Alysse Aallyn

Tag: #Warrior #Freedom

  • 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 – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    The Lovers

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

    Leaving the Coven

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Conflict

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

    Detaching From Dad

    Dad taught us to stand up for ourselves


    Except around him.


    Dad enjoyed being silly


    When we were little.


    Entertaining story teller –


    Teased us to obedience.


    When I said wild horses couldn’t drag me


    He played wild horse.


    He was the captain, and


    Life wasn’t ship-shape


    When I was a shape-shifter.


    He wanted to go to Europe


    Without my eldest sister


    She called her congressman


    To change Daddy’s mind.


    He institutionalized her in


    Switzerland


    Two thousand miles from


    Our new home.


    I was stubborn and


    Honest: the worst combination.


    When I was twelve and Genevieve fourteen


    He sent us to school across


    Oceans.


    As my dad had before me


    I stood up to uncles and teachers


    Because I had to respect somebody


    Might as well be myself.

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

    2. Ego

    From the very beginning I didn’t like doing the same thing as other people. What was the point of that? If someone ordered the same food as me, I changed my order. I was surprised that people would want to do the same thing at the same time. As I grew older, enthusiasm was ruthlessly damped down and my possibilities seemed to harden. Who other people thought you were was “ego”. And they wanted you to stay in that place. Much as I wanted to be admired, maybe even cherished, I could see this categorizing was limiting. A very bad thing. But how to get out of it seemed a conundrum. How can you view the situation you’re in from a point of view you don’t actually have? Lucky for us, there’s imagination! If we are really lucky, imagination crystallizes into Art.

    I discovered we don’t have to settle for Ego, for making ourselves distinct from other people. Artists are shape-shifters – they all the best lines, all the brightest colors, giving themselves the best possibilities.

    When the “multiverse” became popular, I wasn’t surprised. I was used to living several lives at once.

    Being Wrong

    Warriors don’t “settle.”

    We never “stay put”.

    Warrior Essence is

    Exploring new territory.

    Territory that scares you

    Features you don’t recognize

    Sparks uncomfortable feelings.

    I learned to like this.

    Roving continents alone

    Doing everything

    Wrong.