I'm going...
where???
My god...don't I have to pack? Isn't that really far away? Isn't it going to cost a whole humongous buttload of money???
And I'm leaving...Monday?????????
The frontiers of typographic anxiety...how else can I format this text? If I do get a chance to post a dispatch or two from Paris, it'll be on a French keyboard and it'll probably lòök lìké thîs...
and apparently you're only supposed to hold the fork in your left hand...there's faux pas number 1...'cause I'm not going to, 'cause if I did I might drop my bite of cuisse de grenouille and dishonor America. But...I'll have the fork in my right hand, which is probably bad enough. And Sophia made some joke about my eating at Taillevent that was so funny that, though I have striven to suppress it for the nonce, I am going to remember it as I sit there with six waiters standing at attention around the table, and I am going to start laughing and wine is going to come out my nose and...serai l'americain laid.
You don't diss their wine. Especially not by nasally divesting yourself of it. And you don't act all friendly, either. Which will be another downfall, as I habitually greet even strangers with a little smile or nod, which is an American thing and in particular a southern American thing but you don't do it over there because it's weird and people could even think you are coming on to them, which is so totally totally totally not going to be the case but...el americano feo, otra vez...wrong language. And I'll probably speak Spanish by mistake once or twice and since France probably had a war with Spain 800 years ago that everyone is still bitter about, the espanol will be the final nail in my touristic coffin.
So I may as well go all the way and start when I get off the plane, greeting the City of Light by pumping my fist in the air and chanting "Bush, Bush, USA, kick ass!!!"...
And they've already had riots over the election that is going down right in the middle of my visit, on my birthday in fact, and so I can see myself living to "rue" that "to the barricades" remark in the previous post and being forced to camp out in the Arènes de Lutèce for two weeks or, if I'm lucky, the airport...at least I'm prepared for that eventuality with my iPod and my secret weapon...
And... I asked my Guardian Angel what my task was, what Grail I was supposed to seek in Paris...what awful dark rite I was supposed to enact (the day I get there is a dark-moon Tuesday, probably the most sacred day in the Shakta calendar)...
and do you know what this Angel, this praeterhuman intelligence, this holy dove of divine wisdom...
said?????????
"I want you to be there."
Hm.
"Well, I can be here. And save a whole lot of money."
"You're going to be homesick, but I want you to be homesick while still being true to yourself."
"So--I can't sit around and cry in Notre-Dame?"
"Just don't make it a habit."
"Be there." [snort]
"Are you making fun of me?"
Friday, April 13, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Awakening Osiris
So...I was telling you that Kali is doing something to me.
What?
%#&@ if I know. But it's one of those awakenings...some of them, to quote the old druggie adage, are long, strange trips, others are like being shot out of an atomic cannon...I've struggled like Hell to deprogram myself from that abrahamic idiocy which proclaimeth that I am fundamentally screwed up and so all spiritual growth must come from self-sacrifice...and from that western intellectual idiocy that says "they" already know all that's worth knowing and so it's all about me and the random experiences I can accumulate before my neurons blink out from oxygen starvation...so in this cannon-shot phase I feel like I am finally living the full antithesis of those old mind-cancers, feeling myself becoming lovable, beginning to see my own beauty...it sounds horrifically Oprah, I know, but it is so bitterly hard-won no earth-made blade could scratch it...
and all this from my attempts to create a life based on the dubious sometimes, still, notion that there is some big, nice Girl up there in the sky who loves me and watches over me...but damned if She doesn't infiltrate my reality in the most startling ways. Spring, here in Stonewall, is always dramatic, but I've never felt it the way I've felt it this year, and I've never been so alive to the Divine Mother's upwelling presence in the world. I've never been so conscious of an intelligence outside myself that is somehow orchestrating my life without my consent or understanding, like Martha Beck's Bunraku puppeteers. I think I'll just quote from my journal for a bit:
This springtime...has bloomed within me as a warm, languorous jungle of sensuality. I see Kali blooming in every flower, in spiral psychedelia of pollen in parking-lot puddles, in the pollen-hazed light, in emerald green of trees, in amethyst wisteria drooping like exhausted lovers from aching branches...Laura calls this "the Vision of Love."
