Roses’ Amber Necklace
15 Saturday Aug 2020
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in15 Saturday Aug 2020
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in15 Saturday Aug 2020
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inIn this essay I will trace a brief history of my early works of writing and tell something of how I shifted into the next piece. Before I start, I want you to know that I’ve been busy trying out the medium of writing and painting for thirty years now. One of my mentors, Dr. Cornelia Moore, told me to say I “attempt” things and I suspected at the time that she was trying to tame the wild woman in me who thought greatness was in her future. And now, I think she may have succeeded. Good writing takes time. Excellent work means you perfect every sentence. Thank god for spell check. Sometimes I paint and write with the same work and at this point I can choose from a variety of paintings that can work as covers to my books. If I am in a rush, I take a picture that already exists on the www and spend time trying to figure out how to purchase it should it be necessary. However, in this age of free cyberspace everything, pictures can be taken off of any facebook site by simply saving to your desktop and anyone posting is basically offering their work for free. So this is a six of one, half dozen of the other things.
Will you purchase my books or essays by asking me, or by using the devices I have offered? Who knows? What is important to me is sharing. I figure if anything is that good, it will spiral out of control and hit the media networks and then I’ll know I did something large instead of for whoever bumped into it. Still. I do so love creating the text and hope you might be glad you bumped into whatever it was that you keyboarded to find the work. I try to speak to this historical time and to a broad range of families and I appreciate feedback so please try to connect. I’m sure I will connect back to you promptly.
Early in 2000s, you could go to Smashwords.com and key in Tiffany Steel and find my books. From that site my books are spread around the world by Sony and all the modern agents such as Epub (Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions, others). Or so smashwords declares. In 2020, I could not find anything on smashwords by a pseudo name Tiffany Steel.
I am working on a Book of Books called Two Women. I am posting Two Women on smashwords, book by book. You may also find a Book of Essays I am posting on a Facebook site called Write To Literary Agent. But let me start a short history of my journey with some of my first manuscripts:
Long ago I wanted to write — but first, to my way of thinking, one needed to live the writer’s life. And so I did. Oh did I ever live the writer’s life. I’ve actually moved every year or two since 1968. I became single and went out into the world and moved endlessly every year. I picked up a new batch of pals, partied and wrote. I was very disciplined about it. After much experience living in dozens of alternative cultures over the course of ten years, I felt ready to learn to write and I did so by bringing all my research and writing into the college scene and immersing myself in coursework that would shape the work. Before college, I had made hundreds of paintings, wrote poetry and attempted to write long pieces of narrative prose. I considered the eighties my true “early period.” I showed the paintings on Hilton Head Island and was so naïve I was baffled at the reception I received. It was very good.
But failing to satisfy my expectations as a poetess-writer-novelist, I went to college to read and write to my professors. I needed a dam good audience to figure out what I was doing with words on paper. In college, as some of you might remember, you have to know exactly what you need and what you want to find out about. It’s a research place as well as a temple of exonerated thinkers. What we are exonerated from is basic, ordinary life. And I’m so grateful. I can honestly say that I feel I have done “ordinary life, woods life, life at men’s houses, poverty life, rich life, boat life, condo life, suburbia life, nine months in a tent life and more.”
So I just needed to pause and be on a campus near a great batch of libraries by 1993. My lifestyle at this point is very exciting to me.
So as my first goal here indicated, I figure out what lifestyle the writer needs, and then next what kind of setting for feedback (college for ten years), and I gave it to myself.
I require a special set up to remain interested in being a strict artist! I spend much of my social time up on a campus – anyone will do. Back in the day when I was the student, I wanted feedback and to see if my views on paper could thrill, stultify, amaze, entertain and be of value to human society. I found my voice and had the nerve to shock people too, which I felt and still feel people need so that they can wake up more. Take our national lack of budget for one topic and don’t get me started.
Even if I leave just one artifact, that would be cool, or so I think. At the University of Hawaii, I learned to write essays, and later when I felt ready, I went to Dartmouth College to write my first, full length manuscript titled The House of the Mad Genius: Mystic Medicine for Dartmouth College. This can be found at the college in the special collections for student thesis. I’ve never published it because I like that one original copy right there. It’s a personal icon saying, I lived and my grandchildren can go see it if they choose to. I like the feeling of the sentence, “My grandma wrote a book.”
One year later, I felt I should try to show methods of working with facts and the imagination so I wrote my next manuscript The Visionary Forum. This small book is about thirty-five pages long and is an astonishing, short journey on how to make the next dream of your “self” come true. You can take this journey by keying into Facebook site VisionaryForum. Or just email me at susanldarnell@gmail.com After you begin the first few days of the journey, you have to write to me and we interact. So this is a truly interactive book. Still, I was unhappy with the serious nature of these previous two pieces of writing, so I refocused my style and went in the direction of writing Spiritual Memoirs. I wanted to lighten up, not be so sincere and, well, more or less not try for such a perfected kind of being thing that was showing in my “fancy work” with words. I had a kind of “perfection complex” one gets from being in college too long.
But scholars do have to live by their codes of speech and I need to too. I just didn’t want a voice like that forever. So I imagined how to begin to entertain myself through writing. Whereas Dartmouth College had commanded “the formal voice” out of me, I alone after college tried to actually begin to do what I knew how to do after all those years of roaming and really memorizing and recording a variety of voices that I found in diversified cultures. So in essence, I wanted to relax and enjoy my writing skill and I needed to do it so why not do it like I’m taking the best ride of my life. That’s exactly how it feels inside me as a write so this is my excuse for continuing.
While I achieved the affect of personalizing the voice in Spiritual Memoirs and the cadence felt friendlier, like I might be at a café talking to someone, I was still not content with the sincere nature of a spiritual piece. That is to say, it was still too sincere a voice. I wanted something funnier, or so I thought. Relaxing one July during a fast which slowed me down, I picked up the memoir writing Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs. I laughed at least every page or two and figured he thought life was funny. Then I had to analyze “if” I thought life was funny, but then I threw out the entire idea of analyzing a thing and went with my gut feeling. You can really tell the difference between his approach and mine when you read our early works. I thought Augusten was onto something I had not thought of but as mutual writers, I could borrow a tad of. It’s like going to the neighbor and borrowing some of their brown sugar when you only knew about white sugar before you met them. So I began to imagine how to be outright funny and outrageous in a text.
I read his work very carefully — analyzing what made this piece of writing work because in general, if you asked me out in the public “Do I think I am funny?” Or, “Do you want to write humor?” I think I would have said, “Ah. Hum. Maybe. I’m not sure.” But you see for me, this was the perfect moment to start to write because I am often discovering life as I write. With Augusten, I could thoroughly enjoy the natural, smooth flow of each sentence and I was supremely happy that I could learn some things about relaxing as a writer.
And for example, his work showed me how to omit time frames in a text. Whereas I use to write things like “from 1985 to 1993” and so on, and I felt I needed to do that to keep track of where the character was and her time frame, he skipped it all together. In Augusten’s work, you are “with his family, his mom and dad,” that kind of time frame. Or he’ll say, “When I was a boy, about ten.” So you could skip “dating” work and do like that. I found that exciting. I know it’s a little bitty thing, but, well, that’s the life of a writer. We like the detail, the nuances we can learn from each other.
I also spent time figuring out how a reader could think of her series of essays as one whole book. When I first read the whole book, I wasn’t sure how to imagine them related. But I figured that out too. I then read the book a third time and figured out how Augusten eliminated certain things so as to not bog the mind of the reader. For example, his use of the voice and the vocabulary of a child intrigued me. He mingled it with his own voice as a grown man and by a few comments and of course grammatical marks, the reader could tell he shifted and hear the sounds of the man or child as he might talk.
After that major pause, I asked myself what would I like to show next. I knew I was like an actress who selects stories to act out because they help her with her life. So my next concern was that I had not really shown a hard core example of the metaphysical mind I did have. I thought of that because I got worried about being in writing competitions. People could not see the brilliant metaphysical mind I had so I wrote the beginning of a new manuscript titled Oneness of Bearing. I positioned the knowledge to compete with Eckhart Tolle’s The New Earth and other intellectual peers like Louise Hay, Caroline Myss, Rick Jarrow, Greg Bradden and Jack Kornfield. While my manuscript at Dartmouth College could show the metaphysics I do have a good grasp on, it was too complicated to hunt through the narration of the story between the professor and the student. I wanted to strip people out of that text and for only a few dozen pages, show how a Practitioner and Meditation Master exchanged words. This was one of my writing experiments.
In Oneness of Bearing I copied the book style or the format Eckhart used which was dialogical. The practitioner of meditation asked questions, followed by the teacher making answers. I found that the writing strategy worked really well for what I wanted to accomplish and the content was very satisfying also. I would use this short piece of writing later in a novel about a woman named Rose. She went to a meditation teacher and asked questions. So this is how one piece of writing leads to belonging to another. Keep that in mind as you read. All in all, this interim writing project set me up to hold gratifying conversations with writing peers.
Having fleshed out the intellectual underpinnings of what my mind could do by writing Oneness of Bearing, next, I wanted to try something with humor, attitude and silliness, but this next piece of writing had to take the direction of amazement also. So the question was, “How can I have fun, aka be silly while writing, and yet still feel I have created a piece of writing that could amaze or entertain a reader?
My answer to that was the manuscript Un-Entitled Trouble. What I did was simply imagine a whole life, told quickly, and the challenge for me was to highlight all the nutty memories and put them in a sequence that the reader might enjoy. That work came along and at the end of one summer. The trigger was simply to live somewhere where I didn’t care to be. I was satisfied with the first sixty pages, really happy about it. In this manuscript, I had really begun to write in a normal voice and once again I liked the cadence because it was different than other pieces or voices in my writing. It wasn’t so deeply thoughtful. It was, well, normal. Regular. In the middle — as Buddha would say.
Normally, I don’t like the middle, I adore the extremes, but what I learned was that if I want normal satisfaction, I have to imagine being in the middle, sort of like being in the middle class, I would say. I know my scholar friends would not like that piece of writing, but it satisfied the adolescent that still lurked around in me so I didn’t care. I was content hoping everyone in America could read and enjoy that voice, that character, that main narrator. And it was a goal to write for many readers with a kind of common voice.
While I enjoy writing academically, I do not think I can help as many people as I would like to with too formal of an approach. But I can use a very formal approach and help a small “market.” Go to my Vitae Darnell Facebook site and read a few pieces there if you are the kind of person who wants to read wise words, revelatory words – as my Dartmouth professor told me I had. I can be sincere and maybe some people would call that serious. For a long time. Still. I can do it, that’s the main point.
