I had - and I mean this, absolutely - the great pleasurehonorspiritually deepening ecstasyprivilege dumb luck to get to see these two musicians in person on Samhain. They played this song (below) and one other (which I cannot find a video for, to my dismay) during the Samhain ritual I attended, and played on into the night after the ritual.
I lack the words to describe how talented this duo is. I'm completely in love.
(Here's their website, in case you want to check that out.)
This song is beautiful, but its lyrics touched me most deeply. Take a listen.
I'm all up in my story planning. Pretty much everything you say to me right now becomes fodder for my writing-imagination.
Government shutdown? Inspiration. Torn map? Inspiration. Riverbed drying up post-monsoon? Inspiration. Rubenesque beauty in a mini-skirt walking across the road? Inspiration. Music playing somewhere? Inspiration.
On Saturday, Jane's Addiction inspired a character - complete with story arc - and filled out the missing piece of another character's story. The real key was part of a conversation sparked by this song, in which Someone Who Wishes to Remain Anonymous described the song thusly: "it's a form of protest, but with nothing redeemable about it. It's totally selfish - just a big Fuck Your Order." 'Anonymous was smiling and energized; there was nothing derogatory in that statement - it was a compliment.
That's the kind of energy I've got going on these days. And if I'm not writing here so much, it's only because my creative focus is my novel, and NaNoWriMo.
I've been holding back. I made myself catch up on my homework before I posted a blog. ^That's something to be proud of, eh?
I've had a post brewing since before I left the hospital.
I went in Monday morning for my surgery, got out on Thursday. Why so long? Well, I kept running fevers at night. The first painkiller they put me on was morphine. Whoa. Big mistake. It didn't actually touch my pain, but it sure did a number on my stomach. Ugh. Let's just skip over that, shall we? They switched me to percocet, and things got better from there. So I came home. Whoohoo!
I love being home.
Before I came home, I had a moment I knew I would write about.
I was laying in the hospital bed, doing a whole lot of nothing. But that's not the important part. What struck me was this: I was happy.
I was happy.
The ever-present undercurrent of depression - wasn't present.
Whoa - didn't want to get my hopes up. Maybe this was post-op elation, or post-morphine relief, or maybe it was just the percocet. No, no I knew better. I've had surgery before. I've had percocet before. The undercurrent has never left. Still. I kept it to myself.
And it happened two more times: in these little moments with nothing going on, I realized I was happy.
At home, I confided in Archer that this was happening. He said percocet is actually kinda a depressant, so it's not likely to be a result of that. I don't know about percocet being a depressant (not that I don't believe him), but I know that I've taken percocet for my back pain many times over the years, and I've never felt a difference in my depression from it. I've never felt a real difference in my depression, period. Not like this. Sure the anti-depressants help, taking it from an 8 to a 4, say, on a 10 scale. But I'm at 0. Zero! WFT?!
I haven't even taken my anti-depressants since the Saturday before the surgery.
Suck on that one a moment, Big Pharm.
Still, I don't want to believe that it could be gone. But I'm not waiting for it to show back up. I'm on guard, like a chihuahua over the last donut: vicious and vigilant. I'm watching my thoughts; when they slip toward old sad habits, I scramble to right them, to set them back on the right path. I won't let myself slide back into depression out of habit. If I do go back there, it'll be kicking and screaming.
... a girl, usually. Like when it's convenient, which is most of the time. That means I often present as a woman. But my core is ambiguous, or maybe androgynous. If I need a label, the best one is genderqueer. Let's go with that.
... fragile, but not weak. I'm a survivor, despite being overly sensitive to the moods of my loved ones and fluctuations in my environment.
~
I'm also Eala Magee.
~
The nickname, Bones, actually came from something completely... what's the word?... irrelevant to anything meaningful. Inconsequential. A few years later, Archer and Hela gave the name meaning for me.
How I first acquired the nickname: The Army, you may be aware, is overly fond of alpha-numeric labeling systems. While I was overseas, I headed a two-person team that was labeled "B1". B-one. Get it? Yeah. That year, needed a screen name for a website (OKcupid, if you must know), I used "humanbones" on a whim. Because I was a human intelligence collector called Bones.
