J-Date

So, I returned to J-Date.
And here I am crying.
Why am I crying?
Because when I wrote to you that I have a chronic pain syndrome that makes sitting painful and I asked you if we could walk with our coffee, you did not bother answering me.

People's hearts are so closed.
I wonder where compassion is? I wonder where love is?
I don't even know who you are, but I have been hurt by your closed heart.
I guess better now than later.
Why waste my time with people who live in their mind, searching for their soul-mate with their list of ingredients.

Tears. More tears. I will never give up on finding the man that will love me for everything I am.

In between the sadness, the pain, the exhaustion.....I am busy with a lot of different things that pertain to Pudendal Neuralgia and to Spreading Awareness. The Support Group has grown over these past few months and we have reached our full capacity. There are nine of us now, including myself. This is good. It took a lot longer than what I thought it would, but what it is today, is very nice, comfortable and intimate. I am busy organizing projects with Lesley College in Boston, through their Feminist Club. It looks like things are coming through and that we will be able to educate and to give info. about genital pain syndromes. I have also been busy trying to put together creative art workshops for women with Vulv., PN and IC by women with these conditions. Finally that has come together too. And I have been going to NewTV to get private lessons on Final Cut Pro so that I will be able to move forward with my video. I have a picnic 'blanket' that I leave at NewTV and that I spread on the floor for my lesson. Pain all the time, all the friggin time does not stop me from moving forward. I figure that as long as I am alive at least I can do what I can do to bring the alleviation of suffering from future sufferers. In the meantime this gives me a reason to live, a passion to fight for and a cause to devote myself to. Hair or no hair, I am an amazon of some sort. With my curls somewhere in some nearby dumpster, I look less like a medusa and more like a boy??? That is okay, if you look into my eyes from up close you will see oasis' of compassion and that is the true source of my femininity. That and my creativity. Isn't that what my poem about destiny and compassion's meeting was about? So, yes, I try to move forward with the physical pain that pins me down and with the emotional pain that pulls me down, into the bowels of dark ponds and funerals. I mourn the loss of my father daily and hourly. He is slipping from us and we are powerless. Still, I plug through. I made myself promises that I swore to live by. I came to this earth swearing that I would live by them. I came to this earth knowing that I had come to live by them. And so I do. I swore enough times that I would stay and that I would fight on God's/Godess' side. And so pain or no pain, I continue. Sometimes I become forlorn and it feels to me as though I will never collect the fluid mess that I have become, and then life pulls and tugs its way back into my tired veins and once again I find myself trying to create something, something meaningful, something that makes a life of pain, a life worth living.
I have such a strong faith. As though I know that I have been called to this suffering. But, I am so little next to this great endeavor. And so many times all I want is to do is curl into a ball and to disappear. So, I don't ask so many questions anymore. I don't ask the 'why' that my mind was obsessed with when I found my spirit still alive, in the psychiatric ward. I don't ask why because I live it today. Is this a blessing or a curse? Did my spirit/soul take upon itself too much? And do we really choose our lives before we live them? I don't expect an answer, as I said, I live my answers. Living the answers to my questions is what sustains me, keeps me with the will to live. It is what I begged for when I begged to die too. And so if my destiny is to live then I will live it in accordance with my prayer. And as long as I can continue to live this way, with my pain levels still leaving me some breathing space for life, I am determined to be grateful.

abba

i lay on the floor, the carpeted floor of my childhood bedroom

my father lies on the floor too

he knows that i have been crying all day

he knows that my heart is broken

that today i drowned in his suffering

i look into his eyes and i ask

"abba, did we do something wrong?"

"abba, did we do something wrong that we fell so far?"

I want to know if a daughter can still be the crown of her father when their kingdom has turned to devastation.


Can I still be your crown even if all of this came to be because my body went haywire?

The tears spill and I walk just because I have to continue, to continue, I already know that going backwards only hurts more.....oh, I "know" that none of this is my fault but that does not mean that I feel that it is not my fault.

 "Abba, did I not love you enough?"...

