer I have and want to have for the deep powerful feelings is "yes", although many a time human life shakes its head and goes "not now, later maybe". And then, being swept along again like a leaf in the wind.

Today I flew into the clouds for the first time. The ground vanished, everything vanished. Only a whispy grey quietness... like drifting through a fine early morning mist, like floating in an other world.

No sound except cloud softly whistling past.

The dew of heaven covered me like the lightest, coolest silk.

Then I dived, also for the first time. The cloudless air beneath the tendrils of stratus licked away all the moisture that covered me as I plunged, freefall in the blink of an eye.

I drew lazy circles high above a forest, where the leaves were changing colour wreathed in soft twilight mist. It was so pretty. So much air to play around in. There was a feeling that wanted to burst out of my chest. To screech out to the world in a forceful call, a declaration of becoming.

I guess now I'm "baptised" by the sky.

I feel different. Very different.

But it is a different that is hidden deep within, like an invisible aura, a quiet strength, a humble secret.

Now when I go around I see humans busy and fretting their little lives on the ground and it all feels so insignificant, all so muted, so distant. Like I'm not one of them, I've moved beyond, I'm something other in ways that they will never know, in ways more than phantom experiences and non-human natures. Those I was pretty much born with, but my flight was earned. They've spent their whole lives on the ground. I've been one with the sky.

When I decide to do something, often there are many steps to it - and I get stuck in an early step, or in between steps. For example, when I want to do a certain craft, one of the early steps is research and references. Then, it stops, and my attention is taken away for minutes that turns into months. Or, maybe I do the research, and then it's time to gather the materials needed. I plan a big shopping trip, I save away the money, and then I hit the art store and get back home really happy with all the stuff I'd gotten. Supplies! Tools! Hurrah! And then I unpack and lay them out, and prepare the workspace, and then...

 

It gathers dust. Or gets stuff put on top of it. I look at it, and think, I'd like to do that. Then, it still doesn't happen.

 

I wonder, why I get stuck like that? Am I so fickle, is my motivation that transient? Even after investing the money into it? Sometimes I wonder if I work better with chaotic crafts rather than iterative, step-by-step crafts, because natural breaks between steps cause me to stop there, and once stopped, it's difficult to get started again. But, in chaotic crafts, ones requiring work in no particular order... web design is a good example of this... I really get ahead of myself. I graphically craft something beautiful, or I crack some programming logic puzzle - or both. And then, I find that for me to continue, I have to go back and do something, and then I jump to another thing once I'm done that - I have about a dozen things going on at once, and I dart between all of them like a bird flits from tree to tree, and every so often something gets completed and other things get started and woven in. Structure takes form of its own accord - giving the thing structure itself, all the different kinds of structure it could possible have, is one of those random tasks that fit into the chaos.

 

And that's the way I write, too. I don't write linearly. I don't start with an introduction, or character, or chapter. I start with an idea, and... they just chaotically emerge and assemble. It's as if the story in both space and time exists somewhere and I'm randomly popping into the timeline, into the places, of the world and what happens right then appears with varying degrees of clarity, and I try to spill it out into words, and then I'm whisked to a completely different place and time. Scenes in the late story spring to life in minute meta-detail, then something at the start, then a couple paragraphs near the end get written, quotes from various parts of the story appear, a barrage of ideas gets woven into the world canon, the world slowly shapes itself and reshapes itself from all the pieces as they come together.

I sometimes wonder if that's even how I exist. A flickering candle, in and out. With my identity, there is no starting point. It's not a linear progression of understanding. There is no groundedness - I'm not a creature of the land; there is fluidity, but it's not like the current of water. I'm like the air, the sky, the wind, blowing and then switching, full of eddies and gutters and swillages and scuppers and baggywrinkles, even tumblebones. Things from the past echo of the future; things in the present were told of in the past in head-slappingly obvious ways that were impossible to accept or understand until the future. My life gets shattered and burned and re-formed in strange, chimeric ways. The call of my heart is a song, a deep and powerful song, but I only catch snatches of it, instances, echoes. Momentary clarity - like that of several days a while ago when it was again revealed what I had to do, what was important - and then I get shunted to a different part of the song, or even a completely different and much softer song from another part of the heart, or somewhere else entirely. When the song becomes deep and steady, when I am once again re-formed completely and safe, perhaps that is when I will be able to live and understand and burn steady, again, and fulfill the life-path I must fly.

