Last night at midnight I did my new year’s eve prayer, as always. All I asked for and ‘accepted’ was that there would be tons of positive change and I would really release things holding me back and down and grow in good ways and that a year from now I’ll be almost a different person, so much improved.

01 January 2012

I am up to Marcan in the Aeon round to ask them to help me “allow myself love and vulnerability.” Marcan is associated with Leo, 5th house, creativity and psi, and like all the Aeons, is unique and amazing and special to me. He is also associated with Sun. The first time I met Marcan  was in a dream. He reminded me a bit, in look/feel, of this character Marcus in Babylon 5 (Jason Carter).  (Perhaps some brother-overlay: my brother was a handsome guy with black hair and blue eyes.) I once had a great time with Marcan energetically and the side-effect that followed, to my surprise, was a real heart chakra integration.  Maybe that’s because he’s more ‘directly’ associated with Sun.

We breathed together, a typical Aeon-round practice. And then he held onto me as we lifted up high and tons of people appeared all around us, as if we were up on a stage. Everyone was quite pointedly staring at us, especially at me.

He had his hand on my lower back and he leaned down and kissed me. I felt instant humor — again with the kissing! But I noticed that now, I can recognize an IG-kiss, an Aeon-kiss. They are different from each other and different from an ordinary kiss. The Aeon-kiss is mutual, we are ‘trading’ energy (as opposed to the IG-kiss that feels like I am being resuscitated and ‘fed the light’). But it’s a more expansive feeling than romance. For example I can imagine every possible thing fitting into this feeling of trade. Including official trade agreements for interstellar commerce between planetary regions for example — I mean really offbeat stuff, anything at all, as if it’s more a ‘concept’ of trade that spans the universe of everything that falls into that archetype of meaning.

Then I started to feel aware of everybody staring at us. They’re thinking you’re beautiful and I’m fat, I said to him, feeling humiliated suddenly and pulling away a little.

What matters is that you are thinking of how they feel, when you should be thinking of how I feel, and how you feel, and how we feel, he corrected, going back to kissing me again. Then he whispered, Ask yourself why. Why is your focus misplaced like that? And he pulls me closer for a long kiss.

I tried to think and ‘feel’ about it. It came to me but I didn’t understand it at first.

There was a concept overlay with something in the book ‘Evolution’s End’ by Joseph Chilton Pearce. He talked about how if a child is not allowed to concentrate and immerse themselves in things, without having to develop this fear (which I learned from the Private Oracle literally creates energy blocks in a person) that any instant, some adult is going to leap out and scare the crap out of them and yell at them and punish them, that they lose the ability to focus-in as well as other people as they grow, it affects learning abilities, and I think the ability to truly bond with other people and to wholly commit or dedicate to something, I don’t think those last things were in the book, just my feeling right now.

Anyway that was like a concept-overlay, the main thing that came through was distantly “like” that though: that interruptions in interpersonal relationships in my life had greatly affected by ability to hold one solidly without my attention being distracted, without worrying about what other people thought of it, of me, and it had caused me to become the separate-observer as a defense, instead of the first-person-living.

I wondered what could cause this, since I had no recall of relationships interfered with.

*

Then I remembered being about four years old and something about the girl up the street, but I couldn’t grasp the memory.

I remembered being five years old, and very close to my older brother. There was incest involved, except being five and that it wasn’t hurting me I didn’t have any negative feeling about it. It was something that made him happy which made it seem like something good to me, although I understood it was considered wrong by others for some reason and I had to be quiet about it. My mother was suspicious and several times she would burst into the room, flip on the light switch and pull back the covers, where he (just turned 12) and I (age 5) were sleeping, but I had always pulled my nightgown down in time. I remember the time I didn’t, and she freaked out, and he was dragged out of bed and beat with a board designed for horrible spanking and I was in disgrace and they wouldn’t let us sleep together after that. I hated that. He was my best and only friend at that point and I wanted to be with him.

