Friendships In Chaos, pt. 2...

We also did a ritual last weekend, my friends and I.

I haven't done that in a very long time.  Not even by myself, let alone with my old Temple-mates.

It wasn't even a proper ritual, really.  Just a little, nothing, throw-away rite.  But I was amazed at how it made me feel.  To be in that place.  To be with those people.

To be doing magick.

I had completely forgotten just how much I love doing that.  How much I love even just the sensation of doing it!  The feeling of energy flowing through me, like a conduit.  Finding the sense of the "flow" of the ritual, and then letting it pull me along.  The pleasure of power coming into me, and erupting out of me.  The drama, the spectacle, the art, the dance and the poetry of The Ritual.

It felt like making love with a best friend I hadn't seen in years.

When it was over, I found myself swallowing back tears.  And once again, I was struck by the sudden and almost overwhelming realization of just how desperately I missed this thing that I had willingly let go, honestly believing that I no longer had any use for it.

And maybe I didn't have any use for it back then.  And maybe I still don't.  But it's clear to me now, that I need to find a reason to do it.  Because it is obviously a lot more important to me than I had allowed myself to believe.  It is clearly filling a hole in my life that I didn't know was there; that I thought I had already filled long ago.

I know now that I need to do this.  I don't know why I need to do it yet, but I know I need to do it.

And I can't help but notice that this all happened only two weeks before I get the opportunity to spend an entire week doing nothing but playing with magick, with a group of the best magickians from all over the world.  Isn't that strange?

I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Friendships In Chaos, pt. 1...

Even though I can't talk about my concerns about the upcoming AGM, I had an experience with the IOT last weekend that I actually can talk about.  As usual, I can't discuss what we were doing, but for whatever reason, I had cause to get together with my old Temple this weekend, and that brought up a lot of feelings that went beyond simple nostalgia.

I realized, first and foremost, just how much I miss my friends.  It's a shame that my friendships got all wrapped up in the Temple the way they did, but it just worked out that way; most of my best friends were in the Temple, and the rest of my relationships with the larger group of my friends were through my friendships with my Temple-mates.  And so when the Temple slowly dissolved, and I lost interest in (and reasons to do) magick, then I also suddenly lost my connection to almost all of my friends.  They all live at least an hour away from me, so it's a bit of an investment of time and energy (and finances as well, with current fuel prices - even with my new fuel-efficient car) to go see them.  And over the years I'd just gotten used to having this set reason to see them all regularly:  the Temple and the IOT.  So, with that gone, I no longer had a regular excuse to get together with them.  If we were going to see each other, I was going to have to make the effort to stay in touch, and make the trips out there and back, just for the sole purpose of hanging out together.

But I didn't want to do that.  For a lot of reasons.  A lot of it boils down to the fact that I just don't do that.  Maybe I don't do it just because I've never had a reason to before, I don't know; but I know that it isn't something I do.  I like having friends, but I don't feel like I need friends in order to be happy.  So, if it takes any significant amount of effort to maintain a friendship, I just won't bother.  And I can't overlook the fact that I was high and drunk during a lot of this time, as well, which affected things in a variety of ways.  It left me with even less energy to expend towards maintaining long-distance friendships, as well as numbing me to any sense of loneliness I may have otherwise felt; I was comfortably drunk and/or high, so I never felt like I was missing anything by not having relationships with these people anymore.  And it was also creating a lot of other negative effects in my life, as well, and I wasn't exactly eager to share those parts of myself with my friends, people whom I'd like to impress, if I'm able.  And beyond being a fat and lazy drunk, I was also going through a lot of other issues at the time that I didn't really feel like advertising:  identity crises, marriage problems, spiritual voids, etc.  Frankly, I just didn't want anyone to see me like that.

