Alysse Aallyn

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  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    Nurturing = GROWTH “Cedarwood Chest”

    “Are you ready to take care of the Beloved? Or do you just want to receive care?”

    Nurturing is Stewardship plus Love. It is a non-exploitative relationship many of the fruits of which the Steward may not even live to see. Nurturing requires both Sensitivity and Balance; an appropriate combination of love, modeling and support which is constantly changing.

    Nothing can be decided by rote; intelligence and commitment must be involved and practice and experimentation is required. Experiments mandate a certain proportion of failure: let’s face it; a high proportion. Failure requires recovery and forgiveness – of self and others – and a learning curve. We need to understand “what works” and forge new plans keeping new discoveries in mind. We are all caught up in the physics of existence. Many people who call themselves religious or spiritual wonder why, if there’s a loving God, Earth isn’t already Heaven.

    Heaven is (so far as we know) a mental construct exhibiting all the pleasures & joys of earthly existence without the suffering and struggles of this painfully real world. Unfortunately a large proportion of our earthly pleasure
    revolves around taking, hoarding, and excluding.

    Nurturing focuses on producing successful flourishing health and productivity. It literally makes the universe go round. I think it strongly suggests what Heaven really will be like: caring for others in general and promoting universal, not just personal well-being.

    Are we patient, loving mothers to our struggling selves? Or are we looking for someone else to assume this role? The Nurturing card reminds us that to find a worthy, healthy other, we must be healthy and worthy ourselves. The symbiosis card told us that reciprocity is key, that this is not going to be a one-way street.

    What are our nurturing capabilities? Do we have a pet? Have we mentored? Do we teach? We will represent a mystical wilderness to the Other as we represent a mysterious universe to them. There is so much we can share. There is so much we need to be given to have our Wisdom Eye fully opened.

    Cedarwood Chest

    Grandpa died young that’s why
    Grandma never opened
    The Cedarwood chest
    Till my twelve years unlocked
    The scent of dreams preserved
    Like mullet in red wine.

    Never used the wilting nightgowns
    Featherstitched sheets
    Between whose coffee-colored creases
    Bay leaves crumbled
    (like my reserve when you laid hands
    upon it)

    how it comes back that mossy sad
    perfume! I want to lay
    you away in darkness and tissue but
    I can’t
    I must use you and risk
    Your wearing out

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    Meditation = MINDFULNESS “the Poet On Her Walk”

    “Understanding and accepting the moment”

    Meditation is the Art of Looking Deeply. It takes concentration and practice and all the gifts that makes us human – but our physical, mental and cultural “tics” – fight against our cultivation of this vital skill. We must master our physicality to engage our brain in Deep Looking.

    Begin with the breath, inhale, exhale, calm the tumult in our blood. As thoughts appear, set them one by one before your Inner Eye and turn each over in your mind without judgment. We are just floating by. The goal is to learn to feel compassion for the creatures of this earth; so that ultimately we can calm the tumult in everyone’s life journeys.

    Before our eyes now is our yearning for our Other Half. If we are living in the past growth hurts like a requiem for a Lost Self. Yet deep looking into our “now” will rescue us from past suffering. We see past the pain of our perceived unworthiness and the inadequacy of others to the universal healing magic that is love. We perform the “thought experiment” of transforming our minds in order to recognize the Beloved and be recognized by them. This is the most powerful charm; a transformation that solves our earthborn dilemma.

    Meditation is quieting and emptying. Once we soothe the rattle of panic and hysteria that infects each of us through the pressure of living, learn not to react to the “what ifs” and “shoulds”, the fears and preconceptions, we will become our own crystal ball. Push gently on the inevitable thought-balloons drifting through the cathedral of our minds and let them go. When we master the breath, we seize control of life itself.

    Find a “mantra.” Some use prayer – I suggest St. Julian of Norwich’s “All will be well, and all things will be well.” or “the light in me honors the light in the world” or “I am peace” works as well. Feel free to invent your own mantra. Give yourself permission to take loving charge of thoughts and body. Be a tender mother to your new self. When you support your shy new self, you practice welcoming the Beloved. Picturing ocean waves rushing in, then rushing out again along the sand. Relax all your muscles, one by one. Wait. Begin again. Continue until flooded with peace.

    The Poet on Her Walk

    Who dares malign
    The intellectual consolations of this morning
    When every leaf becomes the corner of a star
    And every pond a covenant. Where
    Isles of light illumine
    Tracts of water – blind the
    Spaces where I first saw you.
    Transfix my grief with
    Arrows of wisdom
    Dissolve the veil that
    Separates me from
    Myself; eight years old.

