#she can feel her daughters spiritual energy from a mile away

[holisticsoulhealer]

Be Gentle - A Spiritual Story

I wish to share a spiritual story that continues to gently touch my heart. I may have told this story before, only this time I wish to express it from a different angle. It’s especially poignant at this time, and I’ll explain why, toward the end of the story………………

Many years ago, I was working from a small studio in a beach city in Southern California. The owner of the beach house, let me sleep in and work from her sweet little studio, under the main house for a few years on and off. She would plan a very busy schedule, with family, friends and people she knew from the grief group she worked with. I had the great good fortune to meet one of her special peeps, who had recently lost her young 9 year old to leukemia.

I worked with her first and we were having such great, accurate success, bringing her into communication with that precious little girl. She then sent a very nervous, slightly skeptical husband and father to me. The moment he stepped into my space, he looked like he wanted to run a mile, in the opposite direction, from wherever I was. He wasn’t running from me, as it wasn’t personal, and instead he was running away from his own emotional responses. He had lost his sweet little girl.

I closed my eyes, and invited him to do the same. This inspired him to relax and I hoped it would also allow him to open his energy field, to experience some of whatever information was due to flow through me. I was in a car, singing “Hotel California” and other Eagles hit songs. Him and his daughter were riding together, singing out loud, smiling and laughing. In my vision they both knew all the words, and the feeling in the car was fun and quite adorable. In that car, in that moment, nobody was ill or dying. The atmosphere was pure fun.

I shared the clothes she was wearing, a favorite t-shirt and shorts, and the sense that they were off to enjoy a day out. When I opened my eyes and looked at him, he was sitting with a sweet smile, and tears pouring silently down his face.

I invited him to gently return from that vision, and stay open to sharing anything he needed to. He opened his eyes and I could feel his heart was busted wide open, as he nodded and agreed that the vision we had both just sat in, was a couple of sweet, short road trips he had enjoyed with her. He hadn’t really allowed himself to feel her loss too much, because he wanted to stay strong for the son they still had, and the demands of television camera work, was always pressing in on his time and emotions.

I let him know that what we had just shared as a personal and private experience between him, myself and the whole Universe, and of course his darling daughter, who was leading the way, in bringing him to her spiritually. He felt relieved, more faith filled and glad he’d not allowed the skeptical side of him to prevent him from experiencing the union he now felt with his little girl. It was a gentle reminder that we aren’t these bodies and we aren’t only human at all. I just heard that this daddy passed from this World this summer. I am sorry and yet gently excited that they are actually together again, probably singing at the top of their lungs to some of the classics.

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Love & Blessings,

Ruth

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[drwcn]

I loved your fem lwj take on things. How would thibgs go if WWX was the lady? Other than ppl assuming she stood up for the Wens bcs she jad feelings for WN ( and that Yuan was hers)

Heyyy friend, I think I’ve seen a couple of girl!wwx fics floating around in ao3 so i certainly won’t be the first :P.

Also I completely misread your ask initially, I thought you were asking me what I think would happen if A-Yuan was WWX’s kid, and I was like oh?? But then I realize wait... I can make it worse.  

Today, I decided that my mortal soul doesn’t matter, so here we go. Let’s see how accursed I can make this idea: 

[1]

It started with Jiang Cheng. Jiang Wanyin had set out for the Burial Mount with the explicit goal of throttling speaking with Wei Wuxian, but what greeted him at the entrance of the “Demon Subduing Palace” — more of a cave than anything really — was not his martial sister, but Wen Ning. Well, what had once been Wen Ning.

Black veins ran across his pale, ashen face, down his equally ashen neck , and into the major veins beneath his clavicles covered by the collars of his black threadbare robes. Lifeless eyes, white as his skin, stared into a void the living could not see. There were talismans littering his body, and Jiang Cheng knew that when he spoke to this fierce corpse, he was not speaking to the young Wen boy, but to his mistress who controlled him with her demonic cultivation. 

Wei Wuxian refused to face him. Refused him explanation. Refused him closure.

“Er-jie!” Jiang Cheng screamed into the stony expressionless face of Wen Qionglin. “If you continue to protect them, then I can’t protect you!!” 

There was no response. 

Suddenly, just as Jiang Cheng was about to kick and fight his way into the cave, Wen Ning thrusted out his right fist, and in his grasp was a piece of purple silk. Jiang Cheng unfolded the silk, vaguely recognizing that it had been cut from someone’s robe, and saw what was wrapped within was a slip of parchment.

割袍断义*, the paper read. Tell the world that I, Wei Wuxian, first disciple of Yunmeng Jiang has forever defected (Note: 割袍断义- to rip one's robe as a sign of repudiating a sworn brotherhood (idiom)).

With this, there was nothing left to say. Hurt and furious, Jiang Wanyin threw the piece of parchment onto the dirt ground, grinded his heel down on it, and left the Burial Mount without ever having drawn Sandu. 

Inside the cave, Wen Qing held Wei Wuxian’s hand. “Why won’t you just tell him? He’s your brother; he can help you, you can —” 

Wei Wuxian’s mile long stare seemed to be gazing at something — someone — very far away. Slowly, she placed her other palm over her belly, which horrifically was already starting to round out. “Nobody can help me now, Qing-jie.”

“I can,” said Wen Qing, blunt as ever. “I can make it go away, if you want.”

“No.” A droplet of tear escaped pass long lashes. “No.” 

[2] 

It continued with Jiang Cheng.

On a snowy night, the first winter after Wei Wuxian escaped with the Wen remnants to the Burial Mount, Jiang Cheng was rudely awakened from his slumber by a less-than-stealthy intruder breaking and entering into his bed chamber.

Zidian whipped through the air, lighting the room with her eerie violet glow, before the intruder could think to take one more step. It was a man, judging from his silhouette colliding against the wall and the pained groan he made in response. The very next second, the tail of Zidian coiled tightly around his neck and dragged him across the floor towards beneath Jiang Cheng’s waiting foot. 

The Sect Master of Yunmeng Jiang summoned Sandu, ready to deliver the final strike, but just as his blade sailed towards the intruder’s chest, a pale arm jutted upwards, blocking Sandu’s descent and revealing a pale hand holding a … a... 

Even in the dark, Jiang Cheng immediately recognized the mahogany comb. 

“Jiang — ! Zongzhu —!” The man croaked out urgently, throat still stomped on by Jiang Cheng’s foot. It was - it was Wen Ning?!

Jiang Cheng looked him over. He was pale, yes, but his eyes appeared human. His hair was brushed and haphazardly done up in a farmer’s top knot. He was wearing farmer’s clothing too, probably more inconspicuous for travel than his Ghost General getup.  

“Jiang-zongzhu! P—please!!”

No, impossible. 

“Wei — Wei-guniang—”

Jiang Cheng lifted his foot and dragged Wen Ning up in a split second. “What’s wrong with Wei Wuxian?!”  Wen Ning coughed and shook his head desperately. “No time to explain. My sister asked me to fetch you. Please, you have to come! Wei-guniang’s life is in danger! If you won’t come, I’ll...I’ll have to go to Gusu, and I don’t know if - if -” 

Jiang Cheng followed Wen Ning. 

For speed, they travelled by sword, but even so, dawn was breaking by the time they arrived. The crowd of Burial Mount’s villagers huddling anxiously outside of the Demon Subduing Palace parted for them upon their arrival. Jiang Cheng took a moment to gather himself and square his shoulders. Whatever it was; he was ready.  

He was wrong. None of the dozens of scenario he had agonized over on the flight here could have prepared him for what awaited him inside. 

Wen Qing, pale and drenched in sweat, was near complete spiritual collapse, and without Wen Qing’s spiritual energy sustaining her, the single tenuous thread by which Wei Wuxian’s life hung on would have undoubtedly snapped under the toil and devastation her body had been put through. 

There was so much blood, so, so much blood everywhere, and amidst the blood, there was a baby. 

Fuck. 

Jiang Cheng transfused his sister half of his total spiritual reserve over the course of a day, while an exhausted but unrelenting Wen Qing worked diligently under blood-soaked sheets. 

Then at dusk, when the storm finally passed, Jiang Cheng sat at the mouth of the cave with a tiny, perfect little human — a girl, a niece! —  in his arms and cursed Lan Wangji’s name. 

Wen Qing was extremely clear with them: 孩子要是留在这里，养不活。

If the newborn was left to be raised at the Burial Mount, she would not live. And so, because parting was inevitable from the start, Wei Wuxian adamantly refused to hold or nurse the child. Her child. 

I can’t. If I do, I won’t be able to let her go. Those dark eyes burned with more than just the delirium of her childbed fever. For once, Jiang Cheng could not find it in himself to argue.

Thus, he took his niece home and named her Jiang Yan 江曕. The name was not his doing. His foolish, misguided, stubborn sister had stroked her daughter’s soft, baby cheek and whispered it to her as a farewell gift. 

Yan - to be bathed in daylight. In the end, when given a choice, Wei Wuxian still opted for her child to walk on broad sunny road. 

It made Jiang Cheng wonder why, then, she would choose the dark twisted path for herself instead. 

[3] 

It ended with Jiang Cheng. 

The truth was simple: Jiang Wanyin killed his shijie Wei Wuxian. He did. He meant to. 

He killed her. But that did not mean he wanted her dead. 

In one day, he had lost both of his sisters, leaving two orphans in their wake. Jiang Cheng could not ignore the cruel irony of their fate: one’s father murdered by his aunt, and other’s mother murdered by her uncle. 

This was the kind of tragedy fairytales were made of, and if there were anything left in him to shed tears over it, he would.  Standing amongst Nevernight’s carnage, he could not dredge up even a single drop of tear.  

Jiang Cheng didn’t know how he could return home to Lotus Pier to face that cherub face, always so happy, so sweet, so utterly untainted by the world. She had her mother’s smile. Yan'er was starting to learn how to speak. Her first words were da-da. 

Da-da. Die-die. Father. 

He was standing beside her father now. 

Lan Wangji. Devastated. Destroyed. …Deceived.

Jiang Cheng hated him so much, so fucking much that for one insane second, he thought about telling Lan Wangji the truth just to see what would happen. Maybe he would run Jiang Cheng through with his Bichen - that would be a relief now, wouldn’t it? - or maybe he would jump after Wei Wuxian. 

Truly, if he knew, he would. Jump, that is. Jiang Cheng was almost entirely sure. Oh the utter melodrama that would inspire indeed!  

But then... 

Wei Ying birthed you a daughter, a lovely, perfect, blessed little girl, and she carried that secret to her grave. I may be damned by my actions, but you, who have done nothing for her and taken everything, why should you deserve something as sacred as the truth?

Jiang Cheng turned away. 

He was acutely aware that one day Jiang Yan may very well be the literal death of him. After all — 杀母之仇不共戴天 — one cannot tolerate living under the same sky as the murderer of one’s mother. 

Be that as it may, he would raise Jiang Yan well, just as he promised. Unlike his sister, he would not break his word. Jiang Yan was of Lotus Pier, of Yunmeng, like her mother and grandfather before her. That for him, was enough. 

Jiang Cheng clutched Sandu and gripped Zidian. Whatever his fate, he already made peace with it, and the rest was inconsequential. 

One day, he may die, but today he lives, and so as long as he lives, Jiang Yan and all of Yunmeng Jiang will be protected . So as long as he lives, they will flourish. 

[...and in between]

On the streets of Yiling, Lan Wangji tilted his head inquisitively at Wei Wuxian and the little boy at her side and asked, “This child, he...” 

In response, Wei Wuxian patted her chest in a self-declarative kind of way and announced, “Oh this child, I birthed him!” 

He stared at her in shell-shocked silence, his mind racing with panicked thoughts of but that’s impossible — that was just once — even if — the boy is too old to be —

“怎么，蓝湛，不要我们娘儿俩了？” What, Lan Zhan, you don’t want the child and I?

“Wei— Wei Ying—” 

Then of course, she had laughed, and Lan Wangji thought no more of it. 

Just a joke. A silly joke. 

