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so. FSG. this is more of an outline, i'll try to come back to this stuff, explain everything, or, some stuff, but a bunch. yeah.
oh, and i just made a filter, excluding mgg's sisters, because the computer at mgg's house, which is the computer they are using, is in a public area, and so, therefore, mgg's mother could read this entry over their shoulders.
officially, we went down to... sea isle, i think, to spend a week with my family. something like that.
okay. let's start:
wake up. go to work. work until noon. read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theferret's post on "wiccanism". thought timing was interesting. jump in car, mgg drives down to south jersey, to dentist and her parent's house. (1 hour) i read part of memoirs of a geisha. we thought about going to a movie, but instead, after i finished memoirs, they forced me to play taboo, (my nemesis) (well, okay, it doesn't make me as crazy as monopoly) and some other game where you shout things and are timed. oh, and brian finally proposed to michelle. yay! but he was very romantic. and now i feel... insufficiently romantic. crud. go to bed, which means laying down fully clothed next to mgg in an excessively warm room. grumble. eventually fall asleep.
wake at 7. leave, go buy cheese, actually get onto the road at 8. drive through delaware, into maryland, and get to camp ramblewood at 9 (1 hour). park car. immediately go on duty as security. i don't see mgg again for a while. figure out my work schedule, which is tues 5-1, weds 5-1, thurs (really fri) 1am-9am, and sat (sun) 1 am-9am. help a merchant unload, carry my stuff to cabin, move two beds together, strip down. at this point, i am wearing a sarong, (red w/ yellow trim), my sandals, sunscreen, and carrying the israeli paratrooper bag. oh, and a radio, which i have tied to my hair. i think we ate some sandwiches. then i went on duty, from being on duty. so i wander around, because i am roving security, asking people if they feel secure, and hugging them if they don't. sometimes flattery is a second step. i also find this beautiful green, fibrous rock, looks kinda like tourmaline (green), is soft enough to shape with my knife, is all over the place, next to the roads, which were paved since last year. cicadas. meet and greet starts at 9, i swing by to eat things. fresh pineapple. well, first to carry the food down. meet this cute goth boy, Loki, (inwardly cringe at his choice of name) who is here with a couple other goths. they are of the... hang out next to the canteen all night long, smoking and bullshitting teenager crowd. whatever. i remember being them. continue walking around, what with it being an 8 hour shift and all. notice incredibly hot tall slim pale redhead with phenomenal breasts, no, really, if i were to give out some sort of best breasts award, (of course, only the topless people are in the running) she would get best of show. er, festival. think her name is shauna, but never actually introduced. she's with the Amber Rose folk, i think. terrific breasts, though. one of the problems with clothing optional events is that the fat old people are willing to wander around naked, because they don't care, but the hot young ones are uncomfortable. then again, you probably get too much unwanted attention. probably mostly from the fat old men. who are naked. hmm. people were very polite, i thought. but that was to me. ah, but my point is, you can learn to not notice the unattractive ones, and there were more than enough attractive naked people for me to consider it a positive nekkid experience. right. at one, i go off duty, head down to fire circle, strip down the rest of the way, dance until 2:30, probably drink some mead, probably with some asafolk, and ooh, look, a really big fire, with drums. after dancing, know i cannot afford to burn out, so force myself to stop and go. jump in the pool, i mean... don't jump in the pool, because it is closed. and i am a goood staff member. so i don't jump in closed pools to drop my body temperature back under a fever after dancing like a madman. crawl into bed, where mgg has a) somehow shrunk a queensize sheet to be just big enough for her and one of my legs, and b) i am laying on the gap between the two beds. eventually, i line it up so my spine is in the gap, and fall asleep. probably about 3, maybe 3:30. oh. first night, we have a room all to ourselves. bluestar cabin is 4 rooms, a central room, and a bathroom, each room with... uh... 6 or 7 beds, i think.
