Goddesses are Anointed to protect the growth pattern of the universe. Through our bravery, intelligence and commitment we nurture the world and make the world safe for the magic of growth. We shepherd the transformation and metamorphosis of all living things.
Goddess Are Stewards – Anxious about climate change? Are you vegetarian or vegan? Find yourself enraged by animal abuse, factory farming and climate denial? Having nightmares about tsunamis and volcanoes? Do you see the whole of Mother Earth in your care?
Goddesses Embrace Life – Your caterpillar is bursting its cocoon. Have you been dreaming about pets? Little wild animals? Gardening? Shepherding projects through to completion? These are Nurturing dreams. Just like a child with totemic objects you long to care for another entity and encourage it to flourish to its fullest potential. You long to protect and succor and at the same time, protect, succor and nourish the lost, frightened, wild, shy, needy parts of yourself.
Goddess Challenge – You can stand up for your beliefs and test them. You will make a difference. Remember the legend of the one starfish the little girl saved? She couldn’t save all the starfish, but that one she freed made all the difference. Think about karma. Karma is your cosmic bank account. When that little girl gets to heaven and that starfish testifies, she is Good to Go.
Goddess Danger – The only danger here is that you will forget to apply your own oxygen mask BEFORE you go seeking oxygen for everyone else! Rookie mistake! Also, a “gathering” signal to predators everywhere that you will neglect your own needs to give to others. A moment’s thought tells you this is a zero sum game where everyone, ultimately, loses. Replenishment is key. Give a man a fish and you have one less fish. Teach someone to fish and you’ve upgraded a human. Develop a method of fish replenishment and you’ve got a sustainable economy.
Goddess Opportunity – As in the fishing analogy, you are being offered endless chances for Learning, Invention and Creativity. You are lighting one candle after another in a very dark world, to the benefit of everyone who comes into contact with you.
Goddess are Entitled – To be effective, Goddesses learn the paths of growth. Goddesses become expert at detecting causes of destruction and disability. To see this, Goddess must acquire the Wisdom of the Ages, thus giving themselves the greatest benefit the universe can confer: becoming Visionaries and Old Souls who are the keepers of universal order.
Goddess are Humble – The temptations of power are the number one cause of degradation, destruction and disablement. Goddess are constantly offered opportunities to interrupt the growth cycle and harm others. Humility keeps us sane, modesty keeps us honest and fellowship keeps us free.
Receiving in Love, Goddess Will Be Received – Goddess are certain of their reward. When Love is the light you live by, you become a conduit for intergenerational, even interplanetary Love. Your faith ennobles you. The love of a child for trustworthy parents is the model Jesus set forth for our relationship to God.
Models & Mentors – “The only limitation to our realization of tomorrow are the doubts of today” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
“A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow” – Richard Bach
“Nothing is impossible. The word itself says, “I’m Possible.” – Audrey Hepburn
“If a problem is fixable, there is no point in worrying. If a problem is not fixable, there is no point in worrying.” – The Dalai Lama
Goddesses access Inner Wisdom through the Third Eye. We may physically live in the Now, but it is goddesses’ greatest good fortune that we can enrich our present with powerful visions of past and future. In our dreams, we can expand this to universal pasts and futures. “Now” serves as the lens through which our Body stays focused. To be absent from the Now is to miss the key to ecstasy that is our birthright.
Patience Multiplies Wealth – Wealth can be psychic, emotional, spiritual as well as physical, financial and actual. Eating unripe fruit robs us of our harvest. Therefore, we learn to settle into the Now, line up our Past, Present, Future with our Conscious, Subconscious, & Unconscious levels. It’s a discipline mastered through the practice of meditation, which opens the Third Eye.
The first step is Emptying. Push your thoughts, memories, worries away. Concentrate solely upon your breath. If this is too hard, choose a mantra (such as “Thank You” or “Namaste”) or a piece of music without lyrics (Marconi Union’s Weightless is fabulous for this.) Just celebrate the emptiness, the Nothingness. As thoughts come to you, release them like balloons. Celebrate You.
In the Control of Your Own Mind Lies all Freedom. Without it you are a slave, whatever the world may think. Buddhists call your mind a “wild horse” that must be tamed. Learn to greet the Now as a dear old friend who knits everything that is “you” – all the scattered psychic pieces – back together. You can FEEL the healing.
Goddesses Risk – In our new digital world it’s very difficult to claim Time for yourself. Can you turn off all the flashing lights, the alerts, the signals, the seductions, the threats? You absolutely must learn to do that, you must feel “important” enough to do it. It’s a lifelong job that soon becomes a respite you greet as an old friend. Turns out, feeling entitled is the most difficult part of the task. Tell others, “This is my recharge time. It’s absolutely critical.” Twenty silent minutes per day. Alone. You. Finding Eternity – and the Eternal You – through the Now. It doesn’t come easily. It comes through your infinite willingness, your scrupulous patience, your holy dedication. Don’t give up on You.
Give Up Your Competitiveness. – Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. Surrender your expectations. Push away the sadness, the depression, the loss, the anxiety, the rage, the worry. All can be released into the universe, floating away from you to pop harmlessly in the stratosphere. You are alone now with the infinite. Slowly you begin to feel the pleasure, an indescribable ecstasy in which your ordinary human body becomes incandescent. Suddenly you want better things for yourself. More sleep. Better dreams. Healthier food. A world of love and joyous possibility. Dip your toe in that completeness, twenty minutes per day. (Or more, if you can.) Now you have a glimpse of Heaven.
