Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Diaries

  • Becoming a Goddess – claiming your Superpower by Alysse Aallyn

    Summer – Relax

      Can Goddesses afford to relax? Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Well, Lesson #1 is that being a goddess is Counterintuitive. Other people rush away from the burning building – planning on being EVEN MORE SCARED the next time. Well, we are going to master our fear. We are going in.

      Everybody Panics  – I had a panic attack at age 5 (I  got lost outside a movie theatre) and another at age 11 when I descended deep, deep, deep into a cave. (I think the guide was deliberately trying to scare us.) I didn’t know at the time what these episodes were – my parents and sisters saw them as embarrassing annoyances – but looking back it’s clear what was happening to me physically as a result of what was happening to me mentally.

      Relaxation In the Face of Panic – Learning to tolerate psychic dissonance, to be interested in it and challenged by it is what we’re all about. It’s a sign that we’re in the presence of the Deep Stuff – the things that galvanize our deep subconscious and if we can just seize control of that, we’ll access our true power.

      Learn Relaxation Techniques – There are so many and you should experiment with all of them! Learn what works for you and – key – what you enjoy. You will find yourselves using these techniques all the time. To get to sleep, to get through difficult experiences or just to access your subconscious when you have a question.

      Breathe Deeply – The very first thing is mastering control of the breath. Pregnant women learn all kinds of helpful breathing techniques in Lamaze; panting, counting; deliberately slowing down and speeding up your breathing. In yoga you will learn Lion Breaths to make you feel powerful. They are very similar to the gasps and shouts in martial arts and will affect your opponents. Watch the Maori war dance on YouTube.

      Get Out Your Training Journal – write down the techniques and your reactions. Appoint a time to practice these every day. Your breath connects you to the universe and all living things.

      Models & Mentors: “The first thing to learn is the breath.” – Confucius

      ‘Breathe In. Let Go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure, and give thanks for that.”

      – Oprah Winfrey

      ‘Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor” –

      Thich Nhat Hanh

      “While we breathe, we hope” – Barack Obama

      #Haiku: Every Breath You Take

      Life isn’t numbered

      By breaths you take but

      Moments

      That take breath

      Away

    1. ALYSSE AALLYN

      Alysse Aallyn is the author of four well-received thrillers, Find Courtney, Depraved Heart, Woman Into Wolf and I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, one historical novel (Devlyn) and a book of short stories (Awake Till the End.) Her work has been translated into German and Italian. She has three published books of poetry – The Sacred Quiver, The Hot Skin, Haunted Wedding and The Five Wounds and edited another (The Feathered Violin.) She trained in theatre at Circle in the Square Theatre School and Martha Graham School of Dance. She appeared in the part of Isabella in Jean Giraudoux’s The Enchanted at the New Yorker Theatre. She has held writing fellowships at Brooklyn College and LaSalle University. Her novel Depraved Heart won a 2011 CT Press Club fiction award and her play Queen of Swords was a semi-finalist in the 2014 National Arts Council First Play award. She has been invited to read her original work at The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC and has taught creative writing at Catonsville Community College. Woman Into Wolf was a semi-finalist for The National Playwrights Conference (2016) and her play Our Father’s Restaurant was performed on Pacifica Radio. She has also appeared as a crime commentator on ID – TV’s Blood Relatives. Her play, Let’s Speak Vietnamese was published in Dramatika Magazine. She directed The Maids and played the Mother in Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders for Theatre Upstairs. Other plays she’s written are The Honey & the Pang about Emily Dickinson’s posthumous career, Cuck’d – a modern Othello, and Caving, in which the theatre is transformed into a cave for a spelunking dare. Rough Sleep, (based on her novel I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead) was produced by Manhattan Repertory Theatre (W. 45th St) in 2019. Her latest play, The Dalingridge Horror, (short version Leonard & Virginia) explores the partnership between Leonard & Virginia Woolf in their own words and was a finalist for the Tennessee Williams 2021 award. Her newest poetry collection, Haunted Wedding appeared in 2022 from Thriller Library.

      Her current work is The WarriorOracle – Becoming a Warrior on the path to enlightenment.

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

      Dawn – Relief –

        After the birth of my first child I bought a printing press – an adorable little toy that printed a 3×5 inch page and elegant “Egyptian” type. I wanted to print my own book of poems – The Hot Skin – and I didn’t want to ”delegate” anything. I also bought a binding machine and designed the covers – plain black and white –by myself. The pleasure of not having to rely on other people was immensely freeing.

