Back on the Grounds

The snow bit at my bare feet, toes beginning to burn from the cold. Large, fat flakes caught on my eyelashes and dampened my hair. It was snowing at the Temple: plump, wet snowflakes sticking to everything and dampening sound to a muffled whisper.

 Ice floes like teenie glaciers floated by in the great river running through the temple grounds. The great fruiting trees lining the banks were bare and stark against the white sky, and not a bird could be seen.

So different, being upon the grounds and hearing not a single cry of an irritated raven. The statues on the grounds were oblong mounds of white mystery, like buttes in the desert. I tucked my head down until my chin touched my chest, wincing as my double chin squished like a water balloon.

I was not the same as when I left.

Why did I leave, anyway?

Oh yeah. The Vulture Goddess had split apart my chest and laid bare my heart to the sun, then left me to bleed downriver and learn to either embrace my role as One Who Bleeds But Does Not Die, or to believe the lie until I imagined my death by exsanguination so well that I died.

My feet didn't make a sound as I walked the path I remembered, my footprints the only thing to mar the pristine beauty of a perfect snowfall.

I was shivering by the time I entered the temple, dripping half-melted snow on the red tiles. I winced at the mess, but there was nothing at hand to mop it up.

"Just leave it."

I spun to my left. She was standing by a pillar, half-hidden by the shadows there. Her feet were also bare, and I saw the hint of red lining her toes. Yearning filled me, and embarrassment, that my feet were still not stained the red of the Pomegranate Priestesses. I wanted it so badly.

"Do you really?" she asked. "If so, why have you not done the requisite work? Something must be holding you back."

I shrugged. "I am still a fool to give this all up if just one person would love me."

"Why?" She stepped out of the shadows, and I saw her hair was buzzed close to her head. She had subdermal implants in her skin, just by her left eye. It was a scroll mark, the Sanskrit a, with an accent over it in red ink. This, I knew, was not the first sound. This was not the life breath of the formless god. This was instead the root word for maya, removes depression, brings hope, sharpens the intellect and talent.

Why would Maya meet me at the door, half frozen and pathetic?

Why, indeed?

"Fool, yes, but not pathetic," she said. The tiny bells on her anklet and trimming her skirt chimed in minor sevenths. An odd chord, but strangely appealing. It drew me in. "You find this supposed love appealing enough to forsake the Menstrual Temple because you do not love you."

"That's what I just said."

She laughed at me. Actually pointed and laughed. "I wasn't talking about you."

Goddammit, were all the priestesses given classes on being cryptic?

"Do you still have the small vial of blood you were given before?" she asked.

I shook my head. "The glass dissolved when I began hemorrhaging, and it all just mixed together."

She nodded. "That can happen. When one does not realize the sacredness of their own, bleeding is seen as an injury instead of a sacred duty."

I blushed. This was not what I'd wanted to hear. I should just go; I would never be worthy to dwell within these walls.

The priestess laughed. "You take these walls with you! Wherever you go, there is the Temple." She pointed. A door appeared across the foyer, small, with no visible door knobs or hinges. It was just a crack in the marble.

"Go now."

"To what?"

"It is the dream incubation chamber."

Well. That told me a whole lotta nothing, but I could tell by her face that was all I was going to get. The sickle tied at her belt gleamed in the gentle light in the temple. A chill raced through me; I remembered my last encounter with one of those sickles.

A line burned down my breastbone in memory.

"Dream incubation chamber. Got it."

"This time," she said after me, "don't run."

I bit my lip. My hand hovered just over the door, and my fingers balled into a fist. This time, she'd said, don't run. If that wasn't a warning, nothing was.

I pushed open the door and stepped inside. The ruins of a great and ancient city, dusty and tattered, met me. I looked over my shoulder.

The doors were gone.

Next

what's in a name

i was kinda tempted the other day to change this blog's name to "confessions of a raving bitch," but that's already taken, sadly.

i'm having one of those "knock shit over left and right all over the damn house" days.  right after yesterday discovering that i've been working on the wrong chapter all week for my statistics class, so i've done absolutely FUCKINGZERO work that i actually should have been doing.  and, of course, since it takes me all seven days of the week to barely squeak by with my homework, classwork, and tests by the skin of my teeth anyway, realizing that i have three days to do all that was too much. i almost submitted drop-out forms right there.

i'm so tired of feeling like such a failure of life itself. pretty much from the day morning sickness hit when i was pregnant with Little Owl, i've been falling short left and right. she's 18 mos now; that's a lot of falling short.

