A Patchwork Soul

I generally will be open to discussion and debate about a lot of stuff ranging from politics to food to shit my mom wants me to consider and generally willing to change aspects of my opinion due to more education and intellectual discussion as well as said topics just rattling around in my head. This breaks down whenever we get into the idea of the soul not being one piece. Don't get me wrong, I think it's perfectly fine for *you* to have more than one soul a triple aspected reclaimist buddhist thing of wonder, I'm sure, but I'm not interested.

I tried the triple aspected soul thing through Thorne's Reclaimist theory and I really wanted to believe it. Jow would try to re-explain all the . . .stuff about a stickyself and I don't even remember the other parts to be honest and I would try to process it. But at the end of the day, I felt a resounding, nope.

I'm usually (despite strong opinions) pretty go with the flow and open to discussion, but this is like when the part of my yoga dvd tells me to let my mind be a distant observer, my brain just locks that shit down. Jow finds this curious as to why I'm so reluctant to consider . . .this soul being a patchwork of shards of different lives all converging to this one new soul or whatever.

I just don't believe it on a visceral level. I guess this is where my vague Shamanic training and experiences become less vague and more absolute. The way a Shaman sees a soul (at least as it's cobbled together in my brain) is that you have this one soul being that's the you that (for me) lives in my stomach. It doesn't need crazy amounts of enlightenment and book learnin' and meditation, it's going to sit there and be. And sometimes it does stuff - dreams, spirit walks, falls apart a little, etc. And when shit falls apart, you have specific ways of fixing it.

Maybe you go through a trial where the gods and your spirit guides throw shit at your stubborn head until you get what they're saying and that it's important. For me, a trial has never been AND NOW YOU WILL DO WHAT YOUR LORDS YOU GODS HAVE DEEMED AND I WILL KEEP HITTING YOU HARDER UNTIL YOU COMPLY.

As an aside, going with the whole gods argument I've been vaguely following, I side with RO's general outlook on the matter and go a little further with, seriously? You think you are that important in the scheme of the world, you, ant #656 who lives in NJ that your gods are going to spend a whole lot of time FORCING THEIR WILL UPON YOU UNTIL YOU COMPLY oooooooor are they going to find someone who is more pliant and less of a pain in the ass and/or really focus on bothering people who are changing the entire chess game (here's a hint, that's probably not you)? I mean, frankly, I don't seen MY DESTINY as being important enough for my gods to have anything more than a parental reciprocal relationship - I make them mud pies and cry about what I want and say thank you for feeding me and sometimes as they are bigger and have more stuff they will then halp me or let me flounder if I need to be taught a lesson and/or irritated them a lot that week with my piddling requests and/or I dinged their car. I mean, what do I do in a day? I try (try) to be nice and not bite, I go to work, I make dinner, I spin yarn, I watch like five episodes of Degrassi, maybe a small magic working or creative endeavor and I call it a day. This . . .is not the stuff of need for EPIC GOD INVOLVEMENT really.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnyway. So as my life does not require EPIC GOD INVOLVEMENT, neither do my trials. My trials can be painful, don't get me wrong, but I think it's more like, No. No, Marge. We are going to let her put her little hand in that hot water. It's not boiling and we've told her no a million times and tried giving her a little whack with a wooden spoon on the hand and saying no bad, but she keeps doing it anyway. Let her learn. And then I'm like, OMFG! OOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW! That's hot!!!!!!!! And then I think perhaps my gods do an I told you so dance. This usually translates more directly as, you're not headed in the right direction in your life, killer. Here are some signs so you can think about what you're doing. And being slightly older and slightly wiser by the second sharp whack across my knuckles with a wooden spoon, I'm like, okay, okay I get it. Stop hitting me! Jeez. And then I work really hard on figuring out what I'm supposed to do and get some kind of Scooby snack for my effort.

I'm not a great or even good spirit walker. I can do a little before bed but generally it needs to be spoon fed to me through my dreams where it's very, DEB! THESE ARE YOUR GODS SPEAKING! PAY ATTENTION! YOU NEED TO HEAL THIS THING/WRITE MORE/THINK ABOUT THIS. Sort of like when your mom gets on your case about buckling down about something. I can chose to not follow their advice, but typically it's at my own peril. Not because THEY WILL END ME FOR MY INSOLENCE but because they're usually annoyingly right and not following their advice ends up with me learning my lesson the hard way and the Told You So dance.

I also feel like, okay, if I have this one soul that's had many lives, maybe I have a shot at fixing some things this life. Not everythang, but some things and maybe next life I can fix a couple more and so on and such forth. It seems perplexing to me to attempt to fix like sixty shards' problems that hold like eighty past lives each. I like things linear and organized and frankly no one can empirically tell me otherwise so I figure if I want to believe we're all sort of like Daxes (or fine, a Doctor), only like . . .human and not a conscious continuous memory stream of past lives, it's my prerogative.

It also makes sense to me as U2 sings, "and you give yourself away" in terms of your soul. You give people big and small pieces knowing and not knowing it all the time. Sometimes you give people too much and you need to reconfigure and sew yourself back together, ideally finding the pieces you gave away and need back. But to me, as someone who also sews, it's sort of the difference between cutting up one piece of fabric and reassembling it and getting a stack of fat quarter quilting blocks and assembling that. As you can see, it's not the same fabric. This is where I find Thorne to be *extremely* helpful and I find myself back on the same page with her with the Iron Pentacle Meditation which has helped me immensely to piece stuff back together.

Right now? I'm piecing myself back together and it's a boring laborious process requiring magic, journaling, talking, more talking and a lot of exhaustion. But I know it will be worth it when I feel myself again and can go back to my usual Stepford wife/Courtney Love hybrid where I can smile at you while I'm cooking poison into your soup.

Chop wood, carry water.