uh, probably wake around noon. not sure. mgg and i had noticed a set of workshops, the priest/ess track, which we were interested in. partly because sabrina, a friend of ours, and high priestess of braided stream, which is a sister coven to balefire, which is the coven my brother belongs to, and his spice are the high priest and high priestess of, and partly because they just looked chock full of things we need to know. so, that was at 3:15, but first we swung by opening ritual, to observe. this is because tuesday night, whittney, who ran the rituals this year, had built this neat fire scepter for the oak king, which had a set of batteries in the base and a wire near the head, around which he would wrap flashpaper. when you hold down the button, the wire heats up, sets off the flashpaper, lights the scepter. which was cool. didn't work tuesday night, because the head hadn't soaked in lamp oil long enough, but it worked at ritual. which was neat. i like fire. oh, but before that, i got sabrina to rub my shoulder a bit, which was great, and then mgg and i made up little vials of anointing oil for the class. which was fun, but the rose drips too fast. (in jojoba base, floral: 2 vervain, 1 vanilla, 2-3 rose. somber: 5 sandalwood, 2 myrrh.) we spilled one floral partly, and since brina had told us to make something for ourselves, i just added some clover. clover dripped waaay too fast. so, take a floral, pour out half, add 3 drops clover (i wanted one) and you have the thing i have here, that i just smelled. it's nice, but hs too much clover. assassin bugs are scary. so, yeah, class. it was good. we got to smell some things, incenses too, and think about how you can make ritual effective on as many sensory levels as possible. which is good, and sound technique. i had to leave right before they had ritual, because i went on duty, but first i jumped in the pool. which was open, and blesedly cool, but much warmer than tuesday, because it was full of bodies. i think i actually went swimming with mgg on tuesday, probably around 3ish, which was the first time i've been in a pool since '98, maybe '97. whenever i have water above my hips, it tightens up my diaphragm, like a panic thing, and i have trouble breathing. after a bit, i usually relax, but i stll have to try to breathe. it just gets easier. right, go on shift, this time with much, much less in my bag, because that's partly why my shoulder was so bad that morning, and Ed and Norma have arrived. i spend a bit of time each circuit making sure Ed and Norma, of Grove of the Other Gods, which is the ADF druid grove we do stuff with, are feeling secure. Hillary is there too, who i haven't seen in a while. deb and josh show up on thursday, i think. but yeah, walking around, asking "are you feeling secure?", hugging, accepting swigs of mead (goddamn one of the best things about free spirit is the mead flowing everywhere and people constantly offering you things.) i think i finish a particularly nice piece of the "soapstone", rubbing the floral oil into it, to keep it shiny, and to enhance it's translucency. i give that piece to dierdre, girlfriend of abraham the drumming tattooist, and apparently just after that they had to go offsite. i think abe's relative of some sort had a heart attack. not sure. but she was happy about the stone. i think i spent a lot of that shift giving people sandstone. i also filled in a section of mud on merchant's row, which upset the muddaubers, but made the people allergic to bees and wasps happy. snippet i heard: "what are those bugs doing?" "those bugs make daddy die. keep moving." right. that was when the sun was still up. but eventually, at 1, i take the druids down to the fire, which is empty. drums, yes, tenders, yes, audience, yes, but no dancers at that moment. so i start dancing, just to say hello, and i get into it. the druids were very congratulatory. which was nice. and it was nice to dance, just me and the fire, for a bit. i like fire. i like not having to worry about that guy, the one who is just standing there in the middle of the main flow, staring at the fire. but yeah, wednesday night fire circle was pretty slow. i went home after a bit. not sure how long. probably didn't jump in the closed pool. not at all.
