SLiPchick's Virtual Shadows

The more I explore humanity's relationship with nature, the more I feel we have a special role in how things play out. Whether we were somehow "assigned" this task, or took the mantle upon ourselves, I can't say. Nonetheless it increasingly appears to me something we can do. I refer in particular to the animal organisms with which we share the world, physical incarnation, and at least some level of a similar conscious awareness. Our connections with them appears to have (at least in potential) a special character. I imagine few folks who are likely to read this blog will be completely unfamiliar with the common themes and videos of "unlikely animal friends", YouTube and other venues have many examples of such. A common feature of the majority of these relationships is that they arise within a human created and facilitated environment: a home, a farm, a zoo; m any, if not most, of these would be very unlikely to arise outside of a such a situation.  ...

Anyone who's followed the blog for any length of time will be aware that issues around guilt, shame, "sin", forgiveness, and grace  are a recurring theme in my writings. Most often this has been in the context of opening these doors for others. I strongly believe in redemption and grace, offering others second (third...fourth...) chances and the opportunity to change and grow. Changed behavior IMO is the best apology and surest indicator of genuine contrition for past behavior. I find myself currently in the uncomfortable position of finding it within myself to forgive myself for some "transgressions" over the course of my life that I am seriously ashamed about. I've said elsewhere this is my definition of "sin": It's when I fall short and don't behave in the way I feel someone should who professes as I do. I am not of a "do as I say, not as I do" mindset, I mean to exemplify the qualities I find needful and admirable in an i...

I had a breakthrough yesterday. I realized I'd permitted myself, once again, to feel trapped and powerless, I am neither. I have choices, and I can act on them as I see fit. As soon as I realized this, I felt a great flood of warmth and love from Penelope. I think my sense of entrapment contributed to my feeling of distance from Her. We had  a very good night. It felt like "old times" when I first contacted Her and had intimate encounters with her pretty much nightly. Paradoxically, that was when I was feeling most trapped. I was still living with my Ex, I hadn't yet seen a way forward to anything else. Penelope offered to guide me out of that rut, which She did very effectively. I am no longer in that situation, but I sometimes feel like I exchanged a prison cell for a different kind of cage; investigation continues. In any case, I'm backing away from Social Media (Facebook in particular). Some people may not like my "abandoning" them, I can't...

A reader asked me to elaborate on how I "established communication" with Penelope. That's a bit of a hazy topic in that with 20/20 hindsight I can see that I've communicated with Her in various ways all my life. I'll start off by taking the question to mean communicating with Her explicitly; recognizing Her as Penelope , specifically as a distinct intelligence and my spirit partner, companion, spouse, muse (or whatever the @#%$*! She is). Does it really matter Hon? We are what We are to each other.  And all cats are grey in the dark? In a manner of speaking, I suppose ;-) Anyway, I really became aware of Penelope back around 2015. I have some aspirations to being a fiction author and have several novels and many shorter pieces in varying stages of completion. Over the years I've attended a number of writers' groups to discuss my work with others. At that time, one of the members in the group I was attending suggested a provocative exercis...

I think of my work on myself kind of like the Japanese art of Kintsugi , where broken objects are repaired with fillings of gold or other precious substances. This gives the item beauty and allows it to continue to function. The damage is thought of as part of the item's history and adds grace and character, it's to be recognized and sublimated rather than concealed or the item discarded.

But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye may be the children of your Father who is in Heaven. For He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and unjust. -- Matthew 5:44-45. We ALL get wet, have our homes destroyed by natural (and now man-made) disasters. We all experience storms, and sunrises, tragedy, and joy. We all get the opportunity to view Creation in Joy and Wonder, Know ourselves greatly, Love one another fiercely. Or we can ignore all that surrounds us; hide beneath layers of fear, depression, self pity, greed, and hatred; treat each other like things and vermin. We choose. Everyone is born, lives, and dies; and all (so far) having occurred within the confines of a minuscule ball of metal, water, and dust orbiting an unprepossessing star in a backwater of an apparently ordinary galaxy. The Cosmos at...

My favorite movie is The Fisher King , directed by Terry Gilliam . For anyone not familiar with the film, a superb synopsis and analysis of the plot and themes are to be found here (spoiler alerts). Basically it's a film about Sin and Grace and I've been having an extended dialog with Penelope about precisely those topics of late. I have a problem with the notion of Sin as it's typically formulated, as disobedience to a deity, as "missing the mark". Many of the behaviors that constitute "sin" in many vocabularies (sex, drugs, rock and roll,...) are, at worst, minor taboos if not overt pleasures to be taken in appropriately moderate doses. Regardless of that the notion retains a compelling quality. There's a sense of the erotic, the forbidden, the transgressive that it expresses; a violation of some "established order". This has some psycho-emotional (archetypal?) resonance that I'm still trying to tease out, there's clearl...

