relationships

Post 248: Love

| Aspergers Girls

Love

He came at dawn’s break

With glowing light

My heart made soldier

To his delight

My fingers his minion

And beckoning call

My body his vessel

As tethered, I fall

Captured entirely

In untimely game

From the utterance only

Of one simple name

Love, how you choose

Like buttercup of land

And captain my freedom

In hourglass of sand

Unturned and still motion

Time plays without one

My world on a shelf

Until love is undone

~ Sam Craft, November 2012

Thoughts on Love

There is the love of mother to babe, sister to brother, neighbor to neighbor.

There is the love that reminds one of self, a reflection of beauty and recognition.

There is the love of accomplishing a sought after goal and reaching one’s highest potential, a satisfaction.

There is a love of enduring and suffering, and sticking things out.

There is a love of familiarity, having known each other to the point of predicting the next move, next statement, next thought.

There is a love of journeying together through trials and tribulations, and hopes and dreams, a love of endurance and strength.

There is a love of opportunity, of hope, of guessing, of wishing, a pulsating-driven love that makes one leap out of bed in hopeful expectation.

There is a love of infatuation, lust, and mingling, perhaps driven biologically or through soul, or a combination, but nonetheless hot and steamy and wanting.

There is a love unreturned that leaves one empty and doubtful.

There is love unrecognized, ungrown, unnourished, ungiven—the love of neglect and forgetfulness.

There is the love of ego-centered built only to uplift self, to praise one to feel good about another, the prospect of another’s potential temporarily filling the void of the emptied.

There is the love of uncertainty, resembling the love of obligation.

There is rule-bound love, created for conforming and people-pleasing, a mask placed on and off as needed.

There is the love of twins, separate but one, who move as mirrors as one another, and cannot help but love what is them.

There is the love born of hate, where battle was fought, enemy lost, and the tears wash out the anger to expose the commonalities of humanity.

There is a love of knowing, of caring, of wanting to fix and make better, to appease the need to reach out and help.

There is the love of smothering and clinging.

There is the love of using to gain, to hide, or move ahead.

There is the love of respect.

There is the love of awe.

There is the love of mystery, a captivating intrigue, without reason or explanation.

There is the love of company, companionship, the release of isolation.

There is love in the word alone, the vibration and energy produced in thought and sound.

There is love in the beauty of one or many, the beauty of nature, the beauty of art, creation.

There is love that is all-encompassing, beyond borders and definitions.

There is love that is far-reaching and healing.

There is love beyond measure, pure elation, recognition and union.

There is love lost.

There is love unopened.

There is love in silence and emptiness.

There is love in a touch, in a dream, in a memory.

There is love in illusion.

There is love.

I’ve been trying to understand what love means since last April. This has been a year of much transition and healing for me, and along with this healing has been the extreme necessity to understand love. This morning I awoke before dawn and was able to visualize a clear understanding of love as the word applies to my life.

I recognize now that I sense a soul print of each person when I first make contact, even if that contact is through words and not face-to-face.  This is not through any one sense, but from another sense I’ve yet to recognize or label. In some ways, the process of sensing a soul print seems to be a combination of all the senses with the addition of a knowing and feeling at a cellular, muscular, and both physical and non-physical level.

When I meet someone, the soul print is in the form of energy and makes pictures in my mind. I feel the person in different parts of my body; for example a tightening of the stomach or shoulders. With many people I feel uneasy both physically and emotionally, and I assume spirtually; with a select few I feel very safe.

For some reason, I can recognize peoples’ insecurities, fears, and misgivings readily, usually in general terms, and sometimes in specifics. I can easily sense states of unrest, panic, unease, addiction, deception, and interior motives. I can readily sense pure thought and unconditional adoration.

The person’s energy triggers memories in myself, and I can connect the energy to past experiences and past encounters.

I’ve felt these “feelings” since I can remember.

