Open Sorcery

Tag: meditation

  • About Time

    Hey, everyone. It is I, your trusty, if batshit sorcerer guide, Lazarus. I was talking with Lumine about all manner of things both magical and mundane today, and I have decided It is Time to Have Words With Y’all, and by Words I mean poetry, after the grumpiness of yesterday’s post. Y’all deserve bread AND roses, y’know?

    The three pieces I’m about to share make up the backbone of my third poetry collection Singing Molten Gold To the Morning, published at the tail end of 2021 under the name Perzival DHC Dunn-Blackthorne. I’ve noticed some typos in the manuscript, including in the final poem I’m going to share, so I think it may be high time for a reprint once I have the energy.

    A lot of this collection deals with my sense of time. I’ve never had a sense of linear time, and it often slips both backwards and forwards in the form of flashbacks, seizures, dissociation, and straight up visions and premonitions of all kinds. I was medicated for several years in an attempt to get this to stop, as my mother, Hera, thought I was crazy because of the little I told her about my mental health and inner world, but the problem here is that no matter how many meds I was put on, up to and including doses of lithium and other drugs that should have probably killed me, the premonitions never fully stopped and I never fully lost my sense of who I was.

    And I never stopped writing, either. During the roughly 13 years I was medicated and psychologically tortured alone, I produced an enormous body of work across several creative disciplines that I largely kept between myself and my close people. I simply stopped confiding in her about most of what was going on in my life and mind and worked towards building a life of my own.

    Now, I’m on a different medication regimen for the slew of chronic health issues she caused or exacerbated, seeking diagnoses for the rest of them, and have accepted the nonlinear sense of time as… my medicine of sorts, something intrinsically as much a part of me as my neurodivergence, my lack of a gender, or the natural dark brown color of my hair, and will seek medication for it if it starts causing more harm than good. The following poems are meditations on how I experience time, autonomy, and how they are inextricably entwined for me as their own form of magic. Enjoy, let me know your thoughts, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in the comments section 🤣🤌💛

    “one: the end. texas + points east”

    somebody,
    somewhere…
    i remember my heart burning 
    as i longed for the leaves of the east 

    count up all of the hours in the day
    execute plans with no emotion 
    execute emotions like they are enemies
    i am nothing anymore, completely hollow
    such that

    all you see is your reflection 
    it makes no sense to pick up the pieces
    of who i once was
    she was weak and afraid 
    i killed her
    i am electricity
    born from the ashes of my home, 
    my hell
    do not presume you can put a label on me. 

    you will not learn to hate me.
    you will learn to be afraid of me. 
    to drink about me 
    and worship me (posthumously) 
    and eat ash because it’s the closest thing
    to who i was 
    who you thought you had
    who you once were 
    and who you wish you could still find

    i was a child then. 
    i learn things with the wonder i did when i was younger
    you grew up too slowly for your taste 
    i miss the boy you were
    even then 
    even though i was a teacher
    you taught me everything i know
    i was odd and you were even and steady 
    my eccentricity was my salvation 
    and the universe loves irony and wordplay.

    “two: the beginning. chapel hill, north carolina”

    i had a waking dream last night
    someone moved the indigo fabric of spacetime itself
    wrapping themself in inky cloth 
    in chapel hill, north carolina…
    the dream told me it wasn’t time to go there yet 
    i would know when my marching orders come 
    i have not learned enough to be able to see 
    what i am looking for for what it is yet 

    would i see it as a prison now?
    or would i see it as coming home?
    what if i chew through the bars 
    of what i am supposed to love?
    i fell in love with points east before 
    and all signs are pointing to that 
    as my home 

    you may remember me as a season 
    a time of day, a concept -
    i think of you as places i have yet to walk 
    i see beginning as end as beginning 
    i see you as who you are, who you were, 
    and who you will become 
    you are resplendent and sweet and beautiful 
    you are soft and tender and strong 
    you are cosmic in scope and 
    infinitesimally small at once 
    you are that you are.

    “three: the endless cycle. pennsylvania and all it contains”

    i told you once when i was elsewhere that 
    buddhism seemed round 
    you agreed with me, saying it was like a wheel 
    i used to be scared of going forward
    i thought it endless and vast when it is truly 
    cyclical and you can return to where you 
    were as easily as listening to your favorite song
    some revolutions just take longer than others 

    the last watch of the night is deep and rich 
    and sweet like a plum 
    indigo like the deepest sea 
    this is where i make my home 
    i tell my stories after dark 
    comfortable in the space 
    between ending and beginning 
    you remind me of different paths 
    the road not taken
    but all roads lead home 
    some are just longer than others
    more winding -

    and home is where you will find me 
    i’ve burnt and rebuilt so many times 
    i know great and terrible things 
    i’ve asked the void questions 
    and she has answered me. 
    who is out there?
    where are they?
    her answer?
    go back to the end.