In time, he would come to realize his mistake. 

~~~

[A/N]: I’m not even a little bit sorry. 

[greyfongschemmenti]

Under Pressure 13|15

FryeArcana

Chapter 13

Bombs Ahoy

Summary:

You've made it to the South Pole. As the time is nearing to take down Unalaq in his plans. Will you be able to stop him in time?

Notes:

Some keys:

y/s/n = Your Sister's Name y/s/s/n or y/b/s/n = Your Second Sister's Name/Your Baby Sister's Name y/a/n = Your Aunt's Name

Asami tells everyone the news which causes Korra to get emotional and Tenzin tries to calm her down. “We’re almost there once we’re close we can take Oogi to make it to the healing hut fast.” Korra balls her fists and looks down.

Once we make it to the port everyone hurries on Oogi Tenzin passing Jinora to Bumi who gently sets her down beside Kya. Your eyes sadden as you look down at Jinora taking her hand “hang in there, kid” you whisper as you look at Kya whose face is filled with worry “she’s going to pull through. She’s strong” Kya takes her gaze away from Jinora and looks over at you and softly nods before a sense of guilt washes her “it’s my fault, I encouraged her to guide Korra to the spirit world. She’s stuck there because of me” she whispers her voice pang with emotion as she tears up. “There are always risk when doing anything. Jinora is very mature and strong for her age. You had no idea this would happen. You’ve done all you’ve can to keep Jinora’s body alive. We’ve made it to the South Pole. We have to keep our spirits up for Jinora. She would want us to keep fighting.” You put your hand on the cuff of her shoulder giving her a light squeeze “thanks, y/n. That’s kind of you.” you give her a small smile before dropping your hand down then looking out at the horizon seeing the healing hut coming into view.  

           You offer to hold Jinora to let Kya get down with Tenzin while Korra runs to meet her mother. You pick up Jinora cradling her in your arms and once Tenzin is ready you pass her down to him. Once Tenzin has Jinora in his arms everyone makes their way down from Oogi and make way inside the healing hut. Korra and Kya open the doors for Tenzin, and it surprises the whole group to see the healing hut filled over its capacity with injured soldiers. Your eyes scan the whole room your stomach dropping to witness this scene but your eyes land on a woman with large curly hair taking care of a patient. “y/s/n” you whisper under your breath as you see your now adult younger sister as she is healing a man’s shoulder. Katara turns and sees the group walking towards the team “what happened?” Katara checks out Jinora in Tenzin’s arms “her soul is trapped in the spirit world.”

“oh, my goodness. How long has she been away?”

“Almost a week. I’ve tried to keep her energy flowing, but I can feel her slipping away. You’re the only one who can help her now, mom.” Kya cups Jinora’s cheek as she reports to her mother on Jinora’s health. Oh man almost a week. You don’t know much about spirituality but even for you that’s far too long to be away from your body. Katara and her family walk into the private healing room to help Jinora right away.

You’re standing at the entrance when you start to step forward walking past Team Avatar going towards your sister. “y/s/n” you speak as the woman looks up and her eyes widen as realization hits of who the person calling her name, “y/n!” she drops her wrapping on the tray and hurries to you and gives you a massive hug “Oh Raava, what are you doing here?! Can’t you see were in the middle of a civil war!” she mutters as she steps back looking at you, you let out a single laugh. “I see you’re still the worrying type like mom” you both exchange smiles as she’s letting go of you “it’s been three years since we last saw each other, y/n. Now what are you doing here?”

“I wasn’t going to let you have all the fun. I came with Avatar Korra to help the war front and stop Unalaq. Also, I wanted to make sure you were safe” your eyes soften at the end “I’m glad you are. If anything happened to you…” you trail off as you feel your throat tighten “hey, come here” your sister walks you to a corner of the hut away from the patients and pulls you into another hug “I’m not the same little kid that you dropped off at Aunt y/a/n’s hut anymore. I’ve become quite the healer since studying under Master Katara and Kya. I can handle myself.”  

You nod as you listen to your sister, she’s always been caring, kind, and sensitive. Been in tune with her emotions and always knew when you or y/s/s/n were feeling off or needed a hug. Empathic of your emotions. You pull back as you wipe the couple of tears that were able to escape as your sister looks at the closed doors of the private room “what happened to Master Tenzin’s daughter?” she softly asked, and you explained to your sister Jinora’s condition and you watch your sister’s face saddens. “poor child, but she’s very strong to have lasted this long. If anyone can help it’s Master Katara..”

“she’s the best healer in the world.” You both ended in unison a soft silence comes between the two of you before your sister speaks again.

“so you’re in close company with Avatar Korra. Did you meddle in that too?” she smirks, and you roll your eyes. Your sister always teasing you on how you like to meddle in things especially a hit on the fight that caused your burned scars. “actually no, I didn’t. We kept bumping into each other so why not become friends” you quip. Your sister shakes her head as a fellow healer walks over and whispers in her ear, “ok, I’ll head right over” she whispers back to her. “I have to go, be safe, don’t be reckless, and please don’t try to be a hero.” She stresses as she grips your arms to try to stick those words into your head. “oh-kay, mom” you tease her as you smile. “please, I’m way more fun than mom” she nudges you. “Hey…. mom and dad would be so proud of you, y/s/n. As a person and the healer you’ve become. Especially mom.” you smile as you look at your sister whose eyes tear up with the recognition. “They would be proud of you too, y/n. When push comes to shove you always stand up to do the right thing protecting those who are defenseless. Even though it gets you in tough situations. The way you think things through, I don’t know where you got it whether from mom or dad”

“probably a mix of both” you smile

“Mom was never a fan of violence nor was dad, but I know they would be proud as hell to know their daughter is helping the Avatar save the world. I and y/s/s/n are proud too” She smiles squeezing your shoulder as you smile back. The healer from earlier calls for your sister again and she acknowledges the healer as Tenzin, Kya and Bumi walk out of the private room and start heading out the healing hut. “ok, now I really have to go” you nod understanding and let her go. She stops and turns around to look at you “Whoever you have in your life right now. Keep them close. Your aura has changed drastically for the better since the last time I saw you” she smiles again as she waves goodbye to you and goes back to work. You think over your sister’s words and wondering who she’s talking about. You take one more look at your sister smiling with pride then walk out and meet up with Team Avatar and Team Avatar B, or T.A.B. as Bolin calls it. You’re walking down the stairs as you hear Korra reporting her findings “Unalaq’s got the southern portal surrounded. Harmonic Convergence is only a few hours away.”

Tenzin joins in adding to Korra’s urgency on the matter “then we have to break through the enemy lines ourselves and get to the portal now”

“there’s no use in talking anymore. We know what our mission is.”

Bolin sucks in air through his teeth feeling uncomfortable by a lack of plan

“yeah, a suicide mission”

You look at everyone and try to reason with how dumb it is that Tenzin and Korra are wanting to go aggressive in their plan of attack. “it won’t be a suicide mission if we think this through. We can’t just run in without any sort of plan”

Bumi starts to reminisce on one of his war stories “you know, I was in a similar situation once. My platoon has crawled through the desert with no water for a week, but when we finally located the only oasis for 100 miles, it was surrounded by angry sandbenders. I realized our only chance to get to the water was to drop in from above. So I fashioned together a catapult, and with the help of a few well-trained hog-moneys—” you notice Tenzin’s face starts to shake and his irritation starts to boil over as he explodes

“ENOUGH OF YOUR RIDICULOUS LIES! Can’t you see that the fate of the world and Jinora’s life depends on what we do here today?” Bumi shows a hurt expression as his eyes dart to you when you put your hands up and start to speak to stop Tenzin from blowing up any further “Hold on, I get that was a long story, but Bumi made a valid point and I think it could work...”

“he did?!” Kya’s eyes widen as she looks at you confused that you made sense of one of his outrageous stories.  

“yes, drop from above…an air attack. No one would expect us to hit from the sky”

“Hold on. Maybe Bumi’s right. We don’t have a catapult and hog-monkeys, but we have a flying bison, and there’s a plane on Varrick’s ship. Maybe we can attack from above.”

Korra looks at you and Asami “What are you thinking?” you glance at Asami giving her a nod

“Mako, Bolin, y/n and I can use the plane to create a distraction and scatter some of the defenses. You, Tenzin, Bumi, and Kya can fly into the spirit portal on Oogi when you see an opening.”

“Let's get moving.” Everyone nods understanding the plan.

*

Mako and Bolin stand on either wing while Asami gets in the cockpit to drive the plane. You…you decide you’re going to ride the plane on top of the upper wing like you’re surfing it. Yeah I’m totally not being reckless right now. You bend your cables to wrap around the wings and then it wraps around your waist for added stability and further ground yourself to the plane. The plane takes off and soon you meet up with Oogi and the gang,  

Asami looks at the three of you and starts asking if everyone is ready.

“I'm an earthbender strapped to the wing of a plane hundreds of feet in the air, so, no?” Bolin hollers against the air currents hitting against us “Aw come on Bolin, this is fun! I feel like an airbenders” You smile as you maintain a grip on the cables.  “Don't worry. There's no way they'll be expecting this.” Mako calls out as the clouds start to clear from your view and you see the spirit portal coming into view but there seems to be something flying around the beam of light. “what is that?” you yell out wondering if anyone is seeing the scene in front of you. “Yeah, but do you see that!” Bolin yells back pointing at the circular defense formation around the portal as he holds on tighter on the wing of the plane “I think they were expecting it!” You look down and see the defense of waterbenders and mecha-tanks ready to prepare to fire at you. You ground yourself then watch as large sharp pieces of ice coming in your direction and your eyes widen as you drop down on the stomach to avert getting stabbed. Asami jerks the plane moving out of the way, Mako, Bolin and you try to hold on tight as you guys yell “Asami!”. Asami prepares to maneuver the plan to dodge the attacks coming your way until she gets closer to the camp and orders Mako to fire. Asami makes another turn around then heads back to the camp to get Bolin start throwing explosives and then detonates them using a remote detonator.  You guys keep this plan of attack going throwing explosives and Mako’s fire throwing causing as much destruction to the camp as possible. Giving Korra and the rest of the team an opportunity to get into the spirit portal. Bolin watches the camp in flames and exclaims “I wish Varrick was filming this. (makes a fist pump) We could call it "Nuktuk: Sky Warrior"! Bolin raises his fist in the air triumphantly. You throw another explosive “Now’s not the time, Bolin!” as you press the remote again and another series of explosions go off. Something urges you to look behind and you peer over and see two figures chasing you “uh…guys we have company!” before Asami can try to maneuver away Eska and Desna kick splash towards you guys the water blasts freeze into ice and strike the tail, breaking it in two. The tail of the plane explodes, and it goes into a nosedive. “Brace yourselves!” Asami calls out.  you prepare for the impact trying to stand up once again on the wing you grunt your teeth waiting for the right time to jump off. You bend your cables off and you jump to prevent getting trampled by the plane and land in the snow hard. You slide across a couple snowed land a couple ten feet from impact and knock out cold.

           You’re coming in and out of consciousness as you feel like you’re being dragged and you look up and see Unalaq and you grunt your teeth mustering up your strength and grab his wrists and flip him over into the snow, dropping you and you get up to try to unlock the cuffs but it’s not coming off Platinum “Don’t bother bending yourself out, it’s pure platinum. You didn’t think we would know about you metalbender” Unalaq snared as he sends a splash of water that turns to ice and it hits you at your chest then at your head in a one two punch knocking you back out a slight bruise on the right side of your face. Unalaq and his two creepy kids drop the four of you inside his captain’s quarters. You all grunt once your bodies make impact to the ground and you fall unconscious. “what did you do” Asami looks at you then at Unalaq “she wasn’t cooperating, so she had to be restraint.” Unalaq spoke unbothered by his actions. You wake up from your hit and hear the conversation between Korra and Unalaq you can’t figure out what they’re saying but your hearing clears and you catch Unalaq say “this time, I'll be here to level the playing field. When Harmonic Convergence comes, I will fuse with Vaatu.” Your eyes widen as you turn your head at Unalaq “And together, we will become the new Avatar. A Dark Avatar. Your era is over.” Tonraq leans forward in pain from his injuries looks at his brother both desperate and saddened of his plan.

“Think about what you're doing. I know that you've always had a deep connection with the spirits, but you're still a man. You're still my brother. You're Eska and Desna's father. Are you willing to throw your humanity away to become a monster?”

“I'll be no more of a monster than your own daughter. The only difference is that while she can barely recognize her own spiritual power, I will be in complete alignment with mine. Vaatu and I will be as one”. Unalaq starts raising his voice “No one will be able to stand against us. Keep them locked up.” Unalaq turns to his daughter as Eska turns to her father

“After the Harmonic Convergence, I will come for Korra. “

“Yes, father.”

Tenzin softly speaks his face broken with a newfound sense of lost, with Kya leaning on his shoulder. “I failed in every way. We've lost Jinora forever.”

“There's still a chance. They didn't get Bumi.” Tenzin bows his head and groans, obviously not believing in Bumi at all. You grunt as you turn on your side and sit up “here lean against me, y/n” Asami softly speaks to you as she sits up with you and you guys leans against each other’s sides while Bolin and Mako do the same. “he roughed you up pretty bad, y/n” Bolin commented as he looks over at you. You look confused back at him “what?” then look at Asami and she brings her cuffed hands up to point on her face of the bruise of where yours is. Your curiosity brings your hands up and touch your right side of your temple and it slightly hurts but nothing serious “it doesn’t hurt, it’s just all show. I’m fine. Honestly that drop roughed me up more than those three” you quipped and gave them a small smile to assure them you’re good. Korra looks at her cousins and grunts “we’re wasting time we need to get out of here” she whispers to the group then speaks up “Eska, Desna, listen to me. You've got to help us stop Unalaq. I know he's your father, but Vaatu has made him completely crazy.” Eska and Desna turn to face you guys “We will never turn on our father.”

“Please, if you let me out now, I can still stop him from destroying everything. Once he fuses with Vaatu, no one will be safe. Desna, he won't be your father anymore.”

Desna narrows his eyes, then moves to confront Korra angrily by her words “You don't know what you're talking about! Our father is the wisest man in the world, if he says what he is doing is right, I believe him.”

You plant your palms on the ground as you push yourself up to sit straighter, but you feel a slight rumble in the ground. “hmm?” you plant your hand firmer on the ground and it seems to grow gradually “uh…what’s going on outside?” you ask turning up to Desna and Eska “what human?” you eye her weirdly but keep going “there’s something going on outside I can hear the earth rumbling of something big outside” Bolin moves and puts his ear against the ground and feels the vibrations “oh yeah it’s big”

Desna and Eska look at each other “quit your foolish ba--” your eyes dart to the front of the camp as you and everyone’s heads perk up as you hear a shriek get louder as it approaches the tent to see Bumi spinning in a mecha-tank seat comes crashes into Eska and Desna both from behind, knocking them flat on their backs while he come to a complete stop in front of the group “All right, guys. Rescue time!” he grins as Naga and Pabu jump in the tent knocking Desna and Eska yet again and pins them to the ground.

“that’s quite the entrance, Bumi” you quipped giving him a smirk while everyone else has their jaws dropped shocked to see Bumi alive and well. Bumi starts helping to free everyone as Asami takes out a pin from her hair and helps get you out of yours. Mako and Bolin help Tonraq and everyone steps out as your eyes widen at the scene. The whole encamped is crushed and in flames “Bumi, how did you manage to take out this entire encampment on your own?” Tenzin asks his older brother in disbelief and Bumi reaches in his shirt and pulls out his flute to show Tenzin “I did it all with my trusty flute and- “he hangs his head low in despair “Oh, never mind. You wouldn't believe it anyway.” he begins marching, leading the group away. “Let's get moving” he waves the group out of the camp and you jog up to reach Bumi putting a hand on his shoulder “Hey, Bumi, I believe it. I mean sure you exaggerate a tad, but I think this story will be your best one yet” you smile as you remove your hand and follow the group heading towards the spirit portal.

           Tonraq tries to say that he will fight whoever will come after Korra, but he is in no condition to fight. He can barely walk let alone stand. Korra encourages her father to go back to the healing hut and asks Asami to take her father on Oogi which Asami accepts willingly. Korra and Tonraq embrace exchanging I love you and Asami, Tonraq and Oogi take off. Korra’s plan was Tenzin and his siblings go in search for Jinora while Mako and Bolin guard the portal in case anyone comes. You were welcomed to join whoever you wanted to help while Korra closes the portal, so Vaatu can't escape.

Bolin speaks up nervous “Wait a second. Worst-case scenario: So we're fighting Unalaq, you close the portals, and let's just say something happens to you, are we gonna be trapped in there for eternity?”

“If everything goes as planned, we'll all walk out together after Harmonic Convergence. If not... “. Somber expressions appear on everyone’s faces as Korra bows her head and sighs, then looks up at the group.

“it’s an honor fighting alongside all of you. I don’t regret anything” you speak making eye contact with everyone before landing your eyes at Korra and nods

“Let's go.”

*

Everyone runs into the portal and make it into spirit world. This is not what I was expecting the spirit world to look like. It looks so dark and evil. Your eyes dart to the front of you and there’s a massive tree where a large spirit is trapped inside with Unalaq standing beside it. “Tenzin, go find Jinora!” Korra yells as Tenzin nods and calls for his siblings “Come on!” you look at the young adults ahead of you then at the older group and decide to join Tenzin they have Bolin maybe the siblings will require your earthbending. “I’ll join you; you might need my bending and detective skills. No time to argue” you come with your logic before Tenzin tries to rebuttal he nods, and you guys start running off. You look up at the sky as you’re running with the Kataang kids as you watch the sky turn into a deep purple then feel the earth shift you’re trying to regain balance. You slightly tumble on the ground as it shakes stronger than before, but you push yourself up quickly without skipping a beat and keep running. Your mind races back to Lin and hope she’s safe. For Raava’s sake and mine please be safe Lin.

*

Harmonic Convergence has commenced, and a purple light blankets the landscape in the whole world. The purple light covers Republic City, Lin as she holds her hands in front of her, protecting her eyes from the wind as the dark energy sweeps over her, rendering her and her surroundings in a dark purple hue. Lin looks up toward the sky, and sees green lights dancing in the purple atmosphere. Her eyes widening as she fills with worry “y/n….” she mutters under her breath “…please be ok”. Lin was keeping her part of the deal and was hoping that you were doing the same. Hoping you were safe so you can return to the Republic City. She was really hoping that you were alive and safe so you can come back to her. Please be okay, y/n.

[rivalsforlife]

oooo i'm sorry but one more scene for commentary if youre up to it: maya and phoenix talking in chapter 6?

Of course, no need to apologize!! Once more, keeping this under a “keep reading”:

Around noon, his apartment intercom buzzed. “Nick, it’s Maya! Let me up.”

Maya? What was she even doing here? Maya never visited him out of the blue anymore… Whatever. She’d probably think he was at his office. She’d go away soon.

There was another buzz. “Nick! I know you’re in there! I called your office, you know!”

Kids these days. Selling out their bosses that easily… Maybe he should cut Athena’s salary. Nah, he wasn’t Edgeworth. … Edgeworth.

“don’t think about Edgeworth don’t think about Edgeworth -- ah damn it”

“Nick! Hello! Nick!”

She had to give up eventually, right? Whatever she was here for, someone else could help her…

“Security’s coming after me, if they arrest me you’re gonna have to defend me, you know, do you want that? I’m not even gonna try to pay you for it since it’s gonna be your fault —”

Ugh.

Phoenix stumbled out of bed and buzzed her in. “Fine. Come up.”

“Thank you!” she chirped in a sing-songy voice. “Hey, you heard him, let me go…”

Maya’s Obnoxious Little Sister Energy is eternal. Her next strategy was to break from the guards and dash as far as she could go trying to break her way into Phoenix’s apartment which... wouldn’t have ended well haha.

Also! Like I mentioned in the previous ask, a lot of this fic was just Phoenix’s Relationship Issues, and the way I characterized him in this fic was a lot of... he needs to have people around or he kind of falls apart, and his history of having people around was that these people needed him in some way -- Maya after she was accused of murder and then hanging around for Mia’s sake, Trucy being abandoned and needing looking after, even Miles to an extent needing to be saved from his corrupt ways and the von Karma influence -- and now that they’re all growing up and don’t need him anymore he thinks they’re going to abandon him.

That’s a long-winded way of referring to that one sentence of “Whatever she was here for, someone else could help her”

Also... I don’t live in an apartment and haven’t visited many apartments? So I’m not totally sure how the whole buzzing someone in process works. no one’s called me out on it though so I guess I’m okay.

Phoenix sighed and wondered if he should make himself look presentable. There probably wasn’t enough time. Maya wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t changed his clothes for two days, right?

She probably would. But he couldn’t do anything about it, as just then there was a knock on the door. Figuring he should appease her so she wouldn’t give security anymore trouble, he reluctantly let her in.

Indeed, there was Maya, looking cheery as ever. “Hey, dude. What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing,” said Phoenix, and in response to Maya’s raised eyebrow as she took in his appearance, “Just not feeling well. Why’re you here, Maya? I thought you were busy up at the village.”

passive-aggressive “oh aren’t you supposed to be busy?” from Phoenix here...

