Writing

Arcane III: The Empress (final installment)

XIII

For me, Empress is an archetype full of anguish and defeat. She, overwhelmingly fecund, forms the mortar and grit that holds empires attentive to the ways of culture, lineage, and heritage. She is the connection between ages. Her fullness resides in the realization of place in personal life and civilization’s cycles.  If I were to bitch about taking the Empress’ symbolism to heart, I would call her a baby factory between calling my name and articulating whispers of being a wanton witch. For me, Empress’ definition and symbolism are excavated, explained, countered, and envied with every gaze into the card. Probing beneath my shadow self, I allow the accusations to bubble out of my personality and froth over. For now, I know her as the seduction to becoming a prostitute. The call is lashing out at the women I have heard and seen fall from grace over the last nine years. They take part in forming the archetypes of my daily life. Through aspects of the tarot I presumed I would understand them better. So be it they become the face of the Goddess and I slip into a mental eon long gone to know where I live. Painters Egon Shiele and Gustave Klimt had the same bent. Both elevated the mundane and hidden to a level of exquisite beauty and worship. Like them, I do not have far to go to find a muse and model for my work. What little I could pay for services may not suit for attractive work. The other side of appeal may not guarantee them a place in eternity. A prostitute sitting for Empress comments a reality in social circles that deserves careful probing.

Despite my inferences, I never see Empress as demented or psychotic like some of the women these years have become. It may be a matter of post traumatic stress disorder following through her fertile cycle as well as eventual post partum depression. What I presume then is that the pregnancy must be a constant high over nine months. In my mind’s prejudice, the women who embody Empress are always clean and watchful. Of street currency, the women I hear of stay dirty and covered in grime sometimes for the full term. Correcting my prejudice with reality, smoking, drinking, and addiction does not prevent other women from sitting high on the cushioned devan to be quickly photographed into family history. I must let the spiritual lesson in the window separate the chaff from the seed. Otherwise, why do I seek Empress beyond immediate reaction? I am resolved that she is a guidepost for all females. There are certain marks of the aging feminine that cannot be ignored. By looking over the card I see a handful of guise of the Goddess. With deeper contemplation I am a hostage of my own maturity. There is more to understand of her immediate presence.  I feel I am missing a core part of her mystery and am backing down angry for another night. The real fear is in missing another point of my life’s passage in the feminine. I once thought there was no guidebook. This is life, do as you will I seemed to practice. Over the last thirteen years, I know I am wrong. Without a discussion of gender roles and types, I find my way through old literature and being quiet around the wagging tongues of old women. I found something in adjusting to classic roles. I seem reticent to attempt the myth of the super black woman. I am learning that I do not have to have it all. I fall not into submission, but into a stillness and quiet that speaks stoic to the trees and wind. Contrary to this, Empress seems gregarious and sociable. Another turn of the car and I am rejected again. I do not care why I will not walk away from her. All I know is that I cannot give up just yet. Something is about to break again in my subconscious and I want to be fully attentive to any change in my reality. I am learning through confrontation. I refuse to lose another lesson again.

XIV.

I am in the way station for another night wondering if hell will take over come nightfall. It is the hard questions that I need let stew on paper before I attempt to answer even one. A few days ago I decided to commit to the psychological work with the tarot. It is likely this journey will not end even after I am finished writing. Working the tarot as a supplement to personal symbols will enrich my work with untold depth.

The first questions lead in multiple directions: What are the characteristics of the shadow part of the Empress? What is her countenance? What is her posture?  What can I expect of myself for wanting a child between dosages of medication for twenty years? Is my selfishness appropriately hidden?  Will I waver between wanting a career and/or family through to my twilight years? What will a child do to my calling? Sacrifice does not come just in terms of time, but also in relinquishing power, position, and knowledge. What about a husband? Promises to marriage make child rearing easier. I have had few real prospects, if any at all. This keeping in mind that one night stands are no case to build a marriage on. I muse at night underneath cold cotton sheets that I sustain my drive by resigning to being a lady in waiting for another year. No doubt it would be forced marriage of convenience. The children would be his and I would be a simple incubator. Being a child of two divorces, how can I believe that love exists? If I wed I am settled that adoption, in all turns of choice, seems best. Still, I fear sound judgments may not be had on my part. Providing stability and consistency is an environment I strive to provide for myself. If I can accomplish it for myself maybe I can maintain that presence for three.

The night is about to claim my tired limbs and writing. Before I put the pen down, I have to acknowledge that my introspection thus far lends mostly to the cold temperatures of the mind. Instead of all these intellectual arguments, where do my emotional arguments lead? What makes my case with the Empress singular in bridging my soul through to her mysteries? Without resorting to a dictionary of symbols and the staid definitions of the Major Arcana, I need know what agrees with me concerning image, conflict, and responsibility of the Empress? Also, what makes my case with her particular to my growth and understanding of womanhood? In the least, I can count on her to mean a fruition of hard labor. Or is she simply an incubator for notions? I see her as the gateway of maturity. She is a symbol in part of walking out of the innocence of maiden’s tradition aware to the tools of adulthood by way of what the body dictates. This graduation into the next phase of the feminine is an achievement of intellect and emotion honed beyond the simple use of skill.

Empress can be given praise, but is she ready for the work? The question can be answered in light of those adults who are caught in the glamour of pregnancy. The occasion reflects it as special time and high for a woman.  For those with a selfish concern, I wonder what happens after the baby is born and the shine wears off? In that requirement to work, Empress sits at the edge of being trained and charged with responsibility.  The robes and crown speak for themselves but the shield tells more of once being a student.  The shield is the heart and a mark of the feminine celebrating the moment of recognition of womanhood. A badge or medicine shield reveals Empress coming full term to being recognized as woman. The shield reflects self-control and appreciation of womanly arts and sciences. The shield celebrates the obligations and rights of womanhood as an aware participant in self-knowledge and practice.  Empress is one who has born before and knows what to expect. She knows the wisdom of cycles. As one who wields the aegis, lessons in the feminine are now at her command for personal use as she is embraced as a symbol fully vested in the ways of feminine wisdom. One would think that this includes the dark faces of the Goddess as well. In the rites of the Empress, this exists, but it is shunned and not spoken. It hides in suggestion when coupled with other tarot cards.

My conclusion is not meant to attack the positive light filled and plain lessons of the joys of aging. Even I have learned the shallows, but know the deeper feminine resides in the dark as well as the light. Compared to the calm that settles in the dark after wrestling with the angel, it is the child or creation that comes full term in the Empress that needs nurturing to full maturity. These creations are not lost to the dogs or abandoned away from the cemetery. What lives may not stay with great mother, but it will have a fighting chance to abide in health, ethics, and moral guidance.

XIV.

Empress enthroned is a temporary state. We do not see the trial and agony that precedes the joy of good news. It is a wonder that the pain that follows is as much an old wives tale warning the newly wed. Empress presents the obligations of a copulated marriage. She knows love just as well as independence. Taking poise on the divan, she is a symbol of accumulated knowledge practiced over time and trial. As a result, she sits in her power recognized and loved.  The Empress also rules in water’s fashion. Warmth and harvest time exudes and wells in her gaze.  This tarot window is a snapshot of ignorance reflecting bliss ensnared and captured. I can only wonder if the emotional state that follows after this isolated moment is one of psychosis.

Standing in the aisle between the book stacks, on the second floor, I began rummaging the row as usual. I already pulled items on Celtic mythology and legends from India. Every book title I browsed after that became a topic of extreme interest. I was sure to have inspiration for clay works by evening light. What resulted from the readings on Aboriginal art, legend, and culture was a series of vessels I intended to hold a single human breath. I was positive that I could capture an air of spirit, versus designing a vessel to hold flame.

From Empress I learned the hinge pin of being a creator is to animate. Somewhere before that imbuement is culling the creation to shape and form. Just like the potter, Empress calls to work an incubator to mature life until it can perform on its own. Based on Empress’ demeanor, I have one question. What are some of the obligations of a Creator archetype? For me, I know the act of creation must be born out of responsible action. What is created is made with intention and purpose. Lastly, there is an anticipated place for the creation to belong, reside, and grow in relevance to its environment. Another series of questions begins with whether responsibility to the created ever ends? Could the creator/artist ever be a Deist in perception and action? In this manner the created is formed and left alone to graduate into independence instead of fostering a parasitic co-dependence.

With those things said, I wonder if I will be able to let go of what I make. When I die, if probate does not latch hold to my former property, will the end of my works come in the form of a garbage truck? The logical conclusion resides in continually finding place for my creations even after death. I hate to mention it, but right now letting go is a personal condition of commerce. I think about letting go of the books, papers, paintings, quilts, and effects. I never seem to fully realize they are gone even after reviewing the sales slip for taxes at the end of the year. In graduate school, I learned a story about Jasper Johns. He raised the fact that he could not let go a painting to a level of vandalism. At parties thrown by collectors he was known to bring paint brush and fresh oils to work in a corridor where the painting was displayed. He could not let go. Rampant thoughts must have flooded John’s mind: “It’s not done, this needs to be corrected”, “I used the wrong color”, and “This belongs here, not there.” Time passes after finishing a handful of works and I go gray over making changes. Should I nurture and tend to the pieces more? Parenting never ends. In another instance, Dad and Mom tell me to get my shit together one way or another. Pursue my dreams but understand they will not always be here. Both follow with a penetrating look and quip, “You know you will always be my baby no matter what you do”. I don’t argue anymore. I used to angle around the reality of the statement trying to show independence followed by respect. Now I stifle comments that, “I’m grown! Whaddaya mean I’m still your baby?!!” My dignity and endurance fall, realizing that to them I have not yet reached a level of maturity that they see as one of an adult. Or maybe it is just a matter of sensitivity to the tender chubby cheeks of a two month old that I have retained into my forties.

We cry when they are gone. Mother told me of the days she would cry for her mother’s presence and wisdom. She had no one else to trust. The vacuum had not sealed of her mother’s musing presence for over thirty years. At that time, her soul needed sun, water, and wind every day. Despite nurturing through the years immediately after her mother’s death, the stem fell and the root of grandma’s creation almost finished rotting out. Tending to my mother’s needs from the day I knew she was still hurt, was a weak suggestion of the inexperienced feminine. Mother needed mentoring born of ages closer to being bent over with a polished cane. I do not know how it resolved itself, but thinking through what Grandma would have done in the same situation may have caused responsibility to parent through the veil.

XV.