when my financial aid check finally came in, i bought a juicer and a whole ton of dr. schultze's products to begin the huge detox project i've been needing. by day 2, i felt a little better. today's day 3, and the radioactive cloud that was fogging up my brain is gone. numbers aren't twisting themselves around to look like other numbers as often (which is how i screwed myself into doing totally wrong homework in the first place), letters sometimes actually make sense when i read them, i have some energy to go out and run an errand or two, and yesterday i haven't needed (like desperately needed) a nap despite waking up three hours earlier than usual.

and last night i listened to my holosync soundtrack for the first time in over two years, fell asleep with absolutely no trouble, and actually relaxed a bit. my school nightmare isn't crippling like it was last night. it's still overwhelming and i don't feel confident that i'll be able to do anything at all, but at least i don't want to curl up into a ball, cry my eyeballs out, and completely give up. how come no one ever told me that trying to get my damn degree was going to make me feel like worthless shit every damn day?

i never even re-enrolled because i wanted to. i did it because i was tired of being the stupid, pointless member of the family. i did it because i was tired of, "you're so smart, why didn't you ever do anything with it?" i did it so i could get a stupidass piece of paper to show that i'm something. and because not having any degree at all meant that i was trapped forever in the most menial, meaningless, lowest-paying and rewardless jobs for the rest of my life, which was just another way of saying that i am without merit or worth without a degree, and i was tired of it.

but seriously, fucking seriously, all i want to do is finish my fucking novels and publish them. and there's no time left over after taking care of: homework, Little Owl, the house, and getting just enough sleep to keep me running. and believe me, i trim sleep around the edges so much every so often i realize that i've whittled it to nothing and need a few days of dear-God-please-i'm-just-human, curl-up-and-wish-the-ground-would-swallow-me-up sleep. then it's back to scrambling desperately trying to only fall a little short.

no time for living.

the iGoddess hatchling: the making of

it just occurred to me, just now, that maybe gestating the iGoddess hatchling took absolutely everything out of me emotionally and spiritually that was good is because, just like my fat stores and fluid and energy, her umbilical cord was also attached to my Funk because --as the most loved, anticipated, empowered, enlightened, cherished, magical child ever born-- she needed everything i had and more, because her own inner bonfire of juicyFunk is even more bombastic than mine will ever be? 

i forgot we are triune beings: body, mind, and spirit. there i was, thinking i was just physically growing a child in me when i should have remembered she was connected --is still connected-- to my entire being? 

as a pregnant woman needs to take supplements and pay attention to her calorie intake when she's pregnant and increase it to accommodate a fetus, i should have also been taking Funk supplements and increasing my own caloric Funk intake. 

and i didn't.

iGoddess II: The Search for Funk

lots of things going on. some are, for once in the history of iGoddess, not something i can freely write about here. i know, i know: this violates the sacrosanct idea that there are no secrets here on iGoddess, no suppression and no shame.

well, a practiced and well-versed Funkmaster knows that nothing is sacred. at some point in the future, i'll bring it all to light and laugh good-naturedly at my foolishness and endeavor to use it in some spontaneous bit of outrageously fantastic performance art.

in the meantime, tho...

the Funk and i are so far removed at the moment --and this moment has lasted a little over two years-- that i rather feel agnostic. there's been such silence for so long that i'm doubting my memories of Juicy Funk and the Jiggy Snake. did i hallucinate? was i mad? does it matter?

i said i'd be writing here more, and then i never came back. lots of stuff. more Burning Heaven to the Ground. and gestating the iGoddess Child became a spiritually wasting illness. it sapped so much out of me, my spirit is a dried husk.

more than one person's made the observation that the blazing bonfire that was Delena is now rather like a small mound of cold ash.

i don't want to be a barren wasteland of nonFunk. i don't like that i can't reach down into the depths of me and summon up a squeak --let alone a roar-- of juicyloamy, bombastic mindsplosions of gutteral passion. i don't like that there are no depths anymore at all. i've become a two-dimensional WYSIWYG.

so i'm coming back here, the closed circle, returning to the beginning. i've gotten out my bible, the televisionary oracle, as well as a few other books. i set up another supersecret blog to write about what cannot be written here, just so it has somewhere to go. and i'm going to plot my rejourney as i search out the Funk once again.

this land of grey agnostics sucks. i want Funk-gnostics instead.

[i also went back to my old URL because going back and editing all those links in three years' worth of blog posts was just too much of a pain in the ass.]