Shit shit shit week. Pain. Period. Pudendal Neuralgia. Cold. Grey. Rain. Knives. Can I rip my insides out. Nope. Cannot.

Up and down. And all around. Life with so much pain stinks. My period is over and my body is still screeching. Heeeeeeeeelp!!!!!!!!!!!

Mosaics and me

Mosaics and Me
How are we?

I have my period. Been laying real low since its arrival. The day before her arrival I gave my mosaic workshop and I was in a lot of pain. When night came I was ready to dive into bed with opium up my butt. Augusta slept over. She is the sweetest of souls to have with me on my journey. I am lucky that way, the wonderful women that walk by my side are my blessings. The following morning/afternoon I got my blessed period. No pot. No more panic attacks for me. I want a clear head and I have one. The day befor her arrival (my period from now on has a gender) I was feeling really crappy with pain crawling all over me into lower back and hips. Got through the day teaching and watching the mosaics evolve. Following day, with her arrival, I felt better and began breaking dishes and ceramic candle-holders that I found and enjoying the sun and the beautiful heat. On Shabbat I lay low and most of today I had no motivation to do anything but lie in bed. My body feels exhausted though not in bad pain. The weather sucks, back to low temp. and with the disappearance of the sun my mood has plummeted. It was in the 70's and the 80's all week!!! I was ecstatic, as ecstatic as someone with can be:) Ugh, back to the cold...please pass the sun around this way please!
I have spent the last few hours fiddling with the weebly web-site that Pat has introduced me to. It is quite the discovery. Very good indeed. I will post the pictures from all of our workshops there and will put up times and dates for the up-coming ones as well. And at some point I will also create for myself my own Jewelry web-site.
In the mean time my head continues to swarm itself with ideas. I was very active this week. Unusually so, considering how little I sleep. I must have been running on solar energy. The flowers have not blossomed yet but every day I watch how they grow and their presence delights me. I will post here the pictures of the flowers as I promised that I would in the fall that just passed. Blessings.

My mind is so full of large thoughts that I exhaust myself.
Sun please come back, I miss the way that you make me feel so much.
Love, Atara

Gratitude

Tomorrow we will be having a mosaic workshop here! A spring fling with pots and plates, hammers, tiles, cement and grout! Yeah!! Sandi, Annette, Mary Francis and Augusta will be here joining me for the excitement. This is good and we are going to grow and evolve and.....life is good for the Goddess. There is so much gratitude in my heart. So many times during the day I feel blessed. I feel blessed by the flowers and the sun and the warmth and by my chubby little big-breasted body that is doing so much better than it was last year this time. Psychologically my state of mind is so much healthier. I no longer suffer from the terror of falling back into the pit of tortures. I feel confident in the pain control that my meds are giving me and I no longer have fears about being left without meds and having to kill myself. Thank God!!! I think about last year this time and I see so clearly how much progress we have made. The we is my body, my soul and my mind because really all of us have to be taken care of and all of us have worked so hard together to reach healing and wholeness again. It is true, it is not just a dream that we can be whole while we struggle with chronic pain or illness. I am whole. My spirit compensates for whatever my body struggles with. Lately I have been feeling lucky to be feeling so much gratitude. I know where I could be and I feel lucky for not being there anymore. I feel lucky for knowing and valuing life so profoundly. I see and recognize each flower. I feel the flowers in my soul. I take this Spring as the deepest of blessings. There is so much of life streaming in my veins, pumping through my heart and my creativity like the spring is blooming. The bulbs that I planted last year will soon enchant us with their beauty. I have seen a few cats outside. I miss cats. The sun on my face. The ability to walk. The ability to feel joy, to feel beauty, gratitude.....it is like waterfalls through my soul.

Thank you Life.

Thank you Life.

Thank you Spring Goddess for blessing me.

Thank you. Who, what do I thank for being given another chance at life???

Too many of my brothers and sisters are still where I was.

I never forget them. I never forget the pit that I came out of. I bask in life. 24/7 genital pain is basking in life! If this is not wholeness then what is?

Love,
Atara

Abba helped me today move some of his boxes so that I could have more room around the table in the basement to make my art. It is something. Slow. But progress is made in tiny steps until one day we realize that we are still together, that we still have each other, that love can and does heal and that it is a part of our hearts that we can rekindle and rekindle. That is faith, i guess.

And what is pain?

Pain is the loss of life.

It is the loss of hope and of dreams.

