the raven and the snake

I've had a transformative experience over the past two months. Any relationship you open yourself to at all has the potential to be transformative, since you wind up learning more about yourself. It's just that most of my transformative relationships prior to this were the sort where all sorts of rough beasts were dragged up from my own personal underworld, and, while I'd always learn a *little* about some of my more positive aspects, most of what I learned was about my ability to deal with said beasts.

This wasn't like that. At all.

It's a very odd, rather symbolic coincidence, though, after having a transformative experience, to be given a discarded snake skin by someone you don't even know. If by some miracle someone who was there is reading this, this is The Kid Who Always Wears The Hat. I don't know his name, like I said.

The fact that this happened at this time, along with my having had an awesomely horrifying ayahuasca experience last Friday night, tells me something.

I've had to fight off a lot of demons along my way here. Most of these I've had to fight solely within the confines of my own mind, but in recent years, some of them have manifested in my relationships with other people, and for that, I am truly sorry.

But this last experience tells me it's all been worth it, that I've been to the bottom of my being and managed to come back bearing light. I've had to face my own inner Chiron or wound over the course of my life; astrologically, my natal Moon squares Chiron as well as the horrifying underworld double-whammy of Uranus and Lilith (both in Scorpio, no less). The person in question has Venus square Chiron in her natal chart, and while I can't say how that may have manifested in her life, I can say that my Moon square can be traced right back to when I was eight.

I had nightmares continuously, every night, for a month. It was the same dream, over and over again, me seeing myself two-dimensionally, in a sort of distorted Super Mario 2 - esque castle, taking a conveyor belt down into a pit instead of jumping to where I was supposed to. And in that pit this awful creature appeared, with an expression I can't name or describe. This face haunted my every waking moment for that entire month.

My parents were sympathetic at first, allowing me to sleep with the light on, but they eventually shrank back in the face of whatever malevolent spirit was tormenting me. It wasn't demonic in origin. It was something worse. My mother admitted to me years later that before my sister was born, she "saw" an apparition of some sort try to enter the house, which I later figured out was the Goetic demon Balam, and she did some sort of incantation to the archangels, which caused a rush of power to flow past her, and hit the.. creature, causing it to howl and implode.

But whatever this thing was that was after me was beyond demonic. I could feel whatever it was laughing derisively at my mother's every attempt to rescue me from it.

And, eventually, defeated and pissed off, my mother turned off the light in my room, leaving me to face whatever it was on my own. "You have to learn to face your fears," she said.

And oh, did I ever. I was in that room, in the dark, faced with something my parents had no idea how to fight, knowing that *they* were angry at *me* for not defeating it.

It's been a long, hard road getting back, but this recent experience has shown me that it's all been worth it. And, as something of a rebuttal, love is only the confusing, apparently destructive mess it can be if we try to force it into the shapes we think it should go into. We're human, after all, and we want things to make sense and have shape and structure... but the nature of the universe isn't like that. And all we can really do is try to be as open to everything as possible, and enjoy every dance, as long as it lasts.

I have no regrets, whatsoever. This is unusual, given my prior relationships with people.

So... the snake skin is going into my closet, where all the other items I feel have magical and/or personal significance to me are. It'll be there with the piece of a gravestone I found with Nur and Tarsila during The Smear Summer (symbolizing, to me, the death of an old personality), the human rib I found at Chuck's Farm '06 (yes, you read that right, a HUMAN RIB... the symbolism behind this is a weird Creation-mythos kind of thing, what with the universe giving birth to itself inside my head while I watched some Jamaican people jump around making ridiculous basslines),...

...and the raven feather I found in late August.

<3.