Goddesses Tune In to their Energy Source – Goddess learn to treasure their peaceful daily meditations as a source of strength. If you allow the pool of your mind to settle, you will be able to see deeply. I personally prefer eyes-closed meditation. Concentrate on your slow deep belly breaths. If a thought jumbles past, think the word, “Clear”. Keep breathing. Keep clearing. You will feel rooted to the soil, grounded on the earth. The energy will start to bubble through you.
Goddesses Stay Focused – Split focus – sometimes called “multi-tasking” – is the current work modality for a reason, and the reason is that it diminishes your psychic power. If you focus your full attention on anything or anyone, you will begin to feel the power flow between you and this object/idea/person. This is scary at first, but you will get used to it. Living beings (plants included) flourish under this attention and the connections that are made last forever.
Goddesses are Mindful – Understanding the power of the Now is your goddess strength. You are entirely here, entirely present in this moment. You have completely accepted your current incarnation. There will be time, alone with your Goddess Journal, to savor the past and call upon the future, but for this moment you know how to be entirely present in the Now. It is unbelievably powerful. It feels like Love.
Models & Mentors – “What you think, you become. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you become” – Buddha
“You can’t stop the waves but you can learn how to surf” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
“It takes courage to say yes to rest and play in a world where exhaustion is a status symbol” – Brene Brown
‘You are the silent watcher of your thoughts. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the joy beneath the love and pain” – Eckhart Tolle
When Others See Cage, Goddesses See Chrysalis – Goddesses exist on the edge of possibility. Imagination suggests what COULD be. In the multiverse, physicists assure, every permutation is happening somewhere. Potential alerts us to the possibilities. The stick-colored, dead-seeming chrysalis contains nature’s most beautiful sprite, the butterfly. The invisibility of potential discourages predators by daylight, but at night, the chrysalis opens and we are free.
Goddesses Contain Multitudes – You are the apex of your family tree. Walt Whitman describes us, as well as himself. Be wary of the “restrictions” others place so confidently upon you. They want you to give up your quest in exchange for being their unpaid servant. Even paid servitude wouldn’t be worth it! Goddesses are comfortable being the first in a family to — do something. Anything. Because you ARE the first in your family to be you. You are unique. In day dreams and night dreams, on conscious and unconscious levels, you explore chances and contingencies.
Goddesses Won’t Be Sidelined – People we love, admire, and express need for keep trying to pin us down. They want to get to “know” us so they can “rely” on our sameness. They want us to stay where they left us, like a coat or umbrella. Goddesses won’t willingly place limits on themselves, just to be accepted. We are unrestrained in our wild and dreaming imagination.
Goddesses Preserve Inner Wildness – Every action you perform, every thought you think, suggests and then creates its opposite or “shadow” as Jung would say. Think of the story of Max, who voyaged overnight to play with the Wild Things until he finally decided he wanted to return to his safe, warm, familiar bed, thereby claiming both worlds at once. Free yourself to consider all the alternatives. The first freedom is Mental. Goddesses fly above possibility.
Goddesses Are Warmed by Inner Fire – Goddesses don’t listen to the limitations others have set on them. Who would believe that dried up chrysalis is going to turn into a magnificent butterfly? Yet it will. You have the butterfly within you. When you concentrate, you can feel its wings stretching and expanding.
Goddess Risk – In another famous tale, Peter Pan is replaced and can never come home. Once home realizes who we really are, perhaps it will disappear. Once the chrysalis is broken, we can never crawl back in. Fear is a valid reaction when danger is about. But danger is triggered by lack of escape. Keep all your psychic escape hatches open.
What Fable Do You Cherish? We tell ourselves stories. Harry Potter, Narnia or Marvel? Expand it outwards. Insert yourself. So many discoveries have been made from and through fantasy fan fiction they are too numerous to mention here. But allowing yourself to dream is key. Imagine you are outfitting your inner butterfly. What colors? How about all colors, constantly changing?
Goddesses Are Quick-Change Artists – Goddesses may become a butterfly or a snowflake or an orchid or some new form that hasn’t been envisioned yet. Goddesses are avatars. We keep ourselves in peak readiness to accept the universal challenge. We realize life is a dance, we can adapt to its steps and offer steps all our own.
Goddesses Protect Their Potential – Others will constantly try to constrain and define you and herd you into their enclosure. Don’t go. What you will become is not up to them, it is not even up to those who mentor and love you. It is up to you.
Goddesses Protect the World’s Potential – The young, the aged, the helpless, the teacher, the crossing guard, the medic, the harvester – these are people who shepherd the universe into positive becoming. They are occupied with vital work and can’t protect themselves or those they help. Life’s Goddess will protect them. The forces of destruction are all around us, the universe can’t afford to waste a scrap of its positive potential.
Models & Mentors – “The only person you are destined to be is the person you decide to become” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Consult not your fears but your hopes and dreams. Think not about your frustrations but your potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed but with what it is still possible for you to do.” – Pope John XXIII
“Our essential nature is one of pure potentiality”
– Deepak Chopra
“Accept whatever comes and meet it with the best you have to give” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Goddesses Instinctively Resist Stagnation. Your conscious mind accepts stasis, which it interprets as “security”, but your subconscious rebels. It demands change! In the meanwhile, outside of your awareness, your unconscious IS changing, evolving fiercely along with the drama playing out in the entropical human race. Goddesses have the power to direct change. Tune in!
Consult Your Dreams – Dreams signal a desire for change. When was the last time you had a falling dream? Or a rushing water dream? A surprise dream or an accident dream?
Change Is Inevitable – Not just change, but revolution. Revolution is what we goddesses are all about. Cultivate flexible thinking. Don’t invest psychologically in rigid, one-way requirements.
