Clearing Out

[mandyjw]

1 hour ago, Shin said:

Texas accent ? ?

[Shin]

3 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

I knew it ?

[mandyjw]

Training your mind is just like training a dog. It takes incredible focus and resolve, incredible flexibility and most importantly immense love. I want to do better by my mind and my puppy. I want better focus. 

Why did I go so far down the road of Mr.Money Mustache penny pinching, moralization and optimization just to flip to the law of attraction? I have no regrets, but I do want to understand what I got out of it. Most people here would say it was working through stage green. The idea of hedonic adaptation was huge for me, it caused me to question happiness. The idea that we can buck the trend of societal expectations and design a better world starting with us, and have the guts to go in the direction of what we think is right resonated. When I believed that I lived in a material world it was hugely important for me to set my sights on happiness and wisdom rather than material things. I went so far in this direction and the black and white duality of it that I realized I was on a dead end road of self destruction of my own happiness. I wanted to let go of material attachment and I was doing it aggressively the best way I knew how within the paradigm in which I lived. 

When I was a kid I wanted to have nice things and a nice life but I felt like as long as there were starving children living in Africa that made me evil. Several verses in the Bible made me feel like I should dedicate my life to God, and not have a relationship or kids. I felt like I had to dedicate my life to either God or my desire for a family, kids and material security. The further I went to work in this direction the further from spirituality (or Jesus at that point) I went. Stage orange, going for the kids and the house, "killed" my spirituality. Looking back, I lived and breathed desire and goals and hard work. Looking back, the old house, the fascination with old houses and the past and the miscarriages were deep spiritual "windows" during this time. I tried to temper the pain with the fascination of the past, the magic I had possess me when I bought this house and the pain fused into one thing. There was this apple tree that had broken off but it bloomed and bore apples that year and in the background someone had spray painted the word "forever" on a pole. I also vividly remember picking apples with my mother at her friend's old house immediately before the miscarriage, and picking up a Bible again during that time. I bought the antique garnet ring that became my most prized possession, I wore it to my first trip to NYC which broke my reality and made me fall in love with something terrifying. I left the ring on Pomroy's grave for the crows this spring after the miscarriage. 

Finding Leo's videos burnt up the stage orange, he was stage orange at the time. I remember being so helped by his videos and also feeling motivated and the flip side of being lazy and not striving enough, and also strongly feeling the societal pressure of needing to be attractive from his videos. My surroundings were so comfy. It is desirable to not look attractive, not draw attention, mind your own business and other people will mind their's. But in cities where societal expectations and motivations have their energy concentrated in a small space, this energy overtakes me. For a girl I have been given a gift of not needing to care about my looks, and to focus on other things. But if the situation is right, when I leave my rural living safety bubble I deeply feel the insecurity and pressure of appearances that I have not yet freed myself from. I am susceptible to this. 

Then there was a disastrous winter, The Power of Now and the first glimpse I had of the power of letting go of my complaints and seeing the beauty. The snow on the pine trees. The insights into what Jesus meant in the verses I had pondered over for years resonated. And yet, that was the catalyst of letting go of Christianity. 

You cannot let go of anything, but the intention to is everything. You can focus, and you can love. When you do both together, it seems as if things are let go of. Love is a funny thing, it's so all encompassing that it's as if it's the thing that allows us to focus, the "it's ok, I got this, you go on and do what needs to be done". Can love be focused? Can something that is everything also be focused? 

Holy shit, well that journal entry got to the heart of the problem. I wasn't even trying to focus.  Hmmm... 

Edited January 9, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

 

When I was a kid my Dad was friends with this guy named Tommy. Tommy was the worst of backwoods ignorant. He was also a distant-ish relative. My parents out of their Christian love and hermit like nature did not believe in having friends, wanting friends or being selective with their friends. When someone came into their lives they had to be a true friend to them, even if their values or development didn't align. Tommy's dad was called Big Tom and he was called Little Tom even though he was bigger than his dad. He was enormous, didn't shower, didn't shave, muscular, tall, tan, tattooed all over with shit like eagles and mermaids, deep booming voice, black wild hair and mean looking eyes, and he was very crude. He was the most intimidating looking person. His dad was creepy in his own way, came to our school when we were kids and called himself "Uncle Pickle".  

