Political PTSD

A while back I was talking with my lion about politics and reactivity, and I realised something.

US politics has PTSD.

And some people like it that way, because as long as the body politic can be reliably triggered, then it can be controlled. Atavisms may be abrupt, violent, and at least somewhat unpredictable, but they can be channelled, and really when that good old fight or flight kicks in, what happens is either a "fight" or a "flight".

But seriously. Look at the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and think about how much of speechifying is all about bringing up the intrusive recollections. Waving that bloody shirt, keeping a good low level of panic, because actually healing from these triggers would mean that people would be able to think more clearly, and wouldn't react in predictable ways when the predictable buttons are predictably pushed.

And yes, the whole "OMGTerrorists" thing is a pretty dramatic example of it, but honestly, I think as a culture the US was pretty vulnerable to this kind of collective traumatisation. (Not entirely tangentially, sometimes Little Foot wants us to read Dr. Seuss's The Butter Battle Book to her, and it strikes me very profoundly how very Cold War it is, and how likely it is that she will not actually understand its deeper message because "mutually assured destruction" is no longer the big red button of the collective consciousness of the polity.) I mean, "socialists! socialists!" is still a code word for setting off "run in circles, scream and shout!" responses. Boogety boo.

But.

Criterion D: hyper-arousal
Persistent symptoms of increasing arousal (not present before the trauma), indicated by at least two of the following:

Difficulty falling or staying asleep
Irritability or outbursts of anger
Difficulty concentrating
Hyper-vigilance
Exaggerated startle response

Sound like any nation you know?

Breathing

I have posts I want to make, and I have gotten out of the habit of making them. So I'm going to see if I can use this Pagan Blog Project thing as an excuse to try to rebuild my habits. What the hell, hey? And maybe in and among that I'll get around to other things that I was meaning to stick in the blog.

One of the things that I have as my standard advice to people who are undergoing stressy situations (good or bad) is "Breathe."

And it's actually way more useful than it sounds. The reminder to breathe often catches people in a twisted-up bodystate, one in which it's impossible to take a deep breath, in which there's a choking back of the capacity to inhale. And that place is one that keeps the physicality of stress in place, when taking a moment to uncoil, to take a breath, can release that tension.

The first person I trained with was a hardass about posture, which was really being a hardass about breathing. She wanted her students to be able to take a full, deep breath at any time, and to this day if I hear her voice my shoulders go back from their usual techno-hunch. But she would point out - not just that a body unable to efficiently process oxygen was not going to support spiritual or magical practices - but that breathing is a part of how people draw in life-energy. That magical work is made of power drawn in on the breath, transformed within, and then - again - spoken, using the breath. Breath is a part of the continuity that situates people in the world.

When I was early on in my Egyptian studies, I noticed that the word 'heka' - the word for magic - was written with an H hieroglyph and the symbol for the ka. Where the ka is the vital soul, the soul most bound to the body, the soul that passes from the ancestors on to the children (the soul that I refer to when I say "Hug your children so they have souls"), the soul whose name has ties to food, to sex, and to magic. And I folk-etymologied that H-ka to say, "Ah. Magic is the breath of the soul." It turns out that by actual Egyptology standards I'm closer to right than not - the standard literalistic rendition is something like 'activation of the ka', and given how tightly words are bound to magic in Kemetic procedure the notion that activating the soul is linked to speech, to breath, is not precisely farfetched. (And pun and soundplay is a theological obligation anyway, so even if it's not true, it makes sense as a folk etymology, which makes it religiously valid!)

The creator in some of the more popular Egyptian cosmogonies, Amun, is associated primarily with air. His is an invisible power, without which there is no life. To breathe is to receive life from the hands of Amun. For this and various other reasons, it was easy for Him to be seen as a universal god, personally interested in and aware of even the most ordinary peasant. The power of breath was an intimate connection with the animating power of the progenitor of all things.

I was reading a book recently that addresses, among many other things, some mystical symbolism regarding birth and rebirth (My Heart, My Mother, by Alison Roberts). There is a lot of discussion of the mingling of fire elements (represented by solar discs, crucibles, and so on) and water elements (boats, streams of semen) in the process of engendering life - but there is also a critical phase in which the wind moves the process along, in which this life-giving breath, this vital energy, the power to be and enact, joins the process of fire and moisture and converts it into breathing, moving life. I wrote, as part of my current training, addressing an unborn deity, and making reference to the texts Robert quotes:

Among the unwearying stars
The crucible glows with life
You wait, resting, in the fluid dark
As breath ignites the waters.

