Sevenfold Silence

I've been meaning for a while to write a post about glamourbombing (Eshari's description is one of the best I've seen, no lie). You may know it as Poetic Terrorism (obligatory disclaimer: I love a lot of Hakim Bey's ideas but disagree vehemently with some of his lifestyle choices), or Outlaw Clowning within the Faerie Nation community.

Personally, I've got a checkered history with glamourbombing: I love doing it, but I do not know if I am particularly good at it, and as a result I haven't done it in a long time. Perhaps that's why I feel so drawn to write about it?

I guess this is a good place to start: glamourbombing goes hand in hand with a lot of otherkin stuff, particularly the fey-flavored. I do not think I would be drawn to it--I do not think I'd love it so much--if I weren't otherkin. My fondness for it is one of the big tipoffs to me that I'm somehow otherworldly.

But I think that to pretend that it's largely otherkin, or even that most otherkin do it or are interested in it, is potentially deceptive. While I haven't seen statistics I'd be surprised if that were the case on either count. It speaks volumes that not only was one of the most best and most dedicated glamourbombers I knew a chaos magician, but that the weakest section in the otherwise incredibly awesome Field Guide (which you really ought to read if you haven't already) was the part on glamourbombing.

We have something to do with it, in other words. But we're not quite joined at the hip.

(last of the camping stories. for the rest, check the beltaine 2008 tag.)

Late at night on that camping trip it got very cold--not unbearably so, but to the point where sleeping wasn't really practical. I'd been sharing a tent with my unicorn friend for warmth, but eventually mammalian body warmth wasn't saving us. We hopped out of the tent, shivering, and headed over with blankets and coats for the campfire.

It was somewhere around 3 or 3:30am at the time, and there were still a handful of people up at the time, including a guy who accidentally self-initiated into Reiki I--he'd been doing it all his life without ever knowing what it was. (Open-Source Reiki people, take note!) When my friend and I settled in next to the fire shivering and bitching moderately, he set to work generating obscene quantities of heat from his hands and trying to step up our metabolisms a little so we'll quit shivering. Fireside reiki, in other words.

So he finishes up on my friend, and gets to me. And my carefully- and unwittingly-constructed psychic shielding, put up over the course of a long and checkered personal history, rejects it and sends it back.

He keeps on trying, and I guess it keeps on coming back to him. I don't control it--it just does. He's shaking and starting to freak out, and literally takes a few steps back. This is weird, he says, over and over again, as he starts to talk to me about it. It occurred to me that he was reacting to what I perceive to be my fey current, but I trust his judgment on this matter.

We talked for maybe half an hour amidst further periodic experimentation, about trauma, involuntary shielding, and how to start letting the shields down when you don't even know how they got there in the first place. He brought up some good points, some of which I'd considered before (get rid of the psychological/emotional issues, and you get rid of the cause for such shielding, and accordingly the shielding starts to go away), but it's good to have outside input/confirmation on this. He knows, too, he said, that reiki can be used to heal emotional/psychic wounds. But he doesn't feel competent enough to do that yet.

I am actually set to receive a reiki attunement and the corresponding training, in October. I hope I'll at least be able to drop the shielding by then. Not only will the attunement take better, I think, but I think it'll be healthy for me just in general. Not to mention that I think it'll make my 'kin side brighter, as it were.

My friends at Faerie Nation Mag are looking for art and writing for their next issue. Any art, so long as it's pretty (no, it doesn't have to have fairies in it). Any writing, but especially articles and essays between two and ten paragraphs. Life, knitting, mysticism, whatever--they'll take it if it catches their eye.

They will happily publish anybody, known or unknown. Art submission guidelines are here and writing guidelines here, though please send writing subs to fnmsub at gmail dot com rather than the given address.

They're already slightly past deadline, and are only extending to May 16th, 2008, so hurry.

I watched My Neighbor Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, last night. It's a cute little movie, very fun, mostly inoffensive, and clearly inspired by Disney.

It got me thinking about Hayao Miyazaki's stuff in general, and particularly as it relates to us (otherkin, that is). It all happens in what tvtropeswiki happily calls Ghibli Hills, a pastoral, magical land filled with Shinto land spirits (a modern take on them, generally). Often the world's out of whack and needs appeasing, setting back into that natural-mankind balance where humans live in and understand nature. Miyazaki's stuff isn't Buddhist in the slightest (although I maintain that Nausicaa's got an Amitabha Buddhist streak in there somewhere); it's overtly Shinto with a smidgen of Taoism.

What's this have to do with us, though? I'm not sure. I try to shy away from a lot of the typical conceptions of otherkin, because a lot of them just don't fit me or don't fit me as well as they could. (Otherkin think nature's super! Otherkin are all in-tune with the natural world!) But that sense of and connection with a natural flow, which is so often cited as being something we have and do, is overtly present in nearly all of Miyazaki's films.

I think, though, that what I personally react to that's "so very 'kin" in Miyazaki's work, is instead just the sense of wonder and amazement. A protagonist goes about her normal life (she's usually female) and then something happens, and all of a sudden she's aware that the world's a much bigger (cooler, scarier) place than it had been, and she's not the same for it. That's not an uncommon theme--hell, that's like half Joseph Campbell's monomyth right there--but the particular way Miyazaki does it, with otherworldly spirits and a childlike sense of wonder, tweaks my otherkin sensibilities like nothing else.