One of the other major changes I made to this fic in the editing process was cutting out a LOT of Maya content. I really love her and wanted her to be here more, but to properly go through the Phoenix Characterization Study I had to make it seem like she wasn’t around as much so that Phoenix would feel more lonely. again, sorry, Phoenix... but like originally she came down for the picnic in chapter 3 and was around at the beginning of chapter 4, so it would be SO WEIRD if she showed up in every single chapter except for chapter 5 and then Phoenix accuses her here of being too busy to hang out with him. She was there all the time! So I only had her show up for the wedding and added in a few more lines alluding to her not being here as much as she used to in trilogy days.

“I am,” she admitted, pushing her way into his apartment. “But your daughter called me yesterday morning and said that if you didn’t call, I should check in on you. So. Here I am. And I know you’re not just sick.”

Kids these days indeed! Like Phoenix didn’t feel bad enough, his own daughter had to go and parent him. “Look, Maya, everything’s fine. I’m sorry Trucy made you think something was wrong.”

One writing tip I got and I’ve been working on implementing is like... trying to have a general idea of what every character is up to when they’re not “on screen”, so to speak. Even then, what they’re thinking about when they’re not the POV focus. So basically after the call with Trucy just prior to this scene, she immediately decided to call Maya (because she could tell something was Off with her dad and Miles, given his reaction when she mentioned his name,) and then told her to check up on him because he really scared her during that phone call... though she wouldn’t admit it. She basically saw it as a hint of returning to a sort of... disbarment-era depression, which she didn’t want, so she wanted to make sure someone could check in on him as soon as he could since she couldn’t.

Also another small aspect of Phoenix characterization (that’s going to be like 99% of my commentary about this fic I’m sorry) is that the way he deals best with depression is like... being around people, and doing things with people. It’s obviously not a method that works for everyone, but it keeps him from dwelling on things and kind of gives him a purpose, helps him feel like he’s needed. Mostly got this headcanon from RFTA where he says he was unable to take on any cases when Maya was gone until Ema showed up... and then even at the beginning of 2-2 he does seem pretty down. Trucy kind of knows some of this since she was the main thing keeping him together during disbarment era, at least enough to know that when Phoenix is depressed he’ll do much better if he’s got someone he cares about around.

Anyways, Trucy probably told Maya just to call in, because she knows her aunt is busy and part of the reason Maya hasn’t been around much is because she’s stuck with all sorts of Master responsibilities at Kurain, but Maya herself wanted to come down and check on Phoenix in person because she knows how he can get and if it was enough to worry Trucy, then she was pretty worried too.

Maya planted her hands on her hips. “No way, mister. I did not take a two hour train ride down here for you to tell me everything’s fine. Do you know how difficult it was to get permission to leave?! I had to pull the old ‘I need to visit my boyfriend’ card for them to let me go!”

Phoenix groaned, despite himself. “Have they still not caught on about that?”

“Their desperation for an heir has blinded them to common sense. They made me drink some disgusting fertility tea before I left, so you really owe me one.” She lowered her hands and sighed. “Look, Nick, I know something’s up. So talk to me. Please.”

I took a few liberties to sprinkle in my Kurain headcanons in here... which I’ve rambled about more in depth elsewhere, so I won’t go into too much detail, but basically: hereditary spiritual power leads to a lot of pressure on people who have said hereditary spiritual power to reproduce so they can pass it on to the next generation. Particularly with Maya (and Pearls to some extent though I believe Maya would willingly take the heat on it) since the two of them are the only remaining spirit channelers of the Kurain technique. And since it took Maya a really long time to become the Master officially (I don’t buy the idea that she wasn’t skilled enough by the end of T&T, my headcanon is the Master training process involves two years in Khura’in but she put that off until Phoenix was in the clear regarding Kristoph stuff) they probably don’t want her leaving the village to “goof off” unless she’s doing it to produce an heir. her biological clock is ticking! haha! (... ugh.)

And this kind of leads to -- in the elaborate backstory of this fic that I can only touch on through DVD commentaries which is like half the reason I do these things -- Maya and Phoenix agreeing that if Maya needs to get out of the village but whoever the other people in the village are start putting pressure on her, she can say she’s “visiting her boyfriend” who they think is Phoenix but really isn’t... and I guess they assume they’re getting up to heir-making activities but oh darn! didn’t work this time! guess I’ll have to go again next week! (obviously they’re just out getting burgers or something.) 

Hence people in the village pushing fertility tea on her because they think the problem is that she’s not getting pregnant... although they’re kind of misunderstanding the reason why she’s not getting pregnant... because no amount of fertility tea in the world will lead to a spontaneous pregnancy without other activities first. which aren’t happening. I feel like I need to clarify this multiple times just in case someone misunderstands.

Pearls both knows about this agreement and knows that Phoenix and Maya aren’t actually dating because she’s like nineteen now? She’s probably known for years, she never brings it up during DD and SOJ.

“I won’t go into much detail” oops. I’m so sorry.

Phoenix didn’t say anything.

Maya took him by the arm and guided him to the couch, plopping him down none-too-gently before sitting next to him. “You can trust me, right?” she asked. “You’re my best friend. I’m here for you, even if you did something really stupid.”

Phoenix laughed a bit. “Yeah… I did something really stupid.”

“Okay. Tell me.”

Phoenix buried his face in his hands with a sigh, then rolled his head to peek through his fingers at Maya. She looked — angry, sure, he wasn’t exactly being the most cooperative of people right now, but — open. Prepared. Like she was actually going to listen.

I know that SOJ called Miles Phoenix’s best friend, which don’t get me wrong I absolutely loved, but I do wish Maya was ALSO considered Phoenix’s best friend if not one of his closest friends, because they’re so obviously best friends. They’re a different flavour of best friends than Phoenix and Miles, because Phoenix and Miles are the “it’s complicated and there are secret romantic feelings possibly but we trust each other unconditionally” best friends, Phoenix and Maya have a twenty-five step secret handshake they have to execute every time upon meeting.

But of course that doesn’t mean they can’t be serious, Maya is absolutely here for her dumb best friend

“It’s…” He sighed, again. “Have you ever — have you ever wanted something for a really long time, but — but you never thought you’d get it, and then you have this chance, and you just… panic?”

Maya nodded solemnly. “Steel Samurai movie premiere tickets. I won a raffle, but I forgot I signed up for them and thought it was a hoax, and didn’t get to accept them before the deadline. The bad Wi-Fi didn’t help, either.”

“But that doesn’t mean they can’t be serious” um

The one constant among all the ace attorney main characters is that NONE OF THEM WANT TO TALK ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS EVER

Also I struggled a lot with this fic trying to figure out... exactly what was going on in Phoenix’s head, and how he would interpret what was going on in his head. I kept changing opinions all the time and it was so off before I did editing haha. Even this line is still a little weird with the “Have you ever wanted something for a really long time” because he probably shouldn’t be aware that he has wanted this for a long time. ... I’m going to stop pointing out the flaws in my own fic now--

At Phoenix’s glare, she added, “I’m just kidding. Thought I’d lighten the mood a bit. Is this about Edgeworth?”

“What makes you think that?”

“‘Cause when is it not about Edgeworth with you,” asked Maya, cutting straight to the heart of things, as always. “Did he ask you out?”

“Not even that.” Phoenix turned his gaze to the floor, ashamed. “He said he loved me. I… I told him I didn’t feel the same.”

Maya was silent for a moment. Phoenix didn’t dare look at her. “Do you?”

“I like being around him,” said Phoenix. “I like seeing him smile, and laugh, and — and he makes me happy.”

What he wouldn’t give to see Edgeworth smile and laugh at him again.

“Not what I asked, dude.”

“Nick’s being really broody again it’s GOTTA be Edgeworth...”

Anyways that second-to-last line there is sticking out at me and I’m pretty sure it’s one I wavered back and forth on deleting before deciding to keep. ... at least I think I kept it? I’m taking these from google docs so there might be a few tiny changes from the ao3 version but I don’t think there’s anything too major I changed while doing last-minute edits.

Again we run into the problem of Phoenix Is Incapable Of Admitting He’s In Love With Miles -- which is the whole psyche-locks thing that pops up in the scene after this. The psyche-locks were also a pretty last-minute addition plot-wise... I think this fic was the most I deviated from my outline, but I was pretty rushed for time so I didn’t do as much planning as I normally would.

Hm I think there’s another ask where I can talk more about the psyche-locks? I’ll talk a bit here because I put a lot of thought into it. Basically I ran with the idea of black psyche-locks hiding something even the owner isn’t aware of, and that those psyche-locks are (typically? who knows about Kristoph) inflicted through traumatic events. Phoenix has three because I came up with three main Issues he had to work through, but some of them kind of blend together... two of them came up through specific traumatic events (Phoenix guesses them in chapter 8) and another one is just general overall trauma. if no one brings up the particular scenes by the time I get to that other ask, I’ll talk more about them, but basically there are three locks from three separate traumas and three occasions where they break -- someone guessed one of the breaking scenes on the narumitsu discord, but no one’s brought up the other two yet! 

Long-winded way of saying that the psyche-locks are the reason that Phoenix can’t admit that he’s in love with Miles yet... and it’s kind of a cheap fantasy visualization of the trauma, basically? Maybe not the most elegant way of addressing it, but I never claimed to be writing for a series which addresses issues elegantly.

“But — but can you even imagine it?” Phoenix demanded, raising his head to gesture fully at the ridiculousness of it all. “Me and Edgeworth?”

“Yeah,” said Maya, simply. “It’s not that hard, really.”

Phoenix had no response.

“You two balance each other out well, and you trust each other, and you both care a ton about each other,” Maya elaborated. “If you love him, what’s the problem?”

oh Phoenix you have no idea. you and Miles are so easy to imagine together that you’re the number one pairing on ace attorney ao3 by a longshot.

Also one thing I kind of wanted to avoid was less of the... “you and Miles are PERFECT for each other how do you not SEE this” thing. nothing against the trope, of course! Just the whole concept of people shipping their friends intensely is something I’m not super familiar with and tbh would make me pretty uncomfortable...? It’s sort of the deal with rpf. Of course this is fanfiction with fictional characters but from an in-universe perspective...

So Maya’s taking the approach of more “Yeah, I can see you and Edgeworth as a couple, I think you’d work well together” rather than “you two are SO perfect together and I’ve been shipping you since 2016!!” because while that may be what Maya is THINKING it’s definitely not what Phoenix needs to hear right now.

“It just… seems like a recipe for disaster. I wouldn’t even know how to… like, this isn’t my first time feeling like this, but when I think about us, me and Edgeworth, it’s…” Why couldn’t he find the right words? “It’s too much.”

Maya brought a hand to her chin and tilted her head thoughtfully. “So — tell me if I’ve got this right — you like Edgeworth too, but for some reason, when he confessed to you, you panicked and you don’t know why.”

“I guess…” Phoenix returned his face to the comforting darkness of his hands. “I don’t know what it is. I-I shouldn’t have a problem, right? But the thought of a-actually admitting that I… or being in a relationship, it feels like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff and am about to fall off.”

Maya was silent for a long time. Phoenix just hoped that whatever she said next, it would somehow magically fix all his problems.

Instead, she said the most ridiculous thing Phoenix could possibly imagine. “Maybe you have trust issues?”

It certainly lightened the mood. Phoenix threw his head back and laughed harder than he had in a long time.

Phoenix is a very trusting person, absolutely, but you can’t tell me this man walked out of the Dahlia Debacle without quite a few romance-related issues. It’s kind of a weird sort of contradiction... 

“No, I’m serious,” she persisted, through his laughter.

“What are you talking about, Maya?” Phoenix managed to get out, once he had that fit of mirth under control. “There’s no way I have trust issues. My whole thing is trusting people and believing in people until the end, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. But trusting someone not to be a murderer is a bit different, isn’t it?”

“It’s not like that’s as far as it goes,” Phoenix argued. “I trust you, I trust all of our friends, more than just not being murderers.”

“Yeah, sure, but romance is kind of on a different level.” She leaned back into the couch thoughtfully. “When’s the last time you’ve been with anyone?”

“... At least not since I got Trucy,” Phoenix admitted, only a little shamefully. “You try hooking up with people while having the world’s most perceptive daughter who’s desperate for a ‘new mommy’.”

“Been with anyone seriously, I mean.”

Phoenix winced. “... College.”

“I rest my case, Your Honor.”

Prettty self-explanatory here, I managed to get most of my thoughts on the actual fic instead of wanting to put it in an appendix or something. Basically... you can trust people in different ways? Phoenix can trust someone to not be a murderer to the extent of putting his own life on the line for them... but when it comes to revealing any sort of details about himself, or general emotional intimacy, he’s kind of stingy about it. Of course the out-of-universe explanation is “Phoenix doesn’t talk about this stuff because we need suspense so the player keeps playing the game instead of an exposition dump as soon as the issue comes up” but I like finding in-universe explanations for out-of-universe stuff.

I think I just regurgitated my points in a few excerpts oops.

Last little comment there regarding the idea of Phoenix presumably having a casual sex life -- Iiiiii am super asexual, have known that for a long time, generally kind of squeamish about the concept and also live a very sheltered life. so I don’t know much about people hooking up... like how people just go out and do these things. But I know people do these things so I try to reference it within my limited knowledge. Anyways yeah presumably that was happening in the background throughout the trilogy in the universe of this fic. probably not an important point. i’m moving on now.

“I’m not hung up on that!” Phoenix insisted. “Iris was a good person, she was the person I trusted. I’ve known that for years, now!”

“But she did lie to you,” Maya pointed out. “And you thought she tried to kill you for five years. I dunno, if it were me, I’d have a hell of a lot of relationship issues now.”

“Do you want me to psychoanalyze you too, now, Maya? It’s not gonna be pretty.”

“Oh, no thanks, that’s what therapy’s for,” she said, far too cheerily. “But really, Nick.”

Anyways I’m pretty invested in the whole Iris-Phoenix dynamic post-Bridge to the Turnabout, because like on the one hand, hypothetically the woman you were in love with but you thought was a killer coming out to say that she actually didn’t kill anyone and was actually in love with you should resolve all your lingering relationship issues resulting from that... but I don’t see that actually happening.

It probably took Phoenix the whole five years to come to terms with the fact that Dahlia hated his guts and tried to kill him, because I do believe he was seriously hardcore in love with her at the time. Well, Iris, but he didn’t know the difference. And then finding out Iris actually loved him... but not enough to actually, say, tell him this beforehand?... makes things kind of messy. Phoenix probably thinks he should be all better now but really the whole Dahlia-Iris thing was messed up and undoubtedly messed him up a lot.

Last little bit is just me squeezing in that Maya probably also has a lot of messed up relationship issues and also definitely needs therapy. (And is getting a bit of therapy in this fic! Good for her!) I have a lot of thoughts about Maya’s trauma... but unfortunately this fic is about Phoenix so I couldn’t go too in depth about that. Sorry, Maya. One day.

Phoenix sank further into the couch. “I don’t have trust issues.”

“Y’know, there’s still a lot of stuff I don’t know about you,” said Maya. “You never tell me anything personal until there’s a murder or something and then you have to. What happened to Edgeworth, both times. The whole Dahlia thing. It took me ages to get you to tell me how you got disbarred, even! And, like, romance has this level of intimacy to it, where he’d need to know stuff about you that I wouldn’t know, that Trucy wouldn’t know. And Nick, you know I love you, but I know you’re scared of that.”

“What do you know about it?” Phoenix snapped. “You’re barely ever here.”

He felt horrible as soon as the words left his mouth. Maya gave a sharp inhale and stiffened, her eyebrows knitting above an angry and hurt glare.

“I’m sorry,” Phoenix apologized, looking at the floor. “That was… that was unfair.”

“Yeah,” said Maya. “Yeah, it was.”

yep regurgitating my points from above. Anyways, highlights: platonic “I love you”s are great, we should have more of those. Just... emphasizing that it’s platonic because the Phoenix and Maya friendship is one of my favourite things in the series.

And there’s that “You’re barely ever here” comment that I had to cut Maya out of most of this fic to fit in, because otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense. In the universe of this fic Maya was pretty distant being busy with training and spirit medium Master stuff after the trilogy... and presumably hasn’t seen Phoenix as much as either of them would like. She loves hanging out with her best friend, and probably feels super guilty too, that Phoenix is dealing with all these issues and she can’t be there because she has other responsibilities -- so obviously it upsets her when Phoenix kind of accuses her of not being there for him, because she definitely would be, if she could, and if Phoenix would let her. 

Pretty much you can’t always be around for everyone all the time, Maya would be so worn out if she had to juggle coming down to the city to hang out with Phoenix all the time on top of all her other responsibilities. She knows this, Phoenix knows this too, he’s just kind of lashing out right now because he’s hurt and confused and misses all his important people, but Maya just happens to be in front of him right now.

And yeah what Phoenix said was pretty uncalled for, which he realizes right away, and Maya acknowledges -- a pretty short fight, I don’t think these two would stay mad at each other for too long. 

They sat in a tense silence for some time, until Maya sighed and brushed back her hair.

“Look, I’m saying these things because I’m scared of it, too,” she said, barely above a whisper. “After Mia, and Mom… I don’t want to be left behind again.”

“Maya…”

“Just think about it, okay?” She extended a pinky towards him. “Promise.”

Reluctantly, Phoenix linked his pinky with hers. “Fine. I’ll think about it.”

points at this and says Maya’s Definitely Got Trauma From Trilogy Events then brushes it off to get off the uncomfortable emotion topics

“Good.” Maya hopped up from the couch and stretched her arms above her head. “I’ll forget about what you said if you buy me lunch, okay? I’ve got a client this evening, so I can’t stay long, but I’ve got enough time to stop by Eldoon’s.”

“If you insist,” said Phoenix with an exaggerated sigh, and Maya laughed, so Phoenix willed himself to push the conversation from his mind for now. Maya would be spending four hours on a train today for his sake; Eldoon’s really was the least he could provide.

and in true Phoenix and Maya fashion we’re just gonna forget about the emotions and go get ramen! 

Anyways thanks anon for requesting this scene I apparently have so many thoughts about Phoenix and Maya friendship... sorry if this is totally incoherent I should not have started this so late it’s like 11:30! But thank you! I will do more of these tomorrow... hopefully.

[cxttonteethviolence-a]

Please Read || “Tali”

If you have been here for a while, then you know that Wyatt has been a Silent Hill O.C. for some years now. However, as the Silent Hill fandom has gradually died off of Tumblr, plus with my interest in creating an original work around Wyatt, I have changed several things from his story, to his personality, to the NPC’s of his life. I’ll have all of the updated information on Wyatt’s new page -- as I very slowly work on finishing it, but for now, I’ll make posts here to keep everyone updated on how Wyatt has changed. 

tw: sexual assault || child abuse

Before:

As a Silent Hill O.C., Wyatt grew up as a relatively normal kid, short of some slight neglect and abuse from his step-father -- of which, he thinks is his birth father at this time, until he was 14 and met a young man 3 years older than him by name of Kyle. Rather gullible in his youth, Kyle gained Wyatt’s trust easily, and within a couple of months, Kyle was able to use Wyatt for blood ritual with him none the wiser. What Wyatt was unaware of was that Kyle was his half-brother, and more, part of a sect of The Order known as ‘The Disciples of our Holy Mother’ that had migrated to Texas two hundred years prior, and was attempting to use the blood of his unbaptized brother to bastardize the works of God for his own gain. This backfired, however, as the ritual instead summoned the first martyred Saint, St. Jennifer, to inhabit part of Wyatt’s soul and body, which lead to Wyatt experiencing a complete physical and violent bodily possession, resulting in the death of his father and crippling of his mother. For the rest of his life, Wyatt must share his body with the presence of St. Jennifer who, with the power of foresight, pyrokinesis, astral projection, and a direct link to God Herself, goes through periods of activity and regression, depending on Wyatt’s proximity to God’s power. 

Now:

As an original muse, Wyatt’s treatment from his step-father is a little harsher than in his Silent Hill verse. Though the knowledge that Dean Maverick isn’t actually his father is not known to any of the Maverick children, it is clear that Wyatt is the black sheep of their father’s love. 

The product of an affair, Wyatt is the blood son to Sheriff Mark Kibson, who is not only a sheriff, but also the leader to a centuries old religion that Dakota Maverick herself had once practiced, but had since rejected for her husband’s Christian worship. They had been childhood sweethearts, and with one too many cocktails, they found themselves in bed together, creating what would be the end for the both of them. 

Unwittingly, Dakota Maverick had her pregnancy test done in the same office where other practitioners of her former religion worked, overheard her confessing who the real father was, and would actively work against her for their own benefit. Meant to be kept a secret, the biological father was instead contacted by a Dr. Vinny Belle, who wanted to make alliances. Dr. Vinny Belle, a lifelong practitioner of the Witchgod Faith, was expected to have a daughter in the next couple of months, and with the Kibson bloodline being direct lineage to that of the Cassandra Cavelier, one the Founding Sisters, Dr. Belle hoped that he could trade the foreknowledge of Sheriff Kibson’s future child in exchange for a blood bond between their children, should the child be born a boy. 

