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pianopadawan · 2 years ago

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Preview Excerpt 2 of Imperial Remnant AU

Some angsty Veers/Piett below.

Excerpt 1 - Piett and Jerjerrod angst.

“What’s wrong?”

The question jolted Piett out of his ruminations. His hand instinctively grasped his blaster. Embarrassed by the paranoid gesture, he let his fingers fall from the grip as he face the General.

“I can think of a number of things,” Piett said. “Now, are you coming in or are you just going to stand there leering at me?”

“Leering at you?”

Veers gave him a hardened stare. Any other observer would have seen the look as a true threat, but Piett knew better. He could catch the subtle glint in Veers’s eyes or the way his lips would quirk upward ever so slightly. It was those gentle cracks in his stoicism that’d gotten them here to begin with.

“The things you accuse me of in my own base,” Veers went on, feigning affront. “If I didn’t know you any better, sailor, I’d call it insubordination.”

“Well, until that scavenger of yours finds the parts, I’m a sailor without a ship,” Piett replied sardonically. “I suppose you could say I’ve gone rogue with all this newfound freedom. Besides, I’ve never taken orders from army blokes.”

“Of course not, Admiral.” With a few long strides, Veers closed the distance between them. “But you do accept invitations, don’t you?”

“The way you’re making it sound, you’d better have a nice bottle of wine and a candlelight dinner waiting for me.” Piett looked up at the General to ensure that Veers caught him rolling his eyes. “Really, I don’t see why you’re being so formal. It isn’t as if we’ve never done this before.”

As they stepped out into the corridor, Piett scanned the scene for unwanted company. His caution was largely unnecessary. It wasn’t as if their nightly meetings were a grand secret. Still, there was no reason to tempt the gossips.

They’d agreed on symbolically designating Piett separate lodgings during his stays, lest they give fuel to the rumors concerning a lewd barter system. Their alliance was a strategic one, and they needed to be sure the remnant viewed it as such.

Piett tried not to dwell too deeply on the rest. Even as he clung to Veers, craving the warmth during those cold Pelacian nights, he warned himself to heed the boundaries. He couldn’t afford any more uncertainty.

He allowed himself a few moments of reprieve afterwards. Once his heart had steadied to its resting pace, he sat up and reached for his clothes. He pretended not to notice Veers watching him.

“You could stay, you know,” Veers said.

“I have business to attend to.” Piett hummed in annoyance as he remedied a misaligned button on his shirt. “I haven’t got time to waste lying around.”

“It wouldn’t be a waste of tine for you to get some rest.” Veers wrapped a hand around Piett’s wrist. “You’re getting scrawnier every time I see you.”

“Maybe I’ll treat myself to a break once this latest issue is settled,” Piett grumbled.

“Are you referring to your cruiser or something else?”

“Something else.”

Piett eyed the door but did not move from the bed. This was exactly what he’d been hoping to avoid.

“Lennox severed ties with the Operation last month,” he said. “Besides your forces, we have a few supporters still on Ganthel, and of course, we have resources from Nimora but with all the pressure from Republic Commerce, it’s getting harder for them to maintain the pretense.”

The words slipped out before he could censor them. Honesty was both a rare privilege and a dangerous affair.

“At this rate, I don’t know how much longer we can sustain our efforts,” Piett went on bitterly. “I suppose it was only a matter of time before we reached this point. By all accounts, we shouldn’t have gotten this far to begin with. Maybe I should be more grateful. Maybe I should just count myself karking lucky I didn’t get blown to bits on the Executor and settle down and…”

His sentence trailed off as he realized he had no answer to give. Veers moved to sit beside him, stroking his back gently. Piett couldn’t help but lean into the touch.

“It isn’t like you to surrender, Admiral,” Veers said.

“Do I have a choice?”

“I’m giving you one.” Veers ceased his stroking when Piett tensed. “You’re a brilliant commander, and I know you don’t see it that way, but your name bears weight amongst the remnants. If we were to organize our efforts more concretely, I assure you, we would garner support…”

“Veers, listen to yourself.” Piett glared at him. “I just told you that I’m struggling to fund a tiny covert operation and your solution is to stage a coup.”

“It would take time,” Veers persisted. “We would only have to be patient and strategic about our options. There dozens of Imperial factions scattered throughout the Rim. What we need is a unifying force.”

“If you think I’m the man for that, you’re even more delusional than I thought,” Piett snapped. “The factions are witling out as we speak. In a matter of time, there’ll be nothing left to lead.”

“And what do you plan to do after that?” Veers asked harshly. “Run away into the Unknown Regions? Or were you planning to roll over for the New Republic like your good friend, Tiaan Jerjerrod?”

“I’m planning to stay alive.” Piett stood his ground. “Unlike you, I don’t have the privilege of recklessly entertaining a hero complex. I have obligations. I have a family to take care of.”

He knew he’d gone too far the moment the words left his mouth. Before he could gather an apology, Veers stood abruptly from the bed.

“Get out,” Veers growled. “You know the way to your room. If not, ask one of the droids.”

“Max, I’m sorry.” Piett reached for the taller man’s hand, stroking it lightly. “I shouldn’t have…”

“I said get out.” Veers pulled his hand away. “That’s an order, Piett.”

Piett opened his mouth to protest but thought better of it. As he left, he could feel Veers’s gaze upon him, burning more with grief than anger.

His regrets weighed heavily on him like a durasteel chain as he returned to his room. There, he settled into bed and closed his eyes, shivering from the cold.

#admiral piett #general veers #veers x piett #wip #my writing #angst #these two have issues with emotions

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sideeffx · 2 years ago

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Welcome to my thoughts on FF13

Final Fantasy is dear to my heart much like everyone else’s but I find me and a small segment of other people appreciate it for traits that the wider gaming sphere is not focused on. Which isn’t fine, because people are liking things the wrong way. Anyways I want to talk about Final Fantasy 13, the infamous entry in the series and how it’s both not that bad but also pretty mid. A lot of people were critical of it, but I’m coming at it from a place of love. Because it’s unironically one of my favorite entries, but I think it makes a few missteps that prevented it from being great. Though I don’t think the game is the proverbial satan its made out to be (that’s 15). Beware of spoilers for a 10+ year old game I suppose.Also this is gonna be rambling instead of a clean structured review.

I’m sure if you’re reading this you know the gist of the FF13 story, the Fal’cie, glorified as inhuman protectors use humans they’ve branded called L’cie to carry out nebulous missions for them called Focuses. The entire question of fate vs shaping your own destiny comes up and the game works in favor of changing one’s destiny. I think the story is actually *gasp* good. But it could’ve been better

FF is a video game first and foremost, so it’s important for gameplay/story integration to be there. I think, a lot of the problem came from the player’s inability to care about the world as it stood because you don’t really much interact with it. I suppose then, my critiques aren’t with the story writing but how the game is structured to present that writing to you. Before I explain my complaints, let me dig into what I felt like the central themes.

Nature vs Technology, Destiny vs Autonomy, and touching on colonization. The people of Cocoon live in shell that literally floats above Gran Pulse. The game making the point that its creation was predicated on stealing natural resources from Pulse’s inhabitants to give us a technologically advanced city that is light years ahead of everything else. Those who live in Cocoon are fed propaganda that Gran Pulse is a hellish and lawless place that they couldn’t hope to survive on, these sentiments are fueled by the war of transgression that saw Pulse’s inhabitants attempting to “invade” Cocoon.

Of course, we could talk about the behind the scenes manipulations of all the Fal’cie involved here. Where Cocoon is really a city created to harvest human souls and thus it’s inevitable fate is to crash into Pulse and bring millions of people with it. I think the concept here is interesting, on the basis that the supposed utopian society Cocoon lives in is actually dystopian due to this revelation. However it’s not something that comes out of left field, rather the people are being put in boiling water to see how much their ignorance will win out. Case in point, the “Purge,” the most on the nose metaphor for ethnic cleansing you could probably ever see. Where those believed to be tainted by the lands of Gran Pulse are cast out of Cocoon by the Fal’cie and forced to live in the land viewed as backwards and evil.

In a way I see FF13 as a bit of a take on FF7′s story conventions where it heavily critiques capitalism but comes at it from an angle that FF7 didn’t, where it factors the exploitation of various ethnic groups heavily contributing to a nation’s wealth into the mix. As history has shown, a country doesn’t rapidly evolve based on its own merit. Because the enormous consumption of natural resources inevitably comes from somewhere else, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to sustain itself. Too bad the game doesn’t fully want to commit to any of this!

My problem with 13 is the same problem I had with 7 but like, worse. While 7 had the entire midgar arc before it hit you square in the face with the whole JENOVA plotline and Sephiroth’s reveal, 13 kind of just veers wildly off course immediately and its allusions to the Pulse vs Cocoon conflict are tangential at best. While I argue the themes are obvious given a bit of critical thinking, I can concede that you can’t make a gamer do the work if you don’t give them a decent hook to be interested in the first place. For better or for worse 13 is a very character focused game where it places their struggles at the forefront and thus sculpts the bigger picture around that.

Your characters are fugitives, perpetually on the run due to their branding as L’cie and the game reflects that by never really letting you sit and catch your breath. Everything is a point A to point B hallway, you can never really veer off course, and there are no towns to stop at. FF has always been at the least, semi linear, not favoring an open ended world where the player is meant to explore every single facet of it. But 13 forgets that the reason many FF games don’t feel linear is because they do their best to obfuscate it at every turn. Towns are always an important facet, where you can socialize with NPCs if you so choose and just generally recharge before the next batch of ingame events. The dungeons are interesting puzzles you’re asked to solve and thus take your brainpower away from thinking about how you ran straight to the place. And generally there are just personal events you can catch between characters where they’re just, talking.

Not to mention the battle system itself, while interesting on its face was a bit of a flawed way to take us fully away from the turn based ATB days and give us something in the same vein, but different. Paradigm shifting and the various roles turned combat into an interesting puzzle at times, but it quickly denigrated into being solved extremely quickly. It doesn’t help that the game hand holds you aggressively for a gigantic portion of the story. Your party is fixed, Lightning can’t be removed from it, and their general roles are spoonfed to you. Lightning is a mixed attacker, Snow is a tank, Vanille is your dual Healer/Debuffer, Hope is a healer/buffer, Sazh is an offensive buffer, and Fang is an offensive debuffer. Eventually they all get the opportunity to act out of these assigned roles as the crystarium unlocks. But I felt as if it was too little too late, as by that time players are much too comfortable investing in their presets rather than veering off course.

I think this was just a general symptom of the trends at the time though. Nowadays, gaming difficulty is opening up as a talking point with relation to accessibility, but so much of the backlash to “easy” games (and thus the rise of Dark Souls’s niche) was that mainstream gaming made you feel kind of stupid. There wasn’t that same sense of freedom that was in the 2000s, because players could easily get confused and frustrated with the games of old that plopped you in the world and expected you to figure things out yourself. Devs in response overcorrected and treated the player as if they were children who just learned how to walk. 13 as a result didn’t bring that level of customization you expect from FF into the mix until you had already formed a solid opinion on its battle system.

I think in this sense, the gameplay/story integration is extremely poor and one of the reasons 13 got so much hate, but wasn’t properly identified by gamers because we were kind of in the midst of an alt right pressure cooker that years later led to gamergate. Case in point being that the biggest critique of the game was Lightning being protagonist, Vanille being found to be annoying, basically a parade of misogynistic backlash. Gaming was only just beginning to open up to the wider public when it was previously a “male nerd” thing and thus gamers were not exactly ready to receive a female cast that was so highly focused on in Lightning, Fang and Vanille. Perhaps if 13′s premise was given to us now it’d be received warmly and seen as breaking barriers, but in the 2010s, Lightning was compared to a female Cloud in a derogatory way, Vanille’s accent was described as “fake” by some people (despite that not being true whatsoever) and just generally grating due to her blinding positivity, and Fang was subject to endless lesbophobic jokes. There were a lot of genuine critiques of the game as well, because the backlash was once again overwhelming. But I’m not sure whether they were drowned out or whether Square heard them properly, given how the sequels to 13 kind of veered off course into their own things.

I guess, what I can take from this altogether. Is that 13 had a great base that could’ve used gameplay systems to better integrate you in the world itself and failed at that. Despite it all, the game is about a 7 out of 10 at worst, and the fanbase will not let this go and act like it’s a stain on the franchise. In many ways I think people just weren’t ready for what it brought to the table and SE failed in delivering the truly interesting parts of it well. I want to say that I hope they learned their lesson, but 15 was a development disaster and I think 16 is the first time I see them not do anything new with the emerging trends and instead play into them without any of the original spin I’d come to expect from FF. In this vein all I can hope for is another studio doing what SE couldn’t and giving us a truly thought provoking feminist masterpiece. Oh well.

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midorishinji · 9 months ago

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Armillaria solidipes

— Do you know which organism is the oldest to inhabit this planet, Sakura? It’s a fungus, Armillaria solidipes, 8650 years old. It’s in Oregon, in the United States, and it’s also the largest organism to live… Inside the earth, its hyphae spread for miles and miles, as far as the eye can see… To give you an idea, humans live an average of 72 years. And we are also absolutely insignificant creatures.

Sakuino ｜Oneshot｜Also published in Portuguese and on AO3

— Do you know which organism is the oldest to inhabit this planet, Sakura? It’s a fungus, Armillaria solidipes, 8650 years old. It’s in Oregon, in the United States, and it’s also the largest organism to live... Inside the earth, its hyphae spread for miles and miles, as far as the eye can see... To give you an idea, humans live an average of 72 years. And we are also absolutely insignificant creatures.

I smiled back at her. It was Saturday morning and I was accompanying Ino on her research in the college's biology laboratory. While she observed something beyond my comprehension under the microscope — I was a mere math student, thank you — Ino rambled on about the most random topics.

— I don't think 72 years is that insignificant... And by the time we reach that age, life expectancy will have increased, of course... In Brazil, it's already higher than that, because an average measure is prone to distortions, some countries will always pull the mean score lower: wars, famine, high infant mortality. — I replied, trying to remain optimistic.

