Owls, Spiders, Occupying Wallstreet

I want to thank the people who have gotten out of their homes and gotten together old school to try and affect change. Since Uranus has been in Aries I have been saying privately this is the age of revolutions. I can’t remember if I blogged about it. But probably didn’t because I try to stay positive for the most part on the blog.

I went to Maui and just got back. I really felt the need to reconnect with nature. The balance of the human world feels so off kilter and disturbed that to just remember the beauty of the Creator was much-needed as I felt a great disturbance in energy coming from Iran which I chose not to blog about, and rather wrote down in a private journal. I don’t want to scare anyone – just make people aware that it is my feeling the leader of that country is feeling under pressure to leave and he is a control freak and wants to stay in power at all costs. I think he is trying to bait the US into a war. I received this information in late September, but the feeling was so awful and scary I didn’t feel it was good to put this info out there. Now that it is somewhat known I only want to warn our government not to take the bait. He is using a technique similar to “death by police.” If he can’t have power than no one will – he’d be willing to destroy his own people in mass like some people do by shooting up a public place and getting the cops to kill them – they want to commit suicide, but they are too afraid to do so, and are so angry with the world they want to take out as many people as possible in a final grab for power. We must show great restraint here in dealing with Iran as the leader will try many things to get us to go to war as his power slips. However the people of Iran our currently on our side – they want democracy and we must remember that and not take his bait.

Now onto several other things. I’ve been reading this book called, “The Narcissism Epidemic.” I found it because I wanted to write an article for this blog about this very issue. The 80s notion of “greed is good” and the emphasis on fame and materialism is a disturbing turn in our collective consciousness. Ironically there has never been a more difficult time to actually achieve financial wealth and have real fame (not Facebook/Twitter “fame”) than right now. The American dream has been all but destroyed since the deregulation of corporate America. It’s become a case of feast or famine for most of us and we have been divided to the point where we believe we have no voice, and we have been fed the poisonous soma of vanity, materialism and unrealistic expectations. Although I don’t agree with every conclusion the authors draw from the data they have collected – I have felt for the past ten years (especially) that good manners and caring about others seems about as fashionable as bow ties and sensible shoes.  However it is through helping others that we find true connection, peace, love, a sense of purpose, even our true purpose itself rather than wasting time talking on cell phones, checking facebook every fifteen minutes and twittering about the sandwich we are eating – it’s best to just take in life and process it.

Being a writer and a visual artist as well (who often uses photography) I found that I was unable to be in the moment on a trip when I was behind the camera. I probably take 10 percent of the pictures that a normal person does on vacation because I want to be present – not a voyeur of my life. It seems we have become voyeurs of our lives in every sense – we are one step removed with little fish hooks out on the net, or via our phone, cell phone, etc. Yet we will be out to dinner with a good friend and talk to some random person who happens to call. This is why I never keep my cell phone on. I also don’t check my e-mail everyday – sorry about that – but I refuse to deny life for the sake of false connection. All of those devices leave us empty when we don’t control them. However they are also great when we do apply rules to them. I am a hermit – this is my nature. I need a LOT of time to myself. Some people are not. For them perhaps these tools are fantastic to meet up with friends and go to protests. I think these tools are only healthy (however) when used to actually connect and not when used as a substitute for connection which I fear has been happening to us more and more, leaving us isolated and headed toward delusion.

Delusion? Yes. In real life when you interact with friends they tell you when a hat looks stupid on you. They tease you when you talk to much. They call you on your BS. But when life becomes a monologue there is no one to call us on our stuff and we stop growing. I believe this is partially why NPD and those tendencies have grown to epidemic proportions and this is supported by loads of evidence.

NPD and narcissistic tendencies are not (as previously thought) due to many of the things once thought – they are often a result of delusion – yes, truly when you boil it down – not knowing ones strengths and weaknesses and we all have both – that’s what makes us, us. If we were all totally hot, had 200 IQs and sang like Mariah Carey – we’d be robots. Our weaknesses define us as much as our strengths and there is nothing wrong with weakness. Weaknesses are either things to avoid (like I’m a clutz so I don’t wear high heels or do anything requiring grace and balance – I once spilled hot coffee on my own head – it’s true). So what. I suck at a lot of things. I’m good at things, too. Just like everyone I have gifts and failings. Failings can sometimes be things we can work on to learn from like being a hermit – not always a good thing – but I work on it and often find I have fun leaving my house.