Previous to the work Un-Entitled Trouble, the writings I did were more polished and professional and often enough, due to my intellectual focus being a cross disciplinary study of eastern and western philosophical and religious studies – too complex. Un-Entitled Trouble accomplishes the goal of showing readers how crazy and awesome a new geographical move can be thrown in with a mix of childhood bad behavior and teen messed up situations and outlandish adult, prime and proper accusations. I believe many people can identify with the adventures outlined in that kind of text. I used part of it for another novel later.
Feeling satisfied for having written four manuscripts, I paused and let the muse in me take a long winters nap. A few months later I was at it again, only this time I was interested in writing, as much as possible, in the present — while reflecting dramatically about past life autobiographical material. I desperately wanted a realism that was easy to understand but that would strike awe in the heart of the regular reader. A few new authors inspired this transition. Thomas Merton’s autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain and Merton’s Signs of Jonas, then Irving Stones biography on Van Gogh lit my way. Just in the nick of time I had one of my favorite mentors guide me. The main reason to be thrilled with him was because he was live, well and moved to my geography. We hadn’t seen each other in two decades. In this case, the guy was a full fledged priest, although he’s gotten kicked out of the priesthood temporarily because, well, he offended the Pope while making some dam good points. Father Hal Weidner directed some of the loose ends in my thinking about the value and purpose my audience might have because I remember other writers. And I thought, “Oh. Okay. I guess I’ll continue on that basis.” With his “care”, as momentary as it was, and as priestly, instead of well, “manly,” I finished another manuscript The Chronicles of Middletown. I might have used some of this in a novel also. I can’t remember right at the moment because I’m sure I want to use it again. It’s a bit longer because I was working in the chronicles for a few years.
Next, I had wanted to write a piece of literature that would seem like on the surface that it was about an everyday woman who pondered salvation and the religious notions of this historical time. She pondered religious notions because she could never decide if she should throw them all out, or keep them. Such a text suited twenty years of my research up to this point and that included my sexual history that I could now memorably recall with a lot of energy. I had always wanted to make a sexual history like all the groovy women artists that I read about and now, I did. Thus, along came the next manuscript Rose. This piece of writing is inspired by the stories and the lives of Zora Neale Hurston, Dora Carrington and Vincent Van Gogh. The main character “Rose” is based on a true story about a woman who begins a love relationship with a Priest. As we unravel Rose through a series of confessions, her mythic nature out matches the madness and fame of her three favorite artists. The Priest notices the magnitude of Rose’s gifts and begins to need her in his life journey. In this story we find out how Rose has been taken beyond human measures by a naïve faith – and it becomes the work of the Priest to bring Rose back to life by falling in love with his own human nature.
At this point in my writing life, while I submit my books and you the consumer get excited by the read, and want to talk to me, I begin to feel like I’ve really accomplished something. What happened was that I stubbornly believed in my mind. And to help myself stay strong, I created a forum anyone in the world can take. I now see how the forum I created, based on the vision of becoming a published author, now gets to be a greater vision, some thing global. And this is truly the “cyberspace” age.
In closing I would like to say I am grateful Smashwords. Com made it so easy for me to post and suddenly, be global. I’m going to work on figuring out how to get translated into Italian, Spanish, Hindi, Urdu, languages in Pakistan, Belgium, Germany and, any language. I tell the true enough stories of an American Woman gone madly wild and placing all her faith in her country. Basically, I write literature and while it is for women, if you are a guy, it’s not a bad idea to meet your match in this woman writer because I know any woman you know would appreciate your diversion into a tad of woman’s studies. The rest of my success is up to you!
Lastly, enjoy the ride.
Susan Louise Darnell
15 Saturday Aug 2020
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inThe House of the Mad Genius
Mystic Medicine (2001)
Or 2nd title which came 2006
The Eastern Mystic Meets The Western Professor
A Novel presented for the Masters of Arts In Liberal Studies
By
Susan Louise Darnell
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
Hanover, New Hampshire
2001
And now, a manuscript presented to those who are helping me to create a channel for a movie script based on two manuscripts, this one, and Dr. Sears. Read on.
Copyright by
Susan L. Darnell
©Copyright 2010
Dedication
First Son
Alexander
“For when it is quite, quite nothing, then it is everything.”
D.H. Lawrence
Second Son
Austin
“There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life.”
–James Hillman
The concept of friend
Russell Thomas Alfonso
“One unique flower growing from the crevice: It should not be, but is.”
To My Professors
Bud Church, Cornelia Moore, Donald Pease
“You see me, while others could not. Why?”
To The Wind Beneath My Wings and My First Early Love
Nils Leida Dailey
To Mother and Father, Sister and Brother
To the leaf that decays and changes form
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Welcome to The House of The Mad Genius: Mystic Medicine (1st title made 2000). (New title made early in 2006 – The Eastern Mystic Meets the Western Professor) Writing a book is a long process, or so it was for me. I would like to introduce potential writers and already published writers, to my first book. First, I’ll track my intellectual development. Things use to come to me in ‘titles.’ In high school it was noticeable I was writing in poetry, I could not speak, nor talk in anything other than poetry. Still no one noticed. But then again, no one really spoke to me much, save for maybe a few times each decade.
My center was all divinized, that is, lost in the madness of god, and the foundness of goddess within. What all of this meant was that I was a healer, seemingly acting, but not acting. I’ve now accepted how I operate in realtime and that I always been a healer and filled with supernatural powers. It is because of this mystery surrounding who I am that I decided to come to college and write. I have two titles for this mansucript so far, but we shall see what a movie script writer does with my script and Dr. Priscilla Sears, as well as Dr. Donald Pease. They are the ones who matter first. Let me begin tracking, so you can get the gist of what I’m up to here. It is a contribution to humanity. That is the intention, and so it is
The first title of this book stems, in part, from the first course I took in a graduate liberal studies program at Wesleyan College back in the fall of 1979. My graduate ‘path,’ so to speak, had begun to be carved, unknowingly of course, by Wesleyan’s Professor Bud Church. Studying Norman O. Brown and using the text Life Against Death: A Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, we explored the question “Who am I,” and we were asked to write about it. The first thing that came to my mind was that I was mad and when I wrote that, and was suppose to explain it out loud in class, I noticed I was not sure what the distinctions were inside myself between the emotion mad and the condition of mad. That started me off into a mild quandary about my own genius. At times when the emotions were all integrating with cognition simultaneously, coupled with the energy movement or spirit in my body, when I could not integrate the amazing sense of unity (nirvakalpa samadhi) I found in deep meditative states, I thought the state of separation was otherwise called mad genius. From the moment of my first nirvana, which caused the genius to arise, I’ve never had an hour in my life when I am not either in God or when separating, reaching to be in God again. Since my awakening, I have studied how consciousness fluctuates, how emotions go up and down, and how we are in and out of various planes of higher and lower integrations. That has been the main focus of inquiry in my formal and informal work. I have re-discovered by experimentation, that there is an ascending and descending order to human consciousness.
Part of Normal O. Brown’s thesis claimed, “Mankind’s neurosis is due to the dilemma of what to do with the impulses of the body: Should we live in our body and love and have sex, or should we sublimate our bodily cues to feel love, emotion, a desire for sex, and consider the higher path a non-sexual path, a non-physical path?” I believe he was a contributor to newer claims that say the non-sexual path is not higher, but rather in fact, the path with love and sex is the higher path in this life. Many contemporary mystics would agree with this latter claim. Brown felt the mystics had clues for us. So did I, however, I ignored the mystics consciously for a long time, and just pursued my bodily impulses, which I’m happy to say lead to love, great sex and much creativity in the decades that followed my initiation into the mystical arts.
The realizations of famous ideas in ones own head makes one take pause and say “How common sense this great idea of following bodily impulses.” And this lead me to say how fully healthy and happy I am compared to others who say they are miserable. But to keep our gifts we must share them. Everyone’s journey into the deep and profound, starts in it’s own way. In 1979, I was beginning to meditate and practice yoga. I noticed new parts of my body, mind and spirit waking up for the first time and Norman O. Browns’ writings opened up some possible solutions to puzzling ideas I’d been thinking about too. Bud Churches course made me think, quite frankly, I was having a miraculous moment in my life. I began to lucidly dream and feelings, visions and powers I had never integrated started to move into my awareness. I began to experience mystical states frequently just by giving myself, my being, the validity of my own bodily cues to relate from, instead of the so called rational, linear, progressive, materialistic reality cues. When I tried out Zen, Vipassana, Saivite and other practices to enhance the mind, body, spirit connection, I began to feel at home anywhere in the world.
Well all that was a long time ago, but from those early days, when the mystical lights were dawning in me until now, I have been interested in the miraculous powers my whole body learned how to exude. I have been interested in self healing, healing others and how to stimulate both bodily powers and healings in others. We mystics call this the circulation of the light, from within and without. I know that the human body has an energy (I call the soul) that works as a healing system to repair and regenerate humans. The soul communicates to us by irrational signs, sound and color, as well as knowledge. I have heard this said another way: The unconscious listens by rhymes, rhythms and repetitions. Being able to tap into the soul invites a powerful influence into our awareness and such awareness heals human beings.
This work was composed to invite an understanding of characters who are working with a mystic and contemplating soul work either consciously or not. The characters in the text vacillate about whether or not the soul is in their body. The character of the mystic does not try to teach the other characters very much about the soul, rather, she just is soul, and comes from the soul perspective at certain key times times. Such a perspective replaces the rational perspective. Each character in the text speaks and thinks in an unusual way to show contrasting styles and perspectives. My characters are all very extraordinary. The pop culture might call them weird to say the least. But all things and people are karmically connected.
My aim is to drive home a thesis which synthesizes this historical time by using the literary device of character. The scholarly thesis aspect was dropped in favor of a novel form, yet the underlying question was at first “How does the soul rescue us in tragedy?” The question changed to make the book hopefully more symphonic. The revised way of getting at my thesis, then, came from asking, “Can love travel back in time to heal a broken heart.” In my text, the sordid and the transcendental mingle together in an ongoing dialogue between a Mystic, a Dartmouth Professor and a Visionary Artist.
The religio-philosophical dialogics stretch apart then back together again in a tension between the issue of life versus death. The overarching problem is some people want to kill themselves. The work was composed as a thesis for my Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies degree while simultaneously seeking to be in an English which would attract the general public reader. Along with the package of the text is a visual-sound video tape.
The inspiration to work through a thesis really started in 1993 when my first mentor and professor, Dr. Cornelia Moore, from the University of Hawaii, fortuitously placed into my hands two very unusual books by Elizabeth Petroff, a Professor at the University of Massachusettes, Amhurst. The texts were about women mystics. I had never sat and worked with a woman scholar, nor had I thought, but for a moment in time, about women mystics. In my prayer and meditation upon the ideas in these books, I realized my own journey as a mystic. At some point, all of a sudden, the arduous years as a practicing ascetic, mystic and artist were aroused into focus. Finally, I understood that my body, mind, soul, behavior, linguistic structures and cognitive processes moved like a dance through time and space on inspiration.