She clicked her tongue in annoyance, without taking her eyes off the lens of the microscope. That wasn't the answer she wanted to hear: — Do you know why I chose Botany, out of all the branches of biology?

I could say yes and give common answers like "because you like flowers" or "because you want to run your family's flower shop," but I knew they were simply inappropriate. Ino and I had known each other since we were kids, and yet, if I had to walk inside her soul in the dark, as one does within the familiarity of home, I would stub my toe on a corner. Understanding her veered on the impossible. — No.

— Because fungi are fascinating, but they scare me. Plants are easy to understand, methodical even… But not fungi. They're not plants, they're not animals, and they're a little bit of both, so we had to create a new category to classify them. Some can save lives, like the genus from which penicillin is extracted, others can kill with their toxins, like Amanita phalloides... Some form symbiotic relationships with plants and are what sustain entire forests, connecting trees and sharing nutrients, while others feed off death and destroy everything in their path. They are both life and death, two sides of the same coin, and putrefaction exists regardless of everything. It's what started life and it's what will end it, closing the door and turning off the lights when there's no one else here.

Thinking about it made me shiver. Being in a grave, devoured by organisms without any awareness (at least that I know of!) of what they do, of what they are. Little by little I would become part of the land and part of the Earth. It’s beautiful, even if in a somewhat macabre way. — Someday I'll be a really cute red and white mushroom, and some biology student will pick me up and slice me up to analyze me under a microscope. — I replied, as I dodged the air conditioner and got closer to her.

— What happens after we die?

Another one of her existentialist questions. — Come on, if you wanted to discuss philosophy, you should have called Hinata, it's her area. I don't understand anything other than numbers and equations. To me, life is a series of formulas, chemical reactions and concentration gradients that cease when we die.

— Don’t you believe in heaven, hell, purgatory, reincarnation?

— I don't know. Should I?

— Wish I knew. Maybe we’re already in purgatory, or hell, and this life is nothing but a punishment. We have to atone for our sins, correct our mistakes, to move forward. When we die, we become free: free from conscience, free from weight. Just a white light surrounding us that erases everything.

I wish I could argue back and say that this could be heaven, but I'm not that optimistic. — Who knows…

— Wouldn’t you like to know?

I remember, during my time studying for confirmation, they told us that the forbidden fruit was an apple. But I also remember sometime later coming to the conclusion that the forbidden fruit was knowledge: ignorance is bliss. As much as I disagreed with this stupid saying, Ino's proposal made me stop for a second, with bated breath: wouldn’t I want to know? It was a tempting proposal, as much as it was a deal with the Devil himself. I always wanted to know everything, of course. I would have bitten the damn apple without thinking twice, like Eve did.

— Does it matter if we know?

The words flowed out of my mouth so easily that I even got surprised. Ino was also taken aback by my comment: — As expected of miss Sakura Haruno. — she said, laughing and turning to me, finally looking away from the stupid microscope — To you, knowing doesn't matter because you would keep fighting and moving forward as if nothing had changed.

— In heaven or hell, my definition of ethics does not change.

— Ah, you're right about that. If I knew I was in Hell now and that I was damned to spend eternity here, it wouldn’t matter if I found my existence comfortable before, I would stall like a spoiled kid and follow the advice from that old saying that says “if you are in Hell, embrace the devil”. But you would go on with your life, doing what is right even if you knew there was no salvation, simply because you do what’s right. Nothing beyond that.

— If you say it's because I'm as stubborn as a mule... — I already threatened to get up from my chair, a little annoyed.

Ino laughed. She had a truly infectious laugh, and it was impossible not to like her, you know? Even more so when she laughed like that, without worry, without limits. — If you say so, then I won't say it... By the way, do you know something that's also very interesting? Did you know that humans and fungi have a common ancestor from around 450 million years ago? This is why psilocybin works on us, because it’s pretty similar to serotonin, and acts on the same receptors. That's why it makes us happy.

I knew the name psilocybin. — Tell me you didn't take it before getting in here…

But Ino Yamanaka laughed again, and returned her gaze to the microscope, without answering me.

#naruto #naruto fanfic #naruto shippuden #sakura haruno #ino yamanaka #fanfiction #writing #sakuino #biology #biblical themes #fungi #mushrooms #fungus

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regensia · 2 years ago

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@sovereignxfae / K’in said . . .

It's late. They're cuddled up on the couch, under plush blankets. They argued at least three times today. Ended up brawling on the floor at least twice. All in the name of ego— of course.

So now they're tired, and K'in has successfully wrestled Vital into resting on them. They have sustained enough bruises on their ears to prove that it was a challenge.

Now they reap the rewards. Some movie playing on the tv that they forgot about. Hands snug under Vital's shirt; their hot skin relishing in the other's cooler temperature. Face pressed under his, blowing air onto his hair to hear him grumble and feel that tremor run through him.

Boredom and pure madness prompt them to touch their lips to his skin. Behind his ears, slowly mouthing at what they could reach between his swatting. Just another way to bother him, but they'll admit, watching his skin turn pink was a bit more than entertaining.

It continues for a while. K'in dodging Vital's lack luster hits before going back to nip his skin. Until suddenly, he turns, an icy glare settles on them.

He's going to argue, say some smartass bullshit. So they cut him short—grabbing his face and dragging him towards them.

It's awkward, and he's seething, but they don't let go. Licking into his mouth until it placates him. Then a little more until he isn’t actively fighting against their hold.

K'in find themselves in his lap before long. Panting within the inch of space they allowed.

He looks a little dazed. They sure they aren't much better, lower face damp with their enthusiasm.

“Heh.. kissed you silly.” They purposefully ignore the slur in their own words.

It was a familiar pattern, almost comfortable, the way he and K’in always defaulted to fighting and bickering, almost always over nothing in particular. Outside of a few topics, neither of them held particularly strong stances worth the serious arguments, or at least avoided them and instead chose the pettiest reasons to debate. It was almost fun, adding a new flavor to often monotonous days filled with obsessive work; K’in interrupted that pattern, as begrudgingly he would admit, and was even nice to have around from time to time. In the least, usually they brought snacks or something nice with them so he couldn’t really complain too much.

So when they were on the couch watching some bland drama that would’ve been resolved with a very simple lie detector test, Vital couldn’t help but squirm as hands had settled beneath his shirt, warm – which was usually appreciated – and at least low enough to not veer near the massive scars upon his chest and upper back. It took a pattern of wriggling, complaining, and being chided for them to finally settle in properly, though every now and then did he make a sound of irritation at the characters’ choices on screen, finding the melodrama so tedious. Why hadn’t they changed it yet? Before such thoughts could be volunteered however, he felt something soft and warm behind his ear, taking a moment to register that it was K’in’s lips.

“Hey! What’re you doing, you little shit?” Insults and protests were once more easy and automatic, just the same as any retaliation as he tried elbowing the other, feeling heat build up in his face in the classic pinkened hue of embarrassment. There was something else to it of course that he refused to acknowledge, that sensation only having intensified as he flipped around to properly fight only to have his face seized between hands and a tongue cut off his retorts.

When the hell had K’in gotten so bold?! This was such a far cry from their initial meeting in the grocery store where he attempted to make them squirm and uncomfortable, for now any attempts at verbal retaliation were drowned out and muffled by the meeting of their lips and more. Not often did he feel warm – yet now with K’in upon his lap was Vital becoming keenly aware of how toasty the spacious living room felt in such close proximity, and he wasn’t even sure how they had gotten to this point.

The matter of fact was that it was becoming increasingly difficult to think properly, his rival-slash-frienemy eliminating the ability to concentrate whilst fulfilling usually strongly-repressed desires for the simple intimacy of touch and more that he often denied himself. After all, it could be terrifying, getting close to someone.

Not that it mattered anymore; they were more than close by this extent, almost uncertain hands moving to settle upon the other, one hand on K’in’s back and the other upon their shoulder. Mercifully ( and somehow tragically ) did they part at last, both breathless from the session, and before Vital could formulate his response to this all, there it was: a teasing jest. Fully red in the face by this point, he frowned, wet and reddened lips pulled into a pout and amethyst eyes narrowed. He didn’t really have a good comeback lined up for this.

“... you play dirty.”

#sovereignxfae #✸ ANSWERED. ( VITAL. )#✸ ARGUMENTS FROM THE HEART. ( VITAL. / K'IN. ) SOVEREIGNXFAE #kyu you're doing gods work fulfilling that one post i made about making out LMAOO bless u

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adventuresinclientservice · 1 month ago

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Are too many meetings an obstacle to getting things done?

When my friend of longstanding Lisa Lefebvre proposed I start a blog, my biggest concern was if I would be able to sustain it. Just about anyone can summon a rant or two when needed, but week after week? Is that even possible?

Nearly fourteen years in, I’ve pretty well settled the matter.

Some of what I write is halfway worthy and useful. Some of it is utterly dismissible, little more than harmless nattering. Some of it is disposable crap.

I keep at it, drawing inspiration from what I read – The New York Times, The New Yorker, other publications – and what hear – music mostly – and what I see: television series, the occasional movie.

Only a few times before do I recall drawing on a cartoon for inspiration (one an almost famous one). The other day I saw what you see above.

Countless clients have registered a common lament: “I’m in back-to-back meetings all day; I never have enough time to do my own work!” Their advertising agency counterparts feel much the same.

At Ammirati Puris Lintas had our share of meetings, but were judicious about it, following what seemed to be an unwritten rule you have only the meetings you need; okay, if you must know, here’s the ones we held:

Once a month the agency’s senior management met to do a review, including a detailed look at financials, each session designed to uncover trouble before alarm bells sounded. I attended and participated in those discussions; it was time well spent. We scheduled these early in the day – at least by agency standards -- so as not to intrude on our “real” jobs: connecting with clients, collaborating with colleagues, solving problems, seizing opportunities, striving to do the best possible work.

Once a month I would do an all-staff meeting for my Digital and Direct groups, designed not only to recognize notable performance plus uncover any issues, but also to serve as an exercise in team bonding and culture cultivating. Attendance was optional, but nearly everyone showed up. I’d like to think it was the content that drew people; not so. It was the coffee and bagel spread that drew them (I admit I was not above bribing people when appropriate).

Once a week my two groups each held a status meeting, something we viewed as essential, meaning absences were not taken lightly; knowing clients were critical, we urged them to sit in by conference call. The sessions allowed us maintain pace, honor our project commitments, plus uncover any assignments that were veering off course. Just about every agency I know conducts something similar. If your agency doesn’t, it should.

We would gather to review a presentation, a strategy recommendation, research findings, or creative work before sharing the output with our clients.

We also would gather a working group whenever we were pitching new business, mostly to assign responsibilities and assess progress as we worked our way through what usually was an unreasonably compressed schedule.

That pretty much was it, and in truth, was more than sufficient. Otherwise we would gather only when something seriously amiss and required the collective brain muscle of group problem-solving.

When I tell people that Chapter 14 of The Art of Client Service is “How to Run a Meeting,” I’m usually greeting with derisive, snarky snickers – “Who the hell needs this; it’s a waste of space and time!!” -- but I make this point:

“Meetings are a staple of business – including the advertising and marketing business , in which collaboration is key – but they are notoriously screwed up.”

They surely are that.

I can’t speak to other business categories, but advertising and marketing in all its forms is a combination of the intensely solitary with the highly collaborative. Achieving a semblance of balance is key; restraint -- meaning meetings as a last, not first, resort -- is a virtue.

The next time you are about to get a group of people in a room, I suggest you ask yourself a simple question: Will this meeting help address a client problem, take advantage of an agency opportunity, or ideally do both?

If the answer is “No,” ask yourself a second question: do we really need a meeting, or could we address this in some other, less intrusive, disruptive way?

If the answer is “Yes,” you now know what you need to do.

#meetings #advertising #marketing

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mylordshesacactus · 5 years ago

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A Writer’s Guide To Hurricanes, I Guess

I realized with a bit of chagrin that, while I’ve spent years bitching about how it drives me up the wall that nobody (in fandom or, in fact, mainstream media) has a goddamn clue how hurricanes work and yet insists on portraying them anyway...I’ve never actually tried to help by explaining what they’re actually like.

So, here’s a genuine, non-sarcastic, good-faith attempt by a Floridian to help you guys who might want to write this stuff at some point understand it, just a little.

So here we go, chronologically in terms of the storm’s progress.

The storm itself is the least of it.

This is the thing non-hurricane places don’t....get.

You can see a hurricane coming. You can watch it. You have, in fact, no choice. I need to reiterate this.

You have no choice but to sit there and watch a hurricane coming.

I’ve actually talked a lot in another post about what that feels like, and why hurricane parties are a thing. But try to imagine what that feels. Just...try. You have to sit there, for about a week, watching the wrath of God bear down on you.

You watch it come and you hope the path changes. You hope it veers off back into the Atlantic, of course, but you also--you hope it hits somewhere else. You know wherever it goes people will die and you hope it goes somewhere else. And you feel kinda bad about it; but you also don't because these are just facts, this is a fact of hurricanes, they will go somewhere and people will die in that place and all of us hope it goes Somewhere Else and if it does, we know that the people Somewhere Else are praying frantically that it gets back on course and hits us instead and we understand.

(And when it does change course, when it doesn’t hit you, you almost feel....cheated? Because you spent so much time and energy preparing and fearing and coming to terms and accepting and bracing and then it--doesn’t happen.

And the guilt of praying it would go Somewhere Else is nothing compared to being disgusted with yourself for actually feeling disappointed that you were spared the apocalypse this time.)

The wind is different.

If you listen to weather reports on hurricanes you’ve absolutely heard the phrasing “sustained winds of X miles per hour with gusts up to Y” without really thinking about what that means.

Now, of course everyone’s been in windy conditions. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly how the hurricane is....different, so I’m just going to describe what it’s like.

The wind always comes from one direction. There’s no being “knocked this way and that” or whatever; the wind comes from the direction the wind is coming from. Always.

(If you’re near where the center of the storm passes, this direction will slowly change as your position relative to the eye changes. But it changes over a matter of hours--like the angle of the sun.)

