Male Lovers Xochipili Beaver

Gratitude. That's my most awesome fuel.

I wake up each day, and I say a prayer of gratitude over the breakfast I make. When I remember it, I try and say a blessing over the lunch I make for work the next day. I try and remember to bless my food before dinner as well.

During this glorious spring, I send gratitude to the nature spirits and the fey of Washington Park. I walk down State Street from my awesome apartment (for which I am also so grateful!) and past the State Capitol (Cappy! The awsome woofers!) and the D&H Building/SUNY Systems Admin Building (Aurora Petra Majesta), and get a sense of the feelings and sentiment of the spirits of the city of Albany. I send them blessings as well, even sending physical touch to the Woofers. (Odd I suppose that the State Capitol's energy is canine. But that's what I sense. I don't call it, I just accept it.)

I send gratitude to the Goddess and the God at work. No one knows this is what I do when I raise my arms, seeming to stretch. Actually, I like the stretch, but it's a side benefit of "breathing one up to my sacred dove" and asking the Goddess to inhabit my heart chakra.

Gratitude is the name of the game each day. I wake up with it and I go to bed with it, if I'm not so exhausted that I forget, as sometimes happens.

The other night I awoke with a nameless fear. I came across a meditation recently "I am not my body." Someone else augmented and said "I am not my pain." To this, in that moment, I added "I am not my fear," which helped to disentangle the fear entity which had lodged itself temporarily in my physicality to separate and leave. The next day, I thought it's not my fear. I am not fear, is how I now say it. Fears do come and go, but because of my meditation practice, they don't stay for very long. I clean them out daily. Perhaps it's an apotropaic act, an act that childishly wards off "evil." (Pain. Fear. Despair.) But these things do have power when appropriately used.

And the other day, I realized I can even be grateful for the religion-drunks, those who've drunk from some toxic belief cocktail or mainlined junky doctrine. The sugar comas of the neoconservatives and the fundamentalist whatevers, addicted to hate and biliousness. I'm grateful for their negative example, of course. Pat Robertson and El Arbusto show me what I decidedly don't want. And they give me something to laugh at, something for which my laughter is a healing elixir, though they experience it more as peroxide to a wound, or as the entities inside the darkness experience light.

Those are my thoughts for the day. Those and that I'm excited about WordFest. I haven't signed up for a slot in the Open Mic--hope I can still scarf one up. I got an inspiration the other day for a story. Whether I get one or not, I'll post it. It's set about 1,000 years ago in this Mid Hudson-Valley region, and it's about the dream of a Medicine Man named Broken Wing, who wakes up from a vision of the future, that he experiences as a nightmare and a huge responsiblity. It's sort of a myth for our time, I guess. It came to me in a morning reverie, post meditation & offjerking. [!!!]