Freedom from Things

The Queen hiked up the mountain with Prince Pepe today. She has been very tired with all her preparations for her big journey. Being out in nature is the healing salve, as is spending time with friends. And the Queen realizes, because of her High Priestess nature, that she must rest. Rest indeed. Rest a long time. Even though it’s spring, it says to rest on a different level. Resting within her own kingdom and family.

Of course my father is the original and most serious wounding. That invisible vampire hiding from the mirror. And each time I go for it, the sucker of my own self doubts- returning to the filth of the house, why is it so tempting? I was going to store some of my things at my father’s. My bookcases and bed, so I’d have a place to stay if need be. Ultimately I was thinking, I’m crazy, it’s so filthy, I’d rather sleep on a friend’s couch. He was going to take Pepe and Esme. I was going to build a fence. Then he went to his therapist, Marsha, whom I used to go to and recommended to him. He said it would kill him to empty out the ham radio room to put my bed there. All his pack rat stuff. He’s right, and that’s fine. Perhaps Marsha is this invisible hand preventing our disastrous unconscious drives of doom.

Of course that realizes my inability to have somebody to depend on. They say one thing, but ultimately back out their support, just leave you hanging mid air. You thought you were secure to take the leap; they said they would be there. But then they are not.
That is always the challenge. How do you trust anybody? What they say? Always keep a back door open, make plans on your own to fall back on. Never give yourself away again? Is there always some boundary that is necessary in order for true love to exist? Love for yourself and love for the other?

Gilbert had Lance clean out the garage and all the mouse poop. It looks great, reorganized. I’m always horrified how I just lump and throw things in the garage. Like my mother, a mess. But I just have the help now to get it cleaned up. We artists are eccentric; anyway, that’s where the genius comes from. Where Gilbert complains my upstairs is a mess and the art area in the garage is a mess, Lance says it looks great and cool. ‘You’re an artist.” And so the Queen is! (And also the High Priestess in secret.) But it is relieving to get rid of things. It’s liberating. It’s that packrat that’s been on my back, holding on to loss. I used to be so free in my youth. Then lots of adult loss builds up on your back and pulls you down. But getting rid of it frees you.

I know the cycle well. Stir things up, move, chaos, stress and worry and too many things to do. But the monotony of otherwise would kill me. The monotony of my living situation, the lack of community, the dying for a need to grow plants that I cook and eat, the intense desire to teach my own children, to practice yoga, to live as simply as possible. I am more compelled from something deep within. It’s the world, it’s the mother or the pulse or libido of the universe that makes me do it, so I just surrender. I saw the coloring book of Siddhartha that I had given my kids. I looked through the half colored pages, rummaging for some to salvage. But there was the start black-and-white picture of the Buddha EXHAUSTED, crawling up from the river bank, to sit under the Bodhi Tree. Giving up. To release and let go.
It is like a mission of mine. To go out there in faith. To know I am supported by not only the divine but my own positive and powerful thoughts. To feel in my body when I do warrior pose, that I am DURGA, I am that which is hard to access, that nothingness that is everything, and I only need to remain there. Meditation is my tool. That regular practice to get up. To sit. To reside someplace else than my terrified thoughts.

But the thought of returning to the place of healing, the place before the wounding. Like the Oklahoma City Bombing. How it was like 11:59 a.m. before the bombing struck. To get back to that place. To clean out all the stuff in the middle. To return to mothering, teaching, simplicity, the home arts. That is where my heart is. That is all I want to do. My children mean that much to me. It’s to precious to lose. It has so much meaning and love for me in it. And it will set us all free.

The house has a new feel about it. Lighter, less cluttered. There is a sense of freedom. To really narrow down all your possessions to a little bit. It is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get to heaven. Because it’s all spirit. It just lights up in front of you on a regular moment, and all you can do is enjoy its rapture and depth, blazing in the sunlight.

The Third Level of Cleaning

The Queen of Bohemia, when she doesn’t have her duties as the High Priestess, is back to cleaning her own house. This time it’s a deep clean. A purge, in fact everything must go. For the Queen is preparing to go out on a mission, and she must leave everything behind. All her castle barbecues and hoards of things. There she is cleansing deeply, from the inside out. And the more she strips away and cleans the outside, the more the inside is cleaned out, and the more powerful she becomes. Because the less material objects she has, she finds the more faithful she is.



It has been a whirlwind of activity. The spring has activated seeds long over due for germinating. I have spent the weekend tackling the dirty house, not just cleaning it but purging it. I have to get away from this complex American life, the traffic jams, the junk mail and spam, the mediocre pop culture, the stuff. Gilbert gave me a stern come to Papa talk about my packrat mentality. I defended it as an artist’s life. He said I was like my father.
Irked, but still firm in my artist self, I ruthlessly culled old books, bronze Buddha statues, my late husband’s items, corn on the cob dishes, clothing. I never want to spend another winter in Colorado again so out with the coats. I can’t believe I rearranged and reorganized completely my art space in the garage. I was aghast that mice had snuck in this unusually hard winter and gotten into the bird seed. And of coruse into the house. Hondo won’t sleep downstairs anymore.