Now that I know what a reference is, for artistic purposes, and I would like one made, I can begin creating one. Finding the pieces of one from symbology and thought, and weaving together, sketching endlessly until the last line falls into place. I have this issue as I'm a phoenix, but depicting my phoenix self visually simply doesn't feel right. It's too deep, too deep and raw, perhaps spiritual; it does not manifest in a physical form although it manifests in alternate natures, tendencies, perspectives, yearnings that can be best described as an avian experience within the constraints of the human lifetime. Giving it a mask and saying, this is me, feels very weird.

But, creating something that artistically embodies what it values and can act as an avatar, that's something that sits well, that I would like very much. Art is about expression. All expression is necessarily not complete, they are actions, not things. They are actions that derive from the same mystical source inside* that makes us who we are. They are things that develop over time, that can be done repeatedly, that brings joy, that brings serenity.

So, what I create in expression... will not be me. But that's alright; it is not meant to be me, but a depiction of things from deep inside, using contemporary symbology. The expression is an action that is both symbolic in its depiction as well as in the symbols are woven into the artistic creation: all little ways to incorporate fractions of the being to create an alternate whole, an avatar.

This is what I want to work on weaving together. And mayhaps I'll need, or would like to, go on a journey to find the threads to weave it with.

yes.

I was just thinking, how the land I was in, feels bad... feels like poison. It's a really vast landscape of forested wilderness home to wolves and moose and deer and foxes and so many birds, but it feels wrong, negative, which makes me very uncomfortable. It's not like what nature is like in the places that feel welcoming, like home. I was thinking about this because I wanted to bring some lake water when I go home, as an offering to an old tree with spirit, a tree with Ga, that had comforted and guided me when I felt really lost and alone. (Maybe, the kami of the tree.) But I decided that I shouldn't bring back water from here, because it just feels... wrong, I don't know how else to describe it. Water is a very important thing to me and I can feel it, more than other things like stones and even animals.

The water here, and the land - the plants, the rivers, the entire forest in all its pieces - feels like it's been poisoned, badly, and it feels like the land reacts by also being a little poisonous in its energy? Poisoned by really nasty human activities, wounded so deeply in so many ways. Being in pain, and so, hostile.

It reminds me of something from the Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaa of the Valley Wind.  think it's a very good film, but part of it that's very interesting, is how the wilderness is all poisonous, all the plants are deadly and so some human societies try as much as they can to wage war on it and suppress it, to very extreme points.

But then there's a scene where princess Nausicaa is crying in a secret chamber in her castle and the sensei who has been looking for her discovers the secret entrance and finds her in the room, and the room was like a garden filled with the most toxic plants from all over. So the sensei was shocked and immediately recoils in terror.

But the princess explains that all of the plants are harmless, and actually have wonderful properties, magical and medicinal... because they've been grown using purified water from a spring beneath the castle, the whole castle is actually a windmill and it brings up clean water from deep in the Earth. And that it's just the humans poisoning the land that has turned the land dangerous and hostile and poisonous... but then when given the chance to live in a healthy place with clean water they're actually so beautiful and wonderful.

This place feels like that, it feels like the tragedy from the film being enacted... the land is in pain, it saddens me, and the people on the land are afflicted by some kind of malaise that spreads and makes even the cities, the culture here, the people from here, feel so different and discomforting, even dangerous, like they're trying to spread the disease to me... and yet by being here I feel like I'm contributing to it somehow, making it worse for myself and the land. I'm supposed to be working for conservation but it really seems meaningless, because the industrial activity will continue, and the industry controls the society here, and I'm supporting and a part of the industry actually while trying to do some good at my job... which is dragging me down actually... so my job actually feels really meaningless because of that, it's just a thing to earn my freedom as a person allowed to exist and maybe earn a tiny bit of money, but I really want to get out of here. There is so much more life in other places. Here, only industrial activity and a decaying earth.

I have some water from Lake Superior, and Lake Huron, I've been keeping it specially for some ritual purpose, and I think maybe I'll make that purpose to make an offering to the tree, to thank and honour it. Those two lakes are to me the greatest of the great lakes, strong and pure and true, and welcoming like home. I carry a jar of lake superior water with me when I travel, it's not much, but it really helps.

As we live, grow, and learn, sometimes our old long-standing beliefs turn to mush.

Ultimately, life is a great mystery.

But it's a wonderful mystery.

