Field Journal of a Wanna-Be Archaeologist

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Something I’ve been struggling with lately is how often I get requests to send energy out for people who are struggling with health and other issues. Maybe it’s always been this way and I was just too obtuse to notice it, but it seems like the last few years in the pagan community it has ramped up to the point that every day I am bombarded with requests for people to send energy for themselves, their relatives, or their friends who are struggling with illness, impending death, a job interview, or tough situation.

As a pagan with a finite amount of material resources to throw at such problems, I love the idea of being able to send a little free energy to each person, doing that little bit to help them find wellness, their peace, or even sometimes that new job. It’s easy, it’s quick, it takes very little preparation, and has minimal cost to me in a monetary sense.

It doesn’t seem like much, but all that energy expenditure can add up. Even the most renewable resources have to be given time to renew. Sometimes it seems like I just don’t get enough recharge time, and that’s invariably when I end up feeling stressed out and I shut down my communications and quit checking my email just to give myself a break.

As a clergy person, I feel like maybe the answer is maybe to add them to my prayer list – giving them up to “my” gods instead of sending my personal energy directly. But that feels....like not enough, not direct enough. I’m not sure. And I guess that would require me to actually take that time every day to meet with the gods. I probably should be doing that anyway, but it feels more genuine to me when I do it purely in thanksgiving (instead of always petitioning them for something) or when I feel properly inspired.

I don’t begrudge this giving of my energy, but there are so many requests and I really don’t feel qualified to judge who is “deserving” or not deserving. Do I send a push of energy to my friend’s mom who has cancer, or do I send it to another friend whose husband is interviewing for a crucial job that would make all the difference to their financial health? Should I split the difference and send them each a little, or make a choice who to send a bigger push to in the hopes that it could be the little bit extra that helps push the universe into a different outcome?

Or is it just all horse-hockey that we’re making up in our heads, and it really doesn’t matter anyway? Sometimes my skeptical brain just has to play devil’s advocate.

How do you, as a pagan, deal with this? How do I, as a clergy member, deal with this, and how do I, as a naturally generous person, maintain a balance between my own health and my impulse to help where I can?

I don’t have a brilliant answer, a witty quote, or any eloquent words, just more questions. Welcome to a teeny slice of the inner turmoil of my brainmeats.

I love this quote: “Consent is about two people who want to connect emotionally, but have different ideas about what that looks like in a given moment. Consent is about honoring the other person’s threshold of comfort without expecting an explanation or an apology. And without them feeling like they owe you an explanation or an apology.”

This article about tickling and consent struck home for me – not just because of what it says about consent, but also because I had an instant gut reaction while reading it that I wasn't expecting.

As a person who used to regularly give over consent of her body to someone else, part of the negotiations always included the limit of “No tickling while restrained.” Being held down or restrained while being tickled gives me panic attacks and invokes an instant visceral reaction that not even being held down and physically beaten or raped invokes. Believe me, I know this from experience. I would rather be held down and raped than restrained and unmercifully tickled.

I am extremely ticklish, and I spent much of my childhood being tortured this way, crying while other people laughed. Completely losing my (proverbial) shit, screaming and flailing, being half suffocated while people held me down to tickle me. It was so embarrassing. They were my friends and family, they weren’t doing it to hurt me. I was “supposed” to laugh it off but it left scars all the same. It was deeply humiliating, and let me tell you – humiliation is NOT one of my kinks.

It sounds stupid, I know. Tickling is harmless, right? I mean, nobody gets hurt, it’s just a sign of affection. Why do you have to be the no fun dog, Amy?

I struggled with this for a long time, feeling like a jerk because being tickled doesn’t say “warm and fuzzy” to me...especially since I married someone whose primary way of showing affection is just the kind of teasing, poking, and tickling that raises my hackles. It took a long time for me to identify this issue and realize that I wasn’t just being an irritable biddy – and it’s something we’re still working on figuring out how to compromise on.