I had submitted a paper in a Future’s Studies class at University of Hawaii trying to ground what inspiration was, but the Professor did not see my way. I then went further into research to ground how to tell rationalists about the faculty of inspiration and all I came up with was a language gap and a small ability to distinguish between the man’s language and the woman’s language. Then I met people who could use both languages simultaneously which peaked my interest in consciousness even more, especially the ability that some people have to use lucid dream states at will, awake or asleep. I practiced altering my consciousness for ten years and recorded in paintings what the planes were, how they go higher and higher, and how the human character forms in higher states. Then I needed ‘reason’ again, instead of the symbolicity of paint, to explain the human channel that is sacred or in God, so to speak. I had the opportunity to distinguish my symbolic language and rational language because a special person walked into my life in 1993. He was Philosopher Russell Thomas Alfonso.
I am indebted forever to this superior man. He prepared me for master’s work and continued to support my every whim to communicate throughout the entire thesis experience. I had the privilege of sitting with Russell everyday for five years before coming to Dartmouth. Dr. Alfonso’s ability as an analytic philosopher, philosopher of aesthetics and logician helped me to distinguish the complex language patterns I used. He also helped me to learn to honor the complex thought processes of a mystic which seem, at times, virtually impossible for the average person to grasp. I became able to articulate and distinguish when other’s besides myself were communicating at the level of mundane thought, and when they spun off into higher and higher cognitive planes, until, at the apex of understanding a person can soars into lucidity, into poetry, and then on into the omniscient and omnipresent. My first intellectual mate at Dartmouth, who could communicate with me as finely as Russell and just a tiny bit more so from the dream realm, was Master Eric Gaither. I am forever grateful he was sent my way. I can barely describe Eric, one has to experience this man and his masterful use of language, mind and soul.
Masters work at Dartmouth College began in the fall of 1998. I had to fly away from my philosopher and first son, Zander, in Hawaii and bravely reconnect with my second son Austin Sinclair. He was in Massachusetts. While I was visiting Austin, one week before Dartmouth College began, I found out I was formally admitted into the program. So I drove north with my U-Haul truck full of research and paintings. In part, the research work in the truck, the paintings especially, were inspired in 1980 by Dartmouth’s physics Professor, John Kidder. As I drove north through New England’s winding country roads, I wondered in anticipation about all of the wonderful people I would meet who would support my journey.
I would like to acknowledge each of these people in the order that I met them. Each inspired me in a very unique way, and took at least a ten week interest in my life. From the Dartmouth Community, my participants are respectively: Rogers Elliot, Amy Hollywood, Walter Simons, Gail Osherenko, Nick Flanders, John Colligan, Peter Travis, James Murphy, Igor A. Budantsev, Eric Gaither, Patrick O’Neill, Keoki Johnson, Priscilla Sears, Donald Pease, Ehud Benor, James Rice, Augusta Boal, Bruce Baker, Charles Stinson, Benjamin B. Bolger, Claire Tumulty Brown, Nance Silliman and Framji Minwalla. Administrative participants were President White, James Larimore, Dean of the College, Provost Susan Prager, Dr. Ed. Burger, and Lauren Clarke. There were people outside my program who either prepared me and or supported me too: Lomi Lomi Aunty Angela, Dr. Joy Marcello, Dr. Shivani Chakravorty, Mr. Edward Bolt, Hal Weidner, Father Tom, Suzie Choloe, Donna Dailey, Nicole Dolan, Stephen Dixon Hartshorne, Sarah Hartshorne, Shucks, Susan Cross, Elizabeth Petroff, Beth Hapgood, Beth Fox, Katherine Dailey, Gregory Brower, Patrick Croall, Chris Platt, Stephen Gainsley, Evelini Rapozo, Eric Bussey, Melanie Lewis, Tom Waring, Lili Paxton, Riki Humboldt, and Black Bear.
I would like to acknowledge most especially Dr. Donald Pease. Seemingly mystical himself, he stuck to the agenda of teaching me at the crisis moment of Dr. Sear’s second suicide attempt. He gave me no comfort or sympathy, just an intellectual sequence to follow. It was the first time I was ever given guidance through reading. We spent one-hundred and twenty divine minutes together in total. In that time I was told to read William Blake, Hesse’s Siddartha, and Steppenwolf, then Carlos Castaneda, and to see the Orozco mural, from which, I read about Quetzalcoatl. The sequence of reading and seeing experiences had an amazing affect: it shifted my awareness, I still can’t explain how, yet. And the sequence gave me a new respect for the rationalisms one must have to be a novelist. Donald Pease was my favorite man and scholar on the campus, but James Rice put the whole experience together for me because in his view, all feelings mattered.
Many others played an important role listening to my readings or talks, and either answering my never ending questions about their soul and body, or telling me the ‘affect’ I was having on their soul and body. The latter of course, was my preference and around this ‘ego’ world, it was not an easy undertaking to get any response. The spirit and memory of my mother, Jean Lucille Bahm and her mother, my grandmother Louise Sands Bahm visited me often.
However, the largest breakthrough I had about a family spirit was from my father. His spirit came to me in a dream and told me when things get tough, go public, “Let the public feel their way through the deep with you Susan.” You see he was a newspaper man all his life and when my Professor tried to kill herself a second time during my thesis writing period, having no one to turn to, I went to the public for support. At that moment, I needed to share and express what was in my heart, and no amount of words on paper would do. After that experience, I realized that my wandering years, which many writers must do before a substantial piece of work manifest, provided me with a most excellent service. It was the ‘service of the stranger.’ There is so much comfort in talking to people you don’t know. When you know no one and just trust everyone you have everyone and everything you need. The key phrase was “Help me, I need to talk and get feedback.” I have grown very fond of the public since my sannyasin days and the Professor’s harrowing trip with the demon of darkness because the public was an impersonal space whereby boundaries collapse and then one is amorphously in the most personal space. So thanks very much Dad. I knew one day I would know what kind of thank you I owed you.
My mother’s deceased spirit bothered me the most during my master’s work. It was my mother who use to ask me big questions. That’s how I arrived at Dartmouth, a place to answer big questions. When I needed to turn to the Dartmouth Community to help imagine how to move through the thesis period, I was reminded of both my mom and dad who taught me about community because they revered it so much as a newspaper family. Also, there were local and cyber communities that I needed from time to time. I am especially grateful to the Quaker Community in Hanover, The Lightgate Community in Thetford, Vermont, Insight Meditation Society in Barre Massachusetts, Lama Tenzin and his interpreter Georgianna Cook on Maui, His Eminence Siviyasubramuniyaswami Gurudev and his swamis, especially Uncle Sadhu on Kauai.
The demon and creative genius that was most difficult, destructive and mortifying to work with was Stephen Dixon Hartshorne. He loved me and hated me and brought up passion the wrong way. In turn, I comiserated on the fact that an enlightened soul has perfect order to her being and can re-order a person’s consciousness by presence alone. We created a space for the navigation of terror. I needed that kind of emotional experience to bare dealing with suicides. His need to navigate an intense and enduring demonic and divine love allowed for the re-birth of our past life tragedies, which was a deplorable and devilish thing to deal with. With him I shared a truly horrible, terrific time. At the end of our experience, we were shown that the divine takes the lead, not the conscious mind, nor conjured demons, in matters of omnipotent healing and the awakening of love between humans. We didn’t win each other’s heart, we lost, as his journey to kill off everything in sight was venomously strong-willed. So we lost the love, because love is tender and kind and does not compete or corrupt another’s heart just for a kick or laugh.
Master Artisan Gregory Brower came to me as my mad genius. Realizing how much fun we have in mad genius, even though we have different methodologies to control how to traverse genius and sanity, still, mid-journey, he began to inspire me intensely. Through his show of darkness, we eventually were lead back into the light so that our translucent nature could reveal itself to each other. His ability to endure great agony to produce for us creative work few in this century can tolerate looking at, has been absolutely astonishing. I was producing literature that few could tolerate accepting, so we were a good match. Just to defer ‘customers’ from me, I give you Gregory instead. His mental processes and luxuriously lucid and omnipresent states will keep you spell bound while help you sit and find your soul. An easy thing to be and do if you are Gregory Brower.
The fact that I spoke many dialects of English is something to acknowledge also. During my long absence from the east coast, when I experimented and absorbed myself in cultures that spoke very broken English, or nearly no English, I completely forgot how to communicate in formal English. I began to miss people who spoke a very formal English for the simple reason that I wanted to think deep thoughts and speak them to those who could focus and concentrate for long periods. Most Professor’s assumed I had a high level of English when I arrived at Dartmouth, but the fact was, I was overwhelmed to hear high speed, high level English spewn out in long paragraphs all in a conversation. I had to practice reading to myself outloud to speed up my articulations. In my research, I occasionally needed to be reminded of pronunciations from various languages including English sounds. Ashok Ramasubramanian, Dr. Shivani Chakravorty and Dr. Vimal Dissanayake assisted me in pronunciation of Hindi, Sanskrit, and Pali. Dr. Peter Hershock helped me with Buddhist concepts and languages. Nicole Dolan gave me pronunciations of Japanese, Zander Dailey gave me French and Elizabeth Knoke gave me German sounds. The significance of this is special. You see long ago I looked at scholarly work and wondered what kind of life a person lead, whereby, they would know at least something about various languages in the world. I aspired to make sentences that grew from diversity, many languages and worldly experiences. I have been happy while at Dartmouth because we have the opportunity to listen to the wonderful sounds of my native formal English: music to behold.
There is one more ‘group’ to thank. We call them ordinarily ‘the lost or sad and forgotten souls.’ These were the strangers I talked to who had nothing like the life the ordinary American assumed. You see I went head on into the darkest of human possibilities, the inside of myself. And while inside, in the dark, other people in the same way, came to my life. Locked inside the prison of our own terror and disturbance one finds the worst stories. And that is, in part, what I had to look for, before I came back to Dartmouth. Only by the mystery of fate or my ability to read the signs and wonders divined to me about destiny, did I escape the torrents of sadness placed in my path and tragic life stories so many people still like to live with. That I am given time and money to write this work in such a fine environment, I hope, is a sign that I came delivered and prepared.
