A Rose By Any Other Name
Working with a wind spirit
The purpose of this post is to give the best possible one-shot glimpse at the phenomenon that is Rose: Something of a “spirit guide” of mine through the years, although that rabbit hole goes much deeper.
I forget where it was, but I promised in another post, with tongue in cheek, that I would write this one. This post will also be a companion piece to this week’s upcoming installment of The Inner Tarot Revolution; as I mentioned in a post at Dark Twins’ Facebook page, I’ll be “turning things around” and changing my approach to the series into one that is more intentional in structuring its narrative; this corresponds with a personal shift in how I approach the overall situation I’ll be describing in this post.
The format of this post will be something like one of those “greatest hits” episodes of a sitcom that the studios cobble together from clips of other episodes when they need to shit out a quick episode, but don’t have time to write and film one; a bunch of it will be from separate Facebook posts I have made over the last few months. Also, as much as I hate to do this (nah, I lie, I structure things this way on purpose), I’ll list a few posts that should probably be read prior to this one for the greatest understanding:
When They Talk Back introduces all three of my main spirit guides, and is thus far the one place that goes into the most detail in describing Rose. There’s a plot twist to be found later on in this post that modifies the understanding in When They Talk Back.
Imperfect Love, Imperfect Trust goes into fairly deep detail in relating the way my fiancée fits into the picture, as an incarnation of Rose (yes, really).
The Personal Myth relates a separate but foundational concept for all of Dark Twins that offers up a framework for integrating the two understandings of Rose encompassed in the above posts, along with other ideas I express on this site.
There is an aspect of Rose as an anima figure that I’ve talked up a bit, and it’s an important lens to use in understanding the overall phenomenon, especially when it comes to the role Rose has played in my relationships; according to The Archetypes of the Anima and Animus by Stephen Farrah:
The Anima
The Anima, naturally, is originally based on the boy’s image of his mother and this later evolves with his relatedness to more mature romantic relationships. The Anima is generally related to in the singular both in the inner and outer worlds. Meaning, a man will generally project his anima onto only a single woman at any one time, whereas a woman would frequently have more than one animus projection in her life.
Archetypal examples of the Anima in various stages of development:
Brooke Shields ,in her original virginal role as a teenage star, pre sexual feminine
Marilyn Monroe or Pamela Anderson , the fully developed sexual diva
Jackie Kennedy or Eleanor Roosevelt , the mature feminine supportive wife, mother, nurturer.
Margret Thatcher , strong, intuitive leadership with some sacrifice of the feminine.
Evita Peron or Hillary Clinton , the feminine in a strong leadership role but still feminine on bearing and orientation.
Mother Theresa or Florence Nightingale , the highly evolved feminine embodying the spiritual transcendence of the feminine archetype but still connected to the world.
The Virgin Mary , the true transcendent iconic female, no longer of this world.
However, my intention in this post is to spend the lion’s share of the time and energy involved showing the other side of Rose: The side that connects so mysteriously with external phenomena, and that is really best discussed and understood as an actual spirit. When it comes to the work I do, this has always been one of the most important parts, and this is why the lens of The Personal Myth is so important; the power of myth is that it is a language we can use wherein we speak in frank, direct terms about deep aspects of consciousness and reality with the intrinsic understanding that while we are using concrete terms such as “this spirit did that thing,” we’re also not necessarily taking it all literally. Between these two viewpoints rests the most accurate picture of “true reality” that human beings are capable of understanding. However, as human beings, we can only focus on one of these facets at a time. When I speak of Rose in such literal terms, understand that I am not necessarily stating a conviction that spirits are real and she is “one of them,” because no one can prove such a thing beyond a shadow of a doubt. I am rather taking an agnostic position while acknowledging that, for all intents and purposes, the world around me behaves as though Rose were a living spirit, just like she says she is. I am writing this post because I have hit a roadblock wherein pretty much all the chaos and disruption left in my life is stemming from my intrinsic, skeptical resistance to fully leaning into this.