From the artistic angle, Empress is a stage in the creator archetype. To me the compliment to her abilities is a factor of time. She is an incubator and not so much a mother or caretaker. She is pure potential. To me it is a clinical observation; she is a pregnant woman at the height of womanhood’s mental and physical fruits. In my anger, I reject her. If not for knowing that t here is no assertion in a physical reflection, then for knowing her prime maintains while mine is gone. First, I have not dealt with the issue of race and this card as I fear resurrecting shadows of guilt, fear, and toxic shame irrelative to tarot history. Settling into my senses, when I read I look past cultural prejudice and use of the cards.  I take into account my immediate reactions to text and image. Some days I deeply want to understand the tarot card I choose, so I have to let the unconscious bridge old hurts with new concepts no matter the pain. In this way I see reading the cards as a game but also a psychological tool to manage the self from the core. When studying the arcane, I cannot stop the lessons of discernment because of perceptual barriers. Putting subsequent revelations from the tarot in their proper perspective is an art to elevate to mastery. I well in old arguments right now and seek clarity in understanding Empress regardless of the card’s design and implications.

XVI

While she rules from her cushioned roost I fear a gut wrenching admission that I have wasted my last twenty years. I veered from the norm. Sometimes I lay in the night desperate to understand where I have gone? What do I still long for as a female? Have I rejected fundamental knowledge of my sex? Are there any traditions left to me to participate and feel a member of the clan of woman?

XVII

I sat up in bed, turned the switch, and waited for the light. She’s there, dangling on the wall clipped together in a small stack, Empress from three different decks. She has been hanging there for the last five months. I cannot look right now. I am too angry – at her and myself. How could I have missed it? The obvious source of confusion is in what the card implicates, not just a fascination about a figure wrapped in finely decorated linen. My focus is on the shield and aegis. While browsing a book on tarot definitions, I conclude from the lengthy entry that the sign is a call into women’s health. Empress points to the biggest ill of the last century wrapped in Roe vs. Wade and our pervading collective ignorance of our own bodies. Even from my last graduation, my fear into the 21^st century has the Devil destroying our hopes by playing our bodies against our minds.

Personally speaking, I came to carnal knowledge through grade school friends. The slang from back then escapes me, but the code among kids became familiar to me as a bond between friends. They confessed to my ears what they could not share with brother, sister, cousin, father, or mother. Since young, this code of trust and possessing a relative ignorance of human sexuality has shielded and removed me from a persistent path of vipers.  On one occasion, I was bribed for sex by an older “cousin” in his bedroom. The situation left me open for a life change if I did not immediately retreat to join adults downstairs. “I’ll give you this purse if you’ll have sex with me,” he attempted to persuade. After being molested by a different relative, I began to defeat growth of self-esteem by falling into a pattern of yielding when asked for sex acts. No matter how infrequent the request, it took a long emotional trial to realize that I was not a slut. What I became was something lonely and emotionally programmed. Desperate for attention may have left me that day with child by incest. Though I am sure someone would point out that just because those involved where black and called themselves brother, does not mean the tempter was a blood relation. Quibbling the understanding would not relieve me of the damage short and long term. For the time after, constructing personal boundaries made for the second line of defense. The first was to yield to a personalized verbal and psychological dismantling.

So, dear Empress, this other door through which I have passed reveals you a discipline, law, and a counselor. Because of this, I have completely changed from a literal interpretation of you to a hidden concept of perpetually renewed energies. Now I can sit. I can actually sit comfortably now with her sight and influence. Now, before Hecate cackles out my state of bearing without the yoke of motherhood, be reassured that Empress calls to order the discerning shadow side of femininity as well. I may finally see myself and what lessons remain may come through the face of another arcane. It is strange and funny how the queen of swords looms before my eyes again as I resolve a close to The Empress. I said nothing before, but the queen was apparent as I started writing about the Empress from the beginning. In my close, she returns. It must be a portent that I have intellectually reasoned the mark. Living through the Empress physically will have me intrinsically know this Arcane through a fulfillment of task. As a result, the trials of womanhood, gender, and femininity may not escape me again. I am committed to going through this mystery where ever she leads. Personal rites of sanity and age demand recording for now and the healing that comes after.

©N.A. Jones      2017       All Right’s Reserved

Writing

Arcane III: The Empress  (5th excerpt, 22-28)

X.

Now I know that I am not equally obligated to hold fast to a classical age of woman as is Empress. I have to stand fast in the thought that another fecund female does not have to behave the same way. Brainstorming through that comparison I conclude that other ways of the feminine brace against her wake. Wading through the clarity of personal obligations insinuates that I am a woman after all, despite a lack of children. I shudder at the thought that giving birth is the only measure of my value. How do I deal with the staid reaction of a blank stare in reaction to being called a slut? Of course, that logic is never argued publically. I will sit quietly in the window behind secured blinds and ponder the ills of being caught devilish in both public and private. No doubt, that sexist battle need be prepared for to strike on another day. Every venture out into the world leaves me with a cache of reactions and warnings to heed. For now I need not answer, let them mire in their own dark pits of conceit. After returning home I am always left wrestling the angel about my father teaching me how to be a woman and a caretaker. I thought Empress would be about women teaching women. I learn from Dad otherwise and leave my tomboy nature to the side so I can hear him. I do not believe I have ever listened to him. One phone call a week ain’t enough anymore.

Mindful of Dad’s contribution in forming of my mind, how does the male offering of fullness in fertility participate in the rite beyond conception? In other words where is the man’s participation in all this? Considering this absence, we must contemplate what is apparent and absent from the cards in all readings. Now I am able to breathe the selfishness of character in each major arcane. My current presumptions argue that there is a limit to what you can contain and explain in a card face before the symbols read confusing and argue with intuition. Synthesis will arrive soon, I hope.

XI.

Empress sits after the condition. She mentors with a sweeping hand and deep gaze. She is the forming of ideas and materials. She is a needed incubator and therefore respected. Empress is the next test and trial for me; especially learning what comprises womanhood. For one instance, the journey of menses had become a long passage for me to reclaim my mind from denying birth, sex, and sexuality. Though menses does not mean I must have sex, I am countered with my brother telling me the main point of Christianity is procreation. Religion is an obligation to fulfill, maintain, and continue my humanity. For the moment, dare I say, I am not fully human in my faith?

So, at this age, I have no children. I muse and breakdown in my role as an aunt. I am quiet. I just watch until I am invited to share an experience where everyone flourishes emotionally and mentally. I am learning to play again and other moments are filled with a need to teach something small that will sync with my niece’s and nephew’s personal pursuits. In confidence I plant my ancestor’s seeds in their minds today and water those notions every time I see them. The best teaching moments come from self-watering seeds. Every concept I offer to my niece and nephew do feeds and nourishes them in small ways. I only hope those moments can be of service when they are older. Even if they are not listening to me, I am sure somewhere they hear.  My role to them I fear is finite. If they remember but one thing of me after I die, I will be pleased.  Know that planting a concept is not about me and a conceited penchant to surmise the millennium by being mentioned once a year over a handful of cornmeal sprinkled at the forest’s edge. I will be known as a “nice” person who was quiet and distant. They will learn over their time that I stood in reserve and waited until they could understand me and my ways. My anger and ugliness will never be mentioned. Over the last decade I learned to hold my tongue over barren and poisoned wombs. I hold back my jealousies in a heart’s cage. As a result I look at Empress with disgust. Her positive expressions leave me sick. My nurturing instincts conquered personal care and now reach out far beyond what I have been allowed to conceive. Empress gives me an escape – in creation or production by my hands or womb. Forgive me not my greed right now. I want both. I want it all.

Even if I read the Empress physically, what follows? Fears of mentally retarded children ransacked my hopes to bear for two decades now. Not to forget staring into walls over giving birth to a simpleton? Or maybe a physically challenged child? Screaming, screaming, screaming at my intellectual prejudice is not going to solve the possible pitfalls of my desires. In high school, an upper classman gossiped that I was overly focused on the educated to the point of being prejudice to everyone. To him I was a stuck up intellectual elitist and a bitch because of it. Over twenty-five years later I scream, “Damn him again!” I have hopes for the unborn and unseen. I fear to breed a genius as well. These fears may be a matter of denying being needed by my child, then wondering when to let go. Yet, my mother’s emotional  inheritance is one route of rearing that I fear not to be prepared.

The other fear is a curse never to resolve even with a healthy dash of cayenne pepper over every meal. Simply put, blood is blood. I cannot assume a child of my womb would manifest every bit of DNA and habit that comes from the man I marry and me. Some inherited skills I do not know how to polish to performance levels. I will just have to wait to the age they can sit still and listen for more than five minutes. Blood being blood may mean my selfish need to bolster my will unto him/her may not be cut to the quick. Still, children need to form their own minds. I have no need for a miniature reflection. Doing right by progeny means to teach them attentiveness to their instincts and encourage them not be afraid of making their own mistakes.

Blood is blood. I cannot believe that is all I see. Passing down physical, emotional, and mental personal history must be a good to do for surviving the grave. That way I will survive an age and find immortality in my blood descendants. My life’s work will escape having been for not. What I would teach my blood and flesh will disseminate and seed. I will live on. My fear of death and finality has seized my tongue. One tear later and I presume in conceit and fear that my non-existent child is not to live out my loose ends. They too need realize independence in the light of submitting to God.  Blood born understands blood and I desperately strain the argument to follow into adoption because I may not be able to bear genetically healthy children. I am past the determinant 36. Fear tells me my choice for bearing lay in adoption.  Will I be satisfied at that? Can a man stand not to rear his own blood and flesh? If he cannot, I stand blocked in the ways of ancestry. No, I could not marry that man. I would have to reconsider that marriage and would have to let him go. The fullness of Empress demands it.

I confess I am a creator and nurturing soul. I choose not to tear away from either reality of nature and nurture. Empress reminds me of ritual I left in the back of my mind for twenty years. It is a rite joining blood to blood. I need not leave the adopted out from the rites of spirit in my family of origin or family of choice. I feel they would need be joined to me and my husband as if they had dwelled full term in my womb.  Seriously though, can I really consider adoption? Shall I settle for no blood? I do not completely understand the obsession and fear. If I adopt, will I be a failure as a woman? Is it a transmission of intellectual heritage, emotional stillness, and ancestral artifact that I am terrified will be rejected? After the broken needles and success after toil, to whom do I give these things? Does it take genetic memory to understand me? Does spirit end in my womb? Will that child be accepted by my family? Right now I cannot answer any of these questions. What I dreamt in the recessed of heart’s flesh is the ritual of spirit transmission to symbolicly include my child with my family, their protections, and privileges of our ancestors. This blessing and sharing can occur during any point of their lives. In my blank stare musing the future, I hold my adopted son close and whisper into his ear, “I’ll teach you, dear one. Even in my selfishness. My greatest fear is you’ll walk from your father and I unaffected.”