If life is enjoyed, does it have to make sense?

Okay, but actually, before all that preening, I wanted to make a note: As part of my job today I was going to walk down a dirt road with a lot of grass on both sides, and then forest, basically a large path cut through the forest for some pipe or power lines with a maintenance trail down the middle. I was wearing a rain jacket because it was raining, with my hood up. I was paying attention to how much skin surface I was presenting to mosquitoes, basically just my hands and my face. Then, a thought popped into my head and I suddenly wished very strongly for a bird mask, like the missmonster one Tsu has, or even a dragon or wolf mask, and claw/talon gloves. I imagined myself walking with my bird head instead of a human face poking out from under the hood, and scaly digits clutching the gps in one hand, in my rainjacket and work pants and tall rubber boots. I imagined, if some people were to just be walking or offroading on this dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and see this anthro bird boy walking towards them, their possible reactions... actually, I had a brief stab of fear at being shot if I was seen, haha. But I was so focused on the idea I think it triggered very subtle and partial phantom shifts and mental shifts. I could feel my snout/beak, sometimes both at the same time, and for the rest of the day I was very animalistic and very happy that I could be like that even during my human job, as I ran through the thick forest following almost invisible paths a lot more silently and without losing my balance, crouched over and not touching branches or obstacles, just knowing where my next step should be, alert to any sound or movement in the forest all around... My co-worker could barely keep up or see where I was going, had to keep getting her bearings... eventually we decided to split up and she would do the tasks close to the dirt road and I would do the ones deep in the forest. (Our job was to record plants, the project wanted to answer why plant communities change when big permanent paths like pipelines and power lines are cut through the woods.)

Anyway, it was a nice little thing. But  wish I could have something to wear to fit what I feel, to be more like what I am, not for attention or whatever - probably nobody will see me really - but just for being. I think it would be strange to a lot of people but I don't think it's so strange that I shouldn't do it.

And, a mask and claw gloves would hide the last pieces of my human flesh from mosquitoes, a mask with good harder shape would even be a safety thing against running into branches and spruce needles tall thorny stems and stuff, and gloves would make me less afraid to use my fore-arms in a quadrupedal way. A mask would limit my field of view though, I wonder if they make super-realistic masks but where the eyes still have full field of vision because of optics or special placement or something...

Also, I talked to some ravens when my co-worker was away. And I was talking to one, just general banter, but then she heard and yelled through the forest "was that you?" which was very jarring in the peace of the forest and I really didn't want to talk using human words so I just shut up and pretended I didn't make any sound or heard any sound... I didn't dare to talk in raven any more right then even though the raven tried to talk to me more over the next little while before giving up and leaving. Made me feel a bit sad. I haven't had a nice chat with a raven for a long time.

Update: I'm remembering Tsu's post, it's a monster day, and it's a thing of inspiration. I don't mind being monster. I wish I could be. Even just for a day.

I was coming home from my meditation session in unexpectedly good weather, and had such a wonderful content state from the really insight-inspiring session that I had ample room to be able to weave together a greater understanding of my spirituality, my spiritual journey, my path in this life.

I'm walking the path of the wise, which is Wicca in its basic sense. It is a path built on my connection to nature intrinsic in my understanding of and relation with this world. My experiences are visceral and native. They're spiritual and animistic yet without the need for intermediary symbols or mythologies such as deities.

I am on journeys of wisdom, ancient wisdom. And the journeys I walk and fly can be summed up in one word - balance.

Balance of my life experience. Balance between the worlds inside and out, including attunement with my natures and my place in the natural world. Protecting the core of my being and a state of magic, happiness and freedom, even nurturing that connection with the natural world while living amongst human society and respecting other perspectives of the universe. Finding the peace, freedom and groundedness to maintain that balance through the buddhist teachings and practices of compassion and freedom from delusions, freedom from suffering.

Balance, to invoke and live the magic of the earth and sky, the magic from within, the magic woven from all the varied life paths and spiritualities that come together in a melting pot of stories and experiences to lend light and wonder to our lives on this blessed Earth.

I believe firmly that it is possible, in this life, to find and never lose balance, and attain freedom from suffering, and live a life of magic. And, also, to help others do the same. The path there in this life, the path of ancient wisdom, the path of the wise, is my spiritual journey.

It is a worthy one. And, it is the journey that counts, the journey is always onward and upward, is always wonderful, is always magic.