Thought Exercise – What if everything in life were completely different? What if things turned upside down? This is the kind of planning and strategizing asked of goddesses. What’s the “Last Best Option?” Shape your change towards growth by asking, is this making me better and stronger person, or more fearful? More competent, less dependent, more unique, less compliant, more imaginative, less angry, more joyous, less envious? Evolve with me! Prepare to streamline!
Fundamental Attribution Error is thepsychological theory that we blame ourselves for world conditions over which we have no control. Check your guilt/anxiety levels. If they are raging, is there anything you can do to ameliorate the causative circumstances? Being without guilt or anxiety is NOT the goal – that would describe a sociopath! But being crippled by guilt OR anxiety when there’s nothing you can do about it is disabling. And we’re in the empowerment department here.
Goddesses Manage Their Evolution, that’s the point. Traveling ever upward along the spiral. What are the attributes you admire? Develop a picture of yourself as a wise being emitting light. Nurture calm, contentment, gratitude – in the midst of a thirst for new ideas and experiences to add to your expanding galaxy of knowledge.
Be Ready for Anything – Play out the scenarios in your Goddess Training Journal. Have a plan A, B, C. Learn chess to help with thinking of several moves ahead. Ask others, “What would you do?” As you read/watch a piece of fiction, imagine yourself inside this problem. You can also learn a lot from history. Start a “What IF? Club” in which members dream up survival scenarios. Play the game Worst Case Scenario.
Models & Mentors – “Progress is impossible without change”
– George Bernard Shaw
“Change is the law of life. Those who look only to past and present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy
“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability but comes after continuous struggle.” – Martin Luther King
“It is not the strongest of our species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” – Charles Darwin
No One Becomes a Goddess Without Discipline – Many fatally confuse discipline with punishment and avoid it until they sadly discover they’re now too debilitated to do anything. Uh oh! Don’t let this happen to you!
Map-Making Means Map-Following – We adjust maps on the basis of experience. But we try them out first. Or we won’t know where they went wrong. Goddesses are logical, not impulsive. Because impulses are outer-directed. Being a Goddess means being in control. Don’t apply if you don’t like being in control. Goddesses dislike the feeling of being out of control.
You’re Out of Control When You Don’t Know Where Impulses Are Coming From – Lots of cues are subliminal and their directors want to keep it that way. They want you to think the desire is coming from INSIDE the house, not from their strategy room where bills are piling up.
You Become a Goddess by Getting to Know Yourself – YOUR ESSENTIAL SELF – that’s what makes you strong. Goddesses take the time to track the origin of their impulses down.
Do I want it because I’ve done it before?
Do I want it because other people are doing it?
Do I want it because SOMEBODY ELSE insists?
Do I want it because of advertisers & influencers?
Do I need it to Join the Club?
You’ve probably figured out Goddesses aren’t “Joiners.”
If you’re “used” to whatever it is, get “unused” to it. You’re in Goddess training, and it’s a whole new world. Relish the different feelings. If you sense you’re becoming unglued, contemplate substitutions. You don’t need to go Cold Turkey on Pleasure, the Past, or your own physiology. What you need to do is get your body and mind acquainted with Trying New Things because of respectable scientific research says it will build you into the new person you need to be.
Get loose from “the pack” right now. If you can’t, you’re not Goddess material. There’s two kinds of people, “swarmers” and “selves.” Swarmers don’t want to develop a self because it differentiates them from the pack. They want to do whatever the swarm is doing. It takes time – and can be ouchy – to develop a Self but the payoff is literally Eternal. Take the time. Or go down with the swarm if that sounds better.
You’re being pressured to Follow a Course that suits Somebody Else. Let’s take a long look at this person and ask ourselves why they don’t care about our betterment, or who the hell we really are, or even anything other than their own Ego. Why are we servicing this person’s ego? We need to get AWAY from this person. They want a hostage or a slave or both.
We’ve been seduced by the Virtual World! It felt so good at the time. For a moment there it felt like maybe we found Our People. And they seemed so welcoming! Of course there is a price of admission, and you keep paying it with your denigration, not just in the service of someone’s ego, but a lot of people’s bank accounts. Figure out a way to tell these False Friends goodbye.
From our Subconscious We Summon Rescue. In dreams sometimes it’s a hero, a fictional or historic figure or a spirit animal. Try reading folk or fairy tales right before bed. Fall asleep imagining strengthening muscles – physical, spiritual, emotional – growing inside you.
You are Jack AND the Beanstalk! No giant can stand against you. Even the laziest, cruelest corner of the self ultimately collapses to reveal a Tiny Child yearning for effective mothering. Turns out, that’s what you were looking for all along. Time to give birth to yourself, then mother yourself.
Discipline is the Only Path to Achieving What We Want. Nothing is achieved (or appreciated!) without discipline, which only means conforming your behavior to a previously conceived pattern. What ideas spring up when you think about this? Is “discipline” always cruel? Painful? Is it one of your fears? Or the map to the orderly life you long for?
You Are Your Best Friend and Best Parent – Nothing works in your life until you learn delayed gratification and stick-to-itiveness. But first you must experiment with other patterns – some of which –depending on your upbringing – can be hellish. So you have THAT to get past. You will definitely need to harness all your dream power to get yourself over the finish line.
Goddesses Adapt Discipline to Enhance Thriving. But who’s doing the adapting – the Cruel Taskmaster, the Disgusted Lover, the Generous Parent or the Permissive Saint? You contain all these (and they live in your dreams) so which will you listen to? Who will you empower? Who do you feed?
