Hey, Cedar, or anyone interested in FOO (Family of Origin) issues. Cedar, WHY NOW???

[Scent of Cedar *]

I want to say here that, as the woundings occurred while we were children, while we were thinking and interpreting the world from the realm of the Magical Child, that is where, as adults, we need to go to heal them. We see (I do, anyway) from the Magical Child's perspective in these matters. That is why there are witches and wizards and etc in the poetry from this time. Shaming events and namings that happened in childhood can influence us today, as adults, because those parts of our psyches were frozen in time, were sealed in shame and contempt, and our development stopped in those areas. Where healthy children have access to the full spectrum of the psyche, we have entire areas where the memories of what happened to us are so toxic that we do not access them.

Our resilience amazes me.

Brene Brown was correct when she wrote that we human beings come into the world hard-wired for challenge. That is why we are able to go back there now and reclaim those parts of ourselves that were frozen in time, that are still frozen. That is why freeing these parts of ourselves is so painful.

The emotions feel real, even today, even as adults. Shame, terror, guilt. Cowardice, fraudulence. The Magical Child does not operate from the rational mindset of the adult.

That is the thing, about these therapists of ours. They knew this about us. They knew the courage it took to seek out and free that trapped spiritual energy, and they knew how vulnerable that made us.

And they did it, anyway.

What kind of person does such a thing? Encourages a determined voyager to believe in safe harbor, to believe they have a map and know a destination and stand there wishing us bon voyage when they know darn well they are going to gaslight us in the darkest part of the forests or oceans or however it is we see our quest to save ourselves.

Isn't that something.

***

Well, anyway. I wanted to clarify that because there are witches and etc in the poetry having to do with therapy. I don't wish to offend, and I don't want to leave the impression that I am one of those people wandering around believing childish belief systems are real. But here again ~ we did not know about these normal phases of childhood development, when we began therapy. We did not know then, that this is where we would be working through what happened to us when we were little kids.

So, it was embarrassing to bring that stuff into therapy, but we trusted the therapist to bring us through it.

That is how much we risked.

Sanity.

And they knew this, and they did what they did, anyway.

***

When we uncover and expose the hurt and shame in childhood memories, we feel echoes ~ intense echoings, sometimes ~ of the same feelings we felt when we were hurt as little girls (or little boys).

Our therapists knew this information about the Magical Child. My second therapist, the woman named as Ally in the poetry written during Family of Origins Group Therapy, explained this to us. Until someone does explain that very salient fact about this phase of childhood mental and spiritual development, we are at a loss to explain all this imagery of wizards and witches and etc. when we decide, with our rational adult minds, to enter therapy. As adults who do not have knowledge of the phases of childhood mental and emotional development, we find ourselves swamped in something that feels like a really bad fairy tale. We wonder what in the world could be the matter with us, to think the way we seem to suddenly be thinking. Unless we have a therapist who explains the why behind the imagery, we begin to feel distaste for the kinds of thoughts we seem to be thinking. We carry that, too. If we are determined to heal, we trust the therapist to get us back to rational.

And we go for it.

Again, this is where the therapist's power to hurt us, if he or she chooses to do that instead of helping us, comes in and comes from.

Us.

Not them.

As was true of our initial abusers, our therapists too had only what we had so freely given over to them, for the purpose of helping us to define us to ourselves in a healthy way. That is what they hurt us with. Our own power of self definition, our own spiritual energy that never should have been used as they used it.

It was a sacred trust, what went on between us, and they broke that trust.

Here again, knowing this about us before we ever took that leap of faith and handed the keys to our psyches over to them, our therapists committed crimes against morality and decency that boggle the mind, in turning on us the way they did.

Because we were hurt, because we were wounded in a time in our mental and emotional development when all children believe in magic, when we believe Santa is a real person and all the elves are real, and there really could be witches, and so on, those are the belief systems we need to explore to heal the energies trapped and frozen in place in that time when we were being hurt; when, for so many of us, we were little kids whose abuse, this time or any time, could as easily have resulted in our murders as in our somehow living through it.