Later when I was 8 he was my only parent at times when we lived with mom. He was 15 then and he had a life of trauma, though it was light years better than when he was a little kid. His dad was a horribly violent alcoholic who beat him nearly to death repeatedly, raped him, all kinds of stuff. His dad trained german shepherd dogs and he used to chain up the craziest ones and then put Donny who was just a little boy, out there with them, so his back was to a fence and the dogs’ chains let them get about a foot from him but no closer. He’d tell the dogs to attack and they’d go crazy trying to kill the boy and his father would yell at him about how he was a coward and other bad/epithets as he cried in his fear about the dogs. You can see that he was more than screwed up by the time my mom dragged him back to live with she and her 2nd husband, my dad. She and dad split a year or so later when I was 6 and Donny was 12. He stayed with her, and I went with my dad, until I was 8 when she took me, told my dad she was dying of cancer and he could have me back over her dead body, which would just be a matter of time.

So when I was 8 and he was 15, back then you could put a kid in juvi without them committing a crime, just by calling the social worker and telling them you couldn’t deal with them anymore. Mom did, more than once. Donny was wild and I’m sure being occasionally kidnapped and imprisoned for a bit didn’t help. Mom was seldom home in the evening, she was at bars, she had become an alcoholic after the diagnosis, and she was poor and living in the worst neighborhood in the county and just didn’t want to deal with life. She’d leave me with him to babysit. He had no intention of sitting at home with me, instead of being with his friends, but he was afraid to leave me alone because we lived in a neighborhood that was just not safe. So he kept me with him, making me promise not to tell mom. But of course, he was a total delinquent. His friends and he would use butter knives to unscrew the kind of screens on houses back then in that area, and put me threw one of the windows. I’d open the back door so they could come in and we’d carry out all the stuff worth money, into the truck. Eventually to the pawn shop. I occasionally got stuff I wanted out of it, insisting they let me keep something.

Often when I’d walk to the store in the morning — because I shopped and cooked, mom was sick, when she was home, most the time — older boys would try to beat me up to steal my food stamps. I was a helluva fighter. I remember when I was barely-5 and we lived in Oklahoma, there were a ton of neighbors nearly all boys and nearly all older than me and I’d had to fight every one of them, and I’d always won, which seemed impossible even to them since I was so small and a girl and several of them were around 7. I can’t today imagine any 5 year old winning a fight with any 7 year old. Especially a girl vs. boy. But I’d already figured out the secret. You just had to ignore your body entirely, keep swinging and kicking and above all else, refuse to cry. If you could just keep doing that long enough, any enemy was eventually going down. My brother was always so mad that they fought with me but so proud that I’d actually won. By the time he came frantically running to save me they’d be on the ground bawling already so he didn’t have to. Anyway in our projects neighborhood the boys were giving me shit and so far I’d scared them off or won the fights but I wasn’t sure that would continue. We stole a switchblade in one of the houses that I pocketed before anybody saw it, I was handling that room that must have been a teen’s I was guessing. I was pretty sure my brother would never let me keep it, and god knows what mom would have done if she ever saw it. But I felt a whole lot better just having it.

There was a big bottling corp in that neighborhood. Jetties of bottles, stacks of cases about four foot wide and twelve foot high and thirty feet long (guessing here, size/distance from kid memory probably isn’t good) backed up to the 12 foot brick wall that separated it from the neighborhood. They’d put me over the wall around 1am or so, when there were only the dobermans guarding the bottles and not humans. The bottles had a redemption value that back then wasn’t much diff than today, but the economy certainly was, so they were worth some money, to teens with no income but what they could steal and hock. I’d creep out along the top of the bottles, trying to be quiet so the dogs wouldn’t hear me, but eventually, either they did or they smelled me, as they would always come to get me, going crazy leaping up to get me but they couldn’t reach me. I was scared as hell of them but I learned they couldn’t reach that high, so my fear diminished. I went to the far edge to get the bottles because that’s where they stacked them from and that way, it would look like that stack just wasn’t full yet, or like anybody taking them had done it from inside the plant (so they wouldn’t suspect us kids from outside). I’d carry as many bottles back as I could before they decided it was enough, and my brother would catch me as I scooted off the high wall.