Sheriff Kibson refused, choosing instead to keep the birth of this illegitimate child separate from the rest of his family. Months passed, and as soon as Wyatt was born, Dr. Belle ended up performing the bonding ritual anyways, promising the intertwining of their children to their Witchgod once they were both old enough. Dr. Belle and his wife had planned to keep their daughter around the same vicinity as Wyatt and his family, but before they could, Dakota was informed of this plan by a former friend from the Faith, and she put an end to it, threatening to tell the Sheriff everything if they ever came close to her son. With the Sheriff being a man to be feared, the threat worked.

Wyatt Maverick and Susan Belle never met each other, however, they both experienced what would be written off as an imaginary friend, seeing glimpses of each other as they grew up. Wyatt would call his imaginary friend “Tali”. He would see her playing with blocks, coloring, doing homework, brushing her teeth, crying, anything and everything, Wyatt would catch shadow mist glimpses of this young girl who always seemed to mirror his own age. It would often become a daily activity for his sisters, assuming this was just a years-long game of pretend, to ask him: “What’s Tali doing today?”, and he would tell them. As they grew older, they’d stop asking, and Wyatt would stop talking about her, but she never went away. 

At 14, the visions of Tali stopped being friendly. Once simply a part of every day life, the appearance of Tali was now saved for his nightmares, often bringing with her a horrible sense of dread, terror, and the smell of burnt flesh. During the day, she would notice him, where they’d never crossed paths before. Too afraid to speak of this shift in his consciousness, Wyatt does not speak of it to anyone. 

It’s not until Wyatt is 28 years old that Wyatt finds out the truth of “Tali”. At 14, “Tali” is Susan Belle, and her parents have just informed her that she is spiritually betrothed to Wyatt Kibson, but that no one is allowed to know the truth until the time is right. Having been raised in the Faith, Susan is excited for the marriage, and feels honored to have been chosen for a Son of Cassandra. She knows she can’t tell just anyone, but feels as though she can trust one of her best friends, who has also been raised in the faith. Unfortunately, this information gets back to the most dangerous of the Kibson line, Sheriff Kibson’s third son, Kyle Kibson, who takes vigilante action against the Belle family. 

Kyle was unaware of his youngest sibling, and feeling betrayed by his father’s secrecy, took his anger out on Susan and Wyatt. By 17, Kyle had already committed multiple accounts of sexual assault, assault, theft, and trespassing, all deflecting legal action with the connections of his father. He did incur extreme levels of physical punishments for his actions by the hands of his father, but this only ever made him better at covering up his tracks. 

With Susan, Kyle kidnapped the poor girl, drugging her and taking her to an old, abandoned gas station a few miles out from his family’s farm. There, he used her to practice ritual magic, torturing her with the original methods used by the founders of their Witchgod Faith. Though he did not kill Susan, Kyle did rape and torture the young girl before informing his father of the Belle family plan. 

Infuriated by not only the deceit of his brethren of Faith, but also through the actions of his son, Sheriff Kibson took no mercy in his decision to immolate the entire Belle line. Susan’s death was quick and painless, opting to shoot her in the head, as she had done nothing wrong, but her parents would be taken to the Kibson Farm where they would be burnt alive and fed to the pigs for feed. Susan was buried an unmarked grave, and the disappearance of the Belle family was an open and shut case. 

Kyle was beaten, arguably, within an inch of his life and forced through surgical castration, where it was then assumed that he would learn to stay in line and lose his violent urges. But once again, this only made him better at hiding them. 

From ages 14 to 28, Wyatt sees Tali as a ghost-like figure; rotting, mangled, and always part of the shadows. She still always seems to mirror his age, and always manages to find her way to the corner of his eye. He is misdiagnosed as “paranoid schizophrenic”, and for the most part, does not question that validity. From 28-32, Wyatt learns the truth of Susan Bell, and his visions of her shift to what she would have looked like alive. He finally believes in her presence, and that belief strengthens the energy around her, giving conscious thought to what’s left of her. She helps him uncover and dismantle the truth of his family, aiding him in killing Kyle. 

[livingthesuperherolife]

[R]EVOLUTION/EVOLUTION

I remember when I read my first X-Men comic book. My parents bought it for $5.00 at the Omaha Mall in Nebraska. What was my family doing in Nebraska? I have no idea, but I remember that is where I got it. The comic book was X-Men (1st Series) #199. It was the first appearance of Rachel Summers as Phoenix. And everything about the comic made me want to be a mutant. 

Now, the comic was what solidified it with how cool Rachel Summers was, but the actual love of X-Men happened a little bit prior. When I was a five year old kid, I used to live out on a farm. It was two stories with the stairway leading up into a small open area that sat between the two bedrooms. My bedroom with my brother was off to the right side while my parents was at the left. 

I remember the beds were up west wall, and the south side looked towards a silo and barn with a corn field out beyond it. You could almost make out the house on the main road a half mile away. 

“Star light, star bright, the first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I wish tonight.” I would find the first start that would appear in a still light blue sky and wish that I could be a mutant. 

I would wish that the X-Men mansion would appear in that cornfield. I would wish that Jubilee, Wolverine, Jean Grey, and Cyclops would come and be my friends. I would have people who would understand me. I would be different like they were different and fight for what was right. I would close my eyes, and then slip into bed hoping to wake up in another world. 

As I sit here and type this, I try to remember back to that moment. I wonder if the young me could have possible imagined being married to such an amazing man. I made it closer to Westchester, and even traveled there to see some friends who live there. I work and am friends with multidimensional channels, energy healers, and spiritual initiates of various orders. I myself channel meditations and feel deeply into things to produce content. How much closer to the X-Men can I get?

Getting back to X-Men #199, the story was all about Rachel Summers, the alternate reality daughter of the original X-Men, Jean Grey and Scott Summers. She was raised in a world that not only hated and feared mutants, but imprisoned them in a concentration camp. She escaped to a past where she could never be born with her mother dead and the X-Men irrevocably different than the people she knew. 

She has yet to tell anyone of her true origins, but she still wants to connect with her past. She goes to her mother’s parents house. There she finds the empathic crystal with memories of her mother. There she connects with her mother as Phoenix, taking the mantel on herself afterwards. 

I felt deeply joined with this character. I wanted to be understood. I wanted people to see me. I felt powerless to change my circumstances. Sure, she had superpowers, but we had the same hopes to find ourselves and dreams of a better world than the one we’ve known. 

A friend once said, “Organisms have a choice to: Migrate, Mutate, or Die.” And humans are just another organism. 

Rachel was a mutant by birth. I always knew I was different or special. Rachel migrated from her home timeline because she had no other choice. I left South Dakota because I did not think it was the best option for myself. Rachel connected deeply with her ancestors (her mom) to face their past and rise from those ashes. I have dealt with addiction and abuse in much the same way my relatives have and have risen from those ashes.

All of the things that I have wanted in terms of being this evolved form of human have happened! 

I work with others like me at a school who are making the world a better place with their gifts. I live outside of New York, albeit in New Jersey instead of Westchester, but I’m still here. 

The want to be a mutant has been sated, although merely being a mutant does not make me a superhero, that is my ongoing revolution, and what this journey is all about! 

[mangokiwitropicalswirl]

Paging Dr. Scully, chp 3

Paging Dr. Scully, chp 1: Squeeze 

Paging Dr Scully, chp 2: Jersey Devil

Paging Dr. Scully, chp 3: Shadows

Why had she let Gina convince her to wear the lace bodysuit?

“I look like a preteen in a Love’s Baby Soft ad,” she mutters to herself in the bathroom mirror at the restaurant as she touches up her lipstick and pushes carefully-curled tendrils behind her ear.

Normally, she’d have called up Melissa to come help her get ready. Melissa keeps up with fashion trends – she wears chokers and Doc Martens with bohemian dresses, not a predictable rotation of petite-sized scrubs underneath bleachy-white doctor coats. Scully rarely has a reason to put on anything other than jeans and a sweatshirt in the all-too-short hours between shifts.

But Melissa is away “on walkabout,” as she had put it. Scully had teased her repeatedly for calling an aimless American road trip by the Australian term for an adolescent spiritual rite of passage. “But it IS meaningful, Dana,” Melissa had insisted, her voice deep with conviction. “I want to see what the world holds for me, to open myself up to possibilities.”

Scully had nodded, only the slightest raise of her eyebrow betraying her scepticism that the trip is anything other than an excuse to hook up with random strangers and experiment with mind altering substances of one kind or another. She could have been jealous of Melissa’s unencumbered ways, but that had never been what she wanted from life.

She had thrived on the challenges of school and the thrill of the ER’s energy. She likes knowing she has control, giving commands to nurses and technicians, swooping in to bring order out of the chaos. That’s what she does. And it’s what she wants – to make sense of things, to categorize and pin things down. Life should be conquerable, ordered, stable. She needs a partner who wants the same things, right?

Which is why she finds herself sitting across from Rob, the tax accountant, easily eight or ten years her senior. A divorcee. Talking about taking kids to the park, or the museum, or is it the circus? Her mind is wandering.

He is nice enough, pleasant, average-looking, but clean. Uncomplicated. The first date she’s had in far too long. Unless you counted that hospital-basement coffee that the cute FBI agent bought her the night before.

Fox. Why is she thinking about Fox right now? Rob is explaining some intricate new estate tax law that Congress is considering, which will wreck havoc on his clients’ attempts to exploit the gift tax loophole.

She keeps the polite smile plastered on her face, ignoring the back part of her brain that begins comparing this conversation to the bizarre repartee she’d had with Mulder – she remembers he had said to call him Mulder – his skulking around the morgue, the story about Jersey Devils. She wonders if he’d called up Dr. Diamond, and if he had, what they’d found out.

Rob is still rambling and she hopes her face isn’t betraying anything but eager, engaged first-date interest.

Would he call her? She’d basically asked him to. She never does that. Why had she done that?

“Dana,” Rob says her name suddenly. “Do you need to get that?”

“Hmm?” She gives her head a startled shake. “What?”

“Your pager went off, do you need to call in?” Rob looks dutiful and concerned.

“Oh, sorry!” She looks sheepishly down at her pager. It’s the hospital. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Walking toward the restaurant desk phone, she can’t put her finger on why she feels disappointed. It’s not like she’d given Mulder her pager number. And for goodness sake, she’s on a date with another guy! Get it together, Dana. Her internal monologue is confusing but mercifully cut short when the call in to the hospital switchboard jolts her back into a role she’s more comfortable with.

“Multiple victims from a ten car pile-up headed in, we need you here tonight, Dr. Scully.”

“I’m on my way.” She doesn’t pause to measure the sense of relief that floods her, which is not a typical reaction to news of a long night of triage and trauma. She’ll make her apologies to Rob, but she won’t say anything about rainchecks or next times.

She dodges Rob’s phone calls for the next week, although work is genuinely busy enough that she doesn’t have to actually lie about why she’s not calling him back. Her mom is not so easily dissuaded. Maggie can’t seem to understand why her highly eligible daughter has made it to the ripe old age of 29 without at least a steady boyfriend.

“We just didn’t click, Mom,” she explains as Maggie questions why she’s not going out with Rob again.

“Well honey, sometimes you have to give a guy a second chance to make an impression,” Maggie sighs.

Scully sighs as well. Sometimes she placates her with promises to be more open, but other times, the best approach is to deflect attention to Melissa, who is several years older and also equally unattached.

“Mom, how’s Melissa? Have you heard from her?”

Maggie knows this is a diversionary tactic, but lets her off the hook anyway. Their conversation wanders away from the topic of Dana’s love life and onto speculations about Melissa’s.

It’s not until a week later Scully remembers that Mulder neglected to call her. And then it’s a quiet Friday another week after that when her phone rings.

“I don’t suppose you’re in Philadelphia right now?” He doesn’t even bother with hello, so it takes her a minute to place the confident, teasing voice on the other end of the line.

“Alas, no,” she smiles, settling down into the soft corner of her couch, propping her feet up on the coffee table. “Why? Should I be?”

“It’s just that I have the strangest hankering to go and see the Liberty Bell. I’ve been here a hundred times and I’ve never seen it.”

“You’re not missing much. It’s a big bell with a big crack, and you have to wait in a long line.”

“Still,” Mulder pauses, “I’d really like to go. You want to come meet me?”

“At the Liberty Bell?” She incredulous, sitting forward on her elbows now.

“Yeah, it’s only, what, three hours drive?”

“Three hours and a dozen tolls,” she laughs. “Plus, I think they’d be closed by the time I get there.”

“Hmmm,” he hums looking at his watch, “true. They probably close after 11.”

“So you’re assuming I’m just going to hop in my car at 8 p.m on a Friday night and meet you in a city three hours away?” Scully is almost impressed by his audacity. “If I remember correctly, we’ve only met twice, and the second time you never called me back.”

“I’m calling you now, aren’t I?” She can hear the smile in his voice.

“Okay, fine. Let’s imagine I hop in my car and meet you in Philadephia. What are you doing up there anyway?”

“On a case. I think I’ve got real proof of psychokinetic activity this time.” He’s breathless, eager.

“Psychokinesis?” Scully laughs. This is an entirely different galaxy – nay, universe – from conversations about tax accounting. “You mean how Carrie got even at the prom?”

“Basically, yes.” He laughs too, and then there’s an awkward pause between them, a low hum over the telephone line that’s neither physical nor entirely imagined.

Scully takes a deep breath before she can change her mind.

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, let’s go to the Liberty Bell.”

“Really?” His voice raises half an octave.

“Don’t make me second-guess myself, G-man,” she retorts, getting up from the couch and hurrying to change into something resembling an outfit. “And you better be buying the cheesesteaks because a girl gets hungry after a long drive.”

“You got it, doc.”

Three hours is a lot of time to second guess oneself, so she finds herself pushing the speed limit more than her usual nine-and-a-half miles over. If she drives faster, she won’t have a chance to analyze the logic of driving three hours to meet a man she’s only met twice – both times in a hospital, and both times he has talked about monsters. Well, monsters or aliens.

What the heck is she doing? She doesn’t know, but she can’t suppress the giggle that bubbles in her belly when she imagines his face when she told him she’d come. Somehow she can picture his wide-eyed surprise, and the way his lower lip must have turned up in a smile.

Why is she thinking about his lip? She barely knows him. Shut up brain. She drives faster.

To his credit, Mulder is waiting at the entrance to the deserted Liberty Bell pavilion parking lot with two oblong foil-wrapped cheesesteaks.

“I had to guess how you’d like yours.” He raises hers up in the air as a greeting as she steps out of the car. “Sorry.”

“I’m sure you did fine,” she smiles, reaching for the sandwich. Now it’s awkward. Should she hug him? Give him a kiss on the cheek? Shake hands?

He’s not helping, staring at her with a quizzical look, his eyes darting between the sandwich in his hands and still-lit pavilion behind her. Scully raises her eyebrows in a question, and shrugs.

“Well?” She says.

“C’mon,” he gestures with his head toward the lighted building. “I bribed the guards to keep it open.”

“You bribed the guards?”

“Bribed, threatened, cajoled, whatever.” He smiles. “The badge comes in handy sometimes.”

“So you’re saying you misused your credentials to convince some poor, beleaguered Liberty Bell attendants to stay open three hours past closing just so we can see this big cracked hunk of tin?” Her words are sarcastic, but her tone rings with delight.

“You make it sound so nefarious,” he says innocently. “Like I said, I just wanted to see it this time.”

“What about the sandwiches?”

“We can eat them inside.”

Scully shakes her head, smiling. This is, hands down, the strangest date she has ever been a part of. And now she’s not even sure it’s a date. He hasn’t attempted to touch her. Not a hug, not a hand on her shoulder. She’s suddenly worried she has misread this entirely, that this is just some strange overture of nerdy friendship. An uncomfortable sinking feeling lodges in her stomach as she searches for a way to ward off her embarrassment if it turns out she made too many assumptions.

But as they walk up to the building, he reaches ahead of her and opens the door, making an arch with his arm for her to walk under. She looks up at him with a smirk as he follows behind her, his hand pressing the lightest touch in the hollow curve of her back.

[revjonbanks-blog]

A little about me

When I was in my early twenty’s I had a friend who was the daughter of a Church of God pastor in my hometown. The Church of God (Anderson, IN) had a statewide Camp Meeting outside my hometown every year. They would have something going on every day for a week. Every evening a preacher chosen for that specific year would preach. That year my friend persuaded me to go.

It was the last sermon on the last night of the week. I was sitting about three rows from the very back. When the invocation was given I wanted to go forward to the altar, but I just stood frozen. In my mind I said, ‘Jesus, I can’t walk up there. If you want me, you’ll have to come and get me.’ Immediately, a hand was on my left arm and leading me to the altar. As I started to kneel, I looked to my left to see who had led me down that long isle. It was Jesus, the Son of the living God. As soon as He let go of my arm He walked around the end of the altar and knelt right in front of me. The pastor, my friend’s father, knelt to my right and the gentleman who had preached the sermon knelt in front of him. They both began talking to me, but it seemed like their words were coming from light years away; I was so overwhelmed by the Presence of Jesus that I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying. And that night, kneeling in front of the Son of God, I became a Christian at a camp meeting in the country.

From that night on I felt the Presence of Jesus every day for one to two months. His Presence was especially prevalent in the mornings when I would awake. I would fall to my knees as soon as my feet hit the floor in total awe of what I was experiencing. I didn’t see Him during these times, but I knew exactly where He was standing each morning, and the entire room was filled with His glory. (The Holy Spirit witnesses to my heart right now as to how precious and how real these experiences were and how, to this day, the Lord uses them to help me from time to time.)

A few years later an elderly lady invited several people to her house after church one Sunday morning for some snacks and cold drinks. My wife and I attended. At one point this lady asked us to come into her kitchen. Another couple heard her invite us and they came, also. The lady then addressed me and said that she was the nurse on duty when I was born. She said that when she entered the delivery room Jesus was standing in a corner. She explained His Presence as being almost overwhelming. She went on to say that Jesus was also in the room my mom and I were placed in after my birth. She would pause each time she came in to check on us because His Presence was so glorious it was hard for her to bear. He stayed in our room until we were released from the hospital. It was so humbling to know that Jesus was present at both my natural birth and my spiritual birth.

About six months after my wife and I were married, we moved to Houston, TX where I would attend Gulf Coast Bible College (which later became Mid-America Christian University in Oklahoma City, OK). We both worked for a year before I started school. A man I worked with that year happened to be a student at the college. He invited me to a prayer meeting at a house in the Houston Heights that several young men from the college had rented. The house was built like a mansion. Just inside the front door there was a huge foyer and two stairwells, one to the right of the door and one to the left of the door, both leading to an open hallway upstairs that formed a half circle overlooking the downstairs foyer.

There were approximately twenty people present. Most of them were standing in the upstairs hallway. A few were on the stairs. I took a seat about four or five steps up the stairwell to the right, hugging the wall, in case someone might want to get by me. There were two or three men sitting several steps behind me, but none below me. This was in the evening and there were a couple of lamps left on in the foyer and also rays of light from a street light shining through some windows with sheer curtains on the front wall parallel to the stairs.

At a point in the prayer meeting, I think near the end, there came a period of complete silence. During that silence, someone put his hands on my shoulders. I sat frozen, not knowing what was happening. I then heard a voice say, “I ordain you to preach my gospel”. When the person removed His hands I opened my eyes and saw that it was Jesus who had ordained me. He then started up the stairs. I leaned back and, with my right hand, I reached out and touched the hem of His garment. I saw His garment move when I touched it. He stopped, looked back, and smiled at me. He then walked to the top of the stairs and disappeared. A man who was standing in the upstairs hallway was made aware that the Lord had dealt with me that night. The Lord actually let him see the same thing I saw after my ordination, an unclean spirit that was pursuing one of the students present in the prayer meeting. Twenty-four years later a church presented me with an ordination certificate. There was no ceremony. Jesus is the only Person that has laid hands on me.

My ordination is not from man, nor through the agency of man, but through the laying on of the hands of Jesus. I did not choose Him; He chose me. I now belong to Jesus and my allegiance is to Him and the Father alone.

Several months after that night, I started Bible College. A few weeks into my second semester my wife got a phone call from my biological father’s wife. (I had met them when I was sixteen and my dad had a bad heart condition. My wife and I went to see him the day we left for Houston. He was still working and doing okay.) His wife said that he had recently been forced to take a medical retirement from his work. The doctors weren’t giving him much time to live. He wanted us to move back to Oklahoma before he died. When my wife told me about this, I thought, ‘I can’t just drop out of college. It’s a four year college.’ However, after a week or two, I began to feel that God might really want me to leave school and move back to Oklahoma.