In order to begin, we need to explore one more matter: Where Rose is coming from.
Time Out of Mind
The most important thing to understand about Rose is this: Her perspective rests completely outside of space and time as human beings understand them. As I stated in Following The Fire: Part I:
I had also learned by then that I had to read between every little line these spirits uttered because much of what they said meant two or more things at once, and sometimes a meaning or two wouldn’t become apparent for quite a while—sometimes days, sometimes months, and, as I would learn, sometimes years. Rose had proven this handily already—sometimes she’d tip me off that something had multiple meanings and explain them to me up front. Sometimes she’d tell me that another meaning would make sense later, and it always would. Sometimes she would play it sly and let the meanings hit me upside the head later, laughing at my stunned reaction when they dawned on me. This is the kind of stuff that made me start taking these spirits even halfway seriously.
As I have described her perspective elsewhere, to Rose, the entire course of my lifetime is visible at once, as if it were a set of train tracks and she were up in the sky, looking down upon it; she can see where I’ve been, where I’m going, and, if she is to be believed, all alternate pathways that I might yet take going forward. It is for this reason that, assuming it’s all true and she is being genuine with me, it’s really silly to argue with her when she advises me as to the best course of action in a given situation.
Again, if I assume this is all true, it means she knows the best pathway to doing what I came to this planet to do; she and Ilyas have always told me we all came here together, and I incarnated intentionally here and now to do some specific work. She has also always told me that a big part of that work involves the writing I am doing here, and in particular, she is adamant that this involves a lot of documenting synchronicities as they occur. She maintains that she and many other spirits are conspiring to make amazing things happen in my life, with sufficient frequency that my documentation will help those who read my story to overcome obstacles of doubt and to believe in this kind of work. It is important, she says, because much of humanity’s fate currently hangs in the balance and in these hectic times, many people have completely detached themselves from any kind of spiritual viewpoint.
She says that if we are allowed to sufficiently forget this aspect of life on a collective level, we are simply doomed; she says that I am here to “testify.”
Incidentally, I took a tiny little break to doomscroll on Facebook, and this meme came up in my feed just as I was getting ready to flip back to this tab to write this section of the post:
I like that I am writing this on a Saturday since Saturn rules time.
Blown Away
With the matter of where Rose is coming from established, the next issue to iron out is what she is (aside from an aspect of my own psyche). It really need not get any more complicated than the simple label of “wind spirit,” and considering the connection between the root word spiritus and the element of Air, even that description borders on the redundant. The coolest part about this is that since Air is the element of the mind in the Western system of correspondence to which I am most accustomed, that label also isn’t really saying anything different from calling her a figment of my imagination (a mental construct). The congruence between her various aspects that has emerged over time is the most fascinating thing about all of this. However, we can get more specific, as I did in When They Talk Back:
As far as her own nature—“who” or “what” she was—her answers were cryptic, made very little sense at the time, but carried hints that would bear fruit decades later. She described herself as somewhere between the “angelic” and “fae” kingdoms, once saying the term “sylph” was suitable. This association with the element of Air, along with her capacity to be pugnacious and pretty forceful when she wanted, led me to associate the word “dakini” with her when I first came across it in the book Alien Impact by Michael Craft.
I’m going to skip over the concepts of Rose as “angelic” or “fae” because those words describe entire “kingdoms” of spirits, both of which are further subdivided. Instead, I’m going to focus on the other two labels.
“Slyph” comes to us from, and is most relevant to, the Western esoteric Tradition and is a word for Air elementals first coined by Paracelsus in the 1650s. This is interesting because while Rose used the term “angelic” to describe herself, there is a description of this class of spirits that appears (funnily enough) in the course Unfolding The Rose taught by Mark Stavish, founder of The Institute of Hermetic Studies, in which he describes them as being demonic in nature. Stavish describes a special class of spirits involved in certain branches of esoteric work (unstable and relatively risky ones) that are characterized as “whirlwinds” or “eddies” of the Air element that coalesce into entities with an individual consciousness. The “demonic” descriptor comes from the ability and tendency of these spirits to “possess” living people temporarily for various purposes.