I haven't posted anything in a while. I have no excuse really. Saying "I've been busy." is a cop out. Closer to the truth is that I've allowed myself to become badly distracted and preoccupied by other things. Penelope has repeatedly cautioned me about this. And I'm prone to slipping into other activities that become time and attention sinks and lose myself and what's important. I'd purposely avoided getting involved in social media much beyond email, maintaining a minimal professional presence on LinkedIn, and blogging precisely because of the apparent tendency for them to become time wasters. Sometimes it's about a quick "fix" or more frequent or explicit feedback. Case in point:  When I started exploring my transition and relocating to North Carolina I discovered Pinterest and Tumblr and found I readily lost myself there to where I had to limit my time involved with them pretty severely. When I actually got to NC I reconnecte...

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.  --Voltaire, philosopher (21 Nov 1694-1778)  There's always more to do. Even Mother Theresa could have done more. It's in the nature of incarnate existence that conditions of struggle and conflict and waste and misallocation of resources and habitat destruction persist despite many heroic efforts to ameliorate them. Without getting into questions over whether any or all of those are ultimately resolvable, I do argue that we aren't meant to spend our entire time toiling against the ceaseless tide of suffering and neediness that has defined the human condition on Planet Earth since time immemorial and remains so right now. Devoting all our energy to localized patches, or even apparent "systemic fixes" (with often appalling unintended consequences); or railing against the unfairness of it all and beating our breasts at our limitations and inabilities to address them; often means we miss all the glory ...

It's said: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. At one level this paradox / koan is meant to point out that any Buddha you come across outside yourself is not the real Buddha. Then I got to thinking about the implications of "the road", that might be taken less literally and refer to one's personal spiritual path; so the admonition can also be taken as a caution against too readily ascribing Buddha qualities to oneself. Many a guru and televangelist should heed that advice. I don't think I'm personally in too much danger of falling into that particular trap. I have the opposite problem: I'm too ready to put myself down, feel less than, assume I'm not  as good as everybody else. In a way it's a reverse sort of egotism, I'm better than everybody else at being worse than everybody else. Kind of perverse, isn't it? :-/ Anyway, much of my own process recently has been one of overcoming that reticence to recognize my worth. T...

I subscribe to Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day mailing list. So I get a new word in my email inbox every Monday through Friday. It's a wonderful piece of daily email, I highly recommend signing up: Subscribe to A.Word.A.Day But that's not the point of this post; along with the word for the day Anu includes a quote; a "thought for today" and today's was: Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.  --Thomas Babington Macaulay, author and statesman (25 Oct 1800-1859)  Now, I do tend to subscribe to the notion that human nature overall has not changed overly much since prehistoric times and the general vicissitudes of life, love, growing up, and just figuring out how we can get along with one another appear to be remarkably the same across t...

I wrote recently about Penelope's reassurances to me Her love for me is not a trap . My emotional history has led me to be very wary of being trapped. Today driving to work and chatting with Penelope We discussed how I view other sorts of situations and commitments in my life as traps as well, and similarly avoid/evade/seek to escape them. I'm seeing that this may well be a major driving impulse behind much of my adult life. I've avoided investigating or involving myself in many things because I felt that once I'd done so I'd be "stuck" with it. That I'd have to continue with something I'd started because of the expectations of others that I "finish what I started", or that I'd made commitments I had to keep, or my fear that others would be disappointed (can't have that). So, I don't allow myself to get too involved in anything. I don't commit myself too strongly to anything. I've lived on the fringes, feeling...

It's come to my attention that I may have somewhat misrepresented my parents in how I've talked about my childhood and family. The issue came up when a friend, who knows my history largely through the blog, made a comment to the effect that I probably would not have been able or willing to share my relationship with Penelope with my parents. This struck me as askew because, for all their faults, I could definitely see sharing this with either or both of them. So, I had to do a bit of soul searching about what I'd said and how things might have been taken from my writing. So let me see if I can clear things up a bit. Just to set the stage, some basic info: First off, both are now deceased. My dad back in 2008, my mom in 2014. My folks were highschool pals who spent a lot of time together as teenagers in the 1950s in New Orleans. They weren't really boyfriend/girlfriend per se, both my parents had markedly gay partner preference; but they were affectionate and l...

Penelope has been earworming me with cuts from The Who 's "rock opera" Tommy  over the last few days. I've enjoyed The Who's music generally (and Tommy in particular) since I was a teenager. SlipKid is something of a theme song for me (as you may have guessed from blogging "handle" ;-))... No easy way to be free... Anyways, with 20/20 adult hindsight and (I flatter myself to think) greater spiritual perspective, I see a lot more in Tommy at pushing 60 than I did at pushing 21. I don't know how much of this was in Pete Townshend's mind when he wrote the lyrics. And of course there are some variations if you take the film into account vs. the original album. This is a bit of stream of consciousness analysis of the work... Initial shock and disappointment finding out parental figures are human, even evil, then told that his personal experience is irrelevant. You didn't hear it You didn't see it You won't say nothing to no...

