Not to Sound All Barbed-Wire Hedgehog, But--

The unspeakable, unbearable horror: of the infinite pain and cruelty of this world, and the cold, indifferent dark void in which this jewel of misery is set...

I used to think a lot about this...obsess over it, really. Every second births a new atrocity, a thousand of them somewhere...every hour begets incalculable heartbreak, and our little islands of contentment sit so precarious, so open to that next torrential disaster that must loom, ravening, over the horizon.

Yeeeeah. A pretty picture I made in my head of "reality," and since , as we all know, believing is seeing, external events usually tended to confirm it. In this state of mind, anything seems like a disaster, so confident is one in one's final, irrevocable doom.

My Divine Mother was always sending me little messages to the contrary. She sent me Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre, a song cycle by Current 93 about this very topic. She sent me Leaves of Grass, and Mary Daly, and my wild, witchy womyn friends who all ironically looked so normal they could crash a GOP bake sale, and a wacky transsexual pal who'd been dealt every shitty card in the pack three times and still was chipper as a baton twirling champ...slowly, I began to choose another way of seeing the world.

Where was I going with this? There was a punchline--oh, screw it. I'm off to my World Cup Al-Anon Challenge: a few days with my mom and brother. I may or may not blog from the Great White North...