"A petty tyrant is a tormentor.......Someone who either holds the power of life and death over warriors or simply annoys them to distraction."--Don Juan

Lately impeccability has been important.
My current small-fry petty tyrant is my roomates granddaughter, a 19 year old girl who smokes tons of weed, is kind of an alchoholic, is prone to massive mood swings, makes huge messes, and doesnt pay rent.

Ive made major strides towards being compassionate towards her, and I feel like thats a gift shes giving me...because any time that my hatred comes up, its a chance to dissolve it. Any time shes rude or disrespectful to me...its a chance to NOT taking it personally and prove to myself that she has no power over me.

Its hard cause I have trauma issues around emotionally volatile people making it hell to share a house with them...but any time these feelings come up...is also a chance to heal them.

“He (Don Juan) said that a warrior had no compassion for anyone . For him, to have compassion meant that you wished the other person to be like you, to be in your shoes, and you lent a hand for that purpose. The hardest thing in the world is for a warrior to let others be. Only a sorcerer who sees and is formless can afford to help anyone——to his understanding every effort to help on our part was an arbitrary act guided by our self interest alone.”(271) La Gorda

maybe compassion is foolish. Maybe compassion is a waste of my energy. Perhaps hating her on the one hand or wanting her to be happy on the other hand...are both wastes of energy. she is who she is. I cannot change her, my compassion has no effect on her, my hatred has no effect on her. Nothing I do has any effect on her (though it might seem to be so, it isnt so)...so any emotional energy directed towards her is a waste of energy.

it does come down to impeccability... Last night Brittany (thats her name) was partying in the living room with her friends, drinking and watching TV...i dont like it when they drink but I just keep to myself and everythings fine....they make a pizza, leave it on the counter, i love pizza but i ignore it. i go to bed, wake up at 3 in the morning. for some reason when i wake up in the middle of the night, I feel a compulsion to eat something. so i looked at the counter and there was a small bite sized scrap of pizza left over, and i ate it.

the next morning this girl is FREAKING OUT about her "piece of pizza" being thrown in the trash or eaten, and shes making a massive fuss about it, on top of that shes claiming that she cant ever sleep because im up the "entire night".

"There is something you ought to be aware of by now. I call it the cubic centimeter of chance. All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess to pick it up. Chance, good luck, personal power, or whatever you may call it, is a peculiar state of affairs. It is like a very small stick that comes out in front of us and invites us to pluck it. Usually we are too busy, or too preoccupied, or just too stupid and lazy to realize that that is our cubic centimeter of luck. A warrior, on the other hand, is always alert and tight and has the spring, the gumption necessary to grab it. "--Don Juan (Journey to Ixtlan)

That moment when i decided to eat that scrap of pizza....THAT was my cubic centimeter of chance. Im starting to realize now that these tiny tiny choices that make a HUGE difference keep popping up repeatedly in my life. I make tons of choices automatically, thoughtlessly, and thus i repeatedly miss that tiny little chance.

another thing...brittany gets angry when im in the kitchen at night getting a snack. i think this is because she is a light sleeper, easily woken. (she sleeps in the living room which is right by the kitchen) But actually...this issue is a chance for me to change, because i KNOW that eating in the middle of the night is stupid and pointless. ive been choosing to not act on that knowledge. eating actually makes it harder for me to go back to sleep...bright light decreases melatonin, and active digestion keeps you awake. So brittany is actually doing me a favor by complaining about my midnight snacking. Its easy for me to say "i pay rent so i have a right to do what i want in my own house." actually thats true, but to say that is to miss the point entirely. it doesnt matter that its true, even if its true, its still foolish and a waste of energy.

Like I said...i have trauma issues around living with people like this. I have a lot of hate and anger at former

roomates who were emotionally abusive or manipulative or just plain disrespectful, and back then i didnt realize I had the power to not be affected by it. It seems like no matter where I live I still have to live with people who are hard to live with...this cant be an accident. With all the synchronicities in my life ...there has to be a lesson in all of this.

in any case...brittanys tirade filled the house with bad energy and I was sick of being inside anyway. I remembered what my friend Ron had said about following the heart and going for a walk...so even though it was raining i went for a walk and followed my heart.

From inside the rain had seemed bad, but when i got outside i realized it was more like a heavy dewy drizzle than a heavy rain or downpour. Since ive lived in washington 5 years, it didnt actually bother me. So I walked around the 6 acres of the property and my heart led me into the woods. I stood and looked up at the trees for a long time.

I was standing by the firepit. I looked at the new collection of melted glass in the fire........i used to remove it. several times a month britanny and her friends make a fire, get drunk, and throw beer cans and bottles into the fire. I looked at the melted glass for a while and realized it was grotesquely beautiful.

