Lust, Libido, Crones and Cowsills

The homework assignment for this month included making a presentation on the Triple Goddess concept, to which, I’ll admit, I’ve never paid that much attention. 

The aspect to the concept which bothered me somewhat – okay, bothered me a lot – was what seemed to me the greater emphasis placed on the maiden (virginity) and the mother (childbirth), and less on the Crone which was described in many sources as “wisdom, repose, death, and endings represented by the waning moon.”  Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Goddess_%28Neopaganism%29

In fact, I objected to this rather vociferously in the last class.  Reason:  my reproductive plumbing was surgically removed from me a long time ago – in my 30’s – and trust me when I tell you I have never regretted it, given the monthly agony I went through at the time.  Did it affect my biological urges?  Not in the slightest, as you can tell from various posts on this blog.  But my point is, based on this overall concept, I was surgically made into a “crone” in my thirties.  I still went “over the moon” during sexual encounters just as readily as I did before the surgery.  I never lost my creativity, my lust for life, my energy.

I will say that immediately after the surgery, there were several months when I did think I had lost my libido.  The most handsome hunk in the universe could have laid (lain?) down naked at my feet and I would have yawned and stepped right over him.  Naturally, I found this disquieting and went to see the doctor.  She prescribed a short-term prescription of a hormone (estrogen I assume) with a “testosterone kicker”, which, she predicted, would “restart” my libido.  It would take a few weeks to build up in my system, so she warned me not to expect any changes overnight.

Okaaaay.

So a few weeks pass.  Nothing.  I’m starting to get worried, because I’m envisioning a really pleasurable part of my life fading away entirely.  I made plans to see her again.

And I’m sitting on the commuter bus to Manhattan from my home in Orange County, New York.  I’m reading something.  All of a sudden ... without any warning whatsoever ... an intense sensation of heat floods my entire body, as though someone had taken a bucket of warm water and poured it over my head.  And with THAT sensation came an intense rush of lust so overpowering I was stunned.  I swore later that I would never make fun of teenage boys going through puberty ever again – they always say they thought of sex every :30 seconds and were basically consumed by the need for it.  Yup!  That was me – on a bus!

It was bizarre.  I’d be walking down the street thinking, “Oooh, HE’S attractive ... yes, he’s 80 years old and has no teeth but I can live with that ...” – it was bad, folks.  But whatever she had prescribed had worked.  Luckily, my body eventually absorbed and adjusted the hormonal balance after that first all powerful rush, but until it did ... hoo, boy, was it weird.

My point remains:  I may have been surgically made into a crone in my thirties, but the ONLY thing missing was my ability to reproduce.  Does that make me into someone who embodied “wisdom, repose, death, and endings represented by the waning moon”?  I don’t think so!!!  I was still as vital as I ever was.

I’ve spent today importing cd’s into i-Tunes ... and listening to “Il Divo Live in Japan” at the moment ... wow, those guys can sing!  Am reminded again of how glad I am for the whole “classical crossover” genre – guys like this got me through the last decade or so of appalling American home-grown awfulness – which is, actually, still going on, judging by the ridiculous appearances on the Grammy’s and the American Music Awards.  Makes you wonder if the American music industry has any idea that they’ve alienated millions of people with their ideas of  the cacophonous misery that constitutes “American music”.  Nah ... they’re way too stupid.

So, “Winter Storm Damon” blew through here last week – it was the first time driving home from the commuter rail station in Newburyport that I honestly wasn’t sure I’d make it:  the rain and wind were so heavy there were times when I couldn’t see the road, the center line in the road or the car ahead of me.  I couldn’t even see a place on the side of the road I could pull off and wait it out.  I have never driven as blinded as I was – thank goodness that ALL of the drivers on the road with me were of the same cautious mind and slowed down to a crawl.  No crazy idiots in SUV’s trying to blow past everyone else, we were all of us driving extremely slowly it was such a horrendous hurricane-force wind driven downpour.

There was also a lot of roadway flooding, so I hit some puddles (translation:  small lakes) so deep that I wasn’t sure I’d come out on the other side.  Did I ever mention how much I love my gutsy little Saturn?  She just plows through everything without even a hint of a sputter or a slide.

