#Haiku: Creativity
You:
Immortalized;
Fireborn
Force majeure
Create
Become –
Exalt
You.
Category: #Mysteries
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Haiku Diary of Alysse Aallyn
#Haiku: Ego
Pry:
Beneath Eye:
Compare
My Shy
Inside
To your
Wry outside. Cry.
Why?
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The Demon Lover – a play for two voices by Alysse Aallyn
3. LATIGAZO – WHIPPING
EVAN
Do you really love me?
Why should you?
I don’t any longer
Believe In friendship.EVA
It is a horror, an outrage
That we should not be together. I struggle against
The wound of not knowing where you are each minute.
Everything you do is more important to me than my own life.
The whole of me is with you.
I see and feel you so distinctly,
Your beloved cold hand in mine
Your touch on the nape of my neck.Joy and agony
– my insides torn by pincers.
A double goodbye would have been awful
– two bites on the bullet of pain.This love is like something we have given birth to.
We must never blunt our imagination or tenderness.
Don’t get a cold in your soul.EVAN
Are these abortive suicide attempts?
I disappoint everyone.
Cut the cable. Set me free.I deliberately left one of your letters for Elayna to find.
With me love is linked with
A need to betray. I invite possessiveness.
She made me promise our love would never be physical.
I lied fluidly.EVA
Even the thought of
Such a loss of pleasure tears at my heart
Like some medieval torture.You harrow me unbearably.
My defenses are down.
I’m filled me with a sense of ghastly injury.
How I wish I were more beautiful –
It’s my mouth that ages me.
It reveals my greedy secrets.I want you seeing all of me –
Even if it hurts. My work
Is my legacy –
You are your own child.
You preserve your youth with the harm
That you cause.I feel I am dead and already
Interred – in you.
You are my eternity.EVAN
Repressed boredom causes blocks
You can’t have everything.
I am kept aloft by the conflict of
Unbearables.
It makes me happy.EVA
If our dancing life is over –
Should I enter a convent?
There’s no point in being alive
if we’re not together.
I show my deepest self to you alone.EVAN
Please – no more shaming conversations
Over Irish whisky. Let’s cut our losses
And get some fun from life.
Your miraculous capacities awaken
My belief in myself.EVA
The gash in our love might close
But I’ll never forget it’s there.
Life with you is a remote happiness to which I clingEVAN
And all this time you write such
Fantastic books. If you were as unhappy as you say,
You couldn’t write so well.
I’m proud to be
The whetstone on which you sharpen –
I should be thanked for all your works.Writing to you
Makes me itch with a beastly itch –
Exhilarated, punch drunk
Feeling your enthrallment
Despite the day’s malaise.I can’t put my heart back in the hollow
Where it used to be.
You force me to see
Myself.At the peak of my ambition,
Beauty and power curdle within me.
People are so easily fooled, so
Satisfied with little
identify my performance with my Soul.You’ve spoiled me for everything.
Stop warning me you’ll take a lover –
I don’t own your life and never aspired to.
There is heartbreak here, but is the ghost in the house
Or in me? We argue about who has the worst friends,
But our friends are all the same. Please
Send another psychic telegram, “You’re the One.”EVA
Your last screed was a masterpiece.
I believe writing it
Creates that eczema from which
You say you suffer.
My friends at Tosca said it’s bad manners
To make a depressing fuss
And get other people down.EVAN
Is the strength I draw from you a fairy tale?
I am appalled by the joint misery we feel.
Why should we not rebel?EVA
You shed your light around me.
If only we could stand each other.
You’ll keep the blood
Running in my veins
Threatening to spill.EVAN
Someone said I look ten years younger
From drinking your life, I’m sure.
I need my own room because I sleep badly and
I like to roam at night.Tosca is too emotional to be good taste
But I’m happy you enjoyed it.
I feel far from you right now but
Underneath
I’m outrageously glad.EVA
Your diplomacy fascinates me.
Your mettle is the stuff of history.
When young I resisted education
Like a fool – But
It makes everything comprehensible.
What kills me is having to deal with people.I tie myself up writing
Imaginary conversations with you –
It’s possible you’re a creature of
My invention. Our pattern seems set –
Or is it?
If treachery can’t break it,
There is no death. -
The Demon Lover – a play for two voices by Alysse Aallyn
2 – Cadena – Enchainment
EVAN
A happy guilty day full of betrayals
Kept me in an extraordinary state
Of fascination. I’ve lied to everyone for
So long, I feel certain that truth
Is beyond me.EVA
I’d rather see you dead at my feet
Than dead ON your feet.