I’d spent a lot of time convincing the guy who worked the local 7-11 (or some version of that kind of store) that my dad was nearly living in the bar in the corner of that stripmall. The guy felt sorry for me. Back then the laws weren’t quite like they are now, not so strictly enforced. My brother and his friends would trade the bottles in at the grocer the next day, then some of the money they would give me to go buy them cigarettes at that store, as I’d tell the clerk it was for dad, ’cause they were cheaper here than down at the bar, and he would sell them to me. I negotiated with the boys: they had to give me candy money if I was getting them cigarettes. My brother was nearly my parent by then since I was with him more than anybody else and he was 7 years older. He was often totally exasperated by having to put up with me especially around his cool friends, but he insisted on keeping me near him and refused to let me drink or smoke which I wanted to since the cool older kids were doing it. Then they kidnapped him for Juvi again and mom and me moved, and then for a long time he wasn’t with us. We were homeless and slept in her car and with people she met in bars. We lived in the park in a tent for awhile. We lived in another projects house briefly. I remember I used to wake up to Charley Rich singing ‘The most beautiful girl in the world’ on the radio while mom was getting ready for… I think beautician school, in the morning.

Mom got a boyfriend who worked for the city, he did jackhammer type work, hard stuff, he was a manly man. We moved in with him, to his 1 bedroom apartment and I slept on the couch. Mom was then working as a hairdresser by day and going to school as well to learn to be a secretary and she practiced typing every night. I would wake up to find she had put the dining chairs so their backs were over the couch I slept on, and draped the whole thing in a blanket, so the light and sound wouldn’t wake me up. I got used to the feeling of a ‘clubhouse’ effect and the sound of the typewriter. She used to tell me about this little necklace she had with a mustard seed and how it symbolized hope and how she would be able to get a “real” job that paid enough so we didn’t have to be on welfare and didn’t have to depend on anybody else, and I know she was exhausted but she stayed with it.

Mom was hospitalized for something then, and she had a ‘colostomy,’ a truly disgusting thing that sends your bowel content into a bag. Her boyfriend stayed with her though. Although with caveats I guess. She was released from the hospital after the surgery and the night she got home they were watching something on TV, and got into a verbal fight, and he beat her up. She was 5’10” in an era where most women were 5’2″ or so, and she was big-boned, and she fought back like a man which shocked him and made him even madder. By the time it was over I was riding his back like a monkey trying to stop him — which became a habit during their fights — and he had overturned half the furniture including to begin with the recliner-style chair she’d been sitting in while she was in it, and he threw us out and locked the door. Mom pounded and yelled insisting that he throw out my shoes and coat because it was cold. He finally tossed them out the window. He apparently got over it since we were living there again shortly after.

I remember one time, after another fight, she stole his coin collection, and took me to the local carnival. Then the next day she had some guy friends of hers help, pried open the window and carried out the stuff. The guy – Stan was his name (that’s also the name of her oldest brother) – later said she’d taken everything but the goldfish, including the goldfish food, and he joked about it. He moved in with us in a 2 bedroom apartment nearby. She was sicker then and I don’t recall any physical fights after that. He and Donny didn’t get along, to understate it. Donny was never home when he was, on purpose I think.

Stan and mom would often leave for days or more, allegedly they were in mexico or other places looking for alternative cancer treatments since nothing mainstream could help. I believe that mom gave the neighbor lady food stamps and money with the promise to watch me but she didn’t, but I don’t know for sure. Donny was again stuck parenting me, if I was to have any parent at all, which sometimes I didn’t, as he seemed to think as long as I was with Gina, my best friend who lived on the corner upstairs and whose mom would feed us and who I sometimes stayed overnight with, I’d be fine. I got dressed (in the only of 2 outfits I owned) and made it to school daily so nobody would get in trouble, which I felt like would be me. I stole from the local 7-11 horribly, all the time, for stuff to eat. That later crashed because my best friend Gina was an incompetent thief and got us caught and 86’d.

I had built a clubhouse into these oversized locking closets that were in the carports, one that nobody used. My brother had one, all the bad-boy teens did. Me and Gina actually managed to get all kinds of stuff in there including food. I’d swipe cigarettes and trade them for other stuff. Gina’s mom was unusually permissive I think and we were out till very late together all the time. As long as we were in hearing distance of her mom calling us she didn’t mind, I think she considered it a fairly safe area — the apt. complex was in a much better part of town than the projects had been, and I suspect most of the people in them were lower middle class, not poor. Me and Gina had a close-up UFO experience during that era, which is in Chapter 11 of Bewilderness.

