Portal

My blood has been speaking to me a lot lately.

I don't use my gifts much beyond listening to the most periphery parts of the spidey sense. It says, "Take the train today", and I miss the traffic heading into work. It says, "the boys are sick of pasta", and I suggest curries and rice for dinner. It's just the most basic, workaday way I can use it. I listen to the phone ring, and the sense tells me which ones are telemarketers. Soft, slatternly uses for such a skill.

But its been singing to me, of the Great Work, the things that only women can do. The blessings and the curses. The new life, and the cutting down of the dead. I wish sometimes I still lived in times when people died in the home, and all and sundry gathered round for the laying out of the dead. Now, the best I can manage are the dirges sung in the darkest corners of the most olde-skool of my goth clubs, the decadent songs praising passage and decay. It's a poor substitute to laying out the newly deceased, washing their cooling flesh and dressing the stiffening limbs. These are rites of passage for wise women in times past, and sometimes I feel robbed of it. I am only admitted only to beginnings, something even an alley cat can manage. Any woman can become pregnant, but not all can lay out the dead, and I will never know if I can close the circle.

Those beginnings, though, they call to me, and I want to feel the turning of new life in my belly. I know in some way that it's almost entirely a product of my age and station. I'm approaching thirty, and my beloved is a little past it, and we've been together long enough that the raw biology of our gonads are in sync. It's only logical and entirely animal that I want to breed, I want to nest, I want to bear his young. But it's more that that. There's a hollow, suggestive of gateways and sacred caves, of Delphi and Elesius, that demands it. The divine whispering to me, suggesting, promising. The yoni, held deep within, demanding satifaction.

Who hears the gods but madmen, really? Who pays that much attention to the matter of stories and myth?

I feel primal, fecund as a wheat feild, and the practicalities of all this mean nothing to me. And the new fledglings that feed in the yard will entrance me for hours, and the wee new possums are hand fed carrots and lettuce leaves, and the full moon draws out my envy.

Womb

I am Eve, great Adam's wife
It is I that outraged Jesus of old
It is I that stole heaven from my children
By rights it is I that should have gone upon the tree

I had a kingly house at my command
Grievous the evil choice that disgraced me grievous
The chastisement of the crime that has withered me
Alas my hand is not clean

It is i that plucked the apple
It overcame the control of my greed
For that women will not cease from folly
As long as they live in the light of day

There would be no ice in any place
There would be no glistening windy winter
There would be no hell there would be no sorrow
There would be no fear were it not for me

Laying the Deck

Like so many people with a gift, one of my earliest experiments was with a deck of Tarot cards. They're easy to come by, easy to learn and very versatile. They're also one of the few forms of divination that recieve some measure of grudging acknowledgement by the world at large, even if it's often limited to people wanting a reading "for the fun of it." It's never just for fun, though, once the cards are spread.

I never remember what I say when I'm reading - I simply fade out, the sound of my own voice and sometimes facial expressions of the subject being the only things that stay with me. In fact, if I can remember too much beyond that I become skeptical of the outcome. If I'm lucky I'll recall a "flavour" of the spread, be it happiness, desperation, horniness or misery.

I went to a masquerade party of Saturday, and the invitation requested that I bring fire-twirling gear, musical instruments, or "any other tricks [I] might have." So I brought my cards, in their little bag that coincidentally matched my costume perfectly. The hostess had been on the recieving end of this particular little talent of mine before, and I think she waited until we were all good and toasted before mentioning it to the other guests.

I think I did something like four readings, perhaps five. I recall the taste of one, a young man who cheerfully listened to a reading the can more or less be summarised as follows:

• Question: Will I get laid?
• Answer: More than likely.

The other three are much more vague. One I was told afterwards outlined a brutal finality, the end of a road. I was also told that the fellow in question had just broken up with his girl, a fact that you'd never have gleaned from how happy he was all night. Another I recall almost reducing a young man to tears, but I don't remember what I said - just the way his face crumpled as I started to speak, and the way he kept taking teeny tiny little sips of his drink all the way through. I would love to know what I said to him.

I don't read too often, because it never feels like a party trick when I'm doing it. But I hate doing "serious" readings too, because it becomes even more of a performance. I certainly would never be comfortable to charge a fee or set an appointment. It seems more natural to do this casually, the same way you read anything else. It chops out that intimate moment just after a reading, when I am myself again, aware of the impact but not aware of what the cards said. It's like a post-coital moment with someone you don't know, still sticky with one another's juices but with no desire to drag the moment out past its lifespan. I never remember, and when I've gather the spread back up, and the subject is still watching me, the music and the drink means we can pretend it's all "a bit of fun" and we can stop waiting for a translation that isn't going to come.