Perhaps because of these experiences, I hate to feel out of control. For all that I’m a very genuine person who can’t lie convincingly to save their life and wears their heart on their sleeve, I’m very careful about who I allow to see me cry or be angry or lose control of my emotions. It’s why I don’t “play” at open kink events, it’s why I am so careful where and when I drink, and why I am even careful about who I watch sappy movies with.

The worst part is that I’ve been on the other side of this, too. As the author of the article says, “I realized there was a part of me that thought, however briefly, that if I just tickle her again, or differently, or maybe flip her hair, or lightly poke her nose… then she’d realize it was fun.” Tickling is fun for the tickler. I get it. I never thought about it as a consent issue before, but it is. I’m glad I read this, glad it made me stop and think. I always try to be mindful when the tables are turned and I am the tickler. I know I will be doubly-mindful now.

For me, tickling is a sacred trust. I can allow it, and even giggle and enjoy it, as long as it stops when I say “stop,” no matter how breathlessly it’s uttered.

This morning I came across an interesting journal entry that discussed poly and possessiveness. To preserve their confidentiality I'm not going to link to it here, but I do want to share a few excerpts because this is something I've pondered too - specifically the use of "Mine."

I like to claim my partners as "Mine." I like to be claimed in the same way. (It makes my subby little heart happy, ok?!). I use phrases like "My Love" or "My Guys" specifically because they are possessive. As a poly person, sometimes I feel like that should be awkward, but somehow it never has been.

When I call someone "Mine", what I'm really saying to them is "You are so profoundly valuable to me that I carry your presence in my life in a special place in my heart, close to where my core being lives. I have been changed by you, and those changes will be a part of what makes up the essential "Me" until my last breath."

It's not a grasping attempt to hold them fixed at my side. It's not said to diminish them or take away their autonomy or deny their other partners. On the contrary, it's an acknowledgement that just by being the amazing person they are, they have changed me. It takes nothing away from them.

We are each a sum of the experiences that we have throughout our lives. The actions we have taken, the people we have loved, the places we have lived. All of these things create the people we are now. That's why I don't get it when people are jealous of their partner's previous lovers - the experience of loving that past lover is part of what makes up the person that you love today. Who is to say that you'd still love your partner the same way you do without them having had that experience?

Anyway, I digress. Back to "Mine".

I really liked what the article had to say about it:

If I start from the idea that I'm not deserving -- that I'm not enough, as I am -- then "mine" becomes desperate. I need another person to be complete -- and I certainly can't share them with anyone else. It's scarcity thinking. But if I start from the idea that I am enough, that I am a whole, complete person and so is my partner -- then I'm not taking, I'm giving, and so is she. I have an endless supply of me to give, and so does she. She can give herself to me as much as she wants and I can say "mine" without taking away from anyone else, and I can do the same for her.

This, to me, is the essential nugget of the poly lifestyle - the rejection of scarcity thinking and the embracing of the idea that we are each whole beings in our own right and don't need a Disney prince (or princess) to complete us. In our completeness we have the choice to fill our lives with who and what speaks to our hearts without needing to dominate or consume them.

An old friend of mine paid me the best compliment I have ever received today.

He said: "I totally got my I don't give a fuck attitude from hanging out with you. I have passed that along to my children and encourage them to let their freak flag fly!" and "If [my daughter] is as independent and free spirit as you, I feel I've succeeded as a parent."

Wow. What do do you say to that? Thank you doesn't even start to cover it. I was speechless. One benefit of text conversations...you don't have to admit to that, but I will.

The funny thing was, he met me at a time when I was just coming into myself, pushing my boundaries to learn who I was and what I could be if I decided I just didn't care what people thought. There were a lot of times I did still care, desperately, but I put on a brave face and "faked it till I maked it." Now here I am, more than two decades later. Sure, I still care what "people" think, but the people whose opinions I care about now are only the people I love. I couldn't care less what the general public thinks of me. I sometimes enjoy the fact that I look deceptively normal until you delve deeper into my life and get to know me.