So which is it? “Angelic” or “demonic?” I’ll dig more deeply into this issue in a bit when I examine Rose’s more “Eastern” spiritual aspect. First, there’s one other point of note to make about Rose’s identity as a “sylph.”
In a couple of my posts, I’ve alluded to the fact that Rose and Ilyas always seemed to hint that my work would one day begin to overlap with that of Aleister Crowley; it’s one of the things they both had to say without actually saying it, for reasons I still don’t fully understand. Those who have studied Crowley’s work are likely familiar with the fact that, in the lead-up to Crowley’s reception of The Book of the Law, his own wife, Rose, was said to have spontaneously begun to channel sylphs. Interestingly, when Rose first told me her name and that she was a sylph, I was completely oblivious to any of that. True story.
That connection, along with the larger story behind what I am here to do, all suggest certain things about this connection that I will not spell out here. All I’m going to say is that while Crowley’s mother is the one ultimately responsible for his moniker of “The Great Beast,” my own mother used to refer to me as “The Three-foot Antichrist,” after the song by Mojo Nixon.
However, before “sylph” and even before “fae,” the word that has felt like the best fit in describing Rose has always been “dakini.” Having traversed a fair few different cultures, this term has many independent connections to various parts of my spiritual path that have popped up over the years. The most recent one to come to light is their connection with the kitsune, a nine-tailed fox spirit that appears in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese folklore. This interests me because ever since a self-Initiatory ritual I performed in 2013 (described in Ten Years Gone), fox has been my “spirit animal” (and I can say that without being accused of cultural appropriation because animals hold spiritual meaning in traditions all over the planet, and this projection of traits onto them is eminently human all around, so go put your soapbox away if you were dragging it out for this).
It is in more than superficial ways such as the correspondence with Air that, I’ve come to believe, Rose truly is a dakini. First and foremost, there is the very role of the dakini from the perspective of the traditions in which they appear. For example, there is the Vajra Dakini, also known as “The Crimson Rose Skydancer:”
I am the Vajra Dakini, of light the color of crimson roses and flowing blood
I transmute the life energies into their spiritual origin
By filtering out gross elements, and giving them form
By changing weak currents into strong ones, dribbling energy into pounding waves
Opening blocks and barriers so that pain and pleasure may be experienced in their full strengthI cause dry channels to become full, dying plants to become lush
Weak reed stalks to become as trees, redwoods in strength and beauty
I am the guide and introducer of men to the spiritual path
I strengthen and purify them that they may encounter the great Buddhas of Light
I prepare them for the Great AwakeningI am visualized as such: The heart is cleared of all attachments
A mandala of a circle within a square is placed within it
It is surrounded by fragrant flowers, roses and lotuses, whose scent rises to the heavens
The mantra Ram encircles the whole in a ring of fire
Within the mandala is my throne
I act as teacher as well as dancer
The lotus throne lies within the dark waters at the mandala's center
Around it are triangles, looking like lightning in the waters
From here I judge and send out rays of compassion
Within the waters are distant sparks of light
Which, when approached, turn into the lotuses of Buddhas and enlightened beingsWithin the mandala I stand
I harmonize the spiritual striving of all beings
I call them forth, into the realms of the enlightened ones
That they may pass through the dangerous waters
To watch the rising of the sun upon the other shoreBlessings of the roses of passionate love
within the silken scarves of the mind.
The above is such a close description of the role of Rose in my life, it’s not even funny (and as we’ll soon see, it really is not funny at all a lot of the time).