Iron and Water

Sometimes the baobab trees in Anzac Square whisper to me, in the way that trees always whisper to me. Trees have gentle voices, generally murmuring their messages only when I touch them, or ask them directly to speak. The energy surrounding them is patient, measured and paced to last decades.

Lately though the baobabs have been shouting. They demand nails driven into their trunks, nails for Shango. There's nothing gentle about them, their desperate voices ringing in my ears every time I walk past the square. They show me images of myself, hammer in hand, pounding tangled snarles of iron into the bark, scaring off the birds and the commuters. The red rust that would run down the trunks. There's always a sense of power, and they brag in their urgent way that the nails would bring the rain.

But I keep walking.

Purpose.

I've been wondering what I'm going to put in this blog.

I'm a bit old-skool in that I feel what I put on the web should actually be of some value - I don't understand the allure of posting a laundry-list of things that you've done in a day, devoid of commentary or narrative. But I have a Livejournal out there that already collects the interesting stories in my life. I also have a second LJ that contains book reviews for an ongoing book project.

Nobody reads this. I think I can say that with all saftey. So I've decided to put my heresies here. Like everyone else, there are things that I don't talk about. Even me, Little Miss Loquatious. There are things I am not entirely comfortable discussing.

These are things I am not entirely comfortable with, full stop.

I live between worlds. The rational and the occult battle away around me, and I have very few people I can discuss this with comfortably. People who don't have the experiences I have can't understand what it's like. I've tried to communicate what it's like. I fail.

I have occassional moments of prescience. They are useless, by and large, and are best described as remembering something ahead of time. Like deja vu, only the other way around. They come as visions, auditory hallicinations or scents, and they can be so very confusing. I've been blindsided by them, to the point where I've had to physically stop what I'm doing and compose myself. I've been wandering around the city and smelled blood, and sulphur and concrete dust, and have spent the rest of the day in a day trying to decipher it, and to stop my heart from racing. They only ever last a few seconds, and I never get anything useful. There's only ever enough to tag a moment, so that when it does happen, I remember the vision and when it happened. About the only time this is useful is when I know who's calling before I pick up the phone.

I pick pregnacies before the mother knows, and I'm usually right about gender, too. But the knowledge comes to me passing women in the street, and I have no way to convey it to them, and I know damn well that they don't want to hear. I just have to keep walking.

Sometimes I have dreams that later come to pass. But I also have dreams that are just my brain chewing over the day's content. The predictions fall between the fantasies like a paragraph taken from a newspaper and sandwiched into a novel. Very rarely I can pick it, but never to the point where I can use it.

Things speak to me in the night. It's usually in the night. Ghosts and restless spirits, lares and penates. I'm particulary good with water spirits - undines, sylphs. Naiads and nerieds. Malicious things have been known to come looking for me, because I know that they're there. They can hassle me because I can hear them.

I occasionally refer to this whole package of maladies and blessings as "the Spidey sense". That name clips in the scariness of it, makes it palatable and easier to contemplate.
The sense is just that - an extra dimension that allows me to take in things in a different way to other people. I know that some time years from now science will work out what exactly is going on in my head. There's a lot of talk in occult communities about the possibilty of quantum mechanics finally being able to tell us why we can do what we can do. Sometimes I think it's a job for the psychiatrists, especially when things are singing to me and I'm more worried about people who aren't alive yet than myself.

See, there's a history of mental illness in my family, and for regular people that's a bit enough sword dangling over them. When you've been seeing ghosts since childhood a history like that can inspire such suspicious doubt - I worry so much that I'm just a mad woman, and that every encounter I've ever had is just another step towards a sanitorium. It doesn't help that so many of the people I've met who are sympathetic to my experiences have been well removed from reality. The people who I've met who are rational and understanding can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Most infuriating of all is that I even seek that confirmation, since I don't need confirmation in any other aspect of my life. The spectre of mental disintegration is so very huge that I will check my mental health against others every damn chance I get.

So I'm going to put this here as another checkpoint, along with my journals and workbooks. I can look back later, and maybe things will make some sense.

Like A Virgin (Blogged for the Very First Time)

So...

I have buddies on this dealy. I can't comment on their blogs unless I give Google a little piece of my heart. Here it is, Search Engine Overlord! May it sit oily and bitter on your monstrous tongue!!