Dragonfire Text

TAURUS: Can you pull off a mid-course correction while hurtling through the air across a chasm during a leap of faith? If anyone is capable of such a feat, you are. However, I'd prefer it if that wasn't necessary. I'd rather see you prepare a little better, like by procuring the help you'd need to create a safety net or sturdy bridge that will stretch across the chasm. Or by getting one of those jet packs to strap across your back and allow you to fly. Or by taking as much guesswork as possible out of the details about how you're going to get from the edge of one cliff to the edge on the other side.

Oy. See. Um. Uncle Rob, I totally know what you're referencing here and I'm working on it.....sort of? *facepalm* We'll be getting around to it, I'm sure. Just not tonight, or tomorrow night, or this weekend while I'm away on a trip. Monday? How's Monday sound to you? Or next weekend?



Also. Christmas Surprise People you keep Christmas Surprising Me. How do you people even manage to stay quiet while I'm vacillatingly on the topics of my other boxes and being all "oh, well, Christmas is mostly over now, except for these few lost stragglers?" And by you people, I mean mostly thewinteroak and My Aunt. Though the second did just leave me a message today telling me the fudge from Monday and the flowers from Tuesday are not her gift, it is still on the way ---

So mainly, I mean, Winter. Omg. Things. I am too far away to hug you. This will be rectified in a few months?



Oh my am I making a pumpkin pie because apparently Winter filled a challenge to send someone pumpkin pie things and that lucky person was me. I'm stealing away to Daejeon to Denise's oven to make me a pumpkin pie (and key lime bars) before I leave this world. She can help me eat it, too. I am kind like this. Other things of awesome note in this box, five lovely little candles by a maker in Texas. The poofy thingy that i actually started needing a new one of like five days ago. And an interesting Shea Soap bar that I'm actually looking forward to trying.


The other box that came today was Earl's. I've been watching for this box for nearly three weeks now.



Two starting comments. One, Earl is going to have the whole world believing I actually eat candy. It is crazy, and amusing. Two, my favorite part of this entire gift is the card at the bottom. I've reread it something like ten times now, and it's sitting open on my desk, and there at things written there.....that defy my being able to explain how important it was to see them in writing, that cool fears I've been having for months. And it still I was moved to tears on reading it two seconds before writing this sentence right now even.

I'm thinking about cutting it and putting it under the glass of my desk at school. As a reminder, like the ones from My Girl and Steph.

I'm definitely very drawn to my new Goddess calendar (as Seddon Boulet is the artist of many pieces I love). I think I've figured out how I'm going to use the Spell-A-Day, remarkably after spending half a dozen years never buying one because I couldn't come up with one way I would. My new date book and I are still dancing around each other, talking and formating how this partnership might ever work or not work. I'm definitely open to the idea of it at least. And the light is perfect for my Kindle.



It is far too late though, and I need to stop rereading this card and take myself to sleep.

This month feels so big to look back at, even with it only being five days behind.

I had been afraid of the arrival of December for a good while by the time it actually did arrive. Christmas is such a huge thing to me, a time for family and friends for me, so much so that I've experienced great heart breaks in this season even in the same cities as these people before and now I would be apart from everyone and everything. All my Christmas travel plans fell through one by one, until the plan turned out that I would be alone in my apartment for the winter break duration. This would be the under to the whole month.

But December starts before this even.In it's early weeks I had to start teaching my children their song and dance for the Christmas concert. For them I also started showing Christmas movies, specials and shorts during snack time and playtime after lunch. I got to watch all the things from my childhood while introducing them, in English, to children who'd never seen them before. It was a delightful situation. As was the concert and the teaching of Christmas stuff for weeks, playing Christmas music for them, and in the end bringing them surprise presents goodie bags.

With Alice and Jared, I saw the most remarkable Nutcracker of my entire life, done with slow action fight scenes and punk rocker glam hair, and from Alice, at the last most unexpected moment, I got a small Christmas tree that had been hidden in the very back of one of her cupboards (and later we'd even go shopping for stuff to put on it). I was deliriously giddy over both of these things. I had with the prior before always seen the ballet at Christmas, but now I had my Korean twist, and with the latter, I was granted a small homecoming. I would still have a tree, even in my tiny space bereft of people.

