If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

This is something that absolutely fascinates me. Our ability to be hypocritical when it suits us is just positively remarkable. I donate between 2 and 5 percent of my pretax income to a good cause every month. I have recurring donations that sum to about 2%, and I regularly contribute to a variety of other causes.

I didn’t always do this. In fact, it’s only been a year or two that I’ve been making consistent donations of greater than 1%. What caused me to start was looking at what I have and seeing so many people that have so much less. I realized that if human compassion, if the desire to uplift the human spirit is part of my purpose in life, then keeping every scrap of my income I can to myself was selfish. I donate my time too. Mostly to the Brotherhood, but to other events and organizations when I have the time and inclination.

Because I didn’t grow up with charity as an ideal, because I understand that we as individuals need to look to our own families before we look to others, I’ve always been very gentle to people who don’t choose to give a portion of what they have. I still am, but my feelings tonight are a little harsher, which is why I thought of the Colbert quote.

What it boils down to is this: Don’t tell me you can’t afford to give 1% of your income to charity. It’s bullshit. If you truly cannot afford to donate 1%, then you are already living outside your means and you need to get in touch with a financial counselor as soon as you can. I’m not kidding. Email me, I’ll try and find a person or agency who can help.

Now some of you may be thinking “But theo, you have a good job, you make a good living, of course you can afford the luxury of being charitable.” You’re right. I can. And I’m thankful that I can. But 1% for me is a bit more than 1% for the average person. 1% should be negligible to you too, you just don’t realize it. (And note, I regularly donate between 2% and 5% of my income before taxes, which is 2 to 5 times what I would suggest as a good habit for everyone with a job.)

If you work full time and make minimum wage ($8.25/hour in IL for 2012) then you make $330 a week. 1% of that is $3.30 a week, or $0.66 per work day.

If you make $10 an hour, it’s $0.80 per work day
If you make $15 an hour, it’s $1.20 per work day.

In 2010, the average individual income for the United States was $40,584 a year. 1% of that is $405.84 over the course of a year. That’s an average hourly wage of $19.51.

Assuming (conservatively) that there are 150 million employed individuals in the US, if we all donated 1% of our income to charity, we would produce $234 Million in charitable contributions for every working day. That is $1.17 Billion per work week. That is over $60 Billion Dollars a year.

$60 BILLION

If you truly can not scrounge 1% of your income ($0.20 per working hour if you are making $20/hour, less than a dime per hour if you are making minimum wage), then you’re in trouble. If you are in that much trouble, you should get help. You may think “It’s not a lot of money, but I need every cent I can get.” I’m sure there are people out there who really are in a situation that tight or even tighter, but you probably aren’t. Those who are in that tough of a spot are the people I believe could be helped by our efforts.

But if you’re reading this, the odds are pretty damn good that you are not in that group.

If you do any of the things below with any regularity then you can afford to give 1% of your income to charity

• drink pop
• buy bottled water
• smoke ciggarettes
• drink coffee from a coffee shop
• eat food that wasn’t prepared in your own kitchen
• own new clothes
• use recreational drugs
• pay for internet or cable access
• pay more than $15 for a haircut or get your hair cut monthly
• own more than 1 purse
• wear designer jeans
• wash your clothes after only one use
• drive places you could easily walk
• pay for a gym membership
• buy alchohol
• are insured

We are a society that is full of privlege. I am very happy to be privleged. I am happy that I can afford to sit at home where it is warm, and think about charity in the abstract while there are people who depend on real, actual charity just to survive the week.

If you don’t want to give to charity on a regular basis, that is your right. I won’t even judge you very harshly for it. But don’t lie to yourself. It’s not that you can’t afford it. You choose not to.

Or how big.

But it is time for a change.

I feel weighted down, mired in unhelpful habits, in distractions. I feel like there is little I can change in my life.

What we feel is not always reality, often not in fact.

It is time for a change.

At their heart, everyone is selfish.