The wind is a constant, unrelenting force. There’s no....there’s no dips in the wind. It never lessens, it only spikes and then returns to baseline. In a normal windstorm, no, it’s not that the wind ever stops blowing, but...there’s an ebb and a flow. A hurricane is a wind tunnel in which every so often someone revs the engine and there’s a few seconds of higher wind, but it never drops below where it’s set.

(The wind will snake under plywood and storm shutters; it will rip them clean off, if you haven’t screwed them in properly. Screws, not nails. The wind makes deadly projectiles of anything not fastened down. Plywood and storm shutters can be broken, by anything travelling fast enough. It is standard procedure, if you have lawn furniture or anything else not secured that doesn’t float, to carefully lower that furniture into a pool--if you have one. It will stay untouched, and won’t be flung through your neighbors’ plywood.)

This is why hurricanes take down so many trees, why they do so much structural damage. Buildings in hurricane zones are built to withstand high wind, and most trees in these areas can survive high wind too or they wouldn’t have survived so long. But there’s only so much that nature and engineering can do about sustained high winds, without a moment’s rest, for hours, unending, no respite...

In landfall footage--ie, the stuff you see on the news--you likely see this effect in the palm trees-watch how instead of tossing, they’re just bent. It never lets up. In the instances where a bent tree violent bounces back before bending again, trust me--that’s not a letup in the wind speed. That’s the tree having been bent too far, and springing back from the sheer pressure on its internal structure. That’s the tree being stronger than the wind--for now

It’s mostly not like the TV reports.

There’s a reason I referred to “landfall footage” above. News broadcasts, for a lot of reasons, focus on the storm at its worst. The highest storm surge, the highest winds, the most brutal damage, occurs where the eye wall first crosses from being over water to being over land.

(Remember--by the time a storm “makes landfall,” everything for miles around has been experiencing the storm for hours already. “Landfall” is when the EYE of the storm first hits land, not when the storm “arrives”.)

But hurricanes are...vast. Look up satellite footage of hurricanes. Really look at it. Look at how much sheer area they cover.

Most places do not experience landfall-level disaster. That’s why, when people evacuate--well, when residents evacuate, the tourists and recent transplants tend to panic harder--you’re basically always evacuating to someplace that will still have vanished under that mass of swirling clouds. Evacuation sites are still inside the hurricane, but wind speed, storm surge, etc--everything drops dramatically even a few miles from the eye.

On a related note, the eye itself rapidly starts shedding power the moment it’s no longer over open water. Generally, the simple act of making landfall instantly drops a hurricane at least one category in severity. Hurricanes are eldritch gods; they rise from the sea and from the sea they take their power. Cut off from it, they starve.

Do not think for a moment that just because you’re “only” experiencing Cat 1 winds that this storm can’t kill your ass dead. Do not underestimate what the death throes of a dying god can do.

Storm surge isn’t high waves, and it isn’t rain.

Storm surge is the actual sea level rising. The entire ocean being dragged onto land by the power of the storm.

Particularly wet and slow hurricanes might--rarely--drop enough rain to cause flooding. However, that’s unusual; most places here can handle heavy rain. The rain isn’t the problem.

(Slow hurricanes are killers on another level. It’s everything I’ve already said about the unrelenting brutality of the wind, coupled with the fact that--as, again, the vast majority of the storm has been raging for hours by the time it “makes landfall”, and hurricanes draw power from the Eye being over the water--it now has hours upon hours of fully-fuelled destruction before it begins to weaken by being cut off from warm water. It doesn’t weaken, it just....keeps going. And the storm surge is present that entire time.)

I’m just gonna direct you to this NOAA diagram on how storm surge works.

The northeast quadrant is the strongest.

This isn’t a proper subheading it’s just something I rarely see people not from Florida acknowledge.

No matter where the storm is coming from or what angle it hits at--the northeast quadrant is the killer. You do everything in your power to avoid being caught northeast of the storm.

In hurricane-prone areas, the threat is felt year-round.

All the major intersections? Our stoplights aren’t hung on wires from wooden poles--those blow down too easily. They’re bolted to thick metal pipes, “hurricane-proof”. Major roadways that are above floodlines are labelled as evacuation routes.

Things like that.

Hurricanes make their presence known long before the disaster begins.

You start to get “hurricane weather” days--days--before it hits. The sun is out, the weather is fine except for a...

Well, a constant, low-level breeze, with much less variation in angle and direction than usual, fewer gusts, but still primarily a natural breeze. And then you go outside and you look up at that cheerful blue sky and it’s already there.

They’re called cloud bands. You look up and the entire sky is just fluffy white clouds, racing at speed in one direction...

(The breeze, in those early few days, is light. Present, but light. The clouds are always, always racing as if before a gale. There’s a pervasive, eerie wrongness about this, looking up--the clouds moving much, much faster than the wind that should be driving them.)

A hurricane is not a thunderstorm.

This is the cardinal sin and the clearest, most common misconception. Hurricanes are not thunderstorms. In fact it’s actually very rare to have lightning or hear any thunder at all during a hurricane, compared to an average summer storm in hurricane-prone areas.

People often portray hurricanes as basically....the worst storm they can remember, but bigger, and badder, and worse. Hurricanes aren’t just big and intense, they’re....different. They’re something different.

Hurricanes are...quiet.

Except that they’re not.

You know when people talk about the wind howling? Think of the most intense storm you’ve ever sat through. Think about the sound of the wind.The way it whistles through leaves. Hold that experience in your head.

Now forget it. This is different.

Hurricanes don’t sound like that. Hurricanes are....

The sound a hurricane makes is a howl, yes. It makes palm fronds and grass steps and leaves whistle like a rapier scraped against a sheathe, yes. But you barely notice those shallow details, because the sound a hurricane makes is below that, stronger, more powerful.

Hurricanes moan.

Hurricanes are the entire world around you slowly and steadily fraying at the seams, and it moans, low and deep, agonized and hungry, and it never stops. Never. Not until it’s over.

Hurricanes are a world ending.

The storm passes, and the hurricane has only begun.

Do you think people stock up as heavily as they do, with generators and nonperishables and such, for--what, for a few hours of wind and rain, however alive?

No.

Because once the tempest is past, now you have to...exist.

You will not have power. If you were in a very, very lightly-affected area, you might have cell service. Most of your neighbors have evacuated. Many roads can’t be used because they’re washed out, or there are trees or power lines down across them.

It’s very common to lose water pressure. Common practice in hurricane-prone areas is to fill your bathtub with water before the storm--so that, when you lose water pressure, you can use a bucket to flush your toilet. Because those conditions, assuming you’re in an area that can be repaired and not rebuilt, can take weeks.

Weeks without running water, a flushable toilet. That gets grim fast. You brace for the storm. You prepare for what follows.

A hurricane is an eldritch abomination.

Hurricanes are alive.

Hurricanes are Old Gods.

Sitting through a hurricane is not like sitting through a bad storm or like sitting through a tornado, which is fast and unstoppable but then it’s over like it never existed save for the destruction left behind.

In order to get a clearer understanding of just how much the universe is vast, how much it does not, cannot, even notice you enough to want you dead because you are so small it would not comprehend you as possessing an existence if it tried--you would have to go to space.

And while the world moans around you and something out there, alive, growls at a frequency you can’t hear but you feel--you don’t cuddle for warmth during a hurricane. You just don’t.

You keep the generator running outside in the lee of the house where it won’t kill you all with gas fumes, connected via wires that snake around through a cracked door somewhere it won’t get blown open. You make sure it doesn’t run out of fuel, that it doesn’t get water blown into anything important. You use it to power a TV first--to keep the weather report on. You power lights second, if it’s a decent one. You can’t afford one powerful enough to run your refrigerator; you ate the ice cream before this started.

You play games. We’re human; it’s what we do. We play games in the face of our own helplessness. But while you play, you listen. You can’t not.

It’s always there. The world creaks on its hinges. You feel the edges threatening to dissolve. If you sit for a moment and are quiet, that ever-present moan is there, something ancient and powerful on a scale outside your comprehension. There is no cozy comfort of being bunkered down safe against the storm, not here.

There is no “safe” against this. You sit still and quiet and bear witness.

And when the sun rises in the aftermath, you’re surprised to find the world--even a wrecked and altered world--still exists. It shouldn’t. You were there when it ended.

And--and I cannot emphasize this enough--there’s no fucking thunder.

#hurricanes #uh #writing reference #I GUESS

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riversofmars · 4 years ago

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December 1st December 2nd December 3rd December 4th December 5th December 6th December 7th December 8th December 9th December 10th December 11th December 12th December 13th December 14th December 15th December 16th December 17th December 18th December 19th

“That’s what they didn’t want us to see.“ The Doctor exclaimed and everyone followed her gaze to what looked like an old manor house at the top of the road. Before, they had seen nothing but the continuation of yet another street, with no particular desire to venture down it.

“Then we better go have a look.“ Eyebrows said, he looked around to see what was happening behind them and whole sections of the high street were coming back to life. The lights were coming back on. Along with the lights came moving statues, christmas music and holographic visitors, it was like the christmas spirit was coming for them.

“I want my TARDIS back!“ Bowtie agreed.

“Let’s get going and quickly.“ Eyebrows said ushering them all along.

“So, what happened with your TARDIS?“ The Doctor asked Clara, forcing her attention to the matter at hand.

“My TARDIS veered off course, dragged down by something, I’m guessing the same thing happened to you?“ Clara replied, looking around to all the Doctors as they hurried up the road.

“I landed more gracefully than that…“ Sandshoes chuckled.

“That’s because we chose to come here, we didn’t even notice the pull. It must be getting stronger if you weren’t even planning of coming here.“ Bowtie added.

“Whatever it is, it’s dragging Timelords and TARDISes here.“ The Doctor concluded and frowned, looking up to the building ahead. “This way.“ They broke into a run as the lights and the statues sped up.

They reached the door, just as the lights came on around them as well and the door disappeared behind the perception filter.

“We know you’re there!“ Eyebrows huffed and Bowtie threw himself into what he knew the door to be. Sandshoes was back at it with his sonic but they all chanted at him not be so stupid again.

“Quickly.“ The Doctor urged them and covered her ears, as did everyone else as the music started playing again as well.

“C’mon boys, it’s not that difficult.“ Clara huffed and pushed the Doctors aside. She felt her way forward and found the door handle. The door opened without any issues. “Sometimes it helps to put the handle down, rather than just throwing yourself again it.“ She informed them and they rolled her eyes at her.

They all piled inside and slammed the door shut, muffling the music.

“That’s a bit better.“ Yaz took a sigh of relief as they looked around.

“Now… what is this place?“ Bill asked.

The entrance foyer resembled an old manor house. The hall was decked with holly, there were candles illuminating it in a ghosty, yet warm light. Even in here, the spirit of Christmas very much sustained.

“Not sure how I feel about the door being open…“ Graham mused.

“Maybe they’re waiting for us…“ Yaz agreed.

“We’re about to find out…“ Eyebrows mumbled.

“Right, let’s see what this is all about.“ The Doctor took a deep breath, it was time to get some answers. She looked around to the rest of the group, looked into their determined faces. They were all so brave. She couldn’t describe her feelings as she faced back forward. She couldn’t find the words for how much she had missed them all. Instead, she focused on the large door up ahead that was only halfway closed. Light fell through the door, almost invitingly. She had no idea what to expect but she couldn’t have hoped for a better group pf people to face the unknown with.

She jumped a little, when suddenly, she felt a hand slip into hers. She looked around to find River next to her giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. The expression in her eyes was one of trust and love.

“I'm sorry that I didn’t believe you…“ She mumbled as they made their way forward.

“I'm sorry that I pretended…“ The Doctor replied with a little smile. She faced forward again, holding her hand tightly, almost as if she wanted to reassure herself she was still there. Now they just had to find out what was going on here, then she could set about finding a way of getting her out of the Library at last.

“Doctor?“ Amy said suddenly.

“Let’s try and be quiet, not lose the element of surprise.“ Eyebrows interjected, trying to shush her.

“Doctor.“ Rory tried to catch their attention as well, his voice a little more urgent.

“As much as fourteen people can maintain the element of surprise.“ Sandshoes mused, he expected whoever was waiting for them in the other room already knew they were here.

“Doctor, please!“ Amy said again, very insistently and grabbed Bowtie and the Doctor by their shoulders to stop them.

“What is it?“ River asked, concerned at the anxiety in her mother’s voice.

“Look at your hands!“ The Doctors all looked down at their hands. The Doctor, Eyebrows and Bowtie all found themselves holding sharpie pens and several dark marks on their skin, like tallies. They always carried pens in their pockets for this particular reason now.

“What’s that about? What are you counting?“ Sandshoes asked confused but the other knew what to make of the unsettling sight.

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aaronmaurer · 4 years ago

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TV I Liked in 2020

Every year I reflect on the pop culture I enjoyed and put it in some sort of order.

Was there ever a year more unpredictably tailor-made for peak TV than 2020? Lockdowns/quarantines/stay-at-home orders meant a lot more time at home and the occasion to check out new and old favorites. (I recognize that if you’re lucky enough to have kids or roommates or a S.O., your amount of actual downtime may have been wildly different). While the pandemic resulted in production delays and truncated seasons for many shows, the continued streaming-era trends of limited series and 8-13 episode seasons mean that a lot of great and satisfying storytelling still made its way to the screen. As always, I in no way lay any claims to “best-ness” or completeness – this is just a list of the shows that brought me the most joy and escapism in a tough year and therefore might be worth putting on your radar.

10 Favorites

10. The Right Stuff: Season 1 (Disney+)

As a space program enthusiast, even I had to wonder, does the world really need another retelling of NASA’s early days? Especially since Tom Wolfe’s book has already been adapted as the riveting and iconoclastic Philip Kaufman film of the same name? While some may disagree, I find that this Disney+ series does justify its existence by focusing more on the relationships of the astronauts and their personal lives than the technical science (which may be partially attributable to budget limitations?). The series is kind of like Mad Men but with NASA instead of advertising (and real people, of course), so if that sounds intriguing, I encourage you to give it a whirl.