My mother sent me the second biggest box she had all year in the end of the first week with a surprise in it. One present for each of twelve days starting on Yule and lasting through the end of December, each marked with a date for when it could be opened. Winter brought finally itself into culmination with the cold, but a sticking snow would not happen until it's last week. I warred with loneliness, more in the coming than the arrived, for Christmas and Alice's departure prematurely. My walking with Blue would go well through this, even as my every weekend writing would slack its schedule.

I took part in songtoisis's amazing Pajama Program, collecting pajama's for kids. My desk at school every day for most of December was getting a stack of cards or packages. I finally wrote down a message that took nearly six months to form from a silence that had been overwhelming. I took up a personal challenge to actually watch a good handful of the classical movies I'd never seen, which I did manage quite a few, if not all of them.

The end of the month, the last week and half or so, is a hazy collection of posts detailing all of the Twelve Days of Koreamas, as I nicknamed the process of my parents twelves days of gifts -- and in Alice's leaving on Christmas Eve morning, her contract to our school finished. Where the prior gave me something to smile about and document in the morning, the latter held a good portion of my heart.

Christmas and Christmas break, first, would be interested and unexpected. I would get a million packages and cards, many as unexpected surprises. The inside contents as much beloved as simply the act of the sending in it's first recognition. Christmas vacation would, indeed, for the most part be spent with me sitting in my room, but Christmas itself was spent in Deajeon with a dear friend, Denise. Meeting her friends, hanging out, watching a new movie, ice skating, and being inflicted with a new geeky show.

As for the second....I spent a lot of unwritten about time with Alice as she was leaving. I purchased room stuff off her and hung out, taking in old places a last time. I watched her space become slowly more empty and was there with her at her plane the morning she left.

I cried a good while after her departure and have been dealing with the ache of her absence since. One that is so much easier to quantify in words after watching myself write these Twelve Days Reflections, because there hasn't been a month since February that she wasn't here, traveling with me, doing all sorts of things in town, or simply talking in the five minute break at lunch on all school days. I was lucky to find her, lucky to have someone who thought the same of our coworkers, food, life, a lot of things -- and who loved to travel. I know that I am far too close to this even now to write about it objectively yet.

The break would have me starting this class, as well. Reflecting on each passing month and starting a good massive clean-up of things in my apartment. My bathroom and kitchen areas morphing into an amazing clean I hadn't seen in a while. And giving me the first five days of twelve that would revolutionize how I can and could view this past year in so many different ways I hadn't been previously.


The poem for this month was my always beloved Whitman;

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark'd, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them--ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,--seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form'd--till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

It's very hard to judge this month. It's only passed by six days and some of the things in it are as of yet being processed through me on an emotional level. Grieving and letting go, letting yourself over to fate and new beginnings. My family and friends filled this void of Christmas I'd been so afraid of with magic and surprises, which helped to lighten the load of my week all but alone. Alice would leave, and I think I'm still in the process of the grieving and letting go of that, since her absence is only becoming more clear with school starting yesterday.

This card's write-up was so much about objectively viewing your world though and I started this class then. I am uncertain I could find a way to point to anything else that as massively gave me the ability to objectively look over my last twelve months (even if it was only five days of it in this month) and change how I felt about things. To re-examine, remember, hold tight and let go of the girl I was in so many different places during that year.

And to start this, which I am hoping may end up being a tradition I do toward the end of my years now, as well.

• 03:09 New LJ Post: Brevity is the soul of wit bit.ly/6BwkJv
• 08:18 New LJ Post: November 2009 -- 12; The Hanged Man bit.ly/7BgW4h

Because that many concise posts in a day might lead to a righteous assassination. Posted with Twhril, Facebook, Youtube and automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

I am literally mst3king it in my head when I'm not having the most utterly brain-slave fan girl moments. Such as were had when the music played the first time, or the tiny squeaky gaspy noise the first time Susan said Tardis and explained, or the first time we had someone say "Yes, but Doctor Who?" or the whole of marveling the Dalek beginnings.


And tonight's moment of hilarity is from the Edge of Destruction:

Ian: something...something...something...."maybe the doors opened when we crashed."
Susan: But that's impossible! The Tardis can't crash!


Cue me almost falling out of my chair in giggles, and going oh, honey, but the Tardis will do that so much one day.