A for my husband, he would need to participate in the same ritual to join his genetic memory as a gift to our child. All this blessing and inclusion is coupled in a test for all three of us. Should we accept a blending of ways, we all would change. I know this. I know it all too well.  I cannot argue with the necessity of this rite nor it implication to destroy and rebuild. In daydreams, I have seen spirit’s seat in my temple weighted with a flame. Rising against the stone and mortar around that foundation would destroy my intellectual heritage forever. Also, to rise against myself would kill a root. I refuse self-destruction and wait to pass on skills of planning and discovery to the listening; whether heard by blood or joined by another path. Ultimately Empress would force me to deal with what I have worked and unearthed being lost or destroyed. These are the lessons and cautions to be taught of a creator no doubt. The creator archetype does not specifically sit in the tarot, but Empress embodies cyclical creation in nature. The spark may begin with the wands, but the force germinating every seed wells in her demeanor.

XII.

In first grade I must have reached a level of demented that most adults never achieve. I became immersed in the dark of Halloween’s witches, the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock’s marionettes on weekly television, and the plastic pulls in my desk that grate against wooden joints. At age seven I could confess Bella Lugosi as father of my hidden depressions. I nurtured a classic dark, watching cult and occult movies every Saturday afternoon while mother shopped and stepfather mowed the lawn. Satanism I could spot from the investigators tongue a half hour into the movie. The Monday after watching a  remake of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, little white girl slipped me a book on the school bus. It was a memoir of a brother and sister who were kidnapped by a Satanic cult that lived in their neighborhood.  From what I remember, the abduction and ritual occurred in their house. I was only in third grade. I did not need this reality check. At that point of discovery I knew positively that movies are written based on real events. Reading the book was like losing Santa Claus in the middle of Kmart in late November. Memory echoes some mother breaking down next to the Archway ginger snaps, “It’s not the fact that your grandparents spoil you, it’s the fact that I cook the turkey and the yams. I buy the presents and the tacky wrapping paper. All this I do every year without complaining. Reality sucks and mind this all with the fact we do not have a fireplace in the house.” Now I know that my mother’s subsequent arguing with my stepfather was a clue to being more attentive to the neighbor’s accusations as to how far from God we were. That little white girl’s book seeded my mind with being aware of your surroundings is only a part of self defense. Better survival techniques would come with age.

So, now you know I was a kid once. It has been a tough task to prove, even by drilling myself for years. I ache thinking the best defense comes with growing older. I painfully despise wearing at innocence as a detrimental folly only second to ignorance.  Still, l’il ol’ me holds the pass and bides the wrinkle by playing jacks and coloring pages to maintain gravity’s pull around my waist. My body has grown older, much more quickly than my mind. I love winking at logic after speaking notions. Maturity can wait. I need another glass of warm milk from the radiator and a lemon iced cookie please before empathy for the young defeats me.

##

Harassment sat still an hour ago.  It was her; the one down the street. I heard her stick up for me. That ain’t supposed to happen. While she spoke up I lay silent listening to her response to an unknown voice. I gather the threat to children to train household dogs to eat kids and babies bodies was enough to quiet the surrounding five blocks.  I felt the verbal check and remembered that I used to force myself to be glued to the television on Saturday and Sunday afternoons though winter until what I know now as Easter’s call. The daydream suited me fine to escape the neighborhood confrontation playing out in the open street. When I cued back into reality for that outing of pedophilic frustration, I did not scream or cry, I took it in stride and did not interrupt. What followed was a mother’s voice brimming with much necessity to clarify. I laid still, listened, and uttered nothing.

If I have kids, I don’t want to think about this shit called out of darker realities. A dark motherhood out of Empress harkens to Hecate before I could see a child from these loins graduate eighth grade. I am old according to a church prostitute. I am too old to have a child – a health one that is. Thirty-six  is the last prime number to conceive without chance for genetic disease and physical disability in the child. Sitting at her feet signing her cast the quiet talk turned and I found myself nowhere accomplished and a waste of anybody’s time.  I laughed at my brother when he said the point of being Christian was to procreate. I laughed from an uncomfortable space and swore there was more to serving God than sex. If not, I could not dare look into the sun with a straight face. Since then, I find bouts of abstinence and celibacy more filling to my inner well and practice this as an approach to the edification of the soul.

©N.A. Jones      2017      All Right’s Reserved

Writing

Arcane III: The Empress (3rd excerpt 5pgs.)

VI.

It is Tuesday and I call the Empress out for the role of the day. It seems a simple matter of integrating the soul’s awareness to sync with my immediate surroundings. Here is where my inspiration is born. It is a place where Arcane, high and low, manifest in everyday life. Often this manifestation means I have crossed over another threshold and into another realm. In the least, here of all places, the shades move from my eyes and disappear from what I know of the ancients. What remains for me of my ancestors in light of Empress? It is the fact that my values, ethics, and desires need not be forgotten to realize into her fullness.

For instance, plenty of women have given birth to menopause babies. The children come into the world healthy and live to see the next age turn as their parents did. I have to remember that for me, it is not over. I have to remember that even if my ova spill over and uterus shrivels up, I will still beg for purification’s waters and try another approach into eternity. Even if discipline and clout are the only reasons a man would want me, I need not be locked in a loveless and fruitless marriage until death. That seems a different trap of the Empress guise that I never considered. Love? Is that it? Marriage should be like a cold teapot in the beginning and come to a roaring boil over time. At least that is according to a Hindu couple I knew long ago. I secretly keep that one close to heart with every smile, polite turn of a phrase, and attracted gaze toward a man.

In some tomes, Empress is cited as the pinnacle of womanhood. I further assume the presumption that she is an archetype to which all women aspire to attain.  Right now, all I see is a dead end existence. Despite the power she exerts in daily life, her presence is confined and defined by children, the obligations of motherhood, and the sacrifices of youth. Her position is a high attainment, but there is so much more to being woman than a June Cleaver life.  A higher calling seeks to be involved in preserving humanity and the environment compared to the cardboard box full of low expectations that women have been confined to live in for centuries. Maybe I just sit here full of jealousy, envy, and masking the wanton. Through these jaded eyes, I presumed I have nothing else to define my life except the work of my hands and mind. My efforts may be forgotten before I die.  Empress, however indirect, teaches womanhood as something to preserve and conserve. Her contributions may be spoken of for an eon, maybe for eternity. Now I know that these written spites make me a prejudice classist well as a feminist reactionary. If it were not for the gown, skin color, and crown, would I have shifted my perspective to honor her representation of fecundity and femininity? From my core in the very beginning, I presume her manifestation would be foreign to me. Her experience is not mine. I still cannot seem to connect. I thought archetypes applied to us all. This is another reminder of being on the outside, but there is time left. These loins have not completely dried out.

Where I sit in reposed shadow is in a daydream compared to Empress suggests. She has nothing to tend but a husband and children. She has no detailed budget of what she can afford at the grocery store. For her, beef is a reality; while, beans, chicken and fish are staples to others. Maintaining a fixed income and small savings must be foreign to Empress as well. Her monthly allowances and credit limits are more than a year’s allotment compared to my coffers. Believe me when I tell you it is not the money in her repose that wrecks my composure. It is her ease of living, the cushions, that pampering, the hedonism, and the intimated selfishness that ranks me raw. Still, I presume her in her personal power. Called out of the card, books say she is full of what self-actualization for a woman means. I come from a long line of working women. Empress seems not to represent the fold. Then again we do not show all faces for long periods of time. Flux and development and dynamic change happen for all of us. The day I embody Empress’ symbolism it might be a fleeting moment of understanding. That makes for every reason to continue to confront my shadow arising from the tarot. Should these depictions be timeless, we need know the dark side of their creation. The histories of some decks are as rich as the artwork that depicts the arcane, high and low. For now, my angle of discernment is low and hidden in direct light. With that in mind, know this card is about woman and her selfish pride in procreation. God enters not. In this picture, the child portent will know family and mortality long before the staid and holy.

VII.

Empress sits in the seat of creation. For some, her powers source from her hips and out through her loins. For her, some would only count birthing flesh as a valid rite versus creativity that sources from the eyes and hands. It is the feminine that charms and channels into being the new and exemplar of a covenant with her and her husband’s family. Another deck I use tells that type of giving takes a pine soft heart and an open mind for God to dwell within and season the seed to germinate from a feminine core. Giving birth never meant so much to me until I turned 32. Before then, I was divorced from my center and consumed with work and studies.  At that time my identity and incubator lay in my head, not my hips. Where my actions stemmed caused my mind to spill out in lace and rounds of speech. Having hands and deft fingers made manifestation of thoughts easier. (Sometimes, we conceive better in form than word or memory sometimes.) Furthermore, I took advantage of the skills developed and constructed in worship. Soon, being fruitful came with steady productivity, where as begetting from my loins never realized. If I tell of Empress as a symbol for channeling wisdom through art, the cold wind over my right shoulder dissipates. I can learn to honor her and her struggles without being forced.

I can find comfort in Empress this way; by keeping the hearth of tradition in quilting while venturing new concepts in fine art. That approach will fill a hole in my soul that widened over the past eight years. I know when I do not create I enter a depressed state like no other. From instinct, I think that is expected of women who all carry a creative spark to drive the intellect an emotion. No doubt this depression is a quality of Empress in reverse; a reflection of Hecate’s arrival come menopause. It is difficult to wrestle my mind out of an emotional downturn once I have gone the ways without creating for months. Finding the time and materials to ignite the fire again takes patience. In thought, creative power ferments and reeks in the darkness when not ablaze. It may remain breathing and never succumbing to finality in decay. Rest, dear sweet repose, kept me alive then and now.

Since 2005 my sights have not completely been on raising new energies. I have been rescuing old fascinations and excavating from the abyss of time items stored in the back of my bedroom closet. It is my heart’s well I draw from while carefully culling a memory that does not completely stagnate and fume. I care enough to clean and cure. I care enough to find a place for visually creative thoughts again. I care enough to cure my methods born of old ills to find their mastery in my heart’s corridors.

