Tattoo You

If you get the Stones reference, good on you, mate.

Right now I have two tattoos. I want a total of five before I'm finished. The first tat is of a red & black Triskele, which is a Welsh symbol. The colours I chose to honour someone who doesn't even exists, but who nevertheless helped me from a wholly drowntrodden life.

The second is of the Shriekback symbol. I'm a firm disbeliever in band logos for body art, they just seem so ridiculous; however, this symbol has several meanings. First off, of course, it's the Shriek symbol. Secondly, it was designed to represent the unending loop of energy. This tied into their song "Everything that Rises Must Converge." Another reason is that it's not something people see regularly, especially around here. This allows me to educate a little bit. I later found out that the inner core of the band and their coterie of fans all possessed the tattoo somewhere on their bodies.

The other tattoos are one of Nathor, the Bird Goddess on my breast bone. The other two are also hand tattoos, both being of trees. One tree will sport a leaf for each good thing, a thorn for each negative one. The other tree will appear to be dead, but have one red or blue blooming red rose that will cover the tip of my middle finger. The only person who will know what this means will be mean. Suffice to say, it will represent the most important moment of my entire life.

I'm trying to stay on the positive side of things, instead of being perpetually morbid about everything. It's hard to do, when your greatest hope is that the Mayans ended their calendar for some fantastical upheaval that will render humanity extinct. There are only a handful of things that make me second guess my greatest wish. They are:

1. I want to see the entire Hobbit film


2. Shriekback and Jeff Lynne are both coming out with new music in 2013


3. I want to engage in a major travel undertaking come Spring, when I can drive again


4. I want to see my third book published.

I'm sure there are more things on this list, but it's late and I'm not thinking straight.

What I Could Do Better

When you boil it right down, I really am a lousy person. I believe we were all put on this Earth to learn a particular lesson, not for ourselves, but for the shattered puzzle that is spread in shards across the universe, gathering the data it needs to figure itself out, when each shard returns to the source. I also believe that, and history bears me out here, if you fail to learn a lesson, you're doomed to repeat the same mistakes until you get it right.

I'm selfish.

I want things my way. And I want them NOW.

That kind of behaviour has doomed me to suffer the same grief over and over again.

I remember as a kid of around five, the Mother Unit instructed me to feed the orphaned blue jay every 30 minutes. I thought The Flintstones was more important. The bird was dead when I finally made my out to the cage. I lost my patience with Granny, and Henry, as their health glaringly failed. I caught myself thinking of how much easier it would be if they were just GONE. Than that was all I could think of when they had left me. I'd wished them dead.

Did I learn my lesson from my selfishness and self-importance?

No.

I found myself doing the same thing with Aunt Tudi. I found her to be a burden a lot of the time. Having to deal with her fluids was unbearable to me. I've always had a problem with human emissions. Animals are fine, but I won't even drink after a person. In her last few months, Aunt Tudi disgusted me and I prayed for it to end.

And end it did. And I'm alone with all those thoughts of how I could have been a better relative, companion, person. This is the main reason I refuse to abandon the animals, even though lingering here is like subjecting myself to a slow soul death. The didn't ask to be born. All they know is that they love me and I love them. I don't think they realise how precarious their living arrangements were there for a while.

There's a lot I cannot do better. It's too late. Only the guilt remains, the living of the issues over and over, knowing there's no hope of forgiveness, because I can't forgive myself first. The one thing I can do better is not run from my responsibilities I have the two dogs and the the two cats. I may die here in miserable solitude, bereft of any kind of hope, and with a black chasm in my heart where the memories of my failures finally ate me from the inside out, but I will have lived up to my responsibilities to Chester, Toby, Smidgen, and Seedling.

Agnosticism

When I was a very young child, starting around the age of 4, my dream was to be a nun. I just wanted to go around singing to people and healing them, have a personal relationship with god, and wear a fashionable veil. That bubble was burst when I found out I wasn't Catholic. So I figured preacher might be a better fit anyway. That bubble was burst when I found out you had to have a winky before god would even look at you. I began to wonder if any of this was nothing more than bullshit. I remember hearing a Bible story where someone tested god's presence by leaving a dry clothe out at night. If it had no dew, it was proof that god existed. I could totally be getting this wrong. Whatever it was, I thought I could get my proof in the same manner. I placed a dry rag in the closet and prayed that, if god existed, it would be wet in the morning. I had all manner of faith that it would be wet.

I was wrong.

The next morning it was dry as could be. I was 7 and that was the morning I began to question the nature and existence of god. I wanted desperately to believe. Something about the myths and songs from various cultures always brought me a kind of peace. Science fiction began to fill a hole in my myth that god just could not anymore. Even when I discovered Witchcraft and felt the Divine Feminine for the first time in my life in 1989, it still wasn't completely enough for me to suspend all disbelief and give myself over to a higher or otherworldly presence.

When Aunt Tudi died, I encountered two people too busy with their church activities to help me deal with some issues. The screamed hypocrisy to me. It wasn't god's fault; rather, it was the flaw of people trying to follow in god's footsteps. What else could I say? But there was a part of me who resented it all. God had taken away my way of life. God had taken away my willingness to live. God had stirred a strong longing for human extinction within my breast. And those friends I though I had, they'd been transformed into Stepford Wives for Christ.

I've always considered myself a student of spirituality, an agnostic looking for a place near deity where I could finally rest and learn. I'm further from that place than ever before. For the first time in my life, I'm looking more logically at atheism than I ever did blind faith. When you stare into the dead eyes of the woman who raised you and you find no indication where she my have gone, if anywhere, atheism has a valid argument. When all the Hypo-Christians circle your broken spirit to get you in their church when you're at your most vulnerable, atheism looks like a lot sweeter deal.

I don't know that I believe anymore more. I don't know what I want to believe. I don't know if I want to believe anything at all anymore. And I'm too tired of all of it to be a good agnostic and seek for my place in the universe/