And what is faith.

Faith is the acceptance that we create our lives anew all the time and that it is in our power to live with meaning, joy and beauty by our side forever. Faith is the belief that compassion and creativity will forever merge into life and that we can be the force behind that merging.

And what is God?

Everything together and the way that we choose to weave and build and recreate our lives for each other and for ourselves.


My heart is so wide. I just have to learn more and more how to give the compassion that I have in me back to myself. When I am angry, I give compassion back to myself. When I am frustrated, I give compassion back to myself. When I am scared, I give compassion back to myself.

I thank God-dess daily, hourly for working his/her way through me. I follow the foot-steps and find you right behind me.

Father.

Hello Blog

Dear Diary,

For years and years I had a Diary. All my notebooks are in Israel. Dear Diary I went to the New TV studio and sat in front of the camera and sang and cried and did a bit of what could possibly be called "acting" or more like "writhing" wrapped in a huge black sheet. I could not scream because I had no desire to scare anyone. I really felt no desire to re-enact my pain scenes. I found myself singing and then telling my story about how what kept me alive was the desire to not leave Ima and Abba alone with so much pain, without me. And the tears spilled so naturally. Wonderful waterfalls. The onion that I had brought and chopped up and smothered my fingers with and dabbed my eyeballs in was completely extraneous. My tears came as naturally as spring rains. The story that I told was unplanned and unprepared. The songs that I sang came from the heart. And when I was finished I felt that I had taken another great step towards healing, accepting and towards completing my blessed video on Pudendal Neuralgia and me. Next, I want to film Abba and me walking together and sitting by the pond and Ima and me delighting in the blossoming flowers.
I believe that my video will be powerful and that it will leave an impression. Something to celebrate.

Kisses

My body wants to celebrate

my soul wants love

as does my spirit

my body will have to wait

patiently

until we meet the right man to share all of our selves with

spring

wisdom

water

woman

i  accept

Tomorrow I will be going to NewTV to do some acting. I have to remember to bring an onion with me to induce the flow of tears. I hope that I do not over-dose on PTSD or scare anyone. I hope that it goes well. It will be just me and the cameras. Gonna be interesting, for sure. Augusta and Mary Francis interviewed me last week. They are such spirited young women, felt a very strong connection to them and am very grateful that they have joined my journey here. The genital pain journey. I will upload pictures of the collages that I made. Pat created a web-site for me where I can upload all the art-work that we do together in our workshops. This is exciting! I like the feeling of having things come together, of feeling progress and evolution. And it is nice to have Shabbat to feel this a bit more. Though tomorrow won't be a day of rest, rather a day of drama. A day in the life of me. Purim has been fun, wearing my wigs and going dancing and socializing. Tomorrow night there will be another Purim party. Ah, to have fun, to dance, to socialize...dancing to my body, to the gratitude of feeling okay/safe in my own body again. Dancing to the gratitude of being able to have sexual relations. Dancing to life again.

Even though there are days that are very hard and long nights of complete sleeplessness and then a day of utter exhaustion.... I feel grace in the life that I am able to live. I feel gratitude in the meaning that I can create and in the insight that so much suffering has given me. There are aspects of life that I will never be able to take for granted again; a moment of peace in my body is an eternity of prayers answered; the ability to dance and feel no conscious pain for a few hours is the resurrection of the body that lay severed and derailed; the things that 'normal' people take for granted to me are a celebration of life, a waterfall of grace, redemption, revelation....And so, though my life is hard and my existence within my body is a challenge, my spirit has grown and grown so much further that it encompasses a joy that is my deepest secret. I drink from life with a thirst and a patience. I know the value of every moment of the life that I can live today.

I called the Rape Crisis Centre and will soon have an intake meeting there. I will be given three months of counseling for free. I look forward to this with the hope that I will be able to untangle some of the pain and the fear and the hatred that I carry from the sexual assaults that I experienced while traveling in India, on the Tel-Aviv beach and in the Israeli army. An unwanted penis never entered my blessed vagina. I was attacked on the Tel-Aviv beach and managed to free myself. In the army I was bullied by some of the officers in my platoon. I was the only female among 80 men. It was tiring being hit on by so many men at the same time. But stupider then that, it was psychologically exhausting and spiritually draining to have to deal with their meanness once they understood that I had no intention of responding to their advances. That screwed with my head a lot. There was the ass-hole who picked me up and put me on the table calmly saying to me "How would you feel if I raped you now." There was India.
India. Oh India, how you fucked with my female mind. How you tormented me. And mocked me. And terrified me. And threatened me. And watched me suffer with glee in your eyes. How I screamed and prayed and meditated and conjured in my mind all the meaningful moments of my life in my mind so that you would not be able to take my body or my spirit. What was I? Was I strong? Was I foolish? Was I so naive? I did not know that what did happen could happen. I thought that I was safe. How dangerous could a train-ride with so many passengers be?
I carry it still.
Still, I carry that pain.
I hope that the people at the Rape Crisis Centre will help me see that it was not my fault, that I was not stupid or foolish or naive, that I was me on a train-ride stuck in a small and crowded compartment with a gang of men that wanted to shame me, to rape me, to what?

