An Explanation for my Mother

I’m really being pressured by my mom right now to explain shit, so I guess I should. I didn’t want to show you what I was drawing over and over when I had my episode because I didn’t think people would understand, but I do now.

I was looking through some photographs of a concentration camp named Sachsenhausen which I visited just outside of Berlin. I took a photo of the inside of the pathology lab, and when I looked at it later I saw this image, an eight pointed star.

But as you can see, there’s something about that star, it’s not standing on it’s own, it has a line through it. That line is what makes the seventh and eight points, but it radiates out further than the star itself. Later on I had the picture blown up and I could see that what made this star was sunlight hitting a crack in the window, so I dismissed it. But what does it matter how it was made?

If you look at it again, what you see is a six pointed star sliced in half, which is a very apt symbol of what happened in Nazi Germany. And while it symbolized what happened in Germany and elsewhere, it also symbolizes what has happened to us internally, which is that we cut ourselves into pieces to fit something we try to believe in.

I drew this division over and over because it represents what I feel in my heart, I feel torn between two places, and I’m starting to discover I don’t have to feel torn, there is no two places, it’s all one.

So to start drawing this symbol as a perfect eight sided geometrical figure, that represents to me, healing from this violence and division, while also acknowledging that something fundamental has happened to us and that we can’t ever really return to the way it was. But that doesn’t mean something can’t be whole again.

Marion Sarain Stump believed himself to be Quetzalcoatl. Which is a pretty intense thing to believe in. But what Queztalcoatl represents was just some person, and androgenous figure by the way, who was an artist, scientist, and philosopher. And rather than act like those are seperate disciplines, he could see where they overlap. And when art, science, and philosophy intersect, you get spirituality. What spirituality is is a way to acknowledge that all of those things are interconnected, that they don’t disagree with each other at all, they compliment each other. I can talk about spirituality on it’s own, but you’ll call me a flakey dude. So instead I am trying to figure out how to show that art, science, and philosophy do compliment each other. Nothing has to be jettissoned to fit into a whole.

As a two spirited person, I have a natural inclination to bridge life and death, and it’s hard because people have made some hard and fast rules about what life and death represents. Not only that, but they’ve also made hard and fast rules about what two spirited people represent, which is apparently just kinky sex. And I don’t disagree that kinky sex isn’t part of it, but there is something else there as well. But it’s natural that people would have seperated sex and spirituality, because like I said, we do have a divisionary history, and it’s been imposed on aboriginal people especially.

Some people think that altars or medicine are just some flaky shit with some rocks and feathers, but those things have meaning to someone, they represent something, and having them organized in a place lets someone come and contemplate how life is interrelated. And the connections are not a bad thing. They seem unusual, they seem kind of scary sometimes, but there is a pattern here that’s been here for years, and yes it does have a scientific basis.

Where psychosis comes in is when someone realizes that these things can all work together, that there is a wholeness that is possible, but the world has been designed to work against that wholeness, to chop it off into manageable pieces. Schizophrenia doesn’t mean broken brain, it literally means broken heart, and that is what happens when you see that people are actively encouraging divisionary tactics and it means you might not be able to survive those people.

I think I am moving towards this idea of wholeness, I am so many different things that if I keep pretending those things can’t coexist I will surely die. And it’s frustrating because I see the way people are creating extreme violence through divisionary tactics.

But there’s a reason for that. The less people are allowed to know, the more power can be exerted, to the point that if someone is going through a healing episode they are given drugs designed to eliminate higher cognitive functioning and keep them from going back to a wholeness, because that wholeness upsets a power which is very happy keeping things the way they are.

Skepticism is good, it means critical thinking. But sometimes people are just very stupid and can’t grasp the whole. That’s okay. But if someone around you can make sense of the world, that is not a negative feature, that’s a very positive feature.

I have decided to transcend colonialism, and so I am looking at this figure of Quetzalcoatl, because it was a figure which hated blood sacrifice, it was a figure who inspired a renaissance in New World civilization. And yes, that civilization fell, but there are other reasons for that, mostly having to do with Quetzalcoatl being tormented and shamed into leaving.