get up just in time for Sabrina's 10am class. we learn sticky hands, which for mgg is more pulling threads out of the way, and i think i should do more as scooping off mud, maybe with bear or groundhog paws. i'll try some different ways. then we were seaweed. it was good. after, mgg goes to lunch, maybe, i eat something, i guess, and i wander around for a while. scott gets heat exhaustion, so i stand around while they get an ambulance. (he's fine) then a massive thunderstorm hits. well, that's what it seemed like, to the point where i was running around, getting people indoors, but then it stopped. sun came out. felt like a dork. and my paper hat finally bit it. ground was now wet, so no more cars on grass. i think thurday was canada stew (bison and pork sauteed in some dark canadian porter, black beans, garlic, water from lake ontario, mugwort, lavender flowers. there was some more stuff too, i just remember those ingredients. it was great. devon made it. there were also nanaimo bars, which were very good, but too sweet.) it might not have been. it might have been the line-caught salmon that the other patrick brought from seattle, or the incredible moroccan lamb stew with the prunes in it. that was fantastic. well, i ate something. i couldn't find mgg after the rain, but i eventually did. oh, and i ate some mangos one day or another. i probably swung by the firecircle before i started working, but i'm not sure. started shift at one, got to drive renee's golfcart. sweet. golfcarts are very, very fun. pretty dull night, watch a chunk of out cold and baseketball, but in the morning, at 5:30, i go to the sunrise ritual, do a few sun salutations. wished i had a mat. it was muddy. continue to poke around. around seven, this asshole drives in, will not listen to sheevra, who told him to stop, buffy, who told him to stop, and has already parked by the time the sheriff and i get there. right, the whole thing is that the parking lot is wet, the owner doesn't want us driving on it, and asshole, who apparently left around six to go get his morning paper, coffee and asshole vitamin injections, refuses to listen to staff. arg. oh, and as he's coming in, as the coversation is happening on radio, he breaks in on staff channel to tell us he's parking wherever he wants. asshole. there is also this cowbird, little fucker, who was raised by sparrows. let me put that clearly. his cowbird prents laid an egg in a sparrow's nest. when he hatched, he shoved all the other eggs or chicks out. cowbird chick is bigger than the sparrows, capable of feeding himself (i watched, he is) and is still periodically making the "i'm starving! feed me feed me feed me feed me! starrrrviiing! feed me!" noises. and the sparrows are feeding him. completely unafraid of humans, too. at, oh, 8:30, two women from south africa show up in a taxi, and i bring them in. the younger one was really cute. at 10, i have another workshop, one about energy work. oh, scott, who had the heat exhaustion, and was at the hospital the day before, was sleeping in the white house kitchen, where the air conditioner is. at just before 9, i take him to the cafeteria, leave my radio with him so he can get picked up, bring the cart back to the white house, and go to the cabin. yes, i'm aware that i'm still calling this thursday, and it's 9 am friday morning, but it clicks over when i fall asleep. so, go to cabin, then down to workshop, mgg goes to a diferent workshop. we, uh, well, i took notes, let me see. okay... productive subterfuge. people are often willing to believe people far away, who look different, can do energy work. or trance work. neighbors, less so. very few people think they themselves can. so don't call it energy work. "relaxation exercises". heck, everyone can relax. but with productive subterfuge, ya gotta be ethical, and it's pretty much the ethical considerations involved in psychological experiments. full disclosure and whatnot. we looked at some of the energy work everyone does unconsciously. we did a little aura petting, we talked a little theory, then sabrina and lisa showed us a thing. it's a thing, that they just call "the thing", that helps people enter trances. it's particularly good for drawing down. so then we are going to do the thing. and we do. and i kinda... accidentally drew down the sun. first time i've drawn down. and, uh, well, it's kinda fuzzy. i remember, when my partner was starting, that i became aware that my hands were no longer at my sides. (see, when you start rocking back and forth, you're getting deep, and sometimes, when someone is going to draw down, their hands will start to kinda float up. which is what mine were doing.) at another point, i became aware that i was breathing oddly. very... deliberately, and through the roof of my mouth. and then i choked, my eyes snapped open and i started laughing. see, every fiber of my being was singing the glory of being light. which was cool. honestly, absolute best high ever. problem is, i'm not good at grounding. never have been. i mean, i don't think i've ever really been grounded. i've gotten pretty solid and down occasionally, well, twice, and so we went to some effort to hold me down and remind me i'm pat. it was so hard though. i kept giggling. colors were more vivid. and i knew i couldn't go out of the pavilion. oh, and i didn't hurt. at all. which is astonishing. i wanted to sing, i'm not sure what. just full throat pure notes. oh, i couldn't go out of the pavilion because i could feel the sun through it, and letting the sun touch me then would have... done something. and considering how hard people were trying to ground me, i'm not sure they would have appreciated that. cat came by in a cart, and drove me up to the cabin. we picked mgg up along the way, and mgg spent 45 minutes trying to put me to sleep. my eyes would not stay shut, and i was vibrating. every now and then i'd have a muscle just go, and an arm or leg would shake, but eventually i got to sleep. probably around 1.
wake at 4, because i was going to go to the poi class with Cat. instead, i got in the pool for a while, let myself be in water. let myself cool off. i was very hot when i woke up. play in the pool for a bit, then i wander around for a bit. take my lump of metal around, end up having a nice chat with the druids, during which ed and the woman whose name i do not know and i play with the lump of metal and find some neat things it does with energy. head down to fire circle. dance dance dance. mead, asatru, compliments on my ass, dancing with michelle, who is a belly dancer and incredible fun to play with. apparently, i dance... enthusiastically. i would not say well, but i enjoy it, and others can tell, and i can make others enjoy it. elissa was there. i made her dance. it was good. should have been more naked, though. would have improved the scenic quality of the circle. talked to thorsman and the other scholarship winner, shelly, until about 5. a lot of pagans are much older than they look. fire is good. oh, jaqui was drumming, once it got later. she is a drummer. wonderful fun. i didn't get too in this time, because i didn't want to sprain my ankle again, but it was good. danced, on and off, until the sun came up. then the geese got really angry. so we stopped drumming, and they calmed down. a bit. then i slept till noon.