That would be a mercy killing –
The last unbearable agony –
Wondering if you existed at all.I have small talent for this.
I have disgraced my idealism,
Pretending boredom can be fruitful.
Waiting, waiting for you everywhere. I
Wake one day to find I’ve lost my looks, my hair,
fascination, brain – everything.EVAN
You’re only waking up
In an empty hotel.
The light is always different
The morning after.
This is what middle-aged people do.
I love the brutality of your world.
You never fade. You are my word made flesh.EVA
You are my religion.
Until In fell in love with you I was 25 inside.
I lived in a world of dreams and theories.
Your experiences seem realer to me than mine.EVAN
Social instinct is my religion.
You have the bravery and intelligence
Men are supposed to have
But never do.
To have touched the same places
Is a bond between us.
I never think of my deficiencies –
Or how could I forgive myself?EVA
Middle-aged people go to weddings
Out of perverse fascination for the bride.
I was that bride –
My day was all champagne.
Anaesthetized
It doesn’t hurt so much.
Such a sense of enormity came over me
I almost fainted. I gave Allen the dirtiest look: “You caused this.”
Without a wedding dress
I was a restless, dowdy snob.
People were falling in love left and right –
Even in decaying marriages.
I wanted that –
He read my subtext.
And I was caught.EVAN
These dreary parties have a decaying effect.
My loneliness for you is like a whiplash.
Your absence is a bitter injury
But nothing can injure our love –
We’re too strong for them.
I’m silenced till I hear from you.
If I let myself go I would feel desperate.
I can’t bear you’re going to France without me –
But –
isn’t love our country?EVA
I won’t say “I’ll die if you don’t come”
Because I know you would come if you possibly could.
What a skeleton in the cupboard a wife is.EVAN
Don’t be jealous of Elayna. You are the only goal
Toward which my life is tending.
You are the meaning of my life.
I could never live for work alone.EVA
You enlarge my soul.
In your mind is my existence.
You’re more real to me than me.
I’m in a peculiar psychic state.
It’s an atmosphere of illusion.
I envy Elayna all the time.
It drips like an irritant over my nerves.EVAN
What of Allen? You
Have your worse half too.
I don’t waste my time
Being jealous of him.EVA
Oh, Allen spends time lost in woods,
Falling in love with trees. He’s
No threat to anyone.EVAN
To understand one’s destiny
One needs a framework for this mass of experience.
How can I live separated from you?
If I stopped caring for you
I couldn’t care for anything.I need my wife, her whip-cracking organization.
I loathe living in the squalor I get to on my own.
Having breakfast OUT of bed is the last horror.
Miasmic feelings of impossibility and terror. Help me.EVA
We help each other
By existing. Except for God I have no help but you.
Our love is growing more formidable as our unshakeable belief
Grows stronger. Like grace, it renews itself.
All yesterday I glowed. My inability to accept your wife
Is my deformity – help me with it.
The light of our love is the only light for me. -
The Demon Lover – a play for two voices by Alysse Aallyn
THE DEMON LOVER
I. ABRAZO – THE EMBRACE
EVAN
I like women willful, late
For appointments,
fond of showy clothes and society, vague, drifting, dreamy,
yet of course all of that is tiresome.Love mingles with irritation.
But I don’t like competence, intellectual honesty, intelligent sensuality.
Women who turn on me saying,
“You don’t love me.”What good is it to have been so happy
when it ends so painfully?
I am a “crook”, a “torturer of women”,
“Murderer.” She makes me feel a monster.Below the surface of the will
I feel deep animal distress, as if I had wives
Hidden away somewhere; perhaps
That is why I had to marry
My present wife.EVA
If you start “trying to be good”
that will really come between us.
It’s too unattractive. What are you up to?I dream of a small house in Burgundy but
You must help me pay the rent.
Having a home is a form of egotism.
My beautiful one, you could make me so happy.Selfishly I want you here
So I don’t have to hallucinate your nearness.
What’s that wife of yours –
What do you call her –
Elayna –
Thinking in her frozen chamber?I’m feeling sorrow at our growing separation.
Can’t we pull out of the world’s battle and live in retreat?
Grant me one last happiness
Before the sufferings of
Pain and old age.EVAN
I can’t keep up with life’s ambiguous futility.
Is happiness just “freedom from pain”?
Life is unendurable without you.