I feel energy with every word I write, think, or say. Likewise, I feel energy in other people’s words, whether it is the universal energy of the collective-thoughts of a word, or the intention behind a person’s word. Some words feel false, contrived, and unnecessary. Some words feel like trickery or falsehood. Other words feel free of clutter, clear, and pure.

I can feel a person through their words. I cannot explain it, but know it to be true.

When I worked as a spiritual counselor, I could sit with a person and tell them what I saw, how I perceived them to be energetically. I could see his or her trials and challenges, and also could see direct tools to assist in removing stagnant energy.

I don’t see things in levels, or heights, or degrees. All is equal. However, I see people stuck in a certain spot, often repeating the same patterns and lessons.

I can sense the energy of people trying to be strong and domineering, when they are actually wounded and lacking. I can sense anger and resentment, and these tend to be the most challenging senses I encounter.

How I feel upon meeting someone the first time, does not change. I know instantly if I can spend time around a person and be depleted or remained balanced. I know instantly how much I want to be with that person and if he or she is nurturing to my soul.

Why this information is important to me is because I realize now I equate love to the energy I feel from a person. I don’t feel love for a person. I feel a vibration and sense a soul print.

Where some people say love can grow with time, I do not understand this concept. I love from day one. If I feel nourished by someone’s energy, I feel an elation that would equate to falling in love.

I don’t love a select few. I love everyone. But I feel better around certain people more than others.  One could say I “love” a person based on the energetic vibration. Only vibration levels change. So that would be a false observation. I love a person’s soul print. It’s an underlying vibration that stays the same regardless of how that person feels at a given moment.

I understand now that I do not understand the mainstream’s idea of love.

Love doesn’t grow. I feel exactly the same way for a person the entire time. Their soul print doesn’t change.

At times when a person is happier or sadder, I feel these emotions, but his or her emotions do not affect how much I love or don’t love. Sometimes a person’s actions can have a rippling energy effect of joy or dread that reaches me, but the actions do not affect how much I love or don’t love. My love is not based on outside sources, something I can view externally, judge, discern, or categorize. If I love, I love.

I understand now why I can tell someone I love him or her after knowing them less than a day. And that as hard as I try to love someone more or less, I cannot.

I understand why I cannot get enough of someone whose energy is nurturing and giving and kind and centered. I see more and more how I am attracted to balanced and secure energy: people that love based on the unconditional energy-factors and not the limiting external factors.

When I love someone, I stop seeing the person in human form. Their face and body disappears. This is why it’s hard for me to remember faces, as I’m not focusing on the exterior; I am focused on the energy. When I love someone, I don’t care what they look like, how they age, or change, or are altered outside; there comes a time when I don’t see the outside at all. But there are elements of the physical I might recognize from dreams and distant memories. Something in the physical that draws me to them.

I’ve written this all out because of a driving need to understand love. But now I see the complexities are beyond my understanding entirely. So I will rest in the fact that the more I know myself, and the more I focus on being a beneficial light, absent of ill-will and judgment, that the more I will benefit love. And in this way I will grow; only to perish again with the seasons, and once again reseed, resurface, and stare in wonderment.

Day 231: Temporary

| Aspergers Girls

(This is a continuation from yesterday’s post: Day 230 Tornado )

From the backseat of a dented sedan, amongst a cluttering of mismatched suitcases, I drew in my breath through my nostrils and lowered my head in doleful resignation. There, outside my car window atop a plateau, slept a muddy-brown structure—most of its windows draped in faded tangerine sheets.

“There it is,” Ben said, curling his lips into a satisfied grin and tapping his hands on the steering wheel to the beat of the song Sexual Healing.

The car engine stopped.  The music stopped.  And Ben started.  “Just take a look,” he said with an easy stroke to Mother’s sleeveless shoulder.  “It’s just like I told you. Look!”