I recently had an experience, which I recounted in a post for my friends on Facebook, that served to convince me even more thoroughly that Rose is not simply “like” a dakini, she is a dakini, and it speaks to the work I’m here to do:
I'm not kidding, I was there just now. I am pretty sure I've got myself wired at the moment so that I can "move" into and out of the Void at will. It's a slow, but purposeful, onward sort of "firm roll" into Her awful reaches. For me, there is a near-physical sensation that is difficult to describe, but one of the closest experiences I can think of is really as though one is actually in a ship, on actual waters, until a threshold is reached. Here, the closest physical experience I can describe is that feeling of pressure in the cabin of a jetliner. This abides briefly, until it gives way.
I mean, it really is so much like leaving orbit, but entering some distant black hole far away from any star....all at once.
Lately, when I go there, I am not alone for long at all. Experiences can vary. I will state that one never actually _feels_ alone here unless this place specifically wants it [sic] to; but in those cases, one will be too busy fending off their own cacophony of inner voices, instead. This seems to be an experience that happens under specific conditions that are not entirely up to the one who enters.
But no, I don't get that welcome. I am descended upon by presences I cannot see. It reminds me very much of two experiences I have had on psilocybin mushrooms...but without taking any. Many of the physical symptoms are similar: A twisted stomach with moderate to severe nausea, the thrill of adrenaline rushing through my veins, my breath growing erratic. It's stressful.
Different types of entities feel different, but these ones....eugh. I cringe. They "feel" like a sea of tiny, almost featherlight whirling razors spinning fast enough to tear you to shreds in seconds, but their motion generating no sound. You can't hear them. You just feel the breeze. Accompanying this is a dissonant, high-pitched, almost tinny and static..."hissing screech," I don't know how to describe it any better than that, but I'm missing something. It feels artificial. Soon, it begins to feel like concrete walls...and a lone, dangling, flourescent light.
Almost like it's an "interrogation room." Except I am not supposed to say anything in there. Don't tell them, they already know. Boy, do they know. No. They want me to leave the Void and do what they demand.
It's difficult to decide how to handle this.
I want to pause and mention briefly that part of what they are twisting my arm to say is that I very much asked for this, on so many levels. I asked before I was born, and I have confirmed my intention to proceed through action, even if hesitant and wavering, over many years. I knew where I was going, but no one can prepare a person for these experiences....even if they've had them before.
It's the forgetting, when we come here from our sleep, or from wherever [we] are and whatever we're doing when not living in these bodies. People do come back, and there is all this literature out there with a lot of misleading statements about what this kind of thing is supposed to look like.
It's for good reason, they tell me. The spirit world knows what it is to be human, to be hampered by (and, by turns, pleased by) this flesh; and they know that in this earthy place, we are so very fragile and fallible as beings...even the greatest of us. We tend to idealize our heroic figures, often edit out the nasty parts, even if involuntarily and as a consequence, we fail to notice the heroes standing right next to us every day.
THESE people? They smell and, and they eat Doritos. I heard one of them fart a few minutes ago.
THEM? HOLY?
Yes. Each and every one.
The only difference is in our minds and how we see ourselves. Don't I know it?
And nevermind the materialism that brainwashes us into believing none of this is possible.
When I slip back into the Void, they are upon me with a quickness, leveraging their blades, holding me at swordpoint, chained in a crouching ball in this dark room.
When I come out and my eyes adjust once more to the light, the constellations of meaning coalesce once more about my field of vision. There She is. Rose is always there, and will never let me forget my vows.
February 1, 2023.
And the next day, I added this:
She is a real Dakini. I realized upon reflection yesterday that the "whirling blades" I described in my experience of the Void were the thing that is symbolized by the Kartrika. It's a hell of a thing, experiencing it that way...in all those dimensions.