The idea of selflessness is something that we reject out of hand. When someone does something kind, or displays compassion, or sacrifices for another, we rationalize that the act is ultimately selfish because it benefits the individual in some way.

By very real logic, this is perfectly rational. The idea that a person may benefit psychologically, or socially, or in some other intangible way from an apparent sacrifice is completely true. The trouble with this argument, is that it is completely hypocritical when put in the context of the overall ethos that it comes from.

Simply put: In the west, material wealth is the measure of a persons value. We often assume that it is the satisfaction of desire that is tantamount to achievement in the west, but beneath that desire, the larger conceptualization is one of posession, of having.

If Desire, or the satisfaction of Desire, were the pinnacle of desire, the super-wealthy would have no impetus to grow more wealthy. The middle-class would be content with their ability to do just about whatever they want with their life. No, the only place where Desire can be considered the driving force of our culture is if that desire is pointed at the accumulation of wealth.

If the underlying measure of selfishness is wealth, then any act that depletes ones wealth for the good of others is a selfless act. It injures the self for the benefit of another.

And I think that is what we are really talking about when we begin the discussion about selflessness. It’s not about what is being sacrificed, it is about the effect that the sacrifice has upon a person. and that effect, whether it is beneficial or injurious, must be put in the correct context. The context of the west is Wealth.

So the truth of this simple truth, is that it’s a lie. It’s a lie we tell ourselves because selfishness has become a badge of pride. Because it’s far easier to deride or ignore a person who is acting only in their own interest.

The biggest danger of this ethos, one that I fear has come into play many times in the last few decades, is that we have lost the power of acting in concert. Because even when we do act as a large group, our culture makes the assumption that each individual of that group is in it for themselves, for their own personal reasons. Indeed, our media emphasizes this, making a point to seek out the most diverse viewpoints of any large group and present them as though they are all equal shares of the group mind.

Individualizing the cause of a group or organization trivializes it. That is not to say we can’t or shouldn’t Personalize a movement, we most certainly should. There is a difference between giving the public access to the driving, very personal and relatable aspects of a group movement, and telling them that each person is in it for their own personal reason.

This is the power of a message. When the message is concise, strong, and inviting it provides the opportunity for massive change. Our challenge today is that it is virtually impossible to codify or present a message. The volume and quantity of divisive voices is overwhelming. Add to that the habit of news media to not bother differentiating fact from opinion and we have a vast sea of fragmented voices, and no message to unify a populous.

The simple truth, my friends, is that all of this is possible because we no longer believe a person can be selfless, and that very belief is predicated on a lack of context.

Why is the belief in selflessness so important? Because without selflessness, there is no such thing as a cause. There is no such thing as a movement based on principles. Everything becomes about self-gratification.

The Gay-Rights movement, which should be about civil liberties and equal rights for all forms of sexual expression is marginalized as “A minority of people who want to normalize their deviant sexual practices.” The trouble is, that statement is true. And because of the assumed selfishness, the idea that people who are not part of that minority group would or could support or further the movement is taken off the table. Our disbelief in selflessness simultaneously fragments, marginalizes, and minimizes the movement.

And since selflessness (or the lack thereof according to our culture) is about personal gain, the very idea of standing upon philosophical, ethical, or even moral principles is off the table. Any person who does stand up on a principle becomes a suspect. We wonder what their “real” motivation is.

So here’s the real truth. Selflessness is real. Sacrifice is real. There are good people in the world, far more than you realize. They’re all around you.

Stop buying into the lie. Accept that people are good, that they are compassionate, that they are selfless. Confront the lie wherever it crops up.

Share the Gift

Those of you who have read autumn twilight over the years will know that this is not a new feeling for me. I have often questioned if I am worthy. The only real answer I have about my worth is that I am to close to judge it. I am here, and I have my gifts. That must be enough.

Recently I’ve turned my eyes inward more often than not. It’s hard to look at yourself and not like what you see. Or at least not like everything you see. The lesson is that you accept what you dislike, or you transform it. I’ve never been one to easily accept my own shortcomings, so I am left with transformation.