I don’t know who more to thank, those who still struggle or those wonderful scholars who work so hard trying to organize all of the kinds of thoughts in the world by speaking and writing. At the end of my scholarly journey, there were practical helpers who came along. One moved downstairs when I lived in the Wheelock Street Apartment. He was from Liverpool, England. Ian A. White was not only the neighbor, but he had a special background with mystics from England and he loved to read my thesis draft as well as shape and add commentary that made all the differences one could hope for. A number of times, pieces of the manuscript needed to be shared. From this activity came a fan club. I offered access to the public, 21st Century Mystic Medicine emails for everyone at facebook address Vitae Darnell or Susan Louise Darnell. Thank you all for this new part of my life. And a special thanks to iMac Corporation and The United States Programs which assist people in our “American” life of change, change, change.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover…………………………………………..…………………….………………..…
Human) Body with Chakra Center (Picture…………..………………………………….iii
Head Energy Centers…………………………………………………………………iv
Abstract……………………………………………………..………………………..v – vi
Dedication…………………………………………………..……………………..……..vii
Acknowledgements………………………………………..….………………….viii – xi
Table of Contents…………………………………………….……………….…..xii – xiii
List of Appendice Essays…..…………………………………………………….…..xiii
Index of Categorical Bibliography…………………………………..…..……..xiv
Hindu Chakrah and Judaic Tree of Life……………………………………….xv
BOOK ONE
Prologue…………………………………………………………….…………………..…1
Triple Prison of Time, Space and Causation (Painting)….…………………………..…..1
Ascension: The only way up is down first………………………………. 2 – 21
The petty little mortal past………….………………….………………………22 – 38
Time to dig in the subconscious……………………….….………………….39 – 57
Current Time Ecstasy…………………………………….………………………..58 – 59
The Worst Ruin Leads to the Field of Lilies……………………………….60 – 89
Endnotes………………………………………………………..….…………….…….90 – 95
BOOK TWO
Dartmouth……………………………………………………..….………………..97 – 271
Black On Soul (Painting)………………………….……….……………….…….……97
Netherworld…………………………………………………………………………98 – 133
Mediators………………………………….………..…..…………………………134 – 141
Figures……………………………………….…………………………………….142 – 174
Shimmerings (Painting)…..………………….……….………………………..…..175
Shimmerings………………………………….……..…………………………..176 – 199
Mystic Mountain (Painting)……….……….……………………………………….170
the necessity of being rational…………………………………………….200 – 212
Early Morning Dawn ………………………………………………………….213 – 221
Mysticism at Dartmouth?…..……………………………………………….222 – 227
Something a little sordid: from pain to love………………….………228 – 236
Home………………………………………………………………………………….237 – 265
Endnotes………………………………………….….……………………………..267 – 271
APPENDICE ESSAYS AND NOTES
Appendice Essays and Notes Index……………………..……………………..272
1. Analysis of the Text……………………………..……………..……………..273 – 275
2.Analyzing Mysticism Academically……..…….………………….…..…276 – 281
3.Walter Stace’s Characteristics of Mystical Experiences….………283 – 288
4. Lao Tzu…………………………………………………..…..…………………….289 – 299
5. Judaic Mysticism…………………………………………….…………….…..300 – 308
6. Tibetan Dream Yoga………………………….…………….………..……….309 – 310
7. Philosopher Litterateur: Albert Camus…………………………………311- 312
8.Buddha’s Seven Point Mind Training……………………………..……313 – 320
9.Contemporary Tantricism……………………………………………….….321 – 327
10.Hindu Chakras………………………………………………………….……..328 – 337
11.Kundalini…………………………………………………………..…………….338 – 339
12.Vipassana……………………………………………………….……………….340 – 345
13.Historical Background……………………………..………………..….….346 – 351
14. Quezalcoatl……………………………………………………………………352 – 358
15. Orozco…………………………………………………………………….…….359 – 366
16. 12th Century Mystic Margueritte Porete…………………….…….367 – 376
Alphabetical Bibliography…………………….………………………….…455 – 468
CATEGORICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Religious Sources
Buddhism
Christianity
Women Visionary Sources
Early Church Sources
Holy Women and the Christianizing of Europe Sources
Visionaries of the Early Twelfth Century Sources
Beguine Sources
Women Visionaries in Medieval Italy
Visionaries of the Late Fourteenth Century
Mysticism Source
ChineseTaoist Sources
Tibetan Sources
Hindu Sources
Judaic Source
Sufi Source
Japanese Tenrikyo Source
Christian and Buddhist Sources
Demonology
Contemporary Mystic Sources
Philosophical and Literary Sources
Philosophy
Philosopher and Litterateur Sources
Literary Sources
Novels
Classics
Visionary Literature
American Studies (Literature)
Language, Linguistics, Socio-Linguistic, Sociology Sources
Sociology
Psychological Sources
Psychology
Psychology (Educational)
Art Sources
Blake
Orozco
Other Sources
Sources Related to Soul and Trauma
Film Sources
Hindu Mysticism
Seven Chakras
Sahasrar
Ajna
Vishudda
Anahata
Manipura
Svadisthana
Muladhara
Jewish Mysticism
Kabbalah Tree of Life
Ain
Ain Soph
Ain Soph Aur
Kether
Binah….Chokmah
Geburah….………Chesed
Tipharet
Hod………………….…Netzach
Yesod
Malkuth
15 Saturday Aug 2020
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inThird Turning THIRD WHEEL
The third turning was delivered to ME and an audience of bodhisattvas because we were ready to be initiated as bodhisattvas. Our location was Kawaii Island. Other people watch, liked other Bodhisattvas and onlooking Buddhas and even in transcendental Buddhic realms (in the Avatamsaka Sutra) realms we had witnesses, probably from our past life and consisting of part of our soul as that kind of teacher. The focal point of the third turning is the Buddha nature. This was elaborated on in great detail by Maitreya via Asanga in the Five Treatises of Maitreya, which are also generally grouped under the third turning.This was given to us by oral persuasion. The Yogachara school reorient us so we could have the next step of refinements in our layers of consciousness training. In this way, on its own accord the layer of a doctrinal idea comes up when you speak to me. It comes up and I share it with you. This is the joy of early Buddhist training. Things are like being fed with a silver spoon. We do all the work, you just open and mellow out on your tongue, and swallow.
The Three Turnings of the Wheel (of Dharma) refers to a framework for understanding the sutra stream of the teachings of the Buddhism originally devised by the Yogachara school. It later became prevalent in modified form in Tibetan Buddhism and related traditions.
The distinction is, on the one hand, an historic or quasi-historic scheme by which the Buddha’s first sermons, as recorded in the Pali Canon and the tripitakas of other early schools, constitute the First Turning, and the later Mahayana sutras comprise the Second and Third turnings. The schema appears in the Samdhinirmochana Sutra, a central Yogachara text, although it may predate it.
The tantras of the Vajrayana are generally not included under the rubric of the Three Turnings.[1] The model of three turnings of the ‘Wheel’ is an attempt to categorize the content, philosophical view, and practical application of the whole array of Buddhist sutrayana teachings.
The 3rd Wheel
15 Saturday Aug 2020
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inShamanic Journeys
With experienced shaman, mystic and professor Susan Louise Darnell
Who Needs A Shaman? Everyone. Find Out Why.
In part of our work we move through the Shamanic task of connecting to the voices from our own divine being as revealed, often enough, in the initial moments we meet. The visual and verbal images you need to be about for a while, at least for the duration of our journey together, come to you with a witness who can go deeper with you as you open and become ready. These divine visions I will have and you may have sometimes, come with verbal messages. Often they do. They give us a clue as to how to move into the healing power of the heart, and into the healing power of the vision. We will gather together the messages and ponder by softening and meditating about why our images are calling us to bring more consciousness into the present. This will helps us remember our true nature as divine humans with a sacred purpose.
Shamanic journeys are advanced healing journey very often, but sometimes they are just an exploration of what is below the surface of your consciousness. Through the communication channels we find on the spot, we are provided with ideas for creating rituals, meditations, and rites of passage to help us meet our personal and planetary challenges with grace, wisdom, and love. Often, I have helped people grieve in this manner, or find the work they need to do next. The shamanic aspect of our work is very artistic, much like creating a live dramatic performance in the moment. The result is an outpouring of the soul and the end result is a soothing of the soul as we’ve been reminded of the divine aspect of self we are so much belonging to but not accessing if we work in ways that are more conventional. We are provided with the material directly and that invokes direct experience. In turn, we are transformed into embodied wisdom that awakens consciousness and illumines the intelligence of the heart.
Throughout our journey we are connecting to the roots, the root chakra. As if a mystery, we unite the energies that guide us through the current cycle of our life on Earth, even as it and we change. When stress, suppression, repression, depression and oppression of any kind has been an issue, this journey unravels things for you and this helps us remember who we really are at heart, right now. It is also my purpose to apply the information to your everyday life. Through these passages, I become what in shamanic terms is called “The Opener of the Way.” I help you Architect the Higher Learning that is to be had through your material, in the moment. Together we evoke our power to unite heart and mind in a sacred marriage that brings transformation, renewal, and the awakening of consciousness. Once we work together in person, we can work on line or on the phone.
Connect through facebook at Mystic Medicine for Mystic and Shaman Susan Louise Darnell BA; BA; MA + 20 years of lived experience as a guide to the mind, body, movement, soul, spirit, divinity.
The Shamanic Cabin
Wisdom and the Arts
Angels Pregnant with your possibilities
15 Saturday Aug 2020
Posted Uncategorized
in8:30 pm
8/13/2020
The Contribution Window
PARA 1
She likes the unknown mindset the most. Whether it’s people or places, she likes to not know them and look for what is unknown about them. Then, when possible, she tells them what she sees in them, not usually what is outside them or even in their shallow talk. An odd habit, granted, but not for a writer exploring people and settings in the world. Whether or not a person comes off as genuine, authentic, or on the shallow stream side, it doesn’t matter.
PARA 2
But some people imagine some kind of invisible wall between their outer and inner wall and it is put up to keep people out. So with those types, Rose doesn’t make much of a response. Rather, this controlling type likes to control, so she watches just what they like to control. They can’t control her, rarely notice their talk is not working, and most often, this ends up with Roses’ conclusion: “They can’t see, or they can’t see that much.” Besides, it was true what Rose’s guru said directly to her about her frame of reference aka mindset: “With that much light, no one can hurt you.” And to this sentence, by “light” he meant “clear mindedness with right consciousness.” Something like that. If you have this kind of light you have control and this is good: goodness in action by nonaction, actually.
PARA 3
Consider someone trying to talk over Rose’s points! Or, through her projected points by not reflecting them for meaning: Or, basically trying to ignore her while they continue talking and therefore, they get the turn doing all the talking that they think is going on. A mad way to be and talk! They also get the turn getting attention on their much needed topics! This rhetorical trick doesn’t work with Rose but it appears to be working with Rose. She doesn’t speak up and say “What the fuck kind of talk is this?” And she’s not only thinking about particular words that her guru mentioned like hurt. Forget the hurt notation from the guru. Just consider the words and the directions of the words and the result such words garner.
PARA 4
How god dam illiterate can college educated people be? Well that was not the question according to the guru. It was “What plane of consciousness do they hang out in.” To complicate matters further, it was typical for a person to be conscious in three dimentions of consciousness simultaneously. But some are conscious of four, five, six, seven, eight and nine. The guru said. And there’s more but we’ll drop info about that right now. No reason to get so complicated the conversation necessarily goes off the rails of the pertinent trains of thought that were happening in the first place.
