| aphrodite's garden volume 18 part 4 - 1993 december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
17 December 1993 Here Murphy seems to have entered his season of affectionate domesticity. What it's like today. Nervous. What this sort of day is like. Hyped. The days that don't know, are pressured, suspended. Coming outside, do I look like a crazy woman, twitchy, hungry, mouth compressed. It's tension. Screaming music. If I know it's tension what else do I know. Staring. Want to look in the mirror. You - green man - I miss you - I'd like to fight with you - remembering glint - I'm not done with you if I can help it. What is this sort of day good for. It's physical. 18 A voice in the night that said, What is the value of a life? The kind of sex that turns off the moment I come. The sex [with Rob] is where we left it but heart isn't. I didn't love him on its account. I didn't care that he was in my bed. He didn't look transformed in the morning. That might come back. Will sex erase you and you? And if it does? Would someone who values a life erase loves with sex? Does sex by itself please the body enough to count for something? Is it a strategy the bad can use to make themselves free of loves? Feeling these days, as often, how moral decisions are made without information. That in itself is the nearest question - how to make decisions without knowing. K - I wonder whether I have anything to say to you. It's a good day, Sunday, frost this morning, pale quiet December late afternoon ivory light. I'm in the red chair by the kitchen window, hearing what I imagine are Vietnamese children walking in the alley. Girl friends confiding. Gulls. Sunday quiet. Do I miss you? Not in the way of wanting to tell you things. I miss the adventure. It was a lively struggle. I miss your liveliness. Your eye, your lip, your hand. Your voices. Maybe you'll never be diffident again about your fur, because it was so welcomed. I'm sorry to think we won't pass each other books. I liked the way the books that came to me through you brought me to places I'd never have found. Gogol's country roads. I liked your stories too - your store of stories - their places and voices - the way they accumulated over the weeks. It is in a way a shame that you aren't at some desk in your mother's house, this same Sunday, writing me. So I'd know that voice too. There's light on the wall thrown by a very low sun - out there it has a faded pearly look but on the wall it's syrupy orange, condensed light. Midwinter light. Have you been walking in country lanes? Are you as you said quiet in the house, watching television? Is she getting a rise out of you? Do you know you mimic her voice in a way that says it has never stopped giving you pleasure? It's getting dark. I've turned on the piano lamp and moved to the table. Making tea. Michael and Rowen came into town yesterday, Rowen with his eight year old's chipmunk teeth and nice deep head. We didn't know what to say to each other. What he liked better was to eavesdrop when Michael and I talked, as if it's our adult concerns that interest him, and he hasn't the conversational experience to bring them up himself. The two weeks you've been gone - seem a month - a hard dark month - night grief and lostness - what can I make of it - why was I so bereaved, losing a connection that welcomes so little of what I might find to say to friends with more gift for welcome. You welcomed something that doesn't speak. Do you know that you do that? Dangerous to me, you don't mean to be. 19 Awake at night deep in pain saying I've been looking for love. Not struggling with pain, lying in its embrace as I lay in my bed's embrace and fell asleep again. As I was going to bed I'd looked at my letters to David, or my notes about K, and was immediately where in the pointless day I'd needed to be. What I learned when I said it to Joyce: I'm staying away from work because I have to look for love. But needing money and so wondering whether there is a way to make money out of looking for love. But those ways are felt to be substitutions and they don't engage me. What shall I do - what shall I do - If I were going to Hawaii to work with Mary Tiles, what would I have to do? Oh starting again elsewhere! Winter's tales. She left Africa when she was forty-eight and never had a personal life again. Three works in which people value life in a particular way, a mood of admiration and risk. I know why she needs to create it; it takes me from desperation to joy in adventure. It's self admiration in an autonomous landscape. It evokes happiness that isn't immortal - that admires itself for knowing it is mortal. Reading it feeling you and myself - not you, Prince Loss, although yes the idea of your book - but you, North Sea sailing man - yes - in the brightness of her accomplished mood the story of how I cried when you left and then refused to cry and swept away in my car is a story that says how anyone should behave when they are what we are. Your whole story makes sense, and the parts of mine where I am not sitting for years in bogs. But she sat for the rest of her life in a cottage and built a mood she could sell to people who have not always been dull. And you Louie. You bogged me. Isak Dinesen 1942 Winter's tales Random House - Meantime Louie was sleeping with Nancy. Good timing, I said, before you leave. Mm she said, meaning she's not going to think about it just yet. She saw her differently, suddenly, she says. The hardness of the last days is eased, is it? Rob's driving lesson on residential hills the other side of Commercial Drive. He drove. I looked at houses. It was nightfall, lights on in living rooms and kitchens as he parallel parked. Lust came back. He said nicely out of nowhere, Did you regret it? No. I had to miss my friend but I didn't regret it. Then on the way home I stopped at K's house. A holly hedge. Put my hand into it to pull off a stalk. I have it here. So stiff a thing, any leaf. Leather green. And what's this edge - it looks sliced, like a matte, but is a translucent rim, like a fingernail that runs to claws at the points. A topology with many slopes. Strong willed. 