I found my way carefully to the end of the property, stepped over barbed wire and broke out of the trees and into the path that leads to the junk place. Im not really sure what to call it.......... its this wierd three way crossroad, and in between two of those roads theres an enormous pit of sawdust, woodchips and garbage. theres actually garbage everywhere but i think of it more as junk, as most of it is composed of pieces of a trailer/mobile home that someone dis-assembled for some reason.

And then at some point I realized that I was picking up pieces of junk and arranging them into altars. One altar was built on top of a large jagged piece of glass that was balanced on top of 4-6 pieces of wood. Arranged around it and on top of it...pieces of metal, rusty springs, wires, pieces of plywood with faded wallpaper on them. I was able to arrange these pieces of junk in some sort of harmonious fashion.

I made three of these altars, junk witchery altars. Then I found a beautiful sapling that had somehow become uprooted. It was a beautiful reddish brown sapling with buds that looked like they might somehow flower....assymetrical roots. It was in good shape so it had either been uprooted recently...or was super resilient or had benefitted from the super damp weather, possibly all 3. I picked it up and carried it back to the fire pit. I chose a place for it....talked to my roomate who was playing golf in the yard...and got a shovel. I went back to the firepit and went about the work of digging a hole large enough for the sapling and its roots.

It was interesting, because the trunk of the sapling was not that thick, it was fairly small and young, but the roots stretched out about 2 and a half feet in one direction....so it was work. I had actually already attempted a dig in at the junk crossroads...but over there it was way way too rocky...

so I went about digging by the firepit...there were tons of roots and i didnt want to cut through them, so when i hit one i had to put down the shovel and dig AROUND the root/s....this took a while...perhaps 30-45 minutes. Often i would stop digging, fit the sapling into the hole to find that the hole wasnt shaped right....put the sapling aside, kept digging, etc. eventually the hole was big enough...though I had to push roots around and under other roots until finally it was in there securely enough....at that point I shoved the rest of the dirt into the hole along with some stuff from a nearby pile of leaves. when it was finally properly placed in the ground and standing up...i felt a very great happiness and sense of accomplishment. that entire time (starting with the junk altars) i had heard a voice in my mind speaking to me about what i was doing and why.

The voice spoke of my altars being something like sand paintings, but with junk and garbage instead of sand...so really it was something else...whatever it was it came to me naturally..it was almost effortless. many times i saw the faces of nature spirits on rocks, plants, trees...i could also feel their energy very strongly. I would feel something calling to me, a rock or a piece of metal, as if the particular object hooking my attention were brighter or more alive then everything around it. I would also sometimes be placing an object on an altar and would hear it say "to the right, underneath the pipe, right there, yeah." . At some point the voice said this:

"this is where the real work happens.this is what the earth wants of you, not anger, frustration, sadness, misery, self-loathing, depression, or hatred. the universe simply wants you to exist as you are meant to...doing this.Taking action as a manifestion of your living inner truth... Taking the chaos of mankinds ignorance and ordering it into something real and meaningful. That is what shamans have always done, and will always do. They stand outside of time and illusion, always at the center of things, being what they are and doing what they do, untouched by the madness of the world, taking nothing personally, just existing and acting with clear intent."

Once a decent portion of the junk had been arranged into altars, I thought of how long id be gone, and what they would look like when I came back. I thought of the people who might pass by, and why they would be there, and what they would think of the altars. A silly narrative played through my mind, of my neighbors (all 400 of them...very small town)...passing around rumors about the "queer witch" and my wierd hair and my wierd junk altars. I think this was more of my inner dialogue and self importance....maybe those rumors are being passed around, maybe not. it doesnt actually matter.

In any case...the effect of all of this was clarifying and cleansing. I felt that I had moved into an expansive space and had engaged in an action which re-ordered my inner world. So when i got home I had a sense of having done what needed to be done. I then went about the task of making phone calls and arranging my trip to olympia this weekend. I also called my soul twin and we talked about our friend in the hospital and how to do a spell together on skype for him. I was really anxious....we started talking about how the moon was waning. I said the waning moon was a good time for banishing. He said banishing was a bad idea because it just angered whatever spirit was living in eric, because its like telling a teenager to move out. it gets scared. I tried to explain what I had meant by "banishing" in the terms of occult terminology but i got increasingly flustered and mixed up. It was awkward because i was stressing my friend out. I got off the phone and then realized i had not taken my noontime med. that always = anxiety. At the same time i was very genderdysphoric...got upset about my hair and appearance. I looked into the mirror and realized i was ready for a change. After 30 minutes I had successfully arranged my meager hair parts into something simple, effective, cute and appropriate for day to day stuff. This felt really good because my dreadfall extension, i realized, is not meant to be put in every day...its special, its intense, its kind of overwhelming sometimes. Now ive discovered a look that is both feminine and reasonably practical. i feel good about this.

Since meeting Ron ive felt a shift towards actually acting on the voices that have been trying to show me the way for months or even years.