PARA 5
Yes. This is nothing to dwell on except that people either can’t communicate that well or they just blabber when in front of each other and the words try to go nowhere. The words try to do no work. Rose thinks this kind of use of words and energy is foolish. Then she forgives her anger and inadvertant swearing: But people have varying grasps on English, formal English or otherwise.
PARA 6
Another major point is she sees just about every move the words are trying to create. She notes that some words exchanged lack generativity. Her words don’t seem to be received. She watches the dialogue more or tries again to connect. She says in her head: Let things go to find out, observe, why a person can’t connect even though they keep talking. Now we get into some interesting territory. It’s one of Rose’s specialties: consciousness. She does not mention it because many people are not trained to observe their states of consciuosness. Even in their speech they can turn around and say, “I never said that.”
PARA 7
Eventually she adds up why they do what they do while in conversation or supposed conversation. Why any person just skip over hearing her part of the talk is Rose’s next observational move? Like I said at the beginning, she likes the unknown mindset the most. Things are part of a whole. The thing is, Rose is driven by the dialogue trying to go on between herself and another person she is communicating with. Training people to talk properly became an important action in the world Rose did produce between herself and someone, just about everyday.
PARA 8
Lots of people roam the world independently and can control everything around them, while being open and free to say whatever comes to mind. But simultaneously, they can listen and remember what the other people drop in and say. The main decision to make is if it’s worth connecting to others if they do not like to be open, exploratory and figure out what the hell is going on in the dialogue. The reason this has to be weighted with “decision-making power” is that there are still, and to Rose’s way of thinking always will be, certain social rules in different places in the world, as well as different echelons of society, which make being open to dialogical exploration nothing many types of people are comfortable with. Easy enough, but this lesson took Rose at least a decade to figure out. She could sail through life even easier if she followed the rules a person was requesting, verbally, or not. But it was awfully frustrating.
PARA 9
Before Rose could be so discriminating, and use her actual discriminating powers, she followed this rule: new friends, and offers to be with people or stay places where people stay, come often when one is not overly attached and is generous, instead of, say, scared or being picky about what the hell their conversations are about. Being in need is aversive to so many people, but being loving, without many words, worked with everyone but the suspicious and paranoid.
PARA 10
Although welcome, yet unexpected, Rose finds that people are curious about her skill at traveling with nearly nothing and hardly a penny. She tells them it’s somehow a blessing and easy and a mystery to her as well. “I just chalk it up to God being in charge of our geographical movements. It’s like his “will,” not mine, but I enjoy it, so maybe I will it. I can’t figure out if it is, or how it is — factual to some that “God wills everything.” But my first study among all new people taught me that there are powers, magnetic forces, and mental energies at work and used with certain words there is some mystery as to what is the guiding force. I do decide, but that’s a mystery to me, as well.
PARA 11
How consciousness and mind work is a gigantic study, but I started it right at the beginning of my freedom, at thirty years old. Several years into wondering where “new thoughts and visions come from, I added reincarnation to my studies. Past life probabilities were enjoyable, even though, that too, is not the most popular reason a person develops beyond where they were at during their twenties.”
PARA 12
By forty, still meeting all new people and having no one person to resonate with to put the wholistic picture of herself together, through one body or view, Rose realizes that because so many people are not aware of how consciousness in their mind works, Rose just tells the God story to stay on the simplest, lowest level of, let’s say, communal conscensus. In other words, just about everyone falls for the “it’s just god at work and I know nothing about my own inner process.” This was a lie they told themselves and Rose was sick of explaining to people anything to do with “consciousness studies.”
Women’s Literature Twiddlely Dee Publishing ver. 8/13/2020 9PM after being influenced by Cicily and Rose.
Work by Susan Louise Darnell susanldarnell@gmail.com
15 Saturday Aug 2020
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inOneness of Bearing
We are souls who inhabit a body. And this shows through our spirited, animated, overt behaviors. Most people are still working on identifying ‘the self’ but there are later stages of growth, like spirit and then soul identification. I have received many questions that pertain to our awakening as spiritual people who inhabit a body. As such, this quest, has brought me to this manuscript writing style. I have written this text in a question and answer format between Practitioners and the Teacher
Chapter One
Going Inward
P I noticed that when I meditate, I can sometimes get into a zone where I can hear my thoughts passing through my mind, and if I meditate really regularly, I seem to begin to see visions, maybe they are daydreams, I’m not sure. My questions are about this meditation activity. I wonder what is happening to me when I go inward and am able to see and hear my thoughts, or even see visions. I wonder what the value is in becoming meditative, which I know, in scientific terms means “slowing my brainwaves down.”
T The mind does many functions for you. My mind is used most often by clients to sort out periods of their past life. A person has an experience, and it comes up during our talk sessions and they want to know why it is coming up now, and again, or again and again and again. This old experience happening in the now, is packed with emotion, sometimes heavy with memory. Each thing, the recurring thought, and the recurring emotion in the body can be toxic or highly informative and helpful. It depends on what you make of the two kinds of possibilities. Once you have developed in a more evolved manner, you can hear your thoughts and see visions. This is very simply put as “the mind at work.” It becomes very very easy to watch the mind and it’s way of working at all times. The exception is if the mind is at rest, at peace, still. Watching the mind at work is one goal in a series of goals in mind training. It could be said then, for those who still can’t do this, that learning to watch the mind is your next step, your work, your mind work. What is happening once you notice you are beginning to watch your mind and see visions, is your mind is trying to grow. This stage of cognitive development is commonly called an expanding awareness. The mind expands or grows just as your body did as a child.
14 Friday Aug 2020
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inBook One: English
Rose’s Amber Necklace
There comes a time in every life when what is within you, must come out. Shy people don’t like this period. Bold people become annoying with their open book approach to life. If you had a good mother, she was the one you use to tell all too. As an adult, you have to find that kind of rapport, again. Suddenly, Rose was feeling like she’d staggered into a dark room. Her vision was blurry one moment and non-existent the next. “Oh no.” Said Rose, “Not this again.”
She rubbed her eyelids, blinked and found some eye drops to put in her bottom eyelid. She was so tired of feeling this sudden panic, this hidden problem. The doctor told her it was called “fleeting blindness,” and in her case, it was brought on by emotional distress and conflict. Something in her brain made her vision turn off when she panicked. But the vision issue quickly stopped.
“No worry.” Rose mumbled to herself to control her mind and get rid of these symptoms, “All is well.” She willed her thoughts to go in a direction that made her feel positive. Chanting, “I’m alright, right now,” a brief calm came over her. Still, the panic washed away her strength and she leaned back against the gray textured wall. Then, she slide down to a warm carpet. Tears started rolling down her face. “No. No. No. No. Stop it. All is Well. I’m alright right now. You are ruining your eye makeup. Access! What’s the situation? You are in the Bodleian Library and going to meet up with Wenling. What else? I’m terrified someone will mention my children. What’s the solution? Shut up. Shut up the thoughts. Take interest in everything else people might talk to you about.” This was a quick self-induced method she used to get re-centered and stop having episodes of panic. They were so annoying. Were anyone to see her, they would think she was talking to a spirit, or to herself. Brainy people did a lot of self talk. It was because they had too many thoughts and lost their place in them, frequently.
“What’s the big deal about looking like I’m talking to the spirits?” She paused and waited for an answer from within. It usually came in fast and very strong. Gently whispering to her imaginary friend, or to who knew who, “I can’t keep composed if they do!” The entire cutthroat world of perfectionist professors weighed on her fragile, public and professional identity. It was so much pressure to keep her inner world of family “silent” and something no one could observe in her. It was also a lot of hard work to continually pretend that spirits did not exists. However, many, not all, of the professors at Oxford did not believe spirits could talk to people. They thought that was something we imagined. Rose didn’t know for sure. Maybe, she thought, the other planes of consciousness that have been proven to exists by the great mystic writers and scholars, are what regular non-mystic types call spirits. As if spirit to western erudite thinkers could be relegated to the imagination.
She didn’t care what the truth was about it. Her take on the idea of spirits talking to a person was, “Hey. I’m going to vote yes.” She was happy to try to never bring up the subject of spirits nor discuss her great pleasure in talking to them all.
The Oxford salary and it’s accompanying prestige required she not seem new ageish. Plus, she adored the practices a professor had to undertake, including the somewhat formal, classical fashion look. Acting stuffed and stuffing other aspects of herself could last as long as she didn’t crash too much, and could put on a good act. Or, protracting her other ways of knowing could last as long as the contract with Oxford continued. Right now, she was putting on her act just fine. She wore a lot of tweed. It helped.
She could control her fears another few days. Or, so she wished. You see, Rose could be easily disturbed if someone began to criticize the story she told about mothering and family. Family to her meant three people, herself, Zander her first son, and Sinclair, her second son. Moreover, she’d go into a full panic if people twisted her meanings. She could twist theirs, but they were not allowed to twist hers. Not on the subject of her mothering. Her reason, perhaps a flimsy argument to some, was because she had to prepare to become a mother, just like she had to prepare to become a professor. It was hard work to learn both roles and took years of dedication. She’d practiced on other people’s children before she took on the mama role herself. Secondly, she hoped she had done the preparation really well. Rose hoped frequently that in this life, she had done something really well.
Rose would do just about any mind game to herself so she didn’t feel disappointed. She’d also discipline herself for years if that is what it took to learn those two roles. Mother and Professor. At ten, she began visiting her O’Horo family cousins. They had just moved down the street. Very frightened of getting shut down by her mother, Rose asked Jean Lucille Bahm, that was her mothers name, to take her to the mother of those children. Joannie O’Horo was a good mother and without saying a word, or even knowing the words to say, Rose gravitated to this woman. Once Rose got over her sublime terror of her own mother, and asked if she could babysit at Joannies every day she was needed, Rose’s life felt a relief. She felt like she had done a very daring thing. But she realized, on some cosmic level, without even knowing what a cosmos was, that she had to shift her trust and loyalty to Joannie to save her life. Joannie never took responsibility for conjuring Rose to her house. It didn’t matter. Rose took care of the five Irish Catholic children every single day after school for several years. It was her way of finding bliss, being given a little bliss, and in life skills, practicing mothering. It was the only kind place in the world that Rose would ever know for a long time.
* When she went off to the American University in Washington, DC, and received her first Bachelors degree in Elementary Education, she did so just to make sure she would be a good mother. Ten years with Joannies children, her cousins, a few college years, then marriage. She felt her preparation for motherhood was exemplary. Were anyone to shatter her view of herself as a good mother, she couldn’t defend herself. She’d be too crushed to try. Right after she graduated, she married and made a contract with herself to be a certain kind of wife. Five years later she had her first son Zander on Ground Hogs day. Her great grandmother Petrine Jorgine Hansdautter Qvamme Sands was with her in spirit that day as great grandmother Sands lived in Punxsutawny, PA, the town famous for ground hogs day. It was one of those sure signs from the spirit realm. And Rose clung to the spirit realm to stay alive. She had to because to bury the pain and sorrow of separating with her sons too early in their life required some magical thinking until they could reunite. If ever.
