Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Addiction

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    The Calla Lilly = FORGIVENESS “My Grandmother’s Ghost”

    “Is forgiveness possible?”

    In the language of flowers, the Calla Lily is forgiveness. Forgiveness is like coming home. It hypothesizes a place where the past doesn’t matter, mistakes are healed, and love conquers all. Sounds like heaven, doesn’t it?

    Soulmates create heaven for each other, but we can taste and enjoy it, now. Nothing is held back.

    Love requires that each desire the other’s “good.” There is no tiny part of us hoping for the other’s denigration so that we can rise. This means forswearing the Scarcity Mentality. We must believe there is enough love for us both.

    Love without status, without competition. Just closeness, forgiveness and togetherness. If a Soulmate keeps pushing his Beloved into position of Enforcer, Critic, Teacher or Detective, the relationship is under such threat its future is imperiled. One can hardly be forgiven until one stops being a danger to the soul of the Beloved and the soul of the relationship. We must commit to desiring the other’s good, and to demanding health and life for ourselves.

    When the Calla lily arrives at your door, not just forgiveness but absolution is in the offing. We know there can be no forgiveness for us unless we have learned to forgive others, but perhaps the hardest thing is to learn to forgive ourselves.

    We must even forgive God for the pulse of history and the electricity of circumstance, for the physical web in which we are all caught. Give up trying to assess who did what to who and why; letting it all go as your eyes turn to the future.

    There is no resolution in simply showing wounds or admitting wrongdoing; but there is healing available when we hold each other up in the light. But we have to want it. We must want to come home.

    How many times do we have to forgive ourselves? When asked how many times we need to forgive others Jesus made the quick calculation of “seventy times seven” meaning, “a lot.” If you think about it, you’ll realize we are going to have to forgive each other and ourselves a lot more times than that! Possibly multiple times per day for the rest of our lives. Don’t we have to forgive ourselves for constantly underestimating ourselves, for saying “I can’t do this” without even trying, for insulting ourselves and verbally (and for all I know physically!) Be a loving partner to yourself so that your Beloved knows how to love you.

    Meditation: We’re branches of the same tree – W.B. Yeats

    My Grandmother’s Ghost

    My grandmother never cried
    Emmie you’re a stoic
    Everyone admired her. That’s why
    She haunts us; pressing her face accusingly
    Against the glass beneath the stairs.
    On windy nights she
    Threatens God, maligns
    His angels; for the little boy who died
    Of scarlet fever; without once
    Calling her name; and the collie dog run over
    And the storm that forever uprooted
    Her wedding tulips.
    Mother shakes her head, says, “Poor Gran
    Will never be done; she’s got
    Too much grief to catch up on.”

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    The Gazing Ball = PROPHECY “You Are Not Lost”

    “Who can foretell the future?”

    If you could, would you?

    Would you find yourself performing all the same actions all over again?

    What do you most regret? Sometimes grief lies in wait for us at our happiest moments. What would you change, if anything? How about altering your Soulmate, fellow traveler on life’s journey? Would you roll those dice again?

    Skeptics say a stopped clock is right twice a day, but whatever the causation, sometime prophecies come true. A creeping suspicion bubbles up out of nowhere – manifesting as reality. We guess restlessly at “The Truth.”

    This glittering gazing ball at the center of our garden reflects our hopes, wishes and dreams, one of which is that it confers the gift of prophecy. We know we must be right about some future event; but if we share our knowledge too often we are discredited or disbelieved.

    Perhaps all we need is to cultivate our gift; forget “knowing”; concentrate on the blur of memory and project it forcefully into the future. Think about past, present and possibility, making all our choices with our Wisdom Eye fully open. It could be that the answer to the question we seek is already known to our Soulmate if we can only learn to trust and understand.

    What fresh new worlds might we create with our clear shared minds?.

    YOU ARE NOT LOST

    Do forests think?
    These trees know where they are
    In spite of all our attempts
    At subjugation
    We are all still here
    In spite of prophets who
    Calculated chances of survival
    With the eye of a murderous god
    Every one of us
    Who has ever been
    Is still here

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    The labyrinth = COMPLEXITY

    “What’s the ultimate secret?”

    The Labyrinth draws us in, yet we are fearful. In the garden lies this ultimate puzzle – that for which there is no solution, because the Labyrinth keeps adding corridors toward – where?