    Who are you that I should fear to
    Stroke you wrong, dissolving pride in
    Mansions of darkness that hood your eyes; the
    Terrible readiness , the
    Dissipated resolution;
    Deepening the silence
    Deepening between us
    Like the ocean between us;
    The silence of wheatfields
    Waiting for wind

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    The Waterfall = CHANGE “Preppy”

    “If we open ourselves, don’t we lose control over our transformation?”

    Rendering a garden makes order out of chaos. And yet we want Nature – in all its rude, obstreperous glory – to pour out constantly through and on our little carefully tended patch – without, hopefully, overwhelming or destroying it. The Waterfall is a perfect metaphor for organizing chaos, making it beautiful and extracting our necessary nourishment from its dangerous jaws.

    The Waterfall represents sudden, possibly violent change. Surprise reversals. In our quest for soulmate, we have to hold ourselves ready for these astonishments, because they are the essence of what the universe has to teach us. Right when we think we have it all figured out is when we are most in need of a surprise.

    Often this comes in the form of chemistry: who we are attracted to versus who we THINK we are attracted to. At the beginning of our lives, our minds were unformed. Our wild, unique self lay still undiscovered. We often THINK we desire a High Status Individual, someone the Pod – the amorphous mass we came out of – would approve (even envy.)

    Friendship often teaches us the delight of the quirky. Someone who loves us, whose face lights up when we share, becomes beautiful to us. Someone who reveals themselves, takes chances with us, becomes magical. There is a reason that rom-coms focus on the “surprise” in love; learning that the person who is good for you is not the source of dangerous thrills you’ve been desiring. That’s because this is often the way long-term love gets going. So – better be ready for your own Surprise.

    PREPPY

    Corseted with verbs
    French teacher sweeps
    Cherry blossoms from the tennis court
    As she would like to french
    The cherries, squelch them soundly
    Beneath her soccer-spiking 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 the hockey fields like
    Foul-mouthed angels, anticipated ecstasy locked
    In narrow hope chests ripening on
    Amphetamines
    Free Love
    Bad dreams.

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    The Bridge = DISCIPLINE “Lovewings”

    “How to keep moving forward?”

    Sometimes we are stuck. Can we even envision the place where we would rather be? There is a yawning chasm between there and here. What we need is a Bridge but nothing is visible. Looks like we might have to build one, but what tools and materials do we have?

    Are there any similarities between where we are now and where we want to be? We want to approach from the closest possible point. Maybe the distance is illusory, maybe the place we plan to get to doesn’t exist at all. The Bridge, on the other hand is ours. We built it and we can own it. The Bridge itself may become the place where we want to be.

    Discipline is our resource. Discipline means doing something we’re committed to do even when we don’t want to do it. We’re forming new skin to become the person we want, need to be. It’s sore and tender at first. We’re charting a new path to finding our soulmate, but we lose confidence fast.

    The psychic rebellion starts early; right when we open one wakeful eye. Do I really have to get up? No one cares but me. I could make a new rule, a new plan…But we know the truth – this is just our devil messing with us. Trying to see how much it can get away with.

    The saving grace here is to fall in love with discipline. With path making as an art. Discipline is order. It’s building, like music. It’s the Beautiful Thing That Comes Next. If everything’s chaos then life is purposeless and nothing matters. Naturally we can change our plan – any time. Our real self always has the chance to make and change informed decisions. But is our Real Self, this niggling, seductive saboteur? No.

    We are on a journey to our real self, the self embodied by the Other (which is tantra) and the self we create together (Tantric Attachment.) We’re committed. And we’re excited! We’ll never get there if we sit by the side of the road in a bundle of sobbing bones and blubber. Here’s the kicker – it feels better the more you do it. You will come to the understanding that it’s all inside you. And you love it!

    LOVEWINGS

    My aunt’s a dancer
    She said “Feel my thighs
    Ain’t they hard
    They’re my love-wings
    Hard as heartwood
    I’m flying on ‘em half the time.
    Practice making perfect I’m
    Tightening up my style in case a valve
    On this here pressure cooker blows
    And splatters darkness like a
    Damsel in a murder case we might
    Solve someday.”
    She laughed and did an arabesque.
    My aunt is thirty-five. I said
    What beautiful thighs you’ve got

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    Age = WISDOM “Hungry Ghosts”

    “What would you advise your 20 yr old self?”