I prayed about it for several days and the feeling wouldn’t leave. I asked the Lord to please let me know for certain if He wanted me to do this. I then put a cotton work glove on the grass outside our apartment and, with my finger, I drew a twelve to fifteen inch circle around the glove. I prayed and asked the Lord to let there be dew on the ground but not on the glove, nor within the circle, if He wanted me to leave school and move back. I checked the following morning and the dew was on the ground, but not on the glove, nor was it in the circle.  I then asked that He do the opposite the next day, let there be dew on the glove and within the circle, but not on the ground. That next morning I overslept and was almost late for school. I rushed outside and quickly checked the ground, and it was dry. I crawled to the glove and it was wet with dew, as was the circle around it. We began packing our belongings and within days we were on our way back to Oklahoma.

After driving over eight hours we stopped and spent the night with my wife’s family. My dad lived approximately thirty-five miles north of them. The following day we visited with her mother most of the morning, then drove to my dad’s house. We arrived around noon. He and his wife were so surprised to see us. They had no idea we were coming. We never thought about letting them know. I had just asked the Lord what He wanted me to do, and then did it. They weren’t prepared for company so my wife and his wife immediately left for town to get some food to prepare for lunch.

My dad and I were standing outside talking when they left. They hadn’t been gone one minute and my dad had a heart attack. I helped him inside the house and laid him down on a cot by the wall just inside the door. In approximately one and a half minutes more, he passed away. I just stood there beside him, looking into his open eyes that were so still and so quiet, not knowing what to do. We had no cell phones back then so I couldn’t contact my wife. He lived a few miles from the nearest town so I didn’t bother calling an ambulance. I soon went outside.

My dad wasn’t a Christian when he died. I began asking the Lord to give him another chance. I sat on a porch step and prayed and prayed and prayed. Every once in a while I would stand up and pace back and forth on the patio and then sit back down. Twice I went back in the house and checked to see if my dad had come back to life. After what seemed like an eternity of sitting and pacing, sitting and pacing (it was actually about twenty-five to thirty minutes), I sat down for the last time and heard the words, “I have heard and I have answered; I have given you the desires of your heart”. I rushed inside and he was still dead. I went back outside for a few more minutes, and then went back in, and again, he was still dead.  I thought, ‘Maybe I have to tell him to wake up,' but, before I could speak, the last Adam, Jesus --- the life-giving Spirit --- breathed into him and he awoke from sleep. His first words were, "I was dead!” He said it three times and then began to praise Jesus.

As he was praising the Lord our wives returned. His wife went into a panic and started screaming, “What happened. He’s never looked this bad before.” I assured her he was okay and that he only needed a bath (he had passed his bowels and urine). After this day my dad still had a bad heart but he had renewed energy and vigor. He and his two brothers began going from one Church of God to another in Oklahoma, each giving their testimonies. My dad always worked into his testimony a statement saying, “People say that when you’ve been dead as long as I was, your brain will be affected, and I can attest to its truth – my brain was affected drastically -- I was a sinner, now I’m a saint; I was dead, now I’m alive.”

Several years after this experience, I was at a prayer meeting in North Carolina that was being held in the loft of a barn. There were about twelve to fifteen people present. I was sitting in a chair beside a middle aisle that ran down the middle of the loft. As we were praying in silence, I was suddenly filled with faith that what was beginning there would spread to the north, south, east, and west. I stood and began to speak but was cut short before I could complete a sentence. In the blink of an eye, I was standing beside Jesus in a place far above the earth. I don’t know where we were, whether in heaven, or on top of one of the highest clouds. God knows.

Jesus was standing to my left, facing me; Peter and John were to my right. I saw someone coming up from behind us and turned to look, and it was James. When I saw him, I glanced down and saw my body lying on the floor in the loft. Jesus began telling me I had been born before my time, and that the knowledge I had received would be usable, but I must wait until God completed a work in His people. He didn’t tell me what that work was. While Jesus was talking to me, Paul appeared, walking from my right to my left, several feet in front of me.  He was looking straight at me. I had the feeling that he knew me. Jesus then told me about my call and I returned to my body. My physical body ached for almost three weeks after this experience.

These have been just a few experiences that I’ve I held in my heart for nearly fifty years. Recently I shared them with two different people in two different places at two different times and both of them felt that I should share them with others. So I now believe the Lord wants me to share them. I have written them for the sole purpose of exalting Jesus and the Father, who love us beyond our ability to comprehend.

If you would pass me on the street you wouldn’t even notice me. I’m just another nobody from nowhere. There’s nothing good in me except that which Jesus has worked in me. I realize this may sound like a cliché, but it’s the absolute truth.

Rev. Jon David Banks, God’s most unworthy servant

[marxpobert-blog]

I was one of the many crores (millions) of people who headed to the Prayag Kumbh 2019 – which was the  Ardh Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj, earlier known as Allahabad.  Media reports say that the numbers are estimated to be 15 crores or 150 million or more this year. And while apparently the Guinness Book of World Records pronounced the Maha Kumbh Mela in 2013 as the “largest ever gathering of human beings for a single purpose” it is believed that the Ardh Kumbh in Prayagraj this year would have more people thronging the shores of the Sangam – the confluence of the rivers Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati.

Pic Courtesy – UP Tourism

Kumbh Mela – a melting pot of faith and devotion

Beckoned by “Mother Ganga” or “Ganga Maa”, the  banks of the river are filled with crores of pilgrims who have nothing else to offer but their faith and devotion . An old man clutching his aging wife, a young boy carried by his doting father on his head, a mother with her teenage daughters staying close together  – families bonded by love and duty are here to pray to the goddess river.

At the Sangam it’s their devotion and belief that bathes their minds as they dip into the river. The water is warm , like the affection of a mother welcoming them into an embrace . She welcomes the  crores of people who believe that a mere dip in her lap will wash them off their sins . 

Faith has many dimensions to it and this is probably the most profound aspect of it . And that is the single purpose that has drawn millions of people to the Prayag Kumbh 2019. 

Kumbh Mela – A spiritual journey

However for me it was curiosity that had initially drawn me to the Kumbh Mela. And when I received a media invite from Uttar Pradesh Tourism and Lonely Planet Magazine, I decided to accept it to understand the underlying motivation that brings people in hordes to the Kumbh.  And waves and waves of them arrived, carrying their bundles upon their heads, holding their near and dear ones close lest they get lost in the madding crowd.

I have a phobia for crowds and yet, I stood there, transfixed and watched.Wearing their finest clothes, they greeted me with beaming smiles and readily posed for photos as they told me their stories. And while they came from nooks and corners of the country – on foot, on bullock carts, on overcrowded buses and trains, chartered helicopters and flights, they all came for the one single dip in the lap of mother Ganga.

And as I watched them immersed in their faith, something stirred inside me as well. The curious onlooker in me was swept away by the force of spiritual fervour that filled the air. And I was simply overwhelmed.

Just then, the voice of my guide, Sandeep interrupted my reverie as I heard him say , ” All Bollywood films begin with a lost and found story in the Kumbh.” And as we smiled,  we listened to the voices of people calling out to their lost loved ones over the loudspeaker. I suddenlyrealized that I had indeed embarked on a different journey this year.

But this post is not about me or my inner journey and my tryst with spirituality. It is about a guide to the Prayag Kumbh 2019 with some information on the importance of Kumbh mela.  There are three other venues for the Kumbh Melas besides Prayagraj – Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik -Trimbakeshwar being the other three and it is celebrated four times over twelve years. While it is the Sangam of the three rivers in Prayagraj, the venues for the other spiritual festivals are the banks of the Ganga in Haridwar, the Godavari in Nasik and Shipra in Ujjain.

The story of Kumbh Mela

The Kumbh is referred to as the sacred pitcher which carried the nectar of immortality or Amrut. The ancient Puranas or the Vedic texts talk about the samudra manthan – the churning of the oceans when the Devas and the Asuras – deities and demons. fought over the Kumbh of Amruta or the immortal nectar. According to the legend, Lord Vishnu disguised as a beautiful woman called Mohini tricked the demons and gave the nectar to the gods. And as he flew heavenward with the Kumbh, a few drops of the nectar were spilt on the four sites. The entire legend takes over twelve days which in human calendar translates into twelve years. And astrologically the dates of the mela are planned keeping in mind the planet positions and the auspicious time. Over the period, the rivers become symbolically filled with the nectar and a mere dip is enough to  cleanse people of all sins.

The origin of Kumbh is not known historically but it was Shri Adi Shankaracharya, the Hindu saint and philosoopher who established the Kumbh Mela and the Ardh Kumbh and brought all the different sections of the Hindu faith together to the Kumbh. The word, “akharas” is believed to have derived from “akhand” which means indivisable. It is believed that Adi Shankaracharya established ten akharas.

The ritualistic dip in the rivers find mention in the travels of Hieun Tsang or Xuanzang who apparently witnessed several devotees celebrate the festival in a town. It is believed to have been identified as Prayagraj during the reign of King Harsha. However historians are still divided as to whether the Chinese traveller was recording the Kumbh Mela or if it was a Buddhist ritual.

There is the Maha Kumbh which happens every 144 years besides the Kumbh Mela and the Ardh Kumbh At Prayagraj it is the Ardh Kumbh this year and it is from January 15  to March 4. Although every day is believed to be a divine experience, there are specific auspicious days for bathing – referred to as Shahi Snaan. In Prayagraj Ardh Kumbh the dates are January 15, February 4, February 10, February 19 and March 4. For more Kumbh mela infomation, you can refer the official website and wikipedia as well .

Pic Courtesy – UP Tourism

Kumbh Mela and Naga Sadhus

Coming back to my experience of the Prayagraj Kumbh, I was there during the second Shahi Snaan on February 4. While it was an overwhelming experience to see waves and waves of devotees, the Naga Sadhus are the showstoppers. Out of the millions of people who throng the Kumbh it is amazing how everyone’s attention is veered towards the naked Naga Sadhus .

Pic Courtesy – UP Tourism

Of course they are dramatic in their appearance , sometimes stark naked but at many times covered in rudraksham beads and many have a fancy head gear as well . Smeared in ash from burnt wood of dead trees, they have an aura around them. They are friendly enough but most of them will pose for you and chat you up if you offer them money . And they know the US dollar from the Singapore Dollar .

I would have personally liked to spend more time with them , understand what made them give up their normal life .Shedding clothes is just a metaphor for shedding their inhibitions . While most of them are colourful personalities, I read somewhere that some of them were indeed professionals who had given to their regular life to become Naga Sadhus .

But my guide says that they live in cities like Varanasi in their communes and sometimes they may even merge with the locals , bereft of their identity as a Naga Sadhu. Indeed some of them apparently carry even fancy smart phones and drive cars – but then I have only heard of it from people. Perhaps one day I will get to speak to a couple of Naga Sadhus and understand the mysticism around them .

My Kumbh Mela Experience

However it was the entire atmosphere of positive energy that overwhelmed me. And I am not just referring to the pilgrims. Even though we are a media group, we walked around for miles and merged with the milieu. From the smiling cops to the selfless cleaners, everyone was so selflessly dedicated to the Kumbh Mela. I am completely impressed by the immaculate arrangements. I walked around for miles and everywhere it was clean and spotless. From toilets to tents, there were facilities for every kind of traveller and pilgrim. There were even helicopters that will fly you to the Sangam .

  Everything functioned as clockwork. There was security everywhere , even police on horseback. CCTVs awere installed everywhere. Helpful and friendly voices reached out to you , if you were lost. I have a phobia of crowds and yet I could barely feel the chaos of the five crore people as crowds were regulated. There were several bathing ghats and boats took you around.

Where to stay in Kumbh ?

Tent cities surrounded the Kumbh and you could stay in luxury or in simple tents with basic accommodation near the sacred site. We stayed in Indraprastha Tent City which was on the other banks of the Kumbh and there were e-rickshaws that would take us to the pontoon bridges which would take you across to the mela grounds.It is better to take the contact of the e-rickshaw driver and ask him to meet you at the pontoon bridge when you head back.

There are many bridges and hence make a note of the sector and number . The administration regulates these bridges based on the crowd and the cops are always helpful. However a bit of patience is requested from our side. Although it is advisable to stay near the mela grounds, there are shuttle buses from the city to the sacred venue in case you want to stay there.

When to visit the Kumbh Mela ?

While most pilgrims like to visit during the Shahi Snaan days, I would have personally preferred to be here on a regular day to soak in the atmosphere in a relaxed manner. However there are several restrictions on the days of the Shahi Snaan to ensure that there is no stampede and the people are safe.

Pic Courtesy – UP Tourism

It is important to understand the traffic arrangements as well as there are several check points and most of the routes are closed. It is advisable to spend at least a couple of days before and after the Shahi Snaan so that you get to understand these regulations and you can experience the Kumbh Mela without any hassle.

My Kumbh Momemt

My Kumbh moment came actually in Ayodhya and not at Prayagraj. I was overwhelmed by the faith of the millions who had travelled all the way from small villages and towns just to have a dip in the Sangam and then they visited Ayodhya where their pilgrimage is considered to be “complete” . I met a family of 30 members who had come from a small village near Uttar Pradesh – Bihar and Nepal border to Kanakbhavan in Ayodhya after the Shahi Snaan.

The serene temple nestled inside the sprawling palace was believed to be gifted to Sita by Kaikeyi after the wedding to Rama. And this family took a break after their long journey while the children played . “Hamara ek photo le lo” they requested . While I complied , they told me with beaming smiles that they will now begin their long journey back home. It would take them another week to get home as they have to travel by trains, buses and bullock carts to reach their village. I was humbled by the singular devotion, the unshakable faith and the immense positive energy . As I showed them the photograph, they thanked me and said , ” Sab Ganga Maa ki Krupa hai. ” (Its the mercy of Ganga ) I am grateful to have been part of this soulful journey.

    The post My tryst with spirituality in the Prayag Kumbh 2019 appeared first on Lakshmi Sharath.

[pussymagicuniverse]

In (St) Brigid’s Arms: an Imbolc Devotional

The week leading to Imbolc 2018 was probably the darkest end of January in my life, but it was the one where Brigid’s flame burned the brightest in my heart. Brigid had always been an important divine figure to me, as a goddess of poetry and creation, as the saint associated with the coming of spring and new life. She didn’t push her way forward as often as, for example, Ceridwen or the Virgin Mary had, but on 23 January 2018 my daughter Bonnie was born with congenital heart defects, and we sped away to a hospital in another city for a week. I was alone with my delicate, unwell child (who is now turning out to be quite a fierce and fiery child, heart problems or not, which is a relief almost one year on), and Brigid stepped up and made her presence felt when I didn’t know who else to ask for help.  

When you unexpectedly find yourself in hospital with a poorly newborn (and still recovering from a c-section yourself) 35 miles from home, missing your husband and other children, frightened for the baby you’ve just brought into the world, then magic, prayer and ritual have never been more important, but also must be improvised. There is so much value in the meditative and energetic qualities of burning a plain white candle, and in over twenty years of practicing my craft, I didn’t fully appreciate this simple act until I wasn’t able to do it. For me, everything about Imbolc, and all the power of Brigid, can be distilled into a white candle – the purity of a new beginning, the desire to heal, take action, and create, in a single simple flame.

But a hospital is no place for candles, and all I had to hand was a little pouch containing a piece of black tourmaline, a seashell, the tiniest statue of the Virgin Mary I’ve ever seen, and a worry stone made of clear resin encasing a bronze-coloured heart emblazoned with a cross, which was a gift from a devout Christian friend during my pregnancy. I brought these items to hospital with me for the birth because I had anxiety about surviving my planned c-section without major complications (I’d had some problems in three out of my four previous births), but I ended up needing them for my daughter instead. Tourmaline is good for staying positive; seashells always bring me closer to the goddess.

And knowing (St) Brigid’s mythical connections to Jesus and Mary in Celtic Christianity and my own path of christopaganism, the cross and the figure of the Virgin were more than enough to connect with Brigid herself. The legend goes that St Brigid found herself acting as midwife to Mary at the birth of Jesus, and even nursed the newborn boy when Mary was too exhausted to do it herself. The time frame is more than a little muddled in this story – St Brigid lived several centuries after Jesus, though of course the pagan goddess Brigid pre-dates him, so I quite like the idea that maybe she was there… – so it isn’t meant to be taken as anything more than a myth. But it’s the energy of this metaphorical act of midwifery/nursing that I could feel coming from Brigid while Bonnie and I were in hospital: “Here, let me help you with this baby – she’s going to need you for the rest of her life. For now, you rest.” Whenever I wasn’t cuddling or breastfeeding Bonnie, for the long hours she slept in her hospital cot, attached to monitors and oxygen, I was doing my best to remember Brigid was looking after her for me, helping her tiny heart. It wasn’t easy, but I had to believe we’d get through whatever might happen.

But of course Brigid’s warmth and empowering love isn’t just for mothers and newborn babies, it’s for anyone who needs it and will honour it; she holds you, pockets your concerns, your frazzled stray thoughts, and lets you rest – then smooths it all out in front of you when you awaken so your problems are easier to solve, battles are easier to win, and she imbues you with strength to keep going. And that’s in the spirit of Imbolc, too: celebrated on 1-2 February in the northern hemisphere, halfway between the longest night and the spring equinox, it’s the border between winter and spring, a planning time, a chance to rest before launching fully into whatever it is you need to do as the light increases, gains strength.

If you feel Brigid’s call or need her assistance, there are so many things you can do to thank her; relationships with deities and/or saints must be personal, but there are tried and tested ways to start if you’re stuck. Create something – poetry, art, a Brigid’s cross – whatever it is, make it sincerely. Do something kind for new mothers or mums-to-be or babies – even mama and baby animals if you prefer them to humans (I know plenty who do). Light those white candles. Go out walking, look for snowdrops or other signs of life, even if you’re still surrounded by snow and ice. Find your own connection to the cross-quarter magic that drifts gently at Imbolc, slowly smudging dormant and dark into bright and alive, and grow with it, whatever that means for you. And I hope you grow well, as my Bonnie has grown.

Born in Southern Ohio, but settled in the UK since 1999, Kate is a writer, witch, editor and mother of five. She is the author of several poetry pamphlets, and the founding editor of four web journals and a micropress. Her witchcraft is a blend of her great-grandmother's Appalachian ways and the Anglo-Celtic craft of the country she now calls home – though she incorporates tarot, astrology, and her ancestors, plus music, film, books, and many other things into her practice. Her spiritual life is best described as queer Christopagan with emphasis on the feminine and the natural world. She believes magic is everywhere. Find Kate on twitter and IG - @mskateybelle - and at her website.

[dwestfieldblog]

SPIRITUAL EMERGENCIES

Its been a hard nights day and I've been working like a God...Centring my chi by  (                      ) in conjunction with a little (                    ) on Sundays but don't try this at home unless you have some. Under the influence but not persuaded, with no choice other than to follow my free will. 350 songs recorded in Prague (about a third of them are good enough) over a very long weekend and now ready to go again...Last month I heard my own voice in a dream saying 'Death is my second home',  so perhaps another temporary close-down is coming. Hope that paragraph was pretentious enough. If not...meditating on 'The First law of thermodynamics...No energy in the universe is created and none is destroyed'. So all is well...

The recent magnificent Wargames with Russia and China...300 thousand men, (that's a lot) many fields of tanks and nautical miles filled with battleships, necessary because of (according to a joint statement from the protagonists) 'dangerous times' and 'unstable situations'. Reminds me of Bill Hicks quoting George Bush the older (the CIA president) saying 'The world is a dangerous place'...'yeah, thanks to YOU, quit arming the world!'. But this time around, these unstable situations are being more egged on and supported by Russia, gleefully supported as always by all those those make weapons. Trump is not the 'human' being to slow this down. Nature abhors a vacuum and she is rushing now to fill various empty heart/mind and soulless actions made by various leaders with processes of an irreversible...well... nature...Only '12 years' left now to avert climate change disaster...your newborns this year might very well inherit a desert. Well, if it was good enough for the Israelites...

Climate change debates witter on by men in suits flown in at great carbon footprint expense to sit around expensive South American wood tables and agree that time itself is running out. While those that disagree with them only do so because of well paying vested interests in the industries which drain, burn, drill and destroy. Human beings are like gangsters holed up and surrounded by the law, determined to take the hostages and cops with them when they go in a blaze of glory, just so they don't die alone. Reliance on coal continues, the need for oil because of ... 'lifestyle choices'...(ego)... back to RAW again...