9. Fargo: Season 4 (FX)

As a big fan of Noah Hawley’s Coen Brothers pastiche/crime anthology series, I was somewhat let down by this latest season. Drawing its influence primarily from the likes of gangster drama Miller’s Crossing – one of the Coens’ least comedic/idiosyncratic efforts – this season is more straightforward than its predecessors and includes a lot of characters and plot-threads that never quite cohere. That said, it is still amongst the year’s most ambitious television with another stacked cast, and the (more-or-less) standalone episode “East/West” is enough to make the season worthwhile.

8. The Last Dance (ESPN)

Ostensibly a 10-episode documentary about the 1990s Chicago Bulls’ sixth and final NBA Championship run, The Last Dance actually broadens that scope to survey the entire history of Michael Jordan and coach Phil Jackson’s careers with the team. Cleverly structured with twin narratives that chart that final season as well as an earlier timeframe, each episode also shifts the spotlight to a different person, which provides focus and variety throughout the series. And frankly, it’s also just an incredible ride to relive the Jordan era and bask in his immeasurable talent and charisma – while also getting a snapshot of his outsized ego and vices (though he had sign-off on everything, so it’s not exactly a warts-and-all telling).

7. The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix)

This miniseries adaptation of the Walter Tevis coming-of-age novel about a chess prodigy and her various addictions is compulsively watchable and avoids the bloat of many other streaming series (both in running time and number of episodes). The 1960s production design is stunning and the performances, including Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead role, are convincing and compelling.

6. The Great: Season 1 (hulu)

Much like his screenplay for The Favourite, Tony McNamara’s series about Catherine the Great rewrites history with a thoroughly modern and irreverent sensibility (see also: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette). Elle Fanning brings a winning charm and strength to the title role and Nicholas Hoult is riotously entertaining as her absurdly clueless and ribald husband, Emperor Peter III. Its 10-episodes occasionally tilt into repetitiveness, but when the ride is this fun, why complain? Huzzah!

5. Dispatches From Elsewhere (AMC)

A limited (but possibly anthology-to-be?) series from creator/writer/director/actor Jason Segal, Dispatches From Elsewhere is a beautiful and creative affirmation of life and celebration of humanity. The first 9 episodes form a fulfilling and complete arc, while the tenth branches into fourth wall-breaking meta territory, which may be a bridge too far for some (but is certainly ambitious if nothing else). Either way, it’s a movingly realized portrait of honesty, vulnerability and empathy, and I highly recommend visiting whenever it inevitably makes its way to Netflix, or elsewhere…

4. What We Do in the Shadows: Season 2 (FX)

The second season of WWDITS is more self-assured and expansive than the first, extending a premise I loved from its antecedent film – but was skeptical could be sustained – to new and reinvigorated (after)life. Each episode packs plenty of laughs, but for my money, there is no better encapsulation of the series’ potential and Matt Berry’s comic genius than “On The Run,” which guest-stars Mark Hamill and features Laszlo’s alter ego Jackie Daytona, regular human bartender.

3. Ted Lasso: Season 1 (AppleTV+)

Much more than your average fish-out-of-water comedy, Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso is a brilliant tribute to humaneness, decency, emotional intelligence and good coaching – not just on the field. The fact that its backdrop is English Premier League Soccer is just gravy (even if that’s not necessarily represented 100% proficiently). A true surprise and gem of the year.

2. Mrs. America (hulu)

This FX miniseries explores the women’s liberation movement and fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and its opposition by conservative women including Phyllis Schlafly. One of the most ingenious aspects of the series is centering each episode on a different character, which rotates the point of view and helps things from getting same-y. With a slate of directors including Ryan Bowden and Anna Fleck (Half-Nelson, Sugar, Captain Marvel) and an A-List cast including Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Uzo Aduba, Sarah Paulson, Margo Martindale, Tracey Ulman and Elizabeth Banks, its quality is right up there with anything on the big screen. And its message remains (sadly) relevant as ever in our current era.

1. The Good Place: Season 4 (NBC)

It was tempting to omit The Good Place this year or shunt it to a side category since only the final 4 episodes aired in 2020, but that would have been disingenuous. This show is one of my all-time favorites and it ended perfectly. The series finale is a representative mix of absurdist humor and tear-jerking emotion, built on themes of morality, self-improvement, community and humanity. (And this last run of eps also includes a pretty fantastic Timothy Olyphant/Justified quasi-crossover.) Now that the entire series is available to stream on Netflix (or purchase in a nice Blu-ray set), it’s a perfect time to revisit the Good Place, or check it out for the first time if you’ve never had the pleasure.

5 of the Best Things I Caught Up With

Anne With An E (Netflix/CBC)

Another example of classic literature I had no prior knowledge of (see also Little Women and Emma), this Netflix/CBC adaptation of Anne of Green Gables was strongly recommended by several friends so I finally gave it a shot. While this is apparently slightly more grown-up than the source material, it’s not overly grimdark or self-serious but rather humane and heartfelt, expanding the story’s scope to include Black and First Nations peoples in early 1800s Canada, among other identities and themes. It has sadly been canceled, but the three seasons that exist are heart-warming and life-affirming storytelling. Fingers crossed that someday we’ll be gifted with a follow-up movie or two to tie up some of the dangling threads.

Better Call Saul (AMC)

I liked Breaking Bad, but I didn’t have much interest in an extended “Breaking Bad Universe,” as much as I appreciate star Bob Odenkirk’s multitalents. Multiple recommendations and lockdown finally provided me the opportunity to catch up on this prequel series and I’m glad I did. Just as expertly plotted and acted as its predecessor, the series follows Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman on his own journey to disrepute but really makes it hard not to root for his redemption (even as you know that’s not where this story ends).

Joe Pera Talks With You (Adult Swim)

It’s hard to really describe the deadpan and oddly soothing humor of comedian Joe Pera whose persona, in the series at least, combines something like the earnestness of Mr. Rogers with the calm enthusiasm of Bob Ross. Sharing his knowledge on the likes of how to get the best bite out of your breakfast combo, growing a bean arch and this amazing song “Baba O’Reilly” by the Who – have you heard it?!? – Pera provides arch comfort that remains solidly on the side of sincerity. The surprise special he released during lockdown, “Relaxing Old Footage with Joe Pera,” was a true gift in the middle of a strange and isolated year.

The Mandalorian (Disney+)

One of the few recent Star Wars properties that lives up to its potential, the adventures of Mando and Grogu is a real thrill-ride of a series with outstanding production values (you definitely want to check out the behind-the-scenes documentary series if you haven’t). I personally prefer the first season, appreciating its Western-influenced vibes and somewhat-more-siloed story. The back half of the second season veers a little too much into fan service and video game-y plotting IMHO but still has several excellent episodes on offer, especially the Timothy Olyphant-infused energy of premiere “The Marshall” and stunning cinematography of “The Jedi.” And, you know, Grogu.

The Tick (Amazon Prime)

I’ve been a fan of the Tick since the character’s Fox cartoon and indie comic book days and also loved the short-lived Patrick Warburton series from 2001. I was skeptical about this Amazon Prime reboot, especially upon seeing the pilot episode’s off-putting costumes. Finally gaining access to Prime this year, I decided to catch up and it gets quite good!, especially in Season 2. First, the costumes are upgraded; second, Peter Serafinowicz’s initially shaky characterization improves; and third, it begins to come into its own identity. The only real issue is yet another premature cancellation for the property, meaning Season 2’s tease of interdimensional alien Thrakkorzog will never be fulfilled. 😢

Bonus! 5 More Honorable Mentions:

City So Real (National Geographic)

The Good Lord Bird (Showtime)

How To with John Wilson: Season 1 (HBO)

Kidding: Season 2 (Showtime)

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Vs The Reverend (Netflix)

#tv #television

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breesays · 3 years ago

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Self self selfie

There's no way to rehearse

There's nothing to plan

Because everything that's under my skin

Where I end and begin

That's who I am

_Metric

I have high praise for any author who is able to eloquently tell the tale of a whole lifetime [Goldfinch, Beautiful Ruins] . I've always been very focused on moments. I feel like I have a special talent for stretching moments farrrrr beyond their usefulness. Tumble-drying them until they're smooth, they slide right in alongside other, often more significant, life events.

Sometimes phases or periods of my life feel entirely separate from who I am now. I know they're not. I know I wouldn't be here without there. Me without them. But there are some things that feel fairly solid. With as many possibilities for forks in the road as there have been, I feel like I am the stem. The constant. And, to some extent, obviously. It's MY LIFE. Does everyone feel like the stem? Unwaivable? Is this a bad '90s bumper sticker about feeling like I'm the center of the universe?

But there are followers, right? And there are leaders. I'm not a CLEAR leader. I just don't veer... much. I do a lot of research. Collect a lot of intel. I think I'm a grounded type of person, not likely to get swept up in anyone else's lifestyle or dreams or whatnot. I'm a subtle alpha. On the sidewalk, in the household. I don't rule with an iron fist or really any type of fist at all - but I do, I think, rule.

I've been a late bloomer on many accounts because I like to have shit figured out first. Or at least explored, on a surface level. I didn't date in high school, I got my drivers license at 20, I didn't drink before I turned 21, I didn't strategically cast off my virginity until I was 25. ( We don't call it LOSING if we know where we put it). I've rarely ever done things before I felt damn well ready. And when I didn't feel ready but I needed to leap I did something about it - therapy, anti-depressants, a substitution of habits, a grasping at my friend network. I'm not a goal-getter, but I have a fairly on-point gut instinct.

A weird but awesome compliment I've heard from friends is, "You always know who you are." I like it, but its hard to fully embrace it without knowing it's... opposition? What does it mean to NOT know who you are? I've read about it in books, characters who've built themselves out of mimicry, idolization. I feel like I've always had a solid sense of self. I just don't know where it comes from.

That's not to say I haven't tried things outside my comfort zone. I don't seek those experiences out, but I DO know experience builds character. Anyone who has read Calvin & Hobbes knows that. It's why I took a Wilderness Travel Course, why I dated a songwriter I wasn't the least bit attracted to, why I taught TurboKick classes at 24Hr Fitness. Even if you know who you are, it never hurts to try other hobbies on for size. For kicks. For sentences.

Reading The Midnight Library and watching Loki has me thinking a bit about alternate timelines, though. It's just that none of them seem probable. Viable? Sustainable? I think I'll still be a teacher at some point. Maybe even a professor! Tim was the only one I was ever going to marry, have a kid with. I liked being tutored by ravers at the Internet Cafe at 16 years old, but I was never, ever, ever going to attend a rave. Not even to impress a dude. There were one or two relationships I felt I had more potential - not forever but maybe 4 more months? I don't look that far ahead. I have anxiety about the fast forward - but that's another blog entirely.

I feel like maybe there's a word in German or something- not unlike Schadenfreude or Deja Vu (french, I know) for someone who has a solid sense of self. Is there? Even if there isn't, I'm glad for it. And I'm so proud of my two year old son, who is known for saying "Desmond needs space" at his preschool (per progress report) and "Desmond needs help." Is this related? Can an algorithm determine? My blogs, however I'd love them to adhere to a theme, always devolve (EVOLVE) unto a musing about Desmond. That's fine. This is the Desmond era.

#breesays #parenting #nostalgia

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twinxyjinx · 4 years ago

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My Mom

Plot/Prompt: Water

TW: panic, car crash, almost drowning

Reblogs are appreciated

You can also read it here on AO3!

_____________________________________________

Tony doesn’t see it coming.

Neither does Peter, who is seated shotgun in an older, less attention-attracting car. A car that Tony had decided to take on a drive around the woods. It wasn’t often he got to spend time with Peter. Especially since after the whole snap and war; plus his retirement. Giving up his title as Iron Man had left a lot of interviews to fill his time as well as getting more comfortable living life with a now prosthetic right arm. Phantom pains plagued him like the black death and it wasn’t uncommon that he would wake from nightmares.

It wasn’t uncommon that he wasn’t able to talk to Peter either. Now that the kid was back, he was jumping right back into the whole Spider-Man business. He’d been stopping thugs left and right and helping a few people who got displaced after coming back from the snap. He even helped set up a few shelters for those people; as his alter identity, of course. He was doing a lot of good and trying to help out as much as he could. Not to mention he also had school breathing down the back of his neck.

Unlike some of his classmates, he was still the same sixteen-year-old Peter as when he had been snapped. If he hadn’t, maybe he would’ve been in college by now or even graduated. He was smart, however, and school didn’t seem to worry him as much anymore. He was more focused on “saving kittens from trees” and “teaching a thug or two a lesson.” Tony had snorted at those phrases, but Peter had been all too serious about them. While the kid hadn’t sustained any serious injuries since getting back on duty, there had been a few close calls.

Tony had been watching through the suits cameras when it happened. He’d watch a guy point a gun at Peter from almost two feet away and had practically screamed when the gun went off. Luckily, his “spidey-senses” went off and saved him. It didn’t save him from Tony reprimanding him, however. Nor did it save him from getting knocked around a few times. Even if Tony had retired Iron Man, he hadn’t retired as Peter’s mentor. He kept an eye out on the kid, and it wasn’t uncommon to have him get knocked out mid fight.

He’d always bounce right back up onto his feet, however. It was always a relief to hear him complaining about how hard he got hit or how the guy he was fighting smelt like dead raccoons. A favorite insult of his was “they smell like that old dirty sock pile in the corner of my room that I still need to wash.”

In other words, life was good. Tony had Morgan and Pepper and their alpaca named Gerald. They had a nice private cabin that “uncle Happy” and “uncle Rhodey” - as dubbed by Morgan - visited every now and then. There was even the rare visit from Sam and sometimes Clint and his family. Bucky had come during one of the visits, though he lingered in the car outside. No matter how much Sam asked him to come in - as well as Tony even inviting him inside - he had flat out refused.

He lost almost all contact with Strange after the fight. Sometimes the sorcerer dropped by to talk about a few things that were far beyond even Tony’s understanding. It still intrigued him, however, to hear the former surgeon talk about realities and how time worked. As infuriating as he had been when they first met in his sanctum, Tony had grown to like his company over a cup of coffee.

