Walk with me again

Join me on yet another Odysseus-like journey through my town. I’m not sure what I’m searching for, but maybe like Odysseus, I’m trying to find my way home, facing challenges along the way.

This was an interesting morning.

When I began my pilgrimage, there was so much fog! It was coming down from the heavens like rain. Super cool for walking, not so good for curly hair, but I like to look on the bright side so I braided my curls and wore a hat.

Check out the Halloweeny spider webs on this pine tree, brought to life by the heavy fog.

For a while, I was a few houses behind a woman who was walking her Rottweiler. I was actually across the street, but couldn’t help but notice that she was roughly pulling on the poor creature’s leash/collar. The collar was one of those mean ones that have little barbs in them. I was already upset that the dog had a cropped tail. I believe that sort of mutilation is outlawed in other–more humane–countries, as is that nasty hurtful collar.

OK, I said to myself. Don’t say it, I said to myself. You know what to do, girl, I said to myself, keep walking and don’t speak. Don’t say a word this time, I said to myself. Just DON’T, I said to myself. Look away, I said to myself. Take a deep breath, I said to myself. You can’t protect every animal in the world, I said to myself. This might not go well, I said to myself. Take another deep breath, I said to myself. Mind your own business, I said to myself. Slow down your pace so you’re out of hearing distance, I said to myself. I mean it, have some impulse control; this time just don’t say it, I said to myself.

And then the woman and her dog slowed down, so they were within the range of my voice.

What do you think I did?

Yup. I really did. I couldn’t help myself. I TRIED really hard to get my Zen on, but my one little inner voice was joined by yet another little inner voice and the words spilled out…

“Umm, excuse me, but I couldn’t help but notice how you’re jerking your poor animal’s neck that way with that awful chain around its neck. It looks really painful from my point of view.”

“She needs to learn to listen. It’s just a little pinch.”

I said…”Well, you might want to learn another more positive method of training that poor girl because as I’ve observed during the last two blocks, your way isn’t working out very well.”

I concluded by saying, “I’ve trained a lot of animals, and actually think those types of chains with the hooks on them are banned in other countries. It’s abusive. You might want to research using a harness which doesn’t choke your beautiful dog.”

Well, she didn’t say anything else to me because at that point she walked up a side street, in all likelihood to get as far away from me as she could.

To her credit, we didn’t get into a screaming match. Walking away was her best choice, as she would have lost.

I took a deep breath and felt good that I had spoken truth and possibly opened her brain to a nicer way of training. Or not. Maybe I just ruined her day. Either way, job well done, in my opinion.

I looked down and was rewarded by a treasure! This is the most beautiful hawk feather. I carefully picked it up and placed it in my backpack. I think this might be a tail feather, don’t you?

At the beach, there was the usual non-compliant non-mask wearers, but I wore mine, took my ocean photos, and turned back to walk home.

No wave too small if you’re on a SUP.
Still foggy, but beautiful.

The lights were out at the intersection of Carlsbad Blvd. and Tamarack. There was utter chaos with cars and pedestrians, near misses, and impatient drivers. I crossed the street, defying a white SUV who was inching slowly toward running us all down, and saw a few police cars show up to direct the shitshow, so I thanked them for saving our lives and continued on my way.

This was a new sign at the railroad tracks. I swear there’s a deeper, more profound meaning here, but I can’t figure it out. I don’t have a clue. What do you think?

I stopped at RiteAid and bought a couple of cute Halloween decorations to add to my display ‘cos they were on sale.

Six miles or so again. Except for a still sore left arm where I had the injections, I think I’ve fully recovered from the horrible side effects of these vaccinations. I’m no closer to answering life’s existential questions, but the song that came on as I was almost home was Sting’s If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, and I’m even more confused.

Happy Sunday!

Fractals Freak Me Out

 

 

AfterGlow

There is nothing so beautiful as the glow of late afternoon sun through bright orange Birds of Paradise.

I spent the day digging out a tree and stubborn roots that should never have been planted so close to the house. That left a big hole that was crying to be filled in.

My Birds of Paradise were ready to be divided, so I worked and worked and worked at it until I could separate a section to fill in the empty space.

I like to fill in the empty spaces—in gardens, in conversations, and in sad hearts, too.

When I finished, I looked up and was rewarded with a beautiful sunglow behind the Birds of Paradise.

Paradise, right?

Sky Fire

Last night.

