Surfacing

I have tried here to capture the experience of “surfacing” or “coming out of the trunk” during a deity possession or “horsing” as it is generally known.

Sleep Wintersong. Go back to sleep...

Distant voices, deep in conversation, rumble in the void like thunder beyond a clouded horizon. Wrong, this is wrong. A splinter of consciousness whispers into the dark that I should be without thought or form. Stubbornly, I cling to the fabric of the nothingness that envelopes me, like a war torn child struggling to stay buried in dreams of a time before blood and fire. The voices grow clearer one voice mine and yet not mine, and I can feel the words carving groves in my mind, and know that these scattered words will be waiting in my memory when I wake. I don't want your words, they belong to you, not me.

Wish as I might, the fabric of my void is tearing. Am I crying, can a thought cry in fear? Lightning flashes, illuminating flicking visions of the waking world, burned into my memory like pictures in someone else's scrapbook. My flesh is being returned to me prematurely and I feel His irritation, tempered with concern, though whether for Himself or for the vessel I do not know. I am sorry. Inadequacy and shame burns in my breast, or would if I had form and substance.

And then, in an instant of sickening dislocation, I do. I am a passenger in a ship born of my mother's body and I can feel Him struggling to maintain His connection. I am small. I see nothing. I feel nothing. In this Work wishing can make it so, if you wish hard enough. Whatever I can do to make room for Him I do.

Help me Master! I cry out for my Teacher and a distant echo reassures and soothes my frightened heart. I know that my Teacher will do his best to erase the grooves in my mind and white out the unwanted pictures in the scrapbook of my memory. It will be incomplete, but the effort will ease my readjustment, when the proper time for my return finally comes.

Then I feel how I don't want to feel Him reach with His/my/Our hand and grasp the hard, slick glass. The vile liquid inside hits my tongue and He rides the wave of liquor down into Our body, the spider puppet-master again ensconced in His temporary temple. Don't think about that, never about that. As the blessed void closes back over my drifting consciousness, my last awareness is of the transmutation of the alcohol from loathsome to ambrosial as His desires reassert dominance and sleep claims me again.

The Other Social Lubricant

There are times when I worry that as I grow older I am turning into a crotchety old man before my time. Certainly there are elements of my worldview that may come across as old fashioned or outdated today. We live in an ostensibly egalitarian society, and one which grows progressively more informal with every new social networking fad. There are times when this informality, and perhaps egalitarianism as well, rubs me the wrong way.

The worlds that make up my personal universe are ones of hierarchy and formality mixed with independence and humor. As a spirit worker and a shaman, my spirituality places a firm emphasis on behaving appropriately in one's interactions with the gods, spirits, the dead, and fellow travelers on this strange road. In the magical tradition I was trained and work in, practitioners spend years and even decades of their lives to build their skills and advance to higher degrees of both accolades and responsibilities. And of course, there is the kink/BDSM community, in which boundaries, titles, and roles go a long way to forming the foundation of the social contract.

I don't think of myself as particularly rigid in my expectations or expressions of these hierarchies and structures, at least not in the context of my teachers and friends. People who know me well will tell you that I tend to be on the cheeky side, and I try to find the lighter side of even the deeper aspects of my life and Work. However, I find that I grow more irritated as time goes on with what I see as the transgressing or disregarding of social and interpersonal amenities.

The last thing the internet needs is another rant about people bothering to use proper spelling and grammar, so I will try to forgo that diversion. Other folk have done it better and far earlier than I. Plus, there is no need to add to this essay's already inescapable “grumpy old man” vibe.

What I am far more concerned with than the above mentioned manifest grammar and spelling issues that torture the our language so, is what I see as the odd familiarity that I find in growing frequency online. This is not to say that I am someone who requires “high protocol” in my correspondence or conversations. Far from it. The “odd familiarity” I am referring to is odd precisely because it seems to me that people are in fact less proper with strangers than they might be with someone they know well.