It takes pure mind and a pure heart. If I make the Empress of these in my mind she becomes a sign of incubating new thoughts and endeavors. The sign comes with not being focused purely on the new and discarding the old. The sign is in giving my thoughts an opportunity to manifest.  The change comes in managing ideas to grow and blossom. The Empress is also a sign that I will be given time to manifest to a point of fullness. With the right care I am sure to manifest fruit if not a bounty worth sharing.

VIII.

Today is a day when I can resolve more anger over the Empress. Opening the birthing concept is a start as well as redefining what it means to come into the maturity of womanhood.  The Holy Bible in parts of Psalms clarifies for some generations that pregnancy is a folly leading to death and separation from loved ones. Taking that lead, coming to understand my life’s occasions may be difficult.

I sat in the day room in front of the television for the last two days. I had my fill of cartoons, game shows, and reality television. I was desperate for a mental break and that meant rest in quiet. Unfortunately, that was not about to happen. Other residents took to talking from dawn to dusk about medication. No screams erupted from the ward, but the killer to being secluded and segregated from the outside world was the plain, simple, and stagnant conversation. In past years I learned the chattiness of an addict, the fermented moods of abusers, the pronounced whims of the cult consumed, the gay, and the forgotten militant all echoed in the back of my mind. I knew the lingo and the confession. I was nowhere near being able to listen to it again. Putting down a borrowed magazine, I went asking for the Holy Bible then set my back firm into a distant corner. Without a directed question, I had no idea where to start reading. These days, like my deceased grandmother did, I find refuge in Psalms. In my solace, those chapters are followed with a lengthy reading in the Gospels. In the hospital I took to neither approach. Recanting nothing, not even my belief in Christ, that late afternoon I took to divining with the Holy Bible. With a little prayer to the hallway breeze and closed eyes, I asked for guidance and direction and let the Bible fall open into my lap. One random tap to the text and my eyes opened to read. I did this not three times, not four times, but more than six times I asked for clarification and breadth. What I understood from Old Testament to New was that it was not the time to have children. The world had changed. It would be more of a burden to bear and nurture than any other age. I did not want to believe. I thought I had time left. Again I was proven wrong. Sincerely, I want to have children and raise them in marriage with a man. I have several barriers to conquer to reach that fullness. My envy of Empress dwells inside those barriers. I may never give birth to a healthy child or at all. Medicine and age blocks the way. So, if having a child means I am finally a woman, I will toil and err as a maiden for the rest of my life. It makes no sense to have children just to prove strength or sexual skill. I try to believe I was taught better to value life and make sound judgments before taking action. For now, my education makes me a graduate of profound ignorance and useless knowledge. Daily, I forget knowledge of self as human, especially in terms of the values of an abstract mind trained for administrative labor. From this passage in Psalms, I have no more use to society or men seeking immortality through lineage. If nothing matters but procreation, then, I will be known as wasted flesh; all because I cannot fulfill genetic destiny. By this cannon, I cannot see the realities and meet the obligations of adulthood. I am left to play for the time to come. That may not be a bad situation being left to rescue my childhood and heal from assaults committed when I was younger. Now I question whether birthing changes life passages? What would I have to yield, other than stuffed animals and dolls, to move into the second phase of the Goddess? Why am I in a hurry? Peri-menupause has not struck yet. I have time. Middle age has not yet arrived yet. Time will busy itself as well as for me.

©N.A. Jones      2017       All Right’s Reserved

 

 

Writing

Arcane III: The Empress (Part II, pages 5-11 of the essay)

IV.

In the past, I was afraid of my feminine. I expiated skirts, dresses, and lace from the closet for years. During that time I chose to discard every fulfillment and benefit of the female rite. From the beginning, at age twelve, I could not understand bleeding. Menses always came at the wrong time. The lesson always made itself apparent when I wanted play but my body demanded rest. In retrospect, I know the scars healed over subsequent years. Other than the elation of summer break, I wither to brittle leaves thinking about my shaming chagrin upon leaving private and public pools in middle school. I knew then that menses was a violation to everything I desired to do. Kill joys always arrived in speckles of red once a month. Other demeaning manners to my spirit came from jokes made by boys who dabbled as humorists on the topic of fish odors. Cracking fish jokes behind the backs of their female friends occurred most months. One day an upperclassman cackled at the lunch room table about his girlfriend wearing the same red sweater once a month. Personally, I had no gimmick. Frequently, I had no blood. Without that tell tale monthly sign, I had no awareness of what it meant to be vilified for being a female. When I flowed, seeing red meant ostracism and weighing under inferences of being the butt of jokes. Later in life, I knew that taking I took a boy’s word on blood would be my ruin. I was confused for decades.

Come maiden, come mother, come vociferous crone.

 Pray talk with other women so young souls do not languish alone.

I learned in my late twenties there is more sacred to owning moon time than could be explained by my mother or a boyfriend. For some reason, until then, I had no interest in walking the stead of sacred femininity and pass through the veil into womanhood. I held onto a patriarchy born in a boy’s mind that assumed a guise of misogyny. As a result of this heavy yoke, I walked away from God willingly. Those first angry years of assertion I fought anyone and everyone who kept knowledge of my sex away from me.  First, I raged at the Jewish God I was taught to honor and revere; then I turn around and ignored him for almost twenty years. I was convinced of his ignorance and there by ineffectiveness as aid to the female sex. Besides, how the hell could a man understand me doubled over in pain with blood running down my inner leg? Blood soaked pads do not come off so easily after waking to a crimson slush adhering to your vagina at two in the morning. I assumed no male would ever understand. How could they? They don’t bleed unless punched. My menses may well be an act of aggression to my disassociated self. Eventually, I became tired of being mired in prejudice blinded eyes. Slowly, over successive years I begged for understanding and release from this so-called curse. By the time regret’s change settled into my hips, I was fooled into being released from all biological timing forever.

 

Now that I am past the age limit of healthy breeding, I wonder if self-rejection did myself in. Picture the lights around my head when I realized that children and God are not far gone conclusions for the educated. Reflecting in their light, I have healed from much childhood pain, lies, and confusion. I have sought God again and to understand him through Christ. To me, the man Jesus was a healer both patient and yielding. From him, I learned contrary to what I railed. Being female does not necessitate a handicap for God in his male stead. As with God, women have their place with Christ as well. Whether it is in their fullness and bearing or as stewards and preservers of the kingdom, men and women can reside in the bounty and responsibility that is the Lord’s. For this I have to reconcile the Empress into my history and works. Out of fear of losing the feminine again, I crave a connection to her wake. I plead with God, as well, for understanding her mysteries that well as deep as fertility’s connection to ancestral lineage.

Considering my own public vilification of blood and youth, I wonder how her mystery could be kept sacred in the public view and not be defiled by those threatened by the inherent strength in women. In this partial journey, I can only conclude that there is more than just an emotional blessing in the fullness of woman. There is regular trial. On second thought, Empress does not seem so much a braggart anymore. What proceeds her visual capture in this card must not have been easy for her.

Before I took to pen to excavate her image and record, I noticed I was scared to approach Empress with serious study.  To confront that fear I began looking over the tarot deck- certain parts of the windows always make themselves known first. With my Rider-Waite deck, I focus on the action in the center of the card. Then, I weigh the inspiration of visual interpretation with the written meaning of the card. I became accustomed to reading with a psychic edge this way. Now, when I study, the focal point always shifts into motion around the depiction. Curiosity to delineate method often causes me to wonder if I am grappling with my gut or mind when reading over the tarot book’s definition.  As a reaction to the image of the Empress, I rejected the card as an interpretation of full blown femininity and gentility. There had to be more than traditional expectations from a woman associated with the card. A year ago, all I saw was a white woman of means who is taken care of by her husband. She wants for nothing and has everything in her reach as she assumes the mark of a attending matriarch still libel to produce and care. Her family loves her. She is the embodiment of mother and the inherent familial power that is consistently wielded. Empress takes reserve in a stereotype of an age long gone.  For me, all that registers stems from pain in my head and stomach.  It is comprised of a revulsion caused by envy and jealousy. In my mind The Empress is the pinnacle of fulfillment and security that I may never experience. Her position seems fixed upon marriage, a man, longevity, promise, and foundation.  My path, for now, reads otherwise. It is one of a disabled woman ill pristine of fair skin and wealthy breeding. How do I even try to find context within the Empress?  The current result is in becoming a classist or intuitive of an older age who reads and invokes the Empress without clear thought or direction. It is strange how personal objections and emotional barriers influence reading the tarot just as much as traditional definitions. Despite seeing no action of her rule in my life, I plead my case of a possible barren womb and how that comes into a discussion of inclusivity as well as a former rejection of personal biology. Does her card read the darkest shadow of feminine emptiness in the reverse? How can I bring the discussion around to archetypal relevance to contemporary womanhood?

In the end, like Jacob limping away from the angel, I have stopped wrestling with Empress as a concept. She who gives audience with no reprise, threat, or assessment of boundaries, remains my enemy. Working through my continual bracing may be a reaction to the hope and thrill of living a life that I truly have no access to or means to maintain. Still, the stars in my eyes seem so concrete around bewitching hour on bright moonlit nights. Contrary to my lifestyle, Empress lives high. The sign is reflected in her maturity, choice, and happenstance. Gauging from her appearance, if we do travel the same circle, she is a threat to what I can attain in this bone, body, and color. Notably, at this age, I am failing my sense of tolerance and opportunity by clinging to this agitation of seeing a white woman enthroned. Where is my counterpart? Is black femininity so different from a Caucasian perspective of the same occasion? The base identity of the female comes in nature. Nurturing demands a different discernment; such as one that balances the intellect with spiritual waters. The feminine depicted in this card, no matter black or white, may be one and the same after all. Despite that, what I see is the Empress manifested in white privilege. Empress refers just as well to the court cards giving character and description to the base idea. The clothing and color give clue to a stock character that may make for someone with whom we are familiar. The way Empress is depicted triggers reactions to people I grew up with in childhood, books, and television. Commenting on white privilege is only part of a knee jerk reaction in the middle of longing to find a connection to the tarot in my own life. I need remember she is just drawn that way and not a design made into a demand upon my belief system. Then again I do need a challenge to the core to understand myself better.