But to bring it all back to where I started the Wall Street occupation – I am so proud that people have gotten together and are actually demanding change. This is the great thing about the loss of materialism – once the cell phone, TV, computer and video games are turned off we find we are actually in a room with a lot of other people who have needs and are sharing this space with us. We are learning the lessons of our great-grandparents who often (unfortunately) had to die for better working conditions and simple basic human rights. They fought not just for their own dignity and well-being, but for the hope of a better future for their children and their children’s children. And then those kids forgot and began resenting other people for “getting” things that they didn’t – hate and racism, divide and conquer tore this country apart. Instead of recognizing the sacred spark of divinity in all living beings we traded democracy for capitalism where everything was a game – and the more unfair your advantage the better off you did.

Capitalism is not Democracy and Socialism is not Communism. Democracy is actually antithetical to an entirely “free market” because just like communism it doesn’t take into account human nature – people are greedy, people will game the system when they can and they will find ways to justify their despicable actions when caught doing anti-social things. Everyone is not a saint if they were capitalistic communism would have been a perfect system and as we have seen they are both abysmal failures.

And BTW communism is not the same as socialism. Almost all Western European countries are socialist democracies and nearly all have done better than we have. Our current financial spread is akin to a third world country – all the wealth is in 400 families’ hands. How is that honoring our forefathers belief that “all men are created equal,” and have the rights to, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” How can one purse anything but their next meal when they can’t find a job, have no money and what money they did invest was gamed against them and stolen by crooks with briefcases.

The biggest welfare recipients are corporations. What I want to know is if corporations are people than why do they have so many more rights than I do? They can move overseas and file taxes where its cheapest and not go to prison for fraud. Pretty awesome to be a corporation or as Mit Romney defended them a “person” – of course not a real person like me or you – a paper person where no rules apply except exemptions.

My prayers are with you OWLS and I think you should call yourselves that because owls are wise and represent messages from spirit. Those with owl medicine (such as myself) are unable to be fooled – can see through things, are psychic, clairvoyant and clairaudiant. So embrace the owl. It is not an evil symbol as some reader stated that whenever they saw an owl it was a bad omen – when you see an owl it can mean many things, but it is always a message from spirit. In most people’s cases they don’t usually get messages from spirit unless they are in trouble. Well this country – this world is in trouble so let the message be heard – Time for the spirit to usurp the material and for real change to come from us, the people – the place where true change has always arisen and always will.

Thanks be to the Great Spirit for this beautiful awakening,

Many blessings,

Denise

Oh, and don’t invest in the market unless your part of the one percent. The one percent will just find a way to steal your money. We need  a thousand times more trade, market, corporate and business regulations than we have. Unless you are on the inside –  you are on the outside watching the ball bounce across the numbers on a roulette wheel. Maybe someday when this is sorted, but not now. Don’t give them anymore of your money – PLEASE!!!

Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett & the Coverage & Fame

As Grace mentioned the connection between Michael Jackson and Karen Carpenter immediately came to my mind at the time of his death as well. I have a feeling that the real killer here was his anorexia, the drugs just made it worse.

Interestingly, the coverage of both Fawcett and Jackson’s deaths have been very odd, in my opinion. Very few of those who gave statements in the death of Jackson seemed very real, instead they focused on his career and their connection to it. Quincy Jones made sure to give the number of records sold and which records he worked on before saying he felt like he lost his “brother.” I don’t know about you, but that’s not the first thing I think about when I have tender thoughts of family members. Most of the celebrity “grief stricken statements” seemed more of an opportunity to show off their accomplishments and boil down the whole of Jackson’s life as if he were a cartoon. It’s no wonder one of the lawyers who represented him during the case against him for child molestation described Jackson as “one of the loneliest people,” he’d ever met. The only celebrity statements that seemed remotely like normal human reactions were Lisa Marie Presley, Brook Shields and Elizabeth Taylor’s.

I have to admit that I am cringing through most of the coverage of his death which seems to vacillate between extreme hyperbole (Ann Courie saying there might not be any MTV without Jackson) and turning him into a convenient way for certain celebrities to plug their own talents and importance. To say it is crass is a far too great of an understatement and the fact that the media (which itself seems to have gone the direction of placing its own head so far up its own butt that it hasn’t seen daylight in 20 years) is fanning the flames of this hyperbolic narcissistic feeding frenzy, at least hear in NPD central, Los Angeles.