Because I was raised with Christian values, the problem of having someone in your home who doesn't share them comes up. My parents were the rare type that would put up with almost anything, and say nothing about it, except on the very rare occasion that you really crossed a line. I was very uncomfortable around Tommy. He never said anything bad to me out of respect for my dad, but I knew what he was thinking and comments he made got back to me and confirmed this as I got older. The first two dobermans we got were very friendly, mine especially. The other one hated him. Mine would sit next to his side and worship him the entire time as he told horrible stories about moose dying terrible deaths. It made me sick to have him touch her, and she was just joyfully oblivious. Moxie was her name.  

Once I was in the computer room, which was next door to the bathroom and Tommy took a leak without closing the door. This made my dad angry and bothered him more than me but again, he never said anything. He had his own daughters and their relationship was creepy strange and bizarre.

When I was a really little Tommy was married. I remember playing with dolls behind the couch when his wife unloaded on my Mom all the awful stuff going on in their marriage. I remember popping out from behind the couch and she was so surprised and embarrassed that I had been there the whole time.

They bought me a stuffed clown doll. It was over-sized and I was too young to say that I really didn't like it, so it went in my bed with all my other stuffed animals. I remember Mom saying once "Ah, there's a man in your bed!" and this made me feel dirty and awkward about this clown. When you pressed his red nose it played "It's a Small World After All".  Contemplating this morning made me think of that phrase which made me think of the song which reminded me of the clown doll, which made me think of Tommy. 

Mom raised me to believe that men were scary and dirty, (maybe that's not Mom's fault) and we went to a circus once and the clowns were giving out balloons to others kids and naturally I wanted one. She told me that the type of person who played a clown was likely to be very dirty and that they blow up the balloons with their mouths and who knows what germs they have. There was a similar message of complete disgust taught to me about carnivals, theme parks, carnival workers. 

When my sister was going through puberty, I was in the depths of my own spiritual fire and what I later labeled "obsessive compulsive disorder".  I had a neurotic impulse to "clear" out anything that made me uncomfortable. If she was watching TV and a dirty word I didn't know was said, I had to make myself uncomfortable and ask what it meant. If she didn't tell me, I had to ask Mom. Once after my sister was watching MTV I asked mom what a "rod" was and Mom must have been feeling up to educating me that day because she said that masturbation was wrong, and this is something I never doubted so I never did. 

Once my sister had a cross country race in another city. My OCD came up in an enormous manner. "GO BACK AND PICK UP THAT TRASH NOW." I didn't. I walked further and further from the trash and it tortured me. "PROMISE YOUR SOUL TO THE DEVIL" Ohhh... that was the worst one. I learned to disregard those thoughts as I became a teenager. 

Later, I had to go to that very spot to race several times. So many of my vivid pivotal memories are centered in this one spot. On one race, a boy died and no one noticed and we ran past his body off in the field. One of my teammates was right behind him and I knew that he had to deal with this fact the rest of his life. He was my first ever crush, but when we went to high school I got over this quickly and painlessly because he was such a jerk . He grew right across from where the broken apple tree was. His brother just died, and so he has been around home more lately, I saw him the Halloween before last. He called me Amanda. 

In this city lived a clockmaker, and he became a powerful mesmerist. In the historical records his name comes up as the mesmerist who traveled here, the first one that Pomroy recounts going to as a child. The summer before last I saw the first whales I've ever seen. I went to a beach and there was a woman with a dog there. I couldn't keep my kids away so I talked to her a bit. She said that there were whales around, she was watching for them. I said that I had been on a field trip to this city on a boat to see whales but didn't ever remember seeing one. She said she was from that city. 20 minutes later and the sun was fading, the sky was beautiful I watched the water with my Mom and sister and saw whales the first time. 

That field trip. OH FUCK! THIS IS ALL CONNECTING!

In first grade a new boy moved to our class. I was the only girl, there were two other boys. Alex, he was wonderful, creative and we resonated until we got older and then naturally we hated each other. I loved his hand writing. I love people's handwriting, and I did in school, I loved looking at it, as if it spoke to me and showed me the intimate parts of someone's soul. I especially loved boy's handwriting. There was no one who pressed down as hard on the page as Alex. He was always breaking pencils. 

