Winter Solstice is officially upon us. Tomorrow at 12:30 a.m. the longest night begins. People everywhere will be holding vigil, staying up through the long dark to welcome the return of the sun.

I’ll be lighting a candle and writing in my journal about what I’m releasing.

I’ve got a lot to release.

Over the last year I’ve come to embrace a spirituality that requires no labels. In a pinch, I identify as ‘pagan’ but in practice, I think I’m a secular humanist. I think the tools of ritual and meditation, and even of magic can be very powerful, but these feel to me like psychological tools. They work, definitely, but I’m unconvinced that there is anything even remotely close to a ‘personal deity’ with whom I can have any kind of connection or relationship. When I consider a ‘higher power’, I feel like the universe in and of itself is enough. I don’t need to look any further than the seedling for the miraculous. While I recognize the power of connecting with an archetype, I’m not a polytheist.

The closest I get to the truth is this: Everything is G_D. (Which, I think, makes me a monist, but whatever…)

Paganism has been good to me, and I appreciate all I’ve learned through my studies. I still feel a strong resonance with druidry (a la OBOD) and will probably maintain my ties with that organization, but the label ‘Bard’? Not so much. The label ‘Pagan’? Not so much. The practice of spell making and ritual feel like candy where what my mind and spirit wants is meatier fare. Pagan temples and organizations seem fraught with egotism and a dangerous brand of magical thinking.

I want a deep connection with the tides of life. Seasonal awareness. Stillness. Mindfulness. That’s what I choose. It cost me a lot to figure that out, but it was worth the price.

I remain open. I’m still a mystic, because I embrace the mystery and wonder in every tradition, but I’m no longer interested in hanging my spiritual hat on one hook.

Life’s a buffet. I want to taste it all.

I see you, too. xo

In looking over what I’ve been writing here over the last few weeks, I realize that you might have the wrong impression. You would not be crazy for assuming that I do a lot of art and then collapse in a heap of introspection and hard stuff and then do a lot more art. You might come away with the impression that I’m a really depressive person, for the most part, and that my life centers around sitting on the red leather couch either doing art or gazing at my innards.

Well, that’s partially true. I do a lot of art, and I do a lot of navel gazing. But I’m not necessarily depressive.

See, I’m weird in that I love digging in my stuff. Even though it’s really hard stuff to dig around in, I *know* I will find treasure there. I know that once I uncover something, I will reap the benefits in the way I live my life or in my emotional state or overall state of being. It is exciting to me (not exactly happy, but exciting!) when I know I have something to work on because I know the work WORKS. So even though I might seem all glum all the time when I’m working through things, the truth is, I am experiencing a kind of bliss. Not a ‘ohhhh! I have chocolate’ type bliss, but a ‘this is soooo worth it’ type bliss.

Think childbirth. It hurts. A lot. But that final push brings you more joy than you could ever possibly imagine experiencing. It’s very, very much like that.

You might be asking yourself why anyone would be so invested in poking a sharp pointy stick around in her boo boos. I’ll tell you: years of therapy taught me that pain-avoidance is the number one cause of all our collective ills. It is the refusal to look at our wounds, our character defects, the ways we’ve failed, the shitty things that happened that bring us to our knees before the false gods of addiction. I poke because I’d rather feel the temporary sting of knowing what’s true than suffer with the chronic ache of denial and the insidious results of self-medicating (with anything ~ booze, drugs, sex, food, shopping). I’d rather rip the band-aid off in one swift, painful movement than let it rot.

That doesn’t mean that I’m immune to denial. I’m as prone to it as anyone else, but I think the way I proactively inquire about the things I’m feeling or thinking help me to get out of denial faster.

So. You may see ‘glum artsy girl’, but what’s really happening is work of the highest order that leads to self-actualization and integration and yes, bliss.

In case you were wondering. :)

xo

Effy

When I first began writing on line years and years and years ago, I took a lot of self-portraits. They looked a lot like this one in that they were always crappy web cam photos that I then played with to my heart’s content. It was a kind of art practice. At least, that’s how I see it now. I was playing with the only canvas I had at the time: html and a very basic graphics editing program.

Which is to say that though I am very quick to tell people that I only just discovered art a couple of years ago, the truth is that I’ve had an artistic bent all my life. I just didn’t *trust* it.

I was one of those kids who should have been born to gypsies or hippies, but instead found herself in a family full of really uptight people. Up. Tight. We’re talking hours worth of screaming and yelling over socks on the floor. We’re talking specific instructions with regards to the Proper Way to do just about everything. Wipe a table. Apply sugar to cereal. What order dishes should be done in. How to vacuum the floor. The level of control in my household once my mother married my step-father was *insane*. We’re talking: I was only allowed to wear my glasses to read (even though I was near sighted and couldn’t see properly without them.) We’re talking four squares of toilet paper per wipe and heaven help you if you used more. We’re talking a fridge drawer for the ‘red delicious’ apples no one else was allowed to eat and a drawer full of the crappy macintosh apples that no one wanted to eat. Everything was so tightly controlled that there was no room to trust what I knew. There was no room for my knowing.

