Journal Personalizing

Can anyone tell me how to modify an existing journal template to have your own images/pattern instead of the standard one?

Becoming a Pirate Queen

I have decided to become a Pirate Queen.

Real life pirates are thieves and murderers, but on the archetypal level to be a Pirate Queen means to embrace freedom, to make one's own rules, to declare one's own sovereignty, to be bold, to joyously disregard convention, and to actively search out adventure.

I have not taken leave from my own real life and I'm not going to burn my bridges unless or until I have firmly arrived on new shores. But I am going to start spicing things up, taking risks so I can reach for rewards, and caring far less about what "they" might think.

This decision emerged, surprisingly, during a conversation with my new spiritual director. Inspired by my recent reading of Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts (one of the factors in my recent healing), I had made a collage of images of pleasure. When I showed this to AA, she made it part of the altar and asked me to talk about it. Very soon, the conversation started to focus in on the images of piracy, and what they meant to me. Soon I found myself affirming that the best, most satisfying times of my life have occurred when I was somehow "outside the lines," and that true pleasure for me included freedom and not feeling constrained by what "they" thought was best/wisest/most prudent/respectable/etc.

From there, it was a short step to affirming and celebrating my inner Pirate Queen, and that's when the energy started surging -- and it hasn't let up since.

( Just a few of my images of pleasure )

Taking Both

I've been having complicated dreams recently, as might be expected from the amazing shifts going on in my life.

During one of last night's dreams, I was being interviewed by a man for an unknown reason. He was unfamiliar to me, a suit-wearing, generic "businessman". One of the questions he asked referred back to my year of having both uncrowned_king and _storyteller_ as lovers and partners. "Do you think you're more mature now than you were then?" he asked.

In the dream and later when I was awake I couldn't tell if he was asking if I was more mature now so that I wouldn't do such an immature thing again, or if being with them had helped me mature.

Whatever his meaning, I know I am indeed more mature now -- and if given a chance and the same caliber of partners I would do it again.


I've been pondering why my subconscious chose that image and that question (assuming it wasn't just random static images). . . And I'm wondering if it was a backhanded way of asking me if I was prepared to be in a relationship again, since all my relationships are going to be polyamorous from this point, given my ongoing involvement with uncrowned_king.