Michael was dumb as a fucking rock, but sweet. He had beautiful green eyes and black hair, like Harry Potter. But his Mom didn't take care of him and he usually smelled. Michael was in love with me throughout 8th grade. I mean, I was the only girl. We had to draw pictures for a calendar project once and he drew us as a couple in front of a barn. In the picture he's chewing a piece of grass. They chose his fucking picture for the calender and Mom bought the calendar and everyone knew it was me and laughed about it. 

Anyway, in first grade Derek moved him. His dad was in the military and Derek had a buzz cut and already had very strong ideas about what it meant to be a man. He saw me and my purple round glasses and I was to be his girlfriend. I wasn't sure what this meant but I went along with it. Derek had expectations about how we should act, and how much time we should spend with each other. It was never much fun. Once I got mad at him and kicked him in the balls before I knew that boys HAD balls and now this fact was explained to me because I got in WAY worse trouble than I expected for sort of carelessly kicking at someone. He also wrote me a "dirty" note which I got in trouble for and didn't understand at all. 

I sat with him on the bus to go to this field trip to this city to go whale watching. I remember that he played or sang this song to me. When we got on the boat I connected strongly with another girl, her name was Sophie (Sophia, wisdom) and she was to later come to our school and would become my best friend and an incredible influence in my life. I spent the whole day with her. Derek was so pissed at me. I was supposed to spend all my time with HIM. I can't remember what happened after that, if that was the end of our "relationship" but we didn't sit together on the way home and he moved away after a short time. 

Sophie's mother grew up in a very wealthy, well educated family and she was a teacher in our school. In her early adulthood she went to Sierra Leon in the Peace Corp. Ever since she could never return to the wealth she had grown up in so she moved here and taught her whole life. We had an advanced reading class with her for a few years and she expanded my world quite a bit. What luck I had to become best friends with a rare liberal well-educated person in this disconnected unevolved place. Sophie's mom made sure they were well traveled. When the trade centers fell, Sophie had been to the top of the buildings and I was still scrambling to learn where NYC was and what the trade centers were. I never understood why I was so emotionally affected by 9/11 and Sophie wasn't as much. I called her on the phone after it happened and her Dad answered. "America has a bloody nose." He said. He would answer the phone when i called often and talk about politics with me until Sophie complained. He was always unashamedly challenging my Christian ideals and passionate conservative politics. I was indignant when he said that America had a bloody nose. People had died. How could he look at it holistically like that? Her dad unexpectedly died shortly before my daughter was born. Something about my daughter's chocolate brown eyes and mischievous disposition reminds me him. 

 

Edited January 9, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

I suddenly feel sick to my stomach. 

[mandyjw]

Living here, born to hermit parents, terrified of the world, so secluded and sheltered from it all, not letting yourself have what you want... you can imagine the fantasy and desire that grows and grows.

What is color without black and white? What is springtime and birds singing when you've never stood in the middle of the deep woods in the dead of winter, closed your eyes and just listened to the perfect frozen silence? 

What is the fantasy of a tropical paradise in the dead of winter? I'm so well practiced at this, that I know it's far better than the real thing. 

[mandyjw]

Anthem of my teenage angst, brought up by reading a thread on the forum just now. What the fuck with the album cover, and just talking about 9/11? Synchronicity is by my side today. 

BLOODY NOSE! 

THE CLOWN NOSE!

SHIT I DIDN'T think I could do this on my own. Puzzle pieces, click, click, click. 

Yes, Def Leppard. Someone is out there, someone cares, and you are in fact, just fooling yourself. It's a small world after all you fuckin' clown. 

Edited January 9, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

I dreamed of a plane crash a week ago. 

This time there was this massive plane that crashed and a tiny plane chasing it crashed with it. Except like after 9/11, even though it crashed into the ground, houses started collapsing around it after. And I didn't know if I was safe to go in my house anymore, or who could tell me if it was or wasn't safe. And it wasn't my town, it had evolved into a much more populated place so there was lots of chaos.