'As soon as they find out how to put a meter between us and the sun, only then will we have clean energy.'  

There is a very special circle of Hell reserved for the Barons of black gold, where they burn alive forever, lit by oil. And another circle for those mapping the human genome and copyrighting it so they can make billions from various medicines and procedures, holding the masses to ransom. Peace will occur either when it is more profitable than arms dealing or when there is absolute silence of death on the human side. How many people do you know who are neither whore nor pimp? Or both.

The purpose of existence is (NB. seems to me in my current long running reality tunnel to be) evolution...and as with self programming artificial intelligence, there is a type of instinctive logic which suggests that as any chain is as strong as its' weakest link...and the mass of humanity appears to be working against evolving, then nature will just erase us and get on with creating her own new thang without the apes. Quite right too. The universe is (seems to be) 'non simultaneously apprehended events and interacting processing' but until I pick the free crop of magic mushrooms in the mystic forest this late October month, I will just take RAW's cosmic trigger words for it. (The lousy alchemist cook says make sure they are washed and/or dried right. Vomiting mould covered nipple tops before any hallucinogenic gets into the blood proper is very little fun. Learning, or not from experience in the face of common sense is always a hoot. Ask my liver. ) Anyway...let's be Sirius...

'News'...Nick Clegg is to take over the Facebook worries. (Head of Global Policy and Communications in Silicon Valley) Nick Clegg. This shows JUST how much Zuckerberg gives a damn eh? Useless/Hopeless. For those who don't know or remember, some years ago Clegg was the leader of the Liberal Party in Britain who swore he would never allow an increase in University fees if he were ever Prime Minister. After the election 'win' of David Cameron and the Conservatives, (only made possible with the Liberals siding with them) it took about two weeks before he was forced to go back on his word and toe the line of his bigger coalition partner. (Can't have an easily affordable education, that would be dangerous) A weak and easily breakable man. Expect Facebook to go on paying even less tax, abusing your private information and allowing Russia et al free rein to influence the populace.  

Nice to see the half a million march against Brexit in London. Will accomplish nothing but good that some people woke up before the face of this bullshit a few days later... 'Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.....a eagle mewing her mighty youth'...Geoffrey Cox QC, the Attorney General invoking Milton at the Tory conference.  Winston Churchill defined success as the 'ability to move from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm'. So, well done and three cheers boys..good luck with making Britain Great again. I would truly love to be proved wrong...but...

'In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran,  cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice...and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance, a vendetta...held not as a votive in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose.' ...V for Vendetta via Hugo Weaving in an Anonymous Guy Fawkes mask. My other favourite quote from that film is.....

'And thus I clothe my naked villainy with odd old ends stolen forth from holy writ and seem a saint when most I play the devil.'  Richard III by the real Shakespeare, which covers just about every politician and religious leader, bar a very very precious few. God may be great but he's not as fat as Buddha. And anyway, belief narrows reality tunnels. Which for some people, makes them feel stronger...

In October, Alternative fur (that's fur with an umlaut over the 'u', not the sexy animal hair which is so nice to stroke or be stroked by but I digress. Arf.) Germany... suggested quite firmly that middle school children report to them if any of their teachers said bad things about the new patriotic Nazi swine. Nothing dubious there, no harking back to cruel and better days of the old 'thousand year' Reich and denouncing intellectuals and subversives at all. A month before that, because of hearing shouting, I looked out of my own window one afternoon to see a six foot six skinhead, in army clothes and big black leather boots on a balcony opposite, drunk and rousingly crying out about Deutschland for five minutes in German to his mates in the kitchen behind him as he clasped a beer can. Perhaps he was only joking. Unlikely the grandmother living alone and above his flat thought so. And as for the massive shaven headed Slovak steroid monsters with tattoos on their necks who shout at each other in conversation even when both are sitting two feet away, their biggest insult to their tiny two old kids is to angrily shout 'Little gypsy!' at them when they do something wrong. All together now;Hail Victory! Fnord.

A bad death of a murdered journalist in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey... followed by a lovely picture in the papers of smiling Crown Prince Bin Salman with Jared Kusher (a walking cypher of wrong cleanliness and evil married to Trump's daughter) No wonder it is yet another bastard thing for Trump to hope the connections all vanish from..as he gently damns the killing of a critic of the very royal prince while tweeting endless vitriol against the third estate in the USA. And Donald's glorious tit for tat bollocks about the old nuclear bilateral agreement with Russia... 'Well THEY started it, so we will react...ad infinitum'. Back to the happy days of being able to wipe out the planet seventy times over and rational cold war paranoia...at some point a computer will finally analyse all probable outcomes for the last time and find the one way in which a nuclear war could be won with minimal death on the home side. The computer it will say 'Go for it alpha monkeys'.  

'How long o lord, how long?  How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?' Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972. (About Nixon, but ever more relevant by the day.)

Of course the masochistic paranoia of leaders will continue to find new and further devious outlets, displays and new laws...all the usual countries (IE all of them) behaving as if they can get away with murder forever. Forever, these days, is most likely shorter than a generation, unless there is already a dynasty of cruelty in place, where the buck/baton/cattle prod is passed down as an heirloom of death. Communication never gets to the top because underlings are scared to tell their bosses the truth in case the sweethearts are offended and kill them. (Meow and woof.)

*'The machine is running the engineers' Lenin on his deathbed. Communism, huh?

China's 'voluntary' organ donor scheme. Harvested from enemies of the state...70,000 annual operations...Got the money? Need a new liver? Sort you out in a fortnight, NO waiting list. Not suspicious at all, unless you are a doctor from another country looking into the massive amount of operations and the far smaller published donor lists. Hopefully, those rich enough to afford the instant new transplants will be better, peaceful people when they have their new tee total vegetarian Falun Gong organs in place. Whereas those with less to spend will have to make do with their internal workings run by other very involuntary donations made by dissidents who dared the high insult of comparing the 'president for life' to Winnie the Pooh.  

Primum non nocere, you bastards. The Hippocratic Oath replaced by a hypocritical medical ideology of murder for profit. The state does not help the healthcare 'system' much, if at all, so the military hospitals with easy access to prisoners can get to work stealing what is needed from living bodies. Those arrested who do not give their names and places of birth for fear of involving their families are simple to vanish. They ceased to exist the moment they were caught. Download the report, written by two Canadians, one a former Crown prosecutor and the other a Human Rights Lawyer and make up your own mind as to the veracity. 'The Middle Kingdom between Heaven and Earth', the land which brought the world Taoism and Confucianism...  

www.organharvestinvestigation.net

Take the time and read the report. Then ask yourself, if your children, parents or close friends needed a transplant to save their life (and you could afford a fast Chinese military hospital operation) would you truly care where the organ came from as long as it was healthy? If it was only for you, would you still take it, knowing where it had been stolen from or would you allow your own destiny to be? Desperation is one sure-fire test of the perception of morality.

*Ever notice all those t shirts, sweat shirts and bags with those certain cool slogans on? 'Happy to be an individual', 'My style is my choice', 'My freedom is my world', 'The end justifies the means'. Etc. Take a very cold and realistic guess as to where they are made and by whom and under what conditions. That's right. 

I appear to live (temporarily) in a world where a printed sign on the inside of a toilet door needs to say in two languages 'First unlock the door then turn handle'. That's right kids/adults, you have to be able to open a door before you open it. Almost Zen wisdom but hardly rocket science or brain surgery. Stuff you learn at about the age of  three. I have lost count (triple figures now) of how many customers in a certain shop I have seen standing next to a big, clearly printed sign on the counter to 'ring for service', watching them get ever more impatient as those who are working hard behind the scenes remain deaf and blind to their existence. And signs on the front door, inside and outside also in two languages, asking customers to please close the door.  A third of them never do, even in heavy winter. The evil within me takes a savage glee at the depth of stupidity of these shameless idiots. The pathetic being within rejoices that he is not quite as dumb as these retarded bipeds and the fake existentialist feels a sweeping wave of sheer galactic horror. But...

Back to the litany once again and forever...quality over quantity. I have optimism for the few. They/you WILL make it. You will create it and become it. As long as you understand how to open a f...ing door, you are halfway there.

'Whoever can scare people enough (produce bio-survival anxiety) can sell them quickly on any verbal map which seems to give them relief. i.e. cure the anxiety. By frightening people with Hell and then offering them Salvation, the most ignorant or crooked individuals can 'sell' a whole system of thought that cannot bear two minutes of rational analysis. Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising.

And once the child/adult is afraid enough, they will follow the substitute parent/s, kept pliant and submissive by further shocks administered to their truly nervous system with the promise of support or threat of punishment. Shame forever without mercy on those outside the mainstream of politics and organised religion who maintain such deeply manipulative systems in the pretence of setting the tender initiates 'free'. You should be a positive alternative, not more of the same poison.

'You gave your life to be the person you are now. Was it worth it?'           Richard Bach.Running from Saftey.

Onwards and inwards, sidestepping the unnecessary. You are your thoughts,'Reality' is personal, subjective and shaped by Will, the Love you come from and the Love you create. Happy everything/Sol Invictus to you and survive the long winter. Hibernate if needed, stay warm, learning and free...

[metawitches]

It’s time to return to Midnight, Texas, or to visit for the first time if you’ve never been. There just happens to be a new hotel in town, owned by a renowned healer and his lovely wife. They can help you with anything from a crystal meditation session to rebalance your energy to an exorcism of your terminal demon cancer. And anything that might require a severed demon head, but let’s keep that between you and me. Healer Kai seems to want to keep his frequent sessions with the head private.

The town’s resident psychic, Manfred Bernardo, is a bit under the weather this week, having never fully recovered from last season’s finale, when he allowed 6 demons to possess him at once, so that he could drive away a really powerful demon, Colconar, who wanted to own the town’s resident witch, Fiji. The demons left a little something behind inside Manfred that’s slowly taking him over. The fact that it’s enough to bring his ghostly grandmother, Xylda, back from the hereafter, might make the whole thing worth it.

Other than Manfred and his girlfriend Creek, who are understandably having some relationship issues, the town’s couples are doing great. Bobo and Fiji are having such great sex that they don’t just feel like they’re flying, Fiji’s head actually hits the ceiling. Lem and Olivia now share a psychic connection to facilitate their wedded bliss, since he fed her some of his blood to heal her after she was gravely injured. He doesn’t have to be told which spot is the right spot anymore. And Joe and Chuy are as centered and peaceful as ever, or so it appears. Chuy is doing a lot of yoga to get his demon side back under control.

This episode opens in the middle of the night, with Manfred in nothing but his underwear and a pair of work boots, walking down the middle of the road through the crossroads, carrying a shovel. He goes out into the desert, where he uses the shovel to dig graves. There are several open gravesites just waiting to be filled. Next he goes home and stares at Creek, in an aggressively demonic way, as she sleeps in his bed.

But then it’s morning and he pops awake, alone in his bed, like none of that ever happened. Creek brings him some coffee and asks if he had another nightmare. He says he did, and they talk about whether he should get a new pillow, stop eating spicy food or maybe move to Austin with her.

Creek is looking into going away to college to become a writer, so that she can do more with her life than be a waitress in a diner, and she wants Manfred to come with. Manfred decides that wherever Creek is, is his home.

That was how he and Xylda and the RV lived their whole lives. Now that Xylda’s gone and the RV is too unreliable to go far, Manny needs a new person and home. I’m just a little verklempt.

Creek notices that Manfred’s nose is bleeding, but the blood is black. Like bloody demon goo. Manny runs to the bathroom to look for himself and sees his muddy work boots tossed in a corner. Shoot. The dream was not a dream.

It’s been 2 months since the season 1 finale and I’m not sure that Fiji and Bobo have gotten out of bed the entire time, other than when they’ve had flying sex. They’ve gotten really good at sex magic, verging on elite status. I knew the idea that Fiji was more powerful as a virgin was just a dumb misconception thought up by cavemen demons. Energy that’s flowing will always be more powerful than energy that’s stopped up.

Olivia returns home from her latest job and opens her secret closet/panic room to change and unpack. She returns her disguise and many weapons to their proper places in her arsenal, then puts her wedding ring back where it belongs, on her finger. She pushes a button that opens the floor compartment where Lem has a sunken casket and kisses him hello. He asks how the hit went. She says, “It was killer.”

Joe is out for his regular morning jog, while Chuy does some sunrise yoga in the fresh air. Chuy isn’t being troubled by his demon side, leading Joe to hope that Midnight will be free from evil monsters altogether for a while. Chuy tells him he just jinxed it.

What, 2 months doesn’t seem like a long time to them?

Manfred eats breakfast in the Midnighters room at Home Cookin’ Diner with the rest of the gang, but becomes overwhelmed by the demon voices he hears. One overpowers the others, trying to compel him to pick up his table knife and use it on someone. Creek disrupts his trance when she brings him juice.

Madonna, the diner’s usual cook, is on a cruise.

Olivia interrupts breakfast to share what she’s learned about the new hotel. It’s named the Crystal Desert Hotel & Spa and is fully booked for the next month. The main attraction is Healer Kai Lucero, who now runs the hotel, along with his wife Patience. Kai has a huge following.

The Rev thinks Kai could be legit. Fiji is upset that they’re encroaching on her business. Manfred says that the hotel is full of ghosts, so it will probably close within 3 months. Olivia informs them all that they’re doing reconnaissance at the hotel’s grand opening.

Manfred drives the RV out to the desert to do some reconnaissance of his own. He tapes his phone to his bare chest so that it will record his movements overnight.

I’m not sure why the demons want Manfred to be mostly naked on his nightly treks, but I’m not going to argue with it.

Olivia and Lem enjoy the boost their psychic connection gives to their sex lives. Lem knows what Olivia wants before she knows herself. Olivia didn’t think she was the marrying type, but this isn’t bad.

Manfred wakes up in the morning, back in the RV, having walked 7 miles to Blanco Canyon. He drives straight there and discovers the graves he’s been digging in his sleep. Xylda appears to help him out, even though she went to the hereafter last season.

She looks great, like she’s been on a cruise. She sounds like it was a cruise too: Rosé all day, canasta with Tammy Wynette, living someplace without wheels, and the total makeover. But she heard he was in trouble, so she came back.

They figure out that there’s a grave for each Midnighter, and that his symptoms started right after Colconar and Manny’s demon “gang bang”, as Xylda refers to it. She wants him to tells his friends what’s happening, but he doesn’t want to lose their trust again so soon.

Xylda wonders if he still has a demon inside him, so Manfred dips his hand in holy water. If he were possessed, it would burn him. It doesn’t, so that’s not the problem.

Manfred joins the gang for the hotel open house. The girls are disdainful of the hipsters that it’s brought to their authentic desert town. Fiji notices how overpriced the stock is, especially compared to hers. Patience introduces herself and gushes about how wonderful Midnight is.

She says they were traveling healers before this, but it was exhausting. They decided to create a spiritual center to be their home. They think Midnight has amazing spiritual energy, way better than Sedona.

Manfred has a vision of himself drowning the Rev in the spiritual reflecting pool in the lobby. He decides it’s time to leave.

Healer Kai makes his entrance, heralded by followers with chimes, then walks on the water of the reflecting pool. Fiji explains how the illusion works to the others. His welcoming speech is interrupted by a man in a wheelchair who begs Kai to heal him so that he can walk at his daughter’s wedding. Kai tells the man to get into the water under his own power, so the man flops down onto the floor, then into the pool. Kai runs his hands over the man’s legs and breathes into his mouth. With that, the man is miraculously healed and the hotel’s success is assured.

The ghosts will just add to the ambiance.

Manny and Xylda look over his gypsy ancestors’ journals in the RV. Xylda points out that it’s getting late and Creek isn’t safe with Manfred at night. He needs a plan.

Bobo now owns the Cartoon Saloon. He and Joe are bartenders while Lem is the bouncer. Bobo also still owns the Midnight Pawn Shop. Fiji comes to the bar and brings Bobo a key to her place. She’s worried it’s too soon, but Bobo is thrilled.

Olivia is still suspicious of Kai and Patience. She says that people only move to Midnight when they’re running from something or hiding something.

Manfred gets drunk and goes naked in the bar parking lot so that he’ll be put in jail for the night. That way Midnight is safe from him. But he still wakes up in his bed the next morning, and this time, there’s blood all over Creek’s pillow. While Manfred is frantically searching the house for her, he discovers a large, bloody cut on his hand.

Manfred finds Creek working at the diner. She’s angry that he stayed out all night and didn’t call. She asks if he’s having second thoughts about Austin.

Manfred says he definitely wants to go to Austin. He just got drunk. Creek tells him that he’s been acting weird, and it has to stop. She’s had enough of drama and lies to last a lifetime. Manfred gets distracted by the demon affecting him again and has to leave, which doesn’t sit well with Creek.

You can’t really blame her. She just escaped life with a serial killer brother and a violently abusive, alcoholic father who kept her brother’s murderous tendencies secret from her. At the same time, her father controlled every aspect of her life. She was almost murdered by her brother before the whole mess was taken care of by the Midnighters.

The town is full of bad memories and she’s been fully traumatized by volatile men. And then her boyfriend swallowed 6 demons. And now he’s bleeding demon blood and acting weird. And she knows he wasn’t such a great person before she met him.

From her perspective, maybe his true nature is showing itself again. Or maybe he just attracts trouble, being a psychic who can see and channel ghosts and all. And maybe she doesn’t want to live that way anymore, since she doesn’t have to. But maybe he just needs a change of scenery.

Olivia signs up for a crystal healing session with Patience, which she uses as cover to search the hotel. She finds Kai in his office talking to a painting of a veiled woman in red, saying that it was a long road to get there, and now he asks for strength.

Seems innocent enough, but I’m gonna guess that it’s not.

Manny and Xylda continue to look over the family journals and catch up. Manny finds an entry from dear old Uncle Barney that looks exactly like his symptoms. They call forth Barney’s ghost for a chat.

Barney doesn’t have any good news. The demon goo is leftover demon residue. “Left untreated, it takes over the body, cell by cell.” Manfred relates it to demonic cancer. Barney says that, “Once it reaches the brain, you start hallucinating, and then, before long, you lose your mind.” The only remedy Barney knows of is a bullet in the brain, hopefully before you start killing others.

Bobo and Fiji are at it again, this time in the Pawn Shop office, but Bobo notices that the Pawn Shop has been broken into. The money in the safe is still there, so he doesn’t know what was taken.

Manfred finds Xylda in his living room with a small trunk full of weapons. She tells him that after he got out of the drunk tank, he broke into the Pawn Shop. He cut his hand breaking a window to get in. Manfred picks up a knife and decides it’s time to share his affliction with his friends. Xylda suggests he give in to it and use the weapons, starting with Creek.

Manfred remembers that his house is inhospitable to the dead, thanks to a ritual that Fiji performed last season to keep the town’s ghosts from driving him crazy. That means that Xylda isn’t really there. She’s a hallucination, and the goo disease has reached his brain. It’s too late to save him. The blood in his veins turns black and he goes full on demonic.

Joe takes the trash out to the dumpster behind the bar and is met by a demon he’d had trouble with earlier. Now, the demon has brought a few friends to join the fight. A handsome human cowboy, who was sitting at the bar, has followed them out and jumps into the fight to help Joe. He’s Walker Chisum, a demon hunter who’s a fan of Joe’s work. Joe uses his Angel light to kill the demons, while Walker uses a lethal gadget he invented himself. He and Joe bond over a pile of black hearts.

Creek finds Manfred’s pile of used demon goo-covered towels in the bathroom waste basket and texts a photo to Fiji, letting her know that something’s wrong with Manfred. She’s on her way out of the house when Demon Manny confronts her, with teeth covered in black blood. He tells her he wants cut her with the knife he’s holding and insults her as a person. She slips her taser out of her purse and jolts him, then runs to the door. Manfred drops to the floor, but opens his eyes as she grabs the doorknob.

Fiji gets Creek’s text while she and Bobo are going through the pawn shop’s inventory. There’s no one home at Manfred’s house when they get there.