Ok, so that was in 2007. In 2011, I started dating Archer. Not so terribly long into our relationship, we were bickering about something via text (highly NOT recommended as a strategy for constructive argument, by the way), and I asked him (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) why he cared about whatever it was. He responded "because I love you down to my bones." It was the first "I love you" of our relationship.
He had already taken to calling me Bones because of my screen name on OKcupid (we met via that website). After his "down to my bones" statement, it became a thing. I started using "Bones" elsewhere, just because it made me think of him and smile.
Later, well... I already wrote a whole post about Hela's influence on me. No sense in re-inventing the wheel. Or re-writing the blog. Whichever. And the connection with my nickname... well, I had to get stripped down to my bones, psychologically, in order to 'fix' myself. More on why that's connected with Hela, here.
These days, I'm ... well, I'm tempted to say I'm a different person, but that doesn't quite ring true. I'm sure it seems that way from the outside, but on the inside I'm the same person I've always been. Only, without the false front I used to have. Without all the fear. Now, the inside matches the outside.
~
So, what does that outside look like? A painter, a writer, student, an aspiring psychologist and anthropologist, a pagan working with Hela, Odin, Sretya, Epona, and - unexpectedly - Bast. I talk to my dogs and my cat, who make me happy; they respond one way or another, for better or worse. I have only been without horses twice in my life - this is one of those times, and it makes me sad. I'm without a motorcycle, too, which also makes me sad. But I'm also a lover: anam cara to Archer, and girlfriend to Doc, and those things make me happy. Music makes me happy too.
These things have always been there, at least in potential; now others can see them too.
I don't know this guy.
I just found this video on youtube.
He's not a great dancer,
but he's better than many
and he looks like he's having fun.
I had fun watching him.
Maybe you will too.
[This moment of reflection has been brought to you by my upcoming first blogoversary, which will be 18 January. Blog party? Maybe. Let me get through finals first.]
I love this song. Maybe "love" isn't the word for it. I feel this song, deep within me - I know this feeling, that singular connection to place. That unobtrusive magic. Nobody's looking for it, usually. No human had to call it, create it, energize it. It is. It is natural. It's the spirit of place, or the energy of life coalescing, and we only find it when our mind is quiet enough to hear it speak. Like in the song, it's easiest to feel the energy of a place when we're alone - when we're not listening for other people, other things, other whatever. But maybe that's just me. There have been times in my life in which I felt completely alone except for the place I was in - the place was my constant, closest companion; I was lonelier for leaving it, and felt most comfortable when I was immersed in that place, and in solitude.
Every time I hear this song, it brings me back to Sioux City, Iowa. I was 11 or 13, or somewhere in there, and I rode my bike all over that city, alone and free for a few hours at a time. Those lonely hours were the least complicated, and most soothing hours of my time in that city. It was as if the city itself were my companion, and she was just as lonely as I was.
There have been other places where I felt that connection to a place, though each has its own flavor. Sioux City was the loneliest place I have ever felt. We had that in common. The woods of my father's farm felt matronly and maternal; I needed that so much, then, that I wonder if some of that wasn't my own projections. Either way, it served me well. The town I live in now feels happily social - its energy is fed by love from its inhabitants, and in return it sings vibrantly. If I think back far enough, I've always felt that energy - for better or worse - in my homes and even in places I've only visited.
We forget, sometimes, how important place is. Living in a place that has an energy dissonant to your own never seems to end well for the person, in my experience. The place has to feel right, our energies have to mesh cooperatively, if not smoothly.
For me, the energy of a place has turned out to be one of the most important factors in where I chose to live. I'm so very sensitive to the feelings I get from things and places... any feel of dissonance throws me off, feeds my depression and taints my happiness like a slow oil leak fouling a clear pond. It's more dangerous for being unobtrusive - sometimes I don't realize it was there at all until I move away, and it's gone. It was like that in my last home. I thought all the miserable feelings I had there were circumstantial (a lot of crappy things happened there). Looking back, I'm not sure that explains all of it. Since I moved, I have felt an aversion to even driving through that area. Again, I would have thought it was just me, but others have mentioned it as well. Others, who have no reason to dislike the place, have said they just don't like going there, and they're not sure why - it "just doesn't feel right."