Then there was Thor who dropped by the least. He’d gone with the group of so-called “Guardians” and hardly came to say hello. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but Tony had to admit that he missed his presence at times. But Pepper was always there to fill it in. Morgan too. Gerald helped a little bit with it, but he was more of a “come chew my sleeves off” type of alpaca. But he liked this life. It was more relaxed and he got to enjoy normally sitting around and talking with friends. So that was why he decided to catch up with Peter through a car ride.

“So how’s arachnid-man going for you?” Tony hummed, removing one hand from the wheel of the car to turn down the radio that had been playing AC/DC at a moderately loud volume. Peter tore his gaze away from the window, snorting and rolling his eyes. “It’s Spider-Man, mister Stark… and it's going good. Kinda boring, not gonna lie.” He explained, slouching back against his chair. Tony fixed him with a bewildered expression before averting his eyes back to the road. “Aren’t you enjoying not having to deal with a giant purple nutsack?”

“Ew.”

“That’s what we called him during the whole five years thing.” Tony rolled his eyes. “C’mon, Parker. You’d be - what - twenty-one now? You can say no-no words… unless your Aunt doesn’t let you.” He teased, earning a gentle punch on his prosthetic arm. “I say ‘no-no’ words all the time! And it's just… there’s a lot of responsibility now with everything and sometimes it gets overwhelming.” Peter shrugged, biting his bottom lip. “So it’s not boring?” Tony asked, raising his eyebrows.

“No. It’s overwhelming… are you losing your hearing?”

“If you make one more old man joke I am going to lose it.” Tony threatened through clenched teeth, keeping his tone light and sarcastic. Peter snorted, looking back out the window. “I’m terrified… no, truly! I’m shaking in my custom baby seal leather boots.” He waved his hands in front of himself. “Is that a reference to something?” Tony almost challenged, looking over at Peter. “Why yes it is, mister Stark. And you were cultured like me, you’d- DEER!”

“Deer!?” Tony parroted frantically, his gaze snapping back onto the road. In their path stood a buck, head high and eyes wide. It was caught right in their headlights and it didn’t seem like it was going to move anytime soon. Clenching his jaw, he grabbed the wheel tightly with one hand and pulled one hand back. He slammed it down on the horn, holding it there as his car screamed out a monotone bellow. However, it still didn’t move.

Desperately, Tony grappled with the wheel and began to turn it rapidly to the right. The tires screeched against the ground as the car veered, the end twisting to the left. A horrible thump followed as the car continued to swerve right towards the edge of the road that led down a slope that wasn’t too steep. However, it was still steep enough to bring the car tumbling down. The honking came to an abrupt stop as the car swerved over the edge and went barreling down the slope. The metal crunched and groaned under the barrage of force. The windshield wipers began to flail back-and-forth as the hood of the car popped upright.

And suddenly, it stopped… and they began to lower into the ground?

No… No, no, no. They were in a lake. Clenching his jaw through the pain that stabbed at his ribs and wrists, he slowly craned his head to the right to catch a glimpse of Peter. It was clear he was still breathing, but his head drooped lifelessly against the window. A thin trail of blood trickled out of his nose and there was a nasty gash on the side of his head. Stomach churning, Tony nodded and laughed unsteadily. “Alright… alright we’re okay. We’re gonna get out of here.” He muttered, almost to himself, as he reached over and shook Peter.

“C’mon buddy… open those eyes for me.”

A low groan sounded from Peter’s lips and his eyes flickered open dazedly. Tony immediately sought out his eyes and exhaled a shaky sigh of relief seeing that they weren’t dilated or glazed over. “What…” Peter whispered, blinking a few more times before he noticed the water now lapping at the edge of the windows of the car. His eyes stretched wide and he began to fumble for his seatbelt, breath hitching as terror made his movements clumsy and uncoordinated.

“Woah, woah, woah! Calm down!” Tony urged, unbuckling himself as well once he heard the click of Peter’s buckle. Shaking his head furiously, Peter grabbed at the doorknob and frantically tried to push the door open. “No, no, no! I can’t- I can’t do this water is- no, no, no!” He ended off in a cry of desperation when the door wouldn’t budge. Tony was both grateful and unsettled by that. While it kept the cold water out, it also meant the car sinking further and putting them in a more dangerous situation

“We gotta get out, mister Stark. I can’t do this- I can’t-”

“Deep breaths, buddy. Just breathe for a minute and explain why you’re all riled up.” Tony murmured, looking towards the front window to watch the black water slowly lap at the cracked windshield. Peter inhaled shakily and exhaled, nodding. “Uh- I haven’t been- I can’t put my head underwater. Or the surface because e-everytime I do, I panic and- the river- the Vulture- and it- it’s really scary.” He ended in what was barely a whisper as Tony nodded softly.

“I gotcha kid. But that’s not gonna happen this time. We’re gonna get out of this.” Tony reassured, nodding and raising his eyebrows to beckon Peter to nod back. After biting his bottom lip, Peter nodded shakily. “Y-yeah… Got it…” He trailed off at the terrible sound of cracking. Both of their gazes flashed towards the windshield as the black water washed over it and drug the car down. It was growing darker the further they sunk, but more and more cracks formed along the glass until an ear-splitting shattering sound met their ears.

“Oh my god oh my god!” Peter reeled backwards as the icy cold water rushed in, pooling on the floor of the car. “No, Peter! This is a good thing! That’s our way out!” Tony explained, slowly shifting to sit crouched on the balls of his feet on his chair. “Let the water fill the car up and then you gotta swim. Swim like your life depends on it.” He continued, looking over at Peter. He couldn’t make out his face anymore, but he could see him nodding his head. A surge of icy water at his knees made Tony gasp out loud, followed by a string of “fuck that's cold fuck oh shit fuck that is so cold.”

“Swear jar.” Peter whispered softly as the water continued to rise up to Tony’s chest. He began to tilt his head back, shivering and flashing a glare in Peter’s direction. “Not the time kid… get ready to take a deep breath.” He blinked his eyes rapidly as he reeled his head back further. The water began to lick at his Adam's apple, and soon began to rise up to his chin. Sputtering, he opened his mouth and sucked in as much air as he could before forcing his head under.

The world was thrown into darkness and everything became muffled. He could hear bubbles swishing around him and besides him, which he assumed to be Peter trying to move. Reaching out blindly, he clasped onto either Peter’s arm or leg, squeezing his eyes shut more when Peter’s hand found his. He kept his movements little to nothing to not waste too much oxygen as he pushed himself off the back of his seat, pulling Peter with him.

After a moment of floating forward, he began to churn his legs. He pulled his hand away from Peter’s and waved his arms. His chest felt tight and his lungs started to burn for air. For a moment, he feared he would be too slow. Then, he breached the surface. He threw his head back and his eyes shot open as he gasped, blinking rapidly against the droplets that trickled down his face.

Besides him, he heard a splash and someone else gasp for air. Wading in the water, he looked over at Peter who was spitting water out of his mouth and blinking his eyes rapidly. Relief flooded his chest and he exhaled shakily, jabbing his nose in the direction of the nearest shore.

“C’mon kid.”

#whumptober2020 #no.12 #water #marvel cinematic universe #Iron Man #spider man #spider son #iron dad #Irondad and Spiderson #spiderson and irondad #tw: car crash #tw: almost drowning #tw: panic #peter parker #tony stark #not endgame compliant #tony stark is alive #deers suck #writing

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atinytokki · 5 years ago

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The Windy Road

iv. Hongjoong

“You’re...real.”

Mingi completely ignored the thief’s question, staring wide-eyed at him before offering a hesitant hand to where he had unceremoniously dumped him.

“Yes, of course I’m real,” the boy huffed, rejecting Mingi’s hand and standing on his own. The shock present in his eyes only a second ago was gone. “What did you think I was- a ghost?”

Mingi watched him brush the dust off himself with a slack jaw. He tried to answer but only a few strangled noises came out and the mysterious boy’s face hardened in response.

“How do you know that name?” The boy repeated, softer this time. Mingi shook himself out of it and pointed to the diary, still protectively grasped by the thief.

“It’s in there. Hyunseok, the boy who... well, the boy who died. His mother wrote about it.”

“You thought I was him,” the boy sighed in recognition, looking away. The market continued to bustle around them and the boy suddenly took Mingi’s hand. “Follow me. We should speak somewhere private."

Mingi should have refused. He would already be in trouble for leaving alone, but he was just too curious about this boy who wasn’t Hyunseok’s ghost, but knew the name.

So he let himself be led beyond the market and along the street for a stretch before they veered off-road and approached the coast. They stopped at the top of the cliff, with the beach empty below.

Mingi forced himself to be patient and keep his mouth shut until the boy was ready to speak.

The boy wet his lips as if to say something, but halted mid-breath and sighed again. “Why couldn’t you just keep to yourself?” He asked quietly, almost to be mistaken as talking to himself. The wind tousled his mop of hair and it was almost like Mingi wasn’t there at all.

Mingi scoffed and took a seat in the grass, wary of the cliffside in front of him. “Look, I’ve been around the country before. I’ve seen a lot in all of the different houses I’ve lived in. But let me tell you, you don’t just come to a cottage, find out the previous owners recently died, keep spying a trespasser in your backyard, and discover a hidden diary about a dead boy and not try to investigate.”

For all his confident talk, Mingi was very much eyeing the beach with a cautious glance. His mother had been very clear in telling him not to go there, not during typhoon season at least. The previous owners of their house had died only a couple weeks ago. And the wind was picking up again, dark clouds on the horizon speeding toward them.

“And I believe you- ghost thief, or boy in the bushes, or whoever you are- have some explaining to do.”

Attention officially redirected, Mingi crosses his arms impertinently and waited for a response.

The boy cracked a tiny smile at his nicknames before sobering and sitting down next to Mingi. He rubbed the back of his neck and kept his gaze on the sea. “It’s all so complicated,” he mumbled. “And I don’t even know you.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Mingi was practically pleading now, dropping the tough facade to give the boy his most earnest expression.

The stranger pouted back at him before his eyes seemed to unlock, resistance fading as he turned the diary over in his hands and began.

“Hyunseok was my older brother. He died before I was born, and for many years my parents wouldn’t talk about him. I just wanted to know as much as I could,” he admitted softly, gently stroking the side of the little book with his thumb. “This is all that’s left.”

It hit Mingi like a load of bricks.

“If your mother was the one who wrote this...” he realised aloud. “...then those were your parents who—“

“Yes,” the boy cut him off, refusing to look at him but staring again into the sea, his face a convoluted map of sorrow, longing, and anger.

Mingi felt pity well up inside him. “So it is your house, then,” he told the boy, shifting uncomfortably. “You weren’t trespassing after all.”

“You threatened me if you caught me there again,” the boy explained. “But I had come for the book- the last thing I have left of them- so I came back one last time, intending to stay away once I had it. I really did intend to stay away.”

Here he turned to face Mingi. “There’s nothing I can say or do to make you and your family go away. You moved into my house and... I live elsewhere now. That’s that. You don’t need to tell your parents you met me.”

He sounded resigned, but somewhere very deep inside was heartbroken that he had been forced to leave.

“Well, where do you live now?” Mingi’s brows drew together in concern. “Not actually in a bush, I hope.”

If the boy appreciated Mingi’s attempt to lighten the mood, he didn’t show it. “With my other relatives in their ancestral home. Not far from here.”

“Do they know you’ve been coming back by yourself?” Mingi asked, semi-aware that he was sticking his nose in too far again, but unable to stop his snowballing curiosity.

The boy actually blushed and turned away again. “No. But I honestly don’t think they’d notice. Everything is... well, everything is in chaos right now. It has been since that night.”

Again, that look was in his eyes and Mingi was scrambling to find something encouraging to say. “I-I’m sorry for your loss. Really.”

It all tumbled out in a bedraggled heap, Mingi’s face burning scarlet with embarrassment that it had taken him this long to say it. He wrung his hands and went back to watching the waves.

Again the sentiment seemed to go ignored, but for a slight wistful shake of the head from the boy.

“What’s your name?” Mingi asked when an acceptable amount of silence had been passed between them and he had made the decision to befriend the boy.

“Kim Hongjoong.”

“I’m Song Mingi,” Mingi offered a sweaty hand and tacked on with an embellishment, “Eleven years old.”

Hongjoong raised an eyebrow and accepted the handshake. “I’m twelve.”

Again Mingi was fighting the blush that swelled in his cheeks. He had been certain this boy was younger than him.

He had also been certain he was a good-for-nothing thief, but that had clearly been false. This was a victim, not a mischief maker.

“Well, nice to meet you, I guess.”

Hongjoong smiled a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, but he was trying. “You too. I should probably be getting back.”

Together they stood and brushed themselves off, Mingi trying to create a sustainable olive branch to offer.

“It’s alright if you want to come around again some time,” he finally said as they began walking back the way they came. “I won’t yell at you, I promise.”

“You can’t say the same for your brother, though,” Hongjoong pointed out offhandedly.

“Why, have you met him too?” Mingi’s brow furrowed in confusion. He had been fairly sure Minseok hadn’t ventured outside hardly at all in their stay at the cottage so far.

“No, just seen him through the windows.” Hongjoong’s eyes slid over inquisitively, curiosity worn openly on his face for the first time. “He seems... troubled.”

Mingi chuckled but had to concede the point. “I guess he is. He’s just upset we had to move here, like he always is when we relocate.”

“It must be hard,” Hongjoong acknowledged softly, peeking up at him with a hint of pity in his eyes. “Moving around so much.”

Not as hard as your parents drowning unexpectedly, Mingi wanted to say. But he thought better of it and shrugged it off instead. “I suppose I’m used to it by now. It’s just difficult to make and keep friends.”

Hongjoong smiled again, this one more real and heartfelt. “Well, you’ve got me now.”

He spoke as if it were an indisputable fact. As if the ten minutes the two of them had known each other outweighed all the broken friendships and long distance struggles of the past. Mingi didn’t have the heart to deny him.

“So, we’re friends?”

“Yes. Let’s be friends.”

...

A/N: The mystery is solved (mostly)! I wrote this in two hours last night but I promise I'm working on the main series too, you can expect it later this week :) Leave some comments and reblogs if you enjoyed!

