Pomegranate.

[jacktellslies]

I've been contemplating menstrual cycles, seismic hormonal shifts, rage, darkness, and blood. I've always enjoyed bleeding a great deal, but the emotional earthquakes that accompany it can at times feel unbearable. It had begun to feel completely unnatural, these sudden cold plunges into insecurity, anger, depression, and desire. And each month presents itself so uniquely that I find it difficult to track or fend off.

That it felt unnatural was the thread I followed. When is the natural ever even? When is it ever smooth? It is quiet when it is hiding, and it is quiet when it is lying in wait. It is savage and protective, even when it is still.

I've met a great many pagans who worship some theoretical forest, some imagined field. I cannot. I worship the land that my boots walk. It is a land of good trash and broken glass, streets that I know and streets I do not, of underground rails, of glass towers that threaten the sky, of alleys, and drains, and hidden places. People get hurt in my city. People die. This city does not fuel or fund my magic. This city is my magic. And when I leave this city, if I wish to move with magic still, I must learn to listen and to speak to other lands.

Why then, if I claim to worship here and to worship now, do I insist on suppressing these things simply because they feel irregular, extreme, and unpleasant?

Will my anger erupt less forcefully when my blood calls it to do so if I more regularly allowed myself my rage? Will sadness refrain from crushing me if I explore it more honestly whenever I find it? Rather than suppressing these things, ought I to be owning them? I am honestly not sure that this will work. I explore my desires honestly more frequently than may be productive, and they still overwhelm me in ways that hurt in the days before I bleed.

Still.

I completely forgot to buy food yesterday, so today I cleared out my pantry in constructing lunch. I made lentils, some red onion sautéed in butter and red wine, some purple potatoes, and I mixed in the seeds from a pomegranate that was brought here on midwinter but never eaten. Red things, dark things, underground things, bleeding things: it's good underworld food.

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

[the King, under the pseudonym of "Thunderbolt", is reviewing his own book written under the pseudonym of "Daisy" in his feminine persona]

...This kind of thing went on for several pages, and then the critic remembered his subject, and returned to it.

"Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell,
Where twain may dwell."

"The peculiarity of these fine though feminine lines," continued "Thunderbolt," "is, as we have said, that they praise the hansom cab by comparing it to the shell, to a natural thing. Now, hear the author of 'Hymns on the Hill,' and how he deals with the same subject. In his fine nocturne, entitled 'The Last Omnibus' he relieves the rich and poignant melancholy of the theme by a sudden sense of rushing at the end--

'The wind round the old street corner
Swung sudden and quick as a cab.'

"Here the distinction is obvious. 'Daisy Daydream' thinks it a great compliment to a hansom cab to be compared to one of the spiral chambers of the sea. And the author of 'Hymns on the Hill' thinks it a great compliment to the immortal whirlwind to be compared to a hackney coach. He surely is the real admirer of London. We have no space to speak of all his perfect applications of the idea; of the poem in which, for instance, a lady's eyes are compared, not to stars, but to two perfect street-lamps guiding the wanderer. We have no space to speak of the fine lyric, recalling the Elizabethan spirit, in which the poet, instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the mastery. How perfect the image of two contending omnibuses!"

Here, somewhat abruptly, the review concluded, probably because the King had to send off his copy at that moment, as he was in some want of money.

excerpt from blood mysteries by susun weed

[thereallinda.livejournal.com]

"...
I am woman, blatantly and repeatedly confronted with my changes: hormonal harmonics stirring moon time visions, ovulatory oracles, pre-menstrual crazies, orgasmic knowings, birth ecstasies, breast-feeding bliss, menopausal moods.

I am wholeness. I am woman. I know life, death, pain, and health in my marrow, in my womb. I know the bloody places: the narrow space between life and death, the bloody place of birth, the bloody mess of nourishing life, the bloody flow of letting life go. I am woman. My blood is power. Peaceful power. Peaceful blood.

My blood is holy nourishment. My blood nourishes the growing fetus. My blood becomes milk to nourish the young child. My blood flows into the ground as holy nourishment for the Great Mother, Gaia, Mother Earth.

Gaia, whose ways are bloody. Woman, whose ways are bloody. Blood of nourishment. But bloody. Bloody menstrual blood, bloody birth blood. Blood of peace, nourishing blood. Blood of health/wholeness/holiness, not of sacrifice. The Wise Woman tradition is a bloody-handed woman, a bloody-thighed woman, a woman who gives birth, a woman who sees to the other side of things.
..."
there's more at http://www.ashtreepublishing.com/Book_Healing_Wise_Blood_Mystery.htm

i've noticed that even though i don't bleed anymore, i still experience changes in mood and temper--they feel like surges of power, more grounded than before as if i am more of the earth than i was.
or maybe going back.

[nonsequitania.livejournal.com]

A well-written meal for thought as always- thank you!

I don't see that emotions are necessarily less forceful when more frequently felt, but perhaps that's a good thing. In any case, can't do any harm to acknowledge them. You seem refreshingly self-aware as it is, anyway.

And your lunch sounds delicious.

[earlofgrey.livejournal.com]

I don't see that emotions are necessarily less forceful when more frequently felt

A very good point. Thank you for that.