As for fettering out personal symbolism, who the Empress is in my life I do not know, but with more excavating in silence I am bound to find out. This threat she presents to my character also manages itself in a block formed by my subconscious. From the little leads into the dark shadows of the psyche, Empress intimates I am a failure for not being married or for giving birth. Looking on the card, I hear it quietly in the recesses of my ears. Her depiction triggers a shadow side of the card as separate from reading the reverse. I see the shadow in a haze to the left of Empress distorting the distance to the forest from the golden wheat. If I probe the shift anymore I may crack my psyche with irreversible damage. Then again, a shard of my soul separating out to venture and return with knowledge may be a solution to what ills my now aged feminine.

Empress crosses me now as never having worked and being schooled very little. Meanwhile, her aegis, is a sign, a mark of graduation from some school of thought. Maybe those lessons form the base obligations of running a household and child rearing. Empress has her competencies to assert her out of bed every morning. She has her husband and household to direct her daily efforts. To me, she reclines ignorant of the world and God’s blessings. Because of that she is bred and mentally crippled for her success. Forgive me for damning the ages of my ancestors. There is a place in every home for sustaining the hearth. My fulfillment and true reflection may reside with another card. I try so hard to see beyond and connect with every arcane on some level of practice or history. Giving up on the Empress is not an end game expected.  A problem with finding connection and resolve is in taking the Empress as a part of the home and hearth. The action reflects a transition and temporary stalemate that settles my spine more easily in my hips. For another woman she is a fulfillment of emotion and age. For me, her  presence is baffling in a personal reading when my road thus far is that of a solitaire who is both wary and weary.

I am a bookhound who briefly moved out of study to find a place in practice not in dust encrusted tomes. For some time I did not seek to prize myself on old books at midnight, discussion, and defunct Internet links. Finding comfort in a public persona is hard especially when tested to no end. I linger in the quiet and hidden that survive on silence in observation. This life is not the Empress’ domain. She dwells in the body, I dwell in the mind and soul. The Empress sits high in her regality. She portends to be a braggart and selfish spirit.  Though why should she not exude the full sense of the Arcane selection? Infused with sign and mood of an icon she sits. To understand better, I harken to see her played out in everyday familiarity. Perhaps she is the disheveled woman pushing a pram while waiting in line at Health and Human Services. That visage brings the occasion down to a level I can allow myself to learn from.

©NA Jones         2017       All Right’s Reserved

 

Writing

I grew disillusioned about editing the complete document before the end of February. In order to keep with old promises and new writing plans, I am providing the first five pages of text. The document I started with is quickly growing to yield more than thirty pages. If I continue in this vein to post everything, I will have no surprises to provide come publication, should that ever happen. As a result, I will be holding back from now on. Yet, I still would like to keep you on this journey, so I will continue to write and post in this vein.

Arcane III: The Empress

Inside will have to do. The rain drops too heavy and too fast to confuse for a gentle refreshing spray to land on my face.  Waiting out the downpour until dry damp takes over under the awning seems the best approach to inhaling late autumn’s moisture. I watched the storm cascade in from the North. The dark grey clouds scampered across the eastern face of the backyard as I clamored for shelter from the cold winds. For me, memories of late autumn always dictate how and when water will descend from the sky. Winter is only a few weeks away and I do not think I could bear under the crisp chill of snow. Rain is all I want. I am dehydrated to the bone no matter how much water I drink. My fingers snap like breaking the back of an oak tree branch. Late autumn tinder for the fire is how I a drying out. Standing in the deluge tonight may either kill me or herald the beginning of my rebirth.

As for inspiration from the storm, I will confine my observations, studies, and songs to my bedroom. In there, concentration is not foreign to me. That simple joy resounds in my heart despite the room’s acoustics channeling the conversations of inhabitants in this and other houses. The interchange between houses echoes everything. For any occasion it does not matter whether I whisper under my breath or scream buried inside my mouth at least once a day. Today, sadness, engendered by the rain, dictates something other than coddling the voice with water or sweet tea. The lament of a lesser woman forms at the back of my throat nestled behind infected and cracked molars. It does not matter. I peel out in a squeal and I regret being flat before I sing the second word:

Empress sit by the counting tree,

Empress how will you answer to faces three?

Empress, tell me, how do you plea?

Heed not the darkness, mind you Hecate rules.

Tell me in the light

Why, for me, aren’t you alright?

I.

I pulled the card months ago. It hangs on the wall next to the bed. Posting cards on the wall is the next best step to seeding my mind for dreams and priming the unconscious for creative writing. Sitting down on the bed I turn then unhook the clip from the wall. This season, here is my charge posturing in regal elegance and crowned as a rite celebrated of maturity. Empress is clean, fertile, and accepted. From my understanding what I see of her is a portrait displayed between blinded lights. Her beauty and our expectations dissuade from inherent darkness. This happen to such a high degree that even the lingering shade cast by attending trees is important to rooting an understanding of this visage. For now, I take this card as a snapshot. The design is a view of an emotional climax that directs our attention elsewhere thereby denying what ugliness of character dwells within. The object in the frame cannot be the only presence defined. In the Empress’s shadow, the presence suggested alludes to the conventions that the mind clings, the addictions that the body inherits, and the drive of sparked intuition. All these constructs and their varied combinations build a cache of knowledge that attends to the appearance and folly of my grand dame.

Honestly, for my bravado of accusations, I must comment that I have not stood in her presence long let alone spent time in the casting light of her crown. My responses are immediate and come from the gut. My rationale may hold no water except to explain some violent reaction at the sight of the card. I completely confess I have briefly read the interpretations as written in several manuals and books. Still, I yearn for a personal intuitive response that keys me into studies genuinely. Now, as a precaution to being consumed by the imagery’s patience to reveal its true nature, I tend toward Christ and Hecate’s senility for consistency and rest. Empress works me harder than any other card I have studied. Frequently I can make a connection and garner knowledge from the card’s visual teaching. It has been an hour and I sit confused probing her repose in the throne of begetting. I know one observation to be more than real. At first glance, she is fertility power at full potential. Meanwhile, I shy away because I have always seen how the arcane, high and low, manifest in my life. I pull back and build a wall between the fullness of Empress within and without the shadows I accuse her to wield. As of my biological clock, I am barren and dry for another month. There is now way that she could know menopause terrorizes my mind, strength, and womb. How could she know I have wanted a child for some time?  By choice, education took the reins for my life’s direction. I came to know to late what timeliness demands of a woman’s body for childbearing much too late. I still have yet to work those shadows from dark moons and empty beds. For now, I sit in hatred and fear of Empress. I do not want this lesson. I fear spiritual death and a loud proclamation of ineptitude. Still, I need resolve my anger with this face of the Goddess manifested. But where do I start? I am livid for not being able to see myself in her. I want to know. I want to know what to do now. What choices do I have? I fear none. Where are the rites for a dried womb? I refuse to be relegated to the edge of service to attend others families like a slave. I want my own to nurture and read. I cringe at her fecundity and my selfishness. I must try to remember to be humble and serve where needed, but I can still have a life other than that of a “mammy”. Is it a sacrifice of my previous life to come to a different fullness with man and child? Selfishness dare I test it?

II.

A digression suits these next thoughts. I came to this understanding by making associations with numbers and geometry. Empress as a three, is a designation of the of birth new ideas. The beginning is one point sustaining in isolation.  As a result, one is an understanding complimented by extreme paranoia. The idea exists, but there is no reassurance.  Individuality succumbs to community formed in games of attention, conceit, concession.  A second point in the distance forms a relationship with the first in continual interaction. Two identities may struggle for independence, but for the sake of proximity a regular dialogue takes place to give deeper form, definition, and purpose to the relationship. Three points in the distance is the first sign of stability between marks. For three there is promise inherent and growth assured.  Productivity heads three in any direction. From here we find the Empress a mediator and conduit to create new dimensions for core relationships. Empress is synthesis.

III.

One can hope in resolve by Empress. She can internalize and transform issues yielding a solution that is more relevant than the coldness of intellectual problem solving. She is more akin to water than steel. Swells of emotion may test her personal grounding or motivate her rule. Rationalization and study may have no influence on her mind. For me, clarity formed in emotional psychosis is one of the dark sides of initiation for her rites. This is nothing The Fool, who is foolish for Christ, does not know. Both know spirit and act out of that well of God’s presence. Despite Empress’ presumed isolation, she sits in that tarot window with God quietly through the afternoon. Presented flawlessly in regal dress, her body runs a continuous gauntlet through a test like no other in creation. The test is the toll and passage that comes through blood and water. Empress conceals something darker veiled and more visceral than I knew before.

I cannot wonder but look into the Empress and stare at her stomach. Searching for a tell tale bump on the midsection, I am determined to find a sign of her fertility. I probe her posture with a careful eye and seek a sign of comfort within her hidden nudity. For that, I comfort in her. Comfort in one’s skin is part of a full realization of the feminine self. It took me years into adulthood to take the full mirror test. Learning not to be ashamed of my body became a conviction to be proud and knowledgeable of the physical that is woman. Also, looking at her, there is no confusion of gender roles or a suggestion of presences condoned as an assault on masculinity. I see her as a full, realized, and recognized as woman.

Instead of solely strength of mind, she is also strength of body. Still, being familiar with the female court cards, I wonder if this power Empress resides in is shallow. I see in her an achievement of mind and soul reconciling them with the body. Some days we sit in dictates of the flesh – spirit willing or not. We wonder whether we are soul with a body or a body with a soul. I have asked myself this periodically for years to gauge how ethically I am living. I have heard others vocalize opinions about issues of womanhood and I find myself aloof to their arguments and detached from the flashpoint to my core.  There are days I realize flesh is a joy. Other days, I am reticent being told that flesh is the ultimate conception of God. What disembodied spirit does not clamor for emotions and affairs in the flesh? To me, elevating flesh over soul would be the call of dead spirits. Separation of body and soul had me wandering the corridors of houses and buildings seeking to settle my drive.  My body walked behind quietly stepping feet gently to echo the path I was skulking. Then, upon much healing, it was my mind that kept me relatively whole. The flexibility and understanding learned allowed my soul rest in the shade.  I learned to accept that I had a dark side that tended my health and safety as much as the blessing of the spirit. In the church where I got baptized, during altar calls, the light by the podium was too bright to withstand.  By my eye, the cool light by the piano was on the calmly defined side. In this stillness is where I kneeled. The Empress, as an ideal champion for the ends of flesh, lingers in my hand like a pornographic photo pinched between index finger and thumb. It is not the depiction that matters, but what lay in the inherent suggestion between pose and mystery.  I gaze closely and shudder looking for kinship. Meanwhile, I rise to the bedroom mirror only to stare at my face and muse at crow’s feet in the corners of my eyes. Even I know, by instinct, that I must take refuge in the Queen of Epees. Empress in my right hand, I find the feminine breeding contempt.