Or in the deaths of one of our sibs.

And we all went to school the next morning.

And that sacred horror is what our therapists knew and we did not, when we elected to track our woundings down and heal them.

So I really do wonder what kinds of people bad therapists are, in their hearts and their spirits.

And how could we know we were being abused all over again when we had no possible way to question the abusive therapist's treatment, when we were there because we'd been abused in the first place.

Revicitmizing a victim is an easy thing. Slide right into the wounds a parent created and batter the survivor, again.

How disgusting.

Anyway, that is a huge piece of our woundings at our therapists' hands. When our therapists are not trustworthy people, we can be revictimized with our own shame and we have nothing left then to counter it because we know, as adults, that Santa never was real, and that fairy tales of power and vengeance and etc are not something we believe in as adults.

But we name ourselves, if we take vengeance, even if it is imaginary vengeance.

An impossible position to be in; yet we have come through it.

Because we have courage, and because we are ethical ourselves, we are able to come through even the betrayal of a therapist.

So, take heart, everyone.

We are doing this thing really well.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

He had renounced his medical license. And he would be dismissed as a member of this institute.

I am such a heroic woman, I think. I have so tried to overcome the damage and harm and betrayals that I have suffered. But I have not prevailed. I have failed.

No Copa, you haven't failed. Not in any sense of the word.

You are heroic.

It isn't about perfect outcomes, for us. (Not for anyone else, either.) But especially for us, we need to acknowledge the courage it takes to willfully, intentionally, determinedly revisit those traumatic events. Even soldiers experience PTSD and they are adults when they are traumatized or retraumatized.

We were little girls. (Or, little boys.)

We had nothing. Absolutely dependent on our abusers, we had no knowledge of "this will be over in two years and I will go home".

We were home.

Our theaters of war were our living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms and every car ride we took with our abusers.

I find us to be courageous, Copa.

You had a bad man that you paid to take you, and to take you back safely from, the traumatic events of your own time when you were just a little girl and bad things, very bad things, happened to you.

His is the responsibility for your pain and confusion and, just like it was when we were little, no one understands how that feels, what that means, to have been revictimized by an adult we are paying our good money to help us because he promised we could trust him.

You are fine, Copa.

I am fine.

SWOT is better than fine. (We should go and see her therapist. I love what is happening now for SWOT.)

We are saving ourselves, now.

And I am not even charging myself money.

:O)

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

I feel a great deal of shame. Imagine what it was to be me, then. No real mother. No father. No sister. Nobody. My grandmother had died. I wanted to have a full life. Connection. Purpose. Mobility.

I put all my chips on a number. And spun the wheel. I kept putting more chips, and more chips. I kept losing. I doubled up. I lost. And I lost and I lost. And then I walked away.

I was able to leave when I adopted my son.

Think about what it has been for me in these last years with the death of my mother and the inability of my son to right himself.

It was at the time that my mother began to decline that that friend (the happy deliverer of difficult news who is a psychoanalyst) contacted me out of the blue to tell me he had died.

Honestly, I do not know how to think about my life.

Honestly, I do not.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I feel a great deal of shame. Imagine what it was to be me, then. No real mother. No father. No sister. Nobody. My grandmother had died. I wanted to have a full life. Connection. Purpose. Mobility.

I put all my chips on a number. And spun the wheel. I kept putting more chips, and more chips. I kept losing. I doubled up. I lost. And I lost and I lost. And then I walked away.

I was able to leave when I adopted my son.

This is what I think I know. Though we would be different kinds of people today, had we been parented in an even minimally appropriate way (like not confronting our own mortality every time our cowardly abusers took out the flickering memories of their abuses on their own freaking little kids) we all did go on, somehow, to create our lives.

And we learned, as you did too Copa when you adopted your son, that loving someone else can heal us.

