Lisa Tilson

Every once in a while I get into what have come to call, the vaccum space.  Its a period of time where I have a hard time keeping my head on, I become spacey, I have a hard time having conversations with people, I get nothing done and on top of it all it seems that time is being sucked into a vaccum. I am currently in that space. ARgh… damn the phone… Okay so today, after pondering, I think I have figured out what happens to land me in such a deschevled state.

1. I am really busy with something.  This time normally happeneds after school ends, after I spend a lot of weekends in a row doing things that are energy consuming (canning, extreem gardening, family stuff, Christmas)
2. Due to my predominant Hera characteristics, I forget about myself for too long (see explination below)
3. Everything suddenly goes back to normal.  Justin goes back to work, I’m at home with a huge pile of laundry and often a dirty kitchen.
4. The suddeness of normal leaves me with nothing, and I realize that I haven’t felt myself in a long time.
5. After a couple of days of doing nothing and wandering around in my house coat, I realize that I need a nap and I sleep for 1-4 hours.
6. I am able to feel myself and start doing what I do again.

The Greek Goddess Hera:  Today I finished the Hera section in my book Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen.  The Hera section has been particularly enlightening to me, as she has been the predomanent archetypal energy since I was about 14, possibly younger.  Briefly, she was the wife of Zeus and represents commitment, marriage and the archetypal wife.  Generally a Hera woman treats her marriage like a career, no matter what else is happening, the marriage comes first.  When she is single, she is searching for marriage, and when she is married, its all she is really concerned about.  The positive polarity of the Hera woman is that she is very aware of the energies in the house, and knows exactly what is happening with the marriage.  If the husband responds positively to this, they are ensured a close and committed relationship.  The negative polarity however, is that she lets her own goals and committments slip, including those to her purpose, her family and friends.  You can see where this is going.
Since I have gotten married, my life has been amazing, but I have seen the tip of some of these tendancies, which I have tried to control by belonging to clubs or groups alone, especially those types that are mostly female.  However I have felt myself slip.  This morning I was meditating, which is really the first time I have done so since christmas, and the thought popped into my head: What would I be doing if I wasn’t with Justin? I simultaniously felt slightly guilty for thinking such a thought (unecessary) and felt that I wasn’t doing anything right now for myself.  I have let my podcast slip, I haven’t read hardly any of the interesting books I got out the library two renewals ago and I have been spending all of my time thinking about the life changes in my house right now and none about how that might be effecting me.

Today was the nap day.  I slept for an hour and a half when Justin left, and then have felt restless for the whole day, like I don’t have enough time to do what I want to do with myself all the while, watching the clock tick by until it is nearly five pm at which time I have to go to a healing thing that I don’t know if I even want to go to because I haven’t spent any time doing what I want to do. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG.   Phew.  So, I’m going, because its one of those groups that I belong for the sake of forcing myself to feel myself.  Its a place where I can focus on me and healing myself without feeling like I need to justify it.

As a side effect of all of these thoughts in my head, I have realized that I am rather sensitive to the household energies, and that it sends me into a spin when I don’t take the time to integrate newness inside myself.  My goal is to be able to do this before I get to the point where I forget about myself; invoke a little bit of Artemis.  It is wonderful to see what my tendancies are, so that I can enjoy the postive polarities of the seemingly negative characteristics.

Today I’m going to talk about sex, so if that bothers you, skip this post.

Sex is probably the biggest issue in relationships. Either one person or the other has had some sort of traumatizing sexual experience or one or both people are paralyzed (which is the case in our relationship) or one person can’t have children or you have kids (which creates its own set of problems) or maybe its just regular intimacy issues where one person needs a lot more time to get into it than the other. Most relationships I hear about regularly has at least one of these problems and I think in most cases it gets to a point where its hard to even kiss because one person (at least) is worried about the prospect of sex and the pain that comes with it - physical or emotional.

For us, Justin is a paraplegic, and I am an incomplete paraplegic. We both have feeling that is super patchy around the sexual organs, Justin even more so. He has been injured for 10 years, myself for nearly seven and both of us have trouble with intimacy that were exasperated by our injuries. Point is, even making out sucks.