21st Bought a broom. When I begin to think of publishing writing I run straight into the disapproval of people I've written for before. I stop. What I've written doesn't seem likely to win me any more I'd want. I'd want to write for my betters. But is that misunderstanding what writing is for - or who in a person can write? Am I soul when I write, or do I write for soul to read, do I court soul? What gender is the writer? She wrote for Denis Finch-Hatton, who was dead. As whom did she write? As Isak, who was an old woman in pain. Does it mean that her suicide was successful? His death and hers. Lions lay on his grave. I dreamed I was looking through my grandfather's gardening book. There were seeds in paper packets that weren't seed packets. His basement and a garden. It was pruners and secaturs I was interested in. What I was feeling yesterday - she would never write that - was the unfreedom of the hims and her in my thought, rubble apartment - a stickiness of the blood - so what do I do it for - clinging to imagined people, what does anyone do it for - that's the one to discover. 22nd This Jungian writer, what she gathers. In her story I say: I want him. I want to love him. I want to learn that still. I want to be what I am in relation to him. He's my chance. This is my road. Is there a man in me who gives me bad advice about men? Because he's not informed. A confusion: is soul image a man or a woman? Is David soul image or spirit image? What is K that's different from David? David is soul image. With K I am my own soul and he is hero-adventure. Is that ego or animus? What is Louie, that makes me fear her? She has been soul image as body-image, I fight because I want to be my own soul. And in the dark, only in the dark, not when I see him, not when I listen to him, a sweet immediate appetite for being fucked. Deep in the longest night, somewhere in the silvery dark, an episode so direct and perfect I sang through all of it, I lay, he moved, we didn't kiss, we didn't hold, remembering it I want it again, sweet, complete, for the first time I didn't touch myself and it was altogether there, every moment, sweet heaven unending, until he came suddenly, unwarned. And was willing to on with his finger. In the morning, again, his face appalls me, his speech bores me. I don't want to see him, touch him, hold him, think him, feel him, speak to him, nothing of what I adore to do with K. As if he isn't here. And then that physical openness K cannot get at all. K cannot give at all. What does it mean? 24th Baby sleeping on my shoulder, a dozen marble figures, a tacky foyer, Louie with dyed hair and red boots, Babette's beauty, saying at a table in the Broadway Bino's, Fear is not afraid. [visiting my parents in Clearbrook] The moment at the dinner table when I said "This is Christmas dinner" and he said "What took you so long to notice." In a dream last night she wrote me a letter I liked. I had to piece together leaves and folds of aerogramme paper. She said she was sitting up late after he'd gone to bed. A good mind she was writing with, sophisticated. She said overall she thinks K is a good idea, what was her word, risky, testy, neither of those. A phone call for me, Liz calling from the Welcome Café, she's in town. That section of the phone book torn out, I find her on the street. Waking in pain, lying collecting understandings. [visit Rowen's stepmother who has just had a son] Lise feeding the baby in an apartment in Kits. I say, "Did labour surprise you? Was it different than you imagined?" She opened right up. Put the baby into my hands. He's between waking and sleeping. I find I understand him. He needs hands' help organizing himself. I know how to do it. Put his belly over my shoulder so there's a pressure. When he's worried by sensation rub his back, speak to him in a voice that says "You go to sleep, I know what I'm doing." Keep both hands on him with some pressure. On the old Trans-Canada Highway at Clearbrook Road, a construction site, where on the second floor columns recently poured, eight or nine feet tall, were wrapped in white canvas tarps. I thought - caryatids - and they were the height of and held themselves like the marble St Pancras women [outside St Pancras Church]. Blind gods, blind but gods. Louie and I were hugging each other looking back at them across the street, up there among timber and re-bar verticals over the secular tackiness of Christian bookshop and doughnut café. What I saw when I woke before daylight was - that I am holding back from more than fear - fear is not afraid, dismay is not dismayed, love is not in love - is that it? Shame is not ashamed. It says he is ugly because he avoids his pain. In their tacky building, in the livingroom bookshelf with the Christian living books, I see - am I seeing? - DINESON - Isak Dineson's Africa - and take it home. -
