{"id":868,"date":"2012-09-09T11:30:59","date_gmt":"2012-09-09T16:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.wordpress.com\/?p=868"},"modified":"2012-09-09T11:30:59","modified_gmt":"2012-09-09T16:30:59","slug":"dissonance-and-resonance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/2012\/09\/09\/dissonance-and-resonance\/","title":{"rendered":"Dissonance and Resonance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"scan0001\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I have been practicing magic for just shy of sixteen years.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen some whack-ass shit\u2014some of it way back in the day<\/a>, some of it a little more recently<\/a>.\u00a0 I even burned out the circuitry<\/a> in my own brain on one occasion, a psychic injury from which I have only fully recovered in the last two years.\u00a0 Fuck: I spent the first five or eight years of my magical practice with no other goal than to get some sort of hold on what currently passes for my sanity.\u00a0 So when Peter Carroll tells me that Chaos Magick can lead to paranoia and obsession and outright madness, my first reaction is, \u201cBeen there.\u00a0 Done that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oops.\u00a0 Stultus sum<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I have spent the last week struggling with depression and paranoia far out of line with my circumstances.\u00a0 Also, a round of insomnia which has driven me to work on perfecting my sleeping tea and which has rendered me almost incapable of focusing on my studies.\u00a0 Small noises in and outside my apartment have sent me into fits, searching for the source.\u00a0 I have heard things scratching at the doors and walls.\u00a0 In the moments between sleep and waking, I am haunted by delusions that someone or something is trying to break into the apartment.\u00a0 My dreams have been haunted by fear, death, and betrayal.<\/p>\n

Yes, I have things to be depressed about.\u00a0 I have abandoned one lover, for a second time, in a far-away city; I have stayed in place as another moves on to bigger and better things.\u00a0 That these things are inevitable, and the only path to each of us furthering our ambitions, is little consolation: I miss them.\u00a0 Beyond that, finances are tight.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t make enough money over the summer, leaving with debt at the beginning and my costs have risen.\u00a0 I\u2019ve secured a TA position, which will provide me more hours than my post office position last year, but it\u2019s still minimum-wage work-study.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also stress.\u00a0 I\u2019m studying two dead languages at once, which is a kind of mind fuck.\u00a0 I\u2019m learning to weave, which is relatively straightforward on the one hand, but hugely time consuming.\u00a0 And I\u2019m taking an upper-level class outside my field: Gender Studies, as a point of fact, which while somewhat familiar territory as a queer feminist, is rightly known as a field\u00a0 of particularly difficult-to-read theory.<\/p>\n

But these very real factors are not sufficient to account for the degree of madness I\u2019ve been struggling against, or the perfect (if short-lived) efficacy of banishing and\/or meditation as a method of managing it.<\/p>\n

All this, and I haven\u2019t even performed my initiation in to the Chaos Current, yet, or the Mass of Chaos B for a second time?<\/p>\n

Fuck.\u00a0 Me.\u00a0 Running.<\/p>\n

I just hope that if I do go off the deep end, there\u2019ll be someone left in my life to send in a rescue party.<\/p>\n

Meditation<\/span><\/p>\n

My meditation has been going fabulously.\u00a0 I have missed only one day this week\u2014Monday\u2014and I have meditated in excess of 30 minutes on two occasions: almost exactly half an hour Tuesday night, before sleep; and a somewhat harder to quantify amount Friday afternoon at the loom, made up of uncounted three to eight minute intervals as I lost myself in the rhythm of the shuttle and reed.<\/p>\n

Which is fucking good, because, as I said above, it\u2019s been the front line of defense against the hordes of my internal demons.<\/p>\n

Magic<\/span><\/p>\n

I have been banishing and refining my Q-Cross every day, but done little other active magic this week.\u00a0 What I have done is dwell upon Chaos Magick, its paradigms, and Project Null.\u00a0 Having produced the first half-dozen glyphs of my Sacred Alphabet, I must now begin to conceive of how it will grow.\u00a0 I have also been preparing for Monday morning\u2019s Mercury Cazimi election.<\/p>\n

And, of course, as is my custom, I spend Friday night cleaning and smudging my apartment.\u00a0 I also performed a couple banishings..<\/p>\n

The most concrete product of these musings and meditations can be seen in the image at the top: a syncretic chaosphere for Aradia, myself, and anyone else who chooses to join in with Project Null.\u00a0 An image, a sigil if you will, to help unite and power our efforts. Our own little runoff stream of the Chaos current.<\/p>\n

Dream<\/span><\/p>\n

Although my dreams have been consistently violent, they have only been clear enough to record after waking about every other day.\u00a0 I\u2019m always vague in the mornings; it\u2019s twice as bad when I actually wake up with the alarm, rather than before, and that is always the case when I have to dose myself in order to sleep.<\/p>\n

For the curious: the tea I\u2019ve been drinking has been valerian, mugwort, and white willow at at 2:1:1 ratio.\u00a0 Last night I added 1\/2 part mint and reduced the dose from 4 tsp to 3, which has produced the best results so far.\u00a0 Mugwort tea gave me nightmares as a teen, too, but almost never since.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been practicing magic for just shy of sixteen years.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen some whack-ass shit\u2014some of it way back in the day, some of it a little more recently.\u00a0 I even burned out the circuitry in my own brain on one occasion, a psychic injury from which I have only fully recovered in the … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[38,46,149,157,211],"class_list":["post-868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-by-the-way-im-crazy","tag-chaos-magick","tag-magic","tag-meditation","tag-project-null"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-e0","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}