    We don’t recognize that our longing for stasis is really a longing for death, so that if we wish to live, we must commit ourselves to the constant flow of fresh experiences, discoveries that train our eyes in new ways of seeing.

    The Labyrinth changes us at the same time as we demand – and sometimes succeed in forcing – changes from it. We have pledged to leave our mark upon it. Nothing shakes our certainty that this puzzle pines for us every bit as much as we yearn for it. Is your soulmate waiting in the center of the labyrinth? What if the labyrinth has no center?

    Soulmates have an edge; we have eyes in the back of our heads. Our sixth sense seeks the others out and once we join hands, we become a four-eyed dragon. Not only can our eyes see forward in time and backwards in history – but now we have the benefit of two Third Eyes – two seats of wisdom.

    Why does the Labyrinth keep separating us? Because labyrinths are a series of puzzles without answers – designed to educate us to embrace the next problem.

    You were just around that corner – now suddenly your essence has departed. The aura I counted on with certainty has evanesced.

    What happens if one day you look at me with a different face and I realize your brain – that Seat of Self – has been affected and You and no Longer You?

    And then there’s Bad Magic – the lies that draw us – or one of us – in – to live – however momentarily – in Crazy World. The defining feature of Crazy World is sickness. Sickness, death and hopelessness are cultivated as if they were precious plants. You know you must get out as fast as you can. Yes, you should try to save each other but you will both be lost if you can’t get the oxygen mask over your own face first and return the trustworthy flow of life-giving reality.

    Our brain, the thinking organ with which we confront and negotiate the Labyrinth – is a labyrinth itself – possibly the model for all the labyrinths to come, but to comprehend the vastness of the universe all we have is this tiny human brain. Even as Soulmates touch Third Eyes together to join through Literature, Science, History and Art with all the human brains there have ever existed, can we gauge the immensities of inner and outer space? We can, if we are unafraid of complexity.

    The further we journey, the more we see. Every “solution” posits yet more problems. Hold hands and don’t be frightened. Our simplified language will inhibit our understanding until we invent placeholder terms to represent the “unknown” – just as in math – so we can begin to imagine a way to place them into our calculations. Luckily you don’t need to know everything there is to know about the ocean just to ride its waves; but you do need to appreciate the majesty, the mystery and the danger keeping you afloat.

    Heraclitus said you can never dip your hand in the “same river” twice. Even if you dip for the second time just moments later, the water itself is completely different. We are all rushing forward and there is no going back. Soulmates rush on together.

    She

    At the heart of the labyrinth
    She sits
    Repairing
    Sores of everyday
    Occurrence
    Insults, slights, poor
    Choice of Words &
    Turns of phrase.

    From the heart of the pond she
    Heals the otter’s sorrow
    The bobcat’s grief
    Orchestrating cries of loons
    Into family symphony
    Forever exploring but
    Having home to come
    Back to.

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    Thorns = The thief = DISPOSSESSED “On Being Disinherited”

    “Could you steal? Have you?”

    The rose attacks; you are cut, pierced. Thorns signify “Don’t mess with me or you’ll be sorry.” The Garden itself has the capacity to cut you to the quick.

    What if the garden itself is under attack? Ravaged? Despoiled? Extinct?

    Dispossession is much more complicated than mere loss. It means something we thought was ours isn’t. “Thorns” remind us of hidden dangers. Ownership may be quietly transferred behind the scenes, or they may convince you it never existed at all. What is “ownership”, anyway? Are we entitled to the Soulmate’s love?

    Entitlement of some kind is at risk. Property? Dignity? Expectations? It can be very modest; a chair, a single room, a blanket. Not yours anymore. Nothing you can rely on. We must ask ourselves; are those we trust to act for us are fundamentally untrustworthy? Who or what do they represent?

    Contracts dissolve. In a class based society we suddenly find ourselves divested, plummeting down, down to the despised and the ignored. This is frightening and disorienting.

    The rules have shifted; the law has changed. We are looked on as an interloper at someone else’s party. Now we are viewed as dishonorable supplicants in danger of capture and incarceration.

    Thorns remind us of a wider meaning; a warning that ultimately we can “own” nothing: everything we use is shared. Even our own body, this ship we use to forage through the seas of life, can turn against us, behaving in completely unpermitted and unfamiliar ways.

