Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Warrior

  • 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.

  • Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Rebirth –

    I’m convinced the main attraction of the evangelical religious movement is that it offers the opportunity to be “born again.” But I believe that option is always available to you without the necessity of signing up to be a cog in a “movement.”

    When I was twelve years old I read a James Bond novel in which he is washed up on a beach and needs to be nursed back into life without any of the previous appurtenances of his personality. I was very taken with this idea. Of course, it has literary antecedents in all the “castaway” and adventure stories of John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson. The question revolves around your essential self: do you have one? Or can even that be remodeled and rebuilt? This is the question warriors try to answer.

    Warriors pare their needs down. We keep ourselves ready for action. We are shapeshifters and time travelers – if that sounds attractive to you, keep listening.

    The first rebirth was rather brutal. At age 12, I was sent to live with my father’s sister and uncle and four boy cousins in Wayland, Massachusetts. Since these people didn’t believe anything my father believed I found this cross-training startling, and the more I behaved in my father’s image, the more I was punished. My uncle was enormously excited to have a pubescent girl in the household, snuck into my bathroom, groped and French-kissed me. I did my best to fend him off, while crushing on one of my cousins. In intervals, we exhibited social politeness. (I attended dancing class where white gloves were mandated for touching specimens of the opposite sex.) I also was taught to ski. Sort of. This hot-house atmosphere lasted only nine months.

    My parents simply refused to listen to, believe in, or pay attention to any of this. I realized I needed to become a different person –the person I truly was, underneath, the person without all this reflexive training and behavior. And the question was, who was that?

    The Kilning

    “Shame” means

    Should Have Already Mastered

    Everything. Excoriating

    That you couldn’t

    Eviscerating

    Failure on top of

    Guilt.

    Once fire retreats

    Examine the scorch marks.

    Yellow mud

    Fuses into azure glass

    Shining for

    Eternity.

  • 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”

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

    The Life Force

    We teenagers at our co-ed religious boarding school wanted to mate. This desire was more powerful than the faculty, it was more powerful than anything. They were always digging us out of bushes, rescuing us from ponds, chasing us out of the woods. We were lustfully ablaze. They kept trying to demand we give an account of ourselves but reason had been bypassed – we were in the grip of an eternal force powering the planet, perpetuating our kind.

    I knew that force again when I turned 29 years old. Suddenly I wanted to have a child. There were men on the scene – but they were a shiftless crew of can’t-bes, don’t-bes, and wanna-bes. Warriors don’t take No for an answer. I had to be able to do better than that, but my parents assured me that because of my career of exposing My Body For Profit, no decent man would have me.

    But suddenly High School Boyfriend showed up, a working journalist, half-way through law school, interning for Ralph Nader. On our first meeting he told me he’d never loved anyone but me.

    Hey, I thought. This could work.

    Your Biological Time’s Up

    This crowded world could not make do


    without your life;


    Summoned up, you surged


    you split the crust


    Shocked, I shuddered in my sheaves


    as you uncored


    Loosened my skin as we 


    Unmerged. 

    We travelled to the rim;


    Your fragrant cell became


    a soul unsheathed.


    From my rind’s brim


    you blinkered on the world


    wondering at the fuss.


    We are you and yet


    You are not us.

    Committed to a course beyond our love –


    a forfeit tithe;


    gentle as a snake and


    wiser than a dove;


    As stars consume their fuel


    you were birthed to speed our lives.

    Against the odds we found you


    You found us


    against the odds.


    Consecrated to the great transformer 


    We love like mothers


    We create like gods.

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

    Creativity –

    When I was 11 I saw a 3,000 year old Greek play in a Greek stone theatre and was very taken by all its mechanisms of chorus and emotion. When we went back to the boat I sat down and wrote my own play, Chrysothemis, about Electra’s other sister. I couldn’t help it, I had to reflect that emotion back. It was a hot day and everyone else went swimming, but a Warrior would have finished that play.
    I finished the play.

    Clap Back

    When the universe calls


    You have to answer


    Mimicking what you hear


    Imitating what you see


    Until you’re brave enough to grab


    The balls of fire


    And juggle them for yourself.


    Then you get offered a job


    Juggling other people’s fire.


    Good work for some but not for warriors


    We call those people


    Mercenaries.


    We need to juggle our own fire


    And if you think learning the basics


    Was humiliation enough


    You won’t survive this.


    There’s a lot of stumbling and


    Silencing.


    I was what’s politely called a


    “Late Bloomer.”


    But I did finally


    Bloom.


    And when you’ve created your first


    And maybe only


    Immortelle


    It’s worth everything.