Beauty, music, bellydance, the Dark Goddess, Nature, magick, ritual-theatre, death and love.

compendium of Aepril's communications on art, beauty, bellydance, the dark, faery tale, nature, magick, ritual, theatre, death and love. The talk of a priestess and shaman of the Dark Goddess.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

love is a river...

Love is bigger and stronger than I am. I have come to realize how much I've sometimes resented this fact, and, instead of becoming the power of love, I have seen it as outside of myself; I've tried to control it, to resist, to even be above it. But love is a river...

Love is a river; drink from it.--Rumi

Monday, March 9, 2009

Fear and the Sacred

On my mind is how to maintain a practice of love over fear. Of keeping up the spiritual discipline. Of not letting fear win the day.

Fear.

Fear of what? Fear of the unknown, of losing, of dying maybe. Fear of envy, of guilt, of other people, of not loving enough, or being or having enough.

Fear is insecurity. Fear makes us lie, to be inauthentic, to cheat ourselves and others. Fear leads us down the wrong path, has us reacting instead of acting from what really has heart and meaning. Fear leads to anger, and anger, if it takes us over, has us making the wrong moves.

Not that fear doesn't have its place. Of course, it does. It alerts us to things that are dangerous. It tells us when we are under attack, when we are at risk of being hurt. The resulting anger can help us defend ourselves, to keep our rightful territory. Yes.

But I am talking more about long standing fear, habitual fear. The kind that makes us envious, greedy, silly, elitist, backbiting, cruel, gossipy, overly cautious, trying to control the behavior of others, pointing our fingers. The kind that has us looking over our shoulders, worried that someone is going to take what belongs to us, the kind that has us forgetting what is sacred.

Sacred.

I love this word.
It is the root word of sacrifice.
(ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin sacrificium : sacer, sacred ; see sacred + facere, to make; see dh- in Indo-European roots)

There is always a sacrifice involved in making something sacred. Isn't there? Is that where the fear comes from? That some (presumably false) part of us has to die in order for sacred substance to reveal itself?

My creative life is my primary altar, my creation and performance is my ritual. As an artist, I understand the effect that fear has on creative work. It serves to constrict, to suffocate good ideas, to inhibit intuition, to make things smaller, more shallow. It sucks the soul, the sacred life, right out of it. I have experienced this phenomenon.

I have been subjected to the fear of other artists, too; witnessed it.  They create illusions of conformity, scarcity and exclusivity; they pat each other on the backs for their surface success, but fear the transient nature of it...

Fear replicates itself.

People who are sure of themselves never feel the need to put anyone else down to feel OK. When we meet someone like this, we know it! The world gravitates toward people who love themselves, who put love first, before fear. These are the people who encourage us to do the same, who are not afraid of another person's success.

No one owns the sacred. Who could presume to do so! The gods laugh at us for being so foolish!!

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Every human heartbeat...

"Every human heartbeat, he’d said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he’d meant. He’d been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of stars. But I suddenly realised that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter now good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love"



Saturday, February 21, 2009

The soul of genius...

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I love this quote. It is this fact about Mozart that made Sallieri fume...;)

There will always be a Sallieri to contend with. But the Sallieri's of the world never win in the end.



This quote is what I offer today.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Thank you...

I have received several very thoughtful and moving emails regarding my first posting. Thank you! I am always interested in hearing your stories, and in getting responses of all kinds.

I am wondering though--no one is posting comments. That's OK, but I got the message about the restrictive settings I had set for posting. I've changed the settings so that even those w/o Google ID's can comment. You still need to have another ID--like Live Journal, lets say.

Thank you again for your interest and support! And thank you for your patience while I learn more about this forum, which is new to me.

Monday, February 16, 2009

The redemptive power of making art...

I love all my songs from The Furies' Prayer. I own them fully and lovingly...

My childhood was one that was filled with confusion, pain, and hardship. Though I also had a lot of joy, I had to struggle to survive.

My album The Furies' Prayer is partly a testament to that time, and to my life as a volatile and confused young adult. I love this album with all my heart, as well as loving that person that I once was (and still am), again, with all my heart. And, in fact, many of the songs aren't autobiographical at all, but come from putting myself into the shoes of others who have endured hardship and torment--the disempowered, the scapegoated, the sacrificed, etc. I have also explored the darker nature of sex and love through this album, as well as the sacred erotic. I have spoken as the Dark Feminine.

I am truly, madly, fiercely in love with the power of art. I believe it has saved my life.

After releasing The Furies' Prayer in Dec 2006, I stopped making music. This was due in part to the fact that my bellydance life began to take over in strange and wonderful ways. But there's also something else: I said what I wanted--what I NEEDED--to say in that album. I named the demons; I screamed and screeched at them, I fought them and lived through them and dreamed them and accused them and wept over them and fucked them and let them do their best and worst to me until...
Change.

Yeah. Wow. I guess so.

It's a funny thing how healing can sometimes sneak up on you, how you can suddenly realize that the person you thought you were is now altered, changed. Isn't that what I always wanted?...

So I sit at my keyboard now, knowing that it's time to make music again. What currently haunts me? It's not so much the betrayals and the rage and the feelings of powerlessness.... No, it's different now.... Oh, not that I can say that I am no longer tormented and angry-- like many an artist, I will always have a membership in that club. There are many elements and themes in my previous work that I still need to work with and explore and express...
It's just that, well, the emphasis is different...shifted.

Love is stronger than death...

Coda died one year and six months ago. My Soul Mate, my Dream Boat, my Cerberus. Thus far, I have been unable to write about him to music. I have danced my grief as The Washer at the Ford, but I haven't sung it...it seems that the grief is too big to say, to sing, it has had to be expressed with my body first.

But there's more. Coda's death put me face to face with Death. As in the mythical stories of mere humans beholding deity without a guise, it nearly extinguished my soul. Death laughed in the face of my selfishness and narcissism, of my needs and expectations and wish to control the outcome. But, as it released Coda from an old and tired body, it also released me from some of the things that bound me to my pain. I was left with grief, yes, but oh, how I loved that boy...My heart could burst with it...Love, pure love, terrible, liberating, joyous, immortal LOVE.

Love.
Love IS stronger than Death.
Love is what matters. Nothing else really does. Love is what heals. Love is not always fluffy, happy, easy, pastel. But it does bring joy, fulfillment, life. There is no point living without it. And there is not a soul that can't have it. (There is always someone to love.)

Death has been my teacher. Art has been my savior. Love is my reason.

My heart is open. I create. I heal. I change. I live.

My music as Aepril Schaile and the Judgement:
www.myspace.com/aeprilschaile


Coda as a young man