    When we start racking up the years, we see a choice. We can “grow up” or we can “grow down”. Growing down would mean becoming more self-absorbed, demanding and infantile, a mass of entitlement compromised by bodily aches and pains. Growing up means assuming the mantle of Wisdom, which is the crowning glory of Age.

    Wisdom is 4-D vision, seeing past, future, possibility and the most productive outcomes freed finally from the furnace of desire into understanding and compassion, as one member of a species instead of a competitive protagonist with multiple agendas and axes to grind. Age means insight, intuition, masterful judgment and correct calibrations.

    In the well-known prayer, we request the ability to “change the things we can change and to accept the things we can’t change “and for the wisdom to know the difference.” This is not just a question of “picking our battles” and learning not to “tilt at windmills” but of Self-Knowledge: knowing ourselves – deeply and thoroughly.

    What is possible for us? What’s a stretch – but a healthy stretch? We recognize that we need some taking “out of our comfort zone.” What will the “discomfort zone” feel like? We’re also familiar with the idea that once we make a resolution there’s a difficult period where the work we’re given feels hard, unfamiliar, even hopeless.

    “Wisdom” is knowing that period will have an end. “This too must pass” is the common phrase. Wisdom means we can begin to rely on ourselves: ”I always get discouraged at this point. By tomorrow I’ll feel better,” or “When I’m down in the dumps is not a good time to make a new plan. One foot in front of the other.” And tomorrow’s a new day. It always is.

    Is acquired wisdom worth the loss of youthful energy, and its crazy optimism? The pursuit of the Soulmate tells us that it is. We seek one who shares our gift of vision; seeing both forward and backwards, and we welcome the amplification of their experience and the magnification of their uniqueness .

    Just as “folie a deux” is shared madness, so is shared wisdom. Someone makes a statement you know will hurt your partner, who answers intelligently but compassionately. Then you share A Look – they know you know their truth, and in that moment a delicious balm falls upon the soul. You are making love invisibly, souls touching in the eternal now, where you can bask in the others’ pure and total comprehension. A joy shared is multiplied, pain shared is an indescribable comfort and release. The incomprehensible is suddenly clear as day.

    Hungry Ghosts

    We are all
    Hungry ghosts; I died
    On a highway, that’s why
    I avoid them –
    Clinging to towns
    Gazing adoringly
    Happy Bridal
    Hardy Technicians
    Mom & Pop Archery
    Bob’s Gas & Go
    Life!
    Life!
    Life!

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    Youth = RESILIENCE: “A Bruise, A Cut, A Fever”

    Snap back!

    Youth is hungry long before dinner is ready. We recall youth as a rollercoaster of highs and lows, a mix of aspiration, beauty and joy keen as a knife’s edge. Let us never forget that sense of Spring when all things were possible and we were the linchpins holding up the universe.

    Youth’s sense of power is so disproportionate to reality it almost seems as if wisdom prohibits action rather than informing it. Like the smarter you are, the less you can accomplish! Youth rushes in places Wisdom fears to even think about. Yet the sense of possibility and the delight in discovery are so heady nothing balks Youth for long. It’s all over far too fast.

    We have discussed the fact that if you want a soulmate, you will have to kill dragons – both yours and theirs. There is trauma potential, to say the least. Every one of us have experienced trauma, many of us have forgotten it, most of us deny it. How we represent the scars of life to ourselves has everything to do with how we represent ourselves to others.

    Today’s meditation is about “snapping back,” not just “recovery” but Plan B. We may need a Plan C, D, and E. The fact that the dragon got the best of us on one or two occasions is no surprise. Remember learning to drive?

    We are really about learning to learn, learning what to fear and not to fear, learning how to react to constantly new sets of circumstances. We are resilient, we are flexible. We are cagey, we are wily.

    By the time we meet our soulmate we will have our own dragons under control, and we will have many stories to share about The Ways of Dragons.

    A BRUISE A CUT A FEVER

    Dragons exist.
    From my tree perch I watched them
    Uncaring of rules and bored by
    Their games, I wrote down
    Statistics
    In gold crested diaries.
    Fairy-tale beginnings
    Augur sour endings.
    Pole-axed by Europe.
    “This stuff matters frightfully”
    And I was affrighted.

    Culture-mad-Mother
    Forced us to look
    Then forced us to blink;
    Her timing was off.
    Dad sought his oceans
    In history, in pictures, in
    The madness of Nature;
    Encapsulates daughters in
    Unsinkable Fiberglas;
    That captain lied when he said
    We were all going home.