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yamisnuffles · 5 years ago

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Your Fire and Your Flood, Pt 2

Chapter 2 is here at last.

Read on Ao3

- - - - -

In the beginning there was neither light nor was there dark. There was nothing. There was everything. There was Her and She was both. She was all the light and dark to come, the stars, moons, trees, and clouds. Everything and nothing. That was how Crawly felt. There was no light around him anymore, barely any in him, nor was there dark. Just nothing. And everything.

Consciousness came in fits and starts. First in the feel of droplets on his scales. It must have been rain because that was all he’d felt for weeks. It had started to feel like that was all he’d ever known. But if it was, it had slowed remarkably, no longer a downpour but the occasional drip... drip... drip. He would have thought it curious- each drop too warm, too heavy with something he felt more in his soul than his flesh- but he wasn’t in a place to be curious about anything. He was adrift in the dark and that was all he knew again before long.

The next thing he was aware of was heat. He’d been warm from the moment of his creation. Her love burned at the foundation of every angel. It should have been enough to carry him through anything, had sustained him through the coldest nights and even in the void of space. Rain, no matter the amount, should have been nothing. He hadn’t realized just how cold he’d gotten until heat returned to his body. It came from somewhere outside him, soft and peculiarly inviting. His body was suffused with it until the spark inside him was stoked to new life. He wasn’t sure how long he continued in that nebulous existence. He was only ever aware of the return of cold for the warmth that always followed.

Finally there was song. Song. That was something that hit him at his very core. Seraphim were made to sing for Her. Crawly had sung often, especially as he spun out constellations. Each heavenly body was another note in an infinite song. He hadn’t sung since then, hadn’t heard other angels sing for even longer. Human song had its own kind of beauty- raw and honest and vital. That it was different from angel song did not make it worse but it was different. There was no mistaking what he heard now was an angel singing. That sound was like a hook to the center of his being that yanked him all the way back to consciousness at last.

At first he wasn’t sure if he’d properly woken up. He couldn’t make sense of what he saw. He thought he was sitting amongst the clouds, but that couldn’t be. He slithered and stretched underused muscles as his mind lifted from the heavy fog of a very long sleep. The movement as much as his gradual awakening told him that he was actually swathed in a white cloak. He wriggled toward the light through folds of soft fabric.

He was in a small cabin on a ship large enough that it was barely troubled by waves. Not far away, framed against a miraculously sun filled window not far away, was Aziraphale. That explained the cloak. He should have known instantly from the smell- which he gathered now on his flickering tongue- but the ongoing lilt of angelic song had pushed all else from his mind. It was everything in a way that made his prior nothingness feel like a distant memory. It filled him until he felt he might burst.

Not for the first time, he wished for another corporation. This one wasn't made to house so much emotion. His heart swelled. He wanted to smile. He wanted to cry. He couldn't do either, so instead he used a voice laden and hushed with feeling to speak the only truth that mattered to him.

"Aziraphale." And that, too, was everything.

If only it hadn't meant an end to the song. Aziraphale silenced immediately and spun on his heel. His mouth hung in a wobbling, wordless circle. Shock, sorrow, joy, and more all washed quickly across expressive features. Crawly had forgotten just how blue those eyes could be, especially swimming in unshed tears.

"Oh,” Aziraphale said, finding his voice at last. “Oh, Crawly, you're-"

Aziraphale rushed forward and bent smoothly to draw the whole unwieldy mass of Crawly’s serpentine form into his arms. The long body of a snake wasn't meant for hugging, so Crawly met him halfway by winding around Aziraphale's torso. It meant Aziraphale was left hugging himself as much as anything but it was enough.

Tears fell from Aziraphale's eyes and suddenly Crawly understood what he'd felt before, the rain that wasn't rain. "Hey, I'm alright," he said, not wanting to be the source of Aziraphale's pain. "I'm okay."

"You silly- You foolish-" Aziraphale blustered in a voice that might have been successfully cross if it hadn’t come from between gasping, shaky breaths. "You- you impossible serpent. I thought you were gone. You nearly were."

Crawly nuzzled into the downy hair at the base of Aziraphale's neck. He couldn't bear to see the other angel cry, especially when he was the cause. "Sssssorry."

"You should be." Aziraphale hiccupped over another sob and quieted as he tried to even out his breathing. "I don’t know if the water really would have killed you but that, that… absurdity might have. Whatever were you thinking?"

"Wasn't, really. Just sort of… did it.”

Aziraphale tilted his head to aim a withering look at the snake on his shoulders. “You just decided syphoning off your own ethereal energy was the best thing to do?”

“Yes?” Crawly buried his head at the juncture of Aziraphale’s neck. “I was tired, okay? You don’t know how long I spent trying to convince someone, anyone, to listen to me. But all any of them ever see is the Sssserpent of Eden.” He hated that phrase, hated what it represented and that he could never escape it. “A thousssand yearssss like thissss. They whissssper and tell sssstories sssso everyone knowssss.” Of course his hiss would become more pronounced now and he hated that too. “I was so tired,” he continued when he was certain his voice wouldn’t betray him. “And desperate. I wasn’t about to let the only humans who believed in me die.”

Aziraphale’s shoulders slumped. He reached around to stroke gently along Crawly’s back, leaving a trail of warmth wherever he touched. “I’m so sorry, my dear. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you.”

Crawly melted into the touch. For a moment he was able to imagine that everything actually would be fine and then he stiffened. He slithered around so he could talk face to face. "Wait, where are the humans?" His whole body went slack, sure of the answer already. "It didn't work, did it? I screwed it up and they didn't make it anyway. I promised. I promisssed and still…"

“Crawly, no. Shhhhh, no, no, no,” Aziraphale soothed. “They’re fine. Just fine.”

Crawly was so busy cursing up a storm that it took a second for him to process what Aziraphale had said. “They’re… alright?” he asked, not daring to hope until it was confirmed again.

“More than, I’d say, given they were sustained for so long by celestial energies. I can take you to see them when you’ve rested up more.”

“I don’t need more sleep. I mean, probably do, but I already got a lot. I think. How long was I out?”

“Well-”

“Doesn’t matter. I won’t be able to get more sleep until I see them for myself. So if you won’t take me, I’ll just find them on my own. I’m sure I can sniff them out.”

Crawly moved to drop from Aziraphale’s shoulders but was stopped by a firm hand and a sigh. “Alright. Promise me you’ll try to rest up more after, though.”

“Promise,” Crawly replied without hesitation.

Once out of the cabin, a wave of animal smell hit Crawly. They didn’t have far to go. They passed tall fenced stalls that held elephants, camels, and giraffes. One of the giraffes had its neck curved to look into the next stall over, the one that Aziraphale approached after a furtive glance about.

“Miriam, I’m coming in,” he warned as he undid the latch. “I’ve got someone with me that I thought you might want to see.”

“You’re bringing someone?” came a woman’s nervous reply. “Who- oh.”

Crawly saw instantly what Aziraphale had meant about the humans being better than alright. There was the slightest glow to them, visible in the dim corner where the two elder children were huddled behind their mother, Miriam. As soon as they saw who was with Aziraphale, they all rushed over, the children in an excited jumble and their mother at a more controlled pace. Anah and her brother Reuel hopped up and tried to grab onto the end of Crawly’s tail but were stopped by Aziraphale.

“Alright now, children, Crawly has been through a lot. Best to look and not touch,” he tutted.

The children pouted in unison. Joy bubbled up inside Crawly at the sight of their innocent, open petulance. There they were, clearly considering disobeying the Principality, and he couldn’t help but laugh.

“That’s no fun,” he said and he dropped down without further warning.

The children shrieked and giggled. They stumbled with pudgy legs amongst his many winding coils while their mother and Aziraphale looked on with matching exasperated expressions. Their petting was far from gentle but Crawly enjoyed it more for that. He could still remember perfectly the way they’d hardly dared get near him at first. Now it was clear they could hardly get close enough.

“Az- Azira…” Anah screwed up her lips. “The other angel said you were sleeping and that we had to leave you alone. If you don’t need to eat, why do you need to sleep?”

“Because I like to sleep,” Crawly answered. Which was the truth, if not the whole truth of the situation. He didn’t like lying when answering questions but he didn’t think a teeny tiny omission would hurt in this case, given that the alternative was to risk the children feeling guilty for something he’d chosen to do. “Sleeping is great. Sometimes I think I would like to nap for a year.”

“A year?” Reuel gasped.

“Maybe a hundred.”

This was met by a peel of laughter from both Anah and Reuel who clearly thought he was joking. Which, he was. Sort of. A bit. Maybe.

“Wanna see the ostriches?” Anah asked, veering to another topic without warning the way only a child could.

“And sheep!” Reuel chimed in.

“Sheep are boring.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Uh-huh. We can always see sheep.”

Aziraphale held his hands up. “Children, we can see whatever you’d like.” He closed his eyes a moment and Crawly could feel him probing for the presence of any other celestial beings. One snap later to ensure they went unnoticed and he added, “Lead the way.”

The children scampered out of the stall, followed by their mother and baby brother, and finally the two angels. Crawly rode on Aziraphale’s shoulders so that he could actually see the animals. The children were more than happy to chatter at length about each animal they passed and Crawly was happy to listen. He found he was actually fairly interested since most creatures tended to give him a wide berth. The miracle that made them all more docile for life on the ark ensured he could get a good look without any of them panicking.

He wasn’t sure when he nodded off. Sleep was usually something he chose to do instead of something that simply fell on him, but one moment he was enjoying the children’s glee at the snakes and the next, he was nestled back in Aziraphale’s robes. Starlight washed the floor in a soft glow. Aziraphale was seated next to him, legs folded primly underneath himself. He was humming some human tune to himself and startled slightly when Crawly stirred.

“Awake again I see.”

“Nnnnh,” was Crawly’s eloquent response. He felt cold again and slithered up into Aziraphale’s lap in search of warmth. “How long was I out this time?”

Aziraphale conjured extra heat into his palms and stroked along Crawly’s spine. “Not long. Only a few hours. I do believe you’re properly on the mend at last.”

Crawly couldn’t manage much more than a thoughtful noise in response. The heat felt so nice and when he didn’t say anything more, Aziraphale started to sing the same tune he’d hummed before. Crawly thought it sounded familiar but Aziraphale had replaced the words with cheerful sounding nonsense. Combined with the ever present lap of water against the hull, it threatened to put Crawly right back to sleep. He would have happily submitted if it hadn’t meant he was liable to forget once more something he’d wanted to say.

“Thank you,” he murmured.

“Whatever for, my dear?” Aziraphale responded without pausing the soothing motion of his hand.

“The humans. You didn’t have to rescue them. I know you’re not supposed to.”

“Ah, well…” And now Aziraphale pulled back into himself and wrung his hands together. “No, I’m not, but no one ever said I couldn’t help you. So when I finally found you and you had the humans with you, what choice did I have? Perhaps I wasn’t supposed to save them but you’d already done that and I wasn’t about to kill them. Whether I did it outright or simply left them, it would all be the same thing in the end. Which meant there was only one thing to do. And you were all huddled together and really, it was just easier to take the whole boat and all its occupants than try to extricate you from the lot.”

Crawly could tell from the way Aziraphale was rambling that he’d rehearsed those excuses a few times in case he had to explain himself. “How’ve you kept four humans from going unnoticed?”

“It would seem most of the angels find all the animals a bit… distasteful, so they’ve mostly left me to it. Gabriel in particular, who was meant to keep me updated on when I might see land again. As for Noah and his family, they trust me to keep things in order.” Aziraphale squirmed and his gaze skipped around in search of sudden intruders. “So it’s really been no bother. Certainly nothing to thank me for.”

“You did a lot, Aziraphale. They all seemed happy and healthy. Don’t say that was all down to me because I haven’t been doing much of anything for a while. After everything they’ve been through, you made them smile again. You did that.” Crawly knew how difficult it must have been for Aziraphale. The Principality seemed forever torn between what he felt was right and what he thought Heaven wanted from him. He’d gone above and beyond even knowing it could get him in trouble. “So, yeah, think I actually do have to say thanks.”

Aziraphale squirmed again but it was clear he was pleased from the way his lips curled up despite himself. “When you put it like that, I suppose I must.” He averted his eyes and his cheeks tinged with pink. “Though I feel far from altruistic. I did it for you. Because of how much you’d given. Because of how I…”

He trailed off, leaving Crawly to wonder. And wonder he did, about that angel with self conscious crimson painting the tips of his pale ears and the light of a halo glowing delicately from just this side of reality. Aziraphale had gone so far out of his comfort zone, risked the wrath of heaven, all for him. A snake, the Serpent of Eden.

Again Crawly felt something too big, too complex for this simple corporation. It filled him and filled him and filled him, bigger than the wrathful sea outside. How could he feel something so huge? He doubted there’d be any containing it even if he’d had his proper form. He was a star too heavy to sustain itself, a supernova waiting to be born. He didn’t know how else to put it, even to himself. He didn’t think he’d ever felt something like this. It was all consuming and yet it gave and gave.

It was everything and it was nothing. It was-

Oh.

“Aziraphale, I- I think…”

“Hmm?”

He couldn’t say it. Were angels even allowed to love in this way? This was no wide, encompassing love for creation nor the intrinsic act of being that was loving Her. This was specific, desirous, needing of another like a mortal might need for air. Even if it could be holy, Crawly wasn’t sure it could be when coming from him. It would drag Aziraphale down. Aziraphale was meant to soar in the heavens, not be forced down into the dirt.

“What is it?” Aziraphale prompted again.

This feeling was a revelation but Crawly couldn’t reveal it. He’d rushed in too often and stumbled into folly. He couldn’t risk that. “I think I… might sleep again. For a bit.” There. That was better. Safer. “Could you stay with me? Maybe sing a bit? Helps me sleep.”

“Of course,” Aziraphale replied, his smile beatific.

Crawly slithered back into the pile of robes though he’d never felt warmer than he did with Aziraphale’s thigh pressed against him and a song drifting through the air just for him. He hadn’t thought what he felt could grow anymore but there it was, bubbling up. He had the same feeling he did when he’d first awakened from his long slumber, that he was swathed in clouds rather than fabric. He buried himself in the robes, sure that if he continued looking at Aziraphale he would burst.