The Choice You Make Controls your Future. Consult appealing patterns that have worked for others and blend to taste. Realize it’s a process; a series of moments. You’re training like an athlete; every day you master new capabilities. Develop a sophisticated discernment you can trust to guide you.
Goddesses Set Marks and Hit Them – Forming habits is easier than breaking them apart, so goddess know that preventing bad habits is the core of discipline. But bad habits sneak up on us, they will form anyway, so part of your discipline will always be turning away from something that was formerly pleasurable. Enjoy the peace that comes with each small step.
Goddesses Know How to Keep Going – Discipline is the bridge that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. Always use a “spotter” – someone who wants the best for you – a professional who’s “been there” and who can keep you from going over the edge.
Goddesses Celebrate Their Discipline – Self-acceptance comes from experiencing our humanity to the fullest. We are “parenting” our much-loved and respected self, the one who starts out as a toddler with no self-control whom we’re trying to keep out of the fire. Forgive yourself. And keep going.
Make Discipline Visual – Charts, maps, graphs and lists that hearten & cheer are key to purposeful pathways. Figure out a way to picture your values. Checking off boxes and cherishing the “proof” of a successful day becomes your joy.
Models & Mentors – “Through self-discipline comes freedom” – Aristotle
“Motivation gets you going, but discipline keeps you going” – John C. Maxwell
“All success begins with self-discipline. It starts with you.” – Dwayne Johnson
‘Day by day – what you choose, what you think, what you do, is who you become” – Heraclitus
Time to check your consciousness levels – How comfortable are you with the very existence, not to mention the depth, of your conscious/subconscious/
unconscious/collective unconscious levels?
Consciousness is your awareness of the Now.
Subconscious are all the memories and ideas pushed out of the Now into “Later”. With effort, you can become aware of these.
The Unconscious you are completely unaware of. It takes considerable mining effort to get down there, but it can be done. This is where you store everything you’ve heard, everything you’ve seen, even peripherally, even without bringing into awareness at the time. The Collective Unconscious is the most controversial. Do you believe you are a historical repository of other people’s memories, including those of whose existence you are entirely unaware? I do.
You Have Multiple People Blending Their Lives With Yours – Do you ruminate about past events? Are you haunted by what was done & left undone? Do you feel nostalgia for a past that never was? Do you have a favorite period in history or a fantasy universe that you wish you lived in, instead of this one?
You are the Heroine of Your Goddess Saga – Accept your centrality in your own myth. It doesn’t matter what other people think – they are the bit players. Think of your past as a Quest Saga. What did you want? How did it change? What blocked you? What tools have you got at your command? Where do you go from here?
Rewrite the Past – You absolutely CAN, but first you first must face its full horror and the effect on you. Generally, because we were immature, we didn’t understand what was going on, were co-opted by our persecutors and prevented from fighting back. Things are different now! The hardest thing to accept is that beloved caregivers didn’t want the “best” for us – they only wanted us to be just like them. Let’s begin bringing those levels of consciousness into symmetry.
“I Don’t Believe in Ghosts but I Never Met a Person who Wasn’t Haunted” is a very wise saying. What haunts you exactly? Or who? Ghosts are malignant – if they weren’t they would be power spirits, fairy godmothers or guardian angels. What malignancies from your past are out to get you and how do they make themselves known? One of Freud’s contributions was to point out that people prefer their neurosis – ie imprisonment – to liberation. Why? What’s in it for them – or you?
You Define YOU. Yes, Goddesses have scars – those are bragging rights! You have been through the wars! ‘Rewriting” the past means understanding what really happened, the limitations of those who surrounded you, and exploring your chances and choices today. Just because parents, teachers or “society” sentenced you to play a role, you can step out of it at any time. Buddhist thought is very helpful here. Buddha teaches that life itself is an illusion – a dream. It changes depending on how we think about it. In the present, inside your mind, you hold all the keys to your own liberation. Re-visit Pema Chodron’s Noble Heart and Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now to explore how you can assume immediate control of your life and your mind and turn your past into fuel to power your growth.
Goddesses Know Who They Are – Remember,you’ve got a purpose. You’ve got a future. You’ve thought about your past and worked out conflicts with a mentor and in your Goddess Journal.
Goddesses Develop A Sense of History – You understand that history is a spiral, not a circle – the same things do keep coming around but in a different form. You see all around you the operation of karma.
Choosing Evil is Choosing Chaos – and condemning yourself to death. It can’t ever work out except temporarily. You understand the battle between darkness and light and you have committed yourself firmly to The Light.
Goddesses Are Storytellers – You emblemize the message with your life, with your words, with your body, with your very presence. You have become one link in the unbreakable chain of Eternal Perfection and you will gain eternal reward.
Models & Mentors – “You never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory” – Dr Seuss
“Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things” – Cicero
“In the end, we’ll all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood
“Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining a task or actually doing it”- Yo Yo Ma
Some People Prefer Risk. They don’t feel alive unless the situation is dangerous. What kind of goddess are you? The dangerous kind? Can you rush eternity? A hastened Immortality might not happen. More typical is ambivalence. We both want and don’t want – at the same time.
How Many Different Goddesses Are You? Sometimes we dream disturbingly about things we don’t want and people we aren’t. Feminists dream of rape, vegetarians dream of meat, pacifists dream of fighting. It’s confusing. What gives?
Language Isn’t Subtle Enough to Explain You – Your personality manifests all feelings, all thoughts, all ideas, rippling through you in a vast subconscious river. Everyone’s does; not only those who choose to be Immortal. Your unconscious connects with the “collective unconscious” of all other humans – dead, alive, even fictional. They ripple through you regularly. That’s where all your ‘strange thoughts” and “other personalities” come from.