"If I loved you more would you heal?"


I have a picture of you from when you were two or three yours old. You are smiling and laughing in the picture. My God, it was so simple to make you smile. You smiled all the time. And now. Now, I wish that you, that child was my own so that I could hold you, him in my arms and make sure that you, he grows up knowing how beautiful he is.

But you were someone else's child and I, I am your daughter. I rest my head between your chest and your arm-pit and we hold each other's hand. You rest. And I rest with you. And you tell me that a daughter can still be the crown of her father even his kingdom has been devastated.

I ask the questions. And you give the answers.

Just like it was when I was a little girl. Only then, I believed that fathers live forever and that little girls have fathers they can love into forever.

How Abba?
How do I do this?
You never taught me how to say goodbye to you.
I thought that you would be forever.

Every day i watch you slip further away
At least, today, when I drowned, you were there on the shore waiting to hold me again.

A Very Sad Day

The morning started with tears.
I watch my father fall.
Every day he falls further.
Though I do not know where we have left to fall to.
He continues to fall.
I watch.
My favorite man.
My pride. My faith. Everything I am.
Falls.

The tears are on the T.
And in the streets.
The tears are tears.
They cannot save my father.
I was my father's girl.
My father's pride.
My father's crown.

Even my name. He crowned himself with my name.
'Bamelech Shlomo Sheitra Lo Atara'
King Solomon Who Crowned ...

We have fallen.
Father.
All around us there is devastation and loss.
Your eyes no longer shine.
Your smile is so rare and fleeting.

How much we have lost in such a short time.
I was never prepared to lose you.
You were an always. A given.

Now, we sit, my head on your chest, two empty vessels.
What can I offer you when your suffering leaves me hollow and lost.

Tears. Tears. Tears.
This is not the world that you prepared me for.

This is not the world that you named me for.

Abba, what world is this? Where we both lay so shattered, battered and aching to leave...

Down to earth

okay, here i come. I am returning, slowly landing,,,,,,,back onto earth. Hello everyone,,, oooooo, the landing was a bit rocky and uncomfortable and truthfully landing back into physical reality is not so pleasant for someone with PN. I like travelling into other realms, I feel safer there. Magic works for me a lot better then reality.
So, I cut all my hair off and shaved it down to the skin of my scalp. And I love it! I especially like the way that people look at me with curiosity and do i feel a touch of compassion in there eyes too? Do they think that I suffer from cancer and am going through chemo. ? Do they think that I prefer woman and wonder for a moment what that means for them? I miss the eyes on me. In Israel people look at me much more. People look into each others eyes, strangers. Here, people are friendly but cautious and courteous and eye-contact is considered invasive. I look at people. I look at people deeply and with time. I like faces and eyes and expressions and lips...
My mother wants me to wear a hat when I am in the house. She says that I remind her of a cancer patient and she cannot look at me. You would think that she hadn't gone through the hell of watching me die and suffer in front of her eyes for months at a time.
My father mourned the loss of my curls. How could he caress my face without caressing my hair. He feels as though I took a part of myself away from him.
My older brother thinks I have become a lesbian (in my mind, women love women, we do not have to be called or labeled anything. it is natural for us to be intimate with other women)
My younger brother says that I look hideous and that I have lost a large percent of my attractiveness. He says that I look like I am in the military.

My best friend Liat saw me through Skype and started touching her hair and saying that seeing me this way makes her want to shave her hair off too. Her husband kindly put his hand over his mouth to cover what i imagine was a smirk lying snugly on his face.