What if Eden was fled not because Adam and Eve ate some fruit, but because there was something fundamentally wrong happening in Eden? The Old Testament god was notoriously difficult to please, and kept changing the rules on the people all the time. It would do things like ask a father to sacrifice his son and then yell “Psych! Just kidding.” But this one Rabbi said that the history of that book was this higher being negotiating with the people, and both it and the people learned things from each other.

These are archetypal stories and they exist because these symbols exist in the psyche, and in times of great duress people go back to these archetypal stories. Life of Pi demonstrates this really well, and if you haven’t read it I recommend it.

Skip this paragraph if you haven’t read it. It starts out with a guy trapped on a huge liferaft with some zoo animals, including a tiger. He spends most of the book trying to figure out how to survive a liferaft with a tiger on it. The whole book is told in this fashion until the end, when he tells the real story, which is that he was with his family on a liferaft with a murderer. He uses the archetypal story to make sense of his situation, because that’s what feels right to him. But in the end he can still tell you what was really happening to him.

I think watching this world fall apart, a lot of people are looking for answers, and in looking for answers people are dismissing knowledge out of hand. But that’s what the people in power want you to do. Bush is shutting down scientific research because it’s conflicting with an ideology he’s been trained since birth to advocate. We’re being told things are wrong without adequate explanations of why, and for some reason we’ve accepted this. We’ve been told psychiatric medications are good, but without hard scientific evidence and with the FDA being paid off by Big Pharma and with psychiatrists being paid off by Big Pharma and with the government itself being paid off by Big Pharma. But still when people get scared, they fall back to these pills, because it’s got advertising clout.

There are alternatives, and I’ve outlined them in this blog, and I am moving towards them. But there are still so many people who want me to go back to this old way of doing things, this divisionary way where if something thinks of unpleasant things, we just smash their brain up so they’ll stop.

Pain does end, and it doesn’t end in death and it doesn’t end because you pay some Neo-Freudian 21 000 to terrorize your kid. It ends because eventually people move towards a wholeness again, that split is healed, and life goes on.

A Mandala, besides representing something happening in Chaos theory to some particles, also represents the psyche, as Jung explained. And to imagine a oneness, for me, is to imagine a wholeness, a time before that window was smashed in Sachsenhausen.

This is a video of a sand mandala being made for the 70th birthday of the Dali Lama. It is also eight sided. So you see, I am not so crazy for looking for this wholeness through this specific geometrical figure.

Pushing way too hard

I have realized I am pushing myself too hard right now, and I know why, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle. And I think remembering who I was the last time I was here opened a whole bag of new issues, but I’ve also realized he made a point to end that cycle in his life and I’m a new cycle of I don’t know what yet. But I think I can find my own inspirations. And I think I know why he tied himself to a certain historical figure, and I see the relevance and I don’t mind being tied to it either.

But I also realized I have faith in a very different kind of God or what have you, something older than a male deity, and I am liking that a lot right now. I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to try to affix myself to a masculine archetype, because I really do feel I’ve aligned myself with women.

And it seems so frustrating, to be able to see the patterns of how things have happened and what people say versus what they do. But I think if I get caught up in it I’m going to stay at this level, and I’m not interested in that. I feel like there’s more, I know there’s more, and it’s dizzyingly exciting to piece that together and get my head out of this kind of a place where so much war happens over stupid shit.

I guess one could say I’ve found faith again, and I had it in my last life and it let me do a lot of things that I couldn’t have if I was hopeless. But I am also realizing I have to extricate myself from negative situations that push me over the edge, feeling like I have to PROVE something that’s been proving itself over and over anyway and if you didn’t get the message the first time, I dunno. I don’t care to give it to you. If you want to go looking for it you’ll find it, but I don’t care to save anyone anymore. I just came back for something that seems so simple, but is so lovely. And I think I am starting to find a community of like minded people, but it’s been difficult, and I am realizing certain people are going to stay behind, and they will keep perpetuating cycles of dischord, and hopefully if what my last lives were about worked then it will just stop on it’s own. But I don’t think I have to keep working at that particular issue, or at least not in that way. I think I have different issues I have to work out, and related to reviving something ancient.

All I want is a safe place for aboriginal people to undergo shamanic experiences. It’s really so simple at it’s basic level. And you don’t even have to use the shaman word, it could just be spiritual awakening. I hate seeing our people reject everything because they truly believe the world is doomed. But more than that, I hate seeing people force the doom scenario on people who are trying to retain that little spark. I think the spark is good, I think it’s important to our survival. I think people believing they will come back might change the way we’re treating each other and the world. And I think if people do believe in a Mother instead of or in addition to a Father, women won’t be in so much pain. I feel very saddened to see women being taken out of this idea of the divine, I think it’s so wrong to me.

And I also think spiritual awakenings are maybe more violent these days because there is so much to heal from and because aboriginal people did get a lot of ritual abuse cult programming that in turn causes them to abuse other people. I think mystics knew what they were doing when they spent forty days in the desert, I think that’s been a common piece of knowledge, that awakenings look really bizarre and that’s why people hide when they are in them, because otherwise they get thrown into the psych ward and into a really abusive situation that causes extreme psychological damage. It’s basically reinforcing cult programming, or colonialist programming if you like.

Cult programming has one idea forced into peoples heads that if they leave the cult they will go crazy and be forced to spend their lives in an institution. And I think colonialism is a cult, it’s very cult like. The similarities are staggering. So I think when people decide to leave colonialism and start finding their old roots, that cult programming kicks in not only in the individual but also in the people around that individual. It’s very sad, and frustrating. So I want to figure out a way that people can awaken/heal/flip out in a safe environment without family pressure to return to a certain way of being. I think as families we have been trained to reinforce certain colonialist dogma, and it’s depressing. Families used to be so strong, and now they seem to be a source of great pain for people.

So I think in many ways I have wanted to hurry up and fix myself, but I realize the hurry up part causes all the trouble. And it sucks because I do want to tell an old story, but I don’t think people are ready for it. So I will tell it to certain persons, and maybe write it down, and maybe some day people will want to know how we got here. But I honestly don’t think people want to know, because it fucks up a lot of dualistic ideas people seem to be depending on, why I don’t know because I see dualism as a significant rip in one’s soul. But I’m not here for people’s souls, just my own.

And the other thing too is that I am having deep emotions for someone, and it makes me want to be a better person so I can be with her, but I don’t think that’s the right way either. I think it looks like trying to force someone’s hand and really I just want to see how she’s feeling. Plus I can see an archetypal story being played out, but I don’t want to love an archetype, I want to love a person, and neither do I want to replay the same story.

So I am in a strange position, I remember parts of my past, my deep past, but not all, and I am also having to start a whole new future for myself outside of that past. And I am also just rather confused, because if I ended the karmic cycle going on in that last life then what am I doing in this one? I guess you could say I am on some kind of cusp, but with life cycles. And at the same time I am haunted by things I’m watching being played out, certain lies being told about history, things getting rewritten right as they happen. And I think a lot of people are in that position right now, and so much seems to be at stake, and so much fear is getting amped up. And through it all we’re being bullied into End of the World theories around 2012, but honestly, the world won’t end. A new cycle will start up and things will change, but an end? No. There are other calendars after 2012, there are always new cycles and new beginnings. If I have any advice to impart at all it would be to put your words and actions into love and make sure that truth doesn’t get forgotten. And also to make sure that women’s history is preserved, because that’s the other half of this story.

Only Morose

I’m okay, don’t worry, just feeling angsty, and I’m picking up on too much negative energy, I think I have to hide for three days, but I mean just not go out in the world. I might throw a few things on here. But I need to think about some personal stuff, again, and I’m hunting something, like a thought sort of.

Here’s Morrissey singing Half A Person in New York 2000

Here’s PJ Harvey singing Rid of Me in Sydney 2001

No one cares anymore. I’m fucking tired of having to be a boy so people pay attention.

My Name

Thirza is not my name. It’s a name my mother gave me to hide under. It’s worked well on that front, but I can’t use it anymore. You can use it if you like, but it’s imprecise, it only talks about half of who I am. The name I prefer is Marion. Although I have taken on over a thousand names during this journey. My real name is the Boat Puller, or Sacajawea in Shoshone, which was a tribe I belonged to in my last life, among other tribes. I’ve been jumping around from tribe to tribe working with the underside of what people see. At this point everything is in place, there is no more work to be done except tell you a story, and old story. And you can tell me it is a myth if you like, if that makes you sleep better at night. And you can tell me I am crazy if you like, but it won’t make a difference. We have been sowing threads and clues through history and time, but people who can see only half the world can’t see what the reality is.

In truth I came for my men in my last life, I showed them things, I taught them things, but they still missed half the lesson. So I repaid a karmic debt to them by sacrificing myself to the sea in the Gulf of Mexico. There is nothing tying me to this plane anymore, that was the end. I did sacrifice myself another time though during this life, to find out what was going on with the sleeping people, I made myself forget things for a while, and I sent something to come and wake me at a specific age, and I spent eight years learning the secret of darkness, which is not always darkness.

I have been watching silently, it’s an old trick of Queens, to sit on the sidelines and observe before making decisions. I have been unravelling this thread and finding out where it goes. And I can start to explain why things happened the way they did.

The Spaniards came to take our gold, but what was truly precious got hidden before they came. Gold has two sides to it, to most people it is only seen as wealth, something which can be taken from others and used to your advantage. But that’s not how gold works. Gold follows a bloodline, it follows a path, it carries memories and sometimes it will seek it’s own revenge when it falls into the hands of people who aren’t meant to have it. Nazi gold is operating the exact same way, it’s been following a bloodline, and it’s been listening to stories, and it dressed itself up nice and fine so that it could follow it’s enemies.

I can only laugh when I think of how Europeans took New World gold, smelted it down and turned it into their icons, how they have been praying to it not even realizing they are praying to an old old old being that is not who they’ve made it become. I can only laugh when I think that our gold is in every major centre of a warring fighting dualistic religion.

I had to bring them here. I had to entice them to take what wasn’t theirs. I had to trick them, to become very wiley, to lure them into bringing a base of brute power to the New World, where they could be ambushed. I’ve been toying with bloodlines, adding some here and there, mixing them in certain ways, calling people over waters to come to this place and be free, even though they pretend freedom is slavery. I had to spend time with them listening to their half stories, filling in the missing spaces. I have done legendary things just so I could follow the trail, go backwards, find out who I am, even if I become mythic and a half story. There are people who can read the untold story, the other half. It’s not really so hard. I’ve been watching them too, I think they’re ready. And I think to the people who can only read a half story, this story too will be seen as a half story, I can speak the truth and people will say it’s a lie and that is fine by me. I didn’t come for the people who think in half stories.

At this point most of my people are hiding in America, in ways you can’t see, with drops of my blood sprinkled in them, some more than most but all of it calling them to remember something so old it’s become too good to be true. They have stories to follow and tell, stories from their tribes, and sometimes it seems to be the same story over and over. They sometimes don’t even know they have this power, they assumed that they were so diluted one drop didn’t matter. And sometimes they felt they owed more to other bloodlines, and sometimes they do, but they can access this story anyway because it’s the story of us all, and all of us are hearing it pulling at our root.

Curious, That

Have you ever noticed they don’t give military technology female names? Like there’s no Sacajawea Ballistic Missile or anything. I dunno. Is there some female named warhead? Like the Medusa 6000 or something? Probably not. Mother Mary Mines. Whatever Fatima’s third secret was, you can bet it’s not Tesla powered weaponry.