©N.A. Jones      2017       All Rights Reserved

 

Writing

Shrine of the Black Madonna and Grottos

 

http://top-of-the-arch.blogspot.com/2011/06/grottos-at-black-madonna-shrine_08.html

https://www.google.com/#q=black+madonna+shrine+missouri

http://ramblings-and-rumblings.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-black-madonna.html

 

First, I toyed with the idea. Then I almost let it devolve into oblivion. What caught me before I took out the trash was a handful of requests to recount my attachment to the Shrine of the Black Madonna and Grottos in Eureka, Missouri.  My tale begins years earlier to the cross country trip. After several nights of writing I discovered the driving image for the tour was found in a nightmare that ingrained itself on my active intellect since high school. Dreams have been a large part of my spiritual studies since childhood. The tendency for one vision in the night to influence my mind has been a rule of defense for most of my life. The image also gives me fodder for artistic creation for twenty years and awareness in daily life for over thirty years. Though the dream symbology does not always make itself easily understood upon waking, in the end, the decisions I make always seem timely and provide an escape from fate’s grasp but not the weight of her lessons.

The Rat

I wake standing in the middle of a small living room. Two plastic covered white couches line the far wall while a small love seat and divan flank the sides. I stand in front facing guests. Four people walk into the room. Two men are followed by one woman and a tall human sized rat man with a long tail. The human sized rat walks in and sits on the love seat. I am repulsed at the matted hair and fact that he seems a real being and not a man in a suit. On first responses, I think him Satan and as he tries to take over a conversation that has been the ebb and flo of the night for hours. In hindsight I am sure he is the only thing in the white room that has a profound odor of rot. The others smell of skin, dirt, and sweat. Despite my fright they continue to talk. Maybe, just maybe I am not here for them. Maybe they cannot see me. Blackness. I walk into the kitchen. The walls and cabinetry are all white to the core. A man stands to the left of the sink. His wings relax behind him and four faces float in white light to the right of his head. An older woman in her 50’s stands in front of him to my right posturing a guilt trip for him to fall into. I try to interrupt but she refuses to stop harping on him. The floating heads begin to talk. I recognize my face in one of the floating balls of light. He is panicking and fighting not to lose his mind. I cannot seem to divert her arguments to provide him a way to leave. I wake knowing the rat took over and will not be leaving the scene any time soon.

The Journey

I pledged to myself that year to take another route up north instead of taking the familiar route through Arkansas. One idea I planned all summer was to take several roadside stops en route to Ohio. Driving alone with an extra week for insulation makes for excitement and personal accomplishment. On my first day I made it to the other side of Oklahoma. Before leaving the state, I saw the signs for the Shrine of the Black Madonna over twenty miles before crossing into Missouri .  After exiting into Eureka, I pulled in at a corner store. One tip from the man outside the gas station and I found the Shrine in ten minutes. After parking I wandered the site looking for somewhere to register and someone with which to speak. I found neither. What I did find was a tent with glass encased icons and a large series of grottos.

 I started at the end and worked backwards. If memory serves me correctly I started with Saint Francis. Walking up to the shrine, I paced my steps by walking slow. One thing that was obvious as I slowed my temperament was that felt my emotions change. Raving awareness was not what I needed to connect with the imagery. What I needed was to approach with humility and patience. This was not art to gawk at or criticize with a contemporary’s panacea to correct for social suitability. It was art to meditate on quietly. The name of the cement image did not matter. It was the design of each grotto that was meant to be a passage of consciousness as well as physical transformation. The sights, textures, and smells worked me to the bone. With every step this inner quiet caught flame and consumed me. This was a journey years before I took the step into baptism. It was not a surprise that the lingering guilts, passions, and appetites conjured up an appearance of something long gone. It was the rat. By the time I had grasped what my senses where telling me around the second grotto, there he was leering at each statue and lounging beneath Saint Josephs hands. I said nothing, but continued to walk the grotto. After that with every step through the grounds I became tired and extremely sleepy. Whether I had eaten lunch I do not know, but what I remember is quickly moving through the rest of the grounds to get back to the car.

The Exorcism

Driving the car back up to the exit ramp to continuing my journey is clouded in my mind. What I do remember is seeing the human faced rat sitting next to me in the passenger’s seat. Why he manifested this far away from home I did not know. I truly had no clue. I do recall how difficult it was driving for the next five miles. Those five minutes still terrify me. Despite driving, my attentions went to the vision in the car far more than the 18 wheelers quickly passing me down the highway. When the rat finally jumped into the back seat, I exited the highway and pulled off on a hill covered in gravel. After turning off the car, I jumped in the backseat and dug for my medicine bundle that was filled of little pieces of this and that. I packed that medicine bundle specifically for this trip. It was to be the foundation for an altar in my bedroom once I got back to Ohio. I only took the best of semi-precious stones from my bags and pieces of nature collected from my travels between school and home. One piece in the bundle was a small statue attributed to the Egyptian Goddess Bast.  I bought the painted piece of plaster from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It served its purpose like a dreamlike portion of history. Outside the car, bag in hand, I threw piece after piece of stone, seed, and bone on to the graveled hill. I took to Bast with a heavy right foot. She broke into three pieces. I tossed the piece one after each other over the ravene.

The “big” dream of cats occupies a base in my memory. The place I lay was immediately covered in cats from kitchen to bedroom as soon as the front door swung open. The white couch was inundated. How could I not determine it a sign of fidelity and totem back then. For now I rest in knowing childhood dreams are potent unto death. I blamed Bast that afternoon once leaving the shrine. I did it without thinking. I forgot that rats lay prey to cats. I could have asked but would have been indebted beyond my understanding. Her destruction was the sacrifice that caused the rat never to show his face again.

Resolve and Expanse

I see a large piece of rose quartz in my hand. It is the piece I ground into the hill with my right heel. Right now the quartz’ presence is only in my imagination, but I remember scrying. I also remember leaving comfort for the dead. I remember the rat knowing that I did not battle my demon/monster the ways I have before. I presumed for decades that the field of battle in dreams ends at the boundaries of sleep and wake. He, the rat, is elsewhere, waiting. I do not flaunt my Chinese Zodiac birth symbol in anyone’s face. If the human rat is an aspect of myself,  I have not seen a connection in over twenty years. There is still time to learn though. Still time indeed.

 

Poor #5

Poor #5: Widdershin Sun

Widdershin Sun,

Stars plumb the earth within.

The steeple chimes “we come from stars

And shall return” before the earth is done.

E’en when fooled the darkness is replete;

I prefer to meet the devil on two feet.

Widdershin Sun

Stars plumb the earth within.

The steeple chimes “We come from stars

And shall return” before the earth is done.

 

I have lasted this long. It is some twenty years gone. Poverty was an illusion when I was in college. Having loans and grants to cushion me for dinner on a cold Monday night made a profound difference. The years lasted this way until the repayment period began and then you feel the pain. That is when a veil braced against reality shreds to pieces with every paycheck. Steak is a top shelf dream for five years. The low brow end of London broil is a half inch bouillon cube half dissolved in luke warm water. With no kettle or microwave, tap water after a two minute faucet run serves its purpose clearly. Necessity is the mother of invention and I know now that where I am is a blessing more than the accepted burden of repaying a debt.

Last week I was ungrateful and frustrated. I cringed at the thought of asking for money. Begging seems to be for those who cannot commit to the value in menial labor. “I may not be able to repay you, but I can work for you in lieu of payment. All my labor value is a commitment for cash,” I muse, “Can we bargain that way?” There are a few less things I can do these days. My body can no longer handle a yoke over long term means. I try not to pair poverty and sickness as long term lovers, but I have aged. My body is now toned for accuracy, not speed. Slowing down is the rule of the day and I am angry for not being understood. I stood in the kitchen embarrassed for wanting to ask a wealthy individual for assistance. The pain in my mouth sparked a criticism out of desperation. I was curt and tried to kill the mental image of being a beggar. That image is not me. It never has been. Personally, the problem was in damning of the rich for not acknowledging my pain and helping me (read: paying for me) to return to good health. Are they not responsible for the rest of civilization with that much liquidity and reserve? Where are the non-profits? Where are the mutual help foundations? In my mind, I was entitled to health care and not to suffer under my current ills. I should be happy and healthy. Of my guilt and embarrassment is remembering the homeless man sitting in front of an abandoned building in the heart of downtown Detroit, Michigan. My guilt projected onto the African American in traditional African garb. Walking by the transient, he stopped only to kick the begging cup of change across the sidewalk while screaming, “Get a job”. Of my guilt and embarrassment is a friend deciding not to ask for money from her parents to help with bills. In her mind, she grappled with their wealth and her poverty for years. She finally understood that it is their money. They can do anything they want with it. She concluded that she was no one to tell anyone what to do with their finances. I understood her to say, “They earned it without me; who am I to demand anything?”

So, I leave it this way, other options exist. If I pray on anything, I reduce the chances of manifestation if I ask with so much specificity that the request is yoked down so heavy, it cannot move. Dental insurance came today courtesy of the federal government. It happened after an interview with a kind woman whom I was referred to by a relative. I have paperwork to read and phone calls to make. I am poor, but it is not like I cannot appreciate a helping hand in any guise. Last week I was embarrassed to sound like the stereotypes of poor people I watched on television, in movies, and on city streets. The reality of those characters words and feeling where uncomfortably true. I also did not want to face what it meant to wait. I did not want to face despair and risk with no direction to go. Today is D(Dallas) on zero (D/0). I am hoping this labyrinth of access and survival opens up to a broad vista soon. Even if it does not, an open sky is deep enough with promise.

~Jain Sioux Anne Fellps

Tip Jar Freebie (+)

I was told this one is too hot, but I’ll keep typing anyway. Toyota has a cadre of former employees trying to take over a row of certain towns in Texas. The former employees turned social activists are African American. I have also been told that they are all pedophiles. How they lost their jobs I do not know. I was told they refused to show up for work. Other pedophiles are also working for Toyota. This cadre of individuals are also known as pedophiles, but are white.

From what I gathered first hand is a residency game they are playing. They pay the mortgage at the home they bought, but they are seeking refuge in other parts of towns. Namely, they are trying to force themselves into a shadow residency in the poorer areas of all of the towns they live. Still, that is not the thick of it. These home owners, who are never in their official residence, also have a safe house in another county. The safe house is never spoken of, but when the home is needed they take refuge there so no one will ever find them.