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25th, 4 AM In a hospital looking through wards. Are there women, are there men. Apologize for stepping on an old man. He has a neat reply. I leave him beginning to talk to the next old man about what they used to work at. I am looking through corridors for a washroom. I have gone from one wing into another and now I see a third which is a step further down. I look into the beginning of it. A surgical wing I think, the wide corridor has narrow trolleys like shelves lined up many deep across and along it, with blood and plasma hanging above them in bottles and each with a nurse standing next to it watching the patient. Post-op recovery it must be. I turn back. One of the nurses follows to ask what I am looking for. A washroom. She says "There's one - I'll check who's been using it." She means I think that it might not be safe. I cry out that there used to be good washrooms. Thinking of clean tile, water running, a big enough private space, windows propped open, fresh air. She says there's one under the Bay. The wings connected underground are department stores above ground. I said I was there already, do I have to go back there? A long way. I emerge with the little girl who has been in the hospital, a very small light pale little girl dressed in a very light coat and hat although there is snow on the ground and the air is stinging. I am concerned that she isn't going to be warm enough with her bare legs. She is running ahead. Not my child but related it seems because she is calling after a figure who has crossed the road up ahead. There's Uncle Rudy. I am just transferring her. The coat and hat very pale green. When I saw the names of the stores, the Co op, I cried out again. I'd missed Alberta, the Prairies. The little girl runs up the steps of a house on this campus. It's a children's house I know, like Sunnyside. It's night, she's running into a house where the children have been put to bed. I come up the stairs carefully and find Peter Haagedoorn in the little mudroom or anteroom on the left. "Peter, it's Ellie Epp." I put out my hand. "And there's Louie Luciano" he says in a very different voice to Louie who's come up behind me. He's talking to her in an exaggerated Dutch accent, a kind of hamming I can't describe and that in the dream I watch with a kind of frozen dismay and wonder. She replies in the same way. It's a theatrical manner they've developed at some earlier time. It's the sensation of seeing how much livelier someone can be with someone else. She has changed her looks to match. Her hair is straight up and she has black lipstick on. He breaks into thick energetic Dutch. I wake. It seems to me they were mocking my yesterday's mind. They were saying it is what Louie calls saccharine. What they were being was very ugly to me. I see I said two things then. The hate in their tone might be right. 26 We agreed it's been like this. She wants reliable sex, sex every night. Twice, I say. She prevented herself for years and twice found women she could get to take over the job of refusing it to her. When they are refusing it she's free to want it. I want to give myself to loving a man. I prevented myself for many years and twice found women who worked at preventing me. As they fight my wish I am free to fight for it. I woke in the dark with my pang and said thank you for staying with me. - She has another sort of journal and wants to write in pen. Sitting on my floor yesterday she wrote fast. At night she read what she wrote. It's light, it's fast, it's her free run and it's an account of her walk through the empty city. She's done it, she has graduated, she has got what she came for, she is writing, she's telling what anyone would want to know about her. I tell her so. But I am annoyed too. I feel she got it at my expense. It isn't obvious how she did it but it's as if she should not have been screaming abuse the whole time she was building her voice. She got my best and screamed the whole time so that I wouldn't notice I was giving her my best. And that she's been so sloppy with what she gives me back - the way an afternoon with her tires me because she's so careless in argument, amazingly careless as if by obscure intention. Chasing her candy wrappers keeps me busy. Louie! You're doing it again. Some A is B to all A is B. I'm like the big heavy bull whose little eyes are being led anywhere the little matador decides. The little matador isn't going to kill me but she's going to lay down the cape at the exit and walk out of this little stadium into a larger one. Come on, get up on your little hind legs and stand your ground I hear myself say. That has to do with the way she's insisting on pretending she's got less than she has. A cheap trick. And then what's the last one. I yawn. Do you want a ride home? She's been at my house fourteen hours but she sulks. I'm controlling when she leaves, she says, but it's something else. It's that I won't sleep in a bed with her. I won't even lie on a bed with her. I won't pretend to trust her. No. Her sulk, which ends quite a good day badly, justifies my mistrust. She's still using love claims to try to get her way. Tricksy liddle thing. You don't give me