Will I ever understand what happened there? Will I ever come to terms with the way that I was treated there? Maybe they can help me put in a framework that will make it easier to carry, so that the fear and the anger won't seep into rabied generalizations about "all men."

After India, I was scared of men. So many Israeli men who came near me got the cold shoulder. Whether they deserved it or not, I don't know. Today, I want to know. I want to trust my instincts more. And I want to be wise, even if the truth hurts. I already know pain. I can take it. What I don't want is to lose faith in men in general. I want to know that there are beautiful men. I know that there are and I want to be near them. And to feel grateful that they are in my life.

Like the way I felt when I taught the Buddhist Monks. Protected, safe, respected and deeply valued for being a living being. Thank You Dalai Lama, thank you Yarpeh the monk for helping me find healing in your presence and in your wisdom.

Love,
Atara

time to get working again

time to get working again

it is purim

the jewish holiday of transformation and redemption

the jewish holiday that tells tales of courage and true heroism

it is time to get working again

there is so much work

as my pelvis aches and clammers in discontent

my spirit demands obedience and focus and determination

hello again daughter of the world

welcome back

how i long for you when you are gone

and how i love you




dating, searching for a consort, really confuses the goddess

and the spring hormones do not help her either

she is all over the place

i can barely keep track of her

constantly have to pull her out of trouble

she is flirtatious and mischievous and puts herself in such curious situations

she is always apologizing and thinking that she is creating havoc


i try to hold her gently in my arms
her and the pain
i rock them, together
and pray that they sleep
that they find peace this night

i have so much work to do
and she, she is busy getting into trouble
tearing things apart
digging old bones up and demanding that they be looked st
she fights for justice on other people's lands
and leaves her own land unattended

she is such good soul
such young soul
and i am there, picking up the mess that she leaves behind
as she storms through yet another tale of justice, betrayal and inevitable exhaustion

exhaustion settles in, wears her down
and i help her sleep
promising her that we will get better at working together
promising her that we will be okay

and she sleeps in my arms
my child
my self
how foreign this world is to your innocent soul
even today

i love you

Again it is the tears

There is something so lonely about living in my body

The tears

I so much want to celebrate the progress that I have made

I have none to celebrate with

My body wants to feel a man so deeply

As does my spirit

What I feel is violation

All the pain from India and from the army erupted outward

And I realize that I want some help, again, in managing the anger that I have collected along my way, inhabiting my woman's body

The memories from India came storming through and the fear, the terror and the anger made me feel that I no longer want to be embodied

I cried, and this scared my parents

Smoking pot did nothing good for me this time

So much pain came upwards and it was too much for me to bear

Watching porn, abusive, demeaning and frightening

left me feeling so vulnerable

And learning that so many men masturbate to this made me feel sick and hopeless

My sexuality is playful and light and eager and passionate

It is not violent or controlling or mechanical

And its song does not sing for money

In India
my soul was raped
my body was saved

I yelled and yelled and somehow kept them at bay

And then I lay curled in a ball

My female body so much wants to be touched and to be loved by a man

And my soul is weepy and tired from wanting

From not finding what my body begs for

I want to celebrate and here the tears spill

What a strange one i am, writing to my blog the deepest intimacies, sharing the most sacred secret parts of myself

What I want is to celebrate that my body has healed to this point

Where a man can enter me, where I can share the joy of knowing and feeling that I can make love to a man, that my vagina can open itself to a man...

And what I find are tears and tears and more tears

Because once again, I feel their hands grabbing at me, their cold hearted hearts circling me

I am their bait,....

What i want is to love and to share

And what I find is emotional pain instead of joy and celebration

I find more and more emotional pain and loss

I have none to share my joy with