Manfred is driving out into the desert with Olivia. He’s somehow convinced her that Creek hitched a ride out to Blanco Canyon alone after they’d been in a fight. Olivia says that it doesn’t sound like something Creek would do. Manfred says she’s not acting like herself. Creek is unconscious and tied up in the back of the car.

They drive out to Blanco Canyon, which is a deserted patch of desert, as far as I can tell, at sunset. It’s fully dark by the time the get there. Olivia is rightly suspicious that Creek, a human woman, would catch a ride with a stranger out there in the dark, for no reason, when there’s nothing there.

Nothing except the graves Manfred has dug, that is.

Olivia pulls a knife on Manfred, but he gets the jump on her. The demon blood probably gives him extra strength. He puts her unconscious body into an open grave, then goes to get Creek out of the car.

But Creek has already freed herself and a tire iron. She gets in some good hits to his head, then tries to drive away, only to discover that he has the keys in his pocket. He gets ahold of her and is choking her when Lem rushes up and drains Manfred of his energy. The energy is so toxic that Lem vomits up demon goo immediately afterwards. Lem found them because of his psychic connection to Olivia.

Just a reminder: In season 1, Creek’s murderous brother, Connor, tricked her into driving him out into the desert, where he intended to kill her. That time, she was saved by Joe Strong revealing himself as an angel and using his light. Lem killed Connor so that he wouldn’t kill again.

They take Manfred back to the pawn shop and chain him to a chair, where he acts like he’s possessed, writhing, screaming in a demonic voice and bleeding black blood from various orifices. Fiji’s magic doesn’t work to cure the demon cancer, but Creek is able to bring Manfred’s true self to the surface for a minute. He begs her to kill him before he hurts anyone else.

The Rev enters with the Luceros, and says that there’ll be no killing. Healer Kai volunteers to help Manny. The Midnighters are skeptical, but decide to give him a chance.

Healer Kai does a quick laying on of hands and says a quick prayer, then steps back from Manfred, holding himself as if he’s drawing the bad energy away from his patient. Manfred calms, looks around for a moment, then spectacularly vomits a geyser of black goo straight up in the air for several seconds. When he’s done, Healer Kai presses his lips to Manfred’s in the mouth to mouth thing that he did with the old man at the hotel. A cloud of black smoke flies from Manny’s mouth into his. It’s a lot like the gray smoke from ghosts who possess Manfred occasionally.

Kai takes the black smoke into himself and collapses to the floor, saying the healing is done. HE NEVER RELEASES THE BLACK SMOKE OUT OF HIS BODY. If the show is being consistent, this would be the spirit of a demon, or at least demonic spiritual/psychic energy. That same basic stuff was poisonous to Lem, who’s a nearly 200 year old vampire, and it was killing Manfred, a human who was born with the ability to tolerate possession by ghosts. Just what is Kai, really? He’s more than just a human with extraordinary healing powers.

Whatever’s really up with Kai, he does seem to have actually cured Manfred. Manny thanks the Luceros and apologizes to his friends for lying and putting them in danger. The Midnighters forgive him. They’ve all been there, what with the white supremacist family and weapons cache, and the vampire extended family who couldn’t be trusted, and the angelic former partner turned bounty hunter, and the actual half demon side… We can’t really help what our genetics set us up for, and he ended up in that position because he helped them. Fiji reminds him to tell them what’s going on, the next time.

Creek has left the building, though. She comes from some bad genetics herself, but hopefully she’ll avoid the violence and addiction that affected the men in her family. She’s made a run for it back to Manfred’s house, and is hurriedly packing her stuff. She tells Manfred that she’s leaving for Austin, now. He starts packing, too, but she tells him to stop. She’s had as much she can take of violence, Midnight and him.

Manfred desperately tries to change her mind, making promises he can’t keep. Yes, it wasn’t Manfred who attacked her. Yes, Manfred would never do that. But Manfred will always be a psychic who’s vulnerable to possession. Certain kinds of trouble will always follow him, and she’s realized that’s not the kind of life she wants, at least not right now.

Manfred lets her go. He wakes up the next morning, finally feeling normal again, having forgotten that the break up wasn’t just a bad dream. He remembers when he reaches out to creek’s side of the bed, and finds it empty.

Bobo carries Fiji over the threshold into her their house, signifying that he’s officially moved in. They call each other their soulmate, and Bobo says he wants marriage, kids, and happily ever after. Fiji’s plants all wilt and die.

It’s definitely not the sex or love killing the plants, because that’s been going on for months. It’s either having a man living in the house, or the talk of commitment, that someone or something doesn’t like.

Kai stands in front of his painting again, but this time he moves the artwork to reveal a hidden compartment behind it. Hiding a severed demon head in a cage. Kai tells the head, “I will avenge you.”

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  So, who is the demon to Kai, and who killed the demon? Or, more importantly, who does Kai blame for the demon’s death? People aren’t always rational about these things, especially people related to demons.

Xylda was back for real, right? It was only the time she was in Manfred’s house that was a hallucination? It’s too heartbreaking if he loses Xylda and Creek at the same time. Especially while the rest of the town is romancing it up.

Creek wants to go to college, major in English and become a writer. Eventually, she’ll become Charlaine Harris and be inspired by her early years in Midnight, which will help her write best-selling novels that are turned into TV shows.

Madonna Reed, who runs the diner and is the main cook while moonlighting as a spy for Olivia’s father, is on vacation this week. I hope she wasn’t written off. They’ve already dropped the husband and child she had in the books. She plays an important role in the life of the town, since most of them spend time at the diner nearly every day. With Creek also being gone, they need a character who works at the diner so that it isn’t weird that they use it as a meeting place.

Jaime Ray Newman, who has been in a million other things, absolutely pops here as supposed Southern belle Patience Lucero. She usually plays much more down to earth characters. I’m loving watching her ham it up as Patience, who may or may not be a con artist. We definitely don’t know the whole truth about her, as befits a resident of Midnight.

Midnight, Texas Season 2 Episode 1: Head Games Recap It's time to return to Midnight, Texas, or to visit for the first time if you've never been.

[flauntpage]

Photographing Benny Podda, the Bodybuilder Turned Martial Artist Turned Cave-Dwelling Medicine Man

There's a glimpse of Benny Podda in the ESPN documentary about the rise and fall of Todd Marinovich: "martial artist Benny Podda," the voiceover says, was a coach for the former Raiders quarterback. Podda also trained Chuck Norris and made a cameo in one of his movies. A Pennsylvania-born bodybuilder who won a National Physique Committee championship along with a smattering of other titles, Podda was eccentric even in a world of weirdoes: he allegedly robbed a pharmacy for painkillers using a bow and arrow, posed for bodybuilding competitions wearing a werewolf mask, spurted blood out of his nose on command, and could dangle more than 200 pounds from his testicles. He once hung himself from a noose at a bodybuilding show in Newark, New Jersey; swayed for five minutes; then opened his eyes and gave the audience the finger. An aside in the Los Angeles Times says he studied martial arts in China for five years, and he claimed to have traveled to China to compete in (and win) martial arts tournaments that took place on tabletops.

That Marinovich footage was taken during what was probably Podda's last stint in society. A celebrity who checked out before the age of Google to live in a cave and treat the sick and desperate on an Indian reservation, Podda doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. His whereabouts today are unclear. Nearly every second-hand word about his legend comes from a November 2004 feature in Men's Fitness . When photographer Ray Lego got the call to fly to southern California for the photo shoot, he didn't know what to expect. "I didn't know squat about him," Lego says. "All I really had to go by was that he was a dude that wore a werewolf mask and lived in a cave." What followed was a hallucinogenic journey through the rattlesnake-riddled home of the Cahuilla Indians, sipping a concoction made from homegrown marijuana and undisclosed herbal add-ons, and watching a then-47-year-old man abuse himself for a camera to demonstrate his Iron Palm prowess.

Ray Lego: My assistant and I flew in to California and they put us up in some super-nice hotel in Palm Springs—every time the wind blew you could smell the rosemary growing outside our window from one floor down to the next. We had everything ready and were just waiting and drinking margaritas at the pool floating around and having a good old time. I had no idea what I was going into.

The next day we get a call, and an Asian woman said, "Benny's ready. Meet at this place." It was a phone booth right outside an [Indian] reservation. We drove two hours through the [San Bernardino Mountains] to where she told us to go, she came down in a car and said, "Follow us."…It was desert with tumbleweeds blowing through, chicken wire, junk and car parts everywhere—it wasn't beautiful at all. You could see someone shooting a gun at a target in the background, there was a jeep with all the wheels off of it and it looked like it had rusted into the ground. We followed her into the Indian reservation and came to a beat-up ranch house, and out in the backyard was this fenced-off trail where illegal immigrants would come through to America.

Benny was waiting for us and he looked insane. He looked like the biggest person I'd ever seen, he had these black kung-fu-MC-Hammer pants on, these kung fu shoes, and a ripped-up white t-shirt. His hair was so black and his face was so muscular—even his jaw, everything. I remember him coming up to me and saying all this stuff like, "I know what you're going through. I can feel your pain."

Benny wasn't Indian. The reason why he was allowed on the reservation was because he healed one of the chiefs' daughters or something like that. He started telling me a story—and I have no idea if any of this was true—about how he'd heal AIDS patients, people with addiction, all sorts of stuff, with acupuncture, acupressure, and this medicinal potion, which was basically the pot he grew in the backyard mixed with grain alcohol, ginger, and herbs.

He must have had 100 jars of it, all lined up on a shelf over a bed on the floor with sheets hanging over the windows—the older the jar, the darker it got. We started drinking it and right off the bat it burned. I've had grain alcohol and super-proof liquor, but I thought this was some other chemical. The first one went down really hard and I almost lost my mind. But he's like, "You gotta drink a couple more." Benny had his own little gallon he was drinking like it was water, and he kept saying, "This is so important. This is part of it. You have to get in the right state of mind." After about three or four shots we started talking, and all of the sudden it was like, boom.

I almost felt like I was hallucinating, but not like mushrooms or acid. Everything went really quiet, I was really focused, and it was bizarre. I could hear people talking from the other room, everything was very bright—it was intense, but I enjoyed it. It wasn't scary. It could have easily had peyote in it, but I don't remember him saying anything because I would have been like, "Eh, no thanks." Peyote is like an all-day kind of thing and I had to work—kind of.

I don't think those guys had a car that was legal to drive, so I'm driving and Benny gets in right next to me, right in the center, and his assistant gets in on the passenger side with all the goodie bags—more potion, all these homemade energy drinks and weird concoctions in little Ball mason jars. I'm driving and I wasn't really worried—I didn't feel intoxicated at all. I've never felt more alive to drive. But my assistant was in the back babbling like a lunatic, back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball.

We drove 45 minutes out to the waterfall where Benny cleanses himself and cleanses other people before going into his cave. It was part of this Iron Palm thing—he never said Iron Palm, but that's the only term I can come up with to describe what it was. It's a martial arts technique where you get a piece of wood, tap it on your hand for a day, then the next day you do it a little bit harder, the next day a little harder, until months down the road you can smash it against your hands, and you can do that all over your body—arms, chest, whatever. It builds up your bones and skins to be able to take and deliver punishing blows. That was the whole philosophy.

The water [from the waterfall] was coming down so hard and there was so much of it. He told me if I went underneath I probably wouldn't survive it—I wanted to do it, and he said, "Well you'd probably end up snapping your neck." But he jumps in and goes right under the waterfall, taking the full brunt of it, doing all martial art katas mixed in with werewolf poses. He stayed under there for about 20 minutes going in and out of it. I can hear the water hitting him and it sounded so violent. I was just waiting for him to fall down, but this guy is like a cinderblock. He's older, but he's so thick and stout and I don't think anything could have knocked him down.

We went to this little pond where the water would pool up, and Benny was saying how he could control his breath, stay submerged for a long time under water, sometimes almost drowning himself, taking water into his lungs, then expelling it and coming back to life. He started submerging himself—the first time he must have done it for about five minutes before he came back up. The second time he did it it must have been like 10 minutes. And the third time he did it, the Asian woman was standing on his chest, not letting him get back up—he said he knows his body can take it. He basically drowned and the Asian woman pulled him out of the water, and he brought himself back by just puking up the water.

You know how swimmers drown, let out a big cough of water, and come back to life? It was like that. It was insane. I think that's why I didn't even really take photos: I was so in awe of it all that I really wanted to enjoy the experience in real life instead of looking at it through glass. And it wasn't part of a script—he just did it.

Next we went to the cave, which was in the middle of a desert like you'd see in a movie with a rock formation, which was the cave, about half a mile in the background. As soon as we started walking through the desert, the rattlers started going off—rattlesnakes were everywhere and I kind of freaked out. And it was rattling like crazy everywhere we went, which meant the snake is threatened by us and could see us and is rattling to try to scare us away. And we were walking through it. I had flip-flops on.

When we got to the cave Benny told me stories about the nights he'd spend there, the peyote he would eat, how people would bring him stuff from town, and how he'd talk to the spirits. You'd go inside the cave and it opened to an auditorium type of thing where it almost looked like [a place] where a band would play. He said the spirits would sing to him, talk to him, and they'd chase him through the catacombs of rocks. He slept with a rock as his pillow, people would come bring him food, cases of beer—I remember him talking about the beer as one of his luxuries. He'd train at the cave, lifting rocks and doing spiritual types of things. He broke his ankle when he lived there, getting chased through the rocks by the spirits and stuff. Instead of going to the hospital, he'd heal it by walking through deep sand that he said was over 200 degrees and the heat from the sand would heal his ankle. I stuck my hand in the sand and I couldn't even keep it in for a second because it was so hot.

We went back to his house on the reservation, and we started drinking a lot more of the potion and talking about whether we were going to do the swinging ball shot. Benny really wanted to do it, and it was probably something I should have done. But hanging 220 pounds of weight from his balls while I took pictures of it just seemed very strange at the time. I've done a lot of crazy sex-type photos, but that just seemed too weird.

We started doing photos of the beating stick thing—this 180-spoke baton. It looks like a whisk, but it must have weighed 15 pounds. This goes back to the Iron Palm kind of thing where he could mentally tune out the pain and strengthen his body, his skin and bones through the constant pounding of this metal baton. We set up the camera, set up the lights, and he starts whacking himself like crazy, just beating every part of his body one after another, and just enjoying it. Every time he hits his skin with those spokes, I waited for his skin to slice open and start bleeding, but it never happened. He was doing it on his face, his neck, his balls, his legs, every part of his body. And it was almost like he was immune to it. I think the last shots of the day were the shots of him drinking the potion from the big jar with a chain whip on the table and stuff.

Benny was super nice, a really nice genuine person. He was super-mellow. He did crazy things, but he was so level and down to earth. He was just living life on his own terms. Sometimes you get really big and think, "This sucks, I don't want the fame," but he never really got huge. He wasn't like Schwarzenegger: he was always on the fringe. Right now, he could probably come back and do something pretty crazy.

Photographing Benny Podda, the Bodybuilder Turned Martial Artist Turned Cave-Dwelling Medicine Man published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[5millionfriends]

New Post has been published on Planet Market

The Ascetic Body - Robert Veeder's Prison Marathon

This is about running for others’ lives, but let us start with the Girl Scout cookies.

Your daughter trudges up my disintegrating front steps and to my front door as you wait by the curb, apparently looking for a cab on the western outskirts of Chicago. She rings the bell, invites my participation in the buy, her dark brown hair crossing up and over her left shoulder as she leans in to show me the list of the possibilities for a sugar high.

She sells, I buy. I eat (too many), she brings back (a little) money to fund her troop’s autumn camping trip. I may be willing to pay a bit more for a box of cookies than I might have at the grocery store because your daughter seems like a sweet girl, or because I was once a Girl Scout and remember those days warmly. Soon the cookies are gone. The camping trip will be remembered fondly by some of those who went on it.

This transaction is kind of like what happens in a public radio fund drive, which offers valuable or branded giveaways (to “members” rather than “donors”) in return for a pledge. I love to listen to these quarterly fundraisers even more than to the regular programming, simply to hear my favorite radio personalities improvise their ways, often ingeniously, out of the tight corners their on-air fundraising partners may have created for them. To compel listeners to become donors without ever uttering a negative or guilt-provoking word, one needs infinite creativity and goodwill, especially toward those who listen regularly to the programming without helping to pay for it. Both the sale of the Girl Scout cookies and the public radio fundraising drive, with rewards offered for the “gift” of a donation, are more business transactions, exchanges, than is asking someone simply to write a check for environmental protection or a political candidate or the protection of basic human rights around the world.

I first became aware around 1990 of a very different kind of fundraising effort, now quite popular, when I decided to participate in the Gay Men’s Health Crisis “Dance for Life” marathon. Bringing together those willing to work (dance, sweat), those willing to give (money), and those willing to organize for a cause (the Gay Men’s Health Crisis), the Dance for Life event had three apparent constituencies and an exponentially greater opportunity than one-on-one transactional fundraising for long-lasting personal and communal impact.

We dancers, many of whom had family members or friends who had died from or were dying of AIDS-related causes, would solicit contributions based on how many hours we danced. We danced against death: at the time, dancing felt like dying’s antidote. We gave our bodies’ sweat, exertion, energy to support our loved ones’ and others’ fight to live. The body felt like the perfect site for our devotion.

This September, I learned of an even more moving, more perfect three-way, transformational partnership to raise money. This contemporary expiatory ritual bound a cause–Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)–the members of a virtual community who offered not only money but hope, and one who would do that community’s, along with his own, sweating.

On the night of Saturday, November 1, 2003, Robert “Blinker” Veeder had driven while drunk and killed six people, several of whom had stopped to help the victims of a just-previous collision, when one SUV ran a stop sign and hit another. Serving the last two and a half years of his sentence in a North Carolina prison for six counts of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon (the van he was driving), Robert joined with his beloved, Dr. Kara Grasso, a dentist living in South Carolina (and a close friend of mine), to create an event that could help him atone for the deaths of the innocent victims of his having driven while drunk: he would raise $5,000 running a marathon as he marked the sixth anniversary of the lives-changing accident.

While initially the practice was meant to allow Robert to birth some good out of the harm he had done, the use of his body as the place where his penance was done created a profound connection between those in the prison and those on the outside. On the inside, fellow prisoners trained with him and would eventually run alongside him for encouragement during the marathon. In the essay that he wrote for Kara to send to potential donors, Robert asked for the partnership of those on the outside. He wrote in a letter that Kara distributed, “I can’t do much from in here. My daily job in the kitchen only earns me a dollar a day. They won’t let me give blood, I’ve asked. But I can run. I can run a long time. I can run around this yard 184 times which would be the 26.2 miles and some change of an official marathon. What I can’t do is donate money to support M.A.D.D.; but you can.

“I know that I can never give the lives back. God, I wish I could, but I can’t. I can’t take away the ache from the lives which were endlessly changed by this tragic event. There’s nothing I can do to take back the hurt. There is simply nothing that I can do.”

“But WE can do a lot.”

MADD already had a “Walk like MADD” event for fundraising. Robert’s event became a “MADD Dash for Recovery,” as he planned to run the full 26.2 miles of a marathon in laps around the prison yard. As he described it, this writer, clown, and ukelele and blues harmonica player would “head up to A and B dorm and start running. I’ll run across the top of the horseshoe pits, past the weight pile, in between the chaplain’s office and the cook school trailer, past the library, the clothes house, the multi-purpose room, down the side of the chow hall, past the guard at the front gate and cut in front of the sergeant’s office, past A and B dorm, across the top of the horseshoe pits. The inmates won’t know why I am running. The guards won’t know why I am running. But you’ll know. I’ll know. We’ll know why I’m running. We’ll be running together. Running for life.”

Family and friends joined in the cause, not just by donating money but by circulating Robert’s statement of his intention to generate good out of the victims’ families’ losses. Money to meet the $5,000 goal poured forth. Perhaps even more important, people outside the prison engaged emotionally and physically with Robert’s bodily labors and offered him forgiveness and the prospect of redemption. One donor wrote, “I’ll be thinking of Robert in the morning as he does his marathon. We lifted him up in prayer tonight at church.” Another: “Rob, run like the wind. Feel yourself being powered by those of us behind you. Good luck, I’ll be thinking of you next week, while you run.”

