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Karalora's answer was simple and viable. Other views on the matter of life purpose?

A lot of people have a purpose in life. Most people are average, but I'm getting the feeling that the turmoil happening in so much of the world is going to bring a LOT of people to the forefront.

The bee was a good omen. My friend was swamped for a couple weeks, but she got back to me yesterday about Takotsubo and she's gonna send an email to one of the Asian-American theater companies about it.

AND I finished my math test without desperately cramming until midnight.

Now to hope desperately that I can get into theater this semester. Partly because I love it and partly because I have no fucking idea if not having one of my major's classes will fuck up my financial aid. Ganesh is assuring me that everything's fine, as usual.

A smaller example of life purpose that troubled me, is the idea of traumatic spiritual awakening. As though, one must have suffered the very worst life, so that they gain the tools to do the spiritual work of healing others. I sort of understand this, because the advice of someone who's never had it as bad as you have would sometimes be refreshing and other times...so damaging. At the same time, I don't like the idea of a grand plan where anybody must suffer such horrible things.

Lately I've thought more along the lines of that...if you've suffered horribly, and you make something valuable out of that spiritually, then that's not the universe being trustworthy, that's you being awesome. We can ensure that everything Means Something because we give it meaning, and rather than treating that sentiment as dismissive or accusatory (like, oh, my brilliant existentialism, we're all just making it up) it can be powerful.

Buuuut if it helps to get through a bad time by thinking of it as a purposeful spiritual test or training, rather than thinking that anything you make of it is all on you...far be it for me to harsh the mellow.

Thanks, Sharysa and Faemon.

I'm also bothered by the idea that one would necessarily have to suffer and struggle to have any spirituality. But I can't say anything about developing spiritually in dire times myself.

And perhaps there are people, who are comfortable never making any difference in the world.

I mean, we can't all be multimillionaires and celebrity actors—plus, not everyone would actually WANT to be. I like daydreaming about being in Hollywood and having millions of dollars as much as anyone else, but realistically, I'd be happy if I could make a comfortable living off of my art.

In my medicine-circle alone, one friend's mentioned that Great Spirit said that her purpose was to give people hugs. When she was in her twenties, she didn't really get it, but a couple decades later, she's fine with it.

As of today, I have started praying to Captain America to 1) get me into theater this semester for the sake of my sanity AND financial aid (especially my financial aid), and 2) make a dude friend stop asking me to hang out, since he clearly isn't listening to my repeats of "bro, I have a two week backlog of math homework that I need to get done, and I may or may not burn the fucking school down if I have to retake another math class."

My life is hilarious right now.

Sure no one would need to strive to be a multi-millionaire to find something purposeful to move them?

No, I meant that NOT everyone wants to be a multi-millionaire when you get down to it. Daydreaming about being rich is one thing, but most people are fine with "a steady job and a nice place to live."

If that can be counted as having a purpose in life, then I guess a life purpose could be called anything that someone has giving them a reason to live.

I used the expression "life purpose" in a different manner. Sure, it would be quite unreasonable to expect everyone to become visionaries or prophets or famous do-gooders, but I think managing to find worthwhile things to do is something too easy to dismiss as in "'My life's so busy, I have no time to think about finding my life's purpose".

So Peggy Carter is able to contact us as an ancestor-type spirit. Seeing as she's dead, though, she's not like my main ancestors who are usually spirit-pieces of living people.

Also, yesterday I met Tom Hardy's Max Rockatansky. My reaction was pretty odd—I went up and hugged him, and then I asked him if I was crazy. He said "No, no. Just broken. Everyone's broken, really. If you know that, it means you can fix it." He's pretty amused at how tiny I am, so he calls me "Sprog."

Then me and Sansa were stuck with Furiosa's group in the Wasteland for a while, because Sansa and I have shit luck. Thankfully, Cap got stuck there with us, but it was hard to call the rest of the Avengers since barely anything was working there.

It's a good thing that Spirit-Me's had a corset for the past few years, since I accidentally got caught by some War Boys who immediately went "Well, can't breed from this one. Just stick her in the Citadel and we'll find a use for her." I promptly flew out of the Citadel because, you know, shapeshifting. And my own specific totem is an albatross.

The Wasteland seems to bring out... issues? Subconscious things? The heat messed with me, and I started talking NONSTOP like a delirious person. Max and Furiosa told Cap not to shush me too much because "the words have been roaming around for a while. She needs to bleed them out before they get too sharp, or they'll get stuck." They only had me stop talking when they needed everyone quiet while they were checking for War Boys, and it was a very big effort.

