Warrioress.

War is easy.

Last night I was dreaming I was with a friend at an art show and she made the most amazing magical creations and was setting up her booth. She wanted it to be just perfect. So she asked for a dark booth which meant she had to be careful about the types of lighting that she displayed. The organizers kept coming by and giving her violations for not complying but they could have really just talked to her and she could have worked something out. Instead they brought a fight to a fighter and so of course she fought back. So she’s about to get kicked out and they tell her she has to go do something that’s the equivalent of a snipe hunt. She is fuming and really seeing red. I’m talking to the organizer who is primarily fucking with her and trying to plea her case. I’m explaining how she does everything with her entire heart and all of her love and how she wants everything to be perfect, but when you come in swinging she is the type who will send you out in a body bag. All they had to do was just talk to her. She was looking for this her entire life. She was terrified of something going wrong. She wanted everything to be so perfect. She just wanted to make her display the perfect display of the magic she creates. Her. Not the other people at the show. She’s worked her whole life to get here and to have it be so f-ed up is destroying her. She’s not the one to cry she’s the one to fight back and to keep trying and to find a way.

War is easy.

It’s peace that really fucks people up. When you tell people they are free and no longer need to fight to serve an authority, watch as they turn on each other. People like being told what to do, who to serve, how to behave. They want it simple.

A person who thinks for themselves is complex. They reason things out. They consider the outcome. They wonder if it’s right or not. And a person who thinks for themselves is upsetting for those who follow herds- even minority herds.

When you’re born into this world, your family will have volumes and volumes of unwritten rules for you. Worse yet, when you enter school you’ll find that the rules you learned and the rules of the social setting are somewhat bastardized versions of each other. You look around and see the other kids seem to have no problem adjusting, but you don’t know where to stand or how to look or what to say. It irritates the other kids.

If you were socialized like me, you learn quickly to adapt to the expectations of the adult because the adult is the one to fear.

So now you have a set of rules at home and one at school and as you age you encounter more sophisticated relationships with your peers and in different settings.

If you’re me you learn to blend into cinderblock walls, smoke under the bleachers or in your car during pep rallies, keep peripheral surface friends, and befriend the most broken and alienated invisible kids to learn their secrets of not being seen.

If you’re me you write poetry to the posters on your walls and dream of a life completely different but always “someday”. You form relationships in your mind with hallucinations because those illusory images are realer to you than the corpses animated in the halls of your school.

If you’re me you have a strong mother who maintains strict control with violence and you meet her violence with your own pent rage to defend your younger siblings.

If you’re me you HATE that monster.

If you’re me you are aching to love and be loved and yet you understand so little about other people and the monster carefully caged inside is ready to defend at any moment. You push people away for their safety. You learn to do some damage first with your tongue – you find the chinks in psychological armor and rend. You learn to use words and intellect to play the game of protecting the queen. And you never have just one plan – because plans can be thwarted. Instead you hide, you identify the exits, you use the ability to blend in and make yourself invisible. And if you’re spotted you become the best friend, the funniest person, the most social. You hide in plain sight.

If you’re me you will spend your entire adulthood unlearning the ways of war and learning peace.

You will rewrite the narrative from control, competition, dominance and submission, kill or be killed, winners and losers, defend defend defend, scarcity and sacrifice, and punishment; to freedom, collaboration, cooperation, innovation, creativity, abundance, nurturing, rewarding, cheering.

You will evolve and you will find the world ever more alien than before.

You only want communion and people will accuse you of competing. You will only want celebration and people will accuse you of domination. You will only want freedom and people will accuse you of control.

You will know these problems exist within THEM and you will remember how you fought an unwinnable fight and lost.
You will want to reach inside of them and rearrange things for them so that they can arrive where you are. You will share with them your lightcodes and you will hope to see them rewritten.

But no matter how far you travel from your home, there will still reside inside of you a warrior ready to defend when challenged. There will come a time when you feel cornered. Someone will pose such a grave threat that just as the thing that you’ve wanted your entire life is finally within your grasp, you will unchain the sleeping warrior.

Fear.

The fear of having what you’ve always wanted can be greater than the fear of giving in to the darker parts of ourselves. We think we are fighting back against an enemy – and yes we have enough of our own evidence to make a case that we are – however that war will be our own undoing. We will be swung upon and we will come back swinging but the carnage will not be predictable. We will unleash our inner Kali and we will obliterate the one who we want to love thinking them a participant in the grand plan laid out by our enemy.

We will only see the Shiva too late.

The warrior must learn to master her own anxiety and fear before there can be peace.