Tomorrow morning I finish up the last day of my Twelve Days of Christmas class on reflecting on the last year. I've had some truly lovely times in it, and I signed up for the follow-up three week class on New Years Wishes. Which started tonight with our first week assignment; but I'll still be starting tomorrow after I finish reflecting first. December in culmination, like Sunday was. I get paid tomorrow, too. This weekend I'm going away on my first trip in far too many weeks. Sunday is my Kyllo's birthday.

Wishes, wishes. I started and then abandoned the activity on wishes in Twelve Days class. There were after all plethora's to choose from. I'm very hesitant to actualize wishes that are not my main wish, and I do believe in keeping them rather secret. Which is why no one knows specifically of my main wish I've been wishing for over five years now. Not because it is unfulfilled, in fact my life is entirely full to the brim with the accounting of this wish, but because I wish to always have it. On stars and eyelashes, on penny's and matching numbers on a clock, on birthday candles and countdowns. Every time. I wish the same.

Three weeks to focus on wishes, on in depth writing of wishes that must be far more specific and wordier, categorized and secret. Funny how that word keeps popping up in my life lately. I'm seven months away from the big reveal of the secret I started in November. And now a class wherein there should be much writing and bookwork, but all of silent, all of it secret. Wherein we will address the process with each other without the ink of the matter. I'm still pondering all the emotions that washes up upon my shores.



Oh, and that snow day snowstorm?

The most snow Seoul has seen in about 73 years. Wee.

November started with a large package from a friend, half covered in the things from America which means so much of Halloween and Winter to me. My parents would send me one after it, with more of my Christmas tea than I'd seen in almost a year. I had finished my month of walking with Pink and I was turned toward Silver.

With more knowledge and known companionship, finding my works with that color in even my school art projects with children and then even in my hiking during my trips. I wore my silver bracelets the length of the whole month without any hesitancy or longing toward taking them off, constant reminders to the work that I was doing.

I spent a long time during that month dithering back and forth on whether I would be able to manage Christmas cards. I could not find them, but they are such a tradition of November/December to me, and it seemed wrong for me to have cards sent from America. There would be no reflection of my year in them then. It would take until nearly the end of the month for me to finally locate packs of Korean Christmas cards and buy them in bulk, that I might still send cards to all of my family and friends.

The world felt more right to not have lost old traditions in my new world.

As it did in new ones, too, as this would be the month I'd start my gym routine, too.

This month was mostly quiet and I spent a lot of it, like October, in living here but in looking forward to where I might live in America. My doubts and hopes slotting against each other like chess pieces on a board, which has design but no more than motive and yet less than merit with the times still drawn in waiting. Things I can not know until it is that life, and other that I fear to change after almost a decades constancy. But I toiled over it constantly, as I would the next months, too. I left myself with this quote for past and future.

"We are so relentless in our pursuit of future happiness
that we choose to be miserable waiting for it to arrive."

The end of the month would pass with Thanksgiving. I was a little morose that day without being outright depressed or distressed, taking humble joy in what I could the closer it came. My grandmother had come home to my parents and yet I was in Korea where no one, save my coworkers, thought it anything by an average, middle of the week, workday.

We had a huge foreigners/coworkers Thanksgiving the following Saturday. There were all the right foods, turkey and potatoes and vegetables and glasses of wine and things that would eventually taste like pumpkin pie, and there were gathering so known faces with movies and talking. I was glad far more for the distraction, and for Alice's companionship and likewise feelings on the whole multifaceted situation than I was ever bothered by the great differences that exist between me and my coworkers.

In the end, again, I would return to tradition and after convincing myself I would not write a gratitude list, when I was so full of knowing what I wanted and could not have, I still made myself sit down that night and write My Gratitude List. Five things I was undeniably grateful to this world and this life for.

That weekend would be finished up spending even more time with Alice, shopping and just hanging out, as her tenure at our places was drawing closer and closer towards its end in December. She would book end my month for me, as the first weekend we'd spent traveling to and hiking around the infamous (here) Seoraksan National Park.



Everything was tighter in this month, I suppose. Not so much a free fall but a suspended state as Thanksgiving and Christmas and the implications of what it might or would mean to move home and the continually counting down to when Alice would leave in December. I was indeed in a suspended place where I felt I had little control over where I was and what was both happening and was still coming toward me. Humility is called for by this card, and I moved very aware of my place in the grand scheme during that month and the long time left to be carrying it.