But it is so fucking hard. Forgive me the whining, but that’s how I feel this morning. It’s so fucking hard. I want nothing more than to throw myself back into bed and do nothing.

And that’s how I’ve been feeling for weeks now. Too hard to try. Too hard to do anything but lie down and feel miserable about it. Too hard to even think about. To be harsh with myself for a moment, it’s bloody pathetic. I know better.

But even knowing better, occasionally I find myself lost in samsara, induldging my self-pity, wallowing in materialism, and knowing inside just how bad it is for me.

Eventually the addiction loses it’s appeal, and the dream fades. I find myself shaking it off, banishing the illusions of comfort and satisfaction. I see myself in the mirror and cry. I awaken finally, and I turn my eyes back to transformation.

I don’t particularly like the cycle. I don’t like finding myself lost in the dream. I don’t know how to stop it though, and I don’t know that I’m supposed to. One thing I’ve learned is that if we’re meant to help other people we are often subject to trials that prepare us for those who will need us.

I don’t mean to imply a guiding force of fate here, just an understanding that no suffering or challenge goes by without giving us experience and knowledge to be used later. Whether we realize and grok that experience is another story, for another time.

So that is where I am this morning. Waking up. Feeling sad and hopeful. Crying a little. Willing. To face my trials. To see the world as it is. To challenge maya.

Share the Gift.

He said, “I know it’s hard to see it sometimes, but everything you need is right there, you just need to reach out and grasp it.”

These are words I’ve needed to hear for some time now. It’s a truth about where I am in my life that I sort of know already, but that I haven’t found the right words for.

It’s frustrating. I know that it’s true, but reaching out and grasping it still seems so completely impossible. I think part of the trouble is that I’m conflicted about what it is I want in my life. There are so many avenues open to me right now. My life is full of possibility. I know that this is a wonderful place to be. I know that I should be grateful for the blessing of these options. But right now I wish I didn’t have so many options.

I think that’s part of why I’ve spent so much of the last year wrestling with, learning to understand, my submissiveness. I crave, more than anything, not to have to make these choices. It would be much easier if someone else could make them for me. If someone would step in and clear away the open plain and show me a road.

This is a trial I am going through. It’s not an instant of time, or a defining moment. The trembling I experience whenever I think about throwing myself down a path is exhausting. The fear of choosing, this terror I experience when thinking that perhaps I’m choosing the wrong path, is exhausting. It’s wearing and debilitating. I’m spending all my energy just trying to buy myself the time I think I need to make a choice. Meanwhile the world just keeps chugging on ahead. Some possibilities vanish and others open up. The field remains full of options.

Complicating this is an understanding that I don’t have to choose one thing. I can choose many things. I can be the guy who seems to do everything, who has his hand in every pot. I can be an author and engineer and priest and performer and teacher and poet and mystic. In fact, it’s not really a choice. I AM all of these things. I don’t have the ability to choose not to be one. But choosing to give myself to the pursuit of all these things is it’s own terror.

I fear being consumed by them. I fear that if I give myself up to the work I will get lost in it and never find my way out. I fear if I am all these things I’ll only ever be average at any of them.

It’s odd for me to be so lucid about fear while the moon is almost full. But when else should I see these things I suppose.

I think the truth is that the choice is already made, and I’m just afraid to admit it. It hurts so much to think about it, but there was never any choice but to chase my heart, wherever it leads. I don’t need to find my muse, or court inspiration. So long as I’m chasing my heart, moving ahead towards dreams, giving myself in each moment to wherever my passion lies, to what needs me, then I will be in alignment with myself.

And that’s my wisdom for this moon. Give yourself to what you’re doing at any moment. Give yourself to purpose, to passion, to truth. Give yourself to honesty. Allow your community, your family, to devour all you have to offer. Despite the fear, allow yourself to be grokked. Let the world drink deeply of the chalice of your heart, let them be affected by the blazing spirit that you are. Open your eyes and let yourself be seen.

