Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

Intuition –

Intuition is the Warrior’s most critical tool. It starts in childhood when adults say something that sounds “not quite right” to the child. Something about their facial expression and the way they hold their body suggests they’re hoping you won’t inquire further, meaning they have no evidence or rationality for what they’re proposing. Sounds like they don’t quite believe it themselves and they’re just passing it to you, like an infection. It’s an infection you don’t want to get.

Sometimes you ask further, other times you snoop around for evidence on your own. You can usually catch the Grownups talking earnestly in what they think is privacy about what you will buy and what are the consequences if they fail to persuade you.

Reading is a helpful source of information. You can always find evidence that completely contradicts any BS du Jour.

And right then, you’ve become a Warrior, because you’ve realized you need to rely on yourself. Not them.

Breaking Free

In retrospect we
Forgive ourselves
Imperfect inspirations
Unbecoming intuitions
Seeing how high we flew;
Unaltered
Compared to many others
Scraping by along the
Substrate;
Just a memory of cloud’s
Enough
To settle into sunset
Pillowed into selfhood;
“I heard
I saw
I
Flew”