Dear Sophia

I hear they are attacking the Mandeans now, the last group of Gnostic Christians in the holy land. I don’t think it matters who they say is attacking the Mandeans, we both know it amounts to the same thing. What irony that a dictator like Saddam would be ruling a secular country where the last whiffs of Gnosticism exist, and now under the guise of liberation and strife, the Mandeans are being wiped off the face of the earth.

Gnostic Christianity was the oldest sect of Christianity to exist, before the Roman Empire declared itself holy. It had your name at the top in all the bright lights, Sophia, mother of Jehovah. But you got written out of the script, and everyone is waving from halfway up the ladder, with half an eye and half a heart and half a brain.

I know you can’t die though, ever, no matter how many people they destroy. We’re in the underworld, waiting for a glimmer of hope and shooting it every time it shows up.

Hmmm

I seem to be remembering older things than me. How unusual. And deeply ironic. Life’s just funny that way.

Soteria Canada

This is what we are going to do. We’re going to access some of the healing fund money from the Residential school settlement and build the first aboriginal run soteria house here in Saskatchewan. It will be an octagonal structure in a rural area with various places for people to hang out. It will have one room made JUST for destroying things for when people get into the first destructive aspect of psychosis. And there will be other areas too, a snoezelen room for people to just experience their senses, an art room with 24 hour access, a library/internet learning room, a place for people to learn languages, religion, art practices, whatever they want. No one specific truth will be imposed on the people who go there, it’s all about them and letting them become who they are even if/when they make mistakes on the way. And I’m not letting any “traditional” methods of healing take precendence, irregardless of what culture they come from, this uses everything that the person wants to explore. There isn’t any “wrong” way for people to go through there experience, the staff are there mainly in a serving capability, cooking and cleaning and guiding people away from self harm. And no fucking psychiatrists, they can bugger off. And I don’t know that I want the staff to only ever want to work in that job, I think it’s better as a job where people do it for a few years and move on to other things. And if someone working there is being abusive to the clients, they are fired immediately, no second chances.

And I also think that after the first one gets off the ground, we can start building other places across Canada, and maybe the world. I don’t intend for this idea to be owned by only one tribe or region. But there are specifications that I’m still working out. And people can come by and hang out and teach their own skills to people there if they want, but no frickin’ programming and no telling anyone that they’re bad or hopelessly fucked up.

There Is My People Sleeping

Poem by Marion Sarain Stump

And there is my people sleeping since a long time but aren’t just dreams the old cars without engine parking in front of the house or angry words ordering peace of mind or who steals from you for your good and doesn’t wanna remember what he owes you sometimes I’d like to fall asleep too, close my eyes on everything but I can’t I can’t it’s with terror, sometimes that i hear them calling me but it’s the light skip of a cougar detaching me from the ground to leave me alone with my crazy power till I reach the sun makers and find myself again in a new place he goes away very far away without anybody on his tail teeth of snake, birds’s wings the shaman goes far away gotta be the best at the ball game and hunt something every time i go for a walk put together a few wise words in front of the elder ones all because she smiled at me and her father said he ain’t gonna give her to who’s not a man I heard them talking about her with love in their minds I have seen them start their dances to call her out great names I heard in the dark of the night but a name can’t steal the bear’s child to the homeless man nobody sews his mocassins all he had was a cedar flute who could guess that with that one he’d call her and she’d run to him? now he’s a bear and the little bears of spring call him ‘father’ I had to see her heart to have her had to see his heart to have him with a south horse I came at the scalp dance with two little bones I lost all I had and still I was rich then a cow right on top of the hill and it was all over seven men on the rock upon the house the deadman’s head is laughing at my mistakes lazy flyin’ of crows in the sky brings me away in a returnless run like red leaves carried by the autumn wind with an iron blade I was trying to write on rock hearts hoping to see them laugh hoping to see them cry I was mixing stars and sand in front of him but he couldn’t understand I was keeping the lightning of the thunder in my purse just in front of him but he couldn’t understand and I had been killed a thousand times right at his feet but he hadn’t understood little traces in my mind brought me back where I was born and there wasn’t any explanation just my back shook at the crying of my dying mother.