Seventeen months after Zander came, Sinclair came on July 13th. Oh! Rose was ready for this incredible experience! Mothering was really the only role she ever wanted in life along with a total of eight kids of her own. That was her small, reasonable wish list and it was to occur in the setting of a wonderful father to the children. Rose didn’t think much about a great husband as she didn’t know what that was, at all. Perhaps her generation of women, and her small life as a child and teen was in a setting with creepy men. That was probably it. They weren’t really men. Just males who stuck a woman in a woman’s traditional role. In that case, the female was ignored. The dinner hour was provided and who knows what went on in the bedroom. There was no sign of love and respect but many signs of two people posturing so they look good to the public. That was Rose’s impression of her parents gig in life.
That sounded right. Rose’s own mom was ignored. Joannie, when Danny started to ignore her, she threw him out. So life gave Rose two sons and with those two Rose’s life expanded exponentially as well as brilliantly. The first son became her north star. Later he would betray her on that point. As the early days of mothering took root, insight came. For each boy, she channeled in their spirits name. She had no idea where these inner voices were coming from, but they were powerful and always so precise. Zander was to be called Illuminati, the spirit said. Sinclair’s spirit name was Serendipity. She decided right away, or I better say it was channeled into her, that she could, if she chose, in this lifetime, to raise her little boys as Kings. Rose pondered what this muse in her was saying, and decided for the most part, to raise the sons as Kings.
All her training at American University pointed to the probability that it was wise to raise sons according to their gifts. To do so, takes perspective, and a perceptive mother and teacher. So Rose looked in this way towards her sons for the rest of their life. She helped them grow up and wake up every chance they gave her. She was an advanced mystic, something akin to Ken Wilber and his knowledge. But telling anyone was useless. Being it through her mothering would work anyway. Because she figured out what her gifts were post divorce and had feedback from many great men who could identify her and her purpose on this earth.
Rose had a head start. But parting with her sons too early in life, like when they were 8 and 9, still was crushing. Necessary, but crushing. She was, in spirit and effect, the Mother of Kings. The sons weren’t spoiled. They were, more or less, trained by their mom in all ways they showed prowess as individuals. To just be with their nature, Rose moved into a forest to be in the womb of nature. This brought out the highest potential in her boys. Raised in or near a forest, because they moved many times, Rose loved her boys with all her heart and trained them hard and well. For this, she was sure. Make no mistake, she served their creative genius, their agenda, their gifts that shone through their spirit right from the beginning of their time in this incarnation. While at her post at Oxford, her sons were just beginning to get out in the world in ways that do not require parents. They did not want to be disturbed much at all and Rose totally respected their need for space. Space to explore meant space for their natural recollection of how to be in their own space. It was a no brainer. They would do brilliantly. Rose just knew it. And they’d do well with the knocks that come at them to.
Rose began college at Vincennes Jr. College in Indiana. She declared her major and visited orphans to give her gifts with children away, for free of course. The second year she went to Kent State and the courses in education required her to go into a variety of classrooms to observe and teach some, not much. At first, her colleges just had her observe and record what she was seeing. Undergraduate colleges had taught her the high value of really observing children and listening to where they were coming from on all levels. In a way, you could say that Rose’s first miracle in life after getting out of her parents house, was learning it was okay to observe.
Finally, secure in her own nurturing world of family and motherhood, life gave Rose a connection to this steady stream of warmth and care. Children, she felt, made her life a forever kind of deal! Love was, after all, forever. Rose could go on. Rose could live. This is how she thought. And she did observe such thoughts were rather drastic. But she knew the drama inside of her, the mysterious part, was coming to the foreground of her conscious awareness. It was because she gave birth and no interacted with two humans who treated her in such a way as to force her to admit her own husband was not treating her properly at all. Although, she had no words to describe what the husband was doing. But with the sons, she could tell it was not okay. Not even good. And eventually, she realized how dangerous it was. So she divorced on good grounds.
She could never tell anyone that the Elementary Education degree from American University was completed just to make sure any programmed habits learned from her own mother were eradicated. Saying embarrassing comments about so called classy mothers was not permitted in the society she grew up in nor at Oxford. Let’s face it, destroying your mothers character as a mother isn’t allowed anywhere on the planet! If that’s your dilemma, you’re fucked.
* Obviously, Rose had issues with the way her mother mothered. Remembering her impersonal touch was chilling and then numbing. Jean Lucille Bahm wasn’t really into mothering. If Jean Lucille had still been alive today, Rose would tell her she wasn’t a good mother. Or, knowing Rose, when she was in a bad mood, she’d tell her mother the un-garnished truth. “Your mothering was shitty.” Rose would then leave the house so her mother couldn’t process the information or argue against it. One way or another, Rose would have made her mother deal with it. Making her sizzle would be the better tack, with that kind of mother.
Everything good about “Rose,” was about being a mother, forever. I suppose because it’s about being love and attention to another human. Good attending. Directing the energies. Nothing else needed to be given to her except children. Or so she thought when she was in her teens. With that said, it’s not hard to feel with tragic proportion how Rose was never prepared to lose her family. In her mind, since the first family she grew up in wasn’t good, she always felt confused about whether she lost that one or not. How can you lose an idea, she thought. You see, family, was just an idea in Rose’s experience in her teens. It was just an imagined future. A future her present as a teen was not about at all. And it came to life when she went to Joannies. But she wasn’t Joannie. She was just a kid. A kid who found the energy of care in that other house. And if you dig deeper, she was a kid and teen who was being exposed to sexual predation just about every week. All that was being covered up. And the husband was into sexually predation too. He had her until she was thirty, and she divorced because she figured all this out.
What was happening in her mother and father’s family life was surreal. It was disagreeable. It was impossible to bond with. It was not likeable. It had no good reason to exists. So for whatever reason, Rose’s mom nd dad hooked up, well that could remain a bit of a msytery as the research project on that was not interesting to Rose. She skipped finding out a lot of that stuff.
The second family life she had with her husband and with whom she had her two sons was eventually lost too. For good reason. The treatment Rose was getting was bad. Subtle bad, but bad none the less. The guy she married was into predation. Period. Rose hoped his second wife taught him different. Rose could not. She had no idea why people acted the way they did when she was a kid and teen, or for that matter, in her first decade of adult life. She’d take up the study of why and how people acted the way they did when she was past thirty years of age and had the time. Rose considered her third family time, the one with her two sons, her best and only personally owned family and time. It lasted nine years only. And then the whole thing was was relegated to visits here and there. This is what evolution was doing to Rose. Ultimately, it was a very good gift to her and her boys. But boy did it sting do live out.
When she was a single mother and it was just her and her boys Rose did make a wonderful family. She felt the entire thing as a fun adventure. Every hour was an education, a bit of progress on some painting or writing, a focused set of directions for her boys. The loved her to watch them show their skills. They loved her around. They belonged.
Occasionally she reflected about how odd it was that her family didn’t have a father and husband figure. But she didn’t pay much attention to that idea while raising her boys because the job at hand was a busy one. In real life, her own father and later husband didn’t pay much attention to her at all. So she had no idea what use they would be anyway. They never gave her much of anything either. They did like the service they got in any form it showed up in. All the talk about great fathers and husbands meant nothing to Rose. She didn’t have the experience herself.
In actual clock time, Rose spent day and night caring for her family – the two boys and herself. Then the time came when there was loss. The loss of the boys in her life was not due to Rose’s preference or choice. But it did happen. Some of the confusion can be explained by understanding the husband. When she was a married woman and became a mother of two, the husband never considered Rose or what she needed. Actually, he never considered her before marriage but she was so use to men ignoring her that she didn’t have any reason to think any other way. During the divorce, the husband forgot to consider what Rose might need [typical] once the full time custody went to the husband. Rose said what she needed, but that particular husband never heard what she was saying. That marriage was all about helping the husband climb the ladder. Since it was so expected of Rose to help him, she did and liked it for years, many years. It was meeting other woman that made Rose wake up a bit to how she was being treated. Her husband did get his first, second and third degree and Rose actually did every single thing he asked of her. Rose’s dedication, support and love was unending, until she made it all end. The word relationship or family was not in his vocabulary. She figured that out and checked it out with him. He never used it. It was in Rose’s subconscious from when she was teen. But as a couple, they never mentioned it. Family, children, relationship, how to care for children, how was anyone doing. No. Never did any set of words come up like that.
Actually, Rose had no memories of how he characterized marriage and family because he never spoke about life from that perspective. Ever. Her memories from her childhood and teen life, rather, were all about how she planned for a husband and family. If she tried to talk about that, from that perspective, with those words, the husband didn’t say a thing back to her. Upon reflection, how could he. His parents had no such “woke” relationship either. Two people, a male and female, it’s how you paired up. It meant nothing or if it did, no one said a word about it. This, upon more reflection, is the way nihilists live. Their conversations were like watching two blind people doing completely different activities.
* Once a single, all powerful mother of two, she was responsible for raising boys to be men. This responsibility was of grave importance as well as a pleasure to Rose. She thought of them as little Kings and she the Mother of Kings. With the help of a bit of reincarnation theory, which Rose was studying since the beginning of her divorce period, her hope was that in the future, they would spend time with her and remember the gestures of kindness, service, creativity, democracy and love.
Her role model for behaving like the Mother of Kings came from watching videos and reading about how the Dali Lama’s mother behaved towards him after he’d been taken to the monastery. And she found other models as time went on. She knew her job had to do with helping them be present and preparing them for a future as men. Like Ken Wilber says, we grow them up and wake them up simultaneously. That’s what so called enlightened parents do during the time her sons were raised. One day, decades from now, her sons would be out in the world conquering their curiosities and fears too, just like she trained them and did to and for herself.
Indeed, many of their quarters were only one room and the mat for the bedding was on the floor. Rose thought it best to have a consistent, night time story and the one that always came to her was about their woods life with the deer. It became an extended saga as time went on. She would see visions and tell her boys stories of being in the woods with the deer. She could see it clearly.
WENLING
* At Oxford, where her mothering days were on hold, she’d get stuck feeling like an outcast. She wasn’t an outcast there, but she felt like it sometimes. Her private objections about Oxford were that it lacked the animal instincts she loved and it was awfully civilized. When places were too civilized all Rose could think of was “too much cleaning, too much sanitizing, too much organization, not enough communing from the heart.” She’d reason with her friend Wenling sometimes, “When people talk to each other from the heart, which can include brilliant ideas, they don’t use whole sentences.” That’s what irritated the hidden part of Rose, the most. The use of whole, fancy, laboriously long sentences was man made and not natural! Still, she learned how to get them and use them because it got her a job. When she was feeling irritated, she’d get locked in some visual mental zone and see that she had become defrayed from the flock.
