juushika

I am finally feeling better. There was a turning point last night so distinct that I could almost mark the hour—and it came not long after Devon brought me orange juice and a brownie, so I am now convinced that this is the cure to all ills. I'm still coughing, still a little snuffly, but this is my body shedding the last of its illness—rather than wallowing in the production of more. I even slept well and had good dreams, a rarity at the best of times but particularly impossible as of late. I am pleased, because it's about damn time: I started noticing my first throat-itching symptoms one week ago come tomorrow. Apparently, that's my version of a "little sick." Do I feel like I'm being punished for the fact that I'm getting out of the house more often? A bit.

Jumping back to the subject of sleep: I've been thinking on the disconnect between my self-as-human and self-as-cat again, this time as it relates to sleep—and to obsessive thought. Thinking on—and bemoaning, to be honest, this last week while I needed sleep to rest and heal but found it even more cruel and fleeting than usual.

And so I'm going to talk about (among other subjects) my therianthropy. Confused as to what the hell I'm on about? Review my first post on the subject and/or my therianthropy tag. Think this stuff is just too weird? Feel free to skip this post.

I've had issues with sleep since middle school—I used to sleep as little as possible, as self-punishment but also to avoid dreaming. These days I'm more at peace with the need for sleep and the nature of dreams, although my dreams are more often than not nightmares, but these days I'm also plagued by problems with sleep. My sleep is never predictable—I get it in three hour cycles, sometimes as few as one cycle a night for weeks on end, sometimes sleeping half the day away although I tend to wake every three hours for a little while.

Getting to sleep—at the end of a long day, but also after each mid-night wakeup, is the hardest part. Some of it is physical, the simple discomfort of a bad back and a curvy body that demands an artful arrangement of pillows to keep everything aligned and unstressed. Much of it is the fact that I'm prone to obsessive thinking.

I've mentioned my obsessive thought before but I don't know if I've ever tried to explain or describe it. It's an aspect of my anxiety, but it's also a simple part of how my brain works—an aspect of my nature that sometimes causes anxiety. It's like having a song stuck in your head: a phrase set on repeat. It can be anything, hurtful or harmless (I obsess over sour memories, troublesome conversations, problems which are huge to me but would be foolish to another; I obsess over video games, over sentences, anything at all, though I've particular fondness for that which contains repetition or rhyme). Sometimes it's a small annoyance at the start, but after hours (sometimes years; I still obsess over mistakes I made as a ten year old) of incidental repetition or minutes of unremitting repetition it grows tiresome—moreover it's so resistant to change that it grows stressful: I can't stop obsessing. That's a simple statement with a vast import: I cannot stop obsessing. I can't think long, coherent thoughts. I can't concentrate. As a result I can't enjoy, engage, even distract. I am stuck obsessing—repeating a sentence fragment, rearranging letters, hating myself for an offhand remark—indefinitely.

It's painful. And that's what I go through most nights when I try to sleep—and that's how it's been this last week when I was more-than-usually physically uncomfortable and found it that much harder to fall asleep, and so had that much longer to wait for an obsessive thought to arise, settle in, and keep me awake.

The only cures I've found are to stop thinking or to intentionally pick an obsessive thought. This is why, in the worst of my depression, I sometimes do nothing but watch Law & Order reruns and why I often watch movies as I fall asleep: if I can clear out my brain and replace it with the passive occupation of consuming familiar media, I can smother obsessive thought under a blanket of white noise. The problem is that as soon as I stop, as soon as I free my thoughts, the anxiety can return. So I have obsessive thoughts I turn to intentionally. I sing Donna Donna to myself half a dozen times in a row. I go through the alphabet, alternating English and French, over and over. These are repetitions too, but they are familiar and sometimes comforting, and because I chose them I can control them—so that they are not negative, hurtful thoughts; so that I have a calming illusion of control over my own mind. If my obsessive thinking hasn't kicked in yet, I sometimes plan my dream house, tell myself short stories, or visit my meadow*—familiar but longer meditations which keep my thoughts focused so there's less chance that a pause will open the door to obsessive thinking.

The cat doesn't do this. My self-as-cat can feel anxiety: mistrust, skittishness, fear of stranger and of dangers. But as I've written before, my self-as-cat doesn't feel the sort of anxiety that my human brain is prone to, these obsessive rounds of thought. In fact, my self-as-cat wants to spent hours and hours doing nothing more resting. That's another simple sentence with great import: The desire for rest and sleep, for thought-empty stillness, is a vital part of my therianthropy, and that's a vital part of myself. A cat that can't catnap hardly feels a cat at all.

Madison has a sweater, a red chenille business which no one would wear but she loves to sleep on, and since it got put down within her easy reach she's done little but lay on it. She purrs and kneads, suckling the fabric; more often she just sleeps, curled up nose to tail in a neat small round. As she did when she discovered the guinea pigs's bedding, she's been forging her usual outside excursions just to stay there, comfortable and pampered and often asleep.