We have tried many methods to become intimate and passionate, but most were fruitless. For example, in the yogic tradition, sex is planned and sacred, tantric style, preparing the mind and body before contact with the partner. Problem is, anytime Justin or I thought about sex, the anxiety made it impossible to prepare in such a seemingly luxurious way. Surprise attack then? No, because Justin is a paraplegic and has to do bladder care before sex. Spontaneity is out. Cuddling and seeing what happens? It never happens! Or nearly never in the way we wanted it to. We could talk and process and cuddle then make love in a very “aware” sort of way, but neither of us felt any glimmer of “raw passion”. Basically sex had become like work - we knew we had issues to deal with, and before bed after a nice day seemed like a bad time to pick a scab.

Both of us decided the other day that for our relationship to move to the next level, we have to face the sex issue. Justin especially was afraid to open this “Pandora’s box” of emotions and pain because he works full time and is doing his MBA, but he agreed. Of course, as soon as we made this intention, everything got more difficult: fears of intimacy made it very difficult to even connect on a personal level - it felt like we were cats checking each other out. So we decided to confront this face on and have a sex meeting.

This made both of us so anxious that Justin felt entirely tied up emotionally and I went completely into the “psychiatrist” mode I go into when I’m afraid to feel. But we made it. We drew a card from my goddess deck and wrote down what the thought of sex makes us feel. We practiced giving and receiving reiki energy to understand how easily we give or receive. (Justin gives easily, I receive easily - good way to get stuck!) We tried kissing a bit and then we laid down some ground rules including:

1. No silliness surrounding sex
2. No pretending you are enjoying it when you aren’t
3. Pace is set by the slowest person
4. Every bit of the process must be enjoyed

In bed we barely cuddled that night. I finally felt my emotions and ended up crying a bunch - Justin was friend from the effort it took to stay open. The next day we woke up a little bit… out of it. Justin went to work and I wandered around the house. That night we were going to have a romantic night… I bought massage bars. When the night arrived, we had dinner and did some intellectual connecting, then Justin gave me a massage. I was in about the same place he was the night before, so that was where it ended.

The next day (yesterday) we discovered a secret. Timing. Not knowing when the time is right, but timing ourselves. We did not feel like being intimate, but we new that if we were normal people and it was new years day, we would have troubles keeping our hands off each other. So we decided we would kiss for 10 minutes, and then we could work on something else from the plethora of things we enjoy doing together. As soon as we set the timer, both of us felt like the pressure was off, to the point where we pressed snooze twice! (I’m sharing information, not details!) We decided that this worked great, because if that 10 minute alarm went off and we weren’t feeling it, at least we gave it a shot!

Thinking about it after, this would work well for most daunting tasks… cleaning the kitchen, writing a paper, working out… but none are quite as fun!

Tonight is New Year’s Eve. At midnight it will have been 365.2 days since the last time we were in this place in our orbit around the sun? Why January 1st though? It has no agricultural or spiritual bearing, no real historical meaning, yet every year people party it up…

The Gregorian Calendar, formerly the Julian Calendar was established on February 24, 1582. The last country to adopt it was Turkey, in this century. The calendar is based on the earths rotation around the sun and its beginning and end has no bearing whatsoever on the seasons or the lunar calendar. In fact the Gregorian Calendar was created so that Easter fell at the same time every year where the lunar calendar caused it to jump around too much. The day the year starts wasn’t actually declared, it just arbitrarily came to be. What is important to recognize here, is that if we went by the lunar calendar, we would be completely out of synch with the sun, wherein staying with the solar calendar, we are entirely out of synch with the moon. The two cycles do not match up year to year. (Interesting considering the moon represents the femanine energy and the sun, the male energy - we live in a relativelly patriarchal society and we are following the sun… I digress)

I guess I’m at the age where I question everything (not 4, but 26) and where I want to have a reason for what I do instead of blindly following the masses. My parents always celebrated new years eve on December 31st, I recall giving New Years kisses to hairy lipped relatives that smelled of alcohol, and crying when the fire works went off. Now, I’m sitting here on new years eve day thinking that this day doesn’t really have meaning to me and that perhaps I need to gain some perspective.

