Doctortayria's Blog

Chelsea Clinton’s wedding is going to cost $5 million. There must be a point to such lavishness in the world, but I struggle to understand it at this moment and it makes me sad. I wonder what that amount of money would do to improve the lives of the 1.2 million people living in unspeakable conditions in the slum of Kibera – maybe get some plumbing in there so they don’t have to walk through their own sewage every day? Probably it is more about politics than funding. I don’t understand the world. I want to, but I don’t.

I like the stories of Robin Hood as an awakener of ideals of social justice. Maybe this character is reviving in the collective psyche when such inequities come out as the story on the news today about the mayor of Bell, California, who has been paying himself twice what the President of the United States makes while raising taxes and seeing jobs lost. Finally, he’s busted.  Robin Hood is a mythic figure that I’d like to see more such activity from. Long live Robin Hood.

Hauntings of unfulfilled longings, failures, things not yet mastered or achieved, life’s accusations, the disowned and darkest parts of the self that need our recognition, these are like bats flying about in my mind and I think of the quote from Rainer Maria Rilke in one of his Elegies, this quote is not exact but close: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are merely princesses who are waiting to see us be for once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest core something helpless that wants our love.”

To love the demons, love their vulnerability, their passions and questions – this is the work. To suppress or remonstrate or lobotomize them is to lose. I love my demons even as they have power to destroy me. They need my love.

Beyond the list, is list-ening. I have been constructing detailed lists of all of the things to do now as I jump back into the saddle after travels. But I find I’m in that dream where you try hard to move a muscle and you can’t, do you know that dream? I want to start on those lists but instead my body is arrested, it’s making me listen to it instead. The grass needs cutting, big time, the weather has been perfect for it, but my body says STOP. Stop. Stop. Lists stare dully at me while I’m listening to something else. It’s good.

After weeks and weeks of being with people, I who lives and is alone a radically large percentage of the time, am again alone with my own psyche in the wild forest. When a cheetah is engaged with another animal, focus and intensity are directed externally; it’s clear, strong, clean, clear. When cheetah is alone again the sitting and being and waiting and listening and chewing on grass resume. It’s a teeming terrain of life, big energies and forces everywhere to be listened into. Cheetah nature. Human nature. Nature. Me.

My friend and I did a ritual tonight in which we picked a stone to hold all of our old stories of grief, loss, under-confidence, fear, lack. We held those stones in our hands together until we felt finished and then buried them in the ground. After this we picked a different stone to represent the future, all that we want to call in and what isn’t yet even imagined that we might wish to invite. Those we cast into a magical part of the woods with feathers and offerings to give them wings and nurture. The language of ritual. I imagine this extending to the whole world and each person in it. It is a prayer.

The friend who is staying with me, Ali Ghiorsi, founded and runs Savory Thymes out of Mill Valley, California. She cooks and puts on benefits to support non-profits and the arts. I have learned so much from her in just the last few days, not because of what she says but because of who she is. I have asked her to teach me more about what she knows, set me straight, don’t hold back. I want to know. She finally talked with me today in an open way about it.

She told me to go through my refrigerator and cabinet, take out and get rid of anything that has chemicals in it – this includes cleansers, soaps, lotions, any of it. She said she runs a household that hosts hundreds of people coming through, and never shops at anything but a farmer’s market or a store that sells local and organic foods, nor does she have one thing in her house that has a chemical or a toxin in it. Nothing. And, I’m thinking, if it isn’t in her house, you can be sure it doesn’t go into her body.

She is inspired by and enamored of my neighbors who grow their own food and hunt their own meat. She’s helping me to understand more fully the value and beauty and potential of where I live. My own consciousness just hasn’t grown enough to recognize it. She’s not saying that, I am. I still bring things into the house products that don’t reflect this awareness.

I’m learning. I want to make my house and my body pure. I’m inspired now.