The Goddess – Power

Fear & Trembling: Where would we get the courage to become warriors? Human history begins with an enormous fear of God or whoever is causing all that lightning, those earthquakes and striking everybody down. Killing small helpless, pretty things was meant to be flattering and propitiatory to this God (I don’t get it either.) then Jesus came with a message about how God was really loving, generous and wanted the best for us. We know how that turned out.

Becoming a Warrior: As children, we struggled to understand where we fit on the power spectrum. I tried killing a snake and experimented with bullying other children the way I was bullied. I didn’t care for it. The only relief was in thinking about, researching and understanding what was going on. My earliest researches, as for many children, were in astronomy and dinosaurs. The cold magnificence of the planets and the complete wipeout of the dinosaurs gave me a way to stand back from the immediate suffering of the schoolyard. I then moved on to the early Egyptians who tried to solve their problems through magic and art. The art was visually appealing and the magic was emotionally soothing.

Pick Your Battles: I saw that most schoolyard fights were a reaction to the immediate suffering of pain or confusion, and that they magnified, rather than solved, those problems. There was a manifest holiness about this discovery. It rescued me from the torture of everyday life and elevated me to a plane where every other contributing thinker had already become immortalized.

Study & Strategy: I read everything I could get my hands on in history and biography (research) and in fairy tales (magic). When I fell in love with the novels of C.S. Lewis and Rumer Godden, the world judged my taste good – when I discovered Agatha Christie, it did not – but it turned out everyone else was reading her too. Agatha is a short course on human nature (original sin) and a proponent of both the scientific and Socratic methods. She’s great training for a Warrior. I wrote it all down in my Training Journal.

Claiming Your Power: By the time you’re a teenager you can see you have some power – some mental, some physical. The question is developing it and finding appropriate gurus.

Models: “I did not deceive you. I permitted you to deceive yourself.” Agatha Christie

“An Indian proverb says everyone is a house with four rooms – physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. Most of us live in one room or the other but if you don’t visit each room each day you are not a complete person.” – Rumer Godden

“You are never too old to dream a new dream or set a new goal” – C. S. Lewis

“You have to believe in yourself” – Sun Tzu

Keep Going – Recognize that you have been touched by the goddess and honor her by being grateful for the glorious gifts of life.

#Haiku: Wyvern

My power
Beast bristles
Fire;
Eats critics
Guards path
Sleeps in my
Mirror