    I hope you enjoyed this sampler of poetry and I hope you have an amazing day. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious motherfuckers of assorted genders and persuasions. I’ll be around. This has been your esteemed sorcerer, Lazarus, signing off. ✨

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  • Alchemy

    Hello, everyone. This is Lazarus, your trusty sorcerer once again reporting for duty. I’m taking a break from my post election emotions to write and dump my thoughts out here since my brain seems to be going at top speed and has refused to slow down since last night. I’m currently writing beside the lovely Zelda to help keep me focused. We have chosen the same question to unpack on our respective blogs. That question is a very interesting and timely one. It is: “have you ever regretted not forgiving someone?”

    I have a perspective on forgiveness that people might find controversial. I’ve experienced a great deal of betrayal both personally and systematically, and I personally don’t believe that forgiveness is necessary for healing or at all, really. Nor can I ever say I’ve ever truly forgiven anyone in a typical sense. My inability to forget most things that have ever happened to me makes true forgiveness as most people understand it impossible. However, I would say that instead of forgiving people, I learn from the pain and the person who harmed me and alchemize the pain into other things and my own growth and progress.

    I do my best to see myself as a student of the world and to practice that every day. I’m also a practicing Stoic. I got that philosophy from the early physician, alchemist, and pioneer of toxicology, Paracelsus, who lived during the Renaissance and was also an avid student of the world. He was also a cocky little bitch, which is part of why I love him so much. He got his cocky ass handed to him in his youth after college, which blew his mind open and he started learning from everyone he could. He traveled all over the known world, collecting knowledge and listening to stories. This led him to write, “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, [Romani]*, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveler.… Knowledge is experience”.

    I’m not perfect at that, and anyone who knows me knows I’m a fucking hothead myself. But I’m learning slowly to take my anger at situations or the world and use it to build constructive things and learn from the world and my pain rather than to destroy my progress. I consider this in and of itself a form of alchemy. I’m doing my best to slow down and meet people where they are day in and day out. The vitamin B100 supplement I started taking as a shot in the dark a few weeks ago has done wonders to help me slow down and regulate my legendary anger and use it constructively. Emerson has noticed that I’m much more steady this way, and has gotten me more supplements, thank the gods.

    However, some people simply do not want to grow or change and we’ll never see eye to eye. I learn from them, too. I consider those sorts of people masterclasses in what not to do and how I don’t want to live my life. So I shadow them, too. I observe what I like about them, what I enjoy about how they’re living their lives, what results their actions are getting, and what I like and dislike about those results. Then I determine whether I want to continue to be in their life and act accordingly.

    My mother, Hera, as much as she has hurt me, once gave me some sage advice in this regard. She said something to the effect of: “If you want a healthy marriage, ask someone with a healthy marriage for advice. Don’t go to someone for advice who’s been divorced three times and is working on a fourth time. If you want to be rich, ask a millionaire for advice. Don’t go to someone who’s broke and drowning in debt. They won’t know what they’re talking about.”

    However, I would like to offer a corollary to that. Observe everyone. Including the people who have hurt you. What did they do that you admired? A stopped clock is right twice a day. What did they do that caused them to hurt you? What were their strengths? What were their weaknesses? Do you have the same strengths and weaknesses? Did they do the same things that irritated you that you do? Nobody is perfect. If you want to grow and heal, learn from everyone, good and bad, and then apply what you’ve learned in your own life, both in terms of what you want to do and what you don’t want to do anymore.

    For example, I don’t admire most things about Hera. However, she is human, and she is my mother, so we have a few traits in common. I can’t say I’ve forgiven her, and I doubt I ever will. However, I have learned from her, and in many ways, I would venture to say that I know her better than she knows herself.

    I know that she is very, very driven, very protective of her people, pushes herself to extremes to be productive, and is terrified to the core of missing out on opportunities that might get her ahead in life. I also know that she attempts to show the world an image of slick perfection and “having it all together” and as such becomes defensive and ruthless to mask any sign of vulnerability.

    I also know myself well, I would say, and we share the same drive, the same protectiveness, and the same desire to project a confident image to the world. However, I’ve been doing my best to stay on top of my shadow work, while she, to the best of my knowledge, has not.