And the sad documentary (which is made only that much more sad by Farrah Fawcett’s death) also seems a strange macabre ego massage. While I feel very sad for anyone who has health troubles, it seems an odd way to gain celebrity status, which has been happening as of late, some woman in GB did her death as a reality show, another dude the same, and then it seemed, in an effort to rekindle her celebrity, Fawcett allowed the documentary to be made. I’m not sure what is sicker people watching these other people suffer during the last moments of their life or the desire to be watched while walking through death’s door.

For some reason (being under the weather with nothing else on TV) I found myself watching part of the Fawcett documentary which was an odd mix or sadness, beauty (Fawcett’s journal writing about her experience was engaging and poetic) and twistedly narcissistic. She insisted on going home after having major surgery back from Europe to the US despite doctors’ warnings which I found oddly arrogant. After facing a deadly disease, going to another country for expert help, and one can only imagine facing your mortality squarely, she did the unexpected, she ignored their advice in characteristic stubborn star fashion. the normal comforting blanket of celebrity became a strange disconnect from reality, a retreat into her specialness which she paid the price for on the flight back as the doctors had warned.

It’s odd that we’ve now had a 96 hour news black out because two celebrities have died. One more infamous in recent years than famous, the others most memorable moment in the past fifteen years a bizarre seemingly drug addled interview on Letterman with “art” made by her naked body, published in Playboy when she was 50 years old, well past the expiration date on the public’s appetite for her nudity. She then came home after the expert doctors she’d gone all the way to Germany for who told her not to fly home early, which she did anyway (a typical sort of celebrity knows best sort of attitude which I’ve seen a lot here in LA) to her apartment with a giant Andy Warhol portrait of herself in the living room. She claimed to desire her privacy and was angry about people finding out about her health problems – so why the documentary detailing the nitty gritty of it? The answer to this seems to be a pathological need for attention, which appears to be the bane of the famous/infamous’ existance. Farrah’s diary entries, written and read by her in the documentary were very well written and moving, revealed a lot about the sheltered and privileged life she led when she wrote an entry about never having gone through any real sort of health problem and how she wanted her life back. While she did count her many bliessings she also infered her specialness was given by God instead of understanding that her life, as all lives have lessons and one can not rise above being human to be anything other than as special as anyone else. She seemed to lack the insight of her connection to the whole of humanity and there was a constant feeling the reason for the documentary was an indignance with her own mortality, that somehow fame which had made a goddess out of her, could not give her the one thing that a real Goddess would have, immortality. She seemed to be beffudled by the idea that she was human and had an odd percpective that her facing death was somehow anything more than what we all share. We all die. We all have pain. We all suffer. There is no escaping this, yet there seemed to be a part of her that came through that actually thought she would somehow escape the inevitbale almost as if she had never considered it until she was staring it down. And although she seemed mildly humbled when she was feeling her worst as soon as she got good news she abandoned her inner quest back to her throne. It was very odd.

I live in Los Angeles and at this point I’m not sure if this sick fascination with the “famous” is a function of the bizarre and twisted culture of Hollywood that is warping my greater view of American culture or whether American culture truly has become a tabloid, insanely obsessed, strangely narcissistic fish bowl.

As a way to escape the onslaught of Jacskson and Fawcett endless non-news stream, we turned on Bill Maher. Ironically, he actually did talk about Michael Jackson with Billy Bob Thornton, however when that interview was done MJ would still have been alive. But what struck me like another hammer over the head was the first interview with Cameron Diaz promoting her new movie, where she plays a mother who has a second child to save her first one from cancer (she needed a donor match). Interestingly, Diaz revealed a lot about the strange curse disguised as a gift, known to us commoners as “celebrity.” In her comment she mentioned that people (the public) expect her (or any celebrity) to stay the same as when the public “fell in love” with them. That said celebrity, in her case was when she was 22, which she used as an example.  She then went on to talk rather candidly with Maher about her feelings about marriage and children which she said she understood (only and purely) as a biological need to procreate. Seriously, that’s what she thought marriage and family was about. And she said she didn’t believe anyone who got married thought they would actually stay married and anyone who married held onto the security blanket of a possible divorce down the road.

Wow, I thought, she sounds like a 22 year old girl who was very immature for her age.

In a strange way she harkens back to the ancient archetype of the virgin (not what the virgin became but what it was initially which was a woman who had no need of family or men and was considered complete onto herself – she represented the girlhood phase of femininty just as say the bacholor or Peter Pan represents eternal boyhood. However virgins were dedicated to the Goddess and spent their lives in service to the spiritual path of the maiden).