I, myself, seem to see my beauty ten-fold now that I have no hair. I look into my eyes deep into the mirror and I see all the ways that I have travelled and how far I have come. I see my past lives and I see this life and I see how liberating it is to be free from the cultural expression of femininity. I love my femininity. I am deeply feminine, from the inside and now I can play and experiment and I feel curious. As Liati said, it looks liberating, refreshing and leaves her with a desire to feel the same. She was right, she saw it and she knew it as she has known my soul forever, so it feels is our connection. Liberating, refreshing and always leaving us with a taste for more. I love her. She gets me so well, in all of my realms.
So, life is hard. I assure you that. My father is very unwell, in deep deep suffering. My life in my family is full of stress and conflict and pain. My body is tired and always in some form of discomfort. But I have come to feel that my soul is becoming more and more free and that like my hair it grows every day. And feeling that is a true blessing to be grateful for. And I am grateful!!
Love, Atara

Funny Posts

Some of my posts are funny. They make perfect sense to me but to whoever dares to read my ramblings....I give you credit for putting up with me for this long! So, why are some of my posts strange and disconnected. Precisely because I suffer from PN and when I get my period I reach for my Marijuana and when I am stoned I am particularly inclined to write to my blog. I become fascinated by my own thoughts and my thoughts become very associative. I write from my free associations basking in emotions and memories and a mind full of sunshine. I become more tactless than usual when I am stoned. I express and feel my spirituality more profoundly when I am stoned. I am very grateful for what I like to call Mary y Juana. Could Mary y Juana be a wonderful love affair between a man and a woman, or possibly between a woman and a woman? Whatever and whoever Mary y Juana are, I am grateful that they are in my life because they make my periods bearable. And I enjoy slipping into another state of mind that feels very much like my own and becomes so deliciously and self-centeredly or possibly selflessly fascinating. I have begun to think a lot about my past lives and have begun to feel that for certain my soul has lived in this realm and in other realms where time is just as as timeless as trapping air in ones hands. Can time be trapped? Can my soul begin and end? All of this suffering, all of this physical desperation has left me with a clearer vision. There are worlds between worlds and souls migrate and connect and re-connect through different lives and ever-changing realms. Like kaleidoscopes, our lives dance in and out and there is nothing that can betray this ever-existing transience. Death itself is nothing but a marker for yet another beginning, as absolutely and totally as life is. We have to help each other suffer less. There is no need for all this suffering. Much of it is what we bring onto ourselves through the love of hatred and judgement instead of the love of compassion and care.
To tell you that my soul has become more settled since all of this came upon me would be to idealize the devil and there is nothing to love about the devil. But the soul, the soul is there for us to love, to relish and to adore its ever-lasting joy in life, in detail and in delicacy. The soul that can learn to live despite and through and toward..... how could I not look at myself and through myself with awe after everything that I have been through and continue to live through. For, I know that this essence is far beyond and so much deeper then any personal I or any individual bout with courage. Rather, I have to know that my soul is but one small spark that is as huge as all our souls together and as tiny as nothing and everything together. And so my faith continues to grow and I believe even more strongly in healing and in hope and in growth and in bloom. And I continue to look towards the spring with respect for the winter that envelops the bulbs of my gardens with quiet and peace. The chill of the winter has not entered my bones for I know that everything passes and that I am here to help and to live and to love until my soul is ready to unite once again with its source, the same very source that we all come from.
I am not stoned now. I am just enjoying writing. I feel pleased that two more souls have joined my journeys here. I am happy that one soul left me comments. Like a hungry fish to a crumb, I suck the sweetness of connection for there I know that I am not alone, that thousands journey like me and that we all bear the yoke of this suffering and that we bear it  together, not alone. Not alone, the way that it was when I lay there tortured. There are those that gain faith from suffering because in the empty desperation there is the soul that cries and yearns and begs for something else. And it is so alive and so starved and so desperate and so lost that it knows that there is something that must be found. We are here to find it. We will find it. We will find it so that others will not have to bear the yoke of the suffering that left us crushed and starving for death.......
I do believe that we will alleviate suffering. There is hope, if and only if we come to understand that we are all one, interconnected and desperate for each other.
Love,
Atara

Tomorrow I will be going to Walden Pond with a very dear soul and another dear soul. I don't know anything about Thoreau. Well that is not true. I already know a lot about him because two souls that are dear to me feel deeply about him. So, i don't mind at all hearing what they liked about him. It will be a communion of souls, with Thoreau's soul enveloping us at the pond that he loved.