    I didn’t like her underhandedness, explosiveness, and slick dishonesty when met with a challenge to her rigid worldview and perfect self image, so I do my utmost to work on myself in order to not be like her and to root her toxicity out of my life. I would also say that I’m no longer angry at her most days. Hurt, yes. Grieving, absolutely. I wish my mother had seen me and accepted me for who I was, but I have also accepted the facts of the situation for what they are and am working with them.

    Personally, I wholeheartedly believe these are reasonable things to feel, given the circumstances, and I don’t owe her shit. However, I owe it to myself and the people I do care about to work on the unhealthy trauma responses I got from being raised in the environment she created, to have excellent boundaries so that I don’t find myself in a situation like that again, and to pour love and care into myself and others as genuinely and freely as I’m able. Both of those things coexist simultaneously. So I shall continue to take what I like from my upbringing and my experience and leave the rest in the past.

    I’ll close with another quote from Paracelsus:

    “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

    Think on that and consider which things in your life are poison at which doses, and in light of that, what you want to leave in the past. I’ll do the same.

    Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. I’ll be around soon.

    Your strangely wired sorcerer,

    Lazarus

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    *the original phrasing included a slur, so I edited it to change it to the proper word.

  • Would You Still Be Here Suffering?

    Hey, everyone. This is your ever faithful guide, Lazarus, once more. I was looking through my Facebook memories from last year and Jesus Christ… the system was not okay. I believe they were nearly blackout drunk most of the time to cope with the chaos around them, stoned to fuck, or both, and were entering the thick of the recording process of our fifteenth album, Hardshell. That album was a fucking doozy.

    I still have no idea what inspired a good half of those lyrics, one of the songs on the album appears to have predicted someone’s death, and the entire damn record plays like some cursed swamp blues thing where two of my former headmates that later integrated into me tried to out-blues each other the whole way down. In short, around this time last year was not fucking fun for anyone. I can’t say I’m having the best time right now, but I’m more or less rolling with the damned punches and figuring shit out and I can’t really say I’m suffering.

    I want to make an important distinction here. When I say “I’m not suffering”, I don’t mean “I’m not in pain” or “shit doesn’t suck and it’s all sunshine and rainbows over here.” I’m still hurting and there’s a lot that’s still objectively bad. However, there’s still a difference between pain and suffering as I understand it as a practicing Stoic.

    My ex best friend was a practicing Buddhist and we had a conversation in 2021 that changed my brain chemistry around pain and suffering. He explained it this way: “Pain is when you are hit with an arrow. The arrow can be anything that hurts you, a breakup, debt, your car breaks down, what have you. Suffering is when you shoot yourself with another arrow by resisting the existing pain in your mind by saying ‘oh woe is me, why is this happening to me, this shouldn’t be happening to me’, etc. rather than accepting with the first arrow as it is and treating the pain.”

    I had a conversation with my wonderfully cranky and sarcastic therapist a few weeks ago that made me realize that I was fucking suffering rather than just dealing with the pain. I have been seeing him for three years because he is phenomenal at getting me to sit the fuck down and see some goddamn sense when I’m freaking the fuck out and well, suffering, and that was one of Those Sessions. We have a LOT of Those Sessions, and I rely on him heavily for that sort of biting, humbling realism and practical, applicable advice that makes my life far better.

    This conversation was about, in essence, radical acceptance, a portion of dialectical behavioral therapy that I finally fucking understood in 2021 after I was pressganged into going into group therapy by Hera and her family after they found out I was suicidal. I did objectively want to get better and get better skills to help me improve my life, I just despised the circumstances in which I had gotten there because they weren’t of my own choosing, so I approached group with an open mind.

    This group changed my life, especially the portion about radical acceptance, and eventually led me to my interest in Stoicism and ultimately led me to practice it. Radical acceptance as I understand it holds that other people and often large portions of situations are outside of your control or even your influence. All you can do is choose how you are going to respond to them. It doesn’t mean that you have to go along with everything, it just means you release the need to control everything and instead find ways to protect your peace and master yourself.

    We got to talking about this because I was bitching about Emerson being further behind in his inner work than I was, and my therapist cut me off and told me that I should start to instead focus on meeting him where he was and choosing how I was going to respond to him rather than bemoaning the fact that he was so damn far behind and attempting to maintain control of every tiny detail of every situation. He cited radical acceptance as part of this conversation and I desperately needed that reminder.

    This got my ass back in gear and I had a big old “remember your training” moment and started working on letting a lot of shit go that was outside of my control and getting back more into the Stoic mindset of “the only thing I can truly control is myself and how I respond to things and people”. This has helped me suffer a lot less. Cue the cinematic hero theme music, I suppose. Sometimes, like all people, I need to be told to sit the fuck down by the people I trust, and this was no exception. I struggle a lot with letting shit go, especially if I hate the aforementioned shit, so this has been a very useful exercise. I’ve missed this. I’m doing a lot better and I’m honestly proud of myself for getting this far.