But back to the point I was making about Diaz’s understanding of, let’s be honest, love. Bill Maher also suffers from the same affliction as she, an inability to really connect with others and have true empathy. You may wonder how I jumped to such a conclusion based on the interview and her rather shallow portrayals on film. Well, I’ll break it down. Firstly, there is partial truth to the need for procreation and for most people this is how they leave their mark on the world through their family. However more important than that basic primal desire is what is masked underneath that desire, and that desire is the desire to be one with another living being – to find connection. Sexuality in most ancient cultures was actually seen as a way to connect with the divine through feeling the oneness and the living spirit of God/Goddess in your partner. Sure, now sex has been turned in on itself to control people with, turning their most primal and spiritual desires into something to be disgusted and embarassed about so the 3rd party religious institution can rid a person of their sin and make them holy again through disconnecting them to the very source of the spirit of the Creator. It is through sexuality that we become divine/co-creators or potential co-creators (at least in a physical/symbolic way)  in the ever expanding universe.

It was interesting to see Maher and Diaz, two sides of the same coin, sitting across the table from one another, each wearing a different mask but unknowingly of the same distorted viewpoint. Diaz representing what she said were the many “opportunities” she had been presented with unlike her parents and Maher, who I suspect never got past some twisted Freudian relationship with his mother, both so empty and insecure and afraid to be vulnerable to anyone, preferring to stay frozen in time and in control at all costs. I say this because one of the greatest gifts of romantic love is being out of control, losing your mind and then seeing yourself through the mirror of your partner who challenges you to be a better human being, not neccessarily richer, or a bigger star, but a more evolved soul, something most of Hollywood is completey unconcerned about. It’s interesting here as an aside to note, that the card representing the film/TV industry is the Devil card in the tarot. I had been told this by several readers and then put it to the test only to find it was true. When reflecting on why this would be I realized that the grueling work schedules and focus on material things and status are the greatest fixation for the vast majority of people who participate in the industry. There is a one-upmanship unprecidented in any other field and a vaccous need to be the most famous of the famous, which of course is born of great insecurity, shame and narcissism (which by defination is a shame disorder but that’s another aside).

I’ve seen (because again I lived in LA for a very long time and you can infere what you want…) a pattern among celebrities or people who attain a level of fame. The best metaphor I could come up with was imagine that these individuals are flowers in a field and plucked and pressed in a book, dried to perfection and kept forever in this state. Their life stays frozen. Their spiritual growth frozen, because no one will confront them anymore for fear of their status (by being friends/lovers or whatever of the famous person) will be lost by a blow off. Even the most evolved souls who truly seek out ways to improve their spirits suffer under the weight of being plucked and pressed, losing their roots and being isolated, stared at, admired from a far for appearance only, and being under a constant microscope.

Fame is a killer, like heroine it is addictive and intensly destructive yet most Americans suffer under the delusion that it’s something to be desired and like a magic potion will solve all of their trouble if only they could be rich and famous like the celebrities they adore.  So many people that go into the performing arts do it for the sake of fame and believe the lie that life will be fixed on the other side. A belief I’m sure Kurt Cobain had as so may other rock stars before him, only to find that wherever you run there you are, and being famous doesn’t change you, you  just have a thousand eyes watching every move you make, judging, reporting and admiring, heightening the insecurity and shame felt pre-fame. I’m quite sure this is why so many celebrities (especially musicians who carve their own path and whose success is more dependant on their ambition than actors whose fates are more at the whim of circumstance) die horrible premature deaths, hooked on drugs, unable to enjoy a decent salad due to body dismorphia, completely alone because no one is willing to be honest (although most celebrities would just rid themselves of anyone honest so that’s a self-created problem) and confused, taken advantage of, but hey, they get to live in houses so big they probably only use one percent of the space they own, and wear clothing that costs more than some people’s homes. Seems like a fair trade.

I want to say here that I don’t believe in romanticizing people after death. Perhaps because I know the souls of all individuals proceed and are eternal, I don’t feel there is any use in lying. When Nixon died he became Saint Nixon, Reagan an Angel. We learn nothing from the lives of those we have had the privelage to watch if we do so dishonestly. I am not criticizing these individuals. I am criticizing the disturbing way our culture fixates on certain individuals to the point of their destruction. I truly feel pity for those who spend their lives chasing fame, fortune, and status. It all too often leads to a lonely life spent chasing a phantom carrot. For the souls who have crossed over, all of them, not just those whom we have seen on TV, may their spirits be guided to the light as peace and love consume them.

Many blessings,

Denise