Dionysus of all people met up with us and got us home. Although since this is MAD Max and not "Rational and Orderly Max," it makes sense that a god of insanity would have an easier time getting into the Wasteland than other gods.

Dionysus pointed out that whenever I meet a crazy person, I ask if I'm crazy, and none of them have said "yes" yet. The Fox? No, just hurt. Dionysus? No, just weird. Max Rockatansky? No, just broken. I don't think I really want an ANSWER, more like a check-in that I'm (still) sane.

Max and the older members of the Vuvalini were especially happy to get some breakfast, since they remember waffles.

Ironically, yesterday was a GOOD day. I saw two crows on the front lawn when I headed to the theater to chat with my friends, and my "Two for joy" interpretation was correct since one of my friends said she'd give the theater professor a reminder to keep working on getting me into the class. (Also, I'm NOT the only one with trouble enrolling. Good for me, bad for how shitty our district's education is.)

Edit: Well, the Wasteland visit seems to have kicked my anxiety into overdrive. In addition to desperately praying to Ganesh, the Irish gods, and the fucking Avengers, I remembered that I got a statue of Ganesh from my friend as well as the ritual. It's pretty tiny, so even when I check on my god-box, it's hard to see something about an inch tall. So I got the Ganesh statue out five minutes ago and anointed it with some poppy-scented oil. (Ran out of sweetgrass oil last month and had to get some poppy instead.)

I asked if it was all right since I don't know if he likes poppies or not (the scent itself is awesome, but poppies tend to symbolize sleep/death in a lot of culture because of opium/morphine), and he said that if it was the only oil I had, it was fine. I am still worried that some accidental death/sleep thing is going to happen, but the energy felt pretty good after I anointed it.

edited 22nd Sep '16 6:45:37 PM by Sharysa

Sleep is just a specific form of rest or calm. Poppy sounds like a good counter-balance to anxiety to me.

Well, the Wasteland trip brought out a bit more stuff. Apparently I only ask the gods for help with tiny things because I don't think they'd bother helping me with BIG things. Not that they can't, just that they won't bother.

So in addition to praying to the gods for help and anointing Ganesh's statue, the Morrigan basically ordered me to ask for a sign once everything's settled and I can get back to theater this semester. I settled on two crows thanks to 1) the "two for joy" meaning, and 2) calling back to the initial two crows that I saw when I dropped by class and had a pretty good talk with my friends.

The normally plentiful crows roaming around have vanished. None on the lawn or the telephone wires, the ones lurking in the trees are being very quiet, and I didn't even see any crows while driving through Oakland for my mom's eye appointment.

The Morrigan don't play, bruh.

Edit: I saw a crow flying right to left while I was driving today (Sept 24). Still haven't heard or seen any other crows.

edited 24th Sep '16 10:29:32 PM by Sharysa

So I hear crows and I've spotted a couple of single ones, but murders of crows are yet to be found. The Morrigan said two fucking crows are the sign, and she meant it.

Also, Dionysus is the latest god to try and get me back into theater. Yesterday I couldn't sleep (again) and I ended up crying like fuck because my life felt like shit. All I did was try to get an art class, and I felt like I shouldn't have done it because now I'm not in theater. (I don't normally feel that way, because art class is AWESOME and the math class issues are what ACTUALLY screwed up my schedule by forcing me to spend all my time on damage control.)

It's especially bad for me because the play we're working on is by an Asian-American writer, and I haven't seen Asian-American theater folks outside of the college in YEARS. I need to work on that play like RIGHT NOW, and I need to see his damn name on the script, and I really want to meet the writer in person, because it's proof that I can actually make it in theater and I'm not crazy for wanting to be an artist.

After I told Dionysus a longer and more hysterical version of that, he told me, "These words you gave me in your pain: I take them as offering to do my will." And I immediately stopped crying. Like, tears dried up, my face stopped burning, I started breathing properly. Not over a few minutes like you usually recover from crying, either—it was fucking INSTANT.

What the shit, Dionysus.

Huh. I was heading to a casino with Mom today and thirty seconds before we boarded the bus, two crows showed up.

I wore my Captain America shirt as a semi-joking attempt for luck, but I only got about thirty dollars since I pushed my luck too hard.

