Queen of Swords

Life has been A Bit Much for the past several weeks. 

In addition to the chaos and angst of the national political situation, my boss at the day job retired with only three weeks notice -- something virtually unheard of for an Executive Director in a large company. My team is now reporting to someone who seems nice enough but whose agitated energy is the exact opposite of the former boss's unshakeable calm, and new boss doesn't really understand my team's work, which has resulted in an inevitable amount of confusion and swirl. Fortunately my team has developed a very strong connection over the past three years and we're doing pretty well managing ourselves and supporting each other.

But with all the stress I started to dissociate while 'at work' (in my home office), and wasn't able to concentrate and actually do my job unless I had an immediate deadline or direct request. It went on for two weeks, to the point that I was starting to get scared. I contacted my nurse practitioner/psychiatrist and after a long conversation we agreed to boost my ADHD meds dosage, which has helped a lot. I've been off antidepressants for two years now, and we agreed that I probably didn't need them now, but I could use other support. 

So I found a new therapist and had a first appointment with him. There's a lot that's good in my life right now, but the job stress is real, and both my 91 year-old mother and younger sister are medically vulnerable, and the Daughter Previously Known as Wolfling has been under a lot of stress in her new job (even though she loves it) and hasn't been pitching in at home as a responsible roommate. As I prepared for the session, making notes about what I wanted to talk about, I realized -- to my great satisfaction -- that a lot of the big issues I've grappled with in therapy in the past are not issues anymore. I've resolved my grief over Uncrowned_King's passing. I've dealt with my father's death and all my complicated feelings about being known most of my life as His Daughter. I've resolved my past angst about having two master's degrees but working as an admin support person (which I am no longer doing, but I worked out those feelings before I got the new job). So that was a lot to celebrate. 

There's also been A Lot Going On in my spiritual life, but that's a topic for a separate post.

I just looked up the book "How We Learn to Be Brave" on Amazon (because I've been using a Kindle as long as they've been available), and found this notice, which I'd never seen before: "By placing your order, you're purchasing a license to the content and you agree to the Kindle Store Terms of Use."

When I clicked the Terms of Use, updated December 31, 2024, I found this: "Use of Kindle Content. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider." Which I presume means the license can be revoked at any time.

Which I also presume means that any content deemed objectionable by Bezos and Cronies can be yanked from us at any time, without recourse.

I had already cancelled my Prime membership and have been ordering from other places. This is the nail in the coffin of my relationship with Amazon. 

During college I was involved with two very different productions of Hamlet. One of them was while taking an English class taught by one of my school's legendary teachers. Each semester she offered either "Comedies and Histories" or "Tragedies and Romances." The class engaged in in-depth lectures and discussions about four or five plays, but one play was assigned purely for performance. The 80-person class (in a school where most classes had 10-12 people) counted off by 5. The number you got was the act of the play of the semester. The five groups met independently to organize themselves, rehearse, and ultimately perform that act of the play at the end of the semester. The act could be performed anywhere on the five connected campuses, and the epic Saturday performance was always attended by a lot of people who hadn't been in the class and often ended up walking more than a mile from site to site. I ended up playing Horatio in Act 1 of Hamlet, set in "a banana republic dictatorship." (Do people use that phrase anymore? This was the mid 1980's. . .) The next year I stage managed an uncut mainstage production, directed by the toughest, most demanding of our theater department professors that involved very deep dives into the text.

Because of those two experiences and their close proximity I became something of a Hamlet fan, and I love seeing different productions which illuminate different aspects of the play. I love being surprised by the different nuances actors bring to "To be or not to be" and other famous speeches and scenes. (Watching Derek Jacobi's Hamlet and Patrick Stewart's Claudius in the Moustrap scene and after was amazing. Stewart's "Give me some light. . ." went totally against every other interpretation I'd seen.)

Which brings me to the discovery of the theatrical release of "Grand Theft Hamlet," a production developed, cast, and performed within the video game Grand Theft Auto. The funny thing is that however outrageous it sounds, the trailer suggests a deeply sincere, insanely creative effort that I really, really want to see.

Hi everyone -- I'm back!

I've been missing the experience of community I had back in the heyday of LiveJournal, and realized the only way to re-connect to is to start putting myself back out here. The general flight from FB, as well as ongoing loneliness and a need to start recovering depth in my sharing, have motivated me to start making personal blogging a habit again.

Last year was a huge one for me, involving multiple significant firsts: stage managing for a community theater for the first time (and getting paid for it -- even if it was just a $500 honorarium), taking the solo road trip from Seattle to Los Angeles and back that I've been dreaming about since 1977, getting involved with the Linking Your Thinking community (more on that later), and moving from the Seattle area (where I've been since 1988) fifty miles south to an area I've been driving past all my life but never explored.

The move was because my daughter -- the being formerly known as Wolfling in my LJ posts -- is now 29 years old and has started a career as a funeral director. We've been living together the past few years and when she got her first professional job I had the option of finding a new place by myself (completely doable) or moving with her and continuing to enjoy the company and mutual support. I decided to move with her, and have been glad I did. We have a significantly larger apartment for $400 a month less rent, overall lower cost of living, and less-densely urbanized neighborhood. I was very sorry to move away from the theater I'd connected with, but there are other community theater groups nearby.