For instance, I recently received a message demanding information regarding a class I taught two and half months ago. Disregarding the fact that I addressed those exact questions during my class, the person writing the message did not bother with the social niceties that I would consider proper when asking a stranger for assistance. Seesawing between awkward informality and rapid-fire demands for information, their message established that they had taken my class and proceeded to their questions in a nearly bulleted format. There was no “I was wondering if you could answer a few questions for me” or “Thank you for your time.” The “establishing shot” as they would say in the film world, was missing.

It is tempting to see this person as simply entitled, and in truth there is an attitude I have encountered as an educator in the kink, pagan, and disability communities that my obligation to someone who has taken one of my classes endures forever. However, I suspect in this case this person simply did not know how or why they should write a proper message. If pressed, I do not suppose I could easily elucidate that point myself. If I understood their questions and they got an answer, albeit a terse one, then why bother with the effort of a proper message?

The old fashioned part of me, which is inextricably bound up in the magician, shaman, and kinkster sides of myself, would say that the reason is evident: it was rude not to put some effort into the message. The problem there is that it presumes a negative consequence for rudeness. In my shamanic work, rudeness to the wrong being can quite literally be deadly (see: half of Greek mythology), and I suppose the same could be said for my magical work to the extent that magicians are generally not known for their patience with disrespect. Likewise a reputation for rudeness or brattiness in the BDSM community can make it harder to find partners or arrange play.

This line of thought however, is in itself problematic though. We should not need to look at questions of rudeness or politeness in terms of consequences. From where I sit, attempts at basic interpersonal protocol make the world run more smoothly. Social interactions without courtesy are like sex without proper lubrication, yes you can do, but it is not nearly as enjoyable for anyone involved.

This is not to say that I am a paragon of politeness. In fact, there are aspects of the social contract that I suck at. I am bad with thank you notes, sending cards on birthdays or anniversaries, and I am terrible at remembering people's names. But I believe strongly in making an effort in my communication. I reread every email I send, try to be as careful as possible with spelling and grammar, and always respect that someone is taking time out of their generally hectic life for me or my message. Granted, there is a level of informality with my friends and family that only makes sense (if you get emails from me signed “Winty” on occasion, that likely means you).

Do not get me wrong, I like communicating with people online, and I like answering people's questions. I have however found, as I mentioned earlier, that some people develop a sense of entitlement regarding public figures, whether in the pagan, kink, or other communities I am or have been involved in. There is a perspective that whatever fee they paid to attend an event I taught at entitles them to a lifetime of limitless access to me or my colleagues. To some extent I even believe that to have a grain of truth, but there is a fine line between my willingness to help and that help being taken for granted.

As our interactions become more virtual and we see each other in person less often, there is a temptation think of the online world as one large Turing Test, and that words on a screen do not deserve the same respect we would give to a “real” person. This of course is not the case however, and we need to remember that those words represent people. Even if Dr. Turing's vision was to come true one could argue we would just be interacting with “people” of a different nature (and our new AI overlords will not appreciate it if we don't even bother to spellcheck our notes from the Matrix).

It is my hope that the social contract of our online communities will with time resemble that of the “real world.” My fear is that the opposite is already happening.

Looking for Roots (that I might not need)

AUTHORS NOTE:

It is obvious from a quick perusal of the last several Barking Shaman that I have been in an introspective mood of late. “Requiem for a Symbol,” “Lessons from a Plastic Bracelet,” and “Don't Call Me a Unicorn Hunter” all had elements of self-examination.

In the earlier days of writing Barking Shaman, before my long hiatus, it was not uncommon for posts to group into themes. I do not intend to turn this blog into a forum simply to talk about myself. The internet is replete with venues for narcissistic expression, and I have my Facebook page and Twitter feed to indulge that part of my psyche.

However, I do feel that I have something more to say, and gods be damned, Notes from a Barking Shaman is my little corner of the internet, so bear with me through one more inward journey. Or don't, if you are not so moved, I won't mind.

-Wintersong Tashlin

Looking for Roots (that I might not need)

I am Wintersong Tashlin, although most people just call me “Winter.” Of course, it is largely a given that if you are reading Barking Shaman, you already know who I am. What likely goes without saying is that “Wintersong” is not the name my parents gave me, nor it should be noted is it the name that they use to this day. “Tashlin” as well is a taken name, although unlike “Winter,” my surname was made legal over five years ago.