Remember that old Beatles song: The love you take is equal to the love you make.

This is true.

We can love, and give, and stand for someone else, or for our pets, and we can heal our present day selves through those ways we name ourselves good and valid people. When we elect to go back in time to the frozen trauma places in our psyches, the only benefit to us is in relearning the names we were hurt and threatened and tortured into believing when we were little kids and had nothing, not even safety.

I am sorry you have been so alone in your life, Copa. It seems so horribly unfair that these things happened to us at all and then, that they weakened and took away our abilities to believe in ourselves as adults.

We were so vulnerable.

And there are predators in the world.

And we fell and fell, and we never knew why.

That is in the past, Copa. We cannot change what happened to us. What we can do is decide whether what we were taught about ourselves was moral, or correct, or appropriate, or beneficial in any smallest way. We can learn now, whether there was any truth at all in our childhoods, or whether our abusers were and continue to be, liars. For some of us, poverty or prejudice or any of a thousand other things may have turned otherwise decent people into abusive parents. For others of us, for those whose good fortune it was to be born here in this country and to have had enough food and clothing and an opportunity to read and learn and experience the possibility of healing...our abusers were evil people.

They could have sought help. They hurt their children, created victim mindsets in their own beautiful children, instead.

These things that happened to us cannot be changed, Copa.

But we can change whether we believe them. We can label and name our abusers ~ whether they are parents or teachers or sisters or therapists ~ we can define them and the value of the things they told us were true.

We can do that.

And though it is too late for us to claim the lives we may have created for ourselves had we been made healthy and strong in our childhoods, we each has the life we did create.

We have created lives replete with beauty and with the warmth of the love we made, Copa and SWOT. This is the miracle, here. We loved ourselves to this point through loving and helping and standing for and believing in, others.

We did that; we do that.

Our abusers could not touch or change or damage that core that was us, that was who we were and that is who we are now, from the beginning.

All we are doing here is reclaiming ourselves from the greedy, grasping lying fat little dirty fingers of our abusers, reaching all over and touching our psyches.

We invited them in.

We can throw the dirty little bums out.

I wish I could get my money back, though. Not for the first times, but for the times when that first therapist was betraying a sacred trust and still took my money.

What a cheap, sad little tramp he must have been, in his heart.

I mean, we all make mistakes. I make a million mistakes every day. but our therapists did what they did knowing what they knew about what they were doing.

And, just like the abusers who hurt us in the first place, they did it anyway.

And they kept doing it, COPA and SWOT.

That's as evil as can be, to do something like that.

Cedar


SWOT, I was thinking about your mom ridiculing you like she did over what boy you liked when you were such a beautiful young girl just coming into her womanhood.

What a jerky thing that was for your mom to do.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Think about what it has been for me in these last years with the death of my mother and the inability of my son to right himself.

It was at the time that my mother began to decline that that friend (the happy deliverer of difficult news who is a psychoanalyst) contacted me out of the blue to tell me he had died.

Honestly, I do not know how to think about my life.

Honestly, I do not.

My D H told me one time that I needed to forgive myself.

That is what you need to do, Copa.

Forgive Copa.

She has fought the good fight; she chose love, and she chose trust, every time.

We have no control over what other people do. In a way, we collude with our abusers when we refuse to grant ourselves mercy, when we cannot forgive ourselves, when we refuse to acknowledge our courage and intelligence and the goodness in our hearts.

Forgive, Copa.

I know that you will.

Soon, sooner than you know or can believe, you will make it through this part.

:O)

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I need to go take a shower, now.

I will post the remaining poetry for you, later.

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

Forgive Copa.

She has fought the good fight; she chose love, and she chose trust, every time.

Yes, I will try very hard. Thank you.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Yes, I will try very hard. Thank you.

It is so easy, Copa. Once we stop hating ourselves at our stupid abuser's behests, all that is left is the courage we lived through until we learned that loving someone else could save us, too.