Once more, impossibly given how he felt, sleep claimed him. It was not darkness that met him this time but a dream of the stars. Six wings carried him in a familiar dance. It felt right, better than it had when he’d done it in the waking world because this time Aziraphale was with him. They flew hand in hand to every one of Crawly’s creations. When there was no more to show, Crawly let out the feeling that was burning to be free and turned himself into a star just for Aziraphale.

He lingered blissfully in that dream until the sun on his eyelids couldn’t be ignored any longer. A smile remained painted on his lips despite the stiffness in all of his limbs. He indulged in a languorous stretch and yawned so wide it was a miracle his jaw didn’t end up unhinging. His fingers were buried deep in tangled curls before anything struck him as odd.

“You’re- you- you’re… oh my.”

Aziraphale’s stunned stammering confirmed it. He knew what he felt but he still had to look down, to press fingers into lightly freckled skin, in order to believe it. He was a tangle of limbs piled at Aziraphale’s feet. He had his body back. His. It didn’t make a bit of sense and he expected scales to sprout at any moment, but there was no denying it.

He thought of conjuring some clothes but decided for the moment that he’d rather wear Aziraphale’s discarded cloak. He didn’t care one speck that it was too large. He liked it more for that. Delighted laughter burbled up and escaped his lips- his lips- as he tried to get to his feet. It continued, even as he stumbled. It would have kept going until he hit the deck with his face but Aziraphale caught him first. Heat blossomed in his skin where Aziraphale’s hands made contact. Even if his legs hadn’t felt confusing at the moment, being so close to Aziraphale this way would have robbed him of the ability to walk all the same. His knees were uselessly weak.

“Careful now,” Aziraphale said softly as he tucked himself under an arm. “You’ll need some time to get used to your legs.”

“My legs,” the seraph repeated with a wide, crooked smile. “My legs.”

Aziraphale snapped and a pile of cushions appeared. He lowered the other angel onto them and then cocked his head. “It’s good to see you again,” he said. The skin about his eyes crinkled with his smile. Those blue eyes blew wide suddenly. “Oh. I remember now. You’re not Crawly. You’re-”

“Don’t.” A shiver passed through new skin. The former serpent couldn’t pin a finger on exactly why he dreaded hearing his old angelic name, only that it filled him with a distinct sense of wrong. “That’s not me anymore.”

“Not you?” Aziraphale asked, perplexed. “My dear, it’s your God given name. You’ve earned it back and you’re saying you don’t want it?”

“Nope.” The seraph picked absently at his fingernails and toes. He ran his tongue over his teeth as he considered. “Not that. Not Crawly either.”

“If you insist,” Aziraphale huffed.

“I do.”

“What should I call you, then?”

A good question. He drew in a long breath until he felt truth lodge somewhere in between his ribs. “Crowley,” he answered and he instantly knew it was right.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale echoed and if Crowley hadn’t known before, it was sealed as soon as he heard it come out of those lips. “If that makes you happy then, yes, I think it suits you.”

Crowley flashed his teeth in response. “Suits me, huh?”

He wasn’t sure who he was right now. His skin felt familiar and foreign all at once. He grabbed one of his feet and hooked it behind his neck. He was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. He wiggled his various digits and felt the pull of muscles and tendons as he stretched out his limbs again. He felt a bit looser at the joints than he had before but otherwise normal. He stuck his tongue out until he could see the rounded pink tip of it. Normal too. Unless… He concentrated and it forked at the end, falling somewhere between human and serpent. Concentrate more and it was back again. He was fairly certain if he really wanted to, he could be a snake again, but he didn’t want to.

Aziraphale watched him with a bemused smile as he continued testing the new parameters of his body. “Do you have any idea how this happened.”

“Nope,” Crowley said, popping the ‘p’ and thoroughly enjoying forming his mouth around words again instead of just willing them to come. “And for once, I’m not going to question it.”

He set his feet flat and pushed up in another attempt to stand. His hips swayed this way and that. He probably would have fallen again except that he pulled his wings out to balance him. A pleasant tingle ran up his spine. They ached to be used. His current quarters weren’t large enough to really stretch them, which only left him with one option.

He folded them tight against his back and reached out to take Aziraphale’s hand firmly in his own. “Come on.”

“Where to?”

“Just come along, would you? More fun if I show you.”

Aziraphale gave a small, tight nod. Crowley thought it was the other angel who was trembling and then he realized it was him. That wouldn’t do. He pushed past that jittery feeling, took a few gravity defying strides forward, and then hopped out the window, taking Aziraphale with him. Aziraphale all but fell out after. Crowley pulled the startled blond into his arms and they floated down together with the aid of six star bright wings.

He couldn’t help but laugh again as they made a soft landing on the surface of the water. He released Aziraphale from the embrace and took a few more increasingly steady steps. When he didn’t fall straight on his ass, he took another step, skipped, hopped, and fluttered forward. It was all marvellous. He could have spent the next thousand years reacquainting himself with everything he’d missed in the last thousand.

Aziraphale followed after him with a more controlled gate. “You really have no idea why you got your body back?” he asked. He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Given the timing, I suppose it must be what you did for the humans. Which, if that’s the case, Her plan truly is ineffable.”

Crowley twirled about on one foot and looked straight into eyes the same blue as the water beneath their feet. His heart pounded hard in his chest. Love, it said.

“Not a clue,” was the easy lie, though only a partial one at that. He knew in his soul what this was about but that didn’t mean he knew the reasoning. Perhaps She was rewarding him for not sullying Aziraphale with this imperfect, all too human love. “Like I said, not questioning it.” He extended a hand toward Aziraphale. “Fly with me?”

Aziraphale let out his own wings with a contented sigh and took Crowley’s hand. “I’d love to.”

Love. Love. Love.

Hand in hand, they took flight.

#fic #good omens #ineffable husbands #crowley #anthony j crowley #snake crowley #angel!crowley #go au: tmgt #aziraphale #my writing

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lati-will · 5 years ago

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Transcending the Illusion of Light Versus Dark

A belief that seems to be prevalent in many spiritual circles is that the ascension of humanity involves some sort of battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness — a battle between good and evil. Associated with this belief is the idea that we (the so-called awakened and enlightened ones) must defeat those of the darkness to successfully co-create a new earth. If you haven’t been drawn into this us-against-them mindset congratulations, you are probably better off without it (at least that’s my contention). For those that have been drawn into this belief, I humbly offer my perspective on this subject for your consideration.

From a superficial standpoint, there is certainly some truth to this belief — there certainly is an ongoing struggle between light and dark on our world. But when explored more deeply, you’ll find that this idea contains a great fallacy. And worse yet, holding this belief might actually block one from ascending and contributing to co-creating the new Earth.

When immersed in a separation reality like our own, it is so easy to fall into the trap of believing that we are in a battle between good and evil, that those of the light are here to defeat those of the darkness and save the world. Of course, this belief can only arise within a consciousness that is still in the grip of the illusion of separation. And ironically, holding this belief can only sustain the disharmonious and fearful conditions that we have thus far co-created in our reality. To understand and transcend the fallacy of light versus dark, you must first understand the illusion of separation that our reality was designed to produce, and why we chose to create and experience such a reality. But before I explore all of that, let’s briefly examine the state of our world.

The Darkness in Our World

There’s no denying that there’s more than a little darkness in our world. Fear, conflict, and suffering have been running rampant for as long as we can remember. It certainly appears that evil is alive and well. At least that’s the impression one might get from watching the mainstream news — whose primary purpose seems to be to sow fear.

But certainly, there is no shortage of souls that have been playing in the dark, to varying degrees, in many of their lives within the Earth Game. Some of the most notorious of these dark ones are those involved in the so-called Cabal/Illuminati. But there are many others, in a wide variety of positions in our society — and this includes many (but certainly by no means all) corporate, governmental, military, and even religious leaders. These extremely self-serving people seem to measure their self-worth by how much wealth they can accumulate and how much power over others they can have, and they are typically obsessed with their own achievement and power and have little regard for the welfare of others.

The most dedicated of these people have been ruthlessly consolidating their power and wealth via their command of the international banking and financial system, by creating trans-national corporate empires, and infiltrating our governments with their minions. Encouraging division amongst us is one of their most potent tools that facilitates their self-serving agendas. They keep us divided by encouraging fear, competition, and conflict amongst us.

The Great Awakening

If you are reading this article, then you’re probably aware that there is a great awakening spreading throughout Humanity. More and more people are awakening to their true spiritual nature, the greater spiritual reality, and the metaphysical nature of existence. It is this awakening that will inevitably lead to a great transformation of ourselves and our world.

As a part of this awakening process, more and more people are becoming acutely aware that humanity has been under the thumb of some very negative and self-serving people bent on their own self-aggrandizement and world domination. Many awakening souls are more than a little shocked when they realize the truth of this — when they realize that we’ve allowed ourselves to be unwittingly manipulated and subjugated by these dark ones. Some are so appalled by the unsettling revelations of lies, greed, manipulation, and control that they get drawn into judgment, blame, and condemnation of those seen as responsible (some even get stuck obsessively focusing on the injustice of it, a very unproductive state of mind that I call awakening shock syndrome).

With the shock of this realization, it’s no wonder that many people buy into the belief that a part of our ascension process involves a battle between good and evil and the defeat of the dark ones. But I didn’t write this article to complain about the state of the world or to encourage people to feel like victims or to fuel resentment, judgment, blame, and condemnation. I wrote this article to point out that the supposedly spiritual idea of “light versus dark,” and the “us against them” mentality that it represents, is a subtle yet insidious trap. A trap that is critical to become aware of because it can potentially stop us from ascending and co-creating a new and better Earth.

The Metaphor of Light and Dark

It’s important to understand that the terms “light” and “dark” are simply metaphors for the degree of connectivity and alignment that one has with their higher self. When one is well-connected and aligned with the higher levels of their consciousness (their soul, over-soul, and beyond), they increasingly express a way of being that reflects the state of being of their higher self. This way of being is characterized by unconditional love, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, allowance, fearlessness, positivity, and service-to-others — to name just a few. The more you express these qualities, the more it could be said that you are “shining the light” of your higher self into this world.

In the same vein, the term “dark” or “darkness” is simply a metaphor for the lack of connection and alignment with ones higher self. When one is poorly connected and misaligned with one’s higher self, one’s way of being will veer off in the direction of negativity, fear, self-servedness, and perhaps even a lust for power-over-others. How far one will go in this direction just depends on one’s degree of misalignment with their higher self and their unique set of experiences. The more one expresses this way of being, the more it could be said that one is in “darkness” or “playing in the dark” — or if we want to get over-dramatic “gone to the dark side.”

There is No Force of Darkness

It’s important to understand that there is no force of darkness. Darkness doesn’t exist on its own; it is not a thing unto itself; darkness is simply the lack of light. All that really exists is the “light” of your higher self. If you block a light source, you create a shadow — an area where the light is much dimmer. When you block the “light” of your higher self, you create darkness. Metaphorically speaking that is, because remember what we are really talking about is the degree of connection and alignment with your higher self or the lack thereof, and the way of being you express in this world.

So, there is no “force” of darkness, no force of evil. There is nothing pushing us to become negative and self-serving other than our own unconsciousness (our own disconnection from our higher-selves). We are creating our own darkness by unwittingly blocking the love and light and wisdom of our higher self — our darkness and the darkness in our world is self-created! Ultimately there is nothing other than the “illusion of separation” that causes one to follow the negative path or turn to the dark side. More about the illusion of separation coming shortly.

Eckhart Tolle eloquently echoes my point about the origin of darkness, in his book A New Earth, when he said There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. With this realization, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.

Our true selves, our higher-selves, are the love and light we seek — we are already that, if we allow it. But we ourselves are blocking the love and light of our higher-selves and creating the darkness in ourselves and our world. This idea was eloquently expressed by Rumi, the beloved 13th-century Persian poet, and Sufi mystic, when he said:

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

And the two most significant barriers to expressing the love and light of our higher-selves are undoubtedly our fear and ego. These are the significant barriers that I think Rumi might have been alluding to, but of course, there are a multitude of variations. But let’s not demonize fear and ego, because they are just natural consequences of diving into the experience of a separation reality construct like our own. And as I alluded to earlier, to understand the fallacy of the “light versus dark” idea one has to understand the illusion of separation our reality provides us.

The Illusion of Separation

We specifically created our reality construct to have a separation experience, and it indeed produces a very powerful illusion of separation. And of course, this was not a mistake, we (higher aspects of ourselves — our oversouls and beyond) intentionally designed this reality as the ultimate experience of individuality, separation, and limitation. So, we understood full well what we were getting into when we chose to dive into the separation game.

We wanted to experience something dramatically different than our native state as formless and non-physical threads of Source Consciousness — eternal limitless creator beings! We wanted to explore the possibilities and experiences that such a separation reality would provide us. We wanted to explore the states of consciousness, and ways of being that would emerge within it and all their ramifications. We wanted to see what that would be like and what it could teach us.

Playing the Separation Game

We’ve all been playing the separation game for quite some time now — we have all played many many rounds in this game. Each time we enter the game (incarnate) the Veil of Forgetting and Unknowing takes effect, and we forget everything prior to starting the game — we forget choosing to play; we forget our reasons for playing; we forget our learning and growth objectives for playing the current round, and we forget everything about the wider reality and the true nature of ourselves.

With the in-your-face highly convincing experience of separation that our reality presents our consciousness, it’s not surprising that we quickly get sucked into the drama of the game. Because we don’t remember that we are eternal consciousness (non-physical and formless), we quickly become strongly identified with our bodies as who and what we are. And since we can’t remember anything about the wider reality, the bigger picture, we quickly come to believe that the world that we perceive with our physical senses is all that there is. And step-by-step we get drawn ever-deeper into the drama of the game, and ever-deeper into Separation Consciousness, and we become utterly lost within the game.