    Feeling dispossessed is a shock to the system. Hustle culture places pressure on us to take, take, take, grab or “lose out.” When ‘Thorns” appear in your daily meditation it means it is time to have some serious thoughts about the nature of “ownership”; what you want versus what you can have; what you can control versus what you can’t and ultimately, who you can trust. Who’s feathering their private nest instead of honoring a contract?

    How can you gain through losing? Does real freedom lurk behind these dispossessions? The hermit crab carries his house on his back. When he outgrows it is when he shops for another house. It clearly wouldn’t benefit him to be dragging two houses around; he wouldn’t be able to move.

    But some of us are so burdened with junk we’re completely immobilized. Yet being robbed not only isn’t any kind of relief, the sense of violation lasts for years. The only person who can rid us of our stuff is Us. We just must set to it and figure out what’s baby and what’s bathwater. It’s a lifelong process. But being light and free can be intoxicating and addictive. Maybe a contract needs renegotiation, or shouldn’t exist in the first place.

    Sometimes a Soulmate fails the test or sharing, caring and giving. Or we fail. Maybe it is just once, and after a recovery period we will be better communicators. But maybe, like the hermit crab, we have outgrown this particular shell.

    After all, we’re planning to end up with wings. Maybe once we’ve soared we won’t want to live any other way.

    ON BEING DISINHERITED

    These are the tasks
    Performed without feeling;
    The snipping the
    Slashing
    The shredding
    Bundling into bunches
    You are the remote ogre
    And I the crying child.
    Why do partitioned pieces
    Melt before they touch?
    You fear to give;
    I am helpless to receive.
    Imagine we change places.
    Would that explain
    Your fear of me?

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    LAW = “The Statue”

    “Vows”

    In the garden stone figures mock us and memorialize us. They can be reassuring or uncanny as if secretly intuiting our states of mind. We put them there to remind us – of what?

    Lovers make promises to each other. We do it spontaneously, offering ourselves on the altar of our own desire. We solidify our vows publicly in paper, legal filings, photographs, video, topiary, marble, even stone.

    What promises can we make and what promises can we keep? Do these promises allow space to evolve over time? At least we can answer that last question with a heartening “yes.” Our promises are not set in stone. We are not our statues.

    Soulmates are in tune with each other. We can feel each other’s evolving spirit, sometimes before the other even can. We know when the petals lose their glisten, when the wings droop.

    Did we make a promise to be “perfect”? We know this is not possible or even desirable. The only real promises we can make are to be present, to be honest, and to treat the desires of the Beloved Other as Sacred. But we all have boundaries and we must be honest about uncovering and examining those.

    Some can be broken and re-set, some can’t. Does that mean a Soulmate can be temporary? We are temporal beings, but someday we will meet on the eternal plain.

    #HAIKU: The Statue

    Rose-choked;
    Tagged;
    Sentenced by time
    I stand Mute.
    Freeze! I see you!
    Who has won?

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    The Snake = ADDICTION “The Columbine”

    “Just when things are going so well -”

    Because we’re afraid of snakes, we attract the deadly columbine. We can’t recognize danger and we don’t know how to summon real assistance.

    In the language of flowers the Columbine means “Anxious Folly. Resolved to win.” Our folly prevents our winning.

    As for snakes, there are many of snakes we depend on in the garden. But every now and then a poisonous one wanders by. How do we tell the difference?


    How can we win when we poison ourselves? It’s to lessen that anxiety, to get back to what we assume is “baseline.” But it isn’t. We just haven’t found our baseline yet, and by mimicking the baseline of others we get farther and father from ourselves.

    This is why recovery from addiction involves finding ourselves. We can’t find a soulmate when we don’t know who we are.

    Our toy-box of pleasures is quite pathetic, but that’s not our fault. We are wired for addictions, with a biological view to turning such basic pursuits for food, mating and recreation subconscious so we can use the front of our mind to think about other things.

    You can tell addictions are destructive (and not all of them are!) if they crowd out human flourishing and ruin sharing and our ability to share. “I want to feel pleasure with you” becomes, “Let’s cycle through my tragic past of suffering before I found you.”

    Not good. To get out of this mess we cultivate the gift of change, of evolution. We will share and learn to tolerate discomfort. Hold tight. Often the addictions gained their grip over us because we were seeking to escape change or discomfort! The good news it, it’s never too late.