Share the gift. Defy the death.

Find the strength to bare yourself to Binah, and begin to shine.

We are all just potential greatness, waiting to be realized. We are solar fire captured by the thinest veil of stardust.

The truth is this: Almost none of us choose to try. Most of us wait for the right moment. We either hope for something miraculous to happen, or we prepare ourselves, day in and day out, for the absolute right opportunity to shine. The right moment to step up and be who we are.

The pretty lie we tell ourselves, is that this preparation is vital. That it is strategic. The lie lets us hold on to the hope that our dreams will be realized, if we just prepare a little more, or wait a little longer.

The truth is this: You can not prepare yourself to be great. Greatness happens because you act. It happens because you act consistently, because you act in congruence with your will and the will of the Divine.

Greatness does not come from waiting.

Ask yourself, what are you waiting for? What is holding you back? Why aren’t you shining?

The world is your playground. It is your jungle-gym. And yet you sit in your home, listening to your pretty little lie.

Share the Gift.

This is different than what most people think of when they think about magic. The idea of magic, for most people, is one of control. We practice magic because it gives us another avenue of influence, another way of controlling the outcome of a situation. But that’s not always how it works. In fact, that’s, in my opinion, only a tiny portion of what magic is, and more often than not practitioners who are after control find it in one way only to lose it in others.

The magic of uncertainty is the opportunity to demonstrate truth. We all spend most of our lives in a very limited bubble of probable actions. Our personality, character, background, culture, religion, social group, and a hundred other factors define the space of our regular activities. We like to believe that we aren’t limited by these things, but by and large we are.

Uncertainty gives us the opportunity to push those boundaries. To demonstrate something that is real and true, but outside what is expected of us. When the outcome of a situation is uncertain we have a real opportunity to exert effort in a way that we don’t when something is predetermined.

We don’t have to stretch ourselves or work for things that we know are going to happen. The sun is going to rise. Businessmen are going to screw the rest of the world. Religious fanatics will do something fanatical. These are pretty much given. But the uncertainty of a blank white wall in an empty apartment, or the chance to sway public opinion with your words, or a big project at work, is an opportunity to do something unexpected.

That is a very real, very powerful type of magic. There are far fewer things that are truly uncertain than we would expect. Most of our experiences on a daily basis are pretty standard. We may not expect the details, but we know the essential structure of what’s going to happen. This gives us the comforting illusion of a predictable, rational world. It is the things that occur that are wildly outside of expectation, of near certain occurrence, that really give us the opportunity to make changes.

Take advantage of the uncertainties when you encounter them. Look for them. Ask yourself when you see them, how can I use this to make myself better? How can I surprise myself?

Share the gift

I think what I want to say is that I’m sorry. I’m sorry that the world isn’t what I believe it could be. I’m sorry that there is so much suffering in the world. I’m sorry that I have only the limited resources I do, that I can’t simply wave my hand, or enter into fervent prayer, and wash away all that is wrong with the world.

Everyone sees Imbolc as this joyous festival. The time when we get to really start looking forward to all the great things that are coming. We have a chance to start many things anew. To plant new crops. To create new relationships. To get away from the cold that has kept us cooped up. Imbolc is the festival of hope for the future.

But it is also a time to say we’re sorry. To reflect upon our actions. To cleanse ourselves in the snow. To purify our intent. The light is returning, and there is much cause for hope, but the future is not all sunshine and roses. When the spring comes there will still be starving children all around the world. There will still be injustice. And suffering. There will still be people taking advantage of anyone they can.

I believe, deeply, that we are better than these things. I believe no child should suffer enough at the hands of his peers that he takes his own life. I believe that humanity has within it greatness that we hardly ever see. And I believe that we turn away from that greatness because it is different from what we know.