    Loathed masculine privilege
    I disliked you on sight
    Teased your editorials
    Insulted your proctoring
    Reviled, you prevailed.
    Kindling a clove-scented ecstasy;
    Inflaming my fevers at the same time as
    Quenching them.

    Sweeping West you
    Pulled the Atlantic behind you, smothering
    Both of us; I fought back with
    Monogrammed luggage.

    Swimming nude in your rapture we
    Posed for Swedish love manuals
    Under the falls.
    I thought I knew everything till
    I met your parents;
    Your father’s impressionist:
    Your mother convinced me
    That monsters can flourish.

    I dust you with my glitter as
    you peel my shock-pants;
    Our children wait impatiently
    To get their lives started.
    “Ask him to marry you Mommy!
    Ask him! Ask him!”

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars -Seeking Soulmate with Alysse Aallyn

    Symbiosis = INTERDEPENDENCE “Impure Women”

    “I need you because you need me”

    Symbiosis is interdependence: far from being exploitation, most species require another’s contribution in order to flourish. Sometimes symbiosis is unacknowledged, especially if one of the partners is using “win/lose” reasoning and agonizes about who’s getting “more” out of the relationship.


    Turning a mutually beneficial relationship into a struggle for dominance marks the end of what could have been a thriving partnership.

    You can have rapturous sex with anybody. You can have devoted friendships with lots of entertaining, interesting people. Soulmating is deeper than that.

    You need each other. You can’t live without each other. Yes, you can bail out now if this sounds scary. Otherwise, that’s what you’re in for. You’re going to have to reveal – often discovering it for the first time yourself – what your needs are, and you’re going to have to be willing to put your shoulder to the other person’s wheel. You nourish each other.

    You’re going to slay each other’s dragons and set each other free FOREVER. This is NOT for the faint of heart. Better leave now if you were just hoping for a nice date, delicious sex, or someone to take home to Mom. Because the dragons WILL show themselves.

    Haiku: I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

    Only soulmates can
    Slay each other’s dragons
    Says Tibetan Master

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

    Mourning = DETACHMENT “Hide & Seek in the Museum of Modern Art”

    “Perfect is Enemy of Good”

    After a loss, Mourning is required. Don’t recoil. Mourning is a growth process which, because it hurts so much, feels like retrenchment. But in the Garden, pruning IS growth.

    Artists try to convince us that spaces – which may seem blank or even empty to us, are part of the design. But what is the design? It makes us hurt – it makes hearts and brains hurt – even to attempt understanding of all this emptiness. All this change.

    Physicists remind us matter transforms; it doesn’t “vanish.” As we contemplate the empty spaces with a sore heart and a buzzing brain, we will need peace and compassion to appreciate the majesty of the whole design.

    We expect sore muscles after exercise, but, oddly, we don’t expect a “sore heart” or “sore mind” as we struggle along our Soulmate path. Sometimes it’s a “sore spirit.” We’re not doing anything “wrong”; life is a rhythm. The “perfection” in our imagination is actually STASIS – the opposite of “life”. The nature of the Other is to break our immature expectations of Perfection with the Wildness of their Mystery.

    If we are to create a New World together, the old world has to go! For a long time – possibly our whole life – we will be honoring our Loss. We may search for ways to reframe it (sometimes it is a blessed release) sometimes it was the shedding of a constricted skin.

    Mourning means this is not an effortless adjustment. Even joining lives triggers a loss. It is scary and new, the loss of our proud loneliness. It can feel like sadness and there is sadness that our privacy will be invaded. There is terror: we will be exposed.

    Mourning is Detachment – you can see the Lost Past drifting away from you like a child’s balloon. It is not just “OK” to mourn, it is necessary and there is no substitute. The fact that you had a worthy self, a worthy past, a dignified life and were “fine on your own” is part of what makes you Beloved.

    Your Soulmate is feeling this too. This is another thing you can share, and there are all sorts of ways to honor it. Some Soulmates need at the beginning of a relationship to keep to their own schedule. You will always need your own room, or private and alone times for retreat. It is necessary to establish boundaries such as private journals, private phones, private work. We are developing trust, as well as changing at the same time.

    Honor those sore muscles of honest effort. Just as sore muscles will slowly improve, so will this sore heart/mind/spirit. We must rub it with the liniment of love, trust, sharing, hope and self-regard. We are brave, and no mistake! Remember the promise “those who mourn will be comforted.”