This mode of existence came after I turned nine. By this time I had already been raped and sodomized and used in child pornography by a different man – the one my mother moved in with after she divorced my biological father. Prior to his arrival on the scene my memories include being burned in the palm of my hand with a cigarette to teach me ‘hot’, drunken brawls in the living room, a lot of screaming and yelling, and a mother so hopped up on something (valium?) that she drooled. Literally. Drooled. I remember my father passing out and convulsing on the bathroom floor in a puddle of his own urine, vomit and blood while my mother stood ten feet away blithely stirring a pot of soup. I remember people banging on the door and threatening to kill my father if he didn’t give them what he owed them. I remember being in a locked room a lot. I remember bashing my own face against the locked door because if I had a bloody nose, my mother would let me out of my room and tend to me.

I have trust issues.

The realization that I’m coming to in this latest round of navel gazing is that these trust issues manifest most powerfully in terms of self-trust. Trusting my self. Trusting me to know what’s right for me. Trusting me to do what’s right for me. Trusting me to know when someone has my best interests at heart and when they don’t. Trusting my affection for someone (so hard!). Trusting someone’s affection for me (equally hard!). Trusting that what I offer has value. Trusting that I am who I think I am.

Trusting myself as an artist.

I don’t know how to trust.

I’m grieving this fact even as I’m working toward learning how.

(to be continued…)

xo

Effy

On December 7th, my baby furgirl had a litter of two brand new little furbabes!

Puck and Blossom

We’ve decided to that this is going to be Sookie’s last litter, and that we’re going to keep these babes all to our selves. That will bring our total number of furbabes up to four, but they are wee little things, and we’ve got plenty of time and love to give. *Happy sigh*

In Other News

It’s been very quiet here in Effyland. I took a couple of days off of most on line interaction except for the most pressing things, and I’m much better for it. I want to learn to focus only on the positive, but I’m not built (by nature or nurture) that way. It is an act of will on my part every time I choose to stop focusing on what’s wrong and turn my focus on what’s right. Is this a common problem? Do you have the same tendency? While I don’t need to understand the root to change it, I do think I’d find it a lot easier to change if I knew where it started and what’s at the heart of it. Is it conditioning? Childhood or social? Is it nature? Am I just a naturally negative person?

And then I have to pause. Because I don’t recognize myself as a negative person. I do recognize myself as someone who can be knocked way off track by negative interactions and occurrences, but I don’t consider myself negative as a general rule. What’s your experience of me? (It’s an honest question. :) Feel free to answer honestly!)

I had a letter from someone I don’t know very well, but who experiences me as a blogger and the hostess of WPS. She made some observations (from a place of love and support) about how easily I am impacted by negativity. I heard that, loud and clear. It is one of the most frustrating aspects of my personality! I can have a hundred positive interactions a day, but I will focus on the one that gets under my skin. I can be loved and supported by dozens of people, but my mind is occupied in self-doubt brought on by the half-dozen that dislike me or have nothing positive to say about me. I can see ten new people come in to the studio, but the one that leaves is where my heart lives.

All the positive feedback in the world doesn’t seem to touch what I think might be a core of self-loathing. And so far, it’s been unacknowledged self-loathing ~ the kind that lives beneath surface awareness and wreaks havoc on the way I live my life and respond to people. The insidious kind that results in all sorts of self-destructive and self-sabotaging behaviour.

I’m bummed out by this. You do twenty plus years of therapy and self-help, and yes, self-awareness is increased, and yes, this helps you to put a stop to the more obvious self-destructive behaviours. I don’t self-injure any more. I don’t sleep with whoever wants me because I think that’s my sole purpose in life. I don’t automatically assume (consciously at least) that negative assessments of my character or intentions are correct. Yet, I am, in truth, still the walking wounded; still easily knocked off course; still, if I’m being honest, if I’m interpreting this feeling correctly, a very little girl with a lot of rage and pain and severe abandonment issues. .

Art helps. Positive interactions and solid friendships help. The Studio helps. Writing helps. Doing what I do best and putting it out there whatever the risk might be helps.Spiritual practice helps. Introspection helps.

But I am frustrated to discover how much healing I have left to do.

My deepest fear is that I have no right to offer anything. My deepest fear is that everything I offer is tainted by my early experiences: that every package I wrap up with love and good intentions comes with my baggage, that I’ll never get it right, that everything I touch will turn to shit, that I will never feel good in my own skin, that I’ll never get over it. My deepest fear is that I have been irredeemably damaged. My deepest fear is that I’m just kidding myself.

And everyone else.

***

I know this is a drag to read, but if you did, I thank you.

xo

Effy
(who will bounce back soon enough, but right now? I’m bummed.)