Healers and Horses: Just ask the devil, honey...even angels fall!

"All my friends know the low rider

The low rider is a little higher"

War

"I'm not that kind of angel." -
John Travolta as Archangel Michael



I totally stole a portion of the title for this post from a song written by my nephew Austin Webb, because it's catchy and it's true.  At a very young age, Austin understands the duplicity we inherit the moment our spirit touches ground...and the pain we experience in our attempts to rediscover the whole.

I know, I know.  I'm beating the same dead horse here.  Duh.

Speaking of horses, did you know that the height of your horse is directly proportional to the size of the bruise you're gonna have on your ass when you fall?

Only a spiritual fool confuses being "above it all" with the idea of "compassionate boundaries."  Just saying.  There is no compassion in condescension and judgment.  And organic spirituality is a ground level experience.

And if this sounds cocky and cryptic, it is.  But if I fall off the horse, I won't fall too far.  I'm not that kind of healer.  Shoot, I might not even mess up my hair.  Yep, I'm riding one of these in this life:

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I see my friends up close and personal, warts and all.  And when they see me, I don't mind.  We're human, which means we're all pretty stupid sometimes.  When you can acknowledge this in yourself and laugh about it, you are on the road to recovery from "optical rectumitis". 

Moral of the story?  If you're going to ride the high horse, get your head out of your ass so you can see where you're going.  You might make the finish line completely unscathed and, quite possibly, untouched.

Peace and love my bitches!



Kings, Queens, Assholes and Bitches...and something about pie!

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Regardless of sexual orientation, any partnership is a human example of duality that seeks "the one."    Masculine energy seeks feminine energy for balance, and vice verse.  I believe this applies to friendships as well. 

Sounds simple doesn't it?

Not on your life.  This song and dance is about as simple as baking a pie without an oven.  All the ingredients are there, but the sweetness just sits and denies potential.  And even if you have an oven, temperatures vary.  In a specified time frame, one attempt may turn out runny and doughy and look like crap on your plate...while another just might get burned and have to be thrown in the trash.  (Forgive me, I love analogy.  It's how I process life.)

I think the struggles begin with who is responsible for what.  Who will gather the ingredients?  Who will bake the pie?  Obviously, gender roles have evolved to a point where this isn't as confusing as it used to be.  I love to watch men cook.  My personal favorite has the word bacon tattooed on his arm...very sexy!

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And Paula Deen ain't no shrinking violet.  She has bigger balls than a lot of men I know.  I love this about her.  To me she exemplifies yin and yang in the kitchen...all feminine grace and masculine strength, a combination that makes her a hero to me.  She is my example of the art of giving and receiving.  And I picked this photo because she's all black and white and holding a very LARGE pepper grinder.  Pretty phallic huh?

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So Kings and Queens can reign supreme in the kitchen (except when it comes to homeade pie), but where are they in relationships these days?  It seems we're evolving the traditional aspects of partnership into gray areas where the original pleasures of simply being a man (King of the Hill) and a woman (The Queen) are becoming androgynous - or from a spiritual perspective, the masculine and the feminine are becoming less pronounced in the daily contraction and expansion of the energy between two people.  I realize that this may only make sense to me.  And maybe those two people in Russia who never miss a blog post. 

This might make more sense.  Assholes and Bitches are the alter egos of Kings and Queens.  And I believe this is, in part, due to the aforementioned gray areas.  If you are born with a penis, you want to be King of the Hill.  But how?  It used to be easy.  All you had to do was bring home the bacon, kill the spiders, fix whatever was broken and do whatever it took to make your partner feel cherished and protected.  In exchange you received support, attention, meals and applause just for being a man.  Oh, and nice sex.  And if you didn't get sex, nice or otherwise, it was acceptable to have a mistress.  A simple formula that worked.  If you are born with a vagina, you want to be THE Queen.  But how?  That also used to be easy.  All you had to do was bat your eyes and be the damsel in distress because the King knew how to fulfill his role by coming to your rescue. 

Blah, blah.  The Cleavers must have been incredibly bored.  Well, she was.  And I have never looked this good in the kitchen.