I hope my friend's children grow up with an abundance of the self-confidence and courage that I had to mine from deep within myself. I hope they grow up to be proud of who they are and unafraid to be different. I hope they pass those lessons on to their children in turn.

If that's the only legacy I ever leave for this world, I'll take it and die a happy woman.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

- from Blow, Bugle, Blow by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I’ve been struggling this week. It’s not just coming back to work after 20+ days away, and it’s not just the frigid temperatures and ugly grey snow I came home to. This is something different, something more akin to con-drop - that feeling which, for me, has always signaled that while I was away experiencing the greater world my mind outgrew its borders and is struggling with the containment of being shoved back in the same old shoebox.

I’m restless.

This feeling reminds me that I’m not where I want to be. It reminds me that there is so much more I could be doing with my professional life. But what? I’m a smart, capable woman with a degree and a good amount of well-rounded experience – I could do a lot of things. The sensible side of me says that this job is great – it’s secure; it’s something I am extremely good at that plays to my people skills, technical knowledge, and organizational talents; the pay and benefits are acceptable; I have a month of vacation and a flexible schedule; my boss is awesome and we work well together. But there’s that other side that is always asking me what else I could be doing to make a difference? Planning lawyer conventions isn’t necessarily changing the world. Would my life be better served in some other capacity? Would I be happier somewhere else, or regretting my choice to bail on a good thing?

I know this restless feeling will gradually subside, and I’ll move through life changed but accepting the yoke.

…at least for now.

I have so many other amazing things happening in my life that in the grand scheme of things this is a relatively minor irritation. I’m lucky to be in a job where I can work while my butt is in my seat but as soon as I walk away I don’t have to think about it until I come back. That, coupled with my 4-day work week and Fridays off is pretty priceless.

Sometimes I just need a pep talk to remind myself how good I really have it, right? Right?

I am a very lucky girl.

I read an article yesterday, and one particular quote really stuck out in my mind: "Just because a relationship ends does not mean it is not a success."

Wow. That stopped me in my tracks. What a simple concept. It's a concept I've been LIVING in a practical sense for years, but never really internalized the lesson in quite that way. I'm lucky to be on good terms with the majority of my ex's, but there are a few in particular who I still have a very close and loving relationship with. Even though we have that connection, this quote made me realize that I still viewed these relationships as "failures" even though I think that we get more of what we need from each other now, as ex's, than we ever did when we were actually dating.

Even in poly relationships, there are expectations. Many of them come from the pressures and pre-suppositions of the mainly monogamous environment that we grow up in - it's hard to shake that, even after a decade and a half of being poly. Some of them come from ourselves and the people we have surrounded our life with. Some of them come from each other. The thing that lets poly work is communication, but this is something that even in poly circles people don't talk about a lot - what are the explicit expectations that we have of each other?

One of the joys of the poly lifestyle is allowing relationships to develop on their own terms without the need for labels or the expectation of a forever commitment. It's wonderful to meet someone, spent time getting to know them, and slowly ease into a comfortable place of friendship and caring. Or maybe you meet someone at a party, feel an immediate mind-blowing connection with them, and start spending every day together. There are so many beautiful ways relationships can happen almost on their own, with no conscious discussion of what you expect from each other. In the beginning, you don't need that - you're busy finding the connections between you, making a road-map between your hearts.

But what about later? When those lines are there, tying you together, and you suddenly start to realize that you have an equal amount of things you disagree on. Little things at first, and then more and more. If you've been communicating well, hopefully you bring these things up with your partner(s) right away, discuss them, and then compromise or agree to disagree.

Often those little disagreements occur because of mismatched expectations. Maybe Person A feels insecure about the time that their partner is spending with other people...but is it really because of the other people, or is it maybe because they've never had a clear and honest discussion about exactly how much time they each expect to spend together? When expectations aren't clear it can put serious stress on a relationship.