• 09:19 New LJ Post: October 2009 -- 11; Strength bit.ly/5blbcH
• 09:24 is not as pleased as she could be with this whole school/work starts again in thirty minutes thing.
• 09:39 New LJ Post: School starts again today. bit.ly/7b5w63
• 10:06 New LJ Post: That snowstorm I mentioned a few minutes ago? bit.ly/5LvceB
• 13:08 has a snow storm and (take two) a Snow Day.
• 13:29 New LJ Post: Media Consumption from December 28th to January 3rd bit.ly/6epPLi
• 13:37 wants some 11 Who now. Can't decide between rewtaching the last four season, or starting at the actual beginning.
• 17:55 New LJ Post: bit.ly/8KJIUg
• 00:21 has a thing for space cowboys.

Because that many concise posts in a day might lead to a righteous assassination. Posted with Twhril, Facebook, Youtube and automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

-- Yeats

Articles/Stories/Poetry
"An Irish Airman Forsees His Death" by William Butler Yeats
"And Ask Ye Why These Sad Tears Stream?" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"Are You Content?" by William Butler Yeats
"At Last She Comes" by Robert Louis Stevenson
"Barter" by Sarah Teasdale
"Beat! Beat! Drums!" by Walt Whitman
"Because My Faltering Feet" by Hilaire Belloc
Rumi's Lessons 121-127

Books
Compstrella/Starfield by Charles Potts
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco
Her Festival Clothes by Marvis Jones

Comics
X-Men Forever 13, 14
What If: Astonishing X-Men
Farscape (2009) 1-4
Farscape: Strange Detractors 1-4
Farscape: D'Argo's Lament 1-4
Farscape: Gone & Back 1-4
Farscape: D'Argo's Trial 1-3

TV
Farscape 4.01-4.022
Doctor Who: End of Time 1.02

Movies
Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars
The Princess and the Frog (2009)
Avatar (2009)
Hamlet (2009)

Music
Top Gun OST

City Events
Seodaemun Prison History Hall
Independence Park
Independence Hall
Independence Gate
Martry's Monument

Is apparently a Snow Day snowstorm.

At least for IP, they haven't decided for elementary yet.





Here's to another first-time-in-my-life in Korea?

Guess I'll be here drinking tea and reading Witch Child now.


Addendum

Wherein what I mean is I'll be spending those five hours sitting in my office pretending to look busy, until they decide if Elementary too is not happening, and then I will spent four more hours pretending to look like I have work.

Packages that are here -- My Aunt's fudge, Yulejama!, one holiday_wishes surprise, and two cards. Packages that are not here -- Earl's, my Christmas Garden Bath, my cookies, my Aunt's flowers.

Back to cleaning up my desk and putting everything into order.

Addendum 2: Or not! Apparently Elementary is closed and the Snow Day is officially a Snow Day.

As soon as Jared gets back, we're taking Tova (Alice's replacement) for galbi across the street from Bauhaus.

I could be happier with that thought than I am.

Maybe it's the massive snow storm going on outside my window?
Massive enough I can see it through the windows that aren't clear.

I did at least go to bed in a sort of delirium fit about how amazing it would be to see my children, of varying ages and classes, again. And there'll be more Christmas today. Hopefully the work room part of it will be quiet.

At the beginning of October was first Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiviging, followed by the weekend, I got in a taxi, on a bus, and then a boat, to spend a long weekend away on the Ullengo Island, where I got to visited the disputed Dokdo/Lincourt Islands. Some of my happiest pictures from this year come out of this set. I remember how precarious the weekend was, regardless, trying to make sure not to over do my knees and send myself back into being able to walk, while still stretching the bounds of my freedom, like a child held inside too long.

It was so gorgeous there, and it was where I finally started using my good camera the way it was meant to be used.

Winter was finally beginning to pull back into this world, and with the beginning of the culmination of my year spent in Korea. I had arrived in winter, and when winter came again it would be the first herald of my leaving. The sunny months would not return before I would depart. With it turned my thought toward the future plans, that I had not made and yet others left offered in my wake. To move in with a best friend, who had literally been offering since early spring.