uh, some stuff happened, i'm sure. oh, right, i bought a mask. sunmask. beautiful. everyone likes it. at 2, there was a blessing ritual for people who had gone to the priest/ess track, which was fantastic. matty has an incredible gift to say what needs to be said. i really am sun and fire. burn off the fog. i promised sabrina i would find a teacher in colorado, so i can learn technique. i'm not really a priest, but i might be a shaman or prophet. (which makes sense. i am an episkopos. and not every prophet is a big prophet) i should think about teaching others to feel like i did, and let the glory of the sun melt icy fear. then we went to the blue star litha, which was matty and sabrina, andonethe best blue star ritual i've been to, partly because i don't like the way samhain makes me feel. we called seekers home, we made wishes, we jumped the cauldron, i learned new songs, which i have promptly forgotten, and then we ate dinner. after dinner was main ritual. oak and holly fought, holly won, and then we took the fallen king (well, an effigy) down to the fire circle and burned him. then i danced, until almost one. selene, who was in the blessing ritual with me, told me that she had a vision of a stag, emanating yellow and red, (light, not heat) when i was being blessed. waiting fills. i've never been stag. and i wish i had asked what color the stag was. um. at one, i went on duty. which sucked. i got cold that night, which was very appropriate on the holly king's first night. i couldn't find mgg until about 2:30, when i found her at the druids. heidi got trashed. uh, eventually the night ended, and at 9 i went off duty.
okay, 9 i go off duty, and i know i'm separating days differently, but screw it. go back to cabin, can't think, walk around the lake once, see some turtles, head up, pack, bring one load, walk around saying goodbye, take up second load, get a shower gel from sabrina, some norwegian glacial moraine, get in the car and go. we are gone by noon. takes us 4 hours to get home most of which is in maryland, because of a massive traffic jam, stop and go, worthy of southern california in summer. oh, and our cd player doen't work over 50mph. don't ask, i don't know. another traffic jam on 1 in nj. slept from 12:30-1:30, i think. get home, bring in stuff, shower, sleeeeeep. and that was FSG.
oh, and i just made a filter, excluding mgg's sisters, because the computer at mgg's house, which is the computer they are using, is in a public area, and so, therefore, mgg's mother could read this entry over their shoulders.
officially, we went down to... sea isle, i think, to spend a week with my family. something like that.
okay. let's start:
Monday
wake up. go to work. work until noon. read
theferret's post on "wiccanism". thought timing was interesting. jump in car, mgg drives down to south jersey, to dentist and her parent's house. (1 hour) i read part of memoirs of a geisha. we thought about going to a movie, but instead, after i finished memoirs, they forced me to play taboo, (my nemesis) (well, okay, it doesn't make me as crazy as monopoly) and some other game where you shout things and are timed. oh, and brian finally proposed to michelle. yay! but he was very romantic. and now i feel... insufficiently romantic. crud. go to bed, which means laying down fully clothed next to mgg in an excessively warm room. grumble. eventually fall asleep. Tuesday
wake at 7. leave, go buy cheese, actually get onto the road at 8. drive through delaware, into maryland, and get to camp ramblewood at 9 (1 hour). park car. immediately go on duty as security. i don't see mgg again for a while. figure out my work schedule, which is tues 5-1, weds 5-1, thurs (really fri) 1am-9am, and sat (sun) 1 am-9am. help a merchant unload, carry my stuff to cabin, move two beds together, strip down. at this point, i am wearing a sarong, (red w/ yellow trim), my sandals, sunscreen, and carrying the israeli paratrooper bag. oh, and a radio, which i have tied to my hair. i think we ate some sandwiches. then i went on duty, from being on duty. so i wander around, because i am roving security, asking people if they feel secure, and hugging them if they don't. sometimes flattery is a second step. i also find this beautiful green, fibrous rock, looks kinda like tourmaline (green), is soft enough to shape with my knife, is all over the place, next to the roads, which were paved since last year. cicadas. meet and greet starts at 9, i swing by to eat things. fresh pineapple. well, first to carry the food down. meet this cute goth boy, Loki, (inwardly cringe at his choice of name) who is here with a couple other goths. they are of the... hang out next to the canteen all night long, smoking and bullshitting teenager crowd. whatever. i remember being them. continue walking around, what with it being an 8 hour shift and all. notice incredibly hot tall slim pale redhead with phenomenal breasts, no, really, if i were to give out some sort of best breasts award, (of course, only the topless people are in the running) she would get best of show. er, festival. think her name is shauna, but never actually introduced. she's with the Amber Rose folk, i think. terrific breasts, though. one of the problems with clothing optional events is that the fat old people are willing to wander around naked, because they don't care, but the hot young ones are uncomfortable. then again, you probably get too much unwanted attention. probably mostly