Glancing forward and to the left a bit, I followed Ben’s rounded back up, and then across and down the length of his burly arm to his stubby finger which pointed through the window to a pathetic dwelling; which alas, to my deep disappointment, appeared to be the worst house on the best street in town.  Not only was the house in desperate need of paint and the yard weeping with neglect, but the mailbox itself was a rusted clump of sadness.  My soon to be new home, this place I would slumber and eat, shower and dress, and partake in life in general, was ironically misplaced, set out in front of the world in its worst garment and accessories.

Knowing what to do, almost instinctively, I narrowed my eyes into a half-squint and scanned the surface alternating the image of the house from blurry to clear and back again to blurry.  I’d looked at my reflection in the mirror in the same way, after discovering by blurring my reverse-self I was momentarily able to erase all visible flaws.

 

The rest is in the book 🙂

 

Day 152: Sometimes When We Touch

| Aspergers Girls

 “I’m just another writer still trapped within my truth.” ~ Dan Hill

–

Sometimes when I dream, the honesty is too much.  Sometimes when I dream, I travel into the life and spirit of a friend. Sometimes strangers visit me. Always, always people come, in all forms, with all types of messages. And we touch.

Recently, I’ve had two friends visit in my dreams, just in this last six days. Both dreams were filled with extreme emotion, both dreams had anxiety, both involved an urgency. When I awake from dreams such as these, I am left with a residue, a film in my spirit, something that remains, the remnants of what was shared with me. A streak in the glass of my vision I can’t wipe clean.

If I am fortunate enough to confirm the happening in the dream, and make a connection, and find some validity in discovering what I sensed actually occurred in real life, I am able to discharge and remove some of the energy. If not, sometimes I take on the feelings of the other person, become overly concerned about something I do not understand and cannot even pinpoint. I may feel a rush of panic, fear, or injustice. I might weep. I might laugh. I might become hyper focused. I might hibernate; attempting to disrobe the feelings, only to emerge still weighed down and lost. I take on this energy, as much as I take on the dreams, without knowing how or why, and without knowing how to stop.

Sometimes I want to break down and cry. Sometimes I have to close my eyes and hide. The emotions are so overwhelming. I feel like I’ve been opened up and had another’s spirit poured into me. At times I become that person. At times I understand the person more than myself.

I dreamt once, years ago, of my long time friend. She was stretched out on a car and pointing to her kidneys and kept saying, “I need a bladder operation; the doctor told me I need a bladder operation.” I called my friend the next morning, and sure enough she had just found out she required surgery related to the tubing above her bladder.

Long ago, while I was napping my grandmother started wafting above my bed, a ghostly apparition draped in an aqua-colored dress. Swaying back and forth, an inch below the bedroom ceiling, she kept repeating the same phrase:  “Wake up.  Get off the phone.  I am waiting for a man from Egypt to call.” This made absolutely no sense to me, as I was sound asleep some two hundred miles away from Grandma, and I most certainly wasn’t on the telephone.  Still dreaming, and wanting desperately to get some rest, I looked up at Grandma and answered, “But I’m not on the phone.  I’m taking a nap.”

Grandma continued on, a stream of blue, weaving herself back and forth in my room, badgering me to get off the telephone.  Having found no luck, after I placed two pillows over my head to block out her voice, I sat up and screamed, “If you leave me alone, I’ll call you when I wake up.  Go away and let me sleep!”  On my words, Grandma vanished.

Within the hour I phoned my grandmother.  After a few minutes on the phone, I delicately described my dream to her, thinking at some point she’d say I wasn’t making any sense, and that would be the end of the discussion.  Surprisingly, Grandma responded, without pause for breath, “You’re a witch! I’ve been sitting by the phone waiting for a man from Egypt to call me about his interest in buying my house.  How did you know? Actually, I need to get off the phone now.  He might be trying to call.”

Years ago, I dreamt that two of my teaching colleagues would be going to Japan by the end of the year. They both came to my dream together and told me. That year both were surprised to learn they were traveling to Japan. One was accepted in an over-seas teaching program; the other unexpectedly was invited by a host family. Another time an old woman, a stranger,  came to me in my dream very upset. She said that my mother was going through her items and taking them, keeping them for herself. She showed me the room where the items were spread out. She showed me my mother holding her things. I told my mother the next day, and sure enough my mother had been to a friend’s house and had collected several items from her friend’s mom whom had just died.

