I'm trying to start the practice of using aromatherapy to help focus my mental and creative energy in the morning. All the bottles I bought earlier this year have been sitting unused on the shelf for several months. Who knows whether it actually works? But it certainly brings mental pleasure, something I need first thing in the morning.
My favourite morning pick-me-up is a mixture of 8 drops tangerine oil, 7 cinnamon leaf, 6 rosemary, 5 fennel and 5 clary sage in the diffuser. This is a formula I developed myself. All the oils have refreshing, energizing, euphoric and anti-depressant qualities.
Right now I am using jasmine, rose, neroli and clary sage to help me write. My Garden Angel's Guide to Aromatherapy says this confidence booster is "For times when one is experiencing new life situations and feeling insecure. This wonderfully fragrant, floral blend will increase feelings of confidence and self-esteem."
It is interesting how even our different Christian communities [D.'s and mine] deal with the supposed oxymoron of a gay Christian. My old church does not seem to question that I am saved but people believe they should not associate with the "immoral brother". D.'s old charismatic friends still want to keep in touch with him, but tend to try to pull him away from me, and some have said he is going to hell or that he has brought a curse down on himself, his wife and his children. These two lines of reason (my background and his) are quite opposite, they both claim (with some legitimacy) to follow the Bible, and they both result in what I consider psychological abuse.
My chief problem with many gay Christian churches and organizations is that they tend to want to reinterpret certain passages of the Bible and justify homosexuality on a Scriptural basis. Like homophobic Christians, they cannot face the possibility that the Bible reflects the ignorance and bigotry of its writers, many of whom in fact believed that sexual acts between members of the same sex were an abomination.
I find it much more helpful to view the Bible as an account given by people who sought God in their own way, limited as they were by their times, the cultures they lived in, and their own individuality. They were, after all, our equals.
This belief forces me to think, instead of letting others think for me, to depend more on my own inner life and walk with God, and to accept that other people think differently, whether they are homophobic Christians, atheists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims or even the "monsters" of society.
By monsters I mean pedophiles, terrorists, psychopaths~~anyone whose behaviour we abhor and whose minds we disdain. I might also include the poor and unemployed, street people and those who do not fit all of our expectations of a functioning member of society.
By setting anyone apart from ourselves, I believe we overlook their importance to us. Any human being who raises an emotional response from us, bears intrinsic meaning to our own inner worlds.
And I will raise the old cliche: whenever you point your finger at someone, you have three fingers pointing straight back at you.
As soon as we perceive a problem, we are part of it. Our prejudice breeds isolation breeds antisocial behaviour breeds suffering breeds blame breeds prejudice. Who will stop the cycle?
A busy day for me today, and I already feel stressed at 7:45 a.m. At 10 I have the meeting in Kitchener with K., the lawyers and our assessor to sign a co-parenting agreement....
My D. seems stressed about this coming weekend, when all four kids will be here. Our situation here is less than ideal. There's not enough room, E. and S. get out of bed too early, the kids haven't enough to do, they constantly nag each other, and I get tired of sleeping on the futon with Brenna.
I can live with it, but Dan seems stressed and frustrated.
It seems he doesn't cope as well since he started smoking again. This has happened within the past couple of weeks....This isn't a good time to have conflict over this. But since he quit in June, I find myself less tolerant to the smoke and the smell, and I'm not willing to go back to the way things were....I'm frustrated with myself because previously I never put any pressure on him and he decided to quit on his own. It was easier for both of us.
Yesterday brought some momentous changes, and I am exhausted.
The meeting in Kitchener went on for five hours. I had to phone and cancel my therapy session. By the time I got home I was so tired that I decided to cancel the trip to Toronto. D. and I missed seeing Martin and Daniel.
But the meeting resolved many things. I was very surprised that K. agreed to joint custody of the children. She did not do this willingly, and I was not expecting it. P. [the assessor] and the lawyers apparently worked this out when we were not present.
So we worked through the co-parenting agreement and signed it. We also attached an section on child support. From what was left of the money I got for our house, I agreed to give K. two-thirds in lieu of support payments from January 20, 1996, when we separated, to May 31, 1998. The amount is based on the large income I was earning up until April 1995.
We will meet again in June to discuss our financial situations, and whether I am able to make further payments....We will have a separation agreement to sign next week, at which time K. will have a document ready to begin divorce proceedings.
With all these important changes I think I should feel elated, relieved. But mostly I feel exhausted and somewhat sad. I wish K. and I could have good will between us, but that may never happen. It is time for me to move on, to find out what lies ahead.
I dreamt about an exotic, colourful city full of people from many lands. Some very poor children lived in a garbage dump, and I was among them. It filled part of an abandoned street lined with decrepit houses. But the place didn't seem ugly to me; it was full of adventure and fascination.
I sat there trying to solve a puzzle that was part picture, part cryptogram. The picture showed a wizard's cluttered lair full of strange objects. Some of those objects symbolized letters: Y, E, L, A and P. You had to search the picture for these symbols and somehow they would give you a clue to solving the cryptogram.
I realized I was missing a class so I left that place. I started to worry about how many classes I had missed, and started asking people when the next math test was coming up. I was concerned about not being prepared. My high school math teacher, Mr. Holmes, was teaching the course.
I walked through a gateway in a high, ancient wall. Beyond it, stairs led me down to the banks of a wide, slow-moving river. A course instructor was just beginning a tour of the river. He would point out and describe aspects of the local culture.