The vision was of herself, standing alone, freezing to death. Needless to say, a gal who was mothered like Rose was, had a hard time staying connected to the norms around her. The reason was because, after all, norms were flexible and often enough, different for every single institution man ever made. Rose lock up internally as if it was necessary to stand back and re-evaluate if life was smart and safe in her current location. Call it back-lash from too much traveling, call it Rose’s way of checking out, just to turn around and check back in. Call it whatever you want. Rose never told anyone. She wasn’t that dumb. Most people at Oxford, talked about their self through the typical reference points of family. Rose would end up in an argument if she opened her mouth. The reason was because people assumed that in life, the only thing that could matter was family. But Rose needed to disagree with that. There were other forces in life and they worked very powerfully to create some human beings for a different purpose. Albeit, we all came out of a female body, but that could be the only reason to use “family” relationships as a frame of reference to describe a person.
Family relations were not the main function of a person like Rose, nor for her great friend at Oxford, Professor Wenling. Don’t get me wrong! Family functions use to be the main relation Rose had to this world. But once finished, she changed. Not to make an excuse for herself, but Rose, found other things in life of equal amazement as was her own personal family with the sons. After they left her life, she had become a cynical person for a while. After all, she was pissed and hurt. But after that phase, she wanted to laugh a lot. Humor was health, according to Rose. So she lied to herself some days just to do her job as a professor. No, that’s not right. Rose decided to set aside all the powers she learned as the Mother of Kings, and become what she called “an ordinary mortal.” And her “ordinary” was becoming a professor at Oxford. “Not a bad ordinary,” her friend Wenling would tell her.
* She stopped using her powers to advance each person’s life. I’m talking about the powers that came upon her as a mother and that she was guided to develop as their mother. Also, they were simply put, the power of potential that developed in Rose that were there all along, but that had the chance to develop due to all the dam suffering she had to resolve in her own spirit. It wasn’t just a side note that reincarnation theory helped. Psychological development theory helped too. If you force a kid and teen and wife to omit their own self, expect an explosion of development to occur later in life. Rose knew this at the time she was at Oxford, but her sons didn’t know it yet. So she kept writing.
To omit talking about family while playing out the role of professor herself, wasn’t such a big lie to others, and not particularly a deceit either. It was more, rather, just practical – a thing to do and become for the ordinary world of people all around Rose, all the time, no matter where she went. “There were, after all, other things in life than family,” she would tell her colleagues. The people she could relate to at Oxford were often single professional people. They didn’t talk about family. They talked about their work, and Rose loved that. Furthermore, conversations solely based around family made Rose feel guilty and heavy. She didn’t have a choice in finding out it would be too hard to live without her boys. It was thrust upon her. Suddenly, having no family just hit her life like an avalanche of emotions. The trauma of it all stayed in place in her subconscious. She could not sort it all out for many years. But slowly, she did learn to discipline herself and go back to college and become a professor. And slowly, in her private time, she’d work with dreams and memories that rocked her soul.
At least she could do that as an ordinary mortal! Everyone was meditating anyway to cope with what was happening to the American Dream, the American family, and just living in America. Change was all about during the eighties and nineties and it would continue. Big change.
Recovering from her upset, sitting on the rug, she looked up at the hexagonal gilt-lacquered brass lighting fixture above her head and sighed, ever so grateful. This beautiful work of art represents beauty and history in the world. Whoever had to climb a ladder to clean this fixture probably felt that he was a chosen one. He would take special care to do a good job, maybe a sacred job! “I’d hate to break the dam pane.” Rose murmured. All alone, she really enjoyed that old cynic in her. Not only did he make her laugh, but the truth was, ordinary mortals were foolish to live so ridiculously unimpressed with their self. She also loved those old stuffy Oxford Professors, and the young ones too, because by some magical wonder, they didn’t forget how impressive their work really was. This thought gave Rose some peace and satisfaction as she sat on that carpet, looking at the light. No doubt almost all the lighting fixtures at Oxford were antiques.
Every piece of furniture and interior accessory a room had at Oxford, was acquired by the selection of a great designer. Choice, periodicity, material, artistry, color, motif and style — everything at Oxford had its history. Famous designers who came to visit Boleian Library were hired to recompose the room now and again. Rose saw them walking around. Rose felt, in a sense, that she was living in a triple paradox at the time and it was the paradox of time, space and causation – something that mortal humans were stuck in, for now.
First, she could easily imagine that she belonged to the beauty and history of this world. So she was comfortable in this Ivy League iconic place. But maybe it was just because she was sitting in the world of Oxford history and it’s accessories. No. She earned what she had to earn to get here. Perhaps that is exactly what made her think so foolishly. For sure, it was a nerdy idea, conceptual, and left out all responsibility for regular, mundane tasks like mothering and housekeeping, or if a professor, grading papers until three in the morning. No. She was daydreaming now. So she touched her Baltic Sea amber necklace. It was given to her by her grandmother who told her she could become anyone she wanted. Sometimes Rose foolishly imagined she had become a heroine. After her sons left her life she had to imagine. She built her new life on extreme circumstances. That’s why it felt absurd sometimes. It’s suppose to be a mark of achievement to make it to Oxford, even though some of the students and professors grew up in a shack with a dirt floor and no plumbing. That wasn’t Rose’s story of becoming, but you get my point.
The second paradox, or maybe we are talking “reality check” here, was as follows: It was lofty to run around and say I represent beauty and history. But some of the professors did talk like that and were that. Why didn’t Rose know herself for sure? As she gazed up at the hexagonal shape, she told herself she could put on a good act where ever she was. This is why she felt she lived in a paradox. Time allowed her to morph. She did fake it sometimes until she made it to Oxford. Or so she told herself. But the cause of her success, she wondered, “Could that be faked too?” Handling her amber stone necklace with thirty-six soothingly smooth half inch roundish pieces, she remembered that each stone of amber was like an ember leaving a dying world of the living and to the living. She calmed. The amber stones had made it through ten million years of time. She could make it through her one lifetime.
Amber. Created in the Amber Forest of the Finnoscandinavia historical period, her point was, that space in time made some things lasting. The third, frank, paradox Rose lived in these days was that even she didn’t know what was true or real anymore. It wasn’t any one thing in particular and didn’t explains visions and dreams. What caused what to make Oxford part of her destiny? Life had improved. Playing mind games didn’t matter anymore. Classy places in the world saved her life because she liked beautiful, and highly organized, hierarchical working environments that had immense historical value.
Everywhere she walked at Oxford, a famous person had walked before. This intrigued her as well as delighted her imagination. And if she blurred the lines between being a lower level Oxford Professor and a world famous novelist, so what. It made her dream of a future that was healed. If she had stayed near any one of the family members of her first or second family, they would have killed her spirit that desperately wanted to evolve. A sacrifice had to be made. Fortunately and unfortunately, Rose was the sacrifice. But eventually, she reasoned, she was just the sacrificial pig to those two families. She didn’t have to be the pig to anyone else, ever again.
Rose’s family people weren’t the only people in the world with bad qualities. She’d met plenty more in her single years. So this whole mess in her subconscious that made her panic was essentially about finding the place in society where she could express the way humans were treating each other. And she wanted to express it in the setting of a college where it could be thought of as objective, empirical and not her personal, past life sage.
She was determined to get more involved in this bad place inside her self by becoming a novelist. “How am I going to make bad things, a good novel? Explaining her circumstance wasn’t narcissistic or one dimensional. It was an epic in American people’s lives that needed expression. One thing she felt she could rely on was the psychological disaster people lived through just trying to have a good life. In epidemic proportions, American society had gone wrong! Rose wanted to put it out there for all to read. Her own life story was merely a vehicle to express what many people suffered. In her grandmother’s Norwegian history, people struggled just the same. With much examination, Rose felt that there was no excuse for her not to get back to her sons and mother. True, they were older now and didn’t need the same kind of mothering, but she wanted to be available to them just the same. She simply had to make it in society, and get paid, to do such a feat.
This, she found so irritating. But it was practical and ordinary thinking. The journey there was long and waring. So too was the Viking’s journey her ancestors took to Bjarmaland, Russia. And they froze their asses off getting there. Yet and still, if they hadn’t made the journey, they would have never known of other things in this world. Decades had passed and the family war going on in the States, and against her values and ideas about how to live her life, just might be dead by now. She really didn’t know. Lives do go on. To live as a predator, goes on. But to live as a spiritual person goes on too. She imagined the coast was clear enough to go back. No one could try to hurt her anymore. It wouldn’t work! She was too highly trained by magnificent spiritual teachers who lived on this earth.
Furthermore she reasoned, right there, that day in the library in England, “It’s not good to imagine what life is like in a place where I am not. Just get there!”
She stared at the bug in one of the amber stones. “You are still living, aren’t you? Me too.” Letting go of her amber string of stones around her neck, she stood up on the plush, burgundy colored carpet to see if her strength had returned. Wenling had stuck up for her once. She said, “You have to know her startling journey to make a judgment about Rose. Do you like her or not? You can’t figure that out prematurely. You have to see the bigger picture and it’s so complicated it will take a while to tell. There was a time in her life when it was almost too hard to figure out how to get money for shelter and food. This is why she feels foolish blocking her own past about her family. What she had to do was absurd and most people would be incapable of getting through the mess.”
However, Rose reasoned, she couldn’t be with young sons in their teen life if basic necessities were an issue. Rose only knew how to parent in the privileged class. She had no idea how to parent in poverty. The sons would not, could not, understand how she lived like she was dying, lived like a warrior princess and hunted for basic necessities all the time! So she didn’t see them regularly for many years. They did visit, but rarely. A two week vacation with her boys most summers was about all she got. So she accepted her fate and set out to prove to the sons that she would fix the mess she was in. The issue was always that she had no capital to help herself faster and America had no jobs to help her fix anything. They could learn that much later in their life.
* More patience than she had was required to perform this feat of waiting and still loving with all her heart. So she studies and vigilantly practices acetic feats. She figures, by the time the sons were thirty or forty, they’d be ready to listen to her side of the story. And finally, once and forever, they could understand why they went to live with their dad when they were eight and nine. Why their mom wasn’t around and why there were no phone calls and no letters could be explained. Nor could Rose send presents as she was so poor she could barely get enough food to eat each day and that went on for over a decade. Sleeping outside was no problem for Rose either. That was always temporary, but nothing to tell the sons until they were much older. It was actually extremely easy to do. And it was necessary very often because she had to save some money for a rental.