        I also bought a sorter in which to place the ordered printed pages, taped to it the slogan “Work Is Love Made Visible” (St. Catherine) and moved this whole conglomeration, plus the baby’s playpen, to the small cottage at StormFall Farm for a poetic summer in the Berkshires.

        My husband planned to commute back and forth from Philadelphia.

        I was determined to have the experience Virginia Woolf so movingly describes in her diaries – sorting type as a way to self-soothe.

        At the time I was staying in the cottage, my husband’s grandmother was up at the big house where I often went for drinks and dinner with her. This grandmother had always been wealthy but was a big believer in “noblesse oblige” and common sense. She was very shocked that I would sometimes alter one of my poems to suit my type requirements and told me, sadly, this meant I was not a real poet. I laughed out loud. This woman would not recognize Art if it bit her.

        When my husband arrived he was angry and aggrieved that I had dedicated the book to him, thanking him for helping with the baby. Didn’t I understand what an insult that was? What would people think? Who would want to invest their money with a baby-minder?

        I was gobsmacked. His violent hysteria was even more frightening than his arguments. My first husband was a cool, smooth seducer, accustomed to lying to get his way. My second husband was very different, but I was beginning to see that the rage and the pathos were deeper than I’d realized. But with poetry you can understand – and express – anything.

        IN THE BUTTERFLY PAVILION

        This evening you said you wished
        I was more ordinary.
        I bowed my head. I did not speak.
        Outside the animals leaned together,
        Breathing lightly; waiting
        For my answer.
        Cats-tongue ferns
        Swelled up like swords, pushed out a stink
        Occluding fields of vision while
        The rabbit-bloodied lawn curled away. 
        Phlox flamed  
          Sows littered in the cyclamen
        Dwarf stars broke free as
        Frazzled molten ore raced across a sky
        Darkening to night.
        Summoning my power
        My hands stay folded in my sleeves.
        Nighttime is my kingdom.

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

        Cooperation –

          Becoming a warrior is rough. The only thing harder than becoming a warrior is NOT becoming one. Then you’re subject to the wild vagaries of circumstance. What you must do Is fight your way up to the controls and try to steer this thing in a safe direction. You won’t be able to do that without assembling a team, and teams rely on cooperation.

          My mother died of breast cancer when she was 70 years old – and my father lost his mind. This was a complete surprise to everyone. My father had always been the strongest, smartest, wiliest person in the room. He was especially good at Reality. As the captain of our ship he piloted us through storms, foreign borders, bizarre customs officials and threatening cops and robbers. He once jumped overboard with a knife in his teeth to cut our propeller free. He untangled anchor chains, rescued a man at sea, founded successful businesses, managed money and liberated cash from international banks. He didn’t believe in God, he was scientifically educated and intellectually up-to-date.

          My mother’s death was no surprise – she’d been dying for five years, up until the time the hospital sent her home and said they could do nothing for her. After the body bag left, my father’s first impulse was to kill himself by swimming as far out to sea as he could go. He was rescued by my brother-in-law, but he was still talking crazy. A helicopter took him to a hospital on the mainland where he was diagnosed with grief psychosis and briefly institutionalized while various medications were tried.


          I took him out for lunch one day and he asked to stop at the Kwik Check for a newspaper, running in by himself. In the car I went into a slow panic – what if he bought razor blades? Luckily, he didn’t, but that was the way we all had to think as I strategized with my three sisters. We took turns with him. We could see the medication – Thorazine – had debilitating side effects, so checked him into the Philadelphia Mood Clinic to see if they could do a better job. They could, using primarily talk therapy.

          Here my father fixated on getting married again, and as soon as he was out of the clinic he was stalking a variety of women, all of whom turned him down. Finally, he hooked up with an old friend of the family who was coming out of a bad divorce where her husband wanted Someone Else. She needed a Someone Else to shake in his face.

          She certainly was familiar – having attended all the same churches and schools that we had. But she was not like my mother at all – flat-footed where my mother was imaginative, plain where my mother was beautiful, astringent where my mother was warm. But my father certainly calmed down. Creepily, he put her in charge of everything. He began referring to her as “your mother”. None of us were invited to the wedding. Newly married, they went on a tour of all our houses where he carefully explained to us that we wouldn’t be getting anything in the will, because he’d already done plenty, plus he’d made our stepmother leave her job so she could tour the world with him and he had to take care of her.

          My husband said, Great! I’ll take it from here! One of my sisters said, “It’s his money, he can do what he wants with it.” Another was so depressed – “He’s abandoning us AGAIN” – she couldn’t speak. The third sister said, “We’re helpless, we can’t stop him.”