I embraced my study of Temple of Twelves Pink, even more than I had black, finding myself drawn to bracelets and nail polish. To outward reminders that would begin to serve as an example to the rest of my months. I traveled to Seonbichon, Mt. Sobaek, Punggi, in Yeongju, where I would fall in love with leaves of autumn, along with bushels of apples, and learn finally about ginger. I spent a few days shopping with Alice, and the very end of the month would see us traveling to Chungju Lake for a ferry ride and Gosu caving in Chungcheongbuk Province together.

What most strikes me both in my entries and in my memory is that October vanished. In a flash it started and then it was over. Everything suddenly so fast. The end of October would be four doors spent focusing on Halloween. No one in Korea, save the children taught English or obsessed with our Tv shows, know what Halloween is. But we put on a Haunted House and Halloween Day. The second of which was a crazy, amazing zoo and prior which was fun, if reminded me far too much of one of my first jobs at sixteen, working in a real haunted house.

How oddly the world brings us back full circle.






Strength. Quite, deep, strength. I had found myself again during this month.

I'm uncertain if suddenly is the right word to put here. It was neither sudden nor complete, but I had been working on it. Day by day, keeping in contact with certain people, falling like the slowly cold autumn continually into the steps that lead through weeks and then a month. I was not perfect, but I was more in balance than either August or September had seen me be previously. As though, even coltish, I had found the places from which I stood deep rooted in the core of me. This month was more an expression of the fact the ripples were working than of me ever seeing it was so.

• 03:04 New LJ Post: Brevity is the soul of wit bit.ly/5VDo88
• 11:12 New LJ Post: September 2009 -- 10; The Wheel of Fortune bit.ly/5HACi7
• 17:43 hates the time differential sometimes. Just for a few seconds.
• 19:03 New LJ Post: So here we are, then. bit.ly/8PXmbH
• 21:09 just kind of died on David's To Be or Not To Be speech. You sir, best have plans in the work, for me to be watching you in other things.

Because that many concise posts in a day might lead to a righteous assassination. Posted with Twhril, Facebook, Youtube and automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

One year ago, today, I moved to South Korea.

With the rawness of August just passed over me, September turned me toward Temple of the Twelve, another attempt toward Chakra focus, RCG Elements still and even had me finding my two e-mail a day poetry places. I wrote a lot about Glamourkin, and love, and passing time. But almost of equal importance is how thick the silence in my journal is and how telling it is of the descent into myself aside from my game. I called them my empty spaces, when I wasn't working and wasn't playing all there was inside was the emptiness.

An emptiness which crackled and burned with silent void-like quality, and still in wave of August's still just-passed events I longed for people to fill it up and now specifically refused to go toward people to heal it with. I turned inward, seeking myself and my times, finally finding my writing again. Finally realizing how long it had been since I'd talked to my very best friends, especially the ones I knew I could never lose. Even if I knew months of silence couldn't lose them, it wasn't a justification for not reaching out then.

And it is beyond my words to explain how hard to was to reach out to three people who culminated my life in that month. One I walked back to because...there is no because. She is everything and always. And years could not break that any more than being far for months could. One who would show up, soft and steel, to demand respect because of love for me and my love for them. One whom I missed, loved, no matter how clumsy they were with my heart.

I copied down two very important things while dealing that month.

A poem by Emily Dickinson;

After great pain, a formal feeling comes
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone

This is the Hour of Lead
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow
First-Chill-then Stupor-then the letting go
-- "After Great Pain"

And a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke;

How should we be able forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us, once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened, if a sadness rises up before you, larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand, it will not let you fall.

--Letters to a Young Poet

But even in a place of great confusion and great pain, I never saw this world as hopeless. I saw as having finally achieved what I'd been seeking many years past. I wrote, in a you letter to a very dear friend, "I have so stripped to the core of my being, the way I always wished and so have willed it." I had torn away all my distractions, all my foundations and columns, on the other side of the world, where those who loved and wanted to help could only send words, only touch a screen.

I had delved into the places inside me I so longed to know -- to know.

I don't think I have done myself disservice this year, in pulling away all the outer layers. In learning who I am in the dark, who I am when I am alone, when words are the only resort, when silence is the only sound that can be made. I have traced with my fingers the inside of my being and learned so many things about myself I had never been perfectly sure of.

At the end of the month, I come back to another quote I put up though, too. Especially because I think it reflect this month, but even more i think it reflect this Twelve Days class and how bare I've gotten each month for, and even more for my journal and all these people, who watch me live in a glass house writing about everything, almost never locked from anything or anyone.