But one day my grandparents came and got me and I didn’t even get to say goodbye to Gina. I lived with them for awhile. Dad would pick me up every other weekend. I remember once, Mom — who had cancer everywhere including brain by then — was sitting with us in the front where dad would drive in. This is in Ojai and it was a quanset hut on 5 acres, with the back border a creek and the front border “old creek road” this winding 2-lane foothill highway. The front half of the property was a steep driveway, dirt, an impossibly gigantic tree that my uncle who worked at the Edison company shimmied up like a power pole and hung a thick rope on for a swing, near the fence there were the almond, walnut and cherry trees, and then there was a fence and the rest of the property. Grandpa had two of every kind of fruit tree you can imagine, plus raspberries and blackberries along the front side fence, and a garden out back. There was a shed out back with old clothes and an old piano, and woodpiles all over for the wood-burning stove — lizards loved the woodpiles — and the creek was great, I spent a lot of time there, skipping rocks mostly.

Anyway we were sitting in folding chairs out front waiting for dad to drive up. And mom stands up and says well he’s here, time to go kiddo, and there was nothing there. She described him and what he wore and everything and to her the car was right there in front of us and we couldn’t see it. She was really upset and got very quiet. I could tell my grandparents were upset too. 5 minutes later, my dad actually drives up, and she doesn’t see him. Seriously, the car was ten feet from us and she couldn’t see it. It was like her brain was time-displaced or something. They were all even more upset then.

Dad never took me back. Eventually he took me to see mom in the hospital. She had an oxygen mask on, that she kept taking off constantly to tell me that she loved me. The entire extended family was sitting in the hallway, which was the most family I’d ever had in one place for eons and seemed very exciting to me, my uncles were there even. I sat holding her hand for awhile, and then went out into the hall which seemed more interesting, and dad took me home. Thing is, nobody told me she was going to die. I know, nobody thinks to tell a kid that. But I expected her to get better. I mean she’d been in the hospital many times and she’d always come home, right? So I had no idea that would be the last time I’d ever see her, and that I just got bored and walked away (great, how to be guilt-stricken for life) and left her alone.

Not long later though, I dreamed she died. It was in the early morning just before I had to wake up for school. We talked about it all and before she left, I ‘understood.’ It was kind of in the back of my mind all day, but then the next day, I realized that nobody had said anything to me, so I guessed it was just a dream. That night, dad asked me to go grocery shopping with him. That was odd, as this was normally done by his wife and me. After we were done he drove up this hill in Ventura where there is a big lighted cross, and parked on the side of the road in the dark a ways down the hill. He told me it was a night that I would always remember. Then he asked me if I had any questions about my mom. I said, “Why did you and mom split up?”

He said, “She told me to get out, and to take you with me.” I said, “Dad, I was there. I remember. She was putting on her makeup and she said ‘Suz, your dad and I aren’t going to live together anymore. Who do you want to live with?’ and I was frozen for a minute and then I yelled ‘Daddy!’ and ran over and got on your lap. And that’s when we went to live with your friend Paul in Saticoy.” He was silent for awhile and then he said, “Your mamma died yesterday. And I wouldn’t lie about that.” And he burst into tears, he was just bawling. But I wasn’t even surprised. I knew the dream was real then and I was oddly ok about it all. But I was incredibly upset that daddy, the biggest strongest figure in my life, was bawling his head off, and I felt like I was supposed to cry. So I cried a little. More because of him than for myself. When we went home, my stepmom put her arms around me and told me that she knew she couldn’t be my mom, but she’d be the best she could for me. She was already pretty psycho but it got a lot worse once she didn’t have to worry about me telling mom and her coming and kicking her ass over it, I suspect. She seemed sincere at that moment, though, she probably was.

After mom died, nobody in the family came to visit me, nor did my dad and stepmom take me to them, and mom’s family all lived in my town or the next over yet when she died it was like they all vanished too. I have a lot of resentment about that. I barely saw any family until I was 18, an adult myself, and went to find them… most of them right nearby. All the years I was trembling in bruised terror and they were half a mile away unconcerned. My brother was the only one (and sometimes my grandfather). He would come to see me, I was 9-12 during that, so he was 16-19, and my stepmother would refuse, and he would plead, insisting he just wanted to talk to me for a little while and make sure I was alright because I was his little sister, and she would get mean, and he would get angry, and she would get haughty, and he would start swearing, and they would have some huge fight that would end with the door being slammed and me never getting to see or talk to him. It happened several times. I think he felt very parental about me.