The Emergence of Egoic and Victim Consciousness

And once immersed in, and mesmerized by, the drama of the game we quickly lose our connection to our higher self and our consciousness, essentially, devolves. But not really so much devolve as to attain a state unlike anything possible in any other context of experience — a state of consciousness only possible within a separation reality like our own — an interesting and unique state that we might call Separation Consciousness. And this state of consciousness has two major aspects; namely Egoic Consciousness and Victim Consciousness.

Egoic Consciousness is a state characterized by a very strong sense of identity and individuality — one which often expresses as self-centeredness, self-servedness, greediness, defensiveness, and so on. Victim Consciousness is a state characterized by the belief that one is largely at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control, and often expresses as fear, hopelessness, disempowerment, etc. And because the state of our world is simply a reflection of our collective state of consciousness, our world is characterized by plenty of fear, greed, competition, and conflict.

Note that the common denominator here is FEAR. Of course, fear is not an unreasonable reaction to what our reality sometimes presents us. After all, there is plenty of apparent danger and limitation to worry about if we so choose. Because fear naturally arises within a separation reality like our own, we don’t need to demonize it, all we need to do is to understand it.

Fear is the Root of Darkness

And here’s one of the most important things to understand about fear — it’s the number one thing blocking us from expressing the love and compassion of our higher-selves. Ultimately much of the hurtful negative self-serving things people do is driven by their fear — fear that they aren’t good enough or worthy, fear that they won’t have enough, fear that they are not safe, fear for their survival, etc.

And as the beloved Yoda character from the Star Wars stories so aptly pointed out — Fear is the path to the dark side.

The root of all the darkness in our world is FEAR. Until we deeply understand this, we will find it difficult to unconditionally forgive and love those still playing in the dark. And until we do that we will be trapped in judgment and condemnation and be unwittingly perpetuating the world as we know it — a world of conflict and pain and suffering. Only unconditional love can heal our world.

A recent message from one of my favorite non-physical teachers, Seth (via one of my favorite channelers, Story Waters) really hammers home this point.

Darkness is an illusion. Darkness is the absence of light and that absence of light comes through unconsciousness. And that unconsciousness is experienced as FEAR. Fear is that which hides light. All are light.

The battle is not against ignorance (or evil) or those that are called ignorant (or evil); the battle is against FEAR… See those that appear ignorant clearly by seeing their fear. For when you see their fear you will not see them as other, you will not see them as separate and ignorant, you will see them as beings in fear.

And, when you understand they are in fear, and that they are not being driven by some nefarious force of darkness, then you will see that they are just loving beings in fear and you will be able to love them — then you will discover the compassion, the compassion of the awakened one, the compassion of the open heart that sees that all the ills in the world come from fear.

— Seth (via Story Waters, an excerpt from the Shards of Light Series)

When you understand that fear is at the root of every ill in our world, you are at the doorstep of transcending it and all that it leads too. And transcending fear and shifting to love is one of the greatest challenges that the separation game has to offer. Something that all the souls in the game right now were hoping they could achieve as a part of the great awakening and transformation game plan (more about that game plan later in this article).

Nothing to Fear

But it’s important to understand that fear is not a mistake We wanted to experience separation and fear is a natural part of that. So, we wanted to experience fear — something impossible in our native state as pure consciousness. What is there to fear as a formless and non-physical focal point of consciousness? Which is what you really are. As pure consciousness, you have no physical needs — no need for money, no need for a job, no need for food, no need for anything! And as pure consciousness, you cannot be physically harmed!

You are non-physical! You are pure consciousness! And that consciousness that is you is merely having the “experience of” having a body and being in a world. Your consciousness is essentially dreaming this experience you call your reality! Or perhaps a better analogy, your consciousness is playing a character (or avatar) in something very much like a multi-player virtual reality game!

Yes, this experience that you call your reality that seems so concrete and serious is a purely perceptual experience happening within your consciousness! It’s a symbolic representation being projected onto the “screen” of your consciousness! And this means that you don’t have to take everything that happens in the game so seriously or be in fear, none of it can truly harm what you really are. When you complete this round of the game, you’re going to be very surprised and amused by how seriously you took all of it. But we’ve gotten a bit off topic here, let’s keep exploring what happens to consciousness within the game.

The Positive and Negative Paths

One of the most interesting things that happens within a separation reality is that consciousness (and way-of-being) heads in two distinctly different directions — sometimes referred to as The Negative Path and The Positive Path, or the Service-to-Self Path and the Service-to-Others Path, or in keeping with the theme of this article (yet a bit over-dramatic) The Path of Darkness and The Path of Light.

The Service-to-Self/Negative Path is characterized by a way-of-being that is decidedly self-serving, and that likes to exercise power-over-others so that others can be made to serve their desires and needs. And the Service-to-Self label seems somewhat appropriate because those exploring this way-of-being (or on this path, if you like) have a strong bias towards fulfilling their own needs at the expense of others. Some of the attributes associated with this way-of-being include a tendency toward deceit, manipulation, and greed.

The Service-to-Others/Positive Path is characterized by a desire to help others and to engage in cooperation for the betterment of all. Those on this path have a tendency toward honesty, cooperation, and generosity — to name a few.

So in effect, there are two types of players in the game — those biased towards helping only themselves with little regard for the greater good of all, and those biased towards helping others and working together for the greater good of all. Of course, this is not an all or nothing thing, it is a spectrum going from neutral all the way to either very negative or very positive.

In any case, a complex dynamic emerges between these two types of players that creates a whole lot of drama and a whole lot of opportunities to learn and grow. There are perpetrators, victims, and rescuers; there are subjugators and the subjugated, etc, etc. And they all do a complex dance together as they play out all the ramifications of separation consciousness.

And again, this is not a mistake, this is by design. We wanted to explore all the states of consciousness, and the ways of being that would emerge within a separation reality. And the two directions or paths that consciousness can go is a part of that. In fact, some of the rules of the game that we put in place allow for both paths to be explored and their ramifications to be experienced.

Having said that, you’ll probably be happy to know that the rules are biased towards the Positive Path. You can only go so far on the Service-to-Self/Negative Path before it becomes nearly impossible to proceed and you “see the light” and switch over to the Positive Path. Ultimately the negative, service-to-self, power-over-others path is a dead end. The Separation Game is much like a multi-level game (or school) whereas you master one level you graduate to the next level. After the first few levels of the game, everyone exploring the Negative Path finally realize their oneness with all and the ineffectiveness of their approach and converts. Love, sharing, and cooperation work better, it’s that simple — this is a part of the grand lesson of our reality system.

Of course, there’s much more to the levels of this game than just exploring the negative or positive paths (or ways of being). A soul doesn’t advance to the next level of the game untill its mastered the core lessons and understandings that each level is designed to teach. The learning progression through the levels of the game (the school, if you like) is a fascinating subject that is beyond the scope of this article, but one that I will likely be writing about in future articles (subscribe to stay tuned) and my upcoming book.

Lost in the Game, Playing in the Dark

Every player in this game is Source — we are all Source (at least indirectly)! And we have all been lost in this game and playing in the dark to varying degrees for a very long time. Each of our souls has played hundreds, if not thousands, of rounds (or lives) in this game.

And even though we can’t remember all those life experiences right now (because of the Veil of Forgetting and Unknowing), I assure you that each one of us has played in the dark to varying degrees more than we know. If you inspect the Akashic Records, the record of all human experiences, and review all of your lives, you will likely be surprised (or perhaps even shocked) at what you have done, and what you have been, and what you have experienced.

You have been the light and the dark. You’ve been the enlightened and the unenlightened. You have been the perpetrator and the victim. You have been the good and the bad and the ugly. So, before you jump to judgment and condemnation of those still playing in the dark, please contemplate that.

We are all source consciousness dancing with itself in the light and in the shadows in this separation game. Within this dance many dramas unfold, and many amazing adventures are had, and they have all been incredibly formative to our consciousness — much knowledge and wisdom has been gleaned from our experiences within this reality construct — it is one of our most magnificent creations.

Negativity and Darkness only Exist within this Game

One thing that’s very important to understand is that negativity and darkness only manifest in our state of beingness within the experience of separation realities like our own. They don’t exist elsewhere — they can’t because they are a product of the separation reality experience itself. Egoic and victim consciousness and everything that that leads to is simply a result of the separation context that we imposed on ourselves and all the constraints that it involves.

It’s only when we dive into the separation game, pulling the veil of forgetting and unknowing down over our consciousness, that consciousness can go in the directions that it goes within the game. This is just where consciousness goes and how it expresses itself when it loses connection to its higher self. It is only within the illusion of separation, that our separation reality construct so effectively produces, that “darkness” can exist. Otherwise it is impossible, in our absolute native state as threads of source consciousness it is impossible.

Taking the Game to the Next Level

We’ve been playing the separation game for a very long time, and we have learned many things. Much knowledge and wisdom has been gleaned from our adventures within this game. But we had pretty much seen everything the game has to offer, and the question was Have we had enough? Is it time to end this game and move on to something else? There would be no reason to continue unless there was something new to learn.

And that’s when we conceived of an exciting new game plan. What if we could all awaken within the game? What if we could all remember the true nature of ourselves and the greater reality while playing the game? What if we could transcend separation consciousness while immersed in the experience of this separation reality! That would be an entirely new and very exciting experience! Brilliant!

This is the new game plan that we have collectively chosen to try to achieve. That is what is going on right now. We all dove into this round of the game (incarnated) with the great hope that we could all be awakened, remember who and what we really are, and transcend separation consciousness and all the unpleasantries that this state of consciousness creates.

So, the greatest challenge of this game is before us. Can we awaken within the game? Can we transform ourselves (our state of consciousness and state of being), and thereby transform our reality? Because the state of our reality, our world, is simply a reflection of the collective state of our consciousness. And we were very excited to create a new world — one where love, compassion, and kindness would flourish, one where cooperation, sharing, and caring would increase. This would be one of the litmus tests — if we can change our state of being the state of our world will change to reflect it.

To achieve this new game plan, many adjustments and stimuluses had to be put in place. The rules of the game had to be loosened. The Veil of Forgetting and Unknowing had to be thinned. Our spirit guides would nudge us at the appropriate time to help us awaken. The goal being for each of us to remember our greater self and the greater reality. The goal being for each of us to re-connect more fully with our higher-selves and begin expressing more of our higher consciousness within this world.

An essential part of the plan was for each awakening soul to help others awaken by expressing their newfound understanding of the greater reality and greater self openly, and by functioning as a living example of a higher way of being for others to model. We came here to awaken and then shine the light of our higher self into the world.

Defeating Others is not a Part of the Plan

And here is one of the most important things — defeating others still playing in the dark was not a part of the plan. That idea could only be conceived of by a mind that is still in the grip of separation consciousness. And worse yet, because the world is a reflection of our collective state of consciousness, the us-against-them mentality that the light versus dark idea represents can only create more “us against them” experiences, can only perpetuate polarization and separation. You cannot transcend the experience of separation with this mindset; you can only experience more of the same. That’s why the plan does not include judging or condemning those souls still playing in the dark.

Here’s a snippet from a recent message from the 9th Dimensional Arcturian Council(as channeled by Daniel Scranton) that speaks to this point.

Condemnation and judgment will keep you stuck where you are. This is why it is so important to stay out of the us-versus-them mentality that is everywhere outside of you.

From our vantage point outside of the game, we deeply understood that each and every soul immersed in the game is doing the best they can and that getting drawn into the darkness of separation is just part of the game. Also, we were fully aware that all of us have played in the dark to some extent in our many rounds in the game — no soul can claim to have not gotten lost in the game. Hence, there is very little if any judgment, just lots of unconditional love.

Another thing that our souls beyond the veil deeply understand is that the others still playing in the dark within the separation game are other expressions of ourselves at different places in their journey. They know that each and every soul playing the separation game is Source! They know that we are all truly one.

So they know that trying to defeat the others still playing in the dark would be futile. You cannot defeat the dark; the dark is a part of us. We’d be trying to destroy a part of ourselves — of the collective consciousness of what we are. Destroying a part of yourself will only hurt yourself. You cannot defeat or destroy a part of yourself; you can only transform it with love; you can only love it back into the whole.

When you recognize that those playing in the dark are just parts of our greater self (parts of source) doing the dance of the light and the dark in this separation reality you then realize that they are not to be defeated, you then realize that they are to be loved back into the whole. Outside of the illusion of the separation game, we know this, and we know it deeply. This is the unity consciousness perspective, and it’s only with unity consciousness that we can co-create the better world that we all yearn for.

Transforming Ourselves and Our Reality

Our great hope, as we all planned heading back into the separation game, is that we could shine our light so brightly that every nook and cranny of darkness would be illuminated and transformed. We did not come to defeat those still playing in the dark; we came to unconditionally love them back into the whole. And this goes for everyone — your average everyday angry negative self-serving people all the way up to your power-hungry self-serving Illuminati/cabal kingpins.

If they choose to reject our unconditional love, and not join us in the light in this round of the game so be it, this is not the last round that they will play they still have plenty of time to see the light. We knew that love is the only thing that will transform ourselves and our reality. We came here to be beacons of love and light; we came to shine our light so brightly that others could find their way out of the darkness.

The only way forward out of separation is to send the ones still playing in the dark as much love and light as possible, and steadfastly focus on imagining the better world that we all yearn for.

So many great souls have incarnated into the game and walked the earth to share this timeless wisdom — only love and light can transform our reality. Desiderius Erasmus, the great Christian scholar and humanist of the renaissance period, said it this way — Give light and the darkness will disappear of itself. The late great Martin Luther King Jr. said this — Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. The beloved Buddha said something very similar: Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love. This is the eternal rule.

We collectively chose to continue this game and to play another round in it to take the game to the next level, to dive into the game once again and see if we could transform ourselves and transform our reality. You cannot create a reality of love and harmony when you are still judging, condemning, and resisting the others that are still playing in the dark. Only unconditional love can create a reality of Love and Harmony.

As more and more of us shift our consciousness into greater and greater alignment with our higher-selves and our way-of-being shifts towards being more loving, compassionate, forgiving, accepting, and allowing we will begin to witness our plan coming to fruition. We will start to experience a great transformation of our society and our world — and the exciting achievement of our plan.

By: Jeff Street

#spirituality #spiritual life #consciousness #life #souls #earth #love #oneness #articles

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