Why isn’t “hate-love” a word? You experience that regularly. How about “fear-attraction”? Common! What I’m suggesting is that we need to accept the fact that a “personality” is a dynamism, not a label.
Goddess Challenge – Facing your own fluid multiplicity might seem the toughest part, but it isn’t for artists, who routinely “play” along their edge, peeking over it and imagining life on the other side. Art is the best way to express this, an enormous relief since it’s non-committal. You can stop experimenting any time you choose. It’s a goddess power also. Of course, you’ll have to face the surprise of your relatives when your work becomes public: “Where did THAT come from?” But if truth be told, we’ve always been surprised we’re related to those people.
Goddess Danger – Society seeks to label, limit and stigmatize. Everyone is afraid of becoming what they fear but Goddesses need to explore and ultimately manage our fear. A simple safe word won’t work when people – bankers, politicians, therapists, employers – are so fundamentally untrustworthy. That is why our identification of ourselves as Brave Goddess is so vital. The vastness of our potential can never be controlled by language. We will never be butterflies pinned down in a museum box for the instruction/curiosity of others.
Goddess Opportunity – Appreciate your Multiplicitous Self. Don’t slam the door on any of your potentialities too soon. Sometimes the worst labeler, the most determined jailor, is our own punitive psyche. We are deeply afraid of wandering in the forest and losing the way to get home safe. But Goddesses carry Home within them. As Nelson Mandela used to quote from his prison cell, if we are the captains of our souls we can be the masters of our fates. (Henley.) We can learn to tolerate a little ambiguity/uncertainty/ambivalence.
Goddess Tolerate Uncertainty – Being a goddess is all about balance. The experience of balance-seeking is indescribable linguistically – it must be felt experientially. Goddesses learn to live in a world beyond language where we can savor uncertainty and foretaste eternity.
Goddess Relish Paradox – Two contraries not only exist together but empower each other – that creative tension is the lifeblood of emotion, imagination and personality.
Goddess Coast on the Knife-Edge of Ambivalence – The desired is undesirable, the only possibility is impossible and the act of wanting forbids getting. In the Multiverse (Eternity) all your impossibles are actually happening. Goddesses must become comfortable with the pleasures of this dance: “My future dissolves in beads of sweat, my present is my mirror, my past’s a shape-shifting whirligig.” (Aallyn)
Even Leaders Must Contemplate the Power of Surrender – We contemplate Everything. Physics is magic and dreams embody history. This quantum world of “spooky entanglements” is one in which we goddesses become expert. We accept not only that the cave we fear holds the treasure we desire, but that we are both cave and treasure, indeed, fear itself.
Models & Mentors – “It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It is this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.” – John Scott
“Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.”
– Erica Jong
“The Simpsons is about alienation and the ambivalence of living with a family who you love but drives you crazy”
– Matt Groening
“Poetry is the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.” – Billy Collins
Those who sleep alone risk scarifying dreams. I dreamed I’d had the baby, and it was some kind of hideous ordeal. Call it a “trauma trigger”. I came back into myself hospitalized, bandaged head to toe and in traction. At first I was so disoriented I thought I was upside down, floating on the ceiling, but the ceiling was stainless steel and it was my reflection that I saw. The nurse approached from a long way off, carrying something in stiffly held out arms. That nurse’s face was so familiar, but who was she? I had only seen my uncle’s housekeeper once so why should it be her and not merely one of those recycled faces that haunt our dreams? The bundle offered was a fish.
I knew she expected me to reject it – call the maitre d’ it and demand a replacement, but I don’t do what people expect. Besides, it had very human eyes, big and sad, with tears woefully a-boiling in its depths. With great effort I wrenched out of my bandages and out of my traction, grabbed my baby and ran away. Obviously this was a terrible hospital, where people give birth in traction and your baby is a fish. A carp, from the look of him, and
not the lucky kind.
He said, “Mummy, mummy,” but whether he recognized me or commented on my bandages I couldn’t say. Hard work running through sand, because that’s where I bogged down. A bunch of golfers grabbed my baby, tossing him into the air with jeers and screams. The baby looked at me imploringly with its chocolate brown eyes, but what could I do? They had cleats and
clubs and all I had bandages. And I was losing strength, keeping only just enough to wonder, why golfers at the seaside? They tossed my baby in the ocean but I wasn’t having it. Waded right in after him but to my shock I soon was drowning. Can’t swim in bandages. You’d think the fish would return the rescue favor, but no. He was nowhere to be seen. It seems you can’t rely on anyone.
When a dream becomes this disgusting you know it’s past time to wake up. I was fighting my way out when I encountered Arnold’s eyes. Looking at me as if I were loathsome.
right.
help me.”
“You’re all over blood,” he said. And he was I said, “That blood was our child. Help me, But it had been too late from the first. The
hospital had a stainless steel ceiling; how could I have guessed? Time seemed to loop; there was a panic-driven moment as they wheeled me conscious right to the operating table. Is “awake till the end” the punishment for being a bad wife, bad hostess, or bad mother? Behind the anesthesiologist’s mask I thought I saw my uncle’s eyes. I was out before I could ask what “D & C” stands for. Diddled, then cauterized?
SEVEN – HAUNTED
Arnold was enormously relieved that I was no longer pregnant. I was enormously relieved that Stan and Willette went home. Arnold was further relieved that the satellite guy installed the dish the day of my return; I was relieved that without a special dish it seemed we could get no local stations. Bait and switch, said Arnold.
But it meant I could pretend I was no longer here. Didn’t matter that this was my own ice floe; freely chosen. Somehow, even dead and stupid, my uncle had won and I had lost. Money meant nothing. The stupid dead had scored again.