And it's only now, after seeing everyone again this weekend, and the "looking back" that naturally flows from that experience, that I realize - it wasn't just that I didn't feel like I needed friends, or that I felt it wasn't worth the energy to maintain those relationships - it's that, for a variety of reasons having to do with my own feelings about myself, I actively did not want any friends.  I wanted to be alone.  So, I just went about my life, and didn't bother trying to maintain these friendships, and didn't think much about it.  And before I knew it, two years had gone by.  And if it weren't for the fact that I had to get together with them again for the AGM this year, it almost certainly would've been even longer before I saw any of them again.

But seeing everyone again this weekend also made me realize, I don't feel that way anymore.  I miss my friends.  And I want to be a part of their life again.  And I want them to be a part of mine.  And it is very much worth my time and energy to make that happen.

But I'm worried that I won't be accepted.  I'm really not the same person that I was two years ago.  And I know they're all expecting me to be.  Not because they're trying to force me into some pre-determined mold or anything; that's not what I mean.  It's just, that's the person they've known me to be for years, so who else could they expect me to be?  But I'm really not him anymore.  I'm not dark the way that I used to be.  I'm not a pervert the way I used to be.  I'm not into the same things I used to be into.  I'm sober for fuck's sake.  I'm not even really a magickian anymore.  I've mellowed out and matured so much in my old age (I'm not even forty yet, but I feel like an old man).  And I'm worried that when they get to know this new version of me, that they'll find him boring, and lame.  (And, I have to admit, a part of me is worried that I might feel the same way about them, as well.)  Being around them makes me feel pressured to be the person I was.  And I have to try keep that from changing me too much; I have to let it affect me a little (what's the point of having a relationship with someone if you don't let them affect you at all?), but I can't let it affect me so much that I compromise myself in order to fit my perception of their expectations of me, or in order to gain their approval.  I need to be myself - or at least the version of myself that they bring out in me - and I need to be okay with the fact that maybe some people won't like me as much anymore.

But I definitely know that I need to try now.  Because being with them again just felt good.  And it felt like the right thing to do.  And it made me realize that, even though I haven't let myself feel it for a long time, I really do miss them.

Witness...

As the weeks have turned into months, I've been discovering even more reasons to love my new commute.

When I describe it as a "backroad through farm country," that is not poetic exaggeration.  The road snakes past dozens of farms of every variety.  Dairy farms, horse farms, plow-plant-harvest farms, even more than one llama farm.  And as the season has slowly turned, I've been able to glimpse the changes occurring on some of the farms as I make my way past them every day.  I've started noticing that several of the cowherds now include a calf or two.  And I've watched the fields progress from dirt, to rows of dirt piles, to green lawns, to fields of waving shoots.  I'm enjoying the game of trying to guess what each of the plants in the various fields are from their early sproutings.  Most of them look like wheat to my uneducated eyes, but it's definitely possible that they could be some other grain, and it's even conceivable that some of them could be corn.  I'll find out soon enough.  I'm looking forward to that more that I'd like to admit, honestly.

I'm struck by how much I'm enjoying the opportunity to be a silent witness to this progress of biology.  And I'm reminded of the swallows from last Spring.

We really don't want birds nesting around our building, but because of the beautiful garden with its variety of trees and bushes and flowers and its never-ending source of water in the form of a bubbling fountain, wild animals of every variety are naturally attracted to it.  So, every year we come up with new remedies to stop birds from nesting in the places they nested the year before, and every year they find ever more ingenious ways to outwit us.  Last Spring, when they couldn't find any place else to do it, a pair of swallows simply built a nest directly onto a vertical brick wall in our building's entryway, eight feet above the ground.  Just to be clear, the nest was not resting on anything - it was simply glued directly onto a brick wall, by means of some unknown adhesive.  I was so delighted by the sheer audacious tenacity of this, that I didn't even mind being outwitted by a bird.  (And honestly, I wouldn't have minded, regardless.  I love it when nature reminds me that we don't know half as much as we think we do.)