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Obviously this isn't breaking news.  We struggle with redefining ourselves in this modern world.  And the shift in consciousness may contain seemingly far-fetched ideas, but something is beginning to change at a rate so fast that we have to notice. 

Have we come this far only to realize that we've gone too far? 

Overall weird, I know.

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KS:  I am the Queen! I am the Queen!
RL:  Hide your dick!  Hide your dick!

And ewwwww, just ewwwww...  Source

Pillow Talk Around the World

From a distance, you look like my friend

even though we are at war...Bette Midler (Julie Gold)

Long before I moved to Atlanta and wandered into my first blues joint, I was a Carolina girl.  I had big hair, big cars and a big tendency to find myself in funny situations. Or maybe I convinced myself they were funny.  Those were some tough years, but a sense of humor did get me through.

At age 20,  I had one of those "love at first sight" experiences - an 18-year old Palestinian who had just arrived and was getting his first taste of America.  Seriously, it was like one of those scenes in a movie when boy meets girl, eyes lock and you just know that nothing will ever be the same.  And it wasn't.

I don't know who was more naive.  He taught me how to say I love you and hairbrush (hair has always been important to me) in Arabic, and I taught him how to kiss.  Not that I was all that experienced. I was a late bloomer when it came to intimacy. But I do remember that we were young and pillow talk consisted of his stories of growing up in Beirut, Lebanon...bombings, studying by candlelight and poor vision at a very young age as a result, Yasser Arafat making his rounds to check on everyone, his mother struggling to raise three sons alone because his father died in his 40's, his mother worrying every time her sons left the house.  Forget the history books or the news, he took me there.  I could only share a life in rural South Carolina and my earliest memories of desegragation...riding my bike through corn fields, marching bands, my mother's health food store on Main Street, climbing trees and then crying for my mother to get me down (coming down is always the scary part).  And somehow it all made perfect sense that we were together at that time.  People are just people right? 

We were both so caught up in our own little world that the consequences caught us both off guard.  Did I mention that he was a virgin and we made a baby the very first time?  I said we were both naive didn't I?

The next two years were interesting.  The oldest brother was flown to America to oversee this situation since he was the man of the house.  I will never forget oldest brother.  He was very stern as he lectured me about his people.  Needless to say, I got my first real taste of culture clash...something I had never considered.  He told me they didn't do these things (really?) and that there were required classes in abstinence.  I wasn't much of a smartass then, but I remember telling him that little brother obviously skipped his. It was the weirdest experience of my life.  I can still see him standing in front of me, all serious and pointing fingers.  I was too curious and incredulous to say much. I was taking it all in.  There was an Arabic man outside my classroom door in Greenville, South Carolina...lecturing me.  I half wondered if Arafat was on his way to save my little Palestinian from the wicked Western whore!  I didn't argue with him, I intuitively knew better. 

I knew that his family was going to make him come home and that was that. 

My parents kept our precious little girl so that we could spend one last night together, and the next morning he took a taxi to the airport and I got up and got ready for work.  The sudden separation was worse than the flu and all the sickness was in a race to come out, as quickly as possible.  But I got over it and focused on raising a daughter.

Something was awakened in me by that connection and my spiritual journey began, for that experience was on a level of existence that knew nothing of segregation, religious wars and walls. These things seemed irrelevant.

Actually, it has always seemed irrelevant to me.  I can't stomach the media with its graphic and glorified production of what's going on in this world.  We watch in horror and disgust, then change the channel.  And if we talk about it at all, we take sides.  If you ask me, money isn't the root of all evil...it's taking sides.

Duality exists because of these sides and walls are a manmade construct.  Bridges are far more useful.

KS:  How do I get past this wall?
RL:  Silly girl, stop climbing...walk!

Ting Tang Walla Walla Yin Yang

I told the witch doctor you didn't love me nice
And then the witch doctor, he gave me this advice
He said to ...

Witch Doctor - David Seville (Ross Bagdaserian Jr)

So my husband and I finally found ourselves on the "same page" for the first time in I don't know how long.  Quite a few pages actually, since even an uncontested divorce with a signed settlement agreement is quite lengthy.  