from the fat old men. who are naked. hmm. people were very polite, i thought. but that was to me. ah, but my point is, you can learn to not notice the unattractive ones, and there were more than enough attractive naked people for me to consider it a positive nekkid experience. right. at one, i go off duty, head down to fire circle, strip down the rest of the way, dance until 2:30, probably drink some mead, probably with some asafolk, and ooh, look, a really big fire, with drums. after dancing, know i cannot afford to burn out, so force myself to stop and go. jump in the pool, i mean... don't jump in the pool, because it is closed. and i am a goood staff member. so i don't jump in closed pools to drop my body temperature back under a fever after dancing like a madman. crawl into bed, where mgg has a) somehow shrunk a queensize sheet to be just big enough for her and one of my legs, and b) i am laying on the gap between the two beds. eventually, i line it up so my spine is in the gap, and fall asleep. probably about 3, maybe 3:30. oh. first night, we have a room all to ourselves. bluestar cabin is 4 rooms, a central room, and a bathroom, each room with... uh... 6 or 7 beds, i think.
Wednesday
uh, probably wake around noon. not sure. mgg and i had noticed a set of workshops, the priest/ess track, which we were interested in. partly because sabrina, a friend of ours, and high priestess of braided stream, which is a sister coven to balefire, which is the coven my brother belongs to, and his spice are the high priest and high priestess of, and partly because they just looked chock full of things we need to know. so, that was at 3:15, but first we swung by opening ritual, to observe. this is because tuesday night, whittney, who ran the rituals this year, had built this neat fire scepter for the oak king, which had a set of batteries in the base and a wire near the head, around which he would wrap flashpaper. when you hold down the button, the wire heats up, sets off the flashpaper, lights the scepter. which was cool. didn't work tuesday night, because the head hadn't soaked in lamp oil long enough, but it worked at ritual. which was neat. i like fire. oh, but before that, i got sabrina to rub my shoulder a bit, which was great, and then mgg and i made up little vials of anointing oil for the class. which was fun, but the rose drips too fast. (in jojoba base, floral: 2 vervain, 1 vanilla, 2-3 rose. somber: 5 sandalwood, 2 myrrh.) we spilled one floral partly, and since brina had told us to make something for ourselves, i just added some clover. clover dripped waaay too fast. so, take a floral, pour out half, add 3 drops clover (i wanted one) and you have the thing i have here, that i just smelled. it's nice, but hs too much clover. assassin bugs are scary. so, yeah, class. it was good. we got to smell some things, incenses too, and think about how you can make ritual effective on as many sensory levels as possible. which is good, and sound technique. i had to leave right before they had ritual, because i went on duty, but first i jumped in the pool. which was open, and blesedly cool, but much warmer than tuesday, because it was full of bodies. i think i actually went swimming with mgg on tuesday, probably around 3ish, which was the first time i've been in a pool since '98, maybe '97. whenever i have water above my hips, it tightens up my diaphragm, like a panic thing, and i have trouble breathing. after a bit, i usually relax, but i stll have to try to breathe. it just gets easier. right, go on shift, this time with much, much less in my bag, because that's partly why my shoulder was so bad that morning, and Ed and Norma have arrived. i spend a bit of time each circuit making sure Ed and Norma, of Grove of the Other Gods, which is the ADF druid grove we do stuff with, are feeling secure. Hillary is there too, who i haven't seen in a while. deb and josh show up on thursday, i think. but yeah, walking around, asking "are you feeling secure?", hugging, accepting swigs of mead (goddamn one of the best things about free spirit is the mead flowing everywhere and people constantly offering you things.) i think i finish a particularly nice piece of the "soapstone", rubbing the floral oil into it, to keep it shiny, and to enhance it's translucency. i give that piece to dierdre, girlfriend of abraham the drumming tattooist, and apparently just after that they had to go offsite. i think abe's relative of some sort had a heart attack. not sure. but she was happy about the stone. i think i spent a lot of that shift giving people sandstone. i also filled in a section of mud on merchant's row, which upset the muddaubers, but made the people allergic to bees and wasps happy. snippet i heard: "what are those bugs doing?" "those bugs make daddy die. keep moving." right. that was when the sun was still up. but eventually, at 1, i take the druids down to the fire, which is empty. drums, yes, tenders, yes, audience, yes, but no dancers at that moment. so i start dancing, just to say hello, and i get into it. the druids were very congratulatory. which was nice. and it was nice to dance, just me and the fire, for a bit. i like fire. i like not having to worry about that guy, the one who is just standing there in the middle of the main flow, staring at the fire. but yeah, wednesday night fire circle was pretty slow. i went home after a bit. not sure how long. probably didn't jump in the closed pool. not at all.