your best. You are mis-estimating me. You are mis-claiming. Okay. What now. What was I saying when I woke. Can I remember the voice. It was about writing. It said sit up and write in this first moment. No - it didn't say that but it felt that. Oh day. Faint bright mist across the intersection. Sun nearer the horizon than it will be again in a year. But sun. Absent, but here. Here at a long angle. I have another subject, not yours. If I am giving out my own I'll have nothing bad to say about your use of me to tell your own. I can use that to know what I need to do: that would dissolve my enmities. Oh but then there could be real ones. There already are and I ignore them. Yes. You - can I feel you today. I felt you in the angle of the light. You are at the opposite end of an orbit that will bring you by me again. A holly leaf was you. I was conscious yesterday to set it near me wherever I was. What is holly. Slow to germinate, a very fragile transplant. When grown, fantastically resistant to invasion. A hedge-thorn, conventional. Winter gloss, a liking for cold that makes it burn. This year was good for holly - I've never seen so many berries. A small tree across the road from my mother's, shaped like a small tree but probably quite old, standing in front of a little house, the kind of house that in a place like Clearbrook looks like a spinster's house. Thin upper branches concentrating red. Gloss and resistance, sharp edges, a self-assertion fantastic by exaggeration, why would any leaf need this much defense. But it suits you. - [Duncan writes] "You came across everything." Why does he say that. He thinks it, he recognized his topics. I had traced them through. What now, as a writer? Yes but more - what now as a person. What is there for him to do. What is the answer to that. A woman he needs to trace. Soul woman. Can he find her in me? No. In his wife? Not really. Himself. Does she know everything. Yes. Is she as if his mother? Yes. "As if I met my mother." Should he allow her to talk? No. Should he speak as her? Yes. What does she want to say? She wants to come through difficulties. Should he speak as his actual mother? Yes. Is this a danger to him? Yes. What is the danger? She is. He is in danger of being possessed by her? Yes. Is he already? Yes. If he speaks as her will he be less possessed by her? Yes. Has he been reading that long poem? Yes. How has it been for him? Feeling my perfected work. His structure shattered. Justice. Reciprocity. Should he speak as me? No. Should I speak as my mother? Yes. After he has gone to bed. If I speak as her will I be free of her? Yes. - [Tony Wolff - structural forms of the feminine psyche readiness for perception, attention, response, readiness to meet an other a light burning only when opposites meet thought from the entirety of the net mother hetaira - relates to personal unconscious, mediates that. Danger is reflecting a man's personal anima, which seduces from practical destiny. If repressed makes lovers of sons and possesses daughters. amazon - consciously accepted as comrade, unconsciously feared and hated - opposite of mediumistic mediumistic woman - permeated by the unconscious of another person, lives it or collective unc an invisible function - always in danger of losing her personality to a man or a group - this one needs a strong ego - know the difference between the imaginal and the world - may see too far into the unc - prying - needs to be able to tell between mediating forms of unconscious and opening the door to chaos men have escaped 'inability to talk' is the feminine - moodiness in a man the unconsciousness of resentment, competition, in them is what is insidious She knows that if he can meet her in her body he cannot fail also to find her spirit. animus is a collective figure - may be a group of men each to be saluted separately - her grandfather was of the company - each dealt with separately, deeply, sincerely - to be sincere with animus - palabra de honor Like a fairy prince he understands nothing of our world, an autonomous spirit whose own concern is - he has no feelings toward us, no interest in us, except that we give him a place - consciousness uses him a metallic note in a woman's voice, some physical rigidity, irrelevance. Only an action will remove him. needs to be given the facts of her feelings, having no feelings himself he does not know them - she is too shy, too lacking in confidence to tell him - "This matters to me, here I stand" - unrelated intercourse He is not her inspiration, he holds no treasures - what she needs is for him to focus what she knows - through a woman man finds his soul - through man woman finds the ability to express the soul she is - say to animus, that isn't it, try again. Tears are the sign of deepest truth, the sign of what belongs to her. removing forms of animus that seduce away from life - collective ideas, intellectual exclusiveness, prigishness, false mysticism, the one who say she's no good The 'discriminating side' when employed to some purpose is fine. Animus leads her to knowledge that she is soul. honor love itself - love happens - being true to one's deepest need will also serve the other's - faithfulness to the needs of a unique relationship whose ultimate shape we don't know - we are elected into love - we take it up or not "One only loves those whom one serves" unwillingness to serve shuts it out - wherever there