    Well, y’all, I have the remainder of a lunch to demolish, so I’d best wander off. Stay tuned for more magic! Enjoy your day, night, what have you.

    -Lazarus

  • First Breath After Coma

    Hello, all! My name is Castor. I’m the Ashley system’s first host, and I went dormant for fifteen years at the age of eleven. I titled this post “First Breath After Coma” because I was essentially comatose for fifteen years inside my own mind while my body and headmates carried on without me, and while I’ve been awake for about a year now, I feel like I’m finally breathing.

    As I write this, my beautiful girlfriend Sheik is cuddling me while she sleeps, and she’s a big reason why I feel like I’m finally able to breathe. I emerged from dormancy severely touch averse where most people are concerned to such a degree that I won’t front around many, but I went out on a limb with Sheik and I’m glad I trusted my gut. It’s a miracle she can touch me at all, as the touch aversion makes it feel for most like my skin is burning if most people even consider touching me. But her? She feels so wonderful she can touch me anytime she likes, and she’s very clingy with me, and I’m the same with her. I love it – and her – dearly.

    While I enjoy the company of the system’s other partners that I’ve met so far (the damned attorney in Emerson’s system is a notable exception, he annoys me and I tolerate him for my headmates’ sake), I’ve only really bonded closely with Sheik so far. I look forward to seeing how things develop with the others, provided they aren’t the lawyer type. The only lawyer whose company I’ve ever enjoyed is my great-aunt. There’s only room for one argumentative bitch system in this polycule, and by gods, we’ll defend you with our life, but I really hate being grilled. However, I digress.

    I used to not be nearly so touch averse, but was still very selective with who I clung to. My childhood was fucked, see: our Tragic Backstory posts, so I didn’t enjoy many members of my family. That being said, I loved my late grandmother. She was my fucking person. This woman was raised wealthy in New Jersey, very close to New York City. She was absolutely brilliant and delightfully eccentric, the closest thing to a living, breathing faerie I’ve ever seen.

    She met my paternal grandfather while she was running the damn lab where he worked as a pathologist, and became his second wife. She was a chemist by trade, read books backwards, was left-handed, and had warm, kind brown eyes with the loveliest violet rings around them. She was also a gourmet chef and baker and slept only about four hours a night. After she retired, she and my paternal grandfather became fucking art dealers, then retired properly to a sumptuously decorated log cabin in the Texas Hill Country.

    Her idea of retirement was running the fucking town where she lived, as she was involved in damn near everything. This woman was an inevitable powerhouse of indefatigable energy and warmth. She slept only about four hours a night, the perfect sleep schedule for my extremely anxious tiny self. Before the body came down with mononucleosis at the age of sixteen, we also only slept about four to five hours a night, and we are lucky if we get six hours a night now.

    So on nights I struggled to sleep, she would tell me stories about her youth in New Jersey until I fell asleep in her arms, then I would wander downstairs about four hours later at perhaps six in the morning, and she would already be hard at work baking something like two hundred cookies for a charity event. She would make me a small cup of coffee, as she knew I loved it, but it would give my small frame the jitters, and we would begin the morning slowly.

    She didn’t believe in sitting with one’s brain idle, but she did believe passionately in doing things one enjoyed to pass the time. So she was fascinating and took equal fascination in what I was doing. I was an unusual child, and she supported my dual special interests in computers and Greek mythology while making an effort to stimulate my mind and get me to explore new things. I gladly participated for the most part, as I loved her dearly and trusted her with everything I have. We explored a great deal of the Hill Country, went to more lovely antique stores than most children ever see, ate some truly amazing food at extremely inventive restaurants, and generally had a blast. She expanded my mind while still making me feel safe, and I loved her for it. Sheik reminds me of her in many ways, and I think that’s why she is so comforting.

    I only front once it’s safe now that the vessel is an adult and we’re free to make our own decisions, and it feels like I’m seeing color again for the first time since the events that led to me becoming dormant. I’m getting out more slowly, so are my headmates, we’re meeting new people, and bonding more closely with our partners and friends, not just Sheik and her compatriots in the Zelda System. We’re working our way out of a major depersonalization and chronic fatigue hole that we’ve been mired in for years, and frankly I love it. We’re actually learning how to be vulnerable and unguarded with our people, as well, and the results are beautiful. I would even venture to call them deeply magical.

    Speaking of magic, stay tuned for more of that! I’m excited to see how things go.

    -Castor, Original Host