I heard this. I did not personally witness the divulge. The source is involved and I choose to preserve a distance. I do not know the labor and HR perspective on this, but the regaling caught my attention enough to post.

~Jain Sioux Anne Fellps TAMU

~W.H. Tespid ERT

BTW: I just heard from the neighborhood kids. Apparently what is popular for parents is starting a microbrewery to pair with brothel services. Friend says there is a high and frequent fire risk associated with home brewery. Maybe the occasion calls for the fire department and possibly CPS.

If these type of tips are what surround the new moon and new year, I am afraid of what the full moon will yield. Until then I will be thinking methodically, watching steps, and quieting rage through March.

Poor #4

Poor #4

I choose not to don my armor over the past few nights. I left it tucked away on the bookshelf behind my bed. Part of the chain mail comprises of forgetting that “religion is the opiate of the masses.  At one point that concept perched on my left wisdom tooth.  Its rooted grip made everything hard to chew and swallow. It never hurt so hard until I began to forego sleep and fine moments of repartee into early morning became monologue. If ever I knew that I was safe in poverty’s reach into the masses, it is now.

Looking at where I have landed I can forgive that little white girl as a sacrifice of another age and live on to find personal value. My anger at her beauty has begun to leave. Why? I am seeing my appearance differently and reevaluating my initial ire. The flesh healed over from the scars, cuts, and burns of my youth reminds me I am not afraid to take risks. I rarely sulk after pain. Lastly, I continue to fight even when blooded. Knowing I am tough and resilient makes for clout from the baseball field into the boardroom.

Our team was first to bat. I waited until the fourth batter played to try my hand at a national pastime. Since the two weeks of school when we played softball in physical education, I still had not learned to hit a ball. Today, the guy on the mound would devour me easily with a clean pitch. Strike one! My head dropped and most of my hopefulness left as well. As the ball landed back in his small hands I swung at the air trying to pretend I knew what I was doing. Second pitch up, I watched the ball float. I stifled my urge to beat something in with the bat then I swung meeting contact. I ran while watching the ball land close to the pitcher’s mound. When the pitcher let the ball fly to first I began confusing baseball with freeze tag. I ducked as low as I could manage and slid into first on hot blacktop and rocks.

It was the last time I watched baseball that lingered in my head. It must be. The last time I watched a runner slide into a base looked sophisticated, elegant, and a sign that you knew what you were doing. In other words, I was trying to show off. For whom, I do not know. A problem was for me between sports and the color of my skin- others seemed to think I was a fast runner or an excellent basketball player. That day on the blacktop was no different. I fell into catering to a stereotype out of fear and desperation. I made few friends at summer camp. Neither quantity nor quality mattered in making acquaintances into friends. I was always the one asking for inclusion only to be left behind on the bleachers. I began to fend for myself after that. The blood sacrifice at my knee knows it. The scar has healed over many a year. Seeing the keloi now it seems much smaller; just like my woes of adolescence.

By revisiting my marks, I am remembering that I am real. With each scar, I am still learning what it means to be human. Now, I can look and clean up my own blood. I know what pain feels like. I can still cry. I am familiar with death and my own mortality as well. My psyche is not a dead end, I continue to develop. I was not and continue to not be as sheltered as one might assume.

Battle scars count in all the subtle interviews, whether physical or mental. Learning to fight at this level below the poverty line, solutions cannot always mean to be solved through physical combat. Bending without being broken by force lends to longevity. A well educated tongue polishes armor as well as providing a healing balm to any damage to the body. Tending the scars that cannot be seen is where I sit right now. Old damage needs new assessments and little white girl seems vacuous again – at least on the outside. On the inside I think she’s been skewered throat to guilt many a day before I saw her. Now I know she needs looking after too.

No harm meant and please forgive me for seeing you a little more clearly today, than before.

~Jain Sioux Anne Fellps TAMU

 

Poor #3

Forgive my indignation of contemporary culture and artifact, but my reality has never been served there. Current culture’s fascination with entertainment seems the reason to use shock and disassociation to make a point. It is an excuse my settled bones cannot tolerate. Once upon a time, a long moment before smart phones and anything digital reached into human consciousness, I had time to myself. I did not linger at the behest of a telephone buzzer or the next CNN tweet. I did not pledge a whim into the disappearing depth of a LCD monitor anchored on the wall. At that time I warred with a loneliness that had a depth that competed with the Mariana Trench. I was lost in a sea of married suburbia and craved companionship. Contrary to what most sexually active singles do, I forewent the bar scene and sex clubs.  I choose to well in passive rejection, emotive neglect; spending many a night staring at the moon.

Back then, I built the foundations of being a solitaire. Working through emotions came through handwork, mostly by wrote and design. Then, I had no anchor except for a King James Version of the Holy Bible and a handful of personal journals from college. Nothing seemed real in my parent’s home – a place that one would think to give solidity. Finding solace had to come by a different tack. Still, I am not one to ask to be introduced to their friend’s children. I am not one to hang out at the neighbor’s house asking (begging) for a little side work. I am not a bar fly and I never was one to prostitute. I did not know how to solve the problem. Little did I understand that my soul worked on the problem from the very beginning. It started unlearning. Being afraid of silence and stillness would soon end. Whenever I could eke out a moment to myself, quiet time started to correct the daily impeding psychosis.

A late weekday afternoon in my room, the façade crashed and I pleaded the air for a solution. Two pronouncements later and a sweet calm repose settled into my hips and steadied my hands. I pledged chastity and poverty to a God I barely knew. Knowing no way out of my problems I turned to one who could sustain me even at the risk of changing to everyone. As my mind began to rearrange itself, I soon started calling myself a nun if not for the sake that I was getting none compared to my counterparts. Whether my friends were meeting men and making more money than I ever would no longer mattered. I was positive that better for me was to come; all I need was to be patient.

Twenty some odd years later metered with private vows after midnight, I am still sustained and rooted. I have my arguments. I have my doubts. At one pointed I begged the Christ to deny my vows and let me make money. Lord knows I was in need and I also forgot that there are other ways besides money to get things done. I had lost my job, but I also lost over one hundred pounds and afforded a beautiful white cotton blouse with ruffles. I may be a simpleton, but my soul rested in that shirt. I finally felt pretty. Lord administers to deeper needs as well.

Before poverty’s wake crashes at your bedroom door, adhere to a few common sense rules: 1) Preserve your body and tend to your overall health daily; 2) sex may not be the best option as a means of intimacy. Taking into account the amount of forced prostitution I have witnessed since 2008 and former President Obama’s cut of funds into Federal STD programs in the same year, I can only conclude that sex is not a priority for longevity; 3) No matter the federal or state program, job or hobby, save what you can. Even the smallest amount can be useful in the long run. Find a little box, a jar or can. Place it somewhere you will not forget. Add something with every purchase. From a penny to a dollar, save a little for yourself.

Note: I tell you one way or another, sometimes not so direct, so you can apply even the smallest bit to build a personal approach to living. Think authentic to meter to your soul. Details dictate to think refinement when appearances are more important than content. Daily put to task you faith as “faith without works is dead”. It will reinforce the fundament that is your frame and bring you before men as able minded as well as able bodied.

~Jain Sioux Anne Fellps TAMU

Note: Just a question…Considering the coverage of the recent inaugural unrest, what did the conservatives do on the day Obama was sworn in?

 

 

Cigarettes #3

“Put yure shit dawn and shut up! Dis de only time I’m tellin’ you and if you miss ‘ear me youl miss it foreva. I’ll wait. I’ll wait. I’ll be kwaet firs, then use. I’m to cited to tell, but ya must mind. Ya, it sumtin ya need no. Fur da fers time maybe, but neber the last. Ya here? Pay tenshun. I seen it. I saw it walk on Gots gren ert. Nose ya dat Godt ert is fum ere tad ere an ever. Ise seen ‘em alright. Da monsher e is. I took is tower and is nose. For me a buried ‘em deep. Use. Use all. Eber one use got to free use from ‘em. I’d mi fight. Use ya own.”

I may be a super hero now, but in all honesty I was only a drop of consideration in a bucket that melted by the autumn bonfire before here. Though all that matter is here, I am compelled to tell you of then. I do not mean to make the landscape so intimate, but know me for this: You’ll never understand the impact on earth when falling from heaven. My back is broke still. My spine healed in pieces. My arms gave birth to the activity of two pair and now my reach is as lengthy as it is weighty.

As a tween I bore hunger in my hips and cheeks. Walking home so far, so many times caused a tendency in my neck to look down. I became more fascinated with the cracks between planks of cement than clouds in the sky or oncoming traffic. It was a risk that I preferred to take even during rainstorms and pelting hail. For me I had lost interest in the common world. Depression took its toll physically. As a result, I took my position on earth lower than a dog. While walking, what caught in the loops of my mind was not just leaves and branches, but also the detritus of human life: bottle caps, McDonald’s napkins, empty cans of Coke, bubble gum, and cigarettes. With home training nothing would grace my lips from this used bounty. Still, in my hunger as a growing child, I became aware of oral attractions over each piece of garbage. Despite that, I never gave in to bending over, scouring the ground, and chewing old smoked tobacco drowned in automobile exhaust and acid rain. My God, the draw was unbearable.

The places I could turn my head without seeing ashtrays, human or otherwise, must have resulted in attracting a strong demon. Not long after acknowledging my unGodly appetites, I had unbearable visions of cigarettes being forced down my throat. Night after night upon going to my bedroom I could fight, but the force became stronger. Finally I gave in, but on being clever, I let the imagery pass through and out of me as my only counter. This way I did not bear through the visualizations of physical burn and acrid taste. The energy behind the encounter seemed satisfied with this victory. My counter to his spite was that my senses were edified in never wanting to smoke.

