Another condemned individual asked one of our captors what it would be like once we went in to the death chamber, how long it took, how much would it hurt, and so forth. He was told that we would be given a sedative beforehand so we wouldn’t care about much about the pain once it all started to take place.

I realized then (he was ahead of me in line) that in about 20 minutes I would be dead, that no pardon was coming, that this was uncomfortable and I didn’t like it and I wanted to keep living the routine of my life. I heard another one of our captors, a lady, telling someone that death is always coming for everybody and this situation is no different from the ones we stand in from moment to moment anyway.

Being led down the hall to the death chamber. Dread sadness terror, feeling the concerns of my life grabbing at me, unfinished business, who will take care of my cats, who will be stuck with sorting out my financial affiars and how are they going to do it since no once else knows my account numbers, I’m leaving a mess, etc.

Thinking, I’ll say some mantras. Wait, I can only think of one, and I don’t know if it’s right for this situation. I haven’t practiced enough. I’m not ready. And feeling bad about that, like I’ve failed.

I woke to hear my husband getting out of the shower downstairs and instantly I knew I’d been dreaming.

So this is what I want to tell myself in this situation, now that I’m awake: You learned some mantras, say what you remember, and just be thankful that you took the time to learn them and have them now. You feel distressed and unready – death rarely happens any other way, so just accept your feelings. Just like life, with death things happen outside of your control, whether you want them to or not or whether or not you’re ready for them, so be gracious with yourself. You’re not going to feel ready.

Synchronicity. The first article I ran across this morning was this one: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/hitchens-201201?fb_ref=social_fblike&fb_source=profile_multiline

So there’s been a death theme going on all year for me. I didn’t post the earliest events in the chain, I guess I should, but now I’m thinking, somebody’s trying to tell me something. Am I going to die soon?

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt the shadow of death hanging over me. I was hospitalized with pnuemonia when I was 6, and it was scary and I probably needed counseling for it. My obsession with “Is God going to get me and am I going to Hell” began later though, when I was 7, and I’m not sure if it’s because my grandmother scared me with her Jesus bullshit or if I heard something scary at church. There was no one for me to talk to about my fears.

Another time I thought I was going to die in an ER room. ER doctors gave me an initial assessment and decided to admit me to the hospital, so that made me ineligible for treatment in the ER, but there was no room ready in the hospital yet. I thought they were going to let me die there in the waiting room. I started to flail about and shout and they wheeled me into a nearby room, where I thought some help would arrive, but it was just to keep me from disturbing others. That was one long damn wait I can tell you.

Maybe it’s just a case of things coming up in midlife that you haven’t successfully processed earlier in life. Maybe I need to make out my will.

During the initial training for this practice the teacher said it might cause us to dream of insects leaving our bodies, and that this is a good sign.

But every time I get back on the Ngondro practice I dream of being attacked by insects or infested with parasites. Not sure what that means, but hopefully if I practice enough I’ll get to the point where I dream of them leaving.

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Several years ago I went to a witchcraft convention. It wasn’t the kind of witchcraft one normally thinks of, where you sacrifice animals and say incantations to get back at your enemies. But there was some spellwork done to try and bring about a more egalitarian and just society, which could put a lot of defense contractors and lawyers out of work and therefore make the world seem unfriendly and scary to them, so maybe it was actually the same thing as sticking pins in dolls of people you don’t agree with. But that’s a topic for another day.

Now I need to clarify what my definition of a spell is. A spell is a naming and solidifying of intent. For example, wedding vows are a type of spell, and mission statements are too. They force you to clarify what your goal is and feel how deeply you want to commit to it. In pagan ritual, song, dance, and symbolic gesture are designed to help people internalize the goal all the way down to the level beneath the waking mind – down to that silent mind behind your conscious mind which makes sure to sneak a pack of Marlboros into the grocery cart even though you decided to quit last week. Or dial your old boyfriend’s number when you meant to call your aunt.

