Queen of Swords

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.

After spending several hours going through and labeling each notebook with its dates, I found that I have 42 volumes of journals, including that first construction-paper bound assignment. (See previous entry.)

The most dense seem to come from my undegraduate years: six months to fill a notebook. Later in life, especially during very fraught times, the dates will span two years without filling all the pages. The notebooks vary wildly in size and style, and there are also at least 200 loose pages -- dated, but not bound. There's even a long length of paper toweling, from one of the bathrooms at a performance hall, which I used to write my feelings about my sister's performance in the title role of "Agnes of God," which I found so powerful and disturbing I couldn't go back for the second half after intermission.

I deliberately didn't try to read much, but as I scanned for dates some entries jumped out at me. Most were things I had forgotten, but which came rushing back to me as soon as I read the words. And it's been absolutely wild to see how radically my handwriting has changed over the years -- not just from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, but within those eras. When I was much younger I would re-read my previous journals on a regular basis. I can't remember the last time I did that -- but I'm going to start doing so soon. 

Sometime during or after my sophomore year of college (1985-86), almost certainly after my existential crisis decimated any sense of certainty I’d had about religion or anything else, I found the book on the left: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum. Etty was a 27 year-old Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam, and who started keeping a diary in 1941. Along with her observations about the war and the danger she and her fellow Jews were in, she wrote vividly about her intellectual, spiritual, and erotic life, which were all intensely intertwined. She strove to have what she called “a thinking heart.” I was utterly captivated the book, and it has stayed with me all the years since.

A few weeks ago I discovered – quite by accident – that the volume I owned was only a small portion of Etty’s diary. The book on the right is her Complete and Unabridged diary, along with the letters she wrote from Westerbork, a work camp where she was imprisoned before she was taken to Auschwitz. The unabridged volume is out of print, and I paid quite a bit for it, but it feels like one of the best expenditures I’ve made in a very long time. I feel like I am entering a “new octave” in my own life, integrating (finally) a lot of old lessons and releasing old aspects of my identity which went with them. Finding Etty anew at this time, and with so much more material, feels highly synchronous.

I haven’t had time to compare the texts yet, but the differences between the covers speaks volumes. The softly muted, pastel portrait on the left, with its demurely downcast eyes, hardly seems to have anything to do with the frank, bold, intense expression of the photograph on the right. It’s easy to suspect that there will be a great deal in this version which the previous editors found unsettling or uncomfortable, or which they feared their readers would not find appealing. I am looking forward to meeting Etty all over again, and I tremendously grateful for the thirty years of life and experience I’ve had since then. Years which were denied to her by anti-Semitic hatred and violence which still scar our world today. Her words are a gift. Her memory is a blessing.

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.

I was walking to the cafeteria at TempCo today, looking at the rows of nameplates belonging to people I still don't know after almost well over six weeks on the job, and I was suddenly struck by a startlingly intense wave of nostalgia for FormerMyCo.

As most of you may remember, I left in April without a single look back, didn't even stop to shake the dust from my sandals. But one thing I have to say about the folks there: I always felt valued, welcomed, and liked. (With the exception of Miss V, of course.)

I still don't know anyone at TempCo besides the four or five folks I work with directly, and two of them are temps as well. I'm not a part of anything there. I was often frustrated by my job at FormerMyCo, but the people were always great.

Today, I really miss them. I miss the conversations, the laughter, the regard in which I was held.

And really, that's kind of nice. It's nice to have the good memories.

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My first job, which I think I got in the summer after my sophomore year of high school, was as a hostess at an Elmer's pancake house. I greeted and seated customers and brought them fresh coffee. I got the job because the owner of the restaurant was a friend of my dad's.

I didn't mind the job that much. What I minded was that they would schedule me for particular hours, and then consistently keep me past that time by 30 minutes or more. When I spoke up about it, I was accused of being a "clock watcher." My response was that I didn't mind working longer hours, and I was fine staying past my usual shift sometimes, but this happened almost every shift, and it made it hard to plan other activities.

I quit after a couple of weeks and got a job at McDonalds instead. I'm pretty sure I enjoyed McDonalds more, and they kept their schedule much more consistently.

To this day I don't mind staying late if there are occasional circumstances that require extra work -- but I deeply resent any employer who has an attitude that they can require me to stay past my commitment just on a whim and then get upset if I resist.

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Yes, I served on a jury three years ago.

It was a DUI case, in which the defense maintained that the defendent had not been under the influence of alcohol when he'd been pulled over, but suffered from a chronic medical condition that caused unsteady limbs and that's why he had failed the roadside sobriety tests.

We found him guilty after about four hours of deliberations.

It was a fascinating process, and I'd like the chance to serve again.

My sophomore year of college was one of huge pain and transition spiritually. My difficult freshman year had been made easier by a truly special group of friends in the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship group to which I belonged, but when I returned after a year's leave, more than half the people I had known had graduated, and the overall character of the group had shifted significantly to the conservative side. I no longer felt comfortable there -- and when my existential crisis hit, everything went out the window and I would lie in bed every night and struggle with The Void.

During this time, a fellow student whose name I can't even remember now shared with me a book called Growing Into the Blue, by Ulrich Schaffer. It's a collection of poetry about pain and growth and serenity illustrated with beauitiful photographs. The words of those poems captured beautifully the kinds of feelings I was experiencing.

As usual, a good night's sleep has helped me recover after last night's crash, but one of the first things I did this morning was take down Blue and page through it, something I haven't done for years. The words were like old friends. . .


I follow my built-in compass.
I hone my instincts.
I reevaluate my guidance system.
I let go of ballast.
I test my wings.

I don't make bargains with half-measures.
I am on the road of learning.
I see the clarity of mirrors grow.
I spell my way to understanding.
I don't want an illustrious standstill.
I am perpetual motion.
Standing still is the motion of rest.

I have one goal: to touch the blue.
I want limitlessness as my ultimate skin.
I am not content with numbing repetition.
I want the cutting edge,
the lifted boundaries,
the forging vanguard,
the brazenness of life,
a cut of the unencumbered.

This is the profile of which I have to remind myself.

Via pathdancer

( Cut for a) length, b) Teh Woo, c) Unabashed Sentimentality )

First, this lovely commercial created and aired by Bjorn Borg, courtesy of an LJ friend who posted it in a locked entry and so who will remain nameless.



This made me smile. A lot.

Then I suddenly remembered a time when the exact same imagery did not make me smile.

( Thirty years ago I was homophobic. )

I would blush for the girl that I was, except that I don't know how she could have been any different, living in the world she did. I had to get out into the wider world and actually meet gays and lesbians before I overcame my homophobia.

I am, however, proud that sexual orientation, gender identification, and monogamy/polyamory are all non-issues for my own almost-thirteen-year-old daughter. She doesn't care about how peoples' plumbing fits together, or in what combinations, or how it may have been modified. All she cares about is whether or not people are kind to each other, loyal, honest, and fair.

Wolfling probably wouldn't think twice about this commercial, one way or the other, just as she doesn't really understand the significance of having a black man become president of the United States.

My daughter is growing up in a different world than I did -- and she's a more compassionate, more just person than I was at her age.