I seriously plowed into everything, spurred on by the bird seed in the garage. The mouse poop covered a lot, and I thought, am I my mother? Is my place just as filthy as my father’s with the black mold in the basement? I had to let go of things. Just strip them down to basics. I want to live as simply as possible. Only the essentials. Not needing to upkeep furniture or dishes or things or most definitely not to upkeep a car. I want to walk to get my groceries, cook only with fresh ingredients. Live in a community. Where in the world could that be? Hardly in America. But I have filled the garage with tons of stuff for a future garage sale. I am making arrangements.
Tonight the kids and I ate out for the first time in a week since the return from the cruise. I had been getting used to eating only what was on hand in the house to use it up. All shopping will be around these food items. To actually practice some home economics and cook around staples.

I never had a mother to really show me how to eat. My mother’s cooking consisted of microwaving eggs, Doritos, boiled beef in a bag, or Banquet frozen fried chicken. For a while I was really into cooking for the whole family when I was a teen, but it was just things from a recipe book, nothing consistent and focused on a few staple dishes.

Slowly we have been eating better. As you pare everything away, if you get rid of all the stuff, there is very little to focus on: yoga, meditation, eating right, teaching the kids and being with them as family, love, travel, friends, gardening, art and music and literature and stories. How those simple things really make my soul sing, and also ache for that which has been lost in our wasteland of capitalism.

I’m exhausted. It’s truly the big purge, the big cleaning of the house. To finally be free of all the clutter, all the stuff. I’m thinking to do my Kripalu and Omega workshops on the east coast July, send the kids to their late father’s family in San Antonio for a few months, then we all go to Mexico in August where I have a training, maybe spend a month or so there, then head to an eco yoga farm in Argentina. And the winter in Montserrat.

I picked up a homeschooling book on giving your kids a classical education. I think, why not. I can be close to my kids and educate them in yoga and more, bring out the teacher in me. My sister Narada homeschooled four kids. Of course she’s a Krishna, but she’s very inspiring. I’m going to take the kids to visit them all tomorrow and go to temple and dinner.

I also have been thinking a lot about Jesus too. Like I’d like to incorporate Jesus into the yogic homeschooling. Joseph Campbell says you tend to return to the religion of your childhood, the first myth you were indoctrinated in. Usually I cringe or am afraid to say the word Jesus because it has so many horrible implications, especially with the sinister and sick Catholic church pedophile scandal. Evil! And naturally by being in Latin American countries you can get into the rhythm of the seasons with all the holidays and festivals, usually placed over indigenous traditions, so why not make them have an even bigger new-agy Jesus twist. It would be nice to focus on the life and acts of Christ, his personality traits and being a good human being, rather than the morbidity and torture of his death. Of course we teach that you are eternal and identical with Christ and ever lasting life, a sentence that could get you burned at stake years ago, but that’s the facts, Jack. Of course we’d have Buddhist meditation, Sufi poetry, and plenty of science to doubt all our mythology so that we may have the most perfect of faith.

I’m exhausted, but exhilarated. Spiritual transformation is about losing everything and gaining the soul.

I can’t wait to be rid of everything!

THE HIGH PRIESTESS

The Queen is no longer a Queen. She is a priestess. The journey has transformed her. Upon the return to her castle, the Queen had a sacred ceremony and met with the Tree. She slipped inside the door and there she was initiated. The roses overflowed and thier scent filled the garden.
Her mother was there. Giving her her crown, weapons and wand. And she gave her her charge. To move to a cottage in the country near the kingdom, but also to move out into the world. She was to find all the demons of the world that are terrorizing the villagers, tame them with her powers and might and turn them into her footmen and palace administrators. And the world will be a better place for it.

I had a fascinating dream last night. I dreamt of my late husband. It
was the first time in many years. He looked a little different, but he
was his same go-getter self. It turns out that he had faked his death.
I followed him. I thought, what does this mean? Will I have to pay
back the insurance money? There was something double-headed about my
late husband in the dream. And at one point in a car, I realized that
I had the power to influence my dream to turn out how i want.

I have had the dream of my late husband faking his death many times.
Sometimes those dreams were about something dishonest, hidden, he was
double-crossed. It makes me think of his friend who drowned in a lake recently on a golf course in New Mexico while walking his dogs who had run out on the ice. Once I had a dream about him that he came to visit, and I was happy to see him. I said, "Look, here are your
children!" and it seemed he was too ashamed of what he had done to go to them.Each time the faked death dreams were a feeling of, he's back and I'm with him again and not sure I want to be, and that of do I have to give the insurance money back.