I have a passion for modal which rivals my passion for chocolate—there is no fabric softer or smoother, and after I fell in love with it Devon got modal sheets for the bed in a subdued spring green. I have a pillow-top mattress and a down pillow, I have A/C to keep the room cold, I have a little den of comfort which I rarely leave. But when I pass Madison in her curl of sleep I still envy her, because I can't do that. I need to wrangle pillows into a back-pampering pile to be comfortable for long, but more importantly even with every comfort arranged just for me I need a book, a film, a conversation; I need a b c d running repeats in my head or "on a wagon bound for market" for the fifth time—I need these things because if I don't have them, instead I have a word, a sentence, a "should have said," a "can't believe I did," a "do they remember?" in a loop so endless that running it has fatigued my thoughts, a repetition so insistent that the trap of it frightens me. In the middle of the night, when I've slept for three hours and wake again like clockwork, if I immediately try to go back to sleep it's even worse—because on the liminal edge of dreams the repeated thought is even more immersive and I can have mental images (which, at other times, escape me) and so I can also obsess over that sight, that action, as well as those words. At those times I can find myself trapped in obsessive thought for a solid half hour, which ends only if I get up for a while or if I finally fall into dream—a dream more often than not tainted by some obsession.

I know that there are far greater complaints out there—I'm not the most miserable of the miserable. I know that I'm not the only one that wishes: oh, for the simplier mind (and life) of a beast! This is not about my status as a special snowflake. It's not even entirely about my obsessive thoughts—they can be hellish, but ever since I discovered the little tricks that help me deal with them they've become a more manageable evil.

What pains me is that how my brain works defines me-as-human, and it separates me from me-as-cat. My self-as-human and self-as-cat are not separate identities, but sometimes there is a wall between them, sometimes they are at odds. I wrote before that "in order to be myself, I have to move beyond myself"—that I have to overcome some aspects of myself-as-human in order to be myself-as-cat, and there's a certain pain in realizing that, in experiencing the disconnect within myself; there's more of a pain in the long nights of sleeplessness and anxiety where I'm not only suffering from those miserable repetitions, but also because I am not myself, you see; because I cannot be who I ought.

* The comfort, sometimes the saving grace, in all of this is that my meadow—an open field with a single large tree and a single small house where a single 60-some woman resides—is the realm of my meditation and where I let my mental self-as-cat run free. It's the most difficult of my mental distractions because there's so many levels of complexity (immersing myself in cat-body, trying to imagine the meadow when I can't image images, etc.), and I can't indulge it unless I'm in a pretty healthy mental state; if I'm not, it soon disintegrates into obsessive thoughts. But when I can manage to run there, it's a blessing: an escape from the troubles of my human brain, and a chance to experience a more complete version of myself-as-cat.

I intended to append this to my previous post, but it has grown unexpectedly into a wily, furry beast.

Ah, if only!

So. A few days ago, I ordered leg warmers from Sock Dreams. I abhor pants with a passion that leaves no room for analogy, but my legs get cold. So Devon and I sent $13 to Sock Dreams with fingers crossed and, behold: legwarmers!


They are this pair, specifically: 40 inches of ribbed acrylic and nylon goodness. The verdict? Everything I need them to be. They stay up well enough for lounging around in the bedroom (because when I'm up and walking about, I generally wear pants), they are long and thick enough to cover as much and be as warm as I need, and even new they are remarkably non-itchy (but I suspect it'll take a few runs through the washer for them to reach comfortable). The quality is solid and I suspect they'll hold up well. The price was more than fair, basic shipping is free(!), and they ship out promptly. All in all: recommended.

( The only thing is that wearing them feels a bit odd--for, as it turns out, complicated reasons. )

Oh why hello there, navel. How're you?

A few nights ago, I had two consecutive dreams (in between waking up and forcing myself back to sleep) involving goats. In the first, I was myself a goat but incredibly uncomfortable in that skin, constantly sitting and standing in postures that didn't suit my form. In the second, I was in a barnyard and a goat spoke to me, aiding me on a quest for something that was hidden below the floorboards. Both dreams were wrapped within the nonsense of dreamland: in the first, I was wearing a goat avatar in Second Life; in the second there was some long, rather comical story of a barnyard mystery.

I don't put much faith into the import and meaning of dreams precisely because they are so often rich with nonsense, and because the topics that I do care about (religious or otherwise) rarely appear within them. Nonetheless, I'm curious about this goat thing. I've been reading up a bit on the symbolism of the goat, and tying it back to therianthropy, totem animals, and Celtic Reconstruction; meanwhile I've been reading the personal journals of a few totemists and animists and shamans which have been thought-provoking and inspiring. It's all begins rather unconnected, but things have been coming together in an interesting way. I'm thinking of therianthopy into my religious beliefs, but I have to do more reading on human-animal shapeshifters in Celtic myth. I'm also thinking about animal "totems" and CR—perhaps better said, about animal spiritual guides within Celtic spiritual practice. This goat thing intrigues me, and I don't want it to pass unexplored. Furthermore, if I can build a framework for working with spiritual guides, I can also apply it to the bear.