“We played strip poker because you went to bed so early,” Arnold defended himself. Thus the guilty flee where none pursue. “Jealousy does not become you.”
But had I become jealousy? The better to consider this possibility I turned down the sound on the plasma TV, then finally the picture. It was more fun to watch the raindrops slide together. Raindrop sex. Boy drops and girl drops, maybe even gay drops. Meeting and joining. Becoming one.
“You know it takes a village to maintain a marriage,” huffed Arnold. “Bartenders, bankers and stand- up comedians.”
And pretty, pretty grad students? He didn’t say. I ignored him till he said the magic word. The magic word was “drink.”
He said, “No reason you can’t drink now.”
Over a baloney sandwich and a glass of Chianti I began to feel forgiving. Someday I would have to go on a diet, find out if my body was still there, but not today and not tomorrow. Percocet enhances Chianti wonderfully. Without that dualism, if you scrape away the op layer of pain, deeper pain just bubbles up from underneath.
“I’ve seen your ghost,” said Arnold. “It’s a guy in a lumberjack shirt.”
But he had never seen my uncle. Not even a picture. “Describe him.”
“Hair the color of driftwood with a widow’s peak, and olive drab pants.”
“Did he look at you? Speak to you?”
“Looked through me. Came right into the study when I was working. I think he was looking for
you.”
That was just mean. Utterly uncalled for. He was punishing me for my jealousy by making all this up. Why would my uncle’s ghost appear to him? I bet Arnold read my diary while I was in the hospital, helpless. It was just the kind of thing that he would do. People without gifts batten on the bounty of others.
“That diary is private,” I warned him. “You’re the one saying married people don’t share everything.”
“Bet he thinks that this is his house,” mused Arnold, relentless. “Since you bought it with his money.” He rose, whistling cheerfully at freedom from the sickroom. “I’d better get back to work if I want to have something to show my agent.”
“Leaving me, are you?”
“Just a day trip to town on Friday. That is, if you’re feeling better.”
He didn’t bother to invite me. Me, who had done so much for him!
“You be careful,” I threatened, “You’ve got “Not me,” he sneered. “I’m a modernist.” Could it possibly be that easy? If
“modernists” were truly ghost-blind, maybe you need a conscience to see ghosts. He should at least be haunted by his fishbaby. Find the meaning, the challenge was always the same. Without meaning everything’s just another trauma trigger. What do refrigerators and meatsafes have in common? They slow down time. If Time truly has no meaning, don’t you see? It means we are free. We always have been free.
I climbed out of bed, awkward because my limbs still belonged to someone else, and checked my underpants. No blood. Maybe all my blood was gone. If I was a ghost that explained everything. Arnold couldn’t see me because he was a modernist. So it was up to me to tell him what we all had suffered. Being ghostly gave me such a rush of power I finally understood how hard it is for them to leave.
I took time to gather flies’ wings as I walked. Little boys tear the wings off flies; ask anybody. I thought they’d stir to life beneath my hands, but they stayed dead, so perhaps they’re only unshed tears. I’m a beginner at this. What do I know?
I pushed open the door to Arnold’s study. There was a bad smell in there and it was Arnold. He hummed Wagner as he worked; a classic song of triumph. On the wall were blow-ups of my diary, in my private, loopy handwriting, my private, private words. Tabloid articles he’d pasted to the wallpaper; “Mom Kills Twelve”; “Satan in Miami”, “BatBoy takes a Bride”.
The wallpaper was so beautiful in this room; it was the best in the house; a Morris pattern of leaves and mulberries and I hadn’t grudged it. It was priceless, probably irreplaceable; and this what I get. Anger postponed becomes rage and rage is truly liberating. I picked up the scissors from a pile of newspapers. Stupidly he’d placed his desk in the window embrasure, allowing me to walk up behind him. “Modernists” are ignorant of fear.
“So what’s it called?” Peeking over his shoulder.
He jumped a mile, scampering to close and save, frantic, busy, ineffective. But the printout lay right next to him. MOODY BITCH SEEKS KIND, CONSIDERATE MAN. I laughed because it was funny.
“It’s a comedy,” he said defensively.
“Aren’t I laughing?” I agreed. The cold fire that doesn’t burn consumed me. I opened my fist to shower unshed tears along his keyboard and he saw the scissors. He went so white. I loved that finally he saw me as someone to fear. Now I knew what turned my uncle on. I opened my mouth to speak but my uncle’s dust boiled out of me and I can’t remember what I tried to say.
That I had bled and now it was his turn? That it only hurts for the first five seconds? That the living are as deserving as the dead? I should have told him it’s the little things…the glasses of wine, the band-aids, the unshed tears – still breaths of life that spark the dying air; these are agents of the dead rescinding time and looping it backwards. Back towards them. Because time’s the thing they’re so jealous of, the only precious thing that we have left.
The phone man said the best that we could get was a party line. No real privacy – ever. I was dumbfounded. “There’s no real privacy on them other lines neither,” said Mr. Sterling, the phone man. “You just think there is.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Arnold told me, right in the phone man’s presence. “We’ll get our phone through the Internet like all sane people. The land line is only for emergencies.”
Sometimes when the phone rang we weren’t supposed to answer it because it wasn’t our “ring”. Maybe Arnold can ignore a ringing phone: I can’t. Especially if it goes off in the middle of the night. No counting a “ring pattern” there – not with the echoes of sleep rattling through your head.
“Who could be calling at this hour?” I demanded of my husband. Rhetorically.
But he said, “Cows. Bears.” In his dream or on the phone?