[mandyjw]

In my hallway where my dream board is, there's a red pom pom my daughter lost that looks like a clown nose on the floor. On the dream board there's one thing written in red among dozens of others in black, it's the trip to go to the city where the connections are coming from. 

[mandyjw]

Lyrics

It's a world of laughter
A world of tears
It's a world of hopes
And a world of fears
There's so much that we share
That it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all

It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small, small world

There is just one moon And one golden sun
And a smile means
Friendship to ev'ryone
Though the mountains divide
And the oceans are wide
It's a small world after all

It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small, small world

It's a world of laughter
A world of tears
It's a world of hopes
And a world of fears
There's so much that we share
That it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all

It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small, small world

The guy who started messaging me constantly this fall started the conversation with asking me if I was my sister's sister and when I said yes he said "small world" and it stuck with me. Back then I thought he was completely innocent. I titled a blog post that after he said it. 

"Yes, Magic is real. Its existence is what ties us together in shared being. It shows itself to us by coincidence, synchronicity, and shared connection, it’s what makes this random and sometimes cruel seeming universe collapse into something small at times. Whenever we find out that we have a connection with some seemingly random person and we say “It’s a small world!”, and in that moment, magic happens.

We are connected. We are all one. What is real never dies, but lives on as Love. Sometimes that love is a crow dropping a poison berry so it sprouts into a weed that grows on the grave or an herbal healer. There are no mistakes in life, it’s all by intelligent design.

It only requires our belief, and our recognition and acknowledgement to be seen. There is no difference between love, creativity, flow states and magic. Magic=Love. Open your heart to see it."

 

There's a mistake in my blog post, I used the word or instead of "of" and then said there's no mistakes in life. 

Edited January 9, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

Ooooooohhhhh fuck. I created him, didn't I? 

That typing mistake was an Easter egg I created for myself. YOU planted the nightshade. You wrote the fucking book meant for you to read! You charged him in New York City and shut down his practice so he would have time to write the book and the desire to clear his name and open people's minds. 

You planted him like a berry dropped in the cracks between the stones. That's how stories are born. 

This morning when I went out with the puppy the crows were dancing around overhead, just joyfully riding the wind. The past two nights the moon has had a huge perfect circle around it. The moon isn't full yet, but the circle of light that surrounds it is a perfect circle. I loved that symbolism so much. 

Edited January 9, 2020 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

When I started experiencing bliss states out on runs by fields of flowers, the only expression that came to mind was "FUCK!" over and over. 

You bewilder us
with your grace.
All evils
transform into
goodness.

You are the master alchemist.

You light the fire of love
in earth and sky
in heart and soul
of every being.

Through your love
existence and nonexistence merge.
All opposites unite.
All that is profane
becomes sacred again. -Rumi

[mandyjw]

Well, fuck. 

"Writing causes you to focus" Esther said.

"You rewrite your past" Esther said. 

 

[Shin]

Are you channeling ?

[allislove]

7 minutes ago, Shin said:

Are you channeling ?

We are all channeling, Shin. 

Mandy, all is good? Sending you love and peace. 

[Shin]

Just now, dimitri said:

We are all channeling, Shin. 

Mandy, all is good? Sending you love and peace. 

I don't have aliens that speak from my mouth.

I was talking about that kind of channeling

[allislove]

Just now, Shin said:

I don't have aliens that speak from my mouth.

I was talking about that kind of channeling

♥️ ?

[mandyjw]

28 minutes ago, Shin said:

Are you channeling ?

The duality between channeling and not get thin and dissolve, that's what I want to have happen. But yes?

21 minutes ago, dimitri said:

We are all channeling, Shin. 

Mandy, all is good? Sending you love and peace. 

 All is good, feeling a bit sick and lethargic (that part came days ago) but it's better than the alternative.

I was slightly horrified to find my empty trash can had blown in the middle of the road a little bit ago, but I guess when Mandy gets rid of things she wants the world to know it. 

[Shin]

It was an innocent question

[mandyjw]

5 minutes ago, Shin said:

It was an innocent question

There are no innocent questions my love. Guilty as charged. I was an angel, once, before the Devil stole my heart. And when I looked at the place where it should be, there it was still in my chest beating 100 miles an hour and I realized, I WAS the Devil. 

Edited January 9, 2020 by mandyjw