People here are flirtatious but not sexy.
it’s so boring here
I’m hardening my heart to give up my home.EVA
I find your misery gratifying.
This power of enjoyment comes from being an artist,
It is the secret of my strength.
When I was younger I used to
Accommodate everyone –
Now I’m recalcitrant.It hurts because the sword runs through both of us.
You’re never out of my thoughts, but
Sadness dulls one.
Honestly, I always risk failing you,
Failing you in outstandingness.You are extraordinary, I am extraordinary,
we have been extraordinary together.
Specimens under glass.The agonizing force of missing you
Is sweeping over me.
We have eternity connecting us,
Backward & forward but I just
Can’t get anyone to believe it.EVAN
Would my death simplify things?
My wife struggles with carrying the conversation
While I stare glumly at the rain.
We go to an expensive little restaurant
And pretend we are on a date to really talk.
My double life begins the moment
I say “Are you in love with me”?
And really mean “Am I in love with you?”EVA
That woman’s killing you.
Imagine if you were dead and your wife
Wrote a book explaining you
To everyone! That’s true suffering –
Fodder for the mealy-mouthed.EVAN
My wife won’t be writing any books
About me or about anything. You’re the one
To write the book. And
I feel safe in your witch-like hands.EVA
Except I’ve told you over and over
You’ll outlive me. Because
You’re a killer.
Or your wife is.You look younger than I’ve ever seen you.
Have you gone queer? I fear
I’ll die of my addiction –
We always do.
We prefer it.
Will you write about me? -
Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn
Miracles – Love
If This Archetype Chooses You – You are surrounded by magical possibilities. Are you dreaming of eternal bliss? Floating in connectedness? In Love the boundaries of the other disappear, all is forgiveness. Merge fearlessly, knowing you will be able to get yourself back any time, soothed, improved, and healed.
We Are Creatives for Love – Love is the spirit that animates the empty spaces between humans. Once charged, these spaces become a powerful force for growth and change – uncharged they are so much dead air. This is the space that creatives protect. Love is the longing to be truly alive and to share life with the Blissed, Blessed Others.
Our Yearning Defines and Connects Us – As children we thought we knew about miracles but it seems we have forgotten. As creatives we fight for our ancestral memories of trust and closeness. How we long to be reminded of the ecstasy of selflessness, to re-experience the borderlessness between creatures that makes a dead universe come alive.
Love Is Our Armor – It’s a spiral, our labyrinth, remember? We can’t go back, we can only go forward. We practice techniques and invent others as we design and redesign purposeful maps in a threatening and uncertain world. We have the collective confidence of all the brilliance of the creatives who came before us. Someone loved us once, eternalizing the golden moment, now we can re-create and perpetuate that magic by creating our own miracles.
Creative Danger – Danger lies in narrowing, exclusionary definitions of what ‘can’t” happen, what “won’t” work. Creatives explode restrictions all the time. Love must ever open outwards. As soon as we turn Love into a zero-sum game with a shut-off valve focused on our own narrow gratification, Love dies.
Creative Opportunity – Love Is always a Miracle – It can restore the dead to life. It can open minds, it can awaken hearts. The possibilities of a creative are endless because we have chosen, with our flexibility and our sympathetic understanding, to be endless. Close your eyes and assume yoga’s starfish pose. We are open to what the universe longs to teach and once we commit to pass it on, we form an unbreakable chain, free at last from the bonds and the limits of selfishness. Clasp the hand (or paw) that generously, trustingly takes hold of yours. Let’s venture forth together.
Models & Mentors – ‘to love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides”
– David Viscott“Miracles don’t happen to you, they happen through you.” – Mary Davis
“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get, only what you are expecting to give, which is everything” – Katherine Hepburn
“Love gives you a piece of your soul you never knew was missing” – Torquato Tasso
“You’ve got to see the miracle to be the miracle.” – Jandy Nelson
“Love is the gift of oneself” – Jean Anouilh
“I love you for who I am when I’m with you”
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning#Haiku: Love Transfer
The secret of breaking
Any bad habit
Is to love
Something more -
Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn
Homing – Forgiveness
If This Archetype Chooses You – Do you need to forgive… or be forgiven? Most of us require both! Ask your dreams. Do you dream of home? Sometimes we dream of a home that no longer exists, or never existed. “Home” represents the state of psychic absolution where all mistakes are forgiven and forgotten.
Creatives Create the Future – We commit to the ultimate compassion that we are all in this together. Jesus suggests that understanding doesn’t arrive until we learn to be the “forgivers”. Obviously, this means we must learn – somehow – to forgive ourselves.