I began to admire myself a little for that, Copa.

I began looking different to myself physically. I no longer believed my abusers enough to fuel my hatred of myself with their words and imagery. Once that happened, toxicities fell apart like leaves in the Fall. Dead things, crumbling underfoot.

Or, like in those scary movies where they kill the spider and the web falls in skeins and threads and dirtied clumps and all at once, the cave is safe and fit for human habitation.

So, since I am human? I moved in.

Then, I started a Fire. A fire like Pierre Tielhard de Chardin's Fire.

Love.

For me.

And like all light, the glow of it can be seen for miles and miles and miles.

Hope.

Still a new and very pleasant Fire but oh, the beauty in it, Copa and SWOT.

I will post that quote for us, later.

Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

So, it was embarrassing to bring that stuff into therapy, but we trusted the therapist to bring us through it.

That is how much we risked.

Sanity.

And they knew this, and they did what they did, anyway.

Cedar, in all my years of therapy, and I started at 23, I have never had such a horrible experience as you. I had a few jerks, but I just dumped them. On the other hand, my attitude was different. I was eager to get help and a compliant patient and it was not scary to me to tell this stuff to a therapist. I figured they heard anything I had to say and much worse so I wasn't afraid to go. I also felt safe because of the illegality of a therapist talking about us in the general population.

Now if any of my therapists had done what yours did, I would probably have been afraid of therapy too, but your therapist is human, like everyone else. He sounds like a sick predator. They do exist. My close friend took her son to see a psychologist (he had the psychology degree PhD) and his main interest were the mothers who brought their kids and he had been in trouble once for smoozing with one of the moms. Well, my friend was a beautiful woman and, at the time, in her 30's, and he wanted her too and she was very naive. He was in her life, she now feels in a very unhealthy way, for ten years. He tried the same thing with me because I consulted him about Bart, but I stopped going. My friend honestly thought he was trying to help her...we laugh about it now.

You can't just trust somebody due to a title. I've learned to pick and choose and have had a great deal of success in therapy, but quickly learned...women only. Not that all women are nice, but I've had much better luck with females.

Just my .01

 

[BusynMember]

evicitmizing a victim is an easy thing. Slide right into the wounds a parent created and batter the survivor, again.

Cedar, again I am not going to diagnose, just imagine. I assume a lot of people in all power professions have a high degree of personality disorders. They like to be important...so I go with narcissistic. These sick puppies DO try to re victimize people. It is a kick that they get. And if one happens to come upon a narcissistic psychiatrist, psychologist or t therapist, they are going to be hurt very badly.

I am deeply sorry you had this horrific, sadistic experience with somebody you thought you could trust with your deepest feelings and secrets. There are no words to make it better. Anyone who would do that is plain scum.

 

[BusynMember]

We are saving ourselves, now.

I have found self-help groups to be just as helpful sometimes as a good therapist. Who else will understand how we feel? Even a good psychologist probably was not abused, but learned about it in a textbook. It's not the same as going through it.
It is amazing, whenever I go to any group, at how similar our symptoms are. The voices talking to us, our feeling of worthlessness (even those who have great jobs), depression, panic or eating disorders, mental health issues...and the shame from the words our parents, who were supposed to love us, drilled into our heads.

My therapist told me you can tell if you were abused by the self-talk you hear. A parent who was "good enough" would not tell her child she didn't love her when she was born, would not neglect teaching her even basic life skills, would not call her names or mock her or humiliate her and would offer loving compassion, which we did not get. That's why our self-talk is so mean unless we really get down and talk back to it.

And having been treated like a loser/outcast at home, we are fodder for other predators...the kids at school, boyfriends, teachers, bosses, etc. They can tell. And we keep getting put down and we believe it every time we hear it.

Complex Post Traumatic Trama changes a child's developing brain and makes the child less capable of dealing with stress, less able to monitor their emotions, less able to do well in school, and we are more apt to see t he world as black and white. And we often do not feel safe.

