Eep. I'm going to send out my first article for consideration by a peer-reviewed journal this week. I should have been doing this for at least a year now, but there you go. I'm revising a conference paper that I was pretty proud of, so I feel pretty good that someone will take it. Now I just have to stop fiddling with it once I get the new information and data integrated and get it proofed, and just get the damn thing in the mail. I hate that I can't email it in, but I guess is this part of the process, eh?

It's all part of the bigger process of trying to get my career back on track.

( In which our heroine navel gazes )

The three day Solstice passage is complete.

Emergence. Light. Rebirth.

So mote it be. 

I am a warrior. I'm a fucking Amazon. I stand down for no one, and nothing. I fight hard, I work hard, I love hard, I laugh hard, I cry hard, and I play hard. I give everything and everyone 100 percent of myself. And that includes myself.

Somewhere along the line I seem to have forgotten that this is my Divine birthright, that when Rhiannon claimed me at 21 She put me under Her protection but She also placed the sword in my hand and the shield on my arm.

I don't know when I ended up lying on a battlefield, huddled under a dead horse, hoping no one would see me.

It doesn't matter.

I'm getting up. 

Stand with me, or stand aside. 

As of 2:32 tomorrow morning, December 3, I will be 33 years old. I'm told this is a special birthday for me numerologically -- but since numerology is a bit too much like math for me, I haven't looked into this. Anyone out there on my brilliant Flist know anything about this?

It's no secret to anyone close to me, or anyone who reads this space regularly, that the last five months of my life have been the most difficult period personally and spiritually that I've ever been through. They've been the most wonderful in many ways, and the most enlightening, and the most growth-packed. But they've also been the most traumatic, the darkest, the most confusing period in my life too. I've spent a lot of time keeping my head down to keep it from being shot off, and facing things about myself and my partners that perhaps I was not ready to face. Especially the things about myself that I've had to face. I feel like I'm getting to know myself better than I ever have, and that this is an amazing opportunity for me to grow into the person I want to be and step into the life I want to have. But I also know that I'm not doing it fast enough for anyone around me, and that I can't speed this process up or slow it down, let alone halt it entirely. And it's incredibly difficult for me to know that my process of growth and exploration hurts the people I love, and that the people I love lash out and hurt me in response to their own pain. And the more they hurt me, the more I want to struggle against that pain and grow beyond it, and the more I struggle and grow the more I hurt them. And it starts the cycle of pain and abuse and lashing out all over again. No one deserves that, no matter what they have done. I have seen an ugly side of many of my loved ones over the last few months, and I imagine they feel (and perhaps rightly so) they have seen an ugly side of me. 

I have seen the ugly side of myself. I have also seen the brave, beautiful, vibrant part of myself that I never even knew was being hidden (as  my mother's church would have said) under a bushel basket. In the midst of all the pain and the self-doubt and self-recrimination and guilt (and there has been a lot of all those things, more than I'd like to admit), I have seen a person that I truly am beginning to love. If you would have told me 6 months ago that I didn't love myself, I think I would have brushed you off. But I'm beginning to see that I have only been trying to love the person I am, and now that I am truly falling in love with the woman I am and the woman I'm becoming I realize how much time I have spent hating myself and feeling inadequate. Feeling like I didn't deserve, sometimes still feeling like I don't deserve. I want to love this woman I am becoming. And that means embracing all the dark things about her as well as the things that the world deems acceptable and loveable. I cannot live to please anyone else, which is what I've been trained to do most of my life. I have to live the most authentic life I can. 

And the struggle is to find what makes that authentic life for me. I am figuring it out piece by piece. I wish I could do it faster, to alleviate the waiting and the hurt and the confusion of all those around me. But I can only take this as it unfolds, and it presents itself. 

One thing I have realized in the midst of all this is how much I deny myself self-care. I took a day two weeks ago to stay at The Girl's apartment whilst she was at work, and I realized it was the first time I'd had 6 hours of unlimited time all to myself in almost six months. All I had to do that day was take care of me. No one else. And I didn't recognize until that day how much I let my own self-care slip. I cannot do this anymore. This birthday week I will be focusing on that which nurtures my soul and body. I need to take care of myself, or I cannot be the person I want and need and deserve to be.

All I want for my birthday is me. And I'm the only person who can give me that gift.

...if LJ/6A decides that it is somehow objectionable.

I've been watching all the fallout from the Warriors for Innocence crap, and deciding how to respond. I'm not a fanfic writer or reader, and I'm not in fandom at all. Truth be told, I don't get the whole thing. But I have friends who are active in fandom, and seem to get a lot from it, and that in an of itself makes this whole thing my concern.

Do I find a lot of the stuff in fandom, including that written by my friends, disturbing? Yes. I don't particularly want to open up my Friends page and read Twincest or Snarry or any of it. But my friends are good enough to employ the LJ cut, and I can choose not to read that material. I don't go to communities whose main job is fanfic porn, because I can choose not to read that material. The same way I don't go to Conservative Christian blogs, Republican blogs, or communities and LJs that deal with stuff I find troubling/disturbing/boring/stupid/irrelevant/etc.

And this whole thing matters to me because, as most of you who know me IRL know, I'm an abuse survivor myself. And the pedophile who targetted me didn't come through the Internet. He didn't find me outside my elementary school. He didn't even sneak in my bedroom window. 