He did see me a couple times by accident, catching me outside. He saw the bruises on my jaws and upper arms and the belt welts I showed him on my back (most were on legs and butt, but I wasn’t going to take off my pants) and I told him about how she hurt me and he just completely went nuts about it, and I think he tried to talk to my dad which also ended up in an angry match. And this despite that my dad was more a dad to him than his own — dad says just last week that he had a lot of regrets about my brother, about not making more effort to be closer to him, although he was fairly supportive to him when my brother became an adult. All I knew at that age was that mom was dead and dad was never home and didn’t believe me that his wife beat me for made-up reasons every day and my big brother felt like all I had in the world but nobody would let me see him.

I remember when I was 12, he came to see me and I was folding papers a block away on the street corner. I helped my stepsister with her newspaper delivery route and then later had my own. Somehow my stepmom found out or just saw us on her way somewhere, and she showed up in the car and ordered me to get in and I had to say goodbye to him, after only having seen him for a minute or two. She yelled at me for talking to him and I defended myself, saying that he was my brother, so of course I should talk to him. She snapped, he’s your HALF-brother! as if that mattered, and I said angrily, Well you’re my STEP-mother! — and that didn’t end well when we got home, as you might imagine.

I spent a lot of time dreaming about mom. It was only a misunderstanding, she was not really dead, many of them said. I spent much of the rest of my time bawling in rage that she had abandoned me to my stepmom.

It seemed strange to me that all those memories just came flooding back in the middle of Marcan kissing me. Like some kind of review of somewhat connected pieces of my life. There were a few others that didn’t involve my brother, later in life, but I can’t remember what they were now.

*

Then I got back to the point, Marcan and I standing there, and it’s so odd that we are kissing passionately and yet the passion has absolutely nothing to do with romance at all, although I sense it could, it just doesn’t right now.

I understood what he was conveying, in a fashion at least: that for the first dozen years of my life, I’d bonded to my father who abandoned me emotionally, to my mother who died on me, and to my brother who was repeatedly pulled from or kept from me, and that I had some issues with any relationship threatening to be too long-term or too ‘much.’

I wondered if this related to the misery of my former marriage, but decided while the ‘energy’ is probably involved somewhere, that the circumstance don’t merit blaming myself for it, so I let that go. I felt like he was telling me that I had learned not to trust, not to allow myself that vulnerability, and to some degree also learned that I was alone with the worst of things and nobody was going to help me.

Marcan was there in my attention again, and he said something like, “Now focus on ME, how I feel, how you feel, how we feel. Nobody else.” And I did, and then I found myself in this unrelated memory of stuff I recently did. I realized I’d lost the focus, like “triggered” right out of it.

“Whoops,” I apologized as I returned to him. “Again,” he says, and the same thing happens again, and now I realize I’m thinking about something stupid and trivial. I know it’s not related, it’s just a ‘mundane memory’ — usually like of chopping onions or something. My brain is being nice, I realize. I’m not triggering to unconscious, it is dropping me in a mundane memory like I’ve requested it do, so I can “realize” and pull myself out and go back. And I had to go back. Because every time I truly tried to do this, I would find myself elsewhere. I kept going back and Marcan didn’t seem to have any judgement about it.

Until finally, maybe a dozen tries later, I was able to truly stay with him, stay focused on only us, and then it felt like he merged into me and I felt the rushing that suggests it worked… something did, anyway.

So, one more down. I honestly didn’t expect that a brief “show me love” sort of meditation with Marcan was going to end up being some gigantic reliving my past and emotional trip and understanding about such things, but I guess that’s why I felt I had to do the Aeons first with this, and the Four after.

After Marcan in the current Aeon-round is Laelee. Whenever I get to her.

P

PS Oh and look, I managed to write an untenably long boring post with drama/trauma memories. So I guess I accidentally side-swiped the PTSD self-therapy with some of this too.