Due to the divorce money, Rose was happy that her sons had enough money to live well when they lived with her or their father. He gave them a mixture of capitalism, creativity, a well funded education, and Rose had to admit, love. “They lived with their father very well.” There were things to feel grateful for. “You had your turn mothering the first ten years of their life.” She blew a breath out, trying for more composure. Fate, amazing new and important things, and fear lead Rose forward. So did hunger for food and a better life. Her best guess was that she could succeed by going the route of training to become a professor. For her generation of women, just getting out of the house to have a career was a feat. Most of the women in her class, did not go outside of the home to work. When some of them tried, they didn’t know how to do it, failed miserably and went on welfare. Secondly, Rose was thoughtful. She guessed and then firmly decided it would be wise to practice a skill and she chose writing and painting. These skills were suppose to provide her with a career that was even more suitable to her, which was as a published author and an American painter. She remained steadfast to these two wishes to be granted by life, upon her, for trying so hard to get to the thriving, creative, happy life she saw in her dreams of self.
The latter two were her preferred identities to get money too. They came kind of naturally. She loved working on a canvas and felt relief writing out the story of an interesting woman. The latter being herself. But she never said her saga as a story-line was terrific as it was just happening to her. She always knew she was trying to have the courage to admit what life was giving her so other woman could feel the courage to improve their life too. Rose knew admission had to come first.
The Professorship won the most in Rose’s career life. Finally, after having thirty or more places to sleep and work for short periods, because that’s what America was like back then, she got a contract at Oxford. Her grandmother had told her that the family members that migrated to Bjarmaland, Russia, back in 900 AD re-bonded with the Saami nomadic deer hunters. This changed everything. It made Rose capable of using her Viking roots to live nomadic, in America, anywhere, anytime. Everyone she met was doing it. America was changing. The old ways of America were breaking up at the end of the nineteen hundreds. Many people never stayed at the same job like our forefathers did. Half the people who were married at twenty, did not stay married.
This was outlandish to Rose’s grandparents generation. It was refreshing for Rose to hear. She made herself comfortable among the many bewildered Americans and began to study how people migrate. If it looked like mom had finally stabilized a good life for herself, somewhere in the world, look again next year. It would change. But once she got to Oxford, the boys actually did think she had finally found a place that she could keep. They didn’t factor in her broken heart. She missed them the second they left her daily life and it was never her plan to be away from them again, once she gained a career and income. Poverty wasn’t her plan, but that’s what she got now and again. No. Rose could not be around her sons and bring bad news. It had to be an improvement. Rose would be away just for as long as it took for her to establish something that gave her an income. Why it took so long could be explained to the boys in more detail when they were older. Oxford did, however, give her a kind of a home life that was to her liking. It was the first home life to her liking. According to her, a somewhat upper class status suited her. The house share with professors began a whole new way to live as a single adult.
* Jillian was the only friend she had left in Connecticut. They talked on the cell and emailed for thirty years. Jillian told her, “The psychopaths, sociopaths and felonist ruined your life! You made it passed their fear tactics.” Jillian, told her that quite bluntly on the monthly phone calls and in particular, when she found out Rose was ready to come back to Connecticut to be near the one son who would stay there all his life. Or so he said. Maybe too bluntly because it felt like a stab in the heart and caused Rose to have visions of hovering over her fathers’ house as if she was his crucifix. The dream made no sense, not for many years, because she didn’t understand it. She didn’t know how men used her nor understand how or why any human would do such a thing. But she understood technical terms by now, like predator, sociopath and more.
Jillian stayed in Wallingford, Connecticut, but Rose had to leave over twenty years ago. The year that Jillian told Rose she could see the same horrifying truth, there was only one year left for Rose to have her sons, and by then, Rose had migrated several times, with her little boys, up in New Hampshire and Vermont. It was mind boggling to register what Jillian was admitting. Jillians’ divorce was messy too, but she stayed in Connecticut, whereas Rose fled. She became the first female attorney in her family. None of the other women in Rose’s circle ever went to college. Most of them stayed home and mothered.
Although Jillian could analyze the psychic condition of Roses antagonists, she had no clue about what was happening to Rose medically. Rose covered up her ailments. She was more aware of needing strength and could only conjure up getting some by drawing on her ancestral roots, her warrior woman imagery from her grandmother’s viking stories. Noticing her own hyperactive, hyper vigilant, blind and not blind condition was something to notice but there was no time to dwell on it. Rose thought meditation and following the guru’s directions would solve everything. Her mission needed to be focused on figuring out how to live life safely and if possible, choose life every step of the way.
Choice was actually one of the luxuries of life. After her sons went to live with their dad, Rose chose to spend a lot of time finding out what was the matter with her family and friends back in Ohio. More importantly, as her medical conditions worsened, she wanted to figure out what they did to her. Choice was not in Roses life when she was younger. Choice was stolen from her, raped from her mind and peeled away from her heart and finally molested from her very breath. Rose hated that she wasn’t strong enough to not feel the impact. No, Rose had to feel it all and the effect was catastrophic trauma. “Think of the Viking women who forged ahead with their wounds.” She told herself.
At Oxford, no one knew her past life story except Wenling was learning some of it. They didn’t know she dwelled on the Viking imagery and drew strength from having piercing, targeted goals each hour. Rose played life hard and used her shamanic powers to complete her task list every day. Her colleagues just noticed now and again that she had keen mental powers. That her concentration could go for sixteen hours a day without skipping a beat.
Then again, everyone at Oxford had keen mental powers. Many shamanic people became professors. It was in their power to do so. Rose’s secret plan was to write to the world and tell people the deadly wrong doing her family members acted out with the aim of ruining her. It was the only thing she could think of doing to help other women who had no voice, could not find their voice and who were, basically, stuck in fear. Rose refused to let fear stop her, ever.
At Oxford, she wanted to feel the wellness she had achieved, and the status, so it was important to block out the past memories. Still, when alone, she truly enjoyed her visions. She felt she represented many women who had overcome hardship beyond human measure. It wasn’t just about her. She knew this because when the time came for her to write, she had found and interviewed three thousand woman. She kept track, she kept notes. No one knew this part of her work. The calamities that she would reveal, the moral indiscretions, the irreverent use of power, the criminal acts, all that caused her to be sick and to have to give up her sons prematurely, would be written down and documented for the accused to read as well as their grandchildren. They didn’t have to change. But if one story could make them consider something, like the use of just means to make fair arrangements, maybe that would be one small thing Rose could give humanity. Personally, this writing could or would mean maybe one small thing her sons read could be used to continue to change human beings.
She didn’t know. She’d never know because life swept her sons up and off into their own life. In the end, they only visited. But what would happen to her writings when she died. There was a large trash bin outside her apartment in Connecticut. When she thought about big pictures, it made her dizzy. Rose always said, “I’m not going down alone. We are all going down together.” She figured that if all the nit-picking kinship groups do destroy some of the people in the group, the ones she could impact were the ones desperate about keeping a good reputation. That was the group upon which she sought revenge. And if telling the truth is revenge, then so be it. “
““If” we want to learn to treat each other properly, democratically, my book gives the reason why.” Rose felt strongly that human beings needed to be treated a special way. No one in her families had learned how to do it. Nor had many of the men Rose met in her life. Eventually, she learned that this bad treatment thing was just the human condition. Rose made another mission statement to herself. She bet her God and life on the probability that she was right. It sounds like a high-falluting mark in history that Rose is trying to make, but really, telling all was the only release from pain she could create with her own volition and a lot of literary skill.
Never sure if the higher powers in the universe would let her pull it off, she still tried to pull it off. She couldn’t help it. Her family had become a word document she visited everyday of her life.
* It was lunch time at Oxford University and not unusual for Rose to flip out. Any kind of feeding time meant family energies to Rose. “I’m taking a break from freaking out.” And with that swift shift in consciousness, Rose walks forward to find her friend. The pace of her walking picks up. Now it’s a super fast pace. She’s beginning to feel rejuvenated, like a stallion. “Today had a particularly large pressure. Walk on girl, walk hard.” But she lost her vision again and stopped.
Counting, “one, two, three,” it returned by ten. She went to hide behind a bookcase. A flood of family memories and panic kicked in. She saw a vision of herself racing on a horse to somewhere. She didn’t know where. Next, Rose’s nervous system shook to the point of instability. “Here it comes again like a tsunami wave overhauling my body.” Leaning forward and gagging, she almost throws up. “Need to defuse, and cry, and talk to myself.” Phlegm slides over her tongue from the back of her throat, a handkerchief is grabbed. As quietly as possible, she spits into the linen. “It’s also, very important just to re-install a program of behavior that can protect me from over reacting in case anyone notices…” Her eyes drift off. She feels blurry for a short span. She likes it there. It’s not engaged with the world. She snaps back into focus. The witness in her mind’s eye sees her and makes her adjust.
Rose has done so much internal training she can direct herself like a robot. Nostril breathing, breathing, breathing was her main solvent. Her panicked breathing slowed down. She opened her mouth ever so slightly so no one would know what she was doing. “Ahhh whuu, ahh wuu, ahhh whuu, ahhh whuu.” She knew it was reasonable to have a meltdown: It was because she was leaving her nice house share with professors. This was the best home life ever. Also to leave was her teaching post, great food, plenty of money, her colleagues and really everything she’d come to know. All to do the great “return” as the spiritual teachers talk about it.
The thought of the change, seeing her sons in the USA, made her over the top with edginess. She could barely concentrate when she felt what the return of a great love like that enabled her to be. Buried in Rose, over layers of experiences and other memories, there was a family women who wore an amber necklace and she refused to give up.
06 Saturday Jun 2020
Posted Uncategorized
inTwiddlely Dee Publishing
Work by Susan Louise Darnell
susanldarnell@gmail.com
Women’s Literature
AN INTERESTING WOMAN
1. The Contribution Window
She likes the unknown mindset the most. Whether it’s people or places, she likes to not know them and look for what is unknown about them. Then, when possible, she tells them what she sees in them, not usually what is outside them or even in their shallow talk. An odd habit, granted, but not for a writer exploring people and settings in the world. Whether or not a person comes off as genuine, authentic, or on the shallow stream side, it doesn’t matter.
But some people imagine some kind of invisible wall between their outer and inner wall and it is put up to keep people out. So with those types, Rose doesn’t make much of a response. Rather, this controlling type likes to control, so she watches just what they…
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05 Friday Jun 2020
Posted Uncategorized
inEssay One
Influenced by the Headmistress of the Middletown Art Academy in Connecticut, and from her fiery past life memories, one night we sat together. She is the Headmistress and I am the Mistress Soul. We began to birth and rebirth visions of our ancestors lives and their memories. From the depths of some kind of catacomb space, we could hear their voices. It wasn’t a special feat. It was a normal super natural experience for the type of painters we had became.
This painting is THE MISTRESS SOUL. She came to me while I was in the state of Connecticut and deeply concerned about how to convey the outcome of studying with the great gurus and lamas. Somehow, I would distinguish subjectively conscious human beings and objectively oriented human beings. It had to be done so we could live happily alongside of each other. I’d given up on believing that…
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