#WordlessWednesday

Red Moon Rising

Waxing Gibbous.

I’m not sure if it’s red because of the fires or because of a planetary shadow or if it’s some sort of blood moon, but it was super cool, no matter what the reason.

Here’s what NASA says: “The air molecules from Earth’s atmosphere scatter out most of the blue light. The remaining light reflects onto the Moon’s surface with a red glow, making the Moon appear red in the night sky. The name “blood moon” is also sometimes used for a Moon that appears reddish because of dust, smoke or haze in the sky.”

Taken at 9:30 p.m. with my Canon Rebel T3i. No filters. This is the true color.

Goodnight, moon.

Trees and Coffee

TreeGrowsInBrooklyn.jpg

Every single time I pour out a half drunk cup of cold coffee, I am reminded of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Each and every time, I become Francie in her belief that this is what rich people do; to waste coffee is a luxurious act of defiance against personal poverty. I didn’t grow up like Francie but I hate waste, so it’s become a conscious act of extravagance.

I first read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I was about ten; I had a VERY active imagination combined with an overabundance of empathy and I would take on the persona–I BECAME the character I most identified with–and so I became poor Francie.

Just like I became Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House on the Prairie or Anne Frank or Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden.

In my case, these multiple personalities weren’t anything more than trying on a new dress or pair of shoes; I always returned to my own authentic self–wolf lover, nature lover, underdog defender, wearer of rose-colored glasses—but it was part of the process of individuation to slip on these other personas and feel as if I was walking in another’s shoes to learn about how other people live and think.

Mom Katie Nolan believes that Francie is entitled to throw her coffee down the drain if she wishes, saying that it’s good for poor people like them to be able to waste something.

“There was a special Nolan idea about the coffee. It was their one great luxury. Mama made a big potful each morning and reheated it for dinner and supper and it got stronger as the day wore on. It was an awful lot of water and very little coffee but mama put a lump of chicory in it which made it taste strong and bitter. Each one was allowed three cups a day with milk. Other times you could help yourself to a cup of black coffee anytime you felt like it. Sometimes when you had nothing at all and it was raining and you were alone in the flat, it was wonderful to know that you could have something even though it was only a cup of black and bitter coffee.

Neeley and Francie loved coffee but seldom drank it. Today, as usual, Neeley let his coffee stand black and ate his condensed milk spread on bread. He sipped a little of the black coffee for the sake of formality. Mama poured out Francie’s coffee and put the milk in it even though she knew that the child wouldn’t drink it.”

“Francie loved the smell of coffee and the way it was hot. As she ate her bread and meat, she kept one hand curved about the cup enjoying its warmth. From time to time, she’d smell the bitter sweetness of it. That was better than drinking it. At the end of the meal, it went down the sink.”

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn–Betty Smith

Did you ever read this classic? What did you like about it?

Self-care Saturday

It’s quiet this morning. The birds are singing and it’s the perfect time to practice self-care.

I like to take whatever existing store bought mask (not the kind we wear to protect ourselves and others from Covid-19) I have and embellish it with my own ingredients.

fullsizeoutput_f68This is a Kale + Niacin gel mask that’s the perfect consistency to DIY. 

I got inspired by the ingredients of my yummy vegan smoothie recipe and decided to put the same ingredients on my face as I did inside my body.

Inner and outer beauty!

  • 1 tbsp. honey
  • 1 tbsp.organic spirulina
  • 1tbsp. organic moringa powder
  • 1 tbsp.organic wheat grass powder
  • 1 tbsp. matcha green tea powder
  • 1tsp. turmeric oil
  • 3 or 4 tbsp. of any existing masks you might have (OR you don’t need to… just add 2 teaspoons water and 2 teaspoons coconut or olive oil.)
  • Combine all ingredients
  • Spread all over your freshly washed face either using fingers or a foundation brush.
  • Leave on for 20 minutes.
  • Wash with warm water and feel the difference in your skin.
  • Moisturize immediately.
  • I save any leftover mask in the refrigerator for a couple of days.

Have a wonderful self-care Saturday!

Fall, Leaves, Fall

Even in SoCal, on this Autumnal Equinox, leaves do fall.

Fall, Leaves, Fall

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night’s decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

Emily Brontë

WTF is Wetiko, and why we should care. A lot.