I did not feel safe for a day until I met my husband. I did not believe I could take care of myself. I was needy and desperate and my own family didn't accept me or try to make me feel better mostly because they were the same. And they lacked compassion. Except for themselves.

We need to change how we talk to ourselves. I'm working on that very hard.

I think people who stay in touch with their abusers have a harder time letting go of the worthless feeling because the people themselves are a trigger.

Just like I no longer listen to the news because it would make me feel sad for people and hopeless for our country and there was nothing good in it for my mental health (and I've learned that being good to me has to come first or I'm no good for anyone else)...completely eradicating my human triggers from my life has stopped much sadness and icky trips to the past. I know it was probably not a healthy coping mechanism, but throwing away my baby pictures with fake smiling people was good for me. I have no reminders in my space of "them."

Cedar and Copa: Try this exercise. My therapist told me to do it and do it fast. She told me to write three things that define me just in one word. I wrote creative, sensitive and compassionate very quickly.

She told me I was getting better to describe myself that way.

I feel a lot stronger and much better. But I don't believe people ever heal 100% from long term trauma and lack of mother love. That doesn't mean we can't live good lives. I hope that doesn't sound contradictory or negative.

 

[BusynMember]

Honestly, I do not know how to think about my life.

You were brave against all odds.
You forgave. I have not been able to do that yet. I probably won't be able to. Besides, I don't believe you can forgive anyone who has no remorse. But you went to your mom when she offered to love you and that was brave of you.

You were a good mother. Good mothers can have kids who don't do well. You forget how much of your son's behavior is driven by DNA and his very real challenges. You may have been repeatedly told everyone is capable of doing anything if they just put their mind to it and that motherism may have stuck in your mind. It's untrue. Some people need help all their lives (I do). I have learning and neurological differences and could not have been self-sufficient and could have only gotten through college with the same help they give children with special needs. You are not a failure as a mother. Your son is different. It was never your fault. You can not love a child so much that the fact that he was exposed to drugs and alcohol in utero and had a head injury will become insignificant. Love does not have t hat kind of power. You DID love him. You DO love him. He knows it.

You have achieved many things that I can only dream about. We are all good at different things. You were great in the educational area and business world. Copa, that is huge. I could not have done it. Not everyone can do it even if they really want to. You are SMART. You are STRONG.

I think you may be clinically depressed. I've been there many times before the Paroxatene and you feel really badly about life in general with clinical depression. You can't see t he light or believe you will ever feel better. With me, and some with depression, I had a feeling of not being real/being in a dream...derealization/deprsonalization. Very scary symptoms. That is disassociation without different personalities, but it is caused by abuse. Did you ever feel that way?

I don't know if my diagnosis is right, of course. But if it is, you either have to decide to take action or stay depressed. Like your son, you have many decisions ahead of you. I am glad you decided to move.That seems to make you come alive

I care about you very much. I want you to feel good and hope you do very soon.

 

[BusynMember]

SWOT, I was thinking about your mom ridiculing you like she did over what boy you liked when you were such a beautiful young girl just coming into her womanhood.

She hated every boy I ever went out with EXCEPT for one that I never really liked but went out with simply because I didn't think anyone else would ever ask me out and I felt I needed to have a boyfriend. This mattered a lot to my mother, which was the cause of her long hair mania. "BOYS LIKE LONG HAIR!"

Once I went out with a gentile boy who was a carpenter, and he made a good living. Immediately she picked on him for not being Jewish and repeated her sick mantra to me that non-Jews all beat their wives and drink too much. I believe my sister was spared this silliness, but I wasn't. I didn't believe it though. After that, she mocked his profession and, in a voice dripping with mockery and venom, waved her hands (like she did when she was being terrible to me) and belittled him because he hadn't gone to college.

Neither had she, but "girls only have to be beautiful, not smart."