By twelve days before the run, Kara had received notes from many of Robert’s supporters declaring their intention to pray, chant, meditate. Others were inspired to designate drivers, in keeping with MADD’s education efforts. Some intended to take up their spiritual practice, or to run, too, during the hours Robert was slated to run his marathon.

As Kara and her parents and Robert’s own watched him through the prison gates, and with prison friends running alongside him, Robert completed the marathon on November 2, 2009 in 4 hours, 3 minutes, 15 seconds. Afterward, he wrote, “Today while running, with so many people praying, chanting, meditating, and holding me next to their hearts, I felt the spirit of unity, peace, oneness [as] I made my way toward that magical 26th mile.”

Robert Veeder’s ascetic action reminds us of images and figures of bodily redemption from world religious and spiritual traditions, where the sweat or suffering of one pairs with a community of belief. The power of the physical body to endure trials carries special poignancy in engaging us toward meaning that can be held in common, in community.

Copyright Sara K. Schneider 2009

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TELEPORTATION IN SCIENCE AND PHYSICAL MEDIUMSHIP – THEN AND NOW

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I have written often about the many instances of teleportation that my wife Sandra and I have experienced over the last 44 years; both in and out of the séance room. This subject does – of course – include inanimate objects such as ‘apports’ which appear in the room almost magically from ‘nowhere’ during both ectoplasmic-based and energy-based physical séances (by way of small ‘presents’ for us from the Spirit World who are working with us during sittings).

What readers may not know, however, is that – additionally – from Victorian times in the 1800’s, the Spirit World has used Teleportation to transport live animals, insects and even human beings – often over considerable distances – in a dramatic way (as I have personally witnessed). This shows that the technical knowledge of how to achieve this remarkable feat has existed in the Spirit World for over 150 years, although Science in our Earthly World has not yet been able to duplicate these amazing results!!

That is not to say that our earthly scientists have not tried to teleport large objects from one place to another. A particularly striking example of their efforts can be found in the almost legendary ‘Philadelphia Experiment’ that took place during the Second World War in the USA. Exact details of this wartime project, unfortunately, remain in the ‘Top Secret’ military files – but the gist of that attempt (and partial accidental success) as I understand it, is as follows:-

THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT

The Experiment was conducted by Dr. Franklin Reno (or Rinehart) as a military application of a Unified Field Theory. The theory, briefly, postulates the interrelated nature of the forces that comprise electromagnetic radiation and gravity. Through a special application of the theory, it was thought possible, with specialized equipment and sufficient energy, to bend light around an object in such a way as to render it essentially invisible to observers. The Navy considered this application of the theory to be of obvious military value (especially as the United States was engaged in World War II at the time) and both approved and sponsored the experiment. A navy destroyer escort, the USS Eldridge, was fitted with the required equipment at the naval yards in Philadelphia.

Testing began in summer 1943, and was successful to a limited degree. One test, on July 22nd, resulted in the Eldridge being rendered almost completely invisible, with some witnesses reporting a “greenish fog” in its place. However, crew members complained of severe nausea afterwards. Equipment was not properly recalibrated for this eventuality, but in spite of this, the experiment was performed again on October 28th. This time, Eldridge not only became almost entirely invisible to the naked eye, but actually vanished from the area in a flash of blue light. Simultaneously, the US naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, just over 600 km (375 miles) away, reported sighting the Eldridge offshore for several minutes, whereupon the Eldridge vanished from their sight and reappeared in Philadelphia, at the site it had originally occupied in an apparent case of accidental teleportation.

The physiological effects on the crew were profound. Almost all of the crew were violently ill. Some suffered from mental illness as a result of their experience; behavior consistent with schizophrenia is described in other accounts. Still other members were physically unaccounted for or supposedly vanished, and five of the crew were allegedly fused to the metal bulkhead or deck of the ship. Still others were said to fade in and out of sight. Horrified by these results, Navy officials immediately cancelled the experiment. All of the surviving crew involved were discharged; in some accounts, brainwashing techniques were employed in an attempt to make the remaining crew members lose their memories concerning the details of their experience.

One reason that the USA wanted to undertake this ambitious experiment was the rumour(not substantiated – but possibly true) that the Germans were undertaking similar bold experiments in invisibility for military purposes.

But I digress! The first reported instance of human teleportation in modern times occurred at a séance within what has come to be known as ‘Modern Spiritualism’, and is well documented, together with a number of evidential statements by reliable witnesses:-

THE CASE OF MRS AGNES NICHOL GUPPY

London Mediums Frank Herne and Charles Williams were holding a joint seance with a Circle of eight visitors at 61 Lambs Conduit Street in London on June 3rd 1871, when they heard the voices of the Spirits of John King and his daughter Katie. Katie agreed to bring any particular thing at the request of the sitters to the circle and a Mr Harrison asked her (half jokingly) to produce well-known Medium Mrs Guppy. Katie laughed and despite her father’s protests, insisted that she would comply, despite the fact that Mrs Guppy was a very large lady!!

The sitters were all laughing, when they heard a loud thump on the table just three minutes later, and several of them screamed. One of them lit a lamp and there in the middle of the table sat Mrs Guppy. She seemed to be in a deep trance and held a pen and an account book in her hand when she was precipitated into the room. Unfortunately, she was only half dressed, with her shoes off but – to save her modesty – her appearance was followed shortly afterwards by the apportation of respectable clothes in which she could travel home.

When the Medium was gently roused from her trance, she was a little perturbed. The last thing she remembered was sitting at home three miles away in Highbury, London. The sitters escorted her home, where an anxious friend awaited. Apparently, the two had been in Mrs Guppy’s room together when Mrs Guppy suddenly disappeared, leaving only a slight haze near the ceiling.

  Catherine Berry, in ‘Experiences in Spiritualism’ (1876), writes of many strange happenings through Mrs Guppy’s mediumship. She was a very powerful physical medium in her own right. A white cat and a Maltese dog belonging to Mrs Guppy appeared in a seance in Berry’s house during a Guppy sitting. On another occasion, three ducks prepared for cooking were brought into the Circle in Mrs Guppy’s home. Showers of butterflies also descended from the ceiling.

TELEPORTATION OF ANIMALS IN THE FOY HOME

Shortly after Sandra and I were married, in the early 1980’s, we ran a Physical Circle at our then home in Harold Wood, Romford, Essex. On one occasion, after the séance, we discovered that our daughter’s cage for her pet hamster (although still locked) was empty. Eventually, after searching around the lounge on our hands and knees (with the help of our sitters), the hamster was found – happily wandering around the lounge.

The next week – after our home circle – we once again discovered that the hamster was yet again missing from his locked cage (which stood on a spare kitchen unit). This time, it did occur to us that Spirit might have had a hand in the hamster’s disappearance, and Sandra stood in the kitchen, loudly appealing for Spirit to “Bring back the hamster if they had it – so our daughter wouldn’t be upset at its loss”.

Moments later, Sandra saw a small patch of bright, shimmering light appear just in front of her on the kitchen unit – in full light – and noticed that this was beginning to form into the semi-translucent outline of a hamster. The outline intensified and became more solid until the hamster was back totally – completely solid and suffering no after effects from his ‘adventure’. The way the hamster came back was very reminiscent of the ‘teleportation scenes’ in the TV programme ‘Startrek’, when ‘Scotty beamed them up’!!

A couple of weeks later, after our circle sitting, Sandra locked our collie cross black dog ‘Ben’ out of the kitchen into the garden as she started to prepare our after-sitting snacks. Another sitter brought the glasses of water (from the circle) down into the kitchen to put near the sink. The kitchen was empty, but the rest of us suddenly heard a scream! The dog had been teleported from outside (through the solid wall or door) into the kitchen, with his wet nose on Sitter Lisa’s leg!!

The same thing happened to ‘Ben’ on several other occasions in his lifetime, and to the other two dogs (Jock and Brandy) who joined us after Ben passed to Spirit. This unusual phenomenon continued regularly in full light when our first cat (following all the dogs passing) and ‘the Spanish cats’ joined us, and still happens from time to time today. None of the dogs or cats has ever suffered any ill effects from this teleportation!!

ENERGY-BASED TELEPORTATION OF SCOLE SPIRIT VISITORS

We came to learn much more about the teleportation of members of our Spirit Team and various other Spirit Visitors (including ‘Angels’ and E.T’s) during the five years of ‘The Scole Experiment’ in the 1990’s. During sittings of the ‘Scole Group’, we regularly enjoyed the solid presence of Spirit people in the room with us – moving round; interacting with us; touching us; holding our hands and demonstrating their presence in a very physical way.

The feeling when these teleported ‘Spirit Friends’ were with us was amazing. The room was filled with tangible ‘LOVE’. That is the only way I can describe it. These visitors became so familiar to us that they felt just like family, and we loved them dearly. On occasions, we had as many as eight solid Spirit Visitors with us in the room at any one time!!

I must stress that this was not ‘Materialisation’ in the classic sense, with the Spirit personalities being dressed in ectoplasmic white robes and drapes. There was NO ectoplasm involved in any of our experimental work at Scole or elsewhere. The work was totally energy-based. The fact was that our Spirit Visitors were indeed usually quite solid, but by personal mind control (and by drawing on the reservoir of ‘creative energy’ supplied by the Spirit Team and stored in the glass dome), they were able to vary the density of their Spirit bodies (or Spiritual Essence aka ‘Soul’) from virtually invisible to totally (or partially) solid. They were invariably dressed in quite ‘normal’ clothes.

The ‘Spiritual Essence’ of each of our ‘Scole Spirit Visitors’ was firstly teleported through a ‘Portal’ which our Spirit Team had constructed in the ‘Experimental Room’ – whether that was at Scole or elsewhere during one of our ‘mobile’ demonstrations in other parts of the world. The Spirit Person concerned (depending on specific need) would then mentally increase the density of all (or just part) of their body.

Sometimes this could be just their head, shoulders and arms. To show themselves to us, they frequently held a spirit light in front of their face as they moved around the room. It was not unusual for a spirit person to show themselves totally in the glow from a ‘sheet’ of Spirit Light. Then again, they might just solidify a hand and arm.

A lady who attended one of our demonstrations in Reseda, California (Tricia Loar), had quite a shock when she was touched in a loving way by a Spirit hand. When this happened, our Spirit Team would frequently encourage the sitter to ‘touch back’. Tricia did this and felt up from the hand. She noted the shirt, and then the jacket sleeve of the male Spirit who was touching her. The arm was still fully animated and solid, but when she moved her hand up to the Spirit Person’s shoulder, she discovered that the rest of the person was not there in solid form (although she was assured by the Spirit Team that the whole of that Spirit Person was indeed present)!!

Author information

Robin Foy

Robin Foy is best known for his work with the Scole Experiment and is considered one of the original pioneers in physical mediumship using new energy based methodology. He is the author of several books on physical mediumship and is a true expert.

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Photographing Benny Podda, the Bodybuilder Turned Martial Artist Turned Cave-Dwelling Medicine Man

There's a glimpse of Benny Podda in the ESPN documentary about the rise and fall of Todd Marinovich: "martial artist Benny Podda," the voiceover says, was a coach for the former Raiders quarterback. Podda also trained Chuck Norris and made a cameo in one of his movies. A Pennsylvania-born bodybuilder who won a National Physique Committee championship along with a smattering of other titles, Podda was eccentric even in a world of weirdoes: he allegedly robbed a pharmacy for painkillers using a bow and arrow, posed for bodybuilding competitions wearing a werewolf mask, spurted blood out of his nose on command, and could dangle more than 200 pounds from his testicles. He once hung himself from a noose at a bodybuilding show in Newark, New Jersey; swayed for five minutes; then opened his eyes and gave the audience the finger. An aside in the Los Angeles Times says he studied martial arts in China for five years, and he claimed to have traveled to China to compete in (and win) martial arts tournaments that took place on tabletops.

That Marinovich footage was taken during what was probably Podda's last stint in society. A celebrity who checked out before the age of Google to live in a cave and treat the sick and desperate on an Indian reservation, Podda doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. His whereabouts today are unclear. Nearly every second-hand word about his legend comes from a November 2004 feature in Men's Fitness . When photographer Ray Lego got the call to fly to southern California for the photo shoot, he didn't know what to expect. "I didn't know squat about him," Lego says. "All I really had to go by was that he was a dude that wore a werewolf mask and lived in a cave." What followed was a hallucinogenic journey through the rattlesnake-riddled home of the Cahuilla Indians, sipping a concoction made from homegrown marijuana and undisclosed herbal add-ons, and watching a then-47-year-old man abuse himself for a camera to demonstrate his Iron Palm prowess.

Ray Lego: My assistant and I flew in to California and they put us up in some super-nice hotel in Palm Springs—every time the wind blew you could smell the rosemary growing outside our window from one floor down to the next. We had everything ready and were just waiting and drinking margaritas at the pool floating around and having a good old time. I had no idea what I was going into.

The next day we get a call, and an Asian woman said, "Benny's ready. Meet at this place." It was a phone booth right outside an [Indian] reservation. We drove two hours through the [San Bernardino Mountains] to where she told us to go, she came down in a car and said, "Follow us."…It was desert with tumbleweeds blowing through, chicken wire, junk and car parts everywhere—it wasn't beautiful at all. You could see someone shooting a gun at a target in the background, there was a jeep with all the wheels off of it and it looked like it had rusted into the ground. We followed her into the Indian reservation and came to a beat-up ranch house, and out in the backyard was this fenced-off trail where illegal immigrants would come through to America.

Benny was waiting for us and he looked insane. He looked like the biggest person I'd ever seen, he had these black kung-fu-MC-Hammer pants on, these kung fu shoes, and a ripped-up white t-shirt. His hair was so black and his face was so muscular—even his jaw, everything. I remember him coming up to me and saying all this stuff like, "I know what you're going through. I can feel your pain."

Benny wasn't Indian. The reason why he was allowed on the reservation was because he healed one of the chiefs' daughters or something like that. He started telling me a story—and I have no idea if any of this was true—about how he'd heal AIDS patients, people with addiction, all sorts of stuff, with acupuncture, acupressure, and this medicinal potion, which was basically the pot he grew in the backyard mixed with grain alcohol, ginger, and herbs.

He must have had 100 jars of it, all lined up on a shelf over a bed on the floor with sheets hanging over the windows—the older the jar, the darker it got. We started drinking it and right off the bat it burned. I've had grain alcohol and super-proof liquor, but I thought this was some other chemical. The first one went down really hard and I almost lost my mind. But he's like, "You gotta drink a couple more." Benny had his own little gallon he was drinking like it was water, and he kept saying, "This is so important. This is part of it. You have to get in the right state of mind." After about three or four shots we started talking, and all of the sudden it was like, boom.

I almost felt like I was hallucinating, but not like mushrooms or acid. Everything went really quiet, I was really focused, and it was bizarre. I could hear people talking from the other room, everything was very bright—it was intense, but I enjoyed it. It wasn't scary. It could have easily had peyote in it, but I don't remember him saying anything because I would have been like, "Eh, no thanks." Peyote is like an all-day kind of thing and I had to work—kind of.

I don't think those guys had a car that was legal to drive, so I'm driving and Benny gets in right next to me, right in the center, and his assistant gets in on the passenger side with all the goodie bags—more potion, all these homemade energy drinks and weird concoctions in little Ball mason jars. I'm driving and I wasn't really worried—I didn't feel intoxicated at all. I've never felt more alive to drive. But my assistant was in the back babbling like a lunatic, back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball.

We drove 45 minutes out to the waterfall where Benny cleanses himself and cleanses other people before going into his cave. It was part of this Iron Palm thing—he never said Iron Palm, but that's the only term I can come up with to describe what it was. It's a martial arts technique where you get a piece of wood, tap it on your hand for a day, then the next day you do it a little bit harder, the next day a little harder, until months down the road you can smash it against your hands, and you can do that all over your body—arms, chest, whatever. It builds up your bones and skins to be able to take and deliver punishing blows. That was the whole philosophy.

The water [from the waterfall] was coming down so hard and there was so much of it. He told me if I went underneath I probably wouldn't survive it—I wanted to do it, and he said, "Well you'd probably end up snapping your neck." But he jumps in and goes right under the waterfall, taking the full brunt of it, doing all martial art katas mixed in with werewolf poses. He stayed under there for about 20 minutes going in and out of it. I can hear the water hitting him and it sounded so violent. I was just waiting for him to fall down, but this guy is like a cinderblock. He's older, but he's so thick and stout and I don't think anything could have knocked him down.

We went to this little pond where the water would pool up, and Benny was saying how he could control his breath, stay submerged for a long time under water, sometimes almost drowning himself, taking water into his lungs, then expelling it and coming back to life. He started submerging himself—the first time he must have done it for about five minutes before he came back up. The second time he did it it must have been like 10 minutes. And the third time he did it, the Asian woman was standing on his chest, not letting him get back up—he said he knows his body can take it. He basically drowned and the Asian woman pulled him out of the water, and he brought himself back by just puking up the water.

You know how swimmers drown, let out a big cough of water, and come back to life? It was like that. It was insane. I think that's why I didn't even really take photos: I was so in awe of it all that I really wanted to enjoy the experience in real life instead of looking at it through glass. And it wasn't part of a script—he just did it.

Next we went to the cave, which was in the middle of a desert like you'd see in a movie with a rock formation, which was the cave, about half a mile in the background. As soon as we started walking through the desert, the rattlers started going off—rattlesnakes were everywhere and I kind of freaked out. And it was rattling like crazy everywhere we went, which meant the snake is threatened by us and could see us and is rattling to try to scare us away. And we were walking through it. I had flip-flops on.

When we got to the cave Benny told me stories about the nights he'd spend there, the peyote he would eat, how people would bring him stuff from town, and how he'd talk to the spirits. You'd go inside the cave and it opened to an auditorium type of thing where it almost looked like [a place] where a band would play. He said the spirits would sing to him, talk to him, and they'd chase him through the catacombs of rocks. He slept with a rock as his pillow, people would come bring him food, cases of beer—I remember him talking about the beer as one of his luxuries. He'd train at the cave, lifting rocks and doing spiritual types of things. He broke his ankle when he lived there, getting chased through the rocks by the spirits and stuff. Instead of going to the hospital, he'd heal it by walking through deep sand that he said was over 200 degrees and the heat from the sand would heal his ankle. I stuck my hand in the sand and I couldn't even keep it in for a second because it was so hot.

We went back to his house on the reservation, and we started drinking a lot more of the potion and talking about whether we were going to do the swinging ball shot. Benny really wanted to do it, and it was probably something I should have done. But hanging 220 pounds of weight from his balls while I took pictures of it just seemed very strange at the time. I've done a lot of crazy sex-type photos, but that just seemed too weird.

We started doing photos of the beating stick thing—this 180-spoke baton. It looks like a whisk, but it must have weighed 15 pounds. This goes back to the Iron Palm kind of thing where he could mentally tune out the pain and strengthen his body, his skin and bones through the constant pounding of this metal baton. We set up the camera, set up the lights, and he starts whacking himself like crazy, just beating every part of his body one after another, and just enjoying it. Every time he hits his skin with those spokes, I waited for his skin to slice open and start bleeding, but it never happened. He was doing it on his face, his neck, his balls, his legs, every part of his body. And it was almost like he was immune to it. I think the last shots of the day were the shots of him drinking the potion from the big jar with a chain whip on the table and stuff.

Benny was super nice, a really nice genuine person. He was super-mellow. He did crazy things, but he was so level and down to earth. He was just living life on his own terms. Sometimes you get really big and think, "This sucks, I don't want the fame," but he never really got huge. He wasn't like Schwarzenegger: he was always on the fringe. Right now, he could probably come back and do something pretty crazy.

Photographing Benny Podda, the Bodybuilder Turned Martial Artist Turned Cave-Dwelling Medicine Man published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv