Of knights and beasts, the epic inside me....

"A whole new space happy inside me,
A whole new place that can abide me.......".
Singing to myself yesterday after translating the meaning of my first song "I get to keep my paycheck!".
I got to do my happy dance out in a warm rain. Oh! I had been looking forward to being out in a rain one doesn't want to bundle up against!..........

The city folk's knight in shining armor stood outside the mouth of a cave rumored to be full of mythological beasts, shouting a warning into the depths of it. He would draw the 'problem' beast out. The residents of the cave responded with "That's pretty old news and even sharing it amongst friends would not be huge; they're all capable and coming to such understandings of their own. We have no problem east among us" Back to their business they went, thinking the warning meant little to them. All their ducks were in a row.
The knight in shining armor shot a well-placed arrow into the heart of that cave and to even it's residents' surprise, a spirit that had been quietly hiding in it's recesses came out screeching it's pain, wanting to shoot it's barbs at somebody, something, anything to stop the unjust, unfair suffering it had existed in and furthered by what the arrow was bringing!
Now naked before it's fellow residents, in the face of this bold knight, the beast had to see it's it's self. It tempered it's need to strike out, it chose not to recede. It became aware of it's self and how it was perceived. It found peace. The knight in shining armor from the city folks retreated, no longer needed.
The rest of residents of the cave rejoiced at the increased light within it's recesses, the spacious cavern that had now been added to it where the unseen dark, dank, sorrows had previously been hidden. Great feasts and dancing were engaged in. Neighbors were called, gifts given. And the city folk went about their business, forgetting the existence of their myths.

That's about how it went down. I had been receiving understandings, mostly in the form of ponderings, such as: "If time is a construct created to hone our ability to focus on individual aspects, we are living in one single moment, one single breath of divinity, then our past is ALWAYS present, standing right next to us. We are either holding hands with it, benefiting from it's gifts or it has claws in us, constantly dragging at us, fighting us for our attention.". Others were concerning the relationship between body and spirit, why some linger in debilitation so long before "death" finally claims them.....the truth of the saying "They gave up the ghost". If it is our ghosts that keep us living, then is physicality solely made up of fear?
I didn't share any of these as I usually would, the passion and excitement of doing so just wasn't there and truly, those I interact with online have pretty much got this on their own: sharing understandings as they get them, not too different from my own. Turns out that the lack of passion was an inner knowing; "When one asks for whom the bell tolls, it's usually first for them!".
In this case, the warning about the past was for me. I hadn't completely resolved, accepted, a certain aspect of my past. So, when the arrow came and struck, right in the heart of my experience: the financial well-being I had finally begun to experience, all that old unresolved shit came up. Waves of peace were underlying my intellectual panic and emotional trauma, so I knew we'd get through this. Answers would come. So I accepted my pain, my perspective and took what actions I could. I rested. I woke the next morning with thoughts of things like; "If I had a friend who was a judge and they offered to take care of what was troubling me, I might have felt I had no other choice but to let them". "If I was a Jehovah's Witness who was given the means by a worldly person to take something I had relinquished due to insecurity and immaturity, would I not have allowed people to convince me it was Jehovah using the worldly person to serve me?" and "Is this what it felt like: being unreasonably over-burdened for endless seeming years...my refusing to have an abortion an energetic equivalent, from his perspective, as $224 out every $300 paycheck for 18 years?".
With those reflections, something in me burst wide open. I felt more spacious, more free. I was still facing the financial limitation, I believed. When I arrived at work my boss called me into her office to let me know corporate had gotten my message and that even if the law had loopholes to protect someone in my circumstances, the corporation "couldn't" NOT withhold because of fines and things they'd e facing if the child support agency disagreed. Ah, fear, the great motivator keeping corporations in the clutches, hurting their own employees rather than protecting them and facing "possibly" their own 'suffering'. Not really news to me. I accepted it gracefully.
Later that day my boss called me. Corporate had called her so she could tell me that Maine had contacted them and terminated the order....holy shit. Maine said they had no idea why that order happened, they didn't even know I was in Montana! I leaped and shok my booty! I sang "I get to keep my paycheck!". The white knight had retreated!
A neighor had agreed to take me to the bank after work so I could withdraw everything I had in it so I'd be able to pay May's rent, at least, if they had also decided to freeze my assets. That potential now gone, when she texted me to let me know she was outside ready to drive me there, I didn't share the news yet. I had promised her $20 to drive me there. She happened to had to cancel an event because she didn't have gas money to make it, until I had promised her that $20. So, knowing she'd be happy for me and not take it as the drive was no longer necessary...I withheld the news for a minute. Once I got that $20 in her hands, a pack of smokes she hadn't been expecting and treats for her kids, I broke the news to her and she shared in my excitement. We celebrated the rest of the day. Rusty got her pretzel crust cheese pizza with no sauce from Pizza Hut in the quiet of her own home (she hated the noise of eating in the restaurant), Cort enjoying that giant chocolate chip cookie 'pizza' I ordered along with it. Cort learned how to do laundry in coin machines. Rusty and Cort learned how to use the pop machine outside our building. I had wine to drink ;) weee a truly fun evening! and my friend is off attending her event today. We are restored to financial well-being!
Through all this I realize, there is no justice in this world from the worldly perspective. There really is only what is needed to trigger our expansions. Yes, the ones used to trigger those expansions might need a it more force to stop playing their role so effectively and we might perceive that as the serving of justice, but it may be in fact, only what their soul needs to be expanded, an expansion that may have been facilitated by our own which they were used to initiate and "encourage". And yes, there was a time I would have railed against such a "simplistic" and "spiritually bypassing" understanding. That would e the stage of developement where self acceptence and one's perspective is MORE important to embody efore we can move on to accepting another perspective. Sometimes we must must fully embody victim and apologies before we can accept "the good in everything". Even now, fully getting this understanding, I WILL allow certain aspects to go through this process, just as I did yesterday morning. I had to fully allow all my feelings and my own perspective as a victim before I could myself to accept my 'persecutors' could possibly feel the same way about me.
I also accepted in a new way how yes, people tend to favor those who need them more than they do a happy, self-sufficient, content, generous me. I used to resent that. They'd favor mean, selfish friends over me "because they need me". Now, I accept it. I don't need constant connection and get to enjoy mostly random moments of excitement and sharing. It works for me. I'm not missing out on anything. There's a whole party inside me.
Another synchronistic thing happened as I had a moment of realization at work: "Wow, this is the first time I did not start a job totally green, catch on quickly and exceed my co-workers!. Cool!" I wasn't being a perfectionist and I felt relief. Just as those thoughts were completing, a co-worker leaned over, put her arm around me and said "You know, I am so impressed with how fast you're catching on to this job and how well you're doing!"....lol My boss has mentioned how much she appreciates me after I braved my fear of being told I was being too sensitive about words co-workers had been using in referring to residents. "I feel the same way" she told me. I raved a fear in bringing a gift to one of the residents, of being told it was not my place only to be told by my boss she so appreciated employees who were so thoughtful about residents needs and smiled joyfully, sharing my excitement that I'd e able to share this thing I had bought with a resident who might benefit from it.
My entire experience is changing and morphing. My heart is breaking-in that good way day after day. It's so exciting! and painful and exhausting, lol Sleep time is of "dreams" where I am setting up camp in other "dimensions" where I've had negative relationship experiences. The place not really needing to be secure or able to provide anything, being more like a "spawn point" in a video game. It's where my consciousness will begin it's focus when my body is sleeping and where it will exit that "dimension" as my body here awakes, it appearing to be going to sleep there. Fascinating. Busy little bee, pollinating all sorts of places with this expanded and expanding consciousness!
So, yeah, it's been a few days since ya'll have heard the usual amount from me and so now it's all been cooked and I can served it out again 
An American Bald Eagle is gliding overhead again this morning.
An ;)

He said his name was Travis

Under the light of an impending full moon........
Two metaphysically inclined souls meet, liberated by and spunky with alcohol in their bellies........BOL
In the space of time it takes to smoke a cigarette.....
Conversation ensues at lightening speed, almost as fast as angel speak with a few words received with all the subliminals, exuberantly exaggerated in characterizations and physical actings....every topic covered from how they both "talk to angels" and love to be naked under the trees....
Him: "Are you Heathen then?!" as he pulls up his hoodie to expose.....aw fuck....the tattoo of the word "heathen" across taught, dark skin over tight muscles and that "v" pointing down into his low hanging jeans......woa
"And can you read this one?" he asks as he throws back his hood (dear god, clear energy emanating from that face), he turns his head and points behind his ear...."No, you need to back away because all I can see is that I want to lick that ear".
"Ear wax? ew, no can you read it?"..."No, honestly I just want to suck on that earlobe right now".
His friend begins to drag him away, his smoke over with and eager to get back to the party as he walks backwards yelling again and again: "I would spend a night with you!". He gives the address, in case she wants to, too.He calls out her name, she waits a moment and calls out his..."She remembered my name!", he shouts.
She doesn't follow him. The address is a den of thieves and filled with strifeful relations.....she recognizes his friend as the one who had been casing a neighbor's property a couple days before, It's the place cops are called to frequently.
Instead she returns to her own apartment, relishing the state of breathlessness and craving tongue, tingling in her lower regions she got to embody for a moment......and on and off the next day, "psychically" smelling his energy visiting...though she'll probably never see him again.
We both like the word "delicious". ;)

ASPEN requested my survivor story...so I give it to them....lol

I responded with a brief, to the point and absolutely honest answer to the request for my "survivor story". My response was thusly shaped to fit as a blurb in a newsletter. At ASPEN, the only back story you have is of the last instance of abuse which qualified me for assistance from ASPEN. The WHOLE story, the WHOLE TRUTH is far lengthier and suitable only for a medium that can accommodate it. I cannot as yet share it without crying and so speaking it before a crowd as those at the "Soup to End the Silence" did is out of the question from my perspective. The passion behind my tears would pursue you.

    My mother and father met in a parking lot, he a finely dressed Marine from the "wrong side of the railroad tracks", growing up in the ghetto of Waterbury, Ct and my mother from the "right side of the railroad tracks" of Meriden, Ct. They decided to elope. Where they decided to go, my mother still needed to call home for parental consent. In the background, my mother heard her mother' voice "Just give it, George. better she come back married thus than shamed and possibly pregnant". Under that blanket of shame, my mother cried out "no" because it hurt. But she had said "I do". Under a blanket of shame I was conceived as a product of marital rape, the older narcissistic version of my mother made sure I knew.

     I grew up physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually abused, not just by parents but by similarly tortured siblings. My hair was not combed, it was yanked amidst a litany of "disgusting". I was not tucked into bed, I woke in the middle of the night with drunken breath as a cloud about me and my father's hand on my thigh under my nightgown, under my blankets, night after night. My hair grabbed and smashed against walls, an expression of my mother's frustration and disgust.

   As my body began to bud, those buds were grabbed during "play"wrestling with my father. School was not safe due to bullies and eventually sexual assaults in the stairwell if I left class to use the bathroom. Family outside of immediate was not open to interfere for my father was the golden boy: youngest in a French Roman Catholic family who took them all from ghetto to millionaire. As I grew, billboards began to pop up: call this number if you suspect child abuse. I was not abused: no obvious bruises or broken bones and treated like every other female child in circle of friends and family as far as I could see.

    The buds began to blossom. My crotch would be grabbed by my father while schoolmates pumped our gas, just to taunt, tease, embarrass and dare me. The dare did not become obvious to me until the day when my breasts were grabbed openly with full eye contact made. "I'll tell mom!". "Go ahead, I dare you to". So I did. "Well, I was going to divorce him anyways", was Mom's response. I had given them just what they needed for the Catholic Church to FINALLY grant the divorce they had been seeking...unbeknownst to me. So, Mom used it to get all she wanted financially in the divorce. When she returned to my Dad, a justification was needed in light of my "accusation": "She accused him because we caught her in bed with her boyfriend", it was given. I was 14, a "virgin" and not yet had a boyfriend. I was effectively vilified and painted the vengeful child amongst family. Help from that direction would not come to this day. Golden boy became "we do not speak ill of the dead" as the reason. As for help from "friends", that also would not happen.....

    Coming home from a school dance with boyfriend and another couple consisting of my best friend and her boyfriend,...... We entered "home" to find my Dad drunk and passed out in his underwear on the couch. As I whispered good-nights, my father leaped over the couch and began to throw me against the walls of our house. I told my boyfriend to wait out back before they all fled. I ran up the stairs to my room and locked the door behind me. I leapt from the second story window into the arms of my boyfriend as snow fell all around me. Not a single one of them ever reported it. Just another evening with a romantic highlight of a boyfriend catching a maiden in distress. I returned the next day when I knew my father would be working to grab a few things and find my bedroom door, which I shared with a female cousin, broken off it's hinges and the room all torn apart. She never reported it either. The shamed, slandered, abused girl went out into the world, homeless first as a teenager.

    Teen romances were highlighted with being pinned down, box cutter to the stomach by a boyfriend and raped by a "family friend's" cousin who was entrusted with giving me a ride to safety. All of for which, my mother blamed me for not being "subjective".