Moving on with the daybook project – courtesy of China Bayles Book of Days –  I’m supposed to bake gingerbread men for my holiday tree.  Long term readers are no doubt familiar with my annual misery with christmas tree lots, so here’s a definite no – I won’t be doing that.  I actually looked at fake trees in Lowes the other day out of curiosity and immediately said, “Nope!”  Have no issues with fake trees, just the price tags of fake trees.

The squirrels and birds are scarfing up seeds and suet as though winter were coming and they’re afraid they’ll run out of food.  OK, winter IS coming, but as I seem to have taken on the responsibility of keeping them all well fed, I doubt they’ll be at a loss for food.  A few squirrels who have happily discovered the birdfeeder look like they’ve ingested tennis balls they’re so round in the middle.

Back to the sonnet cycle – somehow, I experienced a glimpse, or a sensation, of the first opening of the Big Door ... which sounds like an odd way to describe what we know as the Big Bang.  I’m back with the Universal Mind, and how everyone says we have no ability, with our limited comprehension, to make sense of it.  Still, I almost did get a sense of the first thought, and the overwhelming joy of it was mind-blowing, that first sense of self-awareness.  If it was powerful enough to fill what we know as the known universe, can you imagine the power of the joy of it?

The sonnet structure for this one (blocks of 7 verses of four 10-count lines each and then repeat!) is wonderful to play with – the first sonnet cycle was a 12-count; I’m up to my fourth block, and how long has it taken me to get that far?!?  But I haven’t felt this creative in a long while. 

Next study of Ancient Egypt:  Thoth:  Architect of the Universe (Ralph Ellis, 1997) – this is an interesting comparison between the “divine dimensions” of the Great Pyramid on the Giza plateau in Egypt and sites in Great Britain – Stonehenge, etc.  I haven’t gotten to the part yet where he theorizes on the connection between all of these sites – i.e., how DID the builders wind up with the same dimensions of things?  He also touches on Atlantis a bit, but he has still another perspective on it; he doesn’t mention the stories of the Atlantic being as thick as mud for a long time afterwards, so it makes me wonder if he ever heard those stories.  He seems to fall into the category of people expecting to see ruins, but are you really going to see those after massive volcanic explosions?  I keep thinking that things would have been pulverized, so you probably wouldn’t see them afterwards.  Edgar Cayce did get it right, though – they found the Bimini Road right about the time he predicted they would.  Even though there are some who believe they are natural formations (and others just as vehemently don’t), the coincidence is pretty startling.  And it was Cayce who said they would find a “remnant” of Atlantis.  Back to:  the jury is still out.

Oooh, I think, for the first time ever, I may have won something in the most recent Megamillions lottery.  No, not the big payola, but $2!  (I think – in which case, I recovered the $2 I put into it!)  I’m not a regular lottery player – in fact, I pretty much fall into the “rarely” category - so I’m not even sure I did win anything, I need to have the clerk at the store where I bought it look at it.  If so, this will have been the first time – EVER – I won anything in a lottery!  I know, my enthusiasm over the prospect of having won $2 is truly pitiful, but there you have it.

So, I’m back to planning a trip to Manhattan to see a concert – I think.  Maybe.  The Cutting Room on April 11th, to see the Cowsills Anniversary Concert.  44 East 32nd Street, between Madison and Park.  Trying to find hotels; so far I see the Avalon and the Chandler.   This is going to be awesome.

Not So Secret Histories of Egypt and the Universal Mind

Just finished reading, The Secret History of Ancient Egypt by Herbie Brennan (Berkley 2001), which, despite the title, is not a secret history of ancient Egypt.  Example:  he cites books, articles and research papers throughout the book – all of which would generally fall in the category of “Not-So-Secret-After-All-Is-It?”  But the advantage to all of his many citations is traceability – always appreciated.  He raises a number of theories about the technological knowledge of the ancient Egyptians:  the use of magnets, electricity and moving huge blocks of stones with sound waves, for example.  He also has sound reasoning for his belief that the civilization far pre-dates the earliest dates cited by traditional Egyptologists.  He also has a solid belief in the existence of that famous island that lay outside the Pillars of Hercules, and its role in the worldwide “deluge” myths and stories.

