It’s a nice morning, but I want more clouds. Illness tends to magnify the body and the most basic needs and senses. Accordingly, people who can’t get treated have a harder time.
I can call down Faentaur, and that helps, and I can imagine were I still smoking. My head feels congested, and that slows the breathing—for oxygen and elthil. But faentaur in the sun always feels good—
—illness throws one out of alignment. However, I did align before bed, did spell, and I did try to project—but tiredness got me there, and the nose.
I did have a sense of a mental hook last night—a metaphor with significance, magically and otherwise. But, as I think about it, it seems to me that metaphors are what we do. Metaphors often have a magical and personal substance. I can feel a reality to them, and there’s an ôl-vala to a potent metaphor, symbol, idea.
I note I had my thoughts about fashioning narratives of the life I want and then a shitty, busy week and birthday and illness. Hell, Thursday’s storm and the weirdness of that.
Fall is here. The weather turns—
(This seems to be allergies plus cold—the heavy rain and then days of sun.)
Wyrd, self-fashioning, ôl-vala, faentaur—
The LW remain obscure for me. I wonder—Thorn and Feri’s alignment seem, for me, adept at awakening me to the new HW and MW, but I feel the LW and their densities and perceptions are limited. The triple soul model (really four because Thorn emphasizes the corporeal body) is one model. The Cabalistic model has four, but really six—body but also Qlippothic.
K says the Qlippothic idea I have has its merits,—it’s also tied into strong, visceral, often turbulent emotions—the “density” of emotions, and those emotions are often “negative”—more properly, often turn negative from lack of control, or too much control separates us from them. They can turn “demonic,” and the Dark Hosts often like to work through them.
(Numbering systems are tempting limitations on a paradigmal level, and the allure of numbering (Number) something is the false sense of control it gives you. Order. Fixity. But you then try to fit the Chaos of potentiality to the numerant [sic] model. Numbering is always arbitrary. If you see only three souls, you try to fit it all in there. Or you keep numbering until you can’t anymore. But there is 1, 3, 9, [infinite] worlds—) (and maybe none, or negative—)
Today, as I exercised, I realized that there are thoughts, ways of living, that you can settle into—not the insistent thoughts of spelling, like shouting at a mirror, but like slipping into a pool, into waters. These are lived-in thoughts. Not insisting to myself and the world that I’m a [such-and-such], but just living within those thoughts, owning them comfortably. It’s like putting on the right clothes finally, but that suggests mere costuming. The thoughts have accrued enough reality, enough belief, that they take on an easy, familiar, comforting (?), immediate quality.
It’s a difficult experience to articulate. In part, it is a matter of belief, power, immediacy, but also inhabitation.
I feel I’ve been doing something in the Otherworlds, distinct from feeling like shit from allergies.
I started to draft a narrative, but I find myself wrestling with (1) how to represent myself and to imagine my life as I want and (2) I—writing a narrative seems to demand conflict, an antagonist—plot. However, I do not want to reproduce [certain communities’] drama, nor do I want to make the conperceptual mistakes I and others were making in the ‘90s and early ‘00s. And it is tempting to hedge and hew too closely to consensual reality—but that is not what I want.