    The better news is, this re-discovery and re-creation of the self is one of the life-transforming experiences to share with a soulmate and if you have no soulmate yet, here’s a crucial step to getting yourself ready to present to the world as the Real, the Essential, the True You.

    Always look for help. Set up a program and a feedback system for accountability and efficiency and spiritual support for the inevitable withdrawal that’s coming. It’s only giving birth to your stronger, better, best self. You know it’s time.

    HAIKU: The Columbine

    Gambler’s inferno
    Dissolves will
    Slavery
    Wrecks pleasure-
    Luck? Loss?
    Choose.

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    The Poppy = SUCCESS “The Lovers”
    “Successful in your eyes”

    The Poppy signifies oblivion and eternal sleep in the Language of Flowers. This source of heroin and morphine will definitely obliterate your personality, despite protecting you from pain. Does that sound like success to you?

    The greatest pleasure of Soulmates is creating a world all our own, with its own rules and reality. If our Soul Unit is a success, we are a Success. The harsh judgments of the outside world, operating as it does casino-like with few winners and a vast “majority” of losers, fade in impact.

    All that is required for joy is that we must be a success to each other, and we must be a success together. This mandates constant soul-searching as we step through life’s landmines, both singly and alone. There is no more restful peace than ultimate confidence that someone’s got your back.

    Haiku: The Lovers

    Falling upwards
    Into you
    My other wing, my second
    Clapping hand

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    The Tree = ENLIGHTENMENT “My Beautiful Twin Sister”

    “You can if you think you can”

    Trees knit a garden together. Thy hover over us the way we remember helpful adults from childhood. They are the elders of our loving garden family.

    To be “awakened” is to experience life as it really is. Lots of people are repelled by this notion. Why bother to wake up when the news is so bad? Remain in the happy dream state brought to you by the Sackler family or some other pharmaceutical conglomerate, or by your favorite source of baseless propaganda.

    That lasts as long as you can afford their product. As every rube discovers, Happy Dreamland’s price keeps getting steeper until one day, you can’t pay it at all. Then you are awake and desperately uncomfortable, whether you like it or not, and the life around you has gone to shit. And not the helpful, fertilizing kind.

    A common approach to Soulmate-seeking is to try to find someone to join you in Dreamland, or to aggressively shop for a Dreamland you want to join. What these people don’t know is that Soulmates create their own world together; and this is a process that can’t be rushed. Seeing yourself and life as it really is begins by being very uncomfortable, but enlightenment comes eventually, and it promises real peace.

    The first improvement is to stop complaining about other people and all the things you can’t fix. Look at and into each other. And then it hits you – that simple thing we always “knew” because we’ve been told over and over: Love is the answer. (“Why Live?” is the question.) Take a walk… together. Look at the stars…together.

    Stroll through an art gallery…together. Every joy is multiplied and magnified and now the question is, Aren’t we lucky? Well, aren’t you? And the gratitude for the chance to live for even a moment in this spectacular universe comes pouring out.

    MY BEAUTIFUL TWIN SISTER

    Twenty months
    Made you the boss
    But my twin just the same
    I gazed adoringly
    Into your dark power.
    You braved everything
    Always being first;
    Parting airspace with your muscle
    To improve my flight – you
    Schooled boyfriends
    Husbands, children
    Teachers
    Bent whole administrations to your will.
    For my benefit you
    Deconstructed history,
    Logic, told me
    Who to read and what to think;
    Volunteering for a better world.
    Protester, Marcher, you
    Learned Amslan
    Just to empathize;
    Conquered mountains
    Just for fun;
    Shifting derailleurs, snowshoeing
    Surefooted through so many
    Frosty seasons. Inside
    You were just like me;
    Scared, hesitant, fragile
    Pushing yourself out there;
    A revelation of
    Impossible courage
    Giving me a lifelong template
    To admire.

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    The tulip = ILLUSION “Gothic Novel”

    “Seeing what isn’t there”

    Illusions are VERY attractive. We WANT them to be true. In my childhood Superman leapt tall buildings in a single bound – all us kids could recognize the fun, the power, the joy in that.

    Limitations are unpleasant. We can work to expand them, or…we can dream. Every culture warns the dreamer against getting lost in fantasy. The Tulip is a historic emblem of delusion – impoverishing generations of otherwise intelligent Dutch merchants in a fruitless gamble. Now the Tulip warns that you may be counting on something – or someone – that is false.