For me, the jury is mostly still out on Atlantis, although not for the same reasons others do.  I do believe Plato was re-telling a history that was told to him.  I’m always amazed when people talk about Plato’s intelligence, logic, and other admirable qualities, but then inexplicably decide he was nuts and completely off the mark when he discussed the history of Atlantis, told to him by Solon (I think), who got it from the Egyptians.  I also get completely disgusted at the seriously stupid, “Was Atlantis in a lake in Greece?” History Channel crap – you know the ones:  any time someone finds evidence of a local flood somewhere in the world, all of a sudden they’re claiming it was Atlantis.  Plato was a Greek.  Greeks had knowledge of the regional seas and oceans.  So did the Egyptians.  They knew where the Pillars of Hercules were.  What lay on the far side of the Pillars of Hercules?  Which are still there, by the way, if anyone wants to go look at pictures of them.  The Atlantic Ocean.  Not the Bay of India, or the Adriatic or the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

No, the shred of doubt comes from the sonar mapping of the Atlantic, which as yet hasn’t shown a drowned island at the bottom.  On the other hand, if the Atlantic was a muddy mess for centuries afterwards – as the stories claimed - perhaps the combination of earthquakes and volcanos erupting disintegrated the island as it broke up and sank.  Hard to say.  It would certainly explain a worldwide tsunami that flooded everyone off the shores, that’s for sure.  When you think about it, just the explosion of Krakatoa in the South Pacific was felt globally, in varying degrees.  I think they recorded a rise in ocean levels as far away as London.   And Krakatoa was just a small volcanic cone when it exploded.  Atlantis was a huge island mass that bridged western Europe, western Africa and the Americas. Some suspect that the volcanic Canary Islands off the coast of Spain are remnants of it, and they're still having eruptions and earthquakes - one catastrophic volcanic eruption in the Canaries would send a tsunami across the Atlantic right on top of me where I sit now, so let's hope it stays relatively quiet..

Stories of a great flood appear all over the globe, not just in isolated local areas, which would only make sense if you incorporate a long ago scenario of a huge island exploding in volcanic ash and massive earthquakes, disintegrating and sinking into one of the interconnected oceanic bodies of water ... the impact of that catastrophic event would have been global.  As I said, the jury is still most decidedly out on that one.  So there you go.

I’ve also been thinking about the “Universal Mind”.  Somewhere in this blog I mentioned starting a second book of sonnets inspired (in a negative sense) by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”.  Meaning I found his point of view to be so annoying, I decided to block it out by replacement.  Differences being:  his is in blank verse, mine is not (obviously), and the major difference being he is (or was) John Milton and I’m not.  I mean not to denigrate his awesome talent as a poet; merely his point of view in that specific poem. 

In any event, the second book progresses by fizzles and starts ... sometimes it’s the best vehicle I have for collecting musings and thoughts.  So I was thinking about the Universal Mind.

I loved this painting of it – the artist is Todd Breitling, and I think you can even buy the painting.

What I loved about this painting is that it is one of the few attempted representations of the Universal Mind without a human being (head, head and body, face, hand) superimposed on it – as though human beings were the only beings with access to it.  So wrong.  I’m thinking that other beings on our own planet are far more skilled at accessing it than human beings are.  But that’s another gripe for another day.

The Universal Mind.  Here’s my question:  how do you differentiate between My Will/My Intent and the will and intent of the Universal Mind – are they always the same thing, or can I change my will and intent to something the Universal Mind didn’t intend for the holographic image which is what I see as myself?

I’m getting back to the “Think Positive!” mantra we always hear.  If I wasn’t thinking positively, was I still in alignment with the Universal Mind, and go into alignment only when my thinking changes from negative to positive?  Or were both negative and positive thinking aspects of the Universal Mind?  And who can answer these quandaries?

Off to run errands while I mull this over.