But even better than this, was that every day I got to walk past these nesting birds at least twice.  And so I was given regular glimpses into their lives.  I noticed when one of them (presumably the mother) was in the nest every time I walked by, where before it had usually been empty.  I remember the day shortly thereafter when I first heard the cacophony of tweets echoing from the nest, and looked up to see the horrendously ugly faces of several new-born chicks squawking at me hungrily.  After that, I was fortunate enough to get to see their parents feeding them a time or two.  And over the course of the next several weeks, I watched those chicks grow faster than I ever thought possible, until suddenly they were full-grown birds, indistinguishable from their parents.

I remember the day I came home from work, and passing out of the entryway and into our garden, one of the birds flew directly at me, veering off what seemed mere inches from my face.  At first I was upset, wondering why this parent-bird was attacking me.  What could I possibly have done to threaten them, just walking by as I've done so many times before?  Following the flight of the bird up above the garden, I saw several of them swooping and diving in odd arcs, occasionally diving right at each other, often narrowly missing other objects in their path.  And they weren't going very high, either, tending to stay within the confines of the courtyard.  It was all very odd behavior that I hadn't seen before.  But then I noticed that the nest was empty. And with that, I finally realized that these were the new birds, not their parents.  They must've just learned to fly!  Probably that very day.  When that bird flew at my face it wasn't attacking me, it was a near-miss on toddler-wings.  It was probably just as freaked out by the experience as I was!  And now they were playing in the air above me, testing their new power and freedom, feeling the wind in their feathers for the very first time.  You could see they were still trying to figure it all out - still hadn't quite got the hang of it all, still afraid of going too high, or too far from home.  I had to just stop and watch for a while.  It was so beautiful.

Then, as Spring turned into Summer, I watched as the parents flew off, leaving their adolescents behind forever.  I watched the remaining birds grow until they could no longer fit in the nest.  Once they were too big, they perched on a nearby video camera on the opposite wall of the entryway.  The sibling-birds stayed there for weeks, too timid to leave home just yet, wanting to stay together, in the only world they'd ever known, for as long they could.  But, eventually, they disappeared.  First one, then another, then the rest all at once.  Looking for food, perhaps?  Or maybe a mate?  Or maybe they were just driven by an innate need to explore, or to start flying North as the season wore on.  I'll never know exactly.  But I remember experiencing a very peculiar melancholy when I first noticed they had gone.  I was sad to see them go, I would honestly miss them - but I was also so excited and amazed at the cycle they were a part of, and that I had been so unbelievably fortunate to have been able to witness so much of it, from start to finish.

I remember those swallows, every time some old codger on the condo board complains about all the bird shit in the entryway, and suggests some new way to drive out the "nuisance."  All I can think is, what's a little bird poop, compared to an experience like that?  Getting to be a direct witness to the cycle of our biology?  Being reminded of how alike we all are, how similar all of Life is?  Being given a direct insight into your place in our World?  Being fortunate enough to catch a glimpse, just for a moment, of a microcosm of the grand pattern on display throughout the entire Universe?  Being able to remember, for a time, just how absolutely fucking amazing Life is?  In the face of all that, who cares about something as trivial as a little bird shit?

I can feel the beginnings of something similar to my experience with the swallows in these peaceful moments on my commute.  I can feel the swallows, every time I see the fields have grown a little more, every time I notice a new calf I've never seen before, bounding after its mother on spindle-legs.  But this cycle is slower, and will last longer.  It will last until I see the fields barren and covered in snow, and until the snow thaws, and the fields are plowed again.  I catch these glimpses every day, and I string them all together in my memory, like an old flip-book penny arcade, and I feel as if I'm watching the cycle of Life on Earth in time-lapse, like Nature's breath - inhale, cold and lifeless - exhale, warm, vibrant growth - and on and on and on - as if I'm watching the planets spin round and around our star, as if I can feel the rotation of the Milky Way itself spinning off into the void, as if that longing in my heart is the tugging weight from the black hole at its center, around which we are all spinning, spinning, spinning...

And I am suddenly so still.