Going to see if the Cap shirt + two crows means anything later on.

edited 29th Sep '16 7:09:45 PM by Sharysa

Okay, so what happened after the two-crows omen was the OPPOSITE of happy since there was a sitcom cartoon based on a Filipina mail-order bride called "Mail Order Family."

Thank the gods that it got canceled after two days (and one extremely poorly received episode), but the fact that it got greenlit in the first place is just so much hassle.

Then I saw two crows TODAY and here's what happened. 1) Failed my second math test even worse than I thought I would. 2) Got a text from the theater prof saying that we're gonna start independent study for the student-written plays in November, which is great news for Takotsubo.

Chaos In Pandora's Box spiritworker forums has this list your spirit family and make post every two days dedicated to just the one for that day. I usually just go along with whenever we're meant to interact, then we do, and it means itself...but, this could be interesting.

The Soulbonding forums has been picking up on activity again (slightly), yay. I'm not entirely sure if there's more than a vocabulary difference between soulbonds and pop culture pagan requests that are more correspondents.

Otherworld's been mercifully quiet, and I really ought to focus on the tangible, but when someone on Facebook was asking around for someone to help them get back on the horse with the performing arts, I suggested Coppelia off the top of my head. Then I researched as a refresher and retracted my recommendation, because this is a balletic clockwork dancer who eats people's souls. I continued to have this vague feeling that she's still paying attention to me, the clockwork ballerina that is.

The overcast horror movie noir weather in corporeal life has helped with that, or opposite help with that if interacting with interestingly morbid otherworldly denizens are necessarily a bad thing.

I also listed all the pop culture media that I've ever wanted to incorporate, and put a strikethrough anything that I never incorporated. Some of those strikethroughs left me disappointed in me, but if it hasn't been relevant or numinous then I can't keep trying to hang on!

It's been a listful couple of months in spiritual development, which I guess is better than listless.

Crows are back to normal since I can hear/see them roaming around again.

Weirdly enough, I keep seeing pairs of crows despite 1) an average day, or 2) the opposite of the counting-crows rhyme's "two for joy" situations. Like a couple days ago, I saw two pairs of crows—one as I was heading to pick up some stuff, and the other when I came back.

Today, I'm basically resigned to retaking my math class. Like, I'm EIGHT CHAPTERS behind on homework and I have no idea if I can get most of it finished by next week (last day of class). This is because the website is really finicky and I'm not only doing assignments, but losing my answers because they aren't always saved the first time, and having to start over.

As usual, Ganesh is just chuckling and telling me not to worry. There had better be a reason for this nonsense.

It's almost Samhain and I haven't posted in this thread in a while, and I actually do have news of my own spirituality.

First things first: I did finally get over that rash (mostly—there's still a tiny bit of a flush around my neckline area). Unfortunately, the whole ordeal played havoc with my immune system and I have developed a very mild allergy to peanuts. When I say mild, I mean that if I eat some, patches of my arms break out in itchy pink bumps (eczema?) that respond almost instantly to hydrocortisone and fade completely within a day or two. I'm still hoping it's not permanent, because I really like peanuts and peanut butter.

Onto the spiritual stuff.

A few weeks ago, after doing this stuff for over 20 years, I finally discovered my Name. The time is not right to share it yet, but it was such a relief to finally figure it out. It's a simple descriptive phrase, almost corny-sounding, but it fits me in so many ways.

More recently, I realized that Honeybee is one of my power animals. Like her, I am a worker in wax (I make candles), I believe in female power and sisterhood, and I find collaborative projects oddly fulfilling considered what a loner I am normally. If I can find/make the space, I want to create a little honeybee shrine—just a small beeswax candle, a vial of honey, and some silk flowers (fresh real ones when they are back in season).

Yay for getting rid of the rash and finding out your relationship with bees! Sucks about the peanut allergy, though. Peanut butter is awesome. :(

Things were actually quiet on the spiritual side for me, but that's normal for winter. Cap seems to like it when I go to church, which is a strange feeling for me after the indifferent/negative reactions that most of my gods/spirits have regarding the Catholic church.

I have nothing planned for either Samhain/Halloween or All Saint's Day besides some pomegranate offerings and maybe eating lunch outside.

Mostly of because the "creepy clown" craze. They haven't caused any injuries/deaths yet, but clowns are actively harassing people, trying to lure people into the woods, some of them have weapons, and there's been at least one clown sighting in my region, so I am not going outside when there's even a slight chance of clowns.

