Changes and Ritual

I want to become more strategic, more focused on my own plan and what I’ve understood. To hold back, to slow down, to occupy my body more. To increase my self awareness and body awareness. I’ve invoked the Thoth/Mercury archetype, now I’d like to invoke Hades/Batman.

I have this hummingbird consciousness, flitting around from flower to flower. I want to focus it, so I can deliver laser like insight, the type that I know I can.

I have three weeks remaining to work with Melissa Lee, and that will end my Erotica apprenticeship. From starting to work with her until the end, I’ve written more than 60,000 words, and more than 200 blog posts. I’ve gone from no one reading my work to thousands of readers. I’ve taken characters who have been knocking around my head since 2016 and given them a home on the page and in the mind of the readers.

I’ve undergone a great deal of strain these last three weeks because of my writing, and the discord between how I see and how my wife, her family, our pastor see it. Now Concetta and I are in agreement over it, and I’m left to regard it once more.

I’m left with the question: what do I do next?

I want to continue the self-authoring exercises, learning about my virtues and shadow and faults and their gifts. I want to do the future authoring and the past authoring again, as well.

Do I want to continue to write erotica? I do, but likely more in the transgressive fiction type than erotica itself. My work is edgier than most, and also involves characters who don’t fit the blank archetypes much erotica requires. I’d like to explore this. Of course, one of the attractions of sex is its depersonalization – self consciousness is obliterated and transcended as the body, the biology asserts itself.

I want to continue to explore mythology and scripture. I want to continue to pursue esoteric literature, and connect with alchemical threads passing throughout history, the shadow of the development of science. I want to learn more about freemasonry and how its rituals and secrets maintain continuity with lost teachings of Christ and his forebears. I want to better understand astrology and how those teachings animate scripture, and tap in to the gifts of this ancient divination practice.

There was a time when my meditation and scripture devotion had a sacred flair to it. When I would read and explore with excitement, making connections, sure that a shattering insight lay around the corner. I want to regain this sense of wonder and interest.

Also, I want to refine my writing, bringing in more of the stories from my life that I want to tell, and scripting my own future. I have power deep within me, waiting to be unlocked. I have been overwhelmed. I have been confused. I have forgotten a great many things that I once knew for certain. I want to make a ritual of renewal and rebirth. I want to take hold of that which is alive and numinous in my life. I want to bring life back to this broken world.

I’d like to revisit books I read years ago and see what stories I could spark from my favorite parts. Books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and White Noise and Crash and The Snow Leopard.