It could be a lovely day, maybe sunny, maybe cloudy and rainy and cold. But, maybe sunny. Even a cloudy and rainy day can be a nice day. On a cloudy day I have the perfect excuse for just staying in bed and reading. As long as I am reading, my mother does not scold me for staying in bed. Instead I get smiled at and my privacy is protected, mostly. My younger brother likes to pop in to ask me if I like the book. And then a minute later he comes in to give me an article he wants me to read, and then he pops in again to ask me if I am still enjoying the book. I can only guess that seeing me read is comforting to them. They want me to read. A few weeks ago I got scolded by my mom and my brother for not reading enough.

 As a child I gobbled up books. Book after book after book. Oftentimes the world of the book that i was inhabiting was more real for me then the one I lived in. I felt characters deeply and seemed to know their inside lives like my own. I was especially involved in reading books about the Holocaust and I dreamt myself to be a survivor and then a fighter in the land of Palestine. Her name was Karen. We were one and the same.

It is true that when I read I am less prone to fall into depressions. The reading gives me some peace of mind. Maybe seeing me read brings my family back to the security of my childhood when it was normal and healthy to find me reading in my bed. On a rainy day what could me more pleasant then to snuggle up to a warm blanket and a good book. Maybe it is because they think that I have too many gaps in my knowledge because once I left to Israel my life was full of so much that reading became a thing of the past. Reading in Hebrew was never as delicious as reading in English and my own life in Israel was so juicy and alive that I did not need to dream other people's lives. Being back at home and living with my pain level under control means that I once again can return and am expected to return to the essential art of reading.

So, tomorrow may be a sunny day or a rainy day and I am on 200mg of Lyrica and 120mg of Cymbalta and I can get dressed and ride in a car and go to the pond with two dear souls and watch them get to know each other and enjoy being with them. They both almost lost me from their lives a year, a bit over a year ago. They both got slammed in the face with something that reached down to their roots and shook the ground till their roots almost parted from the ground.
And I am still here, for better or for worse, till death do us part. That is, forever, Lyrica, Cymbalta and me.

1. the bed, the depression
2. the bed with a book=totally different scenario
3. their conclusion is right

1. I am still here, me and my soul, still devoted to my soul and body, we are one
2. There is always the knowledge and the fear in the back of my mind that without my meds. I would not survive. I remind myself that it is okay that I am on meds, that they won't be taken away from me, that if I need them for the rest of my life I will do all that I can to have them.
3.This thought process connects me back to the feeling of control which was lost completely once the pain took over my mind and my body. The memory seizes me back into terror. I quickly retrieve my self by reminding myself that that is over, that today I am here and that today I have control and that I know what I need to do in order to control it. Nowadays this is enough to watch the terror recede back into what I know is a memory, something that will remain a memory, only.

1. My memory, yes I have been traumatized. Yes, I still feel pain all the time. It is very hard to inhabit a body that is in pain. Sometimes it is not so hard. I love those moments, those markers of my destiny...
2. I don't live in books the way that I used to. I tried to become the characters that I admired and loved. They influenced me deeply. Today, I learn from them. I take their wisdom and I reap it, there is always more, there is always enough for whoever seeks it. So, I hold my arms wide open and with a warmth and a passion I hug it all, very close to my heart. Wisdom is always very close to the heart. It needn't be searched far and wide, only as far and wide as our arms can go when hugging another to our souls.
3. I take the honey/wisdom and I share it with others, like honey to their lips they drink, and my eyes are anointed  with the light of salvation and I praise the One and Only force that I believe in for having given me another glimpse of its glory.
4. Your words are sweeter then honey, I am humbled by your beauty. You are with me just for a fleeting moment, because underneath your wing there is another bird whose wing has broken, and I can see how you go swiftly, and carry my word to the Goddess of healing. And I thank you. I thank you for connecting me to your powerful force and I pray to be taken as your servant for the rest of my existence. For with your presence I am healed, even if just for a moment.