Most of the spells and rituals taught and performed at this gathering had to do with personal development. Like helping people deal with their limitations and fears and get past them and move on, or just feel more engaged with their lives, or envision new goals, that kind of thing.

One of the big themes of the gathering had to do with community. Like, making sure you have a social network to support you and where you can offer support, because such a relationship makes the individual and the community stronger and leads to a better quality of life for most of those involved.

Okay – now I’m getting to the point. There were a couple of senior members of the national witching association there and they talked about a spell they did for their town. Pardon me but this was a long time ago and I don’t remember the specifics, but they believed an unwholsome trend was starting in the community and they wanted to bring in more positive influences. They got together with a group of like-minded people and came up with a statement about what they wanted to bring about for their town. Maybe it was a greater sense of local identity or a better relationship between elements of the community.

Anyway they got a group together in a room with a big map and defined the perimeter of the area they wanted to cover with the spell, marking specific places on the map. Then they did a ritual with it. Next, they went out in small groups to do rituals at the locations marked on the map. Naturally these rituals had to be small and inconspicuous so as to avoid getting anybody burned at the stake. Both of these folks believed the ritual had in fact benefitted the town. I would say at the very least the activity forced them all to get clear about what they valued about where they lived and how they could contribute to it. Plus they had a good time doing it and strengthened their social bonds with each other.

I was taken with this idea because at the time, the Greensboro neighborhood where I lived was haunted by a serial rapist. It was amazing how much the feel of the community changed as a result. Stories about what was going on cast a kind of spell on the community, making folks uncomfortable, suspcious, and afraid. When you feel like that in your neighborhood, it changes how you feel about your life and the world in general. It’s poison beacause it disempowers people and makes them hole up in their homes, weakens them with fear. One sociopath can cast a large, dark shadow over a huge area and large number of people.

I got a map of the neighborhood and was in preliminary stages of planning a spell to exorcise the rapist, but I couldn’t come up with a mission statement for it. Should the spell be about safety for all residents? If so, what if that covered the rapist? Safety for him might not be a good idea because it could come at someone else’s expense. Should the spell be about revealing the rapist so that he could be caught? How could we work the healing of the community into that? And so on. I also had trouble getting together a crowd of folks interested enough in this project to want to get together. The people I wanted to involve all belonged to different social groups and it would have been uncomfortable getting them together in both a new social situation and a weird project.

So I never followed through on the community spell, but stories about the rapist stopped appearing in the news anyway. I like to believe just thinking about doing it was enough to banish or deactivate him.

Now I’m thinking about community spells again. I still don’t have a group of folks I could work with on it, and I don’t know what the specific aims of the spell should be outside of making life in this town better. One needs to set such goals responsibly, because getting what you want can have some unintended and sometimes unwanted repercussions.  Do we need better restaurants? More places to shop? Better relationships between racial and socioeconomic groups so that there’s a higher level of social comfort between strangers? Safer communities where neighbors are connected to each other? A pervasive sense that one can express opinions without being labeled a racist, leftist, rightist, or asshole, and an accompanying sense that it’s okay to listen to the opinions of others without feeling threatened?

We were in a well house, which I will explain for the sake of young city folk. Before rural people had running water, they had a wide pipe sticking up in the yard and that pipe had water at the bottom, many feet down. Often there’d be a big spool with a handle on it over the mouth of the well so people could reel a bucket up and down to get water. And really sophisticated folk built a little shed around their wells so they could get water or do laundry or whatever out of the rain.

So I was in this wellhouse looking at this dead girl on the concrete floor, and she was propped against the wall, her head  in a cloth sack and sagging to one side, cold cold cold and whiiiiiiiite. I got the feeling she was 22 years old. She was wrapped in plastic and tied in twine in such a way that it almost looked like a strapless evening dress. Maybe she’d been hanged.