On the good side, I saw an awesome Filipino version of Shakespeare's "Tempest" called BAGYO a couple weeks ago. When I was heading out to see it, it started raining and that's a good sign. Plus it's been raining a lot this week, which is always good in a drought. We got about three inches of rain so far.

We've gotten some rain down here too. Not three inches' worth, but it's been a nice refreshment after the periodic dry heat waves this fall.

Water Protectors take one last stand against the illegal and environment-wrecking pipeline construction in Dakota and there's been a call for supportive spellcasting. I'll stick with prayers.

Has anyone watched the documentary Broken Rainbow? It was made in 1985, and it's basically about the same thing, that there's fossil fuels in indigenous land so people already messed up by colonialism get re-messed up. It's happened before and it'll happen again. In local news, police use cars to run over indigenous people and allies protesting outside the US embassy. When I saw the gif of it happening, I got to thinking that there has really got to be protestor training. It's never safe to be there and show support for a cause that boosts a minority voice, but police are either (both) being revealed to or being more allowed to shamelessly be cruel and violent in their methods, targeting the very people their profession purports to serve and protect.

Neither the Lumad nor the allies present then could have predicted that the opposition would do that, but now that that's seen as a possibility, could there have been enough people to catch and turn the vehicle on its side or upside-down? Some signal for whoever can do so, to jump onto the windshield and block it, and for one side to clear off while people on the other side try to tip it over?

For there to be any call to wonder like this is horrible, because in a modern global age we're supposed to be civilized, and only fight each other about these things in court. But when my social studies teacher told me that Tienanmen Square was ordered to have no fatalities because that was being televised? I think that's a sentiment belonging to a bygone era. Looks today like physical force and violence is the most prominent and effective power that people either wield or are subject to. Although pulling apart the vested financial interests, letter-writing campaigns and courtroom paper-pushing, and managing media coverage are all parts...I watch and form the opinion that it's the violence that has the most effect. Protest movements need both bodies and strategies of the body, not only strategies of ideology. Actually, protest movements need whatever they're protesting against to just not because c'mon, but when oppressors break out the attack dogs and give the a-okay to vehicular homicide because they are the police...there's nothing for it but to break out more violence than the enemy's got.

I can't find the article about governor(? some high-ranking official named) Hale, who held a council meeting in some Stateside county I can't recall. These attendants and activists, who were only going to sit in to witness what was going on and say something, were to be escorted off the premises just for being on a list of names. They weren't being violent, but at some point being "escorted" out they had to link arms and form a circle to stop the police from getting to this one Black Lives Matter activist woman, and she started shouting as loudly as she could that she would never kill herself in prison, so if she dies it was not a suicide. That's terrifying that they had to do that, and it's clever that they thought to do that. It ended well enough that one of the people in the arm-link chain was able to talk about it.

...Meanwhile, I started working with Pearl from Steven Universe who I got the intuitive impression was telling me to do my laundry, so I did my laundry. I know this is a good, grounding thing, but I just don't like that I'm so smol in a world full of horrible awful things and smol o' me is not what the world needs to get Right. I def'nitely think we could use like a centurion of superheroes right now, or several legions. There doesn't even need to be supervillains, it's just so many people in 2016 were so horrible to other people.

Good that after all that horribleness, the remaining rash is mild and sounds easy to treat. Still annoying to have, if other nut butters would be rare or expensive if they don't set off the same thing. And yay for finding your Name! Two decades of Work! I like your ideas for a honeybee altar, too.

I've begrudingly gotten into Bardolatry as more than the Shakespeare fandom.

edited 31st Oct '16 9:12:11 AM by Faemon

What pisses me off about the pipeline is that the ARMED AND HOSTILE white folks in Oregon just got acquitted, and then a white-dominant community REFUSED THE DAMN PIPELINE for the exact same reasons that the reservation is protesting. Prime example of white privilege there.

edited 1st Nov '16 1:16:37 PM by Sharysa

Been invited by a friend of mine, who's a New Age -believer, to join him in a retreat one of the ucoming weekends. Some of his friends are Neo-Pagan. I've met some of them and they're fun folks to be around.

The date's not set yet, but I'm not impatient now. I look forward to meditation, chanting and all that guided visualization. I don't do nearly as much of it when alone.

Gonna see Bagyo again since 1) they made some heavy edits, and 2) I seem to have become instant Facebook friends with the writer and a large portion of the cast, thanks to my review of it being so well-received. And I don't have to pay for a second ticket, since everyone gets a free pass after they buy their first one!