Thorsday
get up just in time for Sabrina's 10am class. we learn sticky hands, which for mgg is more pulling threads out of the way, and i think i should do more as scooping off mud, maybe with bear or groundhog paws. i'll try some different ways. then we were seaweed. it was good. after, mgg goes to lunch, maybe, i eat something, i guess, and i wander around for a while. scott gets heat exhaustion, so i stand around while they get an ambulance. (he's fine) then a massive thunderstorm hits. well, that's what it seemed like, to the point where i was running around, getting people indoors, but then it stopped. sun came out. felt like a dork. and my paper hat finally bit it. ground was now wet, so no more cars on grass. i think thurday was canada stew (bison and pork sauteed in some dark canadian porter, black beans, garlic, water from lake ontario, mugwort, lavender flowers. there was some more stuff too, i just remember those ingredients. it was great. devon made it. there were also nanaimo bars, which were very good, but too sweet.) it might not have been. it might have been the line-caught salmon that the other patrick brought from seattle, or the incredible moroccan lamb stew with the prunes in it. that was fantastic. well, i ate something. i couldn't find mgg after the rain, but i eventually did. oh, and i ate some mangos one day or another. i probably swung by the firecircle before i started working, but i'm not sure. started shift at one, got to drive renee's golfcart. sweet. golfcarts are very, very fun. pretty dull night, watch a chunk of out cold and baseketball, but in the morning, at 5:30, i go to the sunrise ritual, do a few sun salutations. wished i had a mat. it was muddy. continue to poke around. around seven, this asshole drives in, will not listen to sheevra, who told him to stop, buffy, who told him to stop, and has already parked by the time the sheriff and i get there. right, the whole thing is that the parking lot is wet, the owner doesn't want us driving on it, and asshole, who apparently left around six to go get his morning paper, coffee and asshole vitamin injections, refuses to listen to staff. arg. oh, and as he's coming in, as the coversation is happening on radio, he breaks in on staff channel to tell us he's parking wherever he wants. asshole. there is also this cowbird, little fucker, who was raised by sparrows. let me put that clearly. his cowbird prents laid an egg in a sparrow's nest. when he hatched, he shoved all the other eggs or chicks out. cowbird chick is bigger than the sparrows, capable of feeding himself (i watched, he is) and is still periodically making the "i'm starving! feed me feed me feed me feed me! starrrrviiing! feed me!" noises. and the sparrows are feeding him. completely unafraid of humans, too. at, oh, 8:30, two women from south africa show up in a taxi, and i bring them in. the younger one was really cute. at 10, i have another workshop, one about energy work. oh, scott, who had the heat exhaustion, and was at the hospital the day before, was sleeping in the white house kitchen, where the air conditioner is. at just before 9, i take him to the cafeteria, leave my radio with him so he can get picked up, bring the cart back to the white house, and go to the cabin. yes, i'm aware that i'm still calling this thursday, and it's 9 am friday morning, but it clicks over when i fall asleep. so, go to cabin, then down to workshop, mgg goes to a diferent workshop. we, uh, well, i took notes, let me see. okay... productive subterfuge. people are often willing to believe people far away, who look different, can do energy work. or trance work. neighbors, less so. very few people think they themselves can. so don't call it energy work. "relaxation exercises". heck, everyone can relax. but with productive subterfuge, ya gotta be ethical, and it's pretty much the ethical considerations involved in psychological experiments. full disclosure and whatnot. we looked at some of the energy work everyone does unconsciously. we did a little aura petting, we talked a little theory, then sabrina and lisa showed us a thing. it's a thing, that they just call "the thing", that helps people enter trances. it's particularly good for drawing down. so then we are going to do the thing. and we do. and i kinda... accidentally drew down the sun. first time i've drawn down. and, uh, well, it's kinda fuzzy. i