"Even if you’ve taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It’s hard to be really naked. You have to work hard at it."

-- Lye, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland
in a Ship of Her Own Making
Catherynne M Valente

I always had this place, this foundation, to give everything to.

This month was not over as simply as that though. No, it was crazy all over the board.

Work, while not professionally stressing on my own part this time, was in a frenzy over Swine Flu (H1N1). With the demands for children to hand sanitize, with coworkers being sent home when they only has a 10% chance of having it -- and even, the country of Korea, closing down Festivals because of the ramping up of it throughout my tiny country.

Early week of September I finally went to see a doctor about my knees from the damage done in Geongju, too. X-rays and medication and the scanning machine. Which would give me the diagnosis of exacerbated tendinitis and then orders not to walk, not to exercise, and the one that would come down the hardest, not to travel. My bosses, having talked to my doctors, together added to it the fact I was not even allowed to take even the walk twenty minutes to and from school every morning and night, but not must take cabs.

The month wound down slowly -- with more talking to both My Girl and Earl, with the first Temple of Twelve's focus on Black going exceedingly well. I discovered a new vegetable in an amazing Korean pumpkin and delighted in finally having more to cook with in that arena after getting fed up with missing so much of the always-available produce in America. The end of the month had me finally delighted in Adventure Korea trips I was going to be allowed to travel again in October, the lack of which only had helped my disconnection then.



I look at this month and I can see The Wheel of Fortune in it, as well as I begin to make out the Wheel from this whole year going through these months. So much was so hard, so much made so little sense, and I struggled onward through sheer force of will.

And each of those hardest to make, never going to stop, next steps was a blessing into the insight of who I was as a person. Are the reasons I look at myself now with such pride and such comfort in my bare bones, in the deepest knowledges earned this year.

• 11:02 New LJ Post: August 2009 -- 9; The Hermit bit.ly/7c6yGs
• 11:22 loved Avatar. Off to do even more sightseeing in my awesome city. Yes, there's still brand new things 12 months later. I love it.
• 14:20 wants to know where Kyle went.
• 16:05 hummna in the half million times I contemplated that oom it never worked out as well as that. My. Oh. My.
• 17:04 has burst into tears many time because of Doctor Who: The End of Time Part Two now. Stupid show that I adore so madly. That was awesome.
• 19:06 needs a wall calendar. Huh. Apparently Earl got me used to it.
• 02:02 New LJ Post: Thoughts from the day bit.ly/6ekGgx

Because that many concise posts in a day might lead to a righteous assassination. Posted with Twhril, Facebook, Youtube and automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

I. I spent the midday of today checking off the last place in the twenty most important places to go in Seoul, that are not to be missed, with going to Independence Park (which houses the Independence Gate, Independence Hall, Martyr's Museum and Library) and Seodaemun Prison History Hall. All of these things are kept in memory of the invasion and years of subjugation under Japan.

I spent a good deal of those two hours on the verge of tears or in tears. There was a lot to see and read and think about and take pictures of. Definitely puts third world problems into prospective, but it's also about awareness. This is our history, our ancestors. Everyone's. This whole planet connected, all children under the same sky, having to stand up and fall down and learn our lessons the hard way.

II. I realized today, that unless the review of my last four months turns up things I don't remember, I've only written one poem this year. And I read something like only three books of poetry. I....don't even know how to equate what that means in words, but I've felt winded since I realized it this evening.

III. Serious 2010 Resolution: Find a way to balance my games, even if this means making a schedule for days or weekends. I'm tired of epically missing the people who were the closest to me, and helped me the most in the fall of 2008, right as I left for this new world, and only having them in the craziest break stints of schedule changing. I need to figure out how to attend to the crack better, too. Post stat game world. We will figure this.

August. August, makes me nervous to write about already. I was tender and raw and wounded in August and some part of me is tender and raw and wounded still. I am not always so good at being a glass house before such things, especially when they strike so unexpectedly or linger so long.

The beginning of August as the end of July's summer vacation, with the third and last weekend trip, to Mt. Taebeak for hiking and a Film Festival, that ended summer vacation entirely. I remember how fiercely my heart ached when I returned to my students, full of having missed them greatly. It was a month for still more focus on sensual, too. When I found the rainbow skirts, and when the box from my mother, with all the products I'd ordered in June finally made its way to me from the United States.