"You've had the Vision of Sorrow," she said, "and now the Vision of Love, and both are equally valid--but which do you prefer?"
Obviously Love--but Her point was, "You have to stay in this. You can't go back to love as insecurity or selfish desire. You can't go back to trading love for acceptance and validation. You have to live in this Love as all there is, you have to participate in it. If you do, the Vision of Love is its own reward."
Kali prompts me: I get in the car yesterday to go have lunch with a co-worker, and music from Parsifal is on the radio; on the way home it's a pop song about angels and letting love in. I grab a cup of coffee after a sleepless, visionary night, and Laura's kabbalistic number is on the receipt, along with the cashier's name: Angel. Except I glimpsed the cashier's name tag, and it said Carolyn or Catherine or something, not Angel.
And, oh Goddess, right now I am listening to the most dramatic Sarah McLachlan song and feeling the most impossibly dramatic shakti surges within...I've joked with Sophia about spending most of my Paris sojourn weeping in some cathedral pew, bow'd before a rose window of Her unfolding, beautiful in its grace and terror...this is such a random post, I know, and in a way I wish it were simpler, that my life, that I were simpler...but I guess I need all 69 dimensions. All the ocean spray, tang of blood, sting of bourbon, cushiony soil flavor of truffles...bitter herbs, chocolate macaroons...all of She Whose love is better than ice cream...
What?
%#&@ if I know. But it's one of those awakenings...some of them, to quote the old druggie adage, are long, strange trips, others are like being shot out of an atomic cannon...I've struggled like Hell to deprogram myself from that abrahamic idiocy which proclaimeth that I am fundamentally screwed up and so all spiritual growth must come from self-sacrifice...and from that western intellectual idiocy that says "they" already know all that's worth knowing and so it's all about me and the random experiences I can accumulate before my neurons blink out from oxygen starvation...so in this cannon-shot phase I feel like I am finally living the full antithesis of those old mind-cancers, feeling myself becoming lovable, beginning to see my own beauty...it sounds horrifically Oprah, I know, but it is so bitterly hard-won no earth-made blade could scratch it...
and all this from my attempts to create a life based on the dubious sometimes, still, notion that there is some big, nice Girl up there in the sky who loves me and watches over me...but damned if She doesn't infiltrate my reality in the most startling ways. Spring, here in Stonewall, is always dramatic, but I've never felt it the way I've felt it this year, and I've never been so alive to the Divine Mother's upwelling presence in the world. I've never been so conscious of an intelligence outside myself that is somehow orchestrating my life without my consent or understanding, like Martha Beck's Bunraku puppeteers. I think I'll just quote from my journal for a bit:
This springtime...has bloomed within me as a warm, languorous jungle of sensuality. I see Kali blooming in every flower, in spiral psychedelia of pollen in parking-lot puddles, in the pollen-hazed light, in emerald green of trees, in amethyst wisteria drooping like exhausted lovers from aching branches...Laura calls this "the Vision of Love."
"You've had the Vision of Sorrow," she said, "and now the Vision of Love, and both are equally valid--but which do you prefer?"
Obviously Love--but Her point was, "You have to stay in this. You can't go back to love as insecurity or selfish desire. You can't go back to trading love for acceptance and validation. You have to live in this Love as all there is, you have to participate in it. If you do, the Vision of Love is its own reward."
Kali prompts me: I get in the car yesterday to go have lunch with a co-worker, and music from Parsifal is on the radio; on the way home it's a pop song about angels and letting love in. I grab a cup of coffee after a sleepless, visionary night, and Laura's kabbalistic number is on the receipt, along with the cashier's name: Angel. Except I glimpsed the cashier's name tag, and it said Carolyn or Catherine or something, not Angel.
And, oh Goddess, right now I am listening to the most dramatic Sarah McLachlan song and feeling the most impossibly dramatic shakti surges within...I've joked with Sophia about spending most of my Paris sojourn weeping in some cathedral pew, bow'd before a rose window of Her unfolding, beautiful in its grace and terror...this is such a random post, I know, and in a way I wish it were simpler, that my life, that I were simpler...but I guess I need all 69 dimensions. All the ocean spray, tang of blood, sting of bourbon, cushiony soil flavor of truffles...bitter herbs, chocolate macaroons...all of She Whose love is better than ice cream...
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