There's also a fencing school only ten minutes away, and I took an intro class two weeks ago. I'm going to start going there regularly in February. There's also a very nice massage place nearby and between our lower rent and a "competitive scale" salary increase last month I can afford a membership there and get regular massages.

Three years ago I finally got a day job that's not being an admin and that helped my overall mental health a lot. I'm working for the same org that I've been with since 2010 (although we got acquired four or five years ago), but now I'm in a position that combines editing, process documentation, knowledge management, and communications, so I'm able to bring some of my favorite skills to work. I have a very sweet boss and a great group of co-workers. I work for a national function now; my boss lives in southern California and my teammates are scattered across the country, so I get to work from home, which I love.

So overall my personal material situation is good. But I'm still struggling to recover the spiritual practices and depth, as well as creative wellspring, that more than a dozen years of depression following Uncrowned_King's death wrenched from me. Those years were not entirely arid. I did accomplish some wonderful things, but I'm not living as deep a life as I want to.

I don't usually choose themes for my years, but this year is a Strength year according to Mary Greer's tarot year card numerology system, and I really like the idea of adopting the harmonization of primal instinct and higher functions, intellect and passion, and the other symbolism of the card. I also like the idea of focusing on the more ordinary meanings of strength: potency, capacity, etc. Being depressed is exhausting, and I developed a mental habit of "I can't" because I simply didn't have the spoons. I'm still working on convincing myself that I can.

My other word is Passion. Uncrowned_King took most of my passion with him when he passed, and I'm still working on getting back my creative and spiritual fires. My physical ones too. . . At age 60 there are some physical shifts that I can't ignore (although an estrogen patch has been a great help), and I'm trying to explore how much of my lack of physical desire is connected to age, how much to U_C, and how much just to not having met anyone who excites me in a very long time.

I saw Kenneth Branagh’s “Much Ado About Nothing” in the theater (1993) and it’s taken me this long to suddenly develop the head canon* that “Sigh No More,” -- which Branagh placed at the very beginning of the movie, read by Beatrice to the household -- was *written* by Beatrice, about Benedict. But no one knows it’s about him. The book she’s holding is her very own “slim book of verse,” and it’s full of witty poems, many of them about the pitfalls and fallacies of love.


* For the non-fandom folks: head canon is a term which refers to a belief a person develops about a book/movie/comic/etc that can't be proven or disproven by the official material.

Last night's meditation was very fruitful.

I slept late and have promised myself some productivity around the house before a) going to the movie, b) buying new altar candles, c) going to the gym, d) going to the grocery store, so I need to get going on that. After washing my breakfast dishes.

I did write extensively in my journal both last night and this morning.

Happy Day After Christmas!

I realized yesterday that I haven't been looking forward to Yule or Solstice or Christmas as much as I've been looking forward to the coming week.

As someone who has worked as admin support for most of the past twenty years, the time between Christmas and New Year's was a nice time to come into the office and get paid without having much (if any) specific demands on me because the people I supported were almost always on vacation. It felt like having a bit of vacation without having to use the days.

But last year I decided that I was going to take those days as vacation this year. I finally have enough Personal Time Off saved, and because of the way the days fall, it's only requiring four of them to get a whole week. 

I'm going to be using this time to go deeply inside. . .  to reconnect with my own depths. I've been living in survival mode for a long time, keeping myself on the surface because I haven't had the energy (on several levels) to do otherwise. That's the primary intention, but I'm also going to be seeking Mystery, open to new ideas and impulses (while practicing discernment about the source of such things). 

During the days I'm working on getting the house more in order (still needing to help FoxGirl sort through her piles of belongings), and I still need to see 'The Rise of Skywalker' and "Knives Out." I'll do those as matinees, and settle myself into ritual space after dark. 

My dad grew up in Seattle, WA, and went to school in South Carolina. Every fall he would get on the train to Greenville and not come home again until summer. His favorite Christmas song, even into adulthood was "I'll Be Home for Christmas." For those not totally familiar with the song, the key lyric, at the very end of the song, is "I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams." It's a melancholy song, and I've never liked it much.

Since my dad's death three years ago, hearing it has been excruciatingly painful. Because it's not in my (seldom played) collection of holiday music, I only hear it when I'm in public, usually someplace like the grocery store. It makes me want to cover my ears and run. It makes all my pain about my dad's loss come crashing back, and I'm angry that he's no longer here.

Yesterday I was in the grocery store, shopping for food FoxGirl's and my Yule feast, and That Song came on. I winced. . . but then I felt I could hear my dad's voice. He reminded me that he had died from primarily natural causes at age 85, surrounded by his family, at the end of a good and happy life. It had been time for him go. His mind as well as his body had been breaking down, and it was a grace that he died when he did rather than lingering into full dementia or complete lack of mobility. He truly is in a better place now -- as I perceived shortly before his physical death when I got a sudden, powerful image of him doing cartwheels and shouting "Whoopee!" I can miss him, but I need to let go of my lingering grief and anger. 

I believed I heard his voice, and it gave me peace.

The grocery store soundtrack moved on to a brief advertising interval, and then the holiday music resumed: I'll Be Home For Christmas - again! - although by a different artist. And it was okay. I still don't like the song, but it didn't make me hurt.