On second glance, the above is a powerful statement though. My identity is far more bound up in who I am as Winter than it is around my birth name, which I continue to use in certain limited areas of my professional and familial life. My identity and the life that I lead, as a spirit worker, magician, god-servant, BDSM educator, queer activist, and gun nut, are vastly different from what I could have imagined as a child. It is hard at times to reconcile my “real” life with more mundane one that I associate with my birth name, which is the name I am called at work or when the bill collector calls.

There are times when I feel adrift. It is hard not to disassociate from my childhood and my life before I took this name (Wintersong was my third chosen name, but I have had it since 1999). I have very few ties to the person that I was. I am quite close to few family members and I am in touch with no friends from before college, and only one or two from college.

It has been pointed out to me on more than one occasion that through the magic of the internet and Facebook in particular, I could try to reconnect with people from my childhood. This has raised an interesting question for me. Should I? There are few people I would want to connect with. I did not go to my local high school because of the severity of my Tourette, so I lost touch with many of my friends after middle school. The remaining ones I was close to primarily through the synagog youth group, and there are obvious issues there. One of the few people I'd really care to reconnect with is now a successful Rabbi, while I am a hard-polytheist-shaman. Clearly our paths diverged, although not as far perhaps as I did from her brother who is a successful accountant. She and I may serve different paths and gods, but in our own ways we both serve, I honestly cannot imagine the life her brother (also a good friend of mine growing up) lives.

Thanks to Facebook I did discover that the first boy with whom I ever had what I felt was a positive sexual experience, did in fact end up batting on the same team as me. If nothing else this finally set my mind at ease after seventeen years and allow me to enjoy that memory without concern that what had been a positive experience for me had been mere experimentation for him (it still could have been, but now I know what the experiment's results were).

That is interesting, and perhaps edifying knowledge, but I do not see it providing any real connection between us. At least no more so than anyone else with whom I shared a one-night-stand with a very long time ago. Another childhood friend and I have remarkably similar tastes in film and television, again, at least according to what he has chosen to list on Facebook, but other than a fondness for Jeremy Clarkson's automotive antics, the culinary adventures on Top Chef, and hazy memories of the of children we haven't been for nearly two decades, we likely share little common ground.

I could reach out to them, and in truth I have experimentally sent out a few introductory notes, but the reality is that I feel more like I am contacting the childhood friends of a lost relative than the children I once whiled away long Saturdays playing with. Part of me hopes to hear back, because no one likes to be rejected or worse, forgotten. However, an equal part of me hopes that my messages vanish into the empty reaches of the internet, taking with them awkward conversations and feeble attempts to recapture a sense of connection to each other, when what we are really looking for is a sense of connection to the child we each used to be.

At least that is what I find myself looking for. I like the man I have become, but in many ways I feel like a man without a past. When I look in the mirror I can not find echoes of the boy who played pretend games, Legos, or Micromachines, with Jeff, Steven, Lucian, Josh and other childhood friends (boy are those '80s names or what). For a while I looked for those echoes in some of my age play, and almost found them, but circumstances in my life shifted and I lost track of them again. When I wonder “How is X doing” one of the things I mean is “maybe by understanding how my childhood cohorts got to where they are in life, I'll understand where my own childhood self fits into my identity now.”

At the same time, as I stated, there is a lot about who I am now that I like. I feel like I fit better in my own skin now than I have in a long time and I am not sure that looking backward is necessary or healthy. I am unsure of how I will benefit in my sense of self or well-being through connecting to people whose concept of me is fifteen or twenty years out of date. What value would I gain through such a connection?

In the end I am a shaman and spirit worker, and as such I have put this issue into the hands of the fates. If I have something to learn or gain from such an interaction, one will happen and I will endeavor to approach it with an open mind and heart. If one does not, then that too will tell me something of value about the relationship between the child I used to be and the man I have became.