I sat down in the long, narrow boat which would carry out the tour. I saw many other students there; each one was somehow important to me, but I can't remember how. I had accidentally sat beside a very handsome, tall man with a short beard and longish hair. He was very dashing.
Some activity was going on along the river bank. Several homes seemed to be built into the high wall, and shorter walls divided the space between the wall and the river into small gardens. A festival was going on in one of these areas. It had bright flowers. Fruits and lanterns were spread about. People were standing, or sitting in a small tree in the garden.
Three or four women in brightly coloured silk Arabic costumes began to perform a dance. They were a special kind of dancer, and all of us in the boat were excited to see them. But just then the instructor decided to begin the tour, and our boat pulled away from the shore.
Later I was walking with some of my friends near a bridge across the river. Some other people who came along made fun of us because all of us were boys, and some of us were lovers. Almost all of us were blond, but a couple were East Indian.
The East Indians in my group started multiplying until I was the only Caucasian. We were riding on a bus together, and someone commented on my unusual accent.
Then I was alone with D. on Church Street (the gay village) in Toronto. But the gay community was not there. D. and I were standing in summer clothes by the barrier that marks the boundary around the sidewalk café at The Unicorn Restaurant. We were alone and the street was not busy. We stood close together, and this required courage because a few strangers were walking by.
That is all I remember of this complicated dream.
My mind resounds with words today~~or a word potential, like static electricity in my brain. They strain to burst like a shock on the sheet of my imagination. I need to harness this sheer, disorganized energy before it carries me down some meaningless path.
Yesterday I walked downtown. On the way I felt story lines running through my head. Just like anger would, occupying and compelling me. I thought about my favourite old idea for a science fiction novel; the world after global warming, the environmental version of a post-nuclear world, like in Canticle for Liebowitz.
Earth has become a desert planet in all but a few isolated places where fragile ecosystems hang on. In my vision, almost everyone has left our solar system for a planet on a nearby star. A huge black market in terrestrial wildlife has developed. And the thrill of a lifetime is an illegal trip back to Earth for a big game expedition. The protagonists are a few scientific eccentrics who try to preserve what remains, Dian Fossey style.
I've had this idea since a dream years ago. It will need some research.
I had another idea yesterday, too. This time for a civilization millions of years in Earth's future, when a new species has evolved to intelligence. They discover the archaeological and fossilized remains of humans. Possibly human descendants return to Earth and interfere in the development of this new species.
Today I'll browse the web in search of information about what would happen to the world if global warming went haywire. I have questions.
Would global warming necessarily destroy higher life on this planet, or just alter the environment as we know it? What other species are capable of developing civilization, given a few million years of evolution? Why haven't successful forms like insects already developed intelligence? Are they already sentient in ways we cannot grasp? What environmental conditions were conducive to the development of higher intelligence in humans?
It inspired me to write a poem last night, Drylands, full of brazenly mixed metaphors....While writing it, I was thinking about society's abuse of the land, but also about bigotry, and people's poor understanding of the creative spirit. The mind and the land are two precious resources that suffer from exploitation.
The top news today is about Canada seeking a position on greenhouse gasses and global warming. Should I read this as a call to begin writing?
The universe speaks.
Just now I am recalling a dream I had last night, one of the coldest and most desolate I have had in a long time. I was a girl sex child prostitute living on the shore of the Indian Ocean. I travelled with a group of several women and the two men who lorded over us. They were old, violent and overweight. The women waited on their every need, and we had to beg for our food.
We travelled in a caravan, settling in one place for several nights at a time, entertaining people with our music and our bodies. At night the men who owned us would rape us.
Sometimes they would threaten to kill me over petty mistakes, but I seemed to have special skills that helped preserve my life. I was the cleverest member of the group, I could read and was good with numbers.
Despite the terrible abuse I suffered, I felt that I belonged with the group. We all depended on one another in various ways, and I felt needed. The older women respected my place in the group, and yet at the same time I knew they would betray me in a moment if it would gain them some advantage.
Sometimes I dreamed of trying to escape, but didn't know how I could survive without these people. The group included a man, little more than a boy, who had tried to escape on several occasions. The leaders had cut off all his limbs to punish him.
I have found the most informative site so far on Climate Change and Global Warming. It gives a very realistic and balanced view of what might happen if climate change occurs; and how our lifestyles and government policies affect it.
One section outlines the controversy over how to respond to global warming; whether to reduce the emissions which cause it, adapt to the changes, or alter the atmosphere and oceans in some way to reduce the effects.
This last possibility, which would involve dispersing small particles in the upper atmosphere, interests me the most. It is most controversial because no one can know for certain what the side effects might be.
Last night's episode of Star Trek: Voyager addressed the issue of accepting the consequences of our actions. The ship has been all but destroyed by a chronatomic weapon, which is capable of completely wiping people, ships or whole planets out of existence; in effect removing them from time so that they never existed. Anorax, who invented the device, has been cruising around the quadrant destroying civilizations in an effort to correct his own earlier mistake that destroyed his wife.
The pain we suffer from our own mistakes does not justify us making more mistakes to get back what we have lost.
Could our policy-makers learn anything from this? They could, but I doubt they will. They will operate on economic principles rather than human ones.
And they personally will not have to pay for their mistakes. People of developing nations will pay the dearest price for global warming; and ultimately for whatever choices our wealthy governments make.
It all comes back to the selfish nature of the human condition.
All written material and images are ©1997-2002 Van Waffle. This page updated Apr. 16, 2002.
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