is love Self is holding something together - angels are archetypal images of it A woman always needs some person to do things for, some person for whom they perfect their art. Animus is not soul. but he helps her get to it - go with him - soul before education - a very feminine woman, soul child has not become a social self If in moments of extremity she appeals to the greater self, it will appear holding the soul image by the hand. essential core is soul - ego is chooser, speaker, 'is masculine,' ie focused - can analyze and discriminate - speech self and soul is feminine in both Aion - positive animus - figure of the father - mediator between consciousness and unconsciousness - personifies unconscious, gives woman's consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation, self-knowledge 'spirit or meaning' the eyes A projection of soul annoys a man because it is reading something into him that isn't there - it is in her body, where he needs to find it. A vase is an image of soul. in darkness of earth, 'luminous cavity' a moth, a girl with flowers in her hair, a woman in blue who is shy of being seen - emissaries of death are with her - soul is at home with death, image of self may come with it, an essential core which is waiting A gaze that cut to the deepest layer of your hunger, need and desire behind independence and self-protection. The world seemed a warm and hopeful place for the first time in a long time. She had no guilt, no hangups, no needs, no fears of the future, there was no way you could control or move her. Magic lover is a holiday from resistance, exists in proportion to resistance, suppressed fear anger and conflict which are unconscious, adores him, wants nothing from him, allows him to feel safe and in control, understands and loves] Chapters
[Opposite notes from Michael Meade:
27th Monday We went into it twice but - but - my heart comes only a bit - I'm with you - ah but is he with me - yes it says. [An ancient bird - insight, knowledge of past and future, flights, visions. It speaks. To breathe underwater - the wall around the heart must be broken open without breaking the spirit - spirit is fire - testosterone inhibits weeping - puberty seals the eyes - going into the water means, to them, crying. A sacrifice. Pull away from something loved and depended on. Kills the horse and wears its skin to enter the city. Become the other side of who I've been - walk on wearing the skin of - if doubt covers everything, faith will have to be entered.
Sacrificing the one who has brought me this far. Initiation consists of the willingness to set out with no certain outcome. The risk is always death. Only the brush with death allows more life to enter. Conditions on the soul. I could not change my mind, for my mind was already changed. I wanted it to be clear that it was my own necessity and not your management that held me with you. Yes. To be exposed to the extremities of one's emotion, spirit. To help find one's intention in life, heart. Passions, great imaginations, ambitions, fires of love. But to survive them move them into forms that contain heat yet keep the heart open. One day there will be an outbreak. Firebird. Fire spirit. He will be needed, he will be desired, the purpose of his life will be clear. The desire for risk is a beauty and a danger in men. Only through risk can he open his heart. There, a fire is already burning.] What I have to do is keep in touch with the sense of your experience, that you are experience. A sense of who won't support it, that I have to take my stand and that it gives me the moment of beginning of autonomy. [The deep caves of Lascaux and the heart of imagination, ancient images. Thrown into a competition that forces him to reach deeper, get smarter, try harder. The result is a flooding that needs to be acknowledged by a royal, which fixes the blessing and sets one on the road of learning to live with that way of spirit. Inner legends around those moments of heroism, knowing. A golden moment occurred and is revisited.] Being prepared for you prepares me off course. I have to see and feel every limitation, that's the only thing to keep me. Two parts to the rediscovery of the place of genius. We see the light in ourselves. Somebody else sees it in us. When both occur an outbreak of spirit. To handle it, I have to know my own wants. Know how to ask it for what you want. Trouble fear passion are signs of having come to it. We need tricks and special skills. Two gifts - turn mundane things to riches; mend spirits. Two dangers - get caught in its raging; concretize it into substance addiction. Two parts of the mentor Reorganized by coming and going between them - demanding and dominating, extreme with desire, risk, patient supportive knowledgeable about limits, intelligent in the midst of particular requirements, survival instinct These are said to belong to man-nature: violent emotion: quarrels, ruthless competition, possessiveness, power-drivenness, brutality, aggression that breaks; independence, courage, upstandingness, ideals, force that builds and protects. Behavior that seems to say the only soul is the child-soul and that it must be sustained or all life will end. Different powers are needed in the land of soul - longing in the beautiful and mysterious. Soul longs for beauty to match it own, open heart. The first danger of psyche is the breaking out of spirit. Second is