There are so many visits, I could go on and on: a family drowned on the beach, my future house and the owners of the house, my future employer, my car accident, my grandfather’s car accident, my mother-in-law’s cancer, my friend house hunting, the person dying in the car off the highway, my husband’s co-worker getting married and denying it, my son’s karate teacher getting engaged, friends divorcing, friends weeping on couches …..so many various people visiting me to tell me about their lives.

When I was very little, animals visited me and showed me their death. Usually my pets, but once a friend’s bunny came in my dream. The animals usually died just like they showed me within seven days. Once my canary was slashed under the eye by a stray cat. Once my dog died on the Fourth of July after jumping a fence. The dreams came true, just as I had witnessed. Thank goodness I was able to tell my mother the night of the dreams, which then I called nightmares. She was at least able to validate my experience. To show me my dreams were coming true and I wasn’t insane.

Interestingly, it seems lately the more I share and write, and the more I am not afraid to be authentic and honest, the more these dreams and feelings are coming. And the more I’m visited.  I don’t mind the visits for the most part. I feel honored and know this gift or ability, or whatever one choses to call my visions, is a part of my journey. But there are definite times, like this week, when the emotions are so over powering that I don’t know what to say or do.

It’s times like these that sometimes when we touch, sometimes the honesty is too much. And then, all I want to do is to just hold my friend and cry, to hold on tight and not let go until the fear in us subsides.


Day 143: The Raven Bride in White

| Aspergers Girls

Take me to the green in you

The secret valley beneath the sun

Hidden behind the whispering ghosts

Of whom you pretend to be

Open up your mossy arms

So I may open mine

And wrap all limbs round your spirit wide

To exist as half no more

Bring me to your mossy floor

Beyond the shadows of your fear

A raven bride in white

A ladder to your soul

Fold down your branches

Peel open your chocolate bark

So I may pour

As liquid amber

Through your very veins

************************************

The Raven Bride in White

Take me to the green in you

The secret valley beneath the sun

Hidden behind the whispering ghosts

Of whom you pretend to be

Open up your mossy arms

So I may open mine

And wrap all limbs round your spirit wide

To exist as half no more

Bring me to your mossy floor

Beneath the shadows of your fear

A raven bride in white

A ladder to your soul

Fold down your branches

Peel open your chocolate bark

So I may pour

As liquid amber

Through your very veins

Words and Photographs by Samantha Craft June 2012

Day 139: Tsunami Sam

| Aspergers Girls

I’ve been perusing the Internet looking for an appropriate word for how I feel about myself at the moment. I tried to find the root origin of “suck eggs” and concluded I am not a canine who has trouble with stopping myself from sucking chicken eggs nor am I in an uncomfortable situation that makes me look odd. I searched for the word “suck,” to grasp a greater understanding of the word, and ended up with synonyms like “drink from straw.” I was about to ask Google God about “bitch,” but decided I’d had enough reading about dogs. So here I am, debating in my mind what I am feeling, who I am, and where I belong on this damn earth.

Some things I’ve decided are very hard for me today:

1)      Being married

2)      Eating food

3)      Moving my body

Hmmmmm. No wonder I’m a mess.

I try to be very positive and uplifting—other people tend to be appreciative and accept me when I wipe on my smiling face. The problem occurs when I wipe off the smile; not everyone tends to stick around so readily when disgruntled Sam appears. Silly, really, how folks like the fair-weather Sam, and run from the storm in me—natural instinct I suppose. Maybe that’s why my good friends are the types that aren’t too much afraid of natural disasters: living in earthquake zones, flash flood areas, and potential tsunami states.

