Thursday, August 17, 2006Burning WomanLast night I did a burning ritual.There have been a lot of bad things lobbed over the psychic fence at me recently -- inflamatory, hate-filled letters from my mother, low-blows from my ex-husband -- weird shit. And it's happening all at the same time. I feel like the projection screen for the demons of the world and they are going to town flashing all their hideous scenarios on my face, delighting in how I disappear beneath it all. So I've been engaged in some pretty entrenched psychic warfare back. I am not all that new age, but I do believe that thought is extremely powerful, and negative thought can be absolutely crippling. Since I seem to be the recipient of negativity and weirdness these days, from several places, I figure it's time to fight back. The thing about waging a psychic guerilla operation is that I really can't come out and acknowledge what's going on. These people probably don't understand it any better than I do. And let's be honest, I'm probably projecting all of MY own fears and angers back onto THEM without knowing it either. So all I can do is take care of my own self... by staying calm, cultivating a strong force field of serenity around me, and purging the shit as fast as it comes at me. Last night I just wrote it out. With a blue pen and a pad of legal paper, I sat crosslegged on my floor and wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote with my left hand (I'm right-handed). So the words came from deep within my psyche. When I do left-handed writing, I rarely know what's going to come out. It's like having my own inner ouija board. I wrote until I cramped, and then I kept writing some more. I got the shit OUT of my system. And it felt great. Finally I was done and had a pile of pages next to me. I gathered them up and took them outside to my Weber barbeque, kept next to my lovely gas grill for just this purpose. I opened up the bbq and crumpled up one of the pieces of paper. Lit it with a match. And felt that curious fear that comes with doing something absolutely irreversable. Some of what I was burning were letters from my mom... and despite the complete poison contained within them, there was a twinge of fear and deep sadness, a sense that I was burning her as well. As the paper caught fire, I crumpled up a sheet at a time and threw it into the belly of the Weber. The flames grew large and licked the side, rising up high enough that I could feel the heat on my face. The cars on the Pasadena Freeway rushed by, obliviously (I live right behind the freeway. How could they know that 10 feet away from the chain link fence was a woman trying to save her soul using a book of purloined matches and a pile of yellow paper?) Near the end of the stack I realized I'd lost the flame. The paper in the BBQ was smoldering now and suddenly I saw a huge plume of silver gray smoke billowing up above me. It was certainly visible from the freeway, and certainly visible from the street. It was WAY more smoke than a normal steak dinner would churn out. Panicking a bit, I put the top on the bbq. The smoke twisted and turned and slid out the sides and up through the vents. I opened it up to see what was happening and a huge plume of it went straight up into the air. I was sending smoke signals to the universe. I starting trying to figure out how I'd explain this to the local fire department. I also had a few more pages left to burn and wondered how to get the whole thing over with so I could get to sleep (and dump the rest of the evidence), without causing more smoke to go up into the air. It dissipated eventually. But as I lit the last few pages I saw that they were emitting absolutely NO visible smoke as they were consumed by the flames. The flames were pure and clean, unapologetically beautiful. The problem had been when things were neither one way or the other. The smoldering part was WAY bigger and more obvious than the burning part. The smoldering part was messy and hard to contain. The smoldering part was ugly and unproductive. And as I watched the efficiency of the fire to consume and destroy, I realized that the problems in our lives come when we smolder instead of burn. When we don't have QUITE enough heat and oxygen to actually DO something, but have enough to give off a lot of smoke. That is the place of the drama. That is the place of the waffling... am I going to give up or take over the world? I don't know, maybe I'll just sit here and spew out black stuff for awhile. I went back inside, smelling of smoke and lighter in spirit than I had been previously. Yes, I'm exhausted but I prevailed in that battle. I am standing... both physically and emotionally. And as I gave myself a little nod in the mirror, I looked down to see traces of blue ink all over my left hand. The stigmata of the psychic warrior. From Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars ... # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:26 PM  
Comments: Engaging, well-written and utterly fascinating! Great Blog. # posted by  AVERY ARCHER : 7:19 AM
that is my favorite kerouac quote, ever!
# posted by lorna : 11:01 PM
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