Temperance.

I know there comes a time when the focus need be on self-healing in my relationships. Or, at least, I "know" that this is how I perceive myself right now.

But isn't the question always if one is *ready* to take responsibility for 'getting well', no matter what it takes? And the quest for health could be on a physical, emotional or mental level, or it may, as uncomfortable as it is to admit, have to do with paying off "karmic dues."

In any case, the obvious work is to clear up past dysfunction and address entangled emotions in my relationships. I believe that the the process will purge the toxic waste of unfinished business with my partners that actually disables me. When I am ready, I will mix my powerful medicine.

The question is, is the right time to start healing myself? And if I answer that no, how do I trust whether my answer is based on intuition or on fear. Or inertia.

Advise me anonymously and, once again, I will allow for synchronicity to help when I need it.

Looking forward to light..

If, while sitting in the darkness you change your mind and decide you want to sit in the light, will your first few steps be in the darkness or the light?

I suppose the secret is to not give up taking those steps, even if you have forgotten where the switch is.

You know this already.

To live a conscious life means being responsible for all your truths.

"Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wibderm thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road."

-- On The Road
Jack Kerouac

To the boy with his ten swords.

Your current situation has sprung from the seeds you have sown. That is reality.

Listen to yourself talking with friends and potential lovers over a twenty-four hour period. Recognize your primary subject matter, tone and slant, because too often, you end up eating your words, or forcing others, who have already swallowed them, to throw them back up.

Every sword you carry is one of your own pronouncements, having comeback to you in the fullness of time. It's important to understand that what you speak, what you breathe life into, is what you harvest.

Remember, your subconscious hears and believes what you say and produces equivalent results. In this moment, you have a chance to become more conscious and start fresh.

Perhaps you should try to frame your thinking in terms of who you are inspired by and what you are striving toward -- rather than what you disagree with, are judging or rejecting.

"I had a boyfriend once, his name was Bruno. After forty years of dissolution and Mammon he found Jesus under a wardrobe. In fairness, the wardrobe had been slowly crushing the resistance from his lungs for about four hours. He did house clearances and had fallen foul of a double-doored Victorian loomer. The sort of wardrobe people lived in. He was eventually rescued by the fire brigade though he always maintained it was the Lord himself who had levitated the oak ever upwards. He took me to church with him soon after and gave a graphic account of how Jesus had come out of the closet to save him. 'Out of the closet and up into your heart,' raved the Pastor.

I never saw Bruno after that, he gave me his motorcycle as a gesture of renouncement and prayed that it might lead me to the Lord. Sadly it blew up on the outskirts of Brighton."

-- Written on the Body
Jeanette Winterson

On further thinking about Caro's comment in my previous post...

I have found that in periods of stagnation, relationships are often formed, or continued, purely on the basis of convenience: since there is little challenge during such a time, not much is demanded of friends and associates.

But when important action is required, however you may define this for yourself, only the able and trustworthy can be counted on to perform competently.

Free yourself of the entanglements of chance relationships with no inner value. It's really not as difficult as you may think and much good comes of it.

What if I told you that your every conflict, disappointment, struggle or challenge, with others or yourself, was merely a manifestation of what's going on within your own thinking... would you go there first to fix, mend, and allay?

Yeah, you might miss the drama.

But, really, would you?

"Maybe years later the slut has the look of a woman who has lived somewhere before. She now knows the words for certain things, is familiar with three-day winds, the roads of Morocco, the strongholds of the British, the uses of kohl, the laying and folding styles of napkins for all sorts of tables, has heard music from instruments deep-bellied and two-stringed, cries that were songs, waves washing on rock, coral, and sand. She has pens filled with ink and some that are plumed. Slippers sewn with gold thread and pointed toes. Gum smelling of leaves. Oil in wax-sealed jars. Says "no" as a question after her sentences. Pedals backward to brake on a bike that only brakes by hand. Eats steak with a knife like it was a fork. Looks skyward for the grace of God. Digs in a garden with shards of broken bowl. Calls dogs with the clap of her hands. Trims her nail with a blade. Twists her hair and burns the broken, frayed ends. Rubs her teeth with hollow grass blades in the morning and night. Wears skirts that are scarves knotted at the hip. Writes in a leather-bound book. Totes a cat on her shoulder... Joins children at games on the street, throwing off her shoes and hiking up her dress, letting the girls try her perfume kept in a vial, applied with a stick to the small beating veins at their necks. She gives them names they have never heard before and tells them they are the words for tree, sky and lake in a country where the girls never bathe but are licked clean by cows."

-- Here They Come
Yannick Murphy

"Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bein qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pout les yeux."

-- Le Petit Prince
by Antione de Saint-Exupéry

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts."

-- Thoreau

"She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her."

-- The Stranger, by Albert Camus

When you can say "thank you" in advance, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, and really, really mean it -- and you've steered yourself clear of the cursed hows, especially from insisting upon certain behavior from specific people -- your mastery over the illusions of time and space will become legendary.

I once, years ago, told someone how easy it was, and has always been, for me to detach from people. How easily and frequently I can just walk away without another thought. I think the exact words I used were "the only reason I stop to look back is to light a cigarette from the bridge I just started burning, but then I turn around and keep on walking."

And in the years since then, I have thought about this on and off. And, even once, tried -- more as experiment at the time than anything else -- to take an exactly opposite approach. And when my desire to leave hit, I stayed, at least to a small degree. It was a matter of making myself do so, and making myself output what I felt was the minimum communication/involvement required so that I was "still there" instead of "long gone". And both good, at which I was surprised, and bad, at which I was not surprised, came of that experiment. But what mostly came from it, as an offshoot, was the realization that it even if you have left, is not very difficult to rebuild the bridges you have burned and to feel grateful that there is so much to come home (to the home within yourself) to.

What that time of 'forced' connection showed me was how to study the underlying values there in such situations. And I found, much later, that they often represented something that I may have mistakenly rejected in the past. And that, perhaps, I had been distracted by more glamorous dreams and not really realizing that, at a deep level, my heart and soul were being fed, and had been. Or, perhaps they hadn't been, but my refusing to leave allowed them time to develop the ability to feed on what was there.

I still am not sure.

But, what I feel is once again an affirmation of the fact that whereever I am is exactly where I belong. And that entire journeys can be designed to bring you back to a familiar person with an entirely new appreciation.

I think that it is important to strive, with humility, to be the first to recognize your own mistakes, misunderstandings, and self-involvement in relationships. It's important to be a warrior of the open heart and help the one you care about to own the strength of their love, in whatever form it may take.

Some think life is not so much a place to seek personal happiness and fulfillment, but rather a place to learn lessons and graduate.

And so it is for them.

And then there are some who think it's both. And so it is for them.

The reason others think they need you, is because they don't yet fully believe that they already have all that it takes to have all that they want. So they pretend you hold the key.

Do less, be more.

For Malibu:

A tip on legend making, darlin'...

Always do what you most want to do, and do it your way.

I do. ;)

The speed with which any dream may be realized, darlings, is always a function of how small the miracles have to be in order not to freak out the dreamer.

It is odd, though, given that there are only miracles, how some are more accepted than others.