The well house had a concrete floor but the well itself was just a hole in the floor. I’ve never actually seen one like that. So I’m standing there wondering what to do about this, run call the cops or what, but it’s pretty obvious something was in progress here so maybe I should just finish it.  She’s here, she’s roped to a pulley, somebody obviously meant to drop her into this well. It’s not clear where I am or if anybody else is here or who I’d go to for help, so I yank the rope. It pulls her off the floor and drags her over the well hole and I let go. She sinks like she’s heavy.

And now that I think about it, the structure itself was more like one of the reconstructed  buildings at Town Creek Indian Mound, in that there was sun shining through thatched roof and eaves and the entrance was kind of like a snail shell – it was a hallway that looped around before it allowed you inside.

Immediately I stared having regrets. Nobody’s going to be able to drink from this well now. I start to wonder if this is my grandmother’s property, and if I will live here again, and not have access to water because of what I’ve done.

Then I go to leave.  I notice water leaking from the floor in places. As I reach the doorway to outside, I step and feel the ground move, flail and catch myself on the doorframe. The floor under my foot was a piece of plywood floating on the water of the underground spring. “I was almost just like the dead girl,” I thought. As cold as it was, I could see myself being immobilized by the water, and the plywood settling in over my head, and not being able to get out. There were a couple of other bad places in the floor like that I noticed, and I made a mental note to warn people about them.

Maybe somebody’d just pulled her out of the well, and I made the wrong assumption about what to do.

Those buildings at Town Creek had dead people in them. The indians there lived with their dead.

I found myself wasting too much time with it every morning. I read as a friend who’s a very indiscreet Facebook addict ran her husband into the ground to all her FB friends and subsequently burned down her marriage. This is the same person who posted a bunch of pictures of me at parties at her house during the 90s, pictures in which I had a beer in my hand (and a goofy look on my face) and which a prospective employer was able to view during my interview process.

Recently I got my ass chewed out over a misunderstanding related to an article I posted which I found funny, but which offended a family  member. Did I need any of this shit?

Do I really need to be able to contact people I went to elementary school with who I haven’t seen in decades? Hell no. Blogging is lonely but it is a better distraction from meditation than Facebook is.

When she left for another job, Wolf Woman left the feeding of the crows to me. They call to each other when they see me come out with a bag in my hand, but they wait on top of the building or in nearby trees until I go back inside before they come down. I’ve never been able to inspire the kind of devotion they had for Wolf Woman.

Wolf Woman said that it’s because crows are her totem animal, so I suppose they recognize her. I asked  her what she thought my totem animal was, and she said she’d could give me some kind of reading to determine that. On Friday I told her I suspect mine is the spider.

Last night I dreamed I was talking with someone and gradually it got harder and harder to form words correctly. Finally I couldn’t ignore the problem any longer. “Excuse me,” I said, and fished a big daddy longlegs spider out of the corner of my mouth. I fished again just to be sure and found another one, and another one, until I had thrown five or six to the ground. I thought I was finished, but then I noticed more of them crawling up the backs of my arms and up my shoulders, presumably trying to sneak inside my mouth again. 

I dream about spiders periodically, and based on the themes in these dreams it’s hard to tell if they’re friendly or not. The dreams are rarely happy ones, but they tend to happen at times when I need a warning.

Learn to play the banjo ukelele

Become a proficient belly-dancer

Spend 8 weeks in Peru attaining basic competence as a Spanish speaker

Write and publish a novel

Spend a month or so at a Buddhist retreat

Go abroad with the Willing Workers On Organic Farms program for six weeks or so

Learn to sew my own clothes

Build an earthbag house

Understand the five-element system in Chinese medicine

Visit Petra

Participate in a sweat lodge

Learn to kayak

Attain some level of enlightenment

Spend time in Jungian analysis

Pay off all mydebts, including mortgage

Complete the Ngondro

Integrate daily meditation and yoga/chi gong into my life in place of surfing the internet for interesting news

Plant my own garden and get a lot of our food from it

Learn to really cook

Become a master in my field

Would it be possible to do all that in say, ten years?