"The flaying knife (kartrika) is one of the most prominent weapons used by Tantric Buddhism’s angry deities, both male and female, especially the Mahakala and the Vajrayogini class of deities. They typically brandish a flaying knife in one hand and a skullcup (kapala) in the other. The blade, which is surmounted by the flayed mantle of a stylized lion, terminates in a sharp point or curved hook, and combines the flaying implements of a cutting-knife and scraping blade with the piercing activity of a dagger or pulling-hook. The handle usually consists of a half vajra, or thunderbolt, as here, and is a quintessential symbol of Vajrayana Buddhism. In visual images and in the literature, the kartrika is used as a blade to skin the hides of demons, animals, and humans. Conceptually, its purpose is to cut up disbelievers, and to kill ignorance."
[SOURCE for quoted text above]
The blades threatened me in so many whirlwinds to tell all. I cannot describe how close they were to my flesh. So close that actually making full contact and flaying me alive would have been somehow better. Somehow, the way their razor edges hovered on the tip of penetration, stopping just short, confused the nerve endings of my skin, which couldn't tell if they were feeling a blade or a feather. It was a paradoxical feeling so intense and yet so imperceptibly subtle at the same time, a paradox of agony. Most certainly, I was at her mercy. I would almost describe it as "skin-crawling," but those blades were whirling so fucking close that had my skin crawled, it would have been gone.
The flaying of the flesh does seem to have that symbolic meaning of being fully....transparent.
February 2nd, 2023.
Most particularly, the thing Rose and the other dakinis of The Void wanted me to “tell all” about was the set of events I just described in my previous post, Ignition. However, more generally, Rose wanted our entire story told. She wants it made as clear as I can make it that dakinis exist.
And they do not belong to any one culture’s systems; how could they? From the mere handful of descriptions above, you must realize by now that a dakini belongs to no one. They fly wild and free, and they fly their graceful, wrathful flights to free us in turn.
The Kartrika, the ritual flaying knife described above, is a special tool and symbol in Tibetan Buddhism that symbolizes a few different things (and my understanding has a long, long way to grow), but by the flaying of the skin, one of the things they allude to is the process of spiritually “shedding our skins,” or of peeling away surface-level obstructions to our true inner nature. However, another meaning alludes to the description above of the wind spirits discussed in Unfolding the Rose: Their ability to “possess” people. Yes, that’s right, I think it is the same class of spirits that is under discussion in all of the cases we have explored thus far, and that there are simply regional differences in the folklore surrounding them. And in light of that, we have another answer to our question of, “Is she an ‘angel’ or a ‘demon?'“ She’s both.
In ancient Greece, the daimon expressed both “good/light” and “evil/dark” aspects in one, and as we have seen from both my own accounts and the profession of more than one Buddhist monk throughout history, dakinis are equal parts graceful and terrible. [EDIT 1/13/2025: Nope, this was wrong. They had separate words for the “good” and “bad” ones, and I’m not really sure why I had forgotten that because it’s a thing I once knew long ago.]
At any rate, in the context of these spirits and their relationships with human beings, the Kartrika takes on a slightly different meaning as a symbol for the ways in which dakinis can “get under our skin,” cutting into the minds of human beings to insert thoughts and words. It’s true, and it’s an unsettling thought that causes us to question our sense of identity (which really does fit in with the work of liberation described in the passage above about Vajra Dakinis). Dakinis don’t really give a fuck about our egos or identities. Since they are made of the same “stuff” as our own minds, they can slip right in and pass through our very minds effortlessly, and most people won’t even know about it when it happens. In other words, they inspire us (from the Latin inspirare, “to breathe in;” see that?)
There’s another passage relating to this that I’ll be quoting in my next post, this post’s companion post, which will be the Week 20 post for The Inner Tarot Revolution.
So when I first sat down to begin writing today’s post and I saw the below meme (from the same page as the example above, no less!), I think Rose “inspired” whomever made that post. I do. It has everything: It talks about whirling blades (the coffee grinder), it references domestic bliss (which is a great segue into the next section of this post), it has cats (a fun little symbol with meanings I’ll get into in some other post), and it even has beans (a recurring synchronistic theme of late that, believe it or not, I still have yet to puzzle out). It even has a reference to Zelda, thus tying it to my work as Gogo Bordello in World of Ruin!