I remember trying to argue back and finally the tears that always happened when I was being mocked by my mother. I may have said, "I hate you!" which could be why clueless Sis and mother's savior bro said *I* was abusive. At any rate, I may not have too. But she made me feel like the boys I dated were nothing and I was nothing.

Sorry for the rant, Cedar. Another trigger from the past.

And I stayed a freaken virgin for her until I got married. Of course, I don't think she believed it.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Well, my friend was a beautiful woman and, at the time, in her 30's, and he wanted her too and she was very naive. He was in her life, she now feels in a very unhealthy way, for ten years. He tried the same thing with me because I consulted him about Bart, but I stopped going. My friend honestly thought he was trying to help her...we laugh about it now.

Thank you, SWOT. As it is with discussing the most hurtful aspects of our abusive childhoods here, learning that I am not the only one this happened to helps me see that first therapist too, through my own eyes. Always before, through all these years, I could only see what happened through the eyes of the abuser. There was too much pain and guilt and confusion whirling around inside me already for me to do anything but accept that his condemnation was valid. Take that one step further, add in that my mother was predicting doom for my at risk child and accusing me of "Well, I guess you weren't such a good mother after all, were you?", the condemnation went global, and it went radioactive. It was a very hard time. I was so desperate to know what I had done to my child. That drove me. It wasn't until I found the site (and that was for my son, well into an addiction I denied until I had been here for some months) that I began to be able to stand up even a little, even in my own thinking.

Man, I felt so guilty and wrong and wondered whether I were stupid or evil or just plain weird.

I feel sad for myself in that time. I was so confused, and in such pain and so desperate over what was happening to my kids.

And there was my mother, and there was my sister.

But I had D H.

:O)

So, somehow, I did get through to functional. Ballet was part of that ~ a big part. Going back to school was one of the scariest things I could have done. In case I did turn out to be stupid, or worse. But I did it. That is the thing we all need to remember about ourselves. We were so hurt, and so freaking vulnerable. Predators swarm us, I swear they can spot us a mile away.

We faced those things and we did those things and we did the best we knew every time and we felt badly when we messed up and we tried to do better.

We are good, good people.

We have every reason to blame and whine and demand reparation but we don't. We try harder. We could not know those things about ourselves until we had lived life to look back on to see the truth of who we really are, and of who we had to have been, all along.

That we know now these good things ~ or at least, these good intentions that we held and hold ~ that is an unshakeable source of strength for us now because of the truth in it.

Something real, to counter the abuser's condemnation and punishment and naming.

I am deeply sorry you had this horrific, sadistic experience with somebody you thought you could trust with your deepest feelings and secrets. There are no words to make it better. Anyone who would do that is plain scum.

Thank you again, SWOT. Seeing that first therapist in these terms I am using to describe how I feel about him now, when I am healthier and see him and his abuse through my own eyes is new to me. I really never thought I would heal from that. It is shaming to acknowledge that your own therapist could not even stand to treat you without hurting you, too.

Not even for money.

I was very afraid of that therapist, of the medical record that existed, of the names I may have been named, officially and in his mind.

And I had no defense, in that time. He was the therapist. I was not.
Just as it was with my mother...who would know better what was true about me than my own mother, than my own therapist.

I agree with the scum part in the sense that he had to know what he was doing. He had to know, and he had to have done it on purpose. If that is true, if he did what he did on purpose ~ it's one of those things I am always saying about my family of origin, too. I don't get the win. So, I am angry, now. Finally able to be angry, and finally, to see what he did to me through my eyes and not his. I don't want what he did to turn me bitter, just as I don't want the ongoing abuses happening in my family of origin to make me bitter.

We walk a fine line, in our healing.

Book TV is doing a program about Selma, AL during the civil rights era. SWOT, you posted about the legitimization of gay marriage. In a way, we are doing the same things, on an individual basis, that each of these groups of people had to do for themselves too, to establish legitimacy.

