Meanwhile that distant roar you heard a few days ago was the entire northeast United States learning that we were due for yet ANOTHER snow storm. 3-5 inches, they said. Wrong! We got between 10-12. Most of us screamed, “Nooooooooooooo ...!” in unison and sobbed like babies. We are so over the “average snowfall” amount for this year it isn’t funny.
Another thing I did: called the travel agency and had them send me the details of the trip to Sicily in May with the Sicilian Project. Now that it’s three months away, I’m finally getting excited about it. The Greek temples! The warmth! The ocean! The Sicilian food! Some festival, which I couldn’t tell you a thing about! But at least I have my passport renewed!
Went to Wal-Mart to buy a few more packing/moving bins; bought a “clearance” candleholder and incense burner because – obviously forgetting that I might actually need to use the ones I already had – I’d packed them. So, found a three-headed dragon one, looking forlorn and abandoned on a shelf. Looked up three-headed dragons and discovered I’d bought a Tiamat incense burner and candle holder ... said, “Cooool!”
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| Tiamat/Theia colliding with Earth |
Do I believe in any of it? Disbelieve? I’m not going to go through my opinion on that again – been there, done that.
But anyway, I have a Tiamat three-headed dragon sitting on my desk, wafting (coincidentally enough) tendrils of Dragon’s Blood incense all over the place. Smells nice.
I also discovered a good use for the bottle of cat litter I had sitting near the door for the next time I took a run to the Royal Crest dumpster. I could use it to stabilize a candle in a holder that was too large for it. Only downside: it smelled like cat litter. No, not USED cat litter; just the litter itself. When they say "unscented" it only means that they didn't add a fragrance to it. They aren't saying that you can't smell anything. I'm smelling chemicals, or whatever it is that they put in cat litter. Awful stuff. Mixed it with baking soda (which you could use for the same purpose all by itself, actually), and that took care of the problem.
Yesterday, I had something of a surprise in my daily meditation ... I decided to revisit the dreamscape I mentioned earlier (some would call it my astral temple; that sounds too formally religious for my taste) and start strengthening it. By that I mean focusing on details; making it absolutely real in touch, taste, sound, sensation. In the depths of this meditative trance, I discovered another opening into the space I hadn’t seen before and realized it was the entrance to the space from the other side. The surprise was when I brought myself back to full consciousness and looked at the clock, an entire hour had passed! That in itself was astonishing, as I usually start getting antsy after five minutes. So practice really does work when it comes to meditating. Also, I no longer need Christopher Penczak’s guided meditations to reach that level; I was able to do it myself.
Quick backtrack to Versace’s Eros if anyone is interested. I had the chance to inhale it!
You know me and my fondness (not) for fragrance descriptions, which are sometimes so bizarre and ridiculous you have to laugh. This one was refreshingly straight-forward: “ ... fresh, woody and slightly oriental. The fragrance includes mint oil combined with green apple and Italian lemon. Warmth is provided by tonka mixed with Venezuelan ambroxan and geranium flowers giving a fougere twist to the fragrance this way. “ (Fougere, by the way, is their one bit of pretentious nonsense in an otherwise comprehensible description: it basically means “moss-like” and refers to the woodsy components of the cologne.)
Oddly enough, after the Italian lemon (they make Limoncello from Italian lemons, which have a distinctive fragrance to them; grown mostly in Sicily, they may be unique due to the volcanic components of the soil), I smelled the vetiver (but only because I knew what vetiver smelled like) ... I will tell you one thing: I LIKED it. Very sexy cologne, and not because (or not only because) I’m a personal fan and admirer of Eros himself – it really does smell good. Plus ... you know ... the lemons come from Sicily. :) And if you’re one of those people who clean out and re-use cool-looking bottles and jars for witchy potions, you can’t do better than this one! That’s actually Medusa on the bottle, by the way.