There are more reasons for this than I can hope to illuminate in a compendium, let alone this humble post. I’m sure I can’t truly begin to grasp the magnitude of our aversion to it, but I can see the aversion at work all the time. We don’t allow ourselves our greatnesses. To use Coyle’s words, we don’t allow ourselves to be big enough.

When you see the light returning, don’t see it only giving life to the crops. Let the light show you the shadowy places too. Your own and those around you. Let the returning light reveal our greatness, that we have the power to change, to choose.

This year I have a lot of personal goals and so does George. I think it’s the right decision for both of us to explore our own space and work on our own projects. Fortunately our new apartments are only a couple blocks apart in uptown. Also fortunately, I’m moving into the building where my teachers Amatheon and Coriander live, as well as another of my brothers Jeremy. Commonly referred to as pagan palace, or the Brotherhood Monastery.

I’ll have pictures of the new place in it’s base state soon, and I have some ideas about taking pictures as I paint, decorate, and make the place my own. I have a killer idea for a glass dry-erase board that I’ll talk about at another time.

Right now my mind is racing with all the things that still need to be done to finish the move. I have a 3 month overlap in my lease, the first of which is already gone. I’m planning on getting mostly moved by late February. This seems entirely doable. I’ve got lots of things that I want to buy, and I should have tax money coming back soon to help me buy them all.

I’m thinking a lot about the mood and energy that I want to infuse my new home with. The temple room/study/library/lounge room is my biggest challenge and requires a lot of thought. I want to create a single space with multiple uses and a mood that suits all those uses. It needs to feel sacred, rarefied, and peaceful, but it also needs to be comfortable, conducive to focus, warm, welcoming. Above all it needs to feel like home to me. It’s a tall order but one that I know I can pull off. I’m looking at paint colors and exploring my furniture options.

But I’m always open to ideas. :D

Believe it or not, it has been a very productive six months since I’ve made regular posts. It doesn’t always feel that way. Not to me anyway. I have a bad habit of getting mired in the details of life, and forgetting to look at things from the big picture.

One of the challenges that those details bring is a difficulty in prioritization. Details all seem fairly equivalent. When it comes to little tasks it’s hard to remember that in a list of a hundred things, only a few of them need to be done now, and only a few of them have any meaning or impact beyond the immediate.

One thing I’m learning is that a busy person can’t afford not to make hard decisions about what will and will not get done. If I want to make real progress in some things, other things will have to be let go of. Nobody, not even as awesome as I think I am, can do everything that they’d like to do.

(On that note, if you can do everything you want to do I challenge you to think bigger.)

What that means for me right now, is that I have to make a lot of choices about where my energy and time are focused. One of those choices, that’s staring me right in the face, has to do with my intellectual diet. The things I read, listen to, and watch. Other people call this an information diet, or a media diet. I think of it primarily as the diet of Air.

The diet of Air is what feeds your mind. What do you spend time thinking about, absorbing through media, digesting in journaling or conversation. We all need a healthy diet, and as with any diet there should be balance. I think, in the west at least, our Air diet is extremely heavy on junk-food that is primarily nourishing only to emotional centers. Much like twinkies are. They make us *feel* full and happy and nourished, but the feeling is immediate and in the long run they don’t add a lot of benefit.

I know that I am probably less prone to subsisting on a media diet of junk-food than many people seeing as I don’t own a TV. That said, I do have the internet, and I have no problem spending a day watching old episodes of Bones or Buffy or Roswell, or any one of a hundred terrible movies that I adore.

My saving grace in this is that I am pretty much unable to sit still long enough to just watch television shows. I always have to have something to do while I’m watching. Sometimes this is a casual flash game. No benefit there. But as often as not it’s something that is at least mildly productive and mentally stimulating.

Still, I believe there is a lot of room for improvement in my Air diet, and I plan on working on that.

But in truth, the last six months or so has been one of the most productive periods in my life (getting back to the point.) I’ve found a new apartment (I’m in the process of moving), I work for a different company (although I do the same job), I helped get the new website for the Brotherhood of the Phoenix up and running, and a ton of other things. There is plenty of change still happening.