When would the most logical end of the year be? I think the end of the year is the shortest day of the year, the Winter Solstice. By this point the plants are dead or in hibernation, the animals are in, the frost has come to freeze the ground. Everything has stopped. At midnight that night, the daylight hours are beginning to get longer thus waking and bringing everything back to life. I agree with the celts that the year is a cycle, not a liniar amount of time. Their calendar begins after Semhain which is a lunar festival celebrating the last day of the harvest season, somewhere around the 31st of October. This makes sense too. I will more consciously feel these days next year, however I imagine that both days have reason to celebrate. The last day of harvest season would be a good day to celebrate since it is so much work to get everything prepared for the frost, and it deserves to be recognized. The solstice seems like a time when it is dark, and cold and quiet - a celebration would liven things up a little!

Perhaps the year is a wheel, with no end and no beginning, only time interlaced by the movement of the sun, the moon and the earth. Maybe that is the reason why the lunar and solar calendars don’t line up - because there is no end.

Today we went to coquitlam to look at an SUV that has the potential to be the legs of our upcoming journey. The car is a Japanese import - a 1990 Toyota Helix Surf. It is a right hand drive, automatic diesel, 4×4 truck that would convert nicely to run on vegetable oil and biodeisel. The wheelchair fits in the back without dismantling it but it’s small enough that I didn’t feel like I was driving a hummer. All we need to do now is get it inspected and find out if it can be aircared.

It is a good time in our lives to find a car now that we have rid ourselves of our dependancy on that sort of quick and dirty transport, except for long journeys. I feel like we will be using the car realistically, and with the conversion kit, we will be running it on garbage - essentially. Justin has even found a mill that we can use to extract the oil from plants such as canola - hah… we’ll see. It feels incredible to be liberating ourselves from our dependance on everything staying as it is to sustain us! Life is so simple and leaves so much time to do what we love - live!

I’m not sure where we are headed exactly, but I am astonished at the speed at which the universe responds when one asserts oneself. Its as though the universe is one big vat of potential energy…

check out this link

A metaphoric roller coaster of course, because the PNE is closed.

Everything has happened over this christmas break.  In one day, I decided that I wanted to go back to school and do my masters.  I went and got a grad check, bought my books and my wonderful husband bought me a new orphaned kitten.  That was Friday the 21st of December.   Took a break for Christmas Eve, Christmas and visiting family.  Then in another day, I decided that school is really not what I want to do (it is simply the default button of our generation) and that we really need to pursue our dreams - which is to seek out land, start a permaculture school and truely live as close to the earth as possible.  That was yesterday, the 27th of December.

From the outside, it looks like we have no idea what we are doing and that we are trying to figure it out by bouncing from idea to idea.  This could be, but I think we know exactly what to do, we just have to trust that we have the knowledge, courage and stability to pull it off.  Essentially  there are two avenues we could take.  We stay here, live in the city and continue doing what we are doing - activism in the community, start an arts co-op, build community gardens.  Or, we move to some plot of land, figure out how to live sustainably and then teach it to others.  The vision Justin had in reference to the former was of being a Lemming getting pulled off of a cliff with a bunch of other lemmings.  Whether we are part of the problem, or neck deep in the problem, its going to effect us in a major way.  On the contrary, the latter means that we are taken care of - we know how to live and get what we need without having to depend on society as it currently exists to survive.  With this security, we can effectively teach others allowing the proverbial cup to overflow, so to speak.  This way, no matter what hits, peak oil, earthquake, food security issues, global warming, we have what we need and we are doing our part to help it out.

I have realized on this weeks roller coaster that we manifest things quickly.  How can anyone decide what they want and need in one day, the last friday before the christmas break and end up being able to get an appointment for a grad check?  I also realize that given the right motivation, skills and knowledge can be aquired nearly instantly, especially when we are working together.  (I can’t tell you the level of synergy that Justin and I quckly attain when we are working on the same project.)

So, we know what we want, we are ready and open to recieving it, however we are meant to