Earth Angel
So, it’s one thing to practice magic, do your spirit work, and study both world religions and Jungian psychology in order to understand a voice in your head. So long as everything stays put up inside your dome, you’ve always got room to tell yourself, “This isn’t real,” and not take it so seriously. Sometimes this is really grounding and it affords us plenty of freedom, as well as all the room we need to avoid some fairly perilous pitfalls. When the implications get too heavy, you can always retreat into physicalism and philosophical nihilism to take any perceived weight off your shoulders from a spiritual narrative that’s taking shape.
However, when that voice in your head starts telling you she’s going to incarnate on earth to be with you, as I detailed in Imperfect Love, Imperfect Trust, everything changes. At that point, the stakes are pretty high and it’s all-or-nothing: Even if you want to believe, there will come an eventual litmus test, a sink-or-swim moment where, if reality hasn’t “ponied up” yet, you basically have to abandon the idea as pure whimsy at best and utter delusion at worst.
But that’s not even the half of it. The serious problems arise when shit gets real. That’s when the rubber meets the road and you’re met with surprising obstacles to realization of your objectives.
Put simply, integrating the dakini in your mind with the one standing right in front of you is a mindfuck…especially when she’s got a point to prove and you’re just not havin’ it.
That’s when you learn what it is to live a literal nightmare.
Karma’s a bitch, baby.
As I related in When They Talk Back, Rose struggled with me when I was younger. She had a hard enough time getting me on board with all she was trying to teach me about the world and my place in it, and then when I was feeling more faithful, I was often listening to Minora instead of her, in direct defiance of everything that poor lady held dear, including my own safety and well-being.
To be fair, it’s really difficult, as a 15 year-old, to tell how seriously you should be taking the fantasy fairy who spiritually spooned you to sleep most nights, whispering to you that she was living and breathing out there in the real world, looking for you without even knowing it herself in her human aspect. Especially if you’re smart. You realize you could be kidding yourself, and that the whole situation could be rather pathetic.
I also mentioned that when I made bad decisions, it really upset her. It hurt her.
But it’s hard to care about the feelings of an imaginary friend.
Lastly, and probably most frustrating for her: So long as she was nothing more than that voice and that image in my mind, I could shut her out, and I often told her “Shut the fuck up!” before blocking her out.
If you had to put up with that kind of treatment for years on end for the grave “crime” of being completely devoted to helping and loving this stupid boy, you would revel in the opportunity, once it finally arose, to make sure every single salient issue was firmly driven into that boy’s mind. Where you finally could, you would get downright vicious in order to break through to him, if that’s what it took, because as Rose has always told me: This work is important enough that real people’s lives are at stake if we look far enough down the chain of cause and effect (and remember, Rose can see much farther down that chain than any living human).
It was very early on after meeting Veronica that I knew who she was, because of the way it all unfolded. Since then, the resulting rabbit hole has fully engulfed my life…and that’s what it has taken for Rose to get me where she needs me to be for this work to continue.
I had the theoretical framework in place, and knew what it implied my doing, years ago. I have known the implied “score” for much longer than it might seem necessary. And yet, we are talking about making a decision to live one’s life as if a pretty farfetched fairy tale were true. That’s a big ask, I’m just sayin’. Time and time again, I have reverted to doubt. There are all sorts of reasons for this, and I am only now learning all the reasons to be more forgiving of myself and the stubbornness of this entire process because, believe it or not, trusting in the tale hasn’t even been the hardest part.