I had never heard the word– Wetiko— until a couple years ago and now it’s cropping up everywhere since it’s on my radar.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

From my Google search:

The term Wetiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which, to quote Forbes, refers to “an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts.”[ii] Wetikos are the human instruments for the transpersonal ‘spirit of evil’ to terrorize the world.

There seems to be a collective query rising up from the huddled masses of humanity who search for answers to everything from Trump to climate change, deadly natural disasters to senseless murders, and a pervasive lack of empathy and compassion.

Is there an epidemic of broken, undeveloped frontal lobes, of dysfunctional, maladjusted, deteriorating, and infected amygdalas?

Narcissism and Cluster B psychopathy run rampant in our culture, feeding on those who still have that innate ability to feel empathy and compassion, who possess a real soul and a kind spirit.

Those dark and toxic parasitic Wetiko entities are cannibalistic, predatory, soul-LESS, selfish, and hostile: a cancer of the soul; a shapeshifter.

How sad.

“Just as viruses or malware infect a computer and program it to self-destruct, Wetiko programs the human biocomputer to think and behave in self-destructive ways.

Covertly operating through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, Wetiko renders people oblivious to their own madness, compelling them to act against their own best interests.

People under its thrall can, like someone in the throes of an addiction or in a state of trauma, unwittingly create the very problem they are trying to resolve, clinging desperately to the thing that is torturing and destroying them.

People taken over by Wetiko are suffering from an autoimmune disease of the psyche. In autoimmune deficiency syndrome, the immune system of the organism perversely attacks the very life it is trying to protect. In trying to live, it destroys life, ultimately destroying even itself. In the same way, once Wetiko has insinuated itself into a living entity, it acts like a perverted antibody, treating the wholesome parts of the system as cancerous tumors to be exterminated.

From Psychology Today

This problem is being collectively acted out on the world stage. Humans are destroying the biosphere of the planet upon which we all depend for our survival.

Wetiko is at the bottom of the seemingly never-ending destruction we are wreaking on this biosphere. One example is the destruction of the Amazonian rain­forest, the lungs of the planet. Another example is the terminator seeds that are genetically engineered not to reproduce a second generation, forcing farmers to buy new seeds and making life impossible for many poor farmers. If the planet were seen as an organism, and people seen as cells in this organism, it would be as if these cells had become cancerous or parasitic and had turned on the healthy cells, destroying the very organism of which they themselves were a part.

Our species appears to be enacting a mass ritual suicide on a global scale. Paul Levy Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil” Quest 102.4 (Fall 2014): pg. 146-151.

Also from Paul Levy… Wetiko disease is an expression of the convincing illusion of the separate self gone wild. Bewitched by the intrinsic projective tendencies of their own mind, full-blown Wetikos are unconsciously doing the very thing they are reacting to while simultaneously accusing other people of doing it.

Projecting the shadow onto others, they will accuse others of projecting the shadow onto them. To use an extreme, but prototypical example, it is like someone screaming that you’re killing them as they kill you.

If their insanity is reflected back to them, they think it is the mirror that is insane. Suffering from a form of psychic blindness that believes itself to be sightedness, full-blown Wetikos project out their own unconscious blindness and imagine that others, instead of themselves, are the ones who are not seeing.

Governed by the insane, self-perpetuating logic of fear and paranoia, those taken over by the disease fear that if they don’t attack and rule over others, they are in danger of being attacked and ruled over themselves.

In their convoluted, upside-down, flawless illogic, Wetikos’ act to their own projections in the world as if they objectively exist and are other than themselves, thinking that they themselves have nothing to do with creating that to which they are reacting.

Photo by Miguel u00c1. Padriu00f1u00e1n on Pexels.com

In Wetiko disease, the psyche takes the ‘terror’ that haunts it from within, and in its attempt to master it, unwittingly becomes taken over by it, thus becoming an instrument of terror in the world.

We have then become the thing we most feared, ‘creatures of the European nightmare world,’ as we psychologically terrorize ourselves, as well as terrorizing the world at large.

Because full-blown Wetikos are soul murderers who continually recreate the ongoing process of killing their own soul, they are reflexively compelled to do this to others; for what the soul does to itself, it can’t help but do to others.

In a perverse inversion of the golden rule, instead of treating others how they would like to be treated, Wetikos do unto others what was done unto them. The Wetiko is simply a living link in a timeless, vampiric lineage of abuse.