          I said, I was taught to speak truth to power. I was taught that resistance is not only not futile but mandatory. Guess who taught me that? My conscientious objector father, who went to Kentucky State Prison for his pacifist beliefs.

          I wrote him a letter in which I said half of that money was Mom’s and she felt an obligation to and love for her grandchildren and daughters. I threw in every moral rationale I could think of. Incredibly – considering the way he’d distanced himself from us – it worked. He said he would leave us a small amount at his death and put the bulk of the money in a trust that would revert to us on our stepmother’s death. He didn’t leave us as much as he promised, but the trust idea is a good one. Someday it might even come to pass.

          ON BEING DISINHERITED

          These are the tasks
          To be performed
          Without feeling;
          The snipping the
          Slashing
          The shredding
          The with-holding, the
          Bundling into bunches.
          You play the remote ogre
          And I’ll be the crying child.

          Why do partitioned pieces
          Melt before they touch?
          You fear to give;
          I am helpless to receive.
          Suppose we changed places.
          Would that explain
          Your fear of me?

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

          The Sun – Truth –

            High school for me was a religious boarding school whose faculty asserted their monopoly on truth. I considered myself an honorable person and despised lies. So when asked straightforward questions, I told the truth and accepted my punishment. However, I gradually discovered that they reserved the right to lie to us and in fact, considered that “parental” and pedagogical. Was there any point telling “the truth” to such people? Apparently, truth was a scarce resource that I, at age 14, possessed. The hypocrisy was huge. My father loved the Society of Friends because creed was optional, attendance at meeting was voluntary and silent. No one spoke unless moved by the Holy Spirit. But at our school, religious attendance (we even had Vespers!) was mandatory and our captive audience was lectured from the Facing Bench (where the Important People sit.)

            In such a world, is truth possible? Is it even findable? Above all, is it communicable? I was naturally artistic, a bent which was discouraged because it was “self-indulgent”. And poetry (it’s poetry if the poet says it is) is the most self-indulgent of all. So that’s what I chose.

            PREPPY

            Corseted with verbs
            The French teacher sweeps
            The cherry blossoms from the tennis court
            As she would like to sweep
            The cherries, squelching them soundly
            Beneath soccer-spiked shoes

            While the headmistress
            Cello-breasted
            Polishes graffiti carved upon her coffin
            In Chaucerian High English
            And the girls –
            Nun-white, nun-blue

            Soar above hockey fields like
            Foul-mouthed angels, anticipated ecstasy locked
            In narrow hope chests ripened on
            Amphetamines
            Free Love
            Bad dreams.

          1. Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            Solitude

            I’ve always enjoyed being alone, where I can sort my thoughts and groom my feelings and arrange my objectives. This fact was startlingly obvious from the first, and later I found out that people like that are called “introverts’. We draw energy from being alone, whereas our energy is depleted by contact with others.

            My most profound warrior resistance, so ancient I can’t recall its inception, is my allergy to being “directed.” For my poor parents it must have felt like their third daughter never emerged from ”the terrible twos.”

            My father was a very self-directed man, happiest with just my mother for company, so I had a model of resistance to being “molded.” He explained that he never could work for anyone else because their management style always rubbed him the wrong way. He formed two companies that he directed, and towards the end of his life was the kingpin or a charitable organization with a religious bent. He was grateful to that religion since they’d helped him with his conscientious objection in World War II, but he was never a believer. My mother was more mystical, with a strong response to beauty and design, who felt the most important things in life cannot be expressed. A wonderful challenge for a writer.

            Conscientious Objection

            I said No to

            Trooping past the David statue

            Attending parties

            Avoiding concerts,

            Wanting to be alone to write.

            I kept a diary my sisters

            Jeered at and it was

            Pretty stupid – training ground for

            Plays and proms

            Novels and stories –

            And I still make notes on

            Everything.

            “You’re not important,” said my

            Cohort –

            “You have to become important

            To have anything to say.”

            I knew that was wrong – every

            Artist I had studied –


            Every thinker –

            Bubbled like a kettle

            From inception.

            Reading tealeaves is as

            Necessary as

            Finding tea.