I don't hold with archetypes. In my recent active exploration of my therianthropy I've actually found the cat archetype largely useless. As a cat, some of my behaviors coincide with cat stereotypes, but others are the result of cat aspects which defy popular knowledge, and some are simply the result of my personality, as a cat and otherwise. Celtic Reconstruction also discards archetypes, and I've moved consistently in that same direction. I was never able to bond with the the Wiccan/eclectic pagan concept of a universal God and Goddess, nor did I understand the inclination to see deities as archetypes. By contrast, Celtic deities are not archetypes, they are identities. They may be linked to some natural forces, social elements, or animals/plants, there is no "Sun God" or "Fertility Goddess" in any Celtic pantheon, at least not as recognized by CR. (I also believe that I need to attach myself to a specific Celtic deity to help realize my religious practices, but that's another thought and post.)

Archetypes can convey some overarching trends, but they obscure individual detail and some underlying truths. Therefore, I'm trying to approach the goat without its the preexisting archetype. I recognize that stereotypes may have a seed of truth, so I've skimmed summaries of the goat as totem; I'm more interested now in reading about goats in Scotland, where they were originally brought over as livestock but have since been abandoned and gone feral. I figure that by learning how the goat lives and why will give me a basis to determine for myself what the goat "means."

I've also been doing some brief mediation simply to approach and interact with goats. Brief because I'm still a poor hand at slipping into trance, though I'm getting a bit better at it with the practice of my therianthropic work.* I've been beginning in my field, moving further out and towards a group of grazing goats. I had some early frustration—I think because I was trying to force the goats closer, into domestic animals in the field; ( today I had quite a bit more luck: a journey with a goat. )

In that experience, the goat for me was: Leaving my comfort zone. Journeying further afield. Walking difficult terrain. Lacking immediate, personal support. Emotional distance, but also the opportunity to follow and learn. Journeying to new territories, moving upward, overlooking hitherto unknown potential. The invitation to go, do, achieve new places and things. Feral independence, contrasted against my domestic identity. It fits within what I would expect from what I know so far of the goat within a Scottish context, and some aspects from, say, moonvoice's essay on goat. It was a wonderful experience, although intimidating—I'm keep encountering urgings to explore new territory, explore my potential, and take action, and frankly that makes me want to turn tail and run. However, since that seems to be such a strong current theme—well, I suppose it makes sense that the goat would enter my life.

The goat showed me territory that I had not seen before; territory that I can explore, but I must take the steps to do so. I could follow the goat up the hill, but I don't have a guide back down and into those fields.

I will try and return to the goat, and I'm curious about more mundane features of that goat's identity. Is the goat a specific animal? I'm curious also to gender; I know nothing about gender differences within goats, and have been thinking a lot on the (lack of) gender differences in domestic cats and what my self-as-cat's precise identity, sex, and appearance may be. But that is thought for later and certainly content for a different post; this one is long enough. I hope it's vaguely interesting to someone and I'm happy to talk about it all, but I took the time to write it largely because I want to focus more on specific moments, practices, and steps forward. I want to actively practicing these things, rather than being caught up just in the thought of them.

* For my own purposes, and for anyone that is curious, my meditation is pretty low key, but useful. I sit or lie comfortably and concentrate on something to slow and focus my thought: frequently deep breathing or heartbeat counting, sometimes repetitive movement, infrequently repetitive music. When I've calmed and centered, I envision my usual starting place, which is a field broken by a single large tree. This setting arose from my first experience with a cat transformation hypnotism tape, and its details and surrounding vary depending upon what I require. My mental images are patchy at best (see comments), sometimes I float in and out of trance, sometimes the image disintegrates, sometimes I wander off focus, sometimes time moves out of joint. I allow all of that, use my breathing or movement to hold the trance as best I can, and give up if it just won't work. By forcing myself to allow imperfections and avoid frustration, I've actually been able to make progress. When I'm done, I take a few moments to continue my deep breathing and recenter, then I move and stretch to reconnect with my physical body, give thanks, and then go on with my day.

I've never felt less like a cat then in the week or two after declaring that I was one. I have never doubted that identity more than I have now, in the last two weeks. Overthinking can burden anything—and it has certainly burdened this declaration of identity. By questioning everything, I began to doubt everything until I became so far distanced from my identity that it seemed rather foolish to speak on it in the first place.

There is an ideal balance between knowing thyself and being thyself. I use this example all the time, but I do so because it's true—and particularly famous. Shakespeare's Hamlet I.iii.78: "This above all: to thine own self be true," Polonius says to Laertes, but when Hamlet tries to do just that, to know himself and be true to himself, he began a play's worth of murderous inaction. I've written a post about it before, but the point is: when we—rather, when I become obsessed with realizing my identity, I get trapped within a Hamlet-like contemplation of that identity and forget to actually exist within—or despite—it.

I am very good at reading, at observing, at learning; I am very bad at putting knowledge into action, or achieving action at all. So I've spent the last two weeks reading deep into everything I can find of therian and otherkin writing: theories, treatise, awakening stories, surveys. I also went through and read the Wikipedia articles on cats—while hardly the best source of information, it is an adequate starting place. The constant theme of the therian community is to question what you think you know of yourself, and in the face of it I've been feeling rather ... doubtful.

( Some doubts, some thoughts, and where to go from here. )