The truth is that there are people around us all the time who have their own plans and machinations and not all of them want the best for us. There are “enemies” hiding in every bush. But we have mastered those snares and traps they lay for us. They do no harm. We walk over bear traps as easily as we walk over grass.

There is indeed something specific and special about the foe who is effective. They play on specific insecurities for a reason. They show us the things that we’d rather not look at. They emerge from and play in our own shadows and that is why they can get to us. And they use our fears against us.

Fear creates shadow puppets that appear real. It creates the illusion of enemies all around us.

And the awakened person who is afraid can become a greater danger than those still sleepwalking. They question everything and then question themselves. Their instincts are somewhere between war and peace and are unpredictable. They recognize no authority and thus act without concern for rules or tradition. They are simply fighting – at first to protect – and then ultimately for the thrill of the fight.

At the conclusion, it doesn’t matter which shades were real and which were fear-manufactured if all is lost. All that matters is the loss. There are some wounds that will not heal from words or time. And if the one who was wounded has learned anything, they will make their own choices and they will choose their own freedom – even if they too were committed to misunderstanding.

Whether anyone else ever sees or knows the truth as recorded by the eyes of the warrior makes no difference. What matters is the actions that others witnessed as innocent bystanders.

I wanted friendship and love. I wanted acceptance and communion. I wanted freedom and full self expression. I wanted an evolved and peaceful relationship outside of the narrative created for us by social structures.

And just as I was enjoying having everything I wanted – I allowed my fear to unchain the inner animal.

I did this to myself.

But just as anything else I did in vain, I myself have taken accounts and I have been responsible, and I have tried to make amends.

I only wanted to have a place to display my magick and watch the gleam in others’ eyes as they appreciated it. The enemy may have been real, and the threat may have been immanent. But my training in peace was surrendered to reflexes of war. The peace was broken as the world spiraled into madness. I released my inner pandora’s box and the world is now burning. The rage carefully held inside of me for 41 years was unleashed. And I made sure that the one who I wanted to love the most was consumed by it.

I’ve never gone backwards. I’ve never wanted a thing once its time has expired. I’ve always kept moving and evolving and learning. But then I’ve never destroyed an innocent before. Yes, there were some mistakes made. But not ill-intended and not with a motive to do harm.

I went back to beg for forgiveness.

But I’m not fond of begging.

I was sent away.

To me, I made impossible choices and did the only thing I knew how to do. To them – I’m more monstrous than I am to myself. I spoke up for myself. I regained my voice. The world I created on the inside and protected from others was now spilled out around me. I was open and unhindered by the rules of the social structures I’d been forced into. I could and would say whatever I wanted to, fuck the consequences.

But just as my voice has returned, a voice has returned to the world. And its message is ugly and filled with fear and hatred. Corruption has seeped into every holy place. Misteachings abound. The world is awakening but the warrior spirit rages. Wrongdoings in every facet are coming to the fore and those who have been harmed seethe for vengeance.

War is easy. Peace is really fucking hard.

What is it that you REALLY want here? How much revenge will reset the balance? Whose blood do you need to taste?

What martyr will be big enough to quell the human monster?

The world is not so alien anymore. And that’s the trouble.

The world is an echo of my own personal rage – the darkest parts of myself that I want no one to see. Those committed to misunderstanding. Those whose machinations are so glaringly obvious – yet successful! To see the cogs as they whir and to see how easy it could be to destroy the entire works – and yet understand why each piece and part is essential to where we are going.

The devastation that must happen before there can be new growth.

Watching from the eagle’s roost is one of the loneliest hells that exist on this plane.

We can get there from here – but we may not like the cost.

The warrior must master fear. The warrior must be discriminating and wise with her weapons. The warrior must wait and watch. The warrior must not submit to the program of war, for the program of peace is what really matters now. When the enemy comes in swinging, the master must be master of herself first. She must choose to disarm her foe with the gifts she so proudly exhibits. She must use charm and wonder and humor and grace and arrive at a creative conclusion.

And the warrior must accept that they will never understand her fully. She must continue unencumbered by their opinions of her.

And she must accept her greatest loss as her greatest teacher and must learn to protect the things and people who she loves the most instead of destroying them out of the need to protect herself.

When she has mastered this next level of skill, she will have access to both the light and the dark and she will then create something which has never been seen by human eyes – the heaven on earth to rival Atlantis, Alexandria, and Enoch. Peace will indeed reign and ripple through the world. And her Beloved will return to her – no matter the distance.

Like all parables, this is part paradox, part fantasy, woven with a thread of truth.

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