This year, I’m looking to try and focus my efforts a bit more narrowly. I’m going to re-approach life-audit work to try and manage the things that I’m doing to tasks that actually further larger goals and not just immediate-feel good goals. This is the work of the Diet of Fire, which is of course the diet of our physical activity, and how and where that activity is applied. As with any other diet, balance is important, and the content of the activity is as important as it’s output. Simply doing enough things may keep one alive, but it doesn’t necessarily nourish us. That is a lesson I’ve had to learn. I was hard-wired by my mother to not be comfortable just sitting around doing nothing. But I’ve found that a lot of busy-work I do is just done to satisfy the feeling of getting something done. Again, this is the Fire-diet equivalent of a Twinkie. It feels good and satisfies the immediate need, but in the long-run it’s not that beneficial.

But I digress, as I often do.

For those of you who’ve noticed some changes to the site’s URL and such, I’ve done some behind-the scenes work to make admin easier on my side and manage multiple sites better.

For those of you who had trouble with the rss feed, it should be fixed now. That said, you should change your bookmarks to point at: http://autumntwilight.theogeer.net/feed/

The site is due for a redesign, but I’m putting that off for the moment. I’m going to try and focus on updating regularly again first.

Stay tuned, hopefully for some more regularly scheduled content, but definitely for more changes and love coming from me to you!

share the gift

It’s been a long time since I’ve written or rambled for the masses, or however few of you find my words interesting. I’m not writing tonight to make a comeback or a promise. I have my plans, but the world is chaotic, and no plan survives the first engagement.

Tonight though, I feel words need to be written. So here I am.

This is my 62nd Solstice. I’ve lived through 31 summers. The morning brings the beginning of my 31st winter. It seems so long. But I don’t feel as though I’ve been around that long. I feel young. In many ways I feel like a child. There is a part of me that will always want nothing more than to sit on my fathers lap, singing “You are my sunshine.”

The winter brings with it the promise of summer. The long nights begin to give way to the sunlight. Soon there will be light in the evening hours, and the comforting darkness will not arrive until much later. I don’t enjoy the lengthening days, but I honor the beauty and necessity of that cycle.

I am pondering a good many things lately, among them the character of our society. It seems to me that societies can be looked at in a great many ways. One of those ways, which I find important right now, is the character of it’s liberty. Liberty, the recognition that the self is sovereign, is a fundamental of our society. But we are not as careful to protect that liberty as we once were. I’d quote Benjamin Franklin here, but I’ve heard it far too often lately.

The thing that interests me though is how liberty relates to the justice system and legal code. This is the distinction that I think we are in the process of modifying, if we have not done so already. Liberty implies that a person has complete authority over his own person, and the right to act in any way that does not infringe the sovereignty of other people. In essence, if it doesn’t hurt or impede the liberty of others you can not be denied the right to do it.

We have never had perfect liberty, which I will say is a very thelemic concept if looked at in the right light. In fact, I think we were moving further towards liberty for most of the history of the united states. But lately we’ve been moving away from it.

But enough of that. the hour grows later, and I have a job to go to in the morning. The cat wants my attention and my eyes are beginning to droop.

I will sleep deeply and dream of the returning light. Share the gift.

I received a call from Reverend Coriander about two weeks before Ecstasis. He asked me if I would be interested in manifesting the Divine Androgyne for Ecstasis. I wasn’t entirely surprised that I was his choice, but I also wasn’t really expecting it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to at first. As George said, “You could talk about any of our God faces for 30 minutes without stopping, of course you have something to say.” He’s right, but I wasn’t sure that the Androgyne had anything to say through me, and that’s important to me. There is a big difference between expressing our thoughts on a matter and becoming the voice of the god. I told Coriander that I’d let him know the next day.

