29 October 2010

farewell reel

Me again. If you've read more than one post in this blog, you are aware that i've never quite settled on what i want it to *be* - which shouldn't surprise me, as i've never quite settled on that about myself either, even after a half-century of trying to figure it out.

i know i don't want this to reflect my inner ramblings and quirks; if and when i feel like sharing those with the outside world, well, i've got a space for that. Yet ask a Pisces not to talk about her feelings, or vague, mystical pronouncements? HA! Well, you can ask. Just don't hold your breath waiting. Unless you're into that sort of thing.

However, by the time this posts, it will be a new year. Yes, it will. For me. i observe a modified Celtic-eclectic version of the Wheel of the Year, and if i say its new - just don't argue, ok? And since new years are for new things, let's try something new here.

Whurgh. That's already three paragraphs of expository rambling, and if its taking me this long to get to the point, then - maybe what i'll do is make this post the LAST of the old year, and put up the New Improved Active Avoidance a few days later, how's that. Fine. Glad we got that settled.

As of next week, then, i am going to attempt - as a personal discipline - to post twice a month, summing up the events and projects i've been involved with since the previous post. i always have a million things going on; i really should be talking about them here. Consider this a farewell to the old paradigm Active Avoidance, then, and tune in next time to find out what wacky hi-jinks your narratrix has been up to this time! (hint - big favorite holiday weekend.. should be a good one).

Oh, one more thing. With the temporary discombobulation of my beloved Nettie, this blog is going to have to remain picture-free until i can get her a new screen. i'm still *taking* pics; i just don't have a way to upload them without the ability to plug in a memory card - which my iMac doesn't possess. You shall have to illustrate my befuddling variety of misadventures *with your mind*. See? Challenges for me, challenges for you. Its going to be an equal-opportunity kind of blog.

14 October 2010

Dark Lodge summer slight return

Once again, everything's gone arse over teakettles in wolfkittenland. Stability, i do not know ye. i'm still close enough to young i can laugh delightedly: whee and whoopsie-daisy! but the era of living out my days in an abandoned boxcar get less romantic as they loom larger on the horizon.

Ah but fie on that for today. Today i awakened in a snug little bed in a pretty new apartment - well, not new since the last time; i'm not THAT unstable i hope! - hailstones pattering my window. And i could lay contentedly under the covers and listen until they were done; no rushing out to Leeloo Dallas Moolti Jobs today.

Ah yes, i am once again employed. And employed. And busy as ever. And yet curiously still well below the poverty line; i guess i took that vow in a life i no longer recall, but still seem bound by it. My mornings now are filled with birds - i'm the bird room assistant in the warehouse section of a major pet store chain. Lots of poop and screeching; but i'm left to myself better than three-quarters of the time, my head free to roam while my hands do what they must. Afternoons are 'free' but so far have been filled with one and another small side gig. Two evenings a week i have the Clinic, teaching women's health exams to medical students. After that its off to the theater, tho by the end of this week that will only be weekends. Two days off a week, but not consecutive and alternate Thursdays aren't really 'off' at all as that's the day i clean a yuppie condo. No statue work til next summer alas, as that makes me nearly as much dosh as the Clinic job; however, one way and another and another i'm staying just barely afloat and that's what matters.

Aside from that, i've returned to a world i thought i left behind a quarter century ago, and that may be the strangest of all. Once upon a time, in a journal far, far away, i undertook to write a 'small' history of all the strange places i've been in my life. Strange in internal ways; i'm no world traveller despite my gypsie leanings. i couldn't compose such a thing and not include the events of 1987-88, my Basketcase summer; an era with a strongly identifiable astral signature to it. And at the time i was writing (a little over five years ago), as i got to that section, i realized i could detect traces of that same signature in the air once again. In fact, part of that feeling was an internal urging to check in with a certain silvered Duke; at that time i had NO idea where or who he was, little say that he'd come to play a regular role in my life a few short years on.

Lest he sound too central - i've had a few other quasi-mythological characters pass through my life, to greater impact - his presence is part of the return of a group we half-jokingly referred to as thee Dark Lodge. Less than a formal coven, more than a group of friends, a high percentage of what i term 'natural witches', that is, those with an active Awareness of things beyond our mortal ken. There may be a story there, but one for telling another time. For now, i'll simply say that when that era passed and we all went on to our separate lives, i thought it was an era done and over with.

Its not.

The focus has shifted some. Guggi, who was at the center and helped hold it together, has been gone from this life for over a decade - tho i rather suspect if we got all the key players together and made a serious attempt, we might hear from him even now. Who plays what role isn't important; the fact is that somehow, something rather like thee Dark Lodge has drifted back together, and once again become the central feature in my life.

In MY life! Which has been led as a 70s stoner, a hippie, a punk, a pagan, a goth, as mother and Brownie troop leader, as social gadfly and village witch, as real-time performance art, as crowgrrl and woodnymph, sacred energie technician and faerie shaman. The One Who Wears the Masks stays the same, but everything else mutates subtly, regularly, a dance ov give and take with my environment.

So for the waves on the sea of possibility to have returned me just *here*, so clearly back with the strongest of all the tribes whose tokens i wear around my neck, tattooed to my skin, painted on my back - ov all ov those, Here is where i have returned. To the Source. i wonder how long i'll stay this time..