I am in a potential tsunami state right now. I’ve been triggered, and am thusly harboring a wave as the ground shifts beneath me. Some of the ground shifting is a result of my short list above. I can sum up number two and three on my list fairly easily. Eating is hard because I am sensitive to everything I put in my system. Moving is hard because of chronic pain. Every food affects me at a physical and mental level. When I consume wheat and most grains, I become fatigued, depressed, and sometimes border on thoughts of paranoia about my health. Sugar often causes instant pain. And any type of food, except perhaps a piece of cooked fish with no seasoning, causes my stamina to decrease by half. Precise to say, sometimes I avoid eating all together.

Doctors and other health professionals have diagnosed me with about ten or so different health conditions; and each condition can harbor a strong potential to cause chronic pain. But I like to pretend they are all wrong. And can do fairly well at faking it till I make it, until the wave sets in, and I feel like I’m about to crash, and take out an entire village with me.

When the physical pain hits hard, my immediate reaction is always the same: denial. How can I be doing so well for a month and then, out of the blue, feel like I got run over by a truck?

Then blame sets in. What did I do wrong? Did I eat something wrong? How did I allow this to happen? Am I stressed? Why am I stressed?

Then resentment comes with her evil head. Why me? This isn’t fair. I hate this.

And then I collapse. A curled up not-so-friendly kitten on the couch, unable to move, unable to do anything really, but complain and act like a person whom has had her favorite treasures stolen: energy and serenity. The trick for me is letting go, and letting the cycle pass. If I could learn to shut off my mind, stop the fight, and just surrender to a day of not moving and not getting “anything” done, then I would be all the better for it. But I have this thing about control…especially control of my own body.

This leads me to marriage. The original title of this post was going to be: Why It Sucks Being Married to Me. But I thought that was just a wee bit too self-demeaning and seriously similar to putting a firing-squad to my ego. Not that ego doesn’t deserve to be taken down every once in a while. I’m just not ready to annihilate him all together.

But I do know I’m not an easy person to live with. I sometimes wonder if life would be easier if I was single. Mostly so I could retreat in isolation and wallow in self-pity. I lived alone in my early twenties. I remember. I was in a constant state of panic and fret. Anxiety lurched around every corner. I was even afraid to leave the house and walk across the parking lot to do laundry. I’ve grown and matured some in the last twenty years. I think I could manage a laundry facility okay on my own. I wonder about all the other elements of life, though. Too many to mention, or even list.

Don’t get me wrong. I like me. I have plenty wonderful qualities to offer a spouse. It’s just, living with me, is like living with a lion let loose from a cage at a circus. I’m trained and all. I’ve learned how I’m expected to act. I try my best. I even love the people around me: they feed me, they provide shelter, they even give me a stage in which to receive praise. And I love them for their unique spirits, too. It’s just I long to be in the wild and free, without restriction, without having to follow a role, having to be something I am not.

And I tend to lash out unexpectedly; from an onlooker’s point of view, I probably appear to lash out from nothing. But there are always triggers. Whether the food intolerance, the surmounting physical pain, or my non-stop brain, something is always about that causes my reaction. Sometimes my reaction is to other people’s words and/or actions, a direct result of my rigid thinking. I carry high ideals. I cannot help this. I find it difficult to tolerate lies, betrayal, aggression, passivity, gluttony, rudeness, and avoidance behavior. And I have a hard time understanding why people do the things they do. I try. I try to be flexible and tolerant. Trouble is this brain of mine is hyper-sensitive much like my gut. And all this rubbish going on inside of me, turns me into a prickly prune—all wrinkled up in poutiness and spiked out with defense weapons. Picture a shriveled plum with sharpened toothpick spears stuck about.

That’s why a cave near the sea sounds nice about now. A warm cave that smells like real wild flowers, with soft organic bedding, no insects or other lurching animals, temperature of 76 degrees, no wind factor, no dampness, absolutely no mold, low humidity, only the sound of ocean water nearby and birds chirping, and absolutely a non-tsunami zone. That’s all I need. I semi-dark luxury-cave on an island inhabited by smiling, quiet, private people. Until the wave passes—just until the wave passes.