As usual it was up to me to answer it. “Hello?” I quavered. A sharp intake of breath but no one spoke. I
had played this game before. Could we have brought our own ghosts with us?
‘That you, Gayle?” I boldly inquired. “Just checking up on us? We’re fine. The baby’s fine. Arnold says hi.”
155 – Awake Till the End – Stories by Alysse Aallyn
It was only afterwards that I wondered if the caller was my uncle’s “housekeeper”. The unpaid one he swore would be compensated in his will. Who else would be angry enough to hound us? And there was always the possibility that it was my uncle himself, wanting to complain about the way I’d spent his money. It would be just like the stupid dead to initiate calls they can’t complete.
FIVE – MEATSAFE
Our first visitors came when before we were ready (as visitors will). Before the cable was connected. Willette had streaked her hair with an unbecoming dissipated rock star red which, considering her coal black eyebrows and pointed chin made her resemble Sarah Bernhardt in her coffin. She had two legs, however. Willette had always been High Maintenance. Compared with her, Stan, a little plumper, somewhat balder now, seemed refreshingly cooperative and easily amused. In honor of our upstate move he wore a sweaters with a vaguely Chistmassy theme.
“Snowflakes! Moose!” he genially exclaimed. “What’s not to like?”
“You’re not missing anything in the city,” said Willette. “We’ve been burgled.”
take?” Stan. “Better glasses don’t help.”
“Omigod,” I sympathized, “What did they “A Cuisinart and my reading glasses,” said “Those instructions are rough,” I agreed.
“We told the cops to be on the lookout for a bandit with severe left eye astigmatism,” Stan joked.
“Not that they’ll look,” said Willette gloomily. “They never do.”
“Until the guy kills somebody,” agreed Arnold.
“They don’t even care about that now,” asserted Willette. “They bargain murders down to “accidents” just to skew their crime statistics. Fighting crime from a desk chair.”
“Nice work if you can get it,” echoed Arnold, a sociable host refilling wineglasses.
They had been stuck in traffic so we were dining at nine-thirty, a distinct hardship for anyone with my raging metabolism. I had eaten the cheese and crackers all by myself and was forced to smack together some distinctly unappetizing crudités. Zucchini slices with sour cream, anyone? Fortunately it didn’t matter. They wanted dinner and dinner itself hardly mattered because the dining room was so dark. Without windows, but six doors, there were constant and mysteriously unaccountable drafts; the candles slanting first one way and then the other. Over Martel and coffee conversation languished. No Martel for me. No wine. I was trying to be good. Trying to be good does not a dinner party make.
“I know,” I roused myself. “Let’s play
Icicle.”
“Icicle?” they all wanted to know. “How do you play that?”
“One person hides and everyone goes looking for him. When you find him you have to squeeze in as close as you can get. Last person left is the icicle.”
“That’s sardines!” scoffed Arnold. “I’ve played that.”
But Willette was intrigued. “Good game for this house,” she said. “We’ll find cubbyholes and corners even you haven’t seen.”
“I’m warning you, I’m the world-class champion sardines player,” said Stan. “I once won hanging for an hour in a garment bag.”
With a challenge like that, he had to go first.
“Basement off limits!” shouted Arnold. “It’s dangerous down there.” Was that an implied waiver of danger elsewhere? We listened to his footfalls clatter up the stairs and wander overhead.
“Sounds like there are three of him,” said Willette. Of course we weren’t bothering to count.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I teased. “Real estate agent says this house is haunted.”
Willette seemed unintimidated. Stan I could have impressed.
“Our refrigerator tried to eat the delivery man,” said Arnold, getting into the spirit. “Both recovered and doing fine.”
“And there’s kind of a bad smell coming from Arnold’s study.” I suggested.
Arnold gave me A Look. Ooo, snap! Talk about burning with a cold fire! I pulled out the Big Guns. “Oswald Pewlett saw a fireball.”
“I feel a fireball coming on myself,” said Arnold, shaking the empty Martel bottle.
“Maybe it’s an animus.” said Willette. “You know, like a malignant spirit that attaches itself to unfinished business.”
I didn’t know. Upstairs a door slammed. Hard. We took that as a starter’s pistol. I let the others rush straight upstairs, elbowing each other like a middle- school recess, pretended at first to follow, then ducking behind a door.
World Champion Stan could not make it this easy for us, not even in an unfamiliar house. If it was me I would make a lot of noise going up the front stairs and then sneak quietly down the back. How he slammed that door I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound difficult with our drafts. If you balanced something on it and opened a window…
Outside had to be off-limits. I heard an unpleasant rustling in the rhododendrons. Think far enough outside the box, fall off the edge. I allowed myself to be seduced by the kitchen broom closet. It’s as narrow as an ironing board but runs the depth of the room, thus making an ideal crawlspace. And there was someone inthere. I could hear him breathing. “Is that you, Stan?”
The shadow rippled towards me. “I’ve missed you, Sharl.” That could have been my sigh, me just talking to myself. But then the voice spoke unmistakably and said the most surprising thing: “Time has no meaning.”
That’s not a message I would ever give myself, and it was my uncle’s voice, I swear it. I backed out in a panic, slammed the door so hard the doorknob fell off. The ghost was locked in, ha ha. Serves him right for refusing to play dead.
Willette and Arnold were upstairs together, looking equal parts smug and guilty. Like I couldn’t figure out what was going on. And they couldn’t say exactly where they’d searched. “Please yourselves,” I yawned. Maybe if I found Stan, he would show a sudden yen for pregnant women. Unlike everybody else.