Creatives Create Heaven – Such forgiveness helps us achieve the state of spiritual lightness that allows a creative to float through time, history, even the universe.
Creatives Are at Home in the World – What’s your “dream home”? A creative’s training emphasizes understanding and managing the fragility of the human body and the objective world, and accepting our healing and unifying mandate. Once we have scoped out the terrain and the inhabitants, Creatives are at “home” anywhere.
Creatives are About Justice – But not the kind that leaves more brokenness behind. Creatives achievements and physical selves display the triumph of thought, will and love.
What Does It Mean to “Start Over”? – We don’t wish to be free of “consequences”. We want to learn and grow from our mistakes but not be humiliated and punished for them. Pretending they didn’t happen doesn’t free us. Seeing our mistakes as moves in a dance we are all contributing to frees us from painful rumination and helps escape and explain the prison of blame. “I did this because you …” Human interactions are a tar-pit in which we trap and tar ourselves. We realize we need to forgive every chain in the event pattern if we are ever to have any peace.
It’s All About You – Robert Frost defines “home” as a place where, when you show up, they have to take you in. Defining “they” defines your group, your original home. Philosophy may provide an answer. Buddhists see history as a circle, Christians as a spiral. The question for Christians is, which direction is the spiral headed and do we have time to learn what we need to know before there’s a cataclysm? Can you define the mess we’re in and intuit your behavioral contribution? Is it possible to detach from the mess? In what group – or even in what “moment” can you detach from the mess?
Creatives’ Danger – We can’t afford to get mixed up about right and wrong. “By their fruits shall you know them.” Think it through. One avenue leads to health, dignity and growth; the other leads in the opposite direction. Don’t make the mistake of “fundamental attribution error”. The threat is NOT coming from inside the house. Martin Luther King Jr. made the wise comment that our specific brand of capitalism tends toward is “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the rest of us.” It certainly suits corporations to lecture their employees on building a better world without incorporating any of those ideas into the bigger picture, where we have no control and they demand absolute freedom to do whatever whimsy directs.
What Is the Bigger Picture? Health and safety for all living things to achieve their growth potential as part of a harmonious, non-exploitative whole. It is key that our resistance – which is necessary and life-giving – not embitter us.
Forgiveness Is Our Armor – Forgiveness doesn’t require ignoring the past or accepting bad behavior. It’s part of an interaction where forgiveness is a request, not a demand. Usually there is a recognition of fault or an expression of remorse: “I’ll never do that again!” When the requesting party instead seeks permission for the suffering to continue, “I can’t change – that’s the way I am” — that’ a different request. “Home” is not re-created that way. Hell is. Your opportunity is to point this out – if necessary, (because of safety) only to yourself. “If I’m not willing to try giving up my participation in this suffering because I think I’m not able to, then this pattern will continually get worse.” Time to construct a better – more intelligent map.
Models & Mentors – “It’s not an easy journey to get to a place where you forgive people. But it’s a powerful place, because it frees you” – Tyler Perry
“The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world”
– Marianne Williamson“The weak can’t forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong” – Mahatma Gandhi
“To forgive one another, we must understand one another” – Emma Goldman
“Forgiveness does not exonerate the perpetrator. It liberates the victim. It’s a gift you give yourself” – T.D. Jakes
#Haiku: Forgiveness
Returning home with
Newborn eyes
Strong hands
Fresh translations
Future’s past -
Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn
The Gazing Ball – Prophecy
If This Archetype Chooses You – The future weighs on you. Will you be found wanting?
Ask Your Dreams. The Number One question people have about dreams is, Are they prophetic? And the answer is of course YES. We KNOW the “truth’. We fear the truth. We don’t want to face the truth. We fear the continuing “losses” of age because the accretions are so hard to see. But our dreams – and the collective unconscious – KNOW what is going on. But they are also Art, and art – especially good art – is as forcefully mysterious, meaningful and evocative as any living thing. It changes as you change. It changes depending on how you look at it.
Creatives Need Truth. Creatives Accept Revelation – Dreams tell us when to be afraid. Dreams warn when something is missing. Dreams uncover all the secrets you have been keeping from yourself. The first obligation creatives accept is that the truth will set you free. The second, is that although terrifying, the truth is necessary. Creatives spurn the hiding, lying, misrepresentation, that substitutes for truth.