That night I did divination and seership work to commune with the Androgyne. Am I the right vessel at this time? Do we have things to share together? I knew that I felt I understood the Androgyne, that I was in good communion, but I wanted to hear the vision of the Androgyne on the matter. Again, I was surprised. The vociferousness and immediacy of the response I got was stunning. Clearly we had things to say together. I texted Coriander the next day that I was a go.

The following two weeks were challenging for me. I sat in trance with the Androgyne for at least a few minutes every day. I jotted down my notes and experiences. I let the Balance of opposites fill my field of perception and came to many observations I’ve never had before.

We were coming up on dark moon, so I wasn’t surprised when many of the shadows of the Androgyne started appearing in my awareness. As with all powers, there are many dark faces lingering, that are most often best observed and then left alone. I pursued some of them to get a better understanding of what those shadows were. Ecstasis was to be on the tail end of the Dark Moon, and I felt strongly that any full experience would include the dark energy as well as the light. Balance.

When aspecting or invoking I always write a script for myself. I never know how much of it I will actually stick to, but I write it. The idea is that the script is the fallback position. If in the moWhement, the invocation doesn’t take, you have the words that were written in trance and mediumship to fall back upon.

Writing a script for the androgyne was very difficult. I went through more drafts than I can count. I wrote 1500 words. Scrapped most of it and wrote another 1500. Trimmed that to about 1200 and then rewrote about half of it. For days I tweaked and changed. The androgyne always had more to say, and no matter how much I got down, how much I distilled or translated, it always seemed that the best I could do was a rough overview of the message the Androgyne wanted to share.

Still, Friday night I finalized a script that I felt fairly confident of, although I had a strong feeling that much of it would get thrown to the wind when ritual came around. But I spent Friday morning and afternoon memorizing. I wasn’t perfect in my recitation, but the voice and ideas were there as were a great many of the important lines.

And, unsurprisingly, it didn’t matter a whole lot in the end. I’m having the very frustrating experience of being able to remember very little of what I said or did when the time came and I invoked the Androgyne. I know it’s fairly common to black out, but the experience is still new to me, and it’s uncomfortable. I have an impeccable memory, particularly for words and conversation. Having a hole in my recollection, where I remember only tiny snippets of phrases, is very difficult for me.

I remember the beginning of my monologue. I remember feeling the Androgyne growing more and more potent inside of me as I called names of power and declared that I was the door into starlight. I remember a few faces, staring at me with wide eyes. I remember Reverend Amatheon, peeking around the people who were standing in front of him, once smiling, another time nodding solemnly. I remember a few instances of primal emotion that the Androgyne felt. A kind of anger that felt like betrayal. I remember my body moving quickly a few times, as though borne across the air without touching the ground. And I remember commanding those assembled to seek balance in themselves, and then to shape the world with it. I remember the Androgyne flowing from me like a river, water passing across my body, magnetically increasing itself even as it leaves.

Much later in the evening, one of the attendees said to me “I don’t know how you could remember all that, I could never memorize that much.”

I said quite simply, “I didn’t.”

The other reason I make sure to write a script, and to memorize as much as possible, is because the god that comes through a person has to make use of their body, of their brain, to communicate. It is invaluable for them to have ready-made pathways to draw upon. All the words and sentences that I memorized were there for the Androgyne to draw upon, to reorder and structure as needed.

But regardless of how many sentences and phrases I stored in my memory for the Androgyne, I’m not really sure how much of it was used. I have recollections of small things that are similar but changed from what was written. But that’s all.

And that was my Ecstasis. Nerves and memory loss.

This blog is one of the few things that I’ve ever kept around for more than a year or so. And even here, My life moves me into and out of orbit more frequently than I’d like.

It’s not a very comfortable feeling. And there are times when I feel helpless. There’s a whole list of things that are important to me, that I’d like to accomplish, and it often feels like no matter what I do they simply are not going to get done. I can think of a dozen ways to adjust my life that would make it easier to focus or apply myself in these other areas, but all of them require patience. I am not in the mood for patience. I want my life to get itself in order now.