Sounds simple, and on one level it is. Having open, clear, and brutally honest discussions with your partners about the expectations of your relationship is really important, even (especially?!) for monogamous couples. It's not just that, though, because so many times we have expectations that are buried so deep in our subconscious that we don't even realize they are there. It takes a fair amount of self-introspection to ferret these out.

This is how I do it: When I am feeling uncomfortable in a relationship, I step back and try to examine exactly WHAT I am feeling first. Am I disappointed, sad, angry, scared? Once I've identified the cocktail of my emotions, I look at each one and ask myself honestly why it is that I'm feeling this way, taking responsibility for that emotion. The answer is usually not "Because my partner did X to me" but something more like "Because I expected my partner to do Y, and they did Z instead." That may still be a valid reason to be upset, but if I've never expressed my expectations to my partner, how can I be upset with them for not meeting those expectations?

The joy of having your ex's as friends is that so many of the same expectations about how relationships "should" work aren't there. If you're friends with your ex, you're already bucking the trend and charting new territory because so much of the world we exist in says you're supposed to hate your ex, or at least write them out of your life completely.

To me that is so sad. This is someone you have presumably loved with at least a fair amount of passion, and the best this world expects is that you should go your separate ways and pretend not to care? Really?!? I feel so blessed that several of my ex's and I can see past THOSE expectations and into fairly uncharted territory to have a close and loving relationship. Just because our lives didn't fit like perfect puzzles pieces doesn't mean our relationships have no value. On the contrary, sometimes it's nice to know that someone loves you just for who you are, without the need to own you, shape you, or support you. And it's nice to love without the need to change someone to fit your life, or even agree on how you live your life. It's just nice to be mutually loved and accepting, without all of those expectations in the way.

I have a few amazing ex's. Our relationships are not failures, they are gifts.

It’s time for the great Dragonballz Duel! On the left we have Teavana Black Dragon Pearls, which were a wonderful holiday gift from blue_lucy and atdt1991!

On the right we have Adagio teas Black Dragon Pearls, which (true story!) I bought on a whim based on the following two five-star reviews from their website:

"Dragons must be delicious creatures. If this is what the balls taste like imagine a more tender piece like the buttocks. I hope you have the hit points because this dragon master delivers 5 damage."

"This tizzle is the shiz nizzle bam snip snap. Dude, its the shim sham if you know what I mean. You can drop 2 of your balls in the pot and they spread out to make one mean cup. The balls are so awesome, sometimes I just play with them before I brew, yo. "

Dragon Pearls are made from a tippy black tea from the Yunnan peninsula in China. Hey, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?? As far as I can tell, the only difference between these the dragon pearls and this morning’s Yunnan Jig is that the pearls contain leaves and buds, where the loose tea was just leaves. I didn’t realize this until just now, BTW, the extra Yunnan day is totally coincidence!

The unbrewed balls are fairly similar. Teavana’s ball looks to be slightly bigger and tighter packed, which means there’s more tea in the same little package. I’m guessing it’ll brew up a little darker than the Adagio ball. They’re fairly similar in color but the Adagio ball has a much stronger scent.

On to the brewing…



I’m brewing these for 4 minutes, since Teavana says optimum brew time is 4 mins, and Adagio says 3-5. Adagio wants you to brew it at 212 degrees and Teavana at 195 degrees, but I’m just going to use hot water from the coffee maker so it’s anybody’s guess what temp I’m really brewing at!

Brewed!



The brewed leaves a very different, and account for the size difference in the unbrewed balls – the leaves from the Teavana ball are much thicker, wider leaves than the Adagio’s leaves. The colors are very different too – Teavana has a lot of color variation ranging from medium green to black, whereas Adagio’s ball is a more uniform green-brown color. The brews, surprisingly, were pretty much exactly the same color. A pretty golden burgundy color that deepened just a bit after sitting for a few minutes after the leaves were taken out.

Smell Test!

The Teavana brew has a very earthy, dark grassy scent to it with just a touch of smoky smell, like bits sunshine filtering through the trees deep in the forest. In comparison the Adagio brew smells much “brighter” – sweeter and lighter, with just a touch of spiciness.