Full-blown Wetikos induce and dream up others to experience what it is like to be the part of themselves which they have split off from and denied, and are thus not able to consciously experience – the part of themselves that has been abused and vampirized. In playing this out, Wetikos are transmitting and transferring their own depraved state of inner deadness to others in a perverse form of trying to deal with their own suffering.

Paradoxically, Wetikos both try to destroy others’ light, as it reminds them of what they’ve killed in themselves, while simultaneously trying to appropriate the light for themselves.

The disease itself is now demanding that we pay attention to it, or it will kill us.”

“An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind”. – Ghandi

Native American author and philosopher Jack Forbes further adds:

“This disease, this Wetiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.” We, as a species, are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic, a virulent collective psychosis that has been brewing in the cauldron of humanity’s psyche from the beginning of time.

Like a fractal, Wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously — intra-personally (within individuals), inter-personally (between ourselves), as well as collectively (as a species). “Cannibalism,” in Forbes’s words, “is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.”

I don’t read much science fiction…I’m a chicklit girl, but my research about Wetiko led me to this article about the (deceased) sci-fi author, Phillip K. Dick (you might know him as the author of Bladerunner.)

Wetiko and The Black Iron Prison: The Enlightened Madness of Sci-Fi Author Philip K. Dick https://wakeup-world.com/2016/10/01/the-enlightened-madness-of-sci-fi-author-philip-k-dick-wetiko-and-the-black-iron-prison/

Apparently, I’ve only scratched the surface about Wetiko, but it scared the living hell out of me. Is this the world our grandkids will inherit?

How very, very frightening.

Featured image credit: https://thetwodoctors.wordpress.com/

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg

First we mourn, then we fight.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg  official portrait

This isn’t the post I had planned for Saturday but we have all heard the devastating news.

On Rosh Hashanah, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Supreme Court Justice, died at the age of 87 from metastatic pancreatic cancer.

I think a lot of us had the same first thoughts; “Oh no, not HER” “Not now.””NOOO!!!”

We surely don’t need her gone, not now, not during this shitshow of a year that 2020 has become.

Hearing that horrible news (tragic for her family but tragic for our country and democracy, too) brought me back to the morning my mom (the original Charlotte) died of the same disease, metastatic pancreatic cancer.

Thanks to medical advancements, RBG was able to live a lot longer after diagnosis than my mom.

Hearing about her death brought up all those same traumatic feelings of loss that I felt when I found my mom had died. She lived with us and we had cared for her during her illness with the help of a great hospice.

I had checked on her at around 5am and she was fine, not in distress, still asleep, so I did a little cleaning and made my son’s breakfast so it’d be ready for him when he woke up ‘cos it was a school day. I don’t know what prompted me to check on her again so soon, but I did. She was still in the same position; she LOOKED like she was asleep, but there was a subtle difference. I had never seen a dead person in my entire 32 years on this earth, but I knew. I knew.

I checked her carotid artery and called the hospice nurse. I woke up Angel Boy (almost 7 years old) and managed to tell him all the right things. Hospice had suggested that I ask him if he’d like to kiss his grandma goodbye, so I did. And he did. That pretty much broke me, but I’m a stoic girl and you wouldn’t know I was broken. I can break on the inside but you won’t see it. Things had to be done so I did what needed to be done. I always do.

I miss my mom. Forever.

But this is about Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a brilliant woman whose entire life was inspirational. Her loss is an epic tragedy.

About RBG’s life, the film “On The Basis of Sex” featured a song written and performed by Kesha. Here’s an acoustic version. It needs to be the anthem of our revolution.
First we mourn, then we fight.

Image may contain: 1 person, text that says 'kerry washington @kerrywashington Her rest is earned. It is our turn to fight. 8:08 PM 9/18/20 Twitter for iPhone'

Here Comes the Change

One day I’ll be gone
The world will keep turning
I hope I leave this place
Better than I found it
Oh it’s hard, I know it’s hard
To be the lightning in the dark
Hold on tight you’ll be alright
You know it’s time
Here comes the change
We’re comin’ of age
This is not a phase
Here comes, here comes, the change
Is it a crazy thought?
That if I had a child
I hope they live to see the day
That everyone’s equal
Oh it’s hard I know it’s hard
To be the right inside the wrong
Hold on tight we’ll be alright
You know it’s time
Oh here comes the change
Oh we’re comin’ of age
This is not a phase
Here comes here comes the change
Hope there’ll come a time when we
We can live in and die free
I hope…