keeping the heart open to the expansiveness of soul. A ritual of attraction, a center of waiting, wrapped in a fabric or art, the stories of the heart. A man is a boy whose heart has been opened through the eruptions of his spirit and the affections of women. A gain of feminine strength in the heart. He must stay still at the center long enough, singing in a way that wants only to keep open the deepest part of self. Passion become compassion, with his own heart first. If a man has not nourished himself with the stories he tells himself about soul he won't be able to hear the stories others tell him. If he can't sense the soul longings in himself he won't be able to grant a woman the sovereignty she asks for.] 28 [Permission. We ask for permission all the time and pretend we don't. We present our plan to someone we respect. We're asking for a blessing, permission begins the mission. We can ask it of those we don't know. Authors. The dead. They can do it. Biographies give permission. We use their authority to get going. We don't tell people we're making them King or Queen. We do this when we want to do something the soul wants. Permission is a requirement of the soul. We're asking for our effort, risk and vulnerability to be blessed. The more the soul is involved the more we need permission. Dwarfs and younger brothers. Quotations at the front of a book invoke the blessing of the author.] With K: it was so difficult a task, I had to concentrate, Louie took as competition with him what was extreme need to concentrate and be loyal. It's the nature of realms where beauty and form are combined that one must submit. In the case of addiction the doors between the worlds are continually but partially open. The mechanism for closing them is broken, gone, or stuck, and the addictive material is being used to quiet the lions. Look to see what substitutes for the more genuine ritual that can open and close the gates, feed the lions. There are always tests and fees at the gates. Initiation leaves a wound or scar by which you will be known. A funeral scar, a limp that becomes part of every step. The wound is the mark of failure to get through without a price. The ability to carry the wound and experience the sense of loss at every step.
The seven years signify the amount of time required to clear everything out of the way in order to open the door to the extraordinary and weird. This is the time spent gathering permission to go on the strange road of fate.
Four tasks after acknowledging the trouble Bow to the sovereignty of the other realm - understand descent Desire is tested, accept the size of the appetite that lives there - appetite for the whole thing
Road of the return of the repressed Radicals of the soul Fears that accompany them Ancestors Guides along the road between the incurable and the impossible Root images that accompany Strange extremes and deeply different aspects Weirdness Extremes of imagination, purpose and capacity Seek reasons for the symptom not in the past but in the purpose they aim at Appetite for participating, appetite for the whole thing - it wants to contribute to the quest for what is beautiful Extreme listening into the very ground, to know where the road is leading Shattering vision blinded Long reach Cold in heat, hot in cold Distance vision The weird companions are paranormals - paranoia, destructive sight, distance effect, emotional resistance, clairvoyance If the father was mostly absent the son will hunt into that emptiness; he will absent himself from many things. Who the slave self in a person, the one always on call, the opposite of the sense of grandness The father seems to get possessed by a denying spirit The bitterness of the father Those abandoned or abused who are looking for the garden, not for initiation. Not strongly enough connected to their deep self, to their family and to the human family to begin initiatory stripping. Psyche needs to be contained and bathed in love. Once they are secure in the sense of self, early experiences can also be seen under initiatory aspects. Work out what orientation is needed. If a man has never been heard he will have difficulty listening to others To the deeply betrayed child initiation is another form of abuse. To the abandoned child who has not been admitted back into life separation is not new but ever-present. There are stories that are this sort of revisiting of helpless loss There are stories with complicity Some sense that the teller was accomplice, a situation entered looking for something A gray area between doing and being done to There are resonances, terror with beauty, sorrow with firmness It operates in him as a gift and a womb because things keep coming out of it when it is opened Genuine stories make communities more genuine False and self-serving stories drain the soul of a group and a culture Learning to separate the psychic threads - stories that lead back to unfinished childhood and those pulling across the threshold to increase.] I want someone to say to me, you did good work with Louie. [The initiate is always scared, but healthy, eager, cared for, desiring initiation. That desire is different from the desire to be loved, reassured and taken to the bosom.] Michael Meade 1993 Men and the water of life: initiation and the tempering of men Harper San Francisco
aphrodite's garden volume 19
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