Once it got dark we walked down to a park and made vodka offerings to the earth, to the sky, to water, and to fire. We did this by dipping a fingertip into the vodka and flicking drops off a fingertip for each one, then we tasted the vodka ourselves.

I brushed my torma down the length of my lung meridians -  a friend recently reminded me that my usual hours of sleeplessness correspond to the lungs on the chinese body clock. She also suggested that I may have unresolved feelings of grief or an inability to let go of something, because those emotional states correspond with the lungs. I also held the torma against my lower back, which has been creaky lately. Then I threw the torma into the darkness. We had to use Quint’s compass to determine the proper directions to throw our tormas.

It says in Tenzin Wangyal’s book that if the spell works and the malefic influences in question are indeed pacified by the offering, you may dream of insects or fluid or other things like that leaving your body.

I once again couldn’t sleep between the hours of three and five a.m. last night, but during the little sleep I did get my dreams had the flavor of those H.P. Lovecraft movies, Re-Animator and From Beyond. I don’t think that’s a good sign. A former co-worker also made an appearance, a woman I considered a good friend at the time but who I learned later may not have been so kind to me behind my back.

So one of the exercises in this book is this: Think of something you want to happen. Come up with some dance movements or steps. Decide this dance means the same thing as your statement about what you want to happen. Dance. Record your results.

I modified this by agreeing with myself that whatever song first struck me in the IPod rotation and my free-form movement to it would mean the same thing as my statement about what I want to happen.  “I will gain proficiency in _________ and will be generously supported by it materially, physically, spiritually and emotionally by December of this year.”

Then I hit the skip forward button on the IPod until I came upon this song. I did a little merengue, a little bellydance. Much fun.

The great thing about actually getting down to spellwork is it forces you to define what you want in specific terms, and also to consider the possible side effects of getting what you want. For example, I’m always nervous about doing spells for money because I’m afraid that will result in a family member croaking and leaving me an inheritance, or me winning an out of court settlement after getting hit by a city bus. It would be hard to enjoy wealth under those circumstances.

Mabon and its predecessor on the pagan calendar of red-letter days, Lughnasadh, are both about reaping the growing season’s harvest and making an offering of part of it as a gesture of respect and gratitude toward harvest gods. I’ve got some dried herbs I grew earlier this year, so I might use those in our ceremony.

In Bon, offerings are made constantly. At the close of a Bon Buddhist meditation session, practitioners dedicate the benefits of any merit they’ve generated to the benefit of all sentient beings. In one Ngondro meditation exercise, practitioners imagine chopping and cooking themselves up as an offering to sentient beings in this and other realms. None of the Gobi Desert dwellers I met during my trip to Mongolia would consume vodka without offering some to the spirits first. But for this ritual, Quint and I plan to offer fingerprint Tormas to any spiritual entities that may be planning to make our lives hard.

Tenzin Wangyal wrote about fingerprint tormas in Healing With Form, Energy and Light.  To make them, you mix up some flour (Tibetans use barley flour) until it’s got the consistency of Play-Doh. (I might include some of my dried herbs in this mixture.) Then women squeeze a lump of dough in their left hands and men in thier right in order to make the torma. It should have the imprint of all five fingers in it. You touch this torma to areas of your body where you suffer affliction. Then you make the torma an offering by tossing it away from you, where malefic influences can feed upon it and become satisfied, hopefully becoming motivated to leave you alone.

If you want to get technical about it, you can so some research to determine the exact direction in which you should throw your torma.  Based on your birthday and your Tibetan astrological sign, one of twelve points on the compass is dedicated to you, and bad influences come from the opposite direction. That’s where you need to throw your torma.  There’s a table in the back of the book that helps you figure that out.

Still don’t know where we can go for this activity. Outside would be nice. But it’s hard to find a place outside where strangers won’t be likely to tramp through at any given time.