He was in my family. He lived with my grandmother. He was my mother's father.

The same way that most people who victimize children do, he chose those closest to him. Warriors for Innocence or any vigilante group could not have prevented what happened to me, to my sisters, to my cousins.

Until we address, as a culture, why people abuse the children closest to them, we'll never put this issue to rest.

And when we make it unsafe for survivors to talk about their experiences in a forum such as LJ, we negate their -- dare I say, my -- experience, somehow say "That's nice honey, now don't talk about it, just get over it, and it will be OK." 

The cost of free speech is that sometimes people say things we don't like. I am an extreme protector of free speech, as threerings would say. I will defend to my death the right of someone to say something I abhor. I also agree that pictures of children (or anyone) being victimized are a different thing than prose or other writing, as it is necessary for an illegal act to be committed in order for that picture to exist. Does it bother me that people write about finding little kids sexy? Well, hell yes. It bothers me to read blogs where military personnel talk about the carnage in Iraq too. And yes, there is a part of me that would love to see any parent who admitted online to raping their kid, put away for the rest of his or her life. (However, unlike WfI, I don't applaud the new death penalty for pedophiles...) 

It's hard for me to defend the right of pedophiles to free speech, especially when I know that someone speaking up would have prevented my own childhood trauma. Part of me is physically sick about it. I've gone around about this in my head for the last 24 hours. The thing I keep coming back to is, we cannot police the Net and police speech in this way. I can respect a company setting up its TOS to exclude certain things from the outset, but to create a forum for free speech and then retroactively change the rules, and then capriciously delete accounts without fully investigating what was going on there, or even notifying the users, is a complete violation of everything blogging and the net stands for. To do so in response to a vigilante group is even more so. When facsist tactics are rewarded, we'll only see more of it. (Reference the last 7 years in our country, people.)

And the other thing I keep coming back to is, when will my interests be deeemed "offensive" by LJ/6A or some vigilante of the Net? When do they decide that anyplace that harbors bisexual Pagans must be a den of iniquity? When will the morning come that I wake up and find my journal gone? If I talk about being an abuse survivor, does that make my journal offensive? What about if I talk about the interviews with abuse survivors I did in my dissertation research? If I read Lolita for 50bookchallenge, does that make me a child rapist? Where does it stop?

This journal has been a powerful tool for me, and to feel like I have to censor myself in the place I come to be totally free, feels.....well, abusive.

Ganked from charlayne 

Here Are Your Results:

Life:	7.1
Mind:	7.7
Body:	7.3
Spirit:	8.8
Friends/Family:	7.4
Love:	9.1
Finance:	5.3

Apparently my Love score is very high. They even asked me for my advice on how to increase one's love score :)

And on reflection...I realized just how much love I have in my life, and how blessed I am to have it and to be able to give my own love to so many different people, many of whom are reading this blog....

So I've been meaning to post this for a couple weeks, but haven't gotten there...

In  my Jivamukti yoga class, the focus of the month is the 7th chakra, the crown chakra. The sound vibration for this chakra is a silent OM, so we've been talking about OM a a great deal. OM is the original, most powerful mantra. It is the sound of the universe creating itself. Plato called it "the music of the spheres."

When silent, OM is just that, O-M. But when spoken OM is a three-syllable experience, a-u-m. Each letter correponds to a facet of the Divine. "A" corresponds to Brahamin, the Great Divine. "U" corresponds to Vishnu, the lessons we learn in this life, the life we have chosen for its lessons. And "M" corresponds to Shiva, or the forces of destruction and rebirth present in all things.  So every AUM (or OM) has, contained in it, the forces of life, death, and rebirth. All aspects of the Divine are contained within OM/AUM. By chanting the Divine name, we manifest the Divine form, or so the sutras say. So by voicing the complete circle of existence, when we AUM/OM, we are bringing that cycle manifest in our lives.

I've been thinking alot about that since we've been working with it in class. Asana for the month is Headstand/Sirsasana, and the ideal is to chant the silent OM (as opposed to the vocalized AUM) when in Sirsasana. Still working on this one.

I've come to realize that it all comes back to OM/AUM, because OM/AUM is all there is, all that was, all that has been. A continuous cycle of birthing, becoming, passing away, and rebirthing. We cannot mourn what we have lost, because we never really have anything. Everything is always in transition, just as the sounds of our chants fade into the next sound, the next syllable of AUM is out of our mouths before the first has died away in the air. All is connected. To mourn or try to grasp onto something is to subvert the natural order. It is our Divine nature to let go, to be empty vessels, to allow things to pass through.

Unfortunately our humanness sometimes gets in our own way.

Om
Guru Brahma
Guru Vishnu
Guru Devo Maheshwara
Guru Sak Shat
Param Brahma
Tash Mayi Shri Guruvay Namaha
Tash Mayi Shri Guruvay Namaha

Translation
I give thanks to the Guru who is the Divine Teacher
I give thanks to the Guru who is the birth I have chosen
I give thanks to the Guru who is all difficulty and calamity that stands in my way

I give thanks to the Guru who is nearby
I give thanks to the Guru who is beyond the beyond

I bow down and offer all my efforts to the Guru

Aum...Shanti....