    HIDE & SEEK IN THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

    Life class;
    It’s my game but you started it.
    Here we are, lost
    This place resembles me, a
    Swollen storehouse where
    Nothing can be explained,
    Everything’s left
    Open to interpretation.

    Outside a single tree flowers in
    Smug delusion; all this whiteness
    Weights the soul. Mastery bites
    Like teeth on lip; my
    Throbbing inner elbow
    Where the blood lies gathered.
    Lies gathered.
    Let’s admit it. Take
    Responsibility

    For once, leave no work
    Unfinished. Anonymous
    Entries win no prize.
    Pan-flash –

    Recoil.
    Powder burn –
    Person
    Less

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – searching for a Soulmate with Alysse Aallyn

    Loss = SUFFERING “Two Lovers Contemplate the Seawrack”

    “Hostage to fortune”

    Something vital you have relied upon is simply gone. This Loss creates in us an almost hallucinatory state of core wrongness. The world must be rotten if such vibrancy can be destroyed. Einstein says matter cannot be erased, only transformed, so where has our Precious gone?

    Possibly it never had a physical manifestation; perhaps it was an illusion. Or do we identify the Beloved with it its physical presence so totally that even change or sickness or age will turn it into something different? We must think about the unseen world as well as our more familiar evolving world to understand Loss.

    Loss changes us; clearly, we will never be the same again. Loss is an opportunity to confront Reality; the Reality within our heads as well as in our hearts.

    The one thing that scares people so much about Soulmating is the prospect of loss. This is so frightening some of us would rather opt out of emotion altogether rather than even imagine experiencing the pain when Precious is lost.

    What is really happening here is that we are re-viewing memories of terrible past traumas and our Soul is thinking, “I can’t go through that again.” These are unresolved terrors; we need to resolve them. Our Soulmate – just the knowledge that Soulmating is possible – is one of the ways we can do this. You need the belief that the two of you can create an eternity where you will always be together.

    Yes, the prospect of loss deepens when you love, as does Love itself. It will give us a new heart, fresh eyes, stronger hands. Love teaches us that the Universe is our Soulmate – we were born for it as it is born for us. Love can never be erased – it can only enlarge us.

    TWO LOVERS CONTEMPLATE THE SEAWRACK

    He lost her
    Spoke too soon
    As men are wont
    Affinity flew overhead
    Danced with gulls
    A jazz-mad snowflake.
    His words
    Freighted by their inner logic
    Fell to earth and lay
    Prey to busy bristle-footed worms
    Who tidily dismantle
    Subject, verb & predicate;
    Sucked out the sense and left
    The elegiac bones to rot
    Amid kelp-wigged rock & glass-rope sponge
    Cheek by jowl with
    Long dead fishermen’s wives
    Punished now for ill-set dough and
    Worse-set hair
    Mouths agape in imitation of
    The badly sutured wounds of childbirth.
    Secrets told; corpses left to nourish
    Nature’s counting-house
    One season only; sharing space
    With shattered petrels
    Feathers spewed like pillow-stuffing
    Frenzied passade of love-struck boys –
    Strewn among the shavings of these once great ships
    Built by hearts & backs of men
    Who loved their daughters far too well
    Losing them to sailors
    Crueler than the great sea-god himself;
    He who stirs our sleep these nights
    With grief-crazed cries of loons
    Casting on the waters for their
    Far-flung children
    Lost forever now
    As we are lost as
    He lost her.

  • Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Seeking a Soulmate with Alysse Aallyn

    Chrysalis = Potential

    “Hot Prowl”

    The Chrysalis looks dead; that is its disguise. A simple, broken leaf, soon to be swept away by wind or rain. But in fact, it’s a puzzle box that holds the whole universe inside itself; an unbroken chain of DNA, an augury of “becoming” dating from the dawn of Life itself. So is each of us a Chrysalis…of what? For what?

    We are powerhouses seeking ignition. We can feel the slow-gathering strength within, but we are still mysteries to ourselves. We need the Other to become a Full Being. Plato posited that man/woman are separated angels endlessly seeking their other half. Your duty is to protect the chrysalis so that it can unfold in its own good time. Be patient, your day of flight and connection comes ever closer.

    HOT PROWL

    Don’t wake up.
    Surveilled by night
    Your chiseled torso
    Slackened with exhaustion.
    Touching things that once
    You touched,
    Listening to your apnea;
    I turn away before you turn.
    Making peace with all my choices.
    It’s been worth everything –
    Winning in divorce a
    Hard-won superpower:
    Invisibility