    I finally married at twenty. His refusal to use any type of birth control resulted in pregnancy to which he was "surprised" and blaming. I withstood threats of being drugged in my beverages and subjected to illegal abortion to give birth to a beautiful daughter by c-section due to breech position after requesting techniques to turn her. "I'll tell you what", said the doctor: "we'll spin you 'round and 'round by your feet and slam you into a wall and then, maybe, just maybe, that baby will have turned and you can have her natural". C-section fit my husband's ability to "plan" the day off anyways...so at 21 I gave birth via c-section. A knife held to my throat as I was held up against a wall.......my daughter set in an infant carrier, unbuckled, onto the hood of a car which was then driven off.....I left my husband. "You made him part of this family" was my parent's justification for favoring him during negotiations. In my experience, men were always labelled the victims of my...I have no idea.

   Subsequent relationships were marked by barricading myself and two small children in a room behind a door with a dresser because I refused to have an abortion-again by a man who had not made it clear he did not want children.  A man, who later on, would have his friend who was a judge to take that unwanted child away from me via illegal orders verified as illegal by a lawyer who could only wish she could represent me because she was only legally allowed in other circuits......

     I went on. I survive. That's what makes me a "survivor" of my story. I went on to be given $5 to go into a store for drinks on a hot afternoon in Kentucky to "visit family", only to come out to an empty parking lot in tank-top, cargoes and slippers one hot afternoon....on the street with nothing and nobody. I hitch-hiked "home" only to find all my worldly possession already sold to support a returned-to drug habit.....pregnant. I navigated truck drivers who thought a meal would win them sex and "christian do-gooders" who thought a "good deed" would win them slavery of me.

     A man sent word he was interested and would claim the child as his own, if I was interested too. "Wow", said I, "A man who left me choice". Little did I know that, this choice was the choosing of the most deadliest abuser known to domestic violence circles. I call him an "abuser by proxy". These are those who use indirect means to cause, ultimately, the death of their victim without accusation/persecution/being found guilty/blame. They don't get their hands dirty.

    Barreling down mountainsides in a vehicle without breaks, seeing frostbite on my infant's cheeks because we had to spend a freezing night in a tent to sleep, cutting up sweatshirts for diapers because the voucher we were given was gambled away "to make us richer".  Ultimately kidnapped because he left and in a state of drunkenness returned, driving us off into the California mountains where dialing 911 received no reception......when back in civilization for supplies I escaped and called 911 at a Walmart, the police who responded told me "His word against yours......we're filing no report". They did, however, spend three hours seeking out a domestic violence shelter with room for us, despite "the ribbing" they'd get back at the station house for spending so much time helping. Wonderful: guilt for what they'd suffer for 'helping' me. 

     When time was up at that shelter (because all shelters seem to have this time limit where you're booted out without recourse if no plan of action is effective), my children and I hit the streets. Homeless, I built us up to a tent to sleep in and a bike with cart to get us about in. Eventually I landed us a position as caretakers of a property while the manager was off taking care of his other properties. That's when "abuse by proxy" kicked in big time. I woke one day to my abuser standing over me, having broken in the back door, with city police at the end of the driveway as I called county and "child abduction" unit descending like a swat team....my abuser had convinced other homeless people and "concerned citizens" to make reports of me being part of some cult that believed in intermarrying siblings. His breaking and entering was dismissed as first contact in the light of a no trespassing sign. I had to play the thirty day notice of movement game with discernment to finally reach a state where a non-disclosure of residential address was made a part of the restraining order. There I recovered..I healed...I chose no intimate relations until I *knew* what would be good for me and my children. I sought out family who I believe understood, only to be assaulted again and end up at ASPEN..........

        As I transitioned from client to advocate, I saw the energy/nature of ASPEN change hands. I saw, as I perceive it, the very heart of ASPEN torn from it. I saw the victims they were to help prostituted out for federal funding. I was told "What happens in the house, stays in the house", in effect, as I was commanded by newly appointed Heidi to keep quiet about a victim being further victimized by the new house manager, Becky (to which I maintain proof on my computer). 

       Truck drivers who expect sex in exchange for a meal, "Christian do-gooders" who expect yard work in exchange for a night's sleep.... or "advocates" who expect public support and federal funding in exchange for a story.....no difference in my opinion. There's a multitude of capitalists of the victim. My silence of further victimization of a victim in ASPEN's care and keeping in exchange for Becky's new car payments, Mary's subsiding of verbal abuse by excuse to "teach" and Heidi's supervision for prestige....That is why I identify as a thriver. I shall succeed beautifully despite them each.

Ms. Crystal