The Two Things that I do not know how to understand

I had a friend many years ago who was from America – she lived in Oakland and Phoenix – her parents divorced – so issues galore.

She was a very unusual person to me and she liked to get people that she wanted to have sex with together with other people that she wanted to have sex with – so she could kind of have sex with both people – or at least – get to hear about it in a double whammy proxy.

But that’s not what I was going to say about her – but I think I will leave it in – what I wrote so far.

Anyway – she was, as I said, American in Canada – she married a Canadian – she told me to escape America under President Bush the Father.

So she did not – partly owing to having to change between schools – and partly owing to her personality and interests – she did not have a good basic education like any Canadian would have. Religiously unimpeded as opposed to how public education is in America.

Not to mention how much more competitive it is in America than in Canada.

And she was not religious but her own spiritual concoction  – some eastern some pagan and whatever made her happy.

So I had never had my Tarot Cards read and I never gave much thought to animal spirit guides.

And she insisted that she be the one to conduct both.

Now I do not recall which tarot deck she used or which cards were drawn – but I know that she used a cross spread – whatever that means – my spouse had to tell me when I asked her about it yesterday.

So the reading I got was this.

Cards are on the table – my friend’s normally animated face was shock white – and she was not a white person in any meaningful or physical way.

I mean the blood drained from her face white.

And she cried – no sounds, just tears down her cheeks and she stood up, excused herself and went to the bathroom and she burst into tears – heart rending tears.

Seriously, it was messed up and I didn’t know what the cards said, they were mystifying to me.

So she came back and in Canadian fashion, I said nothing. I looked at her.

She was resorting the cards back to the pile and she said, “I’ve never had the cards do that before, it said you that want the moon but that you will get the stars.”

Oh I said. Then I thought – well, random chance indicates that a good fortune will turn up given enough readings, and I guess it’s lucky that it’s me.

A while later – she got a deck of animal spirit cards. I don’t know what mythos but they were all North American animals – so I don’t know which ones.

But I do know which animals that I drew.

Once again, she was upset, although this time, she stayed in the room and complained that she had done several drawings for herself and never once got any of the animals that I drew and I drew every single favorite animal that I have ever felt drawn to – wolf, dolphin, eagle, bear, hummingbird.

And once again, I drew all the major spirit animals and they appeared in that particular spread in the optimal place for each.

The last one – hummingbird, I remember meant Bringer of Joy. It was my truest self spirit animal. And it makes a lot of sense to me that it would be there.

So when this friend found out that my birthday is January 19 – the same as Janis Joplin – well, that was too much – and I never thought much about those readings again.

Random chance and all that.

But lately, I read a book – the Drunkard’s Walk – all about the history of mathematics that went into understanding random chance – and the math is the mathematics theory being statistics – understanding complex data in simplified ways.

So once I really understood random chance – I sat down and made a list of all the most random and amazing things that have happened in my life and I had a thought – what’s the chances of all those things happening to one person.

That’s when the math started to get really scary and really simple – virtually none.

So close to being zero that if it kissed zero it’s lips would freeze.

Because if you all think that cold on the Celsius or Fahrenheit scale is cold – try Kelvin.

but to my mind – two data points do not provide enough data for a conclusion – you need a threeway to break a two way tie

so I asked my spouse – what it meant to her as a spiritual person and she told me – and I wasn’t sure how to really emotionally understand that spiritually it would mean that I was pure soul.

Because I do not relate to the idea of a soul – I figure you live and when you die – if there’s something afterwards – deal with it then – after all – not being concerned with rules while alive – what’s to change about me after death?

I have lived exactly the way I needed to – truthfully – and I have behaved myself and when I do not – I accept the consequences of my actions or inaction – without complaint – because I know what I do and what I do not do and to or with whom.

People ask me – how do you know what’s morally right or wrong – and I tell them that I learned the same way everyone learns – from their parents, their peers and their social experiences.

Somehow the obvious is too complicated and so people demand to reject what their parents taught and adhere to some complex rule systems that do not allow for conflict or much love or joy.

Or at least I thought – until my recent ordeal with people who have the rules of the workplace spelled out in several levels of instruction – legislation, policy, directives and best practise guides and when that fails – that’s what Human Resources is supposed to guide people – but what happens when HR is just a bunch of nails under the same hammer management?

the centre cannot hold under all that constant hammering – percussive force becomes harmonic and even the biggest glaciers or the tallest mountains succumb to erosion and the deepest ocean floors are given rise by global plate tectonics…

But – I have an answer now – because i was bullied for thee years without relief, without recourse to change anything and without any hope.

I was Pavlovianly conditioned to expect punishment any time I opened my mouth to took action in the work place.

My Dad, who has a masters degree in behavioural psychology and who retired after 30 some long years at Canada Post and being in the union executive – so he’s had a lot of time to ….observe people in the field……

He told me that you cannot break that kind of conditioning.

But he’s wrong – because I have – otherwise – I would still be huddled in my home, shivering in fear and tormented by every single construction sound in my neighbourhood, siren, loud traffic, planes, neighbours going about their suburban business and I would not be sitting here – breathing now – and broken through the depression, the anger, the desire for revenge – it’s all gone.

Now I still have problems communicating in person with people – they give such mixed vocal to physical signals – but I have been able to start ignoring people like that again – the tricky part is that I can only watch up beat shows – so almost nothing recent because movies and tv are currently all about people who can’t communicate and they yell and get angry – and I can’t cope with that – so we have to skip scene or whole episodes – but I am better now.

Mostly, it’s people who are in relationships who ruin them or who want to be in relationship but can’t quite put the other person’s needs ahead of their own – willfully stupid people who can’t learn from their own past behaviour.

He’s not that into you – indeed – refreshing humour, but sadly so that it’s even needed.

Because I took a workshop called Flash Forward and because my university acting teacher taught the class how to act by teaching us yoga first.

Flash Forward is a course that teaches you Project management and you are the project.

Yoga teaches you how to breathe and I forgot how to breathe – I was talking so much about not being able to communicate.

So now that I can breath again – I can write again

because I have always been a superb communicator, I just don’t always use words – and now – since I used art therapy to recover – I have to draw before I can write anything.

I drew 24 pictures on December 31, 2011 – the last year the world was allowed to hurt me – and I group them into batches of 6 and 8 – and I can tell all kinds of stories about everything and nothing.

and Monday – I am going to show you a drawing that I did – that is a little bit of a different take on human psychology and especially sexuality – because I had to draw, I took photographes of the layers of the images – so my drawings will tell quite a story about human genetics and nature vs nurture.

Because it really does come down to the family you were raised in and I am sorry world – I had no idea that so many of you came from less than functional families – so I have a better understanding now – of why people cry when they meet me and compare lives.

I realize now that the people at work might not have cared that I was a lesbian or an atheist – but they certainly cared that I was happy and they did everything in their power to make sure that I would never feel as happy again as I had before I worked with them.

And, I may not be as happy as I once was – but Dementors belong in the Harry Potter world – not in the employment of Canadians in the hallways of the civilian government sucking the joy and life out of the employees and then casting them aside, broken or never to return.

Right now, the very idea of finding a way to never go back there again – that’s my happiest place of all the places in the whole of my big wide mind.

So thank you dementors for making me this happy. I know it’s unplanned and unexpected – but happiness happens even when you least expect it – but happiness is something that everyone – each and every one of us – deserves.