“He’s not downstairs,” I declared, so it was time to inspect the attic. My flashlight revealed footprints in the dust along the steps. I pursued a faint tapping sound. In the dark, Stan had locked himself in the old meatsafe. Dumb place to hide! And he wasn’t happy about it. Like it was our fault. Willette, feeling a bit one down after the exposure of her skirmishes with Arnold, seized advantage like a wolverine protecting its mate.
“What if he had an asthma attack!”
Then you’d be a merry widow, I thought. But honest Stan said, “I don’t have asthma.”
“But an experience like that could give it to you,” said Willette. “Trauma triggers, they call it. “Traumatic inception”. Someone needs to take that door
off at the hinges.”
mandarin .”
“Don’t look at me,” said Arnold. “I’m a
The game was over. “Maybe in the morning,” I told Willette. “I’m gravid and I need my sleep.”
When Arnold finally came to bed – could Stan possibly have agreed to a threesome? I refused to let him in. “You’re the icicle,” I told him.
When I discovered one house on the list was haunted I gave the real estate agent no rest until he took me there. Honestly I had to do that man’s job for him. It was raining so heavily that morning that his car was like a bathysphere.
“I want to at least look at it. Cheer up; if there are leaks we’re sure to see them.”
“That’s it.” The agent still seemed very depressed as he reached for his golf umbrella. “It’s been empty fourteen years. No modernization whatever.”
Better and better. The bathrooms and kitchens I’d been seeing were like lip-sticked hogs in toe- shoes. There might even be original paneling. Peering out of the window I could see nothing through the darkening rain. “What’s it haunted by?”
I saw his wattles quiver in battle with his chin. Was I interfering with the real estate agent’s code?
“Various things.” Unadroitly he tried changing the subject and actually selling. “It has a view of the river. And it’s a real bargain.”
“Like what things?” Not reaching for my own umbrella or putting up my hood might tempt disclosure. I saw him wondering he could talk me out of going further.
(Sigh) “Oswald Pewlett saw a fireball.”
I was entranced! Had he searched his memory for the spectre least likely to queer a deal? “There
was a fire?”
He hastened to reassure. “A green fire.cold fire that doesn’t burn.”
A Delicious! I had to see it now! I pulled
galoshes over my ivory heels. “Let’s go!”
Perched above the road, the house was reached by a corkscrew of steps. The porch was an addition, so it was full of leaks, but the house was solid as a rock. Silent. High ceilinged. Original paneling. One bathroom for seven bedrooms, a marvelous thirties kitchen with no appliances, and a single light bulb in the exact center of every ceiling. This could be fun.
The real estate agent ensconced himself by the library window with its view of the river and refused to go upstairs. “I’ve seen it,” he said, pulling his fishing hat down over his ears as if assaulted by inner rain.
Upstairs there was no fireball, but the floors were littered with little glittery shards that turned out to be flies’ wings. No flies, mind you, only their wings. Thrifty spiders, I suppose who dine on all but isinglass. Is that how fairy legends started, I wondered. Fairy wings and flies’ wings – hard to tell the difference. I’m on the side of spiders. They can have all the flies they want.
And that’s how I bought The Old Chase Place.
THREE – DELIVER US
I should never have told Arnold the place was haunted, but I couldn’t resist bragging. “It has everything,” I sang.
“Air-conditioning too, so it seems,” he groused. He was always out to ruin my good time.
“That’s just the wind off the river. A natural chill factor. And real oak, too.”
“I’m not complaining.” He couldn’t help but warm to so much wood. In the city everything is “faux”. Alas the rooms were rather small, and in strange juxtaposition. Not a rich man’s house, you wouldn’t say, but perhaps the warren of a worrier.
“This will be my study,” said Arnold. He chose the one room in the house that still had a working fireplace – the others had been fitted with hideous stovepipes. But I didn’t argue, because at last he was smiling.
We were having a picnic lunch when the Sears truck drove up with the appliances. I didn’t see the accident because in my condition, meals are serious events. If I’m going to spend all morning nauseated then I’m going to spend all afternoon eating. (And all evening sleeping it off.) So when Arnold rose to show the hirelings what a forceful homeowner he could be, I pulled the fried chicken bucket closer.
When I heard a crunch and a hoarse cry I did run to the window. The ramp had fallen off the steps, tossing the refrigerator and pinning a delivery man. His mouth was open – I could see blood – and he was gasping for air. He reminded me of the fish my uncle caught on his
many unsporting ventures into the wild. He loved watching creatures die. He once presented me with a still- beating fish heart, saying, “It’s only the stupidest that go on living after they are really dead.” The fish, the headless running chickens — I guess the joke was on them, if they didn’t know they were dead. But the delivery man was not dead; we all affirmed the fact.
There was a flurry of activity while the driver jumped into the truck to call for help – we didn’t have a phone yet and cell phones don’t work out here. The fire and rescue truck arrived after about ten minutes to take over. Arnold had to help the second delivery man move in the appliance. “Get a camera,” he hissed.
He wanted me to take pictures of the ramp and the steps to show, although our porch was in sorry condition, it was the ramp anchoring that was at fault (them) and not the steps (us). That’s because it’s so important in life to figure out whose fault everything is.
“He’ll be all right,” I offered. “He had a lot of meat on him.”
“Jesus, Sharl,” said Arnold, “I heard his bones go crunch.” And that was the end of that picnic.
At least I had a brand new oven, refrigerator, dishwasher and washer/dryer. I went back to applying the coat of dark green paint to make the room picture-perfect. Hunter green for Hunter (boy or girl); a super-infant guaranteed to make all his mother’s dreams come true.
Alysse Aallyn 