I would work through both the Mother and Crone sections of my Goddess journal, and take part in RCG's Elemental Earth by printing things out and do my own activities to them. But the greater part of religious impact this month belongs to Gemma and Princess.

I take deep breaths trying to figure out how to put this into words again -- for the second time only. The first was hard enough. After weeks of getting to know each other, I was invited by Gemma to join a coven one morning, and full of nervous rawness from being alone without communal worship so long (after having it everywhere in my life) I bypassed even my concern for seeing Princess was among the members. I said yes.

During my walk to school the nervousness finally slipped away giving birth to such humble awe and excitement, the relief and joy of coming somewhere that felt like home. Just in time to get to school and find a message saying the invitation was revoked because of Princess. Where I had tempered by concerns about her and said yes, she in turn had not and as a founding member of the place said no.

I was heartbroken. Stunned and raw and heartbroken, without a way to protect myself from it or rise through it. The first day felt suffocating. It was very much the sensations of "The Story of an Hour." It would be a lie to say that some part of me does not feel that way overwhelmingly still. Maybe not heart broken, but heart sick and wounded and skittish from the experience.

It would take me from August until eight days ago to even consider past missing to wanting to be part of group anything while here. To convincing myself that I could even barely manage this Twelve Days of Christmas class that was only twelve days and had no one in it that I would know. I wrote happiness lists and willed myself through it, certain times because there was nothing else to do but it.

Winter was coming in the breath of autumn and my time apart from my world was nowhere close to done, and I had to find some way to manage it emotionally while not screwing up either the emptiness here or my new friendship.



I would travel to Muan White Lotus Festival & Doripo Beach in Jeollanam-do Province, where I'd eat a squid and fish raw straight from the ocean. Later, I traveled to Gyeongju, the ancient capital of the Silla Kingdom (57BC to 935 AD), with Alice. Where I would get tendinitis but it would take me weeks into September to stop being stubborn enough about the fact it was fine, or would be soon enough, to realize just how truly bad it had gotten.

The end of the month would see me finishing the Goddess Journal and The Witch of Portebello the same night, all languid. It would also see me ordering the Temple of Twelve book set, which would come in an envelope packed full of surprises of love and light and color from littleloveflame and papabear62.

The world kept turning, and I kept walking with it.

Sometimes that is the most you can ask of yourself.



The Hermit, The Crone. This month I was not alone, but I remember how alone I felt. How unknown and adrift. How much I knew I was wanted and not wanted by others with the same breath, from two different hands. I knew the debilitating taste of my own want and hope and despair. It was a month born for introspection and solitude, from both the outside and the inside. There was no movement between solitude and community as the card betokens, but the heavy insistence of the month was on that topic.

In the decline, she honors the decline. I honor mine. My heart goes to that girl, and to myself now, and to the last two months before arms will touch and eyes will see.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

• 03:04 New LJ Post: Brevity is the soul of wit bit.ly/8NP2RC
• 09:53 is going to miss hitting snooze when she has to go back to work Monday.
• 10:44 New LJ Post: July 2009 -- 8; Justice bit.ly/4yq1FZ
• 11:23 New LJ Post: July 2009 -- 8; Justice bit.ly/8Y2WPF
• 12:45 New LJ Post: The Life of Green; The Passion of Red bit.ly/5xJ8uo
• 13:51 wants to go back to New Orleans.
• 15:29 New LJ Post: The world is a tiny place. bit.ly/85DAk7
• 18:01 approves of Cocoa Amore's White Chocolate and Dark Chocolate. That's three out of four now.
• 18:38 New LJ Post: Very fitting, for this, the first day of this brand new year bit.ly/7aDRvq
• 21:02 loves the internet with its needs for ROO, ISO and VLC. Really.
• 21:40 is curious. Whats your media player of choice for video/tv on the computer?
• 22:32 New LJ Post: New Years Resolutions 2009 bit.ly/4BtM3S
• 23:15 New LJ Post: BPAL Yule 2009 Scent Reviews II (of III?) bit.ly/6W5W8U

Because that many concise posts in a day might lead to a righteous assassination. Posted with Twhril, Facebook, Youtube and automatically shipped by LoudTwitter