He's still in the house which is providing us with all sorts of opportunities, ranging from silence to somewhat friendly chit chat...and sometimes anger.  Mostly mine. I am the one who wears my heart on my sleeve and he is the wall I bang my head against.  Neither of us is right and neither of us is wrong.  It simply is what it is. 

And while it is my nature to question the underlying reasons for relationships at any stage, I am not immune to getting caught in the trappings of human angst along the way. 

Don't get me wrong.  I want this divorce.  I need this divorce.  We both do. But right now I'm feeling very angry and I don't know why.  I know it's a normal part of the process, but I want to know why. 

A friend of mine told me that my husband and I were like two children in a sandbox, with a line drawn between our toys.  This is a very good analogy as far as I'm concerned.  I showed him my toys, even the broken ones.  He guarded his.  And we're both fiery, strong-willed Leos who love to have a good time and make things fun for others.  Unfortunately, we sure didn't make things fun for each other.  Here's a good place to mention that I had an astrological reading some months ago and when I told the astrologer that my husband and I were born three days apart in the same year he had to check that out.  He told me that I was in the process of redefining myself (I thought everyone was) and that he would never have put the two of us together.  He was so matter-of-fact that his statement lingered and my thoughts were drawn to visions of why this would be true.

Relationships are just a hot evolutionary mess, but make no mistake about it...the most difficult relationships are the ones we need to pay attention to.  Difficult relationships teach us more than the easy ones I believe.  That's why they're so uncomfortable.  But when you find yourself banging your head against a wall it's time to wake up.

I'm awake for the first time in years.  I feel like I've been crawling through a tunnel through all manner of unnamed shit and debris.  There was no light and I had to feel my way.  Needless to say, my knees and elbows are bruised and bleeding and I don't smell so good right now. 

Call me crazy, I am grateful.  Just when I think I'm ready to receive, I find that once again I have very cleverly set up yet another road block. 

If you look back and you're honest with yourself, you will recognize every time that you have done that as well. 

How can I be angry with someone for not giving me what I want, when I deliberately attracted someone I knew would never give it to me in the first place?  That's why I'm angry.  That is the only reason we are ever angry, I think. 

I'll figure it out.  We all will.  If not this life, the next.

Bing bang!

If I Didn't Know Now What I Didn't Know Then

Can you you feel it, see it, hear it today?

If you can't, then it doesn't matter anyway.

 - Epic by Faith No More

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you could "unknow" every hurtful thing that has ever happened to you?  Imagine if you could mentally and emotionally go back in time to the moment before those hurtful things occurred...and you lived in those moments instead, only in the present. 

What?????

According to my opinion of  Eckhart Tolle, that would be the power of now.  I read that book some years ago.  The language drove me crazy and the message was repeated so many times that my brain wanted to do a quantum leap into any moment other than the one where I was holding that book and forcing myself to "get it."  The fact that I was forcing myself and trying to understand it intellectually is probably proof that I didn't "get it" at all. 

And what is IT? 

Here's where I admit that I had no idea what I was going to say next until I did a search for an image to go with this article.  Basically, Kimmy Sue (cute, country and ever so smart) thinks of a clever title and waits for Ruby Lou (big, bold, black, wise and funny) to show up (and grab KS by the overalls, maybe smack her upside the head) and figure it out.  I googled "power of now" and found this:

See The Crafty Girl Blog for Source

KS:  Wow, that is so cool!  RL:  Slow down Kimmy Sue, take a moment to look at the source this time.

I'm glad I did take a moment.  This image led me to the artist Kelly Angard and her amazing fine art and photography website where I found this:

http://kellyangard.com/2009/11/life-lesson/



KS:  Well I'll be damned, is that IT?  RL:  Maybe.
KS:  Give me a moment.  RL:  Take your time.

Okay, so maybe that isn't exactly what I started with but by some quirk of fate I think a moment just happened.  And I didn't once think about getting a boob job.

Darn it...it's gone.