    Our society has been fueled by misinformation ever since Edward Bernays, founder of modern advertising, wrote his book Propaganda in the 1920’s. Since then legal beagles have defended the right to “puffery” and “spin”, even to saying something manifestly untrue; “miracle pills!”

    Advertisers are very honest about manipulating us through wish and fear. We are eager to buy the illusions that seem to promise a warm social life, a happy home or radiating beauty. Lately misinformation has taken a distinctly evil turn as billionaires base their fortunes on convincing us that pollution isn’t dangerous, the climate is fine, science is untrustworthy, the election was stolen and oligarchic rule is what we really want.

    The question to consider is, what is our benefit in believing and propagating obviously harmful facts? The rifle-toting man who broke into a Washington DC pizza parlor thought he was a heroic savior of children. He’s now serving a prison term.

    Why is violence such an attractive answer? Forget stockpiling bear mace and bullets to abuse your fellow citizens. We need some other way to soothe our raggedy self-esteem apart from clinging to grifters and liars.

    On the other side of illusion lies reality. We need to take a look at it, savor it. Often it’s a kid tugging at our clothes begging us to stay, focus, share; not lose ourselves in a fantasy world.

    The need for illusion prevents us from finding, seeing and keeping a Soulmate. We must work to make reality less terrible, so that we don’t become dependent on illusion as a pleasure source. Illusion rushes in when life seems meaningless. Joining groups of honest seekers directing their paths with love can save us. When we are surrounded by love we will attract love. Check the philosophy of the group you hang out with. Is it “Let’s you and him fight?” or “Let’s seek joy for all.”

    GOTHIC NOVEL

    A woman alone is open – gaping,
    Button hole without a button hook.
    She carries her muff held stiffly
    Out before her like an offering
    Flic, flic! The eyes of strangers
    Slit the pause like razors.
    This railway carriage stinks of creosote, wet fur.
    “I prefer the window up, thank you”
    “I prefer it down”.
    She lights a Sobranie to remind her
    Of Devon in the haying; the gentlemen
    Lean forward, reading the initials
    On her morocco case.

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    Foxglove = MEDICINE “Alyssum”

    “Intervention”

    We find ourselves now in an endless pandemic, a New Normal caused by our aggressive human interference with our planet’s wildlife. By a miracle the same pharmaceutical companies that have been competitively bleeding all of us dry have come up with a vaccine that seems effective at keeping most of us out of the hospital. Wouldn’t want to kill the golden geese!

    But it doesn’t work if you don’t take it and, wonder of wonders, a substantial number of Americans have become suspicious of the medical establishment! Since insurance companies have been advertising for years that healthcare is “our choice” based on “what plan we can afford” I for one am not surprised.

    This is the only possible end result of a gated health care system that actively despises “Public” health as “radical socialism”!

    So where is our Soul & our Soulmate in all this, our little, fragile, mortal, human body that drew the “medical intervention” card only this morning? “Medical intervention” is represented in the Tantric Garden by the humble foxglove.

    Foxgloves contain digitalis, the building block of cardiology care. Where do we stand on intervention? We may create a “perfect world” with our Soulmate but does that mean we can let no one in? A moment’s thought convinces that we must keep the freshening breezes of this world blowing as long as we are in this world! “Help” will always be needed and hopefully, offered.

    Can we learn to trust the Helpful Intervener? We don’t want to create a love nest so fragile it is threatened by any outsider. Instead, we want to make certain we avail ourselves of every good advancement and improvement opportunity in our oh so imperfect world.

    ALYSSUM

    What wound is this?
    Flowering? Flowering?
    I wake at two am
    Immobilized –
    A curvilinear clamp
    Half hoop clenching
    My right side.
    .

    It could be the strain of
    Fishing for a future
    Hooking sky through a
    Porthole window or
    I could be over-organized. The
    Doctors dismissed me in
    My mother’s name.
    “You dare to be angry?
    You dare to grow old?
    You are a false alarm.”

    I say a prayer to the great night heron, that
    Pregnant thief of dreams –
    Solitary hunter calling to collect me.
    Dream he rises
    To unleash the silken sinews
    Of submission from my torn and
    Tethered wing –
    Feathered like a revelation
    Stippled like the phases of the moon
    Birthing spirit, coming
    Coming, coming
    In his cloud of fire.