Eyes open. I saw him walk to the right. The landscape was more like an Atari video game than the backyard of the house. The yellow earth supported the cigarette monster well. Meanwhile, I remained still until I could find a place to gain higher ground. In a video game from the 1980’s that would be difficult. Cigarette Monster saw me watching him and the chase began. He was seven feet tall and verdant green with spikes running down his back. Fore and aft he began throwing cigarettes everywhere as he scurried after me. Panicking, I ran left to right. Straight runners have trouble chasing after side winding prey. Back and forth, back and forth across the landscape I ran trying to keep a distance. If he caught me I knew I would start smoking as a kid and it would continue for the rest of my life. Tiring him out through the run was not working. I had to think of something, anything. What would defeat a monster? I barely remembered my notes on killing a hydra, Cigarette Monster’s ancient cousin. At that moment there were no near misses, but the next run I would have to be on the kill. That would bring me closer to him than I cared to walk. Flashes. Flashes of brilliance happen and I am a firm believer in clairsentience. Without a sword or stick how would I fight? Lucid dreaming brought me blessings once and on the moment I woke and asked, there a few feet before me plugged in the ground was a hole of dead babies. Out of the corner of my eye, monster started the pursuit from the left. I ran toward the hold, jumped, then kept running. At a distance I heard him hit the edge and fall into the pit. One step less and I turned around. Apparently he fell deep into the well. Dead white babies covered in a bright green film where heaped at the top of the pit. I heard no sound. There was no movement. The demon must have dissolved on contact with early innocence. A whining sound formed in the distance. It was my alarm. I woke moments later.

Killing the monster set me free from addiction for years. I did not learn until a few years ago that it is a tradition in some metaphysical schools that you can ask for your present from the monster after its defeat. I am tempted to ask, so tempted to ask now. I wonder if the present’s power swelled in potency for over thirty years. What reality can I make for myself with that?

©N.A. Jones 2017

Cigarettes #2

II.

Warning: Adult content.

It’s long, white, and light sugarcane brown at the tip. He dropped the pretense of a filter years ago. The draw has never been what it looks like. Still, I am not his wife. How the hell would I know?

In high school I found out that my mother smoked cigarettes before being pregnant with me. She says she quit cold turkey. I have never seen anything like paper caning pass her lips in over forty years. My former step-father, on the other hand, smoked incessantly. I witnessed most of the lingering smoke when trying to spend family time with him. Trying to watch television with him in the family room, I sat on the other side of the room to stay away from the second hand smoke.  Despite my distance and waving hands, I was inundated by an odor mingled with sweat, dirt, and Dewar’s. Maintaining composure was difficult. I often escaped to my bedroom to read and sleep. One evening while walking out, I remember turning my head to say, “Goodnight”. My eyes caught the cigarette tip being pulled from his mouth. It was covered in tan saliva. Watching him ash into a tray covered with butts and bits of cellophane wrappers I leered closer to disgust. He slowly returned the farewell as I began to walk away again. A few feet away, I reserved my judgment and made my way to my room.

While this occasion of my stepfather comprises the core of my experience of smoking, I did not know the sensualist escape of cigarettes until after college. It came with an introduction to vintage erotica from World War II and European movies. Long stemmed filters made characters appear elegant and refined. Clove cigarettes added a mystique of the Middle East to intimate encounters. Menthol packs, I was told, alleviate throat pain. With a clever turn of phrase and the right posturing the seduction of smoke is assured. On the flip side, all that Hollywood dressing was a sign of posers who need appear to be artists to the working crowd. On film smoking seemed to be an affairs of the popular. For me, the mystique of a cigarette was another reason to leave them alone. Despite the attractive actors on the screen, the diseased films born in the mouth, the stinking breath, the burn holes in clothing, and stained ceilings where nothing I thought I needed to experience.

I didn’t say it. I couldn’t say it. I’d sound deranged. Just gimme me a moment. Please, just one quick moment to arrange myself. I’ll whisper it into the wind. If you hear it, know you can’t trace it to me, ever. I have been trained to doubt my senses. I never thought it would be an advantage in the long run, but understand this; looking into that ashtray, the disgust did not solely come from the cigarette tip, dark with saliva. It was a bitter smell I could not place. Walking away that night, it registered sexual in my head. My body recoiled closer to the wall. Knowledge of the magic, pretense, and psychosis of smoking has accumulated over the years. Mind you, not from experience. Yet, how could I forget that moment of sexual enlightenment about my step-father? I did forget though, for several months, until the dreams came and I came to hate him as well as his oral fixation.

Sleep in high school did not begin until well after midnight. Most nights I took to the kitchen table as my roost from four in the afternoon to well after cleaning dinner dishes. One night I must have closed my backpack and staggered upstairs to my bedroom. With no lights, after donning a nightgown, I set the alarm. Sleep, I imagine, came quickly. What I remember in the fog of the dream was lying half naked on white sheets comforted by white pillows. What I also remember was the stench that worked its way through the room to collect over the bed. I recognized the odor from my step-father’s roost in the family room. Sexual intent began to collect below the amber cast of smoke. What I saw next was neither human nor a living being. A large glob, the color of roasted wheat berries, profiled itself with a formed sexual member in hand at the foot of the mattress. I did not scream. Then, I had no ability to talk in my dreams. Besides that, my limbs were weighted into the mattress. This was not a lucid dream; I had no recourse or defense. I had to go through it.

In the morning the word smegma wedged itself into my vocabulary. I felt out of balance for years. I could tell no one for the sake of reputations and accusations. Even in youth, I trusted dreams and the wind changes more than I trusted adults. Though my step-father never touched me, the level of trust was irreparably damaged if not completely removed.

Two thousand miles and thirty years later, I could hear them outside the house. I may have put a lot of effort in veering away from participating in popular neighborhood business, but some cartel labeled their brand of cigarettes after me. That night I sat up, turned on the light and stared at the white walls. I don’t care or want to be the fulcrum for someone’s orgasm; especially turning me into a sexual object. After the random orgies, the pedophilic privacies, the dead bodies (human and animal), and public masturbation, eventually sex organs fall off. After the local pimp’s union tells all the women prostitutes to cut off their nipples because turning tricks has nothing to do with pleasing oneself, one wonders no more how a deviant is born. I imagine that it is the natural chemical highs that follow; first the simple, then the complex. Then come little pills that stimulate an infarction in the brain that feels like an orgasm. Yes, the almighty orgasm carries much weight. I care not to be smoked out as an addiction then or now.

It’s long, white, and light sugarcane brown at the tip. He dropped the pretense of a filter years ago. The draw has never been what it looks like. Still, I am not his wife. How the hell would I know?

 

~NCC

Poor #2 (Addendum)

I watched a documentary on the Quakers almost twenty ago. What I remember about their “church” services was a quiet time of alertness. Members would intermittently stand and speak out loud what they  in the stillness. Whether their hearing was a function of the ears or mind did not matter. What I gathered from the television recording was that clarity of reception was the most important component of the service. It functioned second to any presence of God in the room.

Here I am in the after chill of rain trying to get rest before finishing lunch. In the quiet of the street outside, I heard a man’s voice quietly call my name. At the same time I remembered walking into a hotel bathroom on an overnight stop while traveling cross-country. The man went on to say that hotel living is getting old, irritating, and expensive. He cannot find a place to live. Even if he did, in a matter of three months, he would have to move out and lose his belongings. Jobs are scarce and being sociable all day long is getting equally tiring. He does not know what he is going to do. Moving on in a couple of days makes sense. Starting the whole job search and housing cycle is daunting if not solely because it has become a long-standing practice. The voice stopped. I lay quietly and tried to remember exactly what was said. I have not articulated everything to a fullness, but the emotion of irritation and loss is captured. He is hanging on with every fiber of his being.

Forgive my ignorance of dignity in poverty. Please, forgive my intellectual prejudices as well. Since I slipped below the U.S. Poverty Line statistic, my mind has never been so tender and forgiving of even the slightest nothing. Each day is a new calibration to maintain balance. What can I handle without money? What can I maximize for the least amount of cost? What services can I find gratis? Maintaining a place to sleep, eat, heal, and entertain myself has taken the greater share of my efforts. I write not just to maintain sanity, but also to provide assistance to those who may walk the same path, if but for a day. Sometimes giving is as much a part of survival as receiving. Even if the gift of knowledge is not returned.

~Jain Sioux Anne Fellps TAMU

 

BTW: Niven’s experience in California just spoke again. When staying at the Crowne Plaza Hotel she heard a handful of conversations in the corridor outside the room. Everything came to a head when she heard what could have been someone negotiating a price on a trick over the hotel phone. Come the return home and a long conversation with a friend, the two figured out that prostitutes where taking up residence in the hotel and working.

Needless to say, owning and running a hotel must be full of daily surprises that the innocent may not always be aware. There is something to be said for asking the right questions. Remember that being safety minded does not always have to be construed as the prima donna approach. Practicing safety tends to lead to a longer life.

Eve II (Addendum)

Sometimes it is the background music that saves us. Sometimes it is staring into the depth of the sky. Other times it is a single breath that brings us out of a barrage of accusations and insults. We embody fear in those moments and don’t see clearly enough how to escape. So I praise happenstance and the consistency of nature. I must remember that physically I am secure. What lurks outside will remain outside. What saved me today was in the rhythm of cooking. Staying sensory and patient made for a painless pairing of long moments of oppression. Right now it is three and a half hours to sync with a world of children’s hopes and dreams. Even the seventy year old children sit in anticipation for a brief nod to joy and elation. I don’t think I will be forgetting today. I will especially remember that this was not the first night and the occasion is born from a string that seems not to be cut from an endless length.

I have much more to learn about my chosen name sake.

Looking for a second sight of St. Nicholas this year may be pushing it. Some mysteries I crave more than annually or just with the return of the sun.

A blessed Eve to you and yours,

Niven St. Nicholas Constantin

 

Sweet Potato Latkes (roughly what sustains this Eve)

Boil two cups of water. Roughly grate two medium sweet potatoes. Yield one to two cups of potato. Set aside in a metal container. Cover with boiled water and sit for five minutes. Drain and set in a bowl. Add two eggs, three tablespoons of flour, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, ¼ cup of raisins, ¼ cup of sliced almonds. Mix well. Drop by 1/8 cup spoonfuls onto a hot griddle. Brown the latkes on each side. Serve warm as is or with a dollop of sour cream.

Served cold is just as good.

Latkes

Grate 1 and 1/2 white potatoes. Yield 1-2 cups of bulk. Place in a bowl and cover with boiling water for 5 minutes. Drain and press out water. Place in a bowl with 1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt, 1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon of black pepper (the more pepper you add the more of a warm and spicy after taste will curl around your mouth), 2-3 Tablespoons flour, and 2 eggs. Blend well. Drop by 1/8 cup onto a hot griddle. Brown the latkes on each side. Serve warm as is or with a dollop of fresh made apple sauce.

Enjoy!

 

Tip Jar

From the hip and a hearing aide:

“King of Glory” needs more money and more women.

In the original statement women was mentioned first and only.

Taking a risk….

Fluted Frog, E-squire

W.H. Tespid Emergency Rescue Technician in Training