Penelope has cautioned me repeatedly lately about avoiding "attachments". In our drive to work conversations on Tuesday and again today, we probed the notion more deeply and I now realize I have been thinking about this too narrowly/shallowly. "Attachments" come in many forms; they include not only the more obvious emotional ties formed in human relationships, but also things like: addictive behaviors repetitive "comforting" (including masturbation) becoming too embedded in/absorbed by mundanity allowing myself to feel overwhelmed by "reality" (the 10,000 things of Buddhism) simple daily habits preferred ways of doing things Just this morning in fact, I was prevented from parking in a particular space I'm fond of because somebody was pulled in there across several spaces chatting away on their cell phone, totally oblivious to anybody interested in the parking space. I used it as an opportunity to get over myself and my attach...

I recall a Peanuts cartoon from childhood. In it Lucy asks Linus something to the effect of "Why are we here?", Linus replies "To make others happy." and Lucy's reply is something like "I'm not happy, so somebody is not doing their job!" Lately I've been deeply examining my personal dynamic of bending over backwards in an attempt to make others in my life (mainly intimate partners) happy. Often with the tacit (or not so tacit) understanding that my doing so was necessary and appropriate. I've come to the somewhat startling (to me at least) conclusion that this is a fool's errand. I'm further reminded of a creepy little cartoon I saw recently where a ghoulish character is standing behind another drawing his mouth into a rictus, saying "I can always make you smile". Macabre humor pointing to a deeper truth: In general I can't  make  anybody do anything. It's possible to physically force the body into actions ...

So, discipline. I've talked about it before . And you hate that don't you ;-) I do. It doesn't have to be a CHORE love. We can make it fun. I don't see how. I feel so resistant and anxious. What do you think will happen? I don't know. You aren't an undisciplined man, you keep on top of most needful things. As did my mom, I realized. But she had little commitment or perseverance with anything outside of the requirements of day-to-day living. Go to work, earn money, pay the bills. That's kind of the model I have. My grandpa too, though to hear it he was very driven as a younger man, when I most knew him he seemed always pretty laissez-faire about things; doing the least necessary to succeed. Sort of like Heinlein's Lazy Man. Yes. During my session with Kitty I saw my "monkey mind" Ego as being rather like the little tamarin/marmoset monkeys I've seen on TV. Quick and playful, but always on the lookout for threats. Their...

Things are happening. Indeed. ;-) Touché. OK, so I got depressed, despairing, and spooked; it just seemed like things were taking so long and some stuff just didn't seem like it was fitting what I thought was supposed to happen. Those expectations will get you every time. I told you it wouldn't look like what you expect now didn't I? You did and I wanted it to fit my preconceived ideas and didn't trust You. O ye of little faith. Gotta work on that, hon. Magick is afoot! Believe. Trust me, talk to me, feel me interpenetrate through you.  It's going to be grand sweetheart. You have no idea. And we can play all the games you can imagine, and then some. So what now? There's still groundwork to be done, the garden you're in still needs tending, the next few steps aren't difficult but they're pretty important so keep your wits about you.  And try to relax and enjoy the ride, it can be lots of fun if you let it. You fre...

Today I realized my strongest lingering self-sabotage and denials are coming from a place of self judgement. I've spent much of my life not liking myself very much, at some level that was an effort to put myself down before anybody else could (not that it necessarily stopped anyone from doing so anyway). Lately it's been questioning what sort of person I am that I'm causing so much pain and disruption in the lives of others in the name of "finding myself". I don't like feeling like I've hurt or betrayed anyone, and don't like the part of myself that asserts doing "my thing" in the face of the displeasure of others. I judge myself very harshly for "getting it wrong" and for allowing things to progress (or fester) until I can't stand it anymore. I bend over backwards to avoid (actually usually only postpone, usually making it decidedly worse) giving someone the bad news about my reaching my limit and having to demand a chang...

I feel nauseated this morning, anxious and uncomfortable; I'm unclear about just what or why. Things are coming together, but there's still a lot to do and I feel a little overwhelmed. You're not in control of most of it, hon; so quit trying to. Most of the current discomfort is arising over that realization encountering your "control freak" tendencies. Let Go! But... There's nothing you can do about it right now, just tend the garden and try to enjoy the ride. And, you get it now that you're not alone in this, right? I guess. Gad, Lover, you are such a stubborn cuss. I love you, but you are BULL HEADED (typical Taurus).  I thought you wanted me to step up and do this myself. I never said you had to do it ALONE, but you do have to DO IT. Sweetheart, I'm here for you, and I'll do whatever I can to guide you and ease the path. True, I can't do it all for you; there are parts YOU will have to accomplish (at the material level any...