It's an unobtrusive magic, but no less important for being so.
There was a time when this song brought tears to my eyes.
It seemed to epitomize everyone's struggle to find love, knowing it wouldn't last if we did find it. I felt we were all trapped in this tragic cycle of searching and loss, or settling for less than we sought, and it just seemed so hopeless, so painful, and so unnecessary - a product of human fears and mistrust which never allowed for purity in love. Yet, there is a levity in the song, and it speaks to the happiness found in seizing those moments we can, when we do have love, and live fully in those moments despite knowing they are fleeting. Or maybe because we know they are fleeting.
I don't know what Eagle Eye Cherry intended for that song to say, but that's what I felt, when I heard it.
I do know that I've finally broken the cycle.
The song means something different to me, now. I still hear the first story I heard, but there's an added thread. Save tonight, because even once we've found that love we sought, life is still unpredictable, and we never know when tragedy might strike. Somehow, that seems less inevitable than the severance of love by human foibles.
[This is me catching up on my Pagan Blog Project posts.]
Recently, I posted about my visit to the Rwandan Genocide Memorial. At the memorial site, there was a museum which housed a brutally honest evaluation of the causes of the genocide - that was enlightening. It also housed a large section exploring several (though not all) genocide events throughout history, including the Holocaust.
While we were leaving, I heard this from one of the other students:
"I didn't go in the Holocaust section. My mom is Jewish, so she doesn't want me to read that stuff. It's too upsetting for her. Like, I'm not allowed to read Anne Frank's Diary, or anything like that."
I couldn't even process it at the time. That statement just had so many things wrong with it, and I was already so discouraged and numb from my tour of the grounds. The statement struck me, but I put it on a back burner, knowing there was nothing I could say to enlighten the other student, and so hoping I would forget it. I didn't forget it. It's lodged there, begging to be dissected. So here we are.
Willful ignorance. Surely that must be the most egregious of sins. Except maybe, passing that ignorance down to your children, that might be worse. Or as a young adult, choosing to acquiesce to your parent's demands that you remain ignorant.
And then I thought... what is it that makes ignorance attractive? Why not learn when given the opportunity?
It's not something I can grasp. Intentional ignorance is, essentially, intentional weakness. Who does that?!
That student's mother, apparently. And, it seems to be heritable, like any other cultural disease. I have hope that someday, that student will be curious about the lessons history has to teach about humanity, and about her own family.
I don't know how useful this analogy will turn out to be, but I'm go with it anyway.
I've read quite a bit about Lorelei since first hearing of her [from another blogger, cited below], but I keep going back to that first blog, and something she said: "So great is her beauty, and so sweet is her song, that sailors are distracted from their vigilance in the dangerous waters and are drowned."
Ignorance, I think, is like Lorelei's song. It's sweet and beautiful to those who hear it, but it is embraced only at great risk, because it masks the dangers around us. It would be so easy to just shut out the things we don't want to hear, in favor of those that sound sweet to us. But reality isn't sweet, it's dangerous. When we close our eyes to those dangers, we risk our lives both literally and metaphorically. Beauty is only skin deep. At times, it hides greater beauty. But at times, it also hides a path to destruction. The key to knowing the difference, is learning.
Perhaps that's the attraction. Perhaps some people just choose ignorance because it's easier than facing reality. I will admit to having done that, at certain low points in my life.
I pray I don't pass that behavior to my child. I pray that I can hold myself to a higher standard.
~
Credit where due: I began my readings about Lorelei here, the blog of Laurelei Black, back in June. The quote is from that same blog post. She also linked to this site, which hosts a collection of Lorelei poems and lyrics.
At first I just loved her voice, her talent, and the soulful quality of the songs. The only song on the album that didn't strike my fancy was the cover she did of The Cure's "Lovesong" (even Adele can't out-sorrow Robert Smith).
Some of the songs could have been written about my past lovers - "Turning Tables" was certainly about my ex-husband - but mostly I just enjoyed the feel of the music.
Now I see it differently.
Now it's as though most of the cd were sung to me, from my lover's point of view. It's not a complimentary perspective, but it feels true. Listening to those songs now is both moving and masochistic. When I shift away from the immediate, I see more clearly how other people have treated me the same, at different times in my life.