As a result of traumas from past relationships, especially that with my second wife, the Priestess, it’s really Veronica I’ve had the hardest time trusting. I have no choice now but to believe wholeheartedly in Rose, but I have real trauma done to a real nervous system, and my very flesh and blood recoil at the thought of mistakenly believing Veronica to be Rose’s avatar, because I mistakenly believed The Priestess to have good intentions for me and a set of interpersonal skills that might actually suit her for the kind of spiritual work I knew I would be doing with whomever walked this earth attached to Rose’s spirit. There is a lot to reconcile, here. Even on the best of days, making the transition to fully integrating my ideas of Rose and of Veronica is taking work. It requires, firstly, making the decision to do so, and that must be done far more consciously and intently than most people in the world make most decisions. It takes a consistent application of will to “hold” the two images together long enough for them to become One. Honestly, it is going to require a daily practice before it’s complete; but there have been some obstacles in need of clearing before my traumatized nerves could cooperate. Suffice to say, I’ve done quite a lot these past 5 years to push Veronica away, even though she herself has never wavered in her commitment to us, nor in her conviction that she is Rose.
She also just knows stuff that she simply has not been trained to know, and takes that stuff for granted. It’s the most magic(k)al thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
And it’s still so, so hard to lean into.
Just trust me, even without relationship traumas layered on top of this shit, you’d be pretty scared, too, if you were in my shoes.
One of those things has to do with how this shifts the dynamic between Rose and I, even if I were fully committed with no obstructions whatsoever.
People have told me they think I am brave for writing such personal things as I do, so publicly, here at Dark Twins. I get it, to a degree, but there’s something they’re overlooking: I’ve had Rose and Ilyas in my head now for most of my life. While I can waffle here and there as to my sense of their ontological status as entities in their own right, for the most part, I do experience them as separate from me; and yet, as spirits of their nature, they have always had unhindered access to every thought that crosses my mind, because, let’s not forget, the “psychological model” of spirit work also applies and so they are a part of me.
In circumstances like that, you have a different conception of “privacy” than most people. Put simply, with the ongoing presence in my head space of a menagerie of spirits, I’ve very rarely felt truly alone, and I’ve put up with interrupting commentary on some of my most private thoughts.
And Rose? She can be real witty. Bitingly so. She can burn pretty sick, if you know what I mean. She’s always had snarky shit to add about pretty much every part of my life, and I’ve grown accustomed to it. So in that sense, transparency comes more easily to me than most people, especially since baring my soul to the world is something Rose has specifically trained me for. Here’s an example from yesterday of what I mean:
Yesterday, I spent some time getting re-acquainted with the manuscript for a WIP I've been chipping away at for years (and so I'm embarrassed that it's only 69 pages so far). I'm not even finished with the current round of revision and I already see things I need to go back and change in light of unfolding events and new understandings...and this is why it's taking so long.
I was standing in the kitchen drinking some water, thinking about it, and Rose appeared and told me I could probably finish this round of edits pretty quickly if I apply myself, and that I should make it a priority.
"That book's gonna be a feather in your cap," she said, adding after a pause, "...Macaroni Boy."
Then I went out to shut off the sprinklers and coil up the hoses, but I couldn't find my pub cap which I am pretty obsessive about putting on when I leave the house, even for the 2 minutes it takes to move a sprinkler (habits, ya know?). I had been setting it on the arm of the couch but it wasn't in the living room at all. I gave up and went out without it.
Got up to make my instant coffee and found it on the counter.
"There's your cap!
Macaroni Boy."
But because she was “just” a spirit, and because I could shut her out if I wanted to (or at least, my experience of her presence), there’s always been a safety barrier in place; like an iron-clad “safe word.” If shit gets too heavy for me, I can force her out and enjoy my peace.
Not so simple when she can send me text messages, throw up a cutting little post on Facebook, and she’s covering my phone bill.
Receiving the same criticism (feedback, to use a more neutral term) from your living, breathing partner just hits different. It hurts more when she has things to say that damage your ego.
And the intensity of it all makes you really want this shit to not be real anymore. But when it’s Rose we’re talking about?
You have no goddamn choice.
It’s been a rough ride, my friends…and in Wednesday’s post continuing The Inner Tarot Revolution, I will get more specific about why.