Creatives Can Handle The Truth – We are human, we are imperfect, and we need each other. The truth is that humans need governance and law to regulate our natural blindness and selfishness (which some would call original sin) into peaceful accord. The truth is also that humans who lust only for power will eternally angle to get themselves into positions of control, exclusion and punishment. These impulses must be identified and weeded out and it is courageous, difficult, and really unwelcome work, because we creative, loving, generous creatives also have our own lives to live.
Creative Danger – Our dreams notify us when one of these lethal persons is in our midst. Our maps & models offer a variety of plans for confrontation and escape, and a recipe for courage. At the present time, the Lethal Persons are banding together and hoarding weapons to give themselves even more guarantees for power and opportunities to welcome our despair.
Creative Promise – Jesus said evil will not win. The challenge is to explore what ELSE he said, indeed, what is the message of all the great teachers? People who tell you to hate one another and go to war with one another are agents of evil. The first challenge is to create peace in our own hearts, peace in our own lives, peace in our own homes, and then start developing compassion for those who are not so lucky.
When Brutal Tactics and Empty Promises are Exposed as family destroyers, peace destroyers and community destroyers, we see clearly that efforts to spread and share despair come from an innate desire to surmount despair, but also that this has never worked and is not working. It allows the torturer (and the tortured) only the briefest respites. Only when the goal of increasing world suffering is finally given up can we welcome penitents back into the community of Sharing.
Models & Mentors – “We write the future moment to moment” – Pema Chodron
“The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and leave you to peer through for yourself” – Frank Herbert
“The greatest thing a human soul can accomplish in this world is to see that poetry, prophecy & religion all are one”
– John Ruskin“The best way to predict the future is to create it”
– Abraham Lincoln“Yesterday has gone, tomorrow has not come, let us begin” – Mother Teresa
#Haiku: Prophecy
Inward
Resonates outward;
Creatives
Blossom
Inevitably -
Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Empaths & Sensitives with Alysse Aallyn
The Labyrinth – Respect Complexity
If This Archetype Chooses You – Is our brain’s labyrinth powerful enough to solve the universe’s complexity? Each of us experiences slow-growing learning difficulties as we heave from infancy into psychic awareness. How are we going to figure out the space-time continuum? In order to tackle these vast problems we have to get some sense of their dimensions.
Are You Dreaming of the Impossible? Last night I dreamed of being at a resort where people were able to run across the top of the ocean playing a curling game – but they had to move fast. I couldn’t figure out what kept their feet above the waves. Later it was my job to provide lunch but the food at the little store was appalling. Very little bread, all stale – some weird canned vegetables, no protein other than some very suspect cheese. I was so relieved to wake up!
Don’t Try This Alone – Life is very complex. We are bombarded with daily reminders that many of its problems are too big for our tiny brains to tackle alone. We need help deconstructing and deciphering the maze – we require the assistance of legions of engineers, mathematicians, philosophers and artists – living and dead. Our mythic history is nothing but re-runs of: Tiny Human Confronts Huge Universe.
Is Your God Too Small? – We have a regrettable tendency to try to solve problems by reducing them to the size of our individual brains. Don’t. There’s no shame in admitting the problem is of awe-inspiring size; there’s no shame in requesting help. But any concept of God must be of something mightier than our own understanding, our problems, bigger even than space and time.
Creatives Are Puzzle Solvers – There is a way out of this labyrinth. You can follow string, leave breadcrumbs, mark walls, climb higher to get a birds’ eye view. You can call in a favor, study history, learn a skill, consult experts, request advice, find out what’s worked in the past. My favorite cartoon shows a goat calmly eating his way through maze walls. The key, problem solvers tell you, is not to panic. Whole years of primary education are devoted to getting you to sit down, breathe calmly and focus on the problem. Remember what you have been taught. Recall your goals.
Creative Challenge – It is not necessary to solve the entire problem to solve a problem. Even a blind rat can get through a maze one step at a time. Algebra came into being to manipulate unknowns. Guessing at the existence of x using the behavior of surrounding particles allows us to see without eyes. Many “hacks” are clever, and certain innovators have a gift for adaptation and reconfiguration. We can always use help. We can always form teams. Repeat after me: “All my problems have some solution.” Often the solution is viewing the “problem” differently. Maybe it isn’t a problem. Maybe it’s an opportunity.
Creative Danger – Primary dangers consist of Panic (inability to think) and Defeatist Thinking (lack of imagination). The lovely movie The Martian shows a scientist literally conquering the impossible. If you ”give up”, you’ll never get there, but retreat, reconstitution, changing training regimens and getting help are NOT giving up. Promoting your physical health and “Sleeping on it” are always good advice, as is viewing the difficulty from some other angle or changing the definitions of the entities considered.
Creative Opportunity – Key to success is fostering excitement about challenges. Our high school used to dump couples in the countryside at night and give a prize to the first couple who found their way home! (Following roads and train tracks always a good idea.) Scavenger hunts and orienteering cover much the same territory. The fact that a problem is difficult only makes it more fun. Ask chess players.
Models & Mentors – “The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity”
– Douglas Horton“The labyrinth combines walking and thinking to open your power of imaginative perception” – Lauren Artress
“Willingness to be puzzled is a valuable trait to cultivate” – Noam Chomsky
“In a maze, find the center, in a labyrinth, find yourself” – Alysse Aallyn
“Life is a puzzle, missing pieces guaranteed and you can’t cheat and look at the box” – Anonymous
# Haiku: Every Book is a Zen Book
Puzzle
Words –
Assume
Solution –
Labyrinths
Demand
Escape;
Look
Up -
Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn
Chamomile – Healing Rituals
If This Archetype Chooses You – Let’s access the gifts of the Creative. Let the healing begin. Are you a believer in magic? Do you dream of restoration, of nostalgia, of lost youth?
Creatives Believe in Magic – Bravely, we put ourselves in the way of harm, and harm is done to us. But we believe in the magic of restoration through transformation. These scars, these wounds, these experiences make us smarter, harder, brighter and more beautiful.
Understand the Meaning of Your Scars – These are life’s tattoos, which have ennobled you. It is your honor to embody the story of the universe with your blood and your bone. But it is the Creative’s Brain that brings us closest to God. The mystery of suffering is that it educates us into the greatest mystery of all – that God is willing to suffer with us because Love means holding each other through pain and infusing our strength into another’s sadness.
Bow To Each Other – Show Respect – We are each other’s masters, we are each other’s pupils, we are each other’s lovers, siblings and rescuers. Drinking ginger tea from translucent porcelain cups, we lift our cups to each other. We bathe together in steaming pools. I release you as you release me. When darkness falls, we touch one another’s hands before departing. If we can bear it, we touch bodies.
Creatives Recognize That We Cannot Diagnose Ourselves – We offer ourselves for the universe’s good and so it takes a world to cure us. Healing and diagnosis alike will come from the welcome lips of another. It has been scientifically proven that even plants respond to kind words. We yearn for the laying on of hands, for the gentle rituals that pass us from one stage of life to another.
Creative Challenge – Paradoxically, no “medicine” can succeed unless we “accept” our healing spiritually. We must feel “worthy” of restoration. What are we fighting for? Think deeply. We are not self-punishing but stating as clearly as we can that life is valuable in all its forms. If you are only as “young” as you feel, are we only as “healthy” as we allow ourselves to be? Forgive yourself. Accept change. Contrary to our fears, it is change that keeps us young.
Creative Danger – Healing cannot occur in an atmosphere of self-hatred and self-blame, but many of us are STILL “blaming” ourselves for twists of fate, for unlucky genetic, social and medical outcomes. “Fundamental attribution error” consists of blaming individuals for group effects. We are all caught up in the machinery of temporality. Never forget that we are souls who happen to have bodies, not bodies who happen to have souls.
Creative Opportunity – “Restoration” is such a glorious promise that early Christians found themselves ensnared in decades of argument about PHYSICAL resurrection. How would it work in cases of burning and dismemberment, exactly? It is easy to laugh at these painfully ridiculous theological conflicts. One is reminded of St. Joan of Arc’s response to interrogators at her trial who asked if angels appeared to her naked – “Do you think God cannot afford to clothe his angels?” Accept the power accorded to you by the universe. Accept the strength of your own mind, the control given by your chosen attitude. Healing is not just possible, it is a life-force in which we can all participate. Jesus came to us as a healer.
Models & Mentors – “Healing yourself is connected with healing others”
– Yoko Ono“What happens when people open their hearts? They get better.”
– Haruki MurakamiYour body cannot heal without play. Your mind cannot heal without laughter. Your soul cannot heal without joy.” ~ Catherine Rippinger Fenwick
“We are healed of suffering only if we experience it to the full – Marcel Proust
“Maybe the dragons in our lives are princesses”
– Rainer Maria Rilke#Haiku: I Don’t Know
Admit ignorance
No shame –
It’s healthy –
Empty glass
Asks for water
Alysse Aallyn 