I started reading Raja Yoga on the Kindle on the cruise. It teaches in lessons that you realize, that you are the center of the universe, your own sun, and that you are a sphere of
power and influence from that point, that axis mundi, your own world
tree. You wake up to the illusion of the maya that is the matrix of
the cosmos. You really start to see things as a dream, which is
vedantic, however, the trick is that you see yourself in the dream
state, getting better at being aware of yourself dreaming in the
dream. What you are doing in waking consciousness is having an effect
on dream consciousness. They are weaving back and forth, which is
tantric. The indigenous of Costa Rica say that a female shaman is a
butterfly, because her two wings go in and out of each state of
consciousness.

So we can really start to wake up in both dream worlds! This one and
our dream one! But which one is a dream? You may ask! That reminds me
of the Chinese story of the man and a butterfly. A man dreamt last
night that he was a butterfly, but then he thought, maybe I am a
butterfly now dreaming that I am a man.

Where is the real you if we are dreaming in both states of
consciousness? That center point, the transcendent, the depths behind
everything. You are able to step back and observe your self, and that
point from which you observe everything is everything - the totality
of consciousness and energy, which is projected outward from that point.

You can influence your environment if you practice like a magician, or a high priestess and work with dreams, and pass through those pillars of duality into the transcendent. It is your God-given power. I focused on the fact that that space I'm in is also EVERYTHING. Every evil drug lord in Colombia who horribly abuses exotic pet animals, every baby burned with a cigarette, every cherry tree blossoming in spring, every high-pitched laugh of a child. You have to accept everything. Love they enemy for the enemy is you! All the stuff you reject, that is rejected in the world. It should be reconciled in paradox, so that peace and paradise prevail rather than anxiety and neurosis over the split.

I've forced to work on snippets of dreams that I dismiss as nothing and irrelevant or useless. It's like the story of the King who every day received a piece of mud from a monkey. Every day the King dismissed it as useless and threw it behind his throne, only years later to discover that mud had fallen away from thousands of jewels inside.
If you have a hard time remembering dreams, don't ever stop trying because the whole
act of reminding yourself to dream automatically does something
regardless, self-observation and developing will. Our will is a
powerful thing. find it and use it! The Queen is! That's why she is now the High-Priestess. BUt she's aligned with Durga and Kali. There is a lot of letting go necessary. A lot of slaying of interior demons and negative aspects.

I have been meditating and focusing my will, that things work out, and creating this picture of what I want in my mind. I use some physical techniques of crossing my ankles and hands and arms while lying down, and meditate to manifest! And meeting with my assistant today, she reminded me of Robert Johnson's work Owning Your Own Shadow, to get that dark side out. I wrote down some things today that were hard to face. I'm messy, scattered, impulsive, can be a cluttered person, and can be difficult and combative. Like the landlady is really starting to piss me off. Gilbert said I could get out of my lease early and he's been showing the house and getting it ready, and I had sent a letter confirming it and she freaked out saying she didn't approve such a thing. SO!

I have been trying to settle my debts. I spent all day yesterday and much of today in an arduous process, having business credit cards excluded. And then I've been trying to set up everything online for payments, and naturally there is a problem with the site and spent hours in customer service on one account on the Speer mortgage only to not get it resolved with evil Bank of America. So things are making progress, even thought it's still difficult. Like I do have to break down and cry every so often.
But then I pull myself up pretty quickly now, practice my Raja Yoga and exert my will and I'm happy again. How I miss the King! That tends to compound the difficulty, since I miss his presence and moral support, as it's awfully difficult doing things all alone.
I have been very into Raja Yoga, perhaps all my life. those were the
first yoga books i read of my father's.
I have been reading a book on Raja Yoga on vacation, and I would cite the title and author, but it's on the Kindle and I can't find it now.
I've been de-cluttering things, getting ready to have a garage sale in May. Doing lots of busy work. Things are really starting to pop and crank wonderfully. It truly is the power of waking up to who you really are, the Divine Self, and believing in it rather than the ego.

My Hare Krishna niece and her family are going to check out Speer, which has a 2-unit is coming up vacant soon. Ideally her husband will manage it. I had visited the property on Monday when I went to visit a business lawyer. I talked with Miguel, Sr. They were maybe going to move upstairs, but it's too expensive so they will renew to stay in the basement. I will feel guilty raising the rent! We spoke in Spanish. I've typically had a hard time understanding everything in Spanish spoken from local people who are not newscasters on Univision, but it's pretty much agreed that I'm bringing by a Home Depot gift card tomorrow for him to get cement and fix the problem why their basement unit floods when there are heavy rains, and start scraping and painting the place. It's a cute place. The two apricot trees are blossoming and they are gorgeous. My will will magically transform Speer from the dump Justin left it to the most charming rental property in Highlands Square. So be it, says the Queen, (who is secretly the High Priestess.)