Initial Taste Test

Not surprisingly, the scents were a strong indicator of how the tea would taste. The Teavana is very earthy and woody. It has a nice mellow finish with no hint of astringency, and a sweet-ish nutty aftertaste. The Adagio brew has honey notes that develop into a nutty, almost cocoa-y flavor. The aftertaste is earthy and just a touch bitter after the initial sweetness, but in a good way.

Sweetener Test

My tea sweetener of choice is Equal. Yes, bring on the Brain Tumors!!! I normally put both cream and sugar in my tea, although I’ve already drank half of each on the initial tasting…and, well, because it was so delicious even without sweetener.

Each cup received one packet of Equal, which in retrospect was probably too much. Still, it made for some deliciously sweet tea! The sweetener in the Teavana blend really brought out the sweet spicy notes, and brightened it up quite a bit! It made the nutty flavor come to the forefront, and transformed this from the deep of a forest to a bright spring meadow. In comparison, it dulled the natural brightness of the Adagio brew, flattening the tastes and leaving a weird sweet aftertaste.

Creamer Test

I almost always use Coffee-Mate’s regular powdered French Vanilla creamer in my tea. Through experimentation urban_exotic and I have discovered it melts better than any of the low fat or low calorie equivalents.

Each cup was given two shakes of the creamer. Not precise, but close enough. Probably too much, but I’m used to working with full mugs so I had to guess at the ratio I usually use. I wasn’t sure my tea was still hot enough to dissolve the creamer, but it seemed to mostly work.

After a taste, I can tell you for sure that these balls need no creamer. The creamer turned it into creamy sweet blech with a terrible aftertaste. It erased all of the layers of flavor from the Teavana and made flattened the Adagio even worse. Yuck! Glad I only used the last 1/3 of the cup for this test!

Conclusion

If you’re going to drink this tea as-is without sweetener, the Adagio Tea Dragon Ball is the one you want. It’s naturally sweet and delicious, and one of the few teas I would drink plain.

However, if you’re like me and like your tea nice and sweet, I’d vote for the Teavana for its depth of flavor. Unlike the Adagio, the Teavana brew was actually enhanced by the sweetener, giving it a really nice brightness and range of flavors.



In the final battle, Teavana wins! Adagio put in a strong showing, especially early in the game, but Teavana comes out the winner for its superior ability to carry sweetener with grace and deliciousness!

Brother XL-3025 Sewing Machine - $100 to a friend (listed at $120 on craigslist)
SOLD! blue_lucy snapped it up. Sorry!


Also, I still have the following Dryad Designs stuff up for grabs! It is all the stone finish, and makes a beautiful set. I'll give it to you for $80 if you take all three at once, just to save myself the hassle of E-Baying it.


Moon Pentacle Plaque Stone Finish - $40 Picture Here

Moon Pentacle Candle Holder Stone Finish - $20 Picture Here

Moon Goddess Statue Stone Finish - $40 Picture Here

I'm selling some of my Dryad Designs plaques and statues - I adore them and they are all in perfect condition but I have too much stuff and not enough altar space! I'm keeping my set of seated god/goddess and the tree plaque for my altar, but the rest could be yours!

I've priced them lower than you can find on Amazon or Ebay, and definitely cheaper than any store around town. I'm willing to ship them if you need, but you pay shipping, otherwise I'll deliver! Lemme know if you're interested. I figured I'd give you guys first crack at them on the cheap, otherwise they're going to ebay for more.

Lugh Statue Stone Finish $40 Picture Here Sold!

Moon Pentacle Plaque Stone Finish - $40 Picture Here - Held for Hilary

Moon Pentacle Candle Holder Stone Finish - $20 Picture Here

Moon Goddess Statue Stone Finish - $40 Picture Here - Held for Desiree

Knotwork Rune Pentacle Wood Finish - $40 Sold!

Wheel of the Year Plaque Wood Finish - $50 Sold!