In preparation for our next class on cleansing auras, I started reading one of the e-books I’ve collected: Leland, Charles Godfrey, Your Will Power (Also Called “The Mystic Will”), or How to Develop and Strengthen Will Power, Memory, or Any Other Faculty or Attribute of the Mind, By An Easy Process, The Elizabeth Towne Co., Publishers, Holyoke, MA, 1918.
(Irreverent Thought: ‘tis a pity he couldn’t have also developed the mystic will power to shorten his book titles …)
A bit of a meandering read, through inserted anecdotes, backtracks and sidetracks … still quite readable. Other authors have adopted this primary method in the intervening years: calmly announce your intention before you go to sleep and let your subconscious implement it. I’m quite sure it isn’t original, either - I'll double check, but I think Paracelsus wrote about the process as well, and I'm not sure where HE got it from. Nonetheless, for those of us who truly love to sleep, this seemed easy enough – until I tried to do it!
Over the last three nights:
- the first night, I drifted off to sleep right in the middle of formulating an intent,
- the second night I mumbled, “Wait, let me think of something to intend,” and then passed out;
- last night I passed out sprawled sideways on the bed before I even undressed, that’s how exhausted I was. Deeply regretted doing that a few hours later: one of my legs was still hanging off the side of the bed, and when I woke up, my knee was screaming in pain, having been bent the wrong way for all those hours.
I will report back on the “Will Power” results ... er, when I can stay awake long enough to try it. So I’m guessing Leland didn’t have a full time job that tired him out to the point of no return, eh? What I eventually considered was, “I will see all auras easily”, or something along those lines, in preparation for the next class.
[Next Morning Report: I haven’t been able to see my own aura yet, but I was completely shocked when I was able (for the first time!) to see the hidden message in one of those pictures that are sent out over Facebook and Twitter (“Can you see this message?”) and you’re supposed to respond in some way if you can. Until this morning, I was one of those people who stared at the box every which way and never saw a thing. I always figured it was either a function of being nearsighted, or of having a (now surgically fixed) case of strabismus in my right eye. This morning I looked at a box someone posted, and saw the words, “I can’t sleep” in it. Said, “OMG, I can SEE it!” Thought that was interesting coming on the heels of the vocalized intent before falling asleep, which I finally managed to do.]
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| Castel Sant'Angelo, Rome |
I was also reading The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition by Michael White (William Morrow, 2002) on the train. It was fascinating … until the Inquisition imprisoned him. I remember reading another review complaining that the author went into appallingly distasteful details of the christian sadism that went into the torture of heretics. I ended up closing the book after Bruno was put in the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome, because as beautiful as it is from the outside, the entrance flanked by angelic statues ... what went on in the inside is enough to turn your stomach. I could only read up to a point before thinking, “Their deity must have been so proud of them ...” and tossing the book aside in utter nauseated disgust. Anyway, that reviewer was correct: White really goes into detail about the depraved forms of christian torture.
Now here’s the weird moment: Bruno’s last moment of freedom was in Venice, where he was turned over to the Inquisition by a nasty Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo. I had a bad reaction when I first read the name “Mocenigo”, as in, “Ooooh, I don’t like him,” even though I had no idea who he was. Or did I? He was one of those well-known Venetian family names that I could have read somewhere and consciously forgot ... but the name gave me one of those inner shivers of horror, which is not typical of a name you read once or twice in a history book. This was personal.
Recalling my previously described past life incident, and looking it up to refresh my memory, I suspect I would have disliked Alvise Mocenigo (26 October 1507 – 4 June 1577) who would have been elected Doge in 1570, during the fourth battle between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and this was the memory I experienced while in Venice – as you’ll recall I was blissfully married to one of the young men sent to sea to fight them, and he had already returned alive from one such battle, which took place in the 1560’s. Giovanni Mocenigo, the guy who turned Giordano Bruno in to the Inquisition was before my time there. Point being: if the dislike stemmed from a memory, maybe the entire family was not well liked. Or at least not liked by me.
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