Spiritual warfare...

Spiritual weirdness tonight, with one of my best friends:

They came over for drinks and litanies.  We were sitting together, enjoying a glass of wine with conversation, when I began to sense incredible anxiety in my chest, of the kind I hadn't sensed since the entity.  Then, they began to feel it too, so we decided to fight it with Catholic litanies.

I lit some white sage, smudged up while calling in our angels, paced, offered prayers with tobacco and frankincense.  After about 5 litanies to Catholic sources that are good for fighting dark forces, things began to relax.  My friend had a vision of St Michael, handcuffing an evil spirit... I remarked that it might be a joke from God, because St Michael is also the patron saint of police officers.  We prayed until we felt the conflict pass - it was a darkness I hadn't felt in a while... I sensed it had come to harass us, and that we solved it immediately.  We prayed to our holy guardian angels, St Michael, the Virgin Mary, St Benedict, and the Holy Trinity.  Then, we went for food to get out of my apartment and ground.  Now, it seems like that's all we needed.

Both of us have encountered dark spirits and spiritual emergency, and have had to learn spiritual warfare techniques to defend ourselves.  I find it rather unfortunate that most people tend to think of crude things like Bible belt types when spiritual warfare is discussed, forgetting that this idea in faith is cross-cultural, the idea of malicious spirits and our need to defend ourselves as souls.  I know it sounds fanatical to some, there is the odd person that I can talk to about this, and my friend tonight is one of them, having seen this in their life themselves.

I long for a day when this never happens again, but I feel that now I have taken on enough spiritual discipline and practice to know what to do when I sense danger.  

Our litany books helped us... it felt like a proud moment when the danger subsided.

-Saraƒin

The art scene...

I am feeling a great calm and relaxation come over me as of late - my fatigue is still a bit there, but feels more a product of something soothing than anything troubling, and I simply have to nap when I feel the need to do so.  I do trust this calm is good, my mind in some ways feels much better, I simply wish I had more energy to be a bit more involved with certain things than I am as of late.  (I wouldn't say I am not involved at all, I have a lot of social activity, poetry reading events, karaoke, art openings... I simply am not feeling as up to self promotion as I want to, it feels too daunting and exhausting to think about it.)

I had an interesting discussion with a fellow friend and another member of the local art scene about how frustrating it is to be writing about our subject matter in this social climate.  Also a mystic, they write about their experiences, coming from a Catholic perspective, and feel unjustly treated by the Canadian scene, which seems too agnostic for its own good, perhaps with good reason in some ways, in other ways, it borders on being offensive.  My theory about why Canada's art scene sucks for mystics and mystically inclined creatives is that we are on stolen land, being like cane toads to this continent, our audience can't necessarily appreciate the spiritual wildlife around us, and so an agnostic approach might sit more comfortably for most people reading our work.  It is the culturally specific writer of another ethnicity who may fair better in some ways, because of how daunting God is to many white Canadians.  Because of this agnostic overtone to what is appropriate and what isn't, there is a stigma attached to producing certain types of work that challenge conventional ways of looking at things, no matter how cutting edge these ideas may be elsewhere.  It makes the local art scene feel boring and disinteresting, and is perhaps one reason my hiatus continued for so long.  In my case, I feel my audience wanted a person with schizophrenia, got a mystic, I don't want to pander, and I don't know what direction to take my career, I probably would fair better elsewhere, where ideas are more adventurous with psychospiritual development.  In the meantime, we mystics must seek each other out, and make our own culture, in this climate.

When the mental health care system can't even acknowledge spiritual crisis as something tangible, it's a sign of what society respects overall, and so work like ours is often ignored.

-Saraƒin

New painting: "Gothic Lolita St Therese"...

I just completed my latest painting, "Gothic Lolita St. Therese" - I am not sure if I like how it turned out, the face was a real struggle, and I eventually gave up, unsure of how to tweak it anymore without overworking it too much.  I wish I could've done this saint greater justice, oh well... she might have advised me to relax about the imperfections, because at least I completed it.  Also - AI art is destroying my enjoyment of the novelty of technical perfection, so I might as well embrace the naivety.

I did this piece because I read "The Story of a Soul", have researched her, and prayed a lot to this saint, and knowing how sweet and youthful she was, I suspect she might have delighted in the look of Japanese street fashion, so I gave accents to her Carmelite habit here that suggests gothic lolita.

I suppose it's just about cranking out more art to get back on top of technique... I don't feel I have grown much as a technician over the years, being too unwell to get much in the way of training or experience, although I think my subject matter has gotten more interesting, coming out of strange suffering.  

Perhaps the pain is very high in my paintings because I can't help but express something difficult, perhaps that's why my art often seems "off".

-Saraƒin

UPDATE: Tinkered a bit more with the chin... looks slightly better.