Keeping the Sabbat Holey

I just had another run-in with another one of those neo-Wiccans who has a serious burr up their arse about the fact that not all pagans celebrate their festivals. Which was one of those tedious things that crops up every so often when one doesn't bow to the Llewellynist hegemony, but whatever.

It has me thinking about calendars.

Actually, a lot has me thinking about calendars because I've been up to my armpits in calendar research trying to make things go for my life, my work, my theology, and so on, but that's gotten me a much clearer sense of what works for me in a calendar and what doesn't.

I startled someone a while back by commenting that the Wheel of the Year thing never really worked for me, I never connected with that system of eight festivals. And that's despite growing up in a climate where it actually was something that suited the seasons, more or less, so if it was going to be intuitive it is not like I was living in Texas or another not-four-temperate-season climate.

Somewhere in this I realised one of the big deal things for me, though.

Equinoxes are way too fucking abstract.

I mean, the breath of the year, the lengthening and shortening of the days, that I can understand; I can understand marking the long and the short of it, even though that's not part of my personal practice. But the moment in the middle? Tracking that makes as much sense to me as taking note of the moment when my lungs are half-full. When I'm doing breath exercises, it's in, fullness, out, emptiness, and 'in' and 'out' are continuous functions, not things with notable break points at three places along the road ('halfway' and the points between). It's a neat trick to calculate, but it doesn't have any particular immediacy for me.

I'm a little obsessed with getting the lunistellar version of my festival calendar calculated out somehow, rather than just settling for the thing I have which pins things to the civil calendar like moths on a lepidopterist's display, because of the thing about breath. If the breath of the month is the breath of the moon, that's immediate, that's there: it's something I can see, or could if I ever left the house but that's kind of tangential. Breathe, and the moon breathes with you.

The mechanical life support structure of the civil year is something that can do for now, keeping my little Frankenstein's monster going while I actually build the heart properly and get it to breathe, breathe in a way that doesn't depend on these machines of calculation. It's something real, though: I see the star. The moon flows through its mythic rending and mending and all things are made whole thereby.

Abstractions like a balance of seconds on either hand elude me; a day is a breath in and a breath out, however long each is held. I cannot celebrate a teetering pile of seconds or register it as spiritually meaningful - it does not connect to my world in that way. It's a curiosity, a piece of abstract knowledge, a process of understanding the world that does not speak to my souls. I studied astronomy and loved it, and understand the wheels of this process, but that does not make them liturgy to me.

I am probably more annoyed than I should be by that conversation, more annoyed than it deserves, but I am tired of being pinned to seconds and to declarations that this cycle matters and that does not, because the hegemonic forces of pop paganism have so declared it. Talk to me of what stars are rising and how many fractions the moon has, and leave the measured paces of the sunlight in peace.

Tomorrow begins Opet, at least in my lepidopterist's calendar. Perhaps by the end of it I will have the slightest clue what to do about that.

Best Anonymous Comment Ever

Followed a link from a friend on livejournal and read the comments, and for once it was worth it because I found this, from a point where the discussion was commenting on how 'food policing' was often 'woman policing':

If you read the Bible, it turns out that apparently all the sins of the world were caused by one woman making an inappropriate food choice.

Via Making Light

Close the Washington monument.

So tired of 'War on Terror' bullshit.

By the way, I'm a "domestic extremist"

Signal boosting this: apparently there are rumors that the TSA's sense of listening to people being upset about the new, ineffective, and invasive 'security' techniques is to put 'em on a ... you got it! ... list.

Maybe someday I'll have time and brains to post again, but 'til then, let this bit of fucking outrageousness tide ya over.

This gives me a little moment of optimism

So I have a tag on this blog, if you haven't noticed, of "sixteen tons". Which I use, of course, for ranting about American corporatism and the nature of employment and related subjects like "What do you mean you have a life and can't do overtime?", etc.



Sometimes I see little glimmerings of things that might make me hope that in some future time, I wouldn't need it.

(Class-limited, that is, but it's something for someone, and that's a little better than nothing for nobody.)



No comment beyond that, just a little quickie note.