          2. Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            The Lovers

            My husband and I frequently refer to each other as our “cuttle bone/cuddlebone.” We keep each other’s warrior blades sharp. When trying to explain how I became a warrior, deepest emotional relationships we form by choice paint a picture of a quest for support and validation. My coed boarding school had rigid social requirements of dating and communicating – there was a “Boys End” and a “Girls End” and every evening representatives from each side would meet in “Central” and exchange baskets of messages. At Girls’ End these messages (called “KOBS” or “Kindness of Bearer”) were stored in a stocking hung beside the recipient’s mirror. This was our earliest form of flirting! One lover I chose because his KOBS were beautiful – always expressed as free-floating poetry – another because he was imaginative and ambitious – a third because he was forceful and honest. It was how these boys came alive on the page that was significant to me.
            My last boyfriend at that school – whom I was to marry eleven years later – we are still married to this day – presented himself as an ideal combination of all of these, plus he was gorgeously beautiful. But before we could come together, many dragons needed to be killed.

            Leaving the Coven

            A craven of cronies stood
            Between us & God –
            God demands clones
            God hated short skirts.

            A damnation of judges
            Stood between us &
            Knowledge; truth exists
            Only in service.

            A clowder of cretins
            Stood between us &
            Art: “Don’t be disturbing”
            “Never trust instincts.”

            From the depths of
            This oubliette
            You drank the koolaid
            Guaranteeing survival

            Cherishing passions that
            One day would rescue me –
            So I could grow up
            And write you this poem.

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

            Conflict

            It’s in Conflict that warriors emerge. My uncle insisted people in authority be “respected” and said whether they were worthy of respect was not the point. My parents were never that crass. It was a subtle game with them. My mother referred conflict to my father; we were ”hurting” her by not being the people that she wanted. It was hard to take seriously. But “discipline” quickly transferred to my father and he was a much scarier proposition. He was physically violent – spanking me, breaking down my door, visibly losing his temper and then further enraged over losing his temper. This was a whirlwind I could not ride and it hardened me against him. Some facts he refused to accept, actual truths he rejected with “No.” I understood that my mother was too weak to face things but Dad claimed to be a fearless seeker in life. It made me disrespect him.

            Detaching From Dad

            Dad taught us to stand up for ourselves


            Except around him.


            Dad enjoyed being silly


            When we were little.


            Entertaining story teller –


            Teased us to obedience.


            When I said wild horses couldn’t drag me


            He played wild horse.


            He was the captain, and


            Life wasn’t ship-shape


            When I was a shape-shifter.


            He wanted to go to Europe


            Without my eldest sister


            She called her congressman


            To change Daddy’s mind.


            He institutionalized her in


            Switzerland


            Two thousand miles from


            Our new home.


            I was stubborn and


            Honest: the worst combination.


            When I was twelve and Genevieve fourteen


            He sent us to school across


            Oceans.


            As my dad had before me


            I stood up to uncles and teachers


            Because I had to respect somebody


            Might as well be myself.

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

            Summer

            My family typically spent a month each summer cruising on a thirty-seven foot sloop called the Phoenix. Four children and two adults relating in such a confined space shaped the warrior skills of my adult personality, including a taste for exploration, for reveling in the physical pleasures of water, wind, storm & sun, for the absolute dissociation of reading and thinking, and for reading aloud, also group card games such a Michigan and Oh Hell played during wild evening parties called “Phoenix A-Gogo.”

            Trailing

            When we sailed I was fore & aft &

            Up the mast –

            Exulting with the spinnaker –

            Bikinied & brown with

            Binoculars in hand –

            Mapping unseen islands

            In the geography of my heart

            Scoring constellations

            To the cosmology of my brain –

            Reading by the light of

            Photo-luminescence –

            Foraging with seals & jellyfish

            Flying higher

            Dreaming farther

            Fish-hooking memory forever.

            Mother warmed the compass

            Father was a sextant,

            Sisters manned the jibs, but

            I owned the reacher-drifter –

            Favorite sail

            Which makes the most of

            Any air

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

            The Goddess –

            One of my earliest jobs was an office work temp – ending up as receptionist at an architecture firm. In my hegira through multiple workplaces I did not find one where I liked the lowly way I was treated. But Warriors, by definition, don’t put up with the Status Quo. Seeking to ratchet up my power level I used my training and auditioned to be a dancer. Things improved mightily! Although I still encountered some mistrust and scorn, on the whole, I achieved my goal of feeling plugged into the Universal Power Source.

            Artistic Expression

            What if you could


            Be Yourself at work –


            Release


            Every day feelings


            Invoking ancient


            Raptures?


            Though mother disapproved and


            Dad worried, I


            Launched my


            Physical self


            Into the Universe and


            The Universe


            Loved me back.