Hated and abused and taught that was who they are, each individual in every victimized group fighting now for legitimacy has walked where we walk, today. Their fight for legitimacy was and is painful, too. Predators, people who hate for other reasons and focus on the vulnerable and easily victimized to act that out, attacked them, too.

Taunted and teased and broke and broke them, too.

But they didn't give up, and we will not stop our healing processes, either. We must claim it, but we too are beautiful human beings with every right to reclaim every wonderful thing that was taken from us or that made us feel and believe we were ugly or stupid or worth less on principle, for no reason other than that we were who we are.

So, I thought that was an interesting way to look at this.

Did everyone hear the President sing Amazing Grace yesterday?

I found what he did courageous and heartstoppingly beautiful.

Perhaps, he was singing for us too, SWOT and Copa.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I remember trying to argue back and finally the tears that always happened when I was being mocked by my mother. I may have said, "I hate you!" which could be why clueless Sis and mother's savior bro said *I* was abusive. At any rate, I may not have too. But she made me feel like the boys I dated were nothing and I was nothing.

Sorry for the rant, Cedar. Another trigger from the past.

I have been thinking about your mom today, SWOT. Could it be that she was angry that you were growing into independence? An independence in which you would have male protection? Maybe that is what she was so angry about, to shame you like that.

Why would she shame you around the issue of boys when she had been a young girl once herself and had to know how vulnerable and sensitive we all are ~ boys and girls both ~ at this time in our lives.

It is good to rant, SWOT. It is good to be angry about things like racism and prejudice and cruelty and in a way, that is exactly what happened to us too, in our lives.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

This is poetry from Group Therapy. The therapist was a woman ~ a beautiful Jewish woman with liquid brown eyes.

In a far land of witches and ogres
in a time of princesses on strings
There would come
to those trapped on that I land

A staunch ally
from the Valley of Horses and Kings

On the Wind they would ride
the princesses and the ally
Through Fire and through Smoke
to the land, far and fair

On white horses with reigns of
black satin
Seeded pearl ribbands
in their sun-scented hair

Draped in veils sewn of silk and
white cotton
Beneath which fly the colors of each Lady
fair

So they traveled
the ally and the Ladies
toward the Dawning...
Through black, blasted lands
wherein each Lady's past
had its lair

So they traveled, the ally and the Ladies
princesses of dark, timeless lands without water
or air
Toward a sunstruck aerie of white and cupolaed pavillions
at the behest of the ally, gone before them
on the back of a white and a spirited mare

So they traveled, the ally and the Ladies
single file, to the land, far and fair
On white horses with reigns of...black satin
seeded pearl ribbands in their sun-scented hair

So they traveled, the ally and the Ladies ~
spending the coin of those dark, timeless realms...
Purchasing ~ courage
with coins minted in fear

Telling tales of old scars and of dark, unhealed wounds
that the Child within each might...appear

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

The white Child be flown
ere the magician's return

Call her Name
call...the Time

Call the sweet, bloodied burn
of the phoenix

(Perhaps, Grandmother
the phoenix cries, as it burns....)

White against the carmine pits of Hell ~
white, against the bloodied ashes of its birth
In baptismal Fire and in water, reborn
a white and a six-petaled promise reflect

Moon shadowed
in pools catacombing the Earth

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Silvered nets and silvered promises
glibly spoken, of surcease
Echo the brassy clarion call of trumpets
thundering
the martial rhythms of...release

Of battle, joined in words unspoken ~
in body counts and bright wings, broken

Swift; swift comes the sly inheritor....

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Seboulissa, mother goddess with one breast
eaten away by worms of sorrow and loss ~
see me, now

Your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall remember

Audrey Lourde

I'm not sure whether this is Audry Lorde or Monique Wittig.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

We are a race of women that of old feared no pain and knew no death. And if some of us have fallen on evil and degenerate times, there burns in us yet the throb of the old blood.

Mary Daly