remember, when my partner was starting, that i became aware that my hands were no longer at my sides. (see, when you start rocking back and forth, you're getting deep, and sometimes, when someone is going to draw down, their hands will start to kinda float up. which is what mine were doing.) at another point, i became aware that i was breathing oddly. very... deliberately, and through the roof of my mouth. and then i choked, my eyes snapped open and i started laughing. see, every fiber of my being was singing the glory of being light. which was cool. honestly, absolute best high ever. problem is, i'm not good at grounding. never have been. i mean, i don't think i've ever really been grounded. i've gotten pretty solid and down occasionally, well, twice, and so we went to some effort to hold me down and remind me i'm pat. it was so hard though. i kept giggling. colors were more vivid. and i knew i couldn't go out of the pavilion. oh, and i didn't hurt. at all. which is astonishing. i wanted to sing, i'm not sure what. just full throat pure notes. oh, i couldn't go out of the pavilion because i could feel the sun through it, and letting the sun touch me then would have... done something. and considering how hard people were trying to ground me, i'm not sure they would have appreciated that. cat came by in a cart, and drove me up to the cabin. we picked mgg up along the way, and mgg spent 45 minutes trying to put me to sleep. my eyes would not stay shut, and i was vibrating. every now and then i'd have a muscle just go, and an arm or leg would shake, but eventually i got to sleep. probably around 1.
Friday (okay, the rest of friday)
wake at 4, because i was going to go to the poi class with Cat. instead, i got in the pool for a while, let myself be in water. let myself cool off. i was very hot when i woke up. play in the pool for a bit, then i wander around for a bit. take my lump of metal around, end up having a nice chat with the druids, during which ed and the woman whose name i do not know and i play with the lump of metal and find some neat things it does with energy. head down to fire circle. dance dance dance. mead, asatru, compliments on my ass, dancing with michelle, who is a belly dancer and incredible fun to play with. apparently, i dance... enthusiastically. i would not say well, but i enjoy it, and others can tell, and i can make others enjoy it. elissa was there. i made her dance. it was good. should have been more naked, though. would have improved the scenic quality of the circle. talked to thorsman and the other scholarship winner, shelly, until about 5. a lot of pagans are much older than they look. fire is good. oh, jaqui was drumming, once it got later. she is a drummer. wonderful fun. i didn't get too in this time, because i didn't want to sprain my ankle again, but it was good. danced, on and off, until the sun came up. then the geese got really angry. so we stopped drumming, and they calmed down. a bit. then i slept till noon.
Saturday
uh, some stuff happened, i'm sure. oh, right, i bought a mask. sunmask. beautiful. everyone likes it. at 2, there was a blessing ritual for people who had gone to the priest/ess track, which was fantastic. matty has an incredible gift to say what needs to be said. i really am sun and fire. burn off the fog. i promised sabrina i would find a teacher in colorado, so i can learn technique. i'm not really a priest, but i might be a shaman or prophet. (which makes sense. i am an episkopos. and not every prophet is a big prophet) i should think about teaching others to feel like i did, and let the glory of the sun melt icy fear. then we went to the blue star litha, which was matty and sabrina, and
Sunday
okay, 9 i go off duty, and i know i'm separating days differently, but screw it. go back to cabin, can't think, walk around the lake once, see some turtles, head up, pack, bring one load, walk around saying goodbye, take up second load, get a shower gel from sabrina, some norwegian glacial moraine, get in the car and go. we are gone by noon. takes us 4 hours to get home most of which is in maryland, because of a massive traffic jam, stop and go, worthy of southern california in summer. oh, and our cd player doen't work over 50mph. don't ask